Welcome to The Cloud 5, our weekly feature where we scour the web searching for the five most intriguing and poignant cloud links we can find.
Before we jump into this week’s links, please have a look at one of our recent blog posts, Serverless computing is coming to a cloud near you. The notion of serverless computing, where you only access the exact infrastructure you need when you need it, is beginning to take off.
And without further delay, here we go with this week’s links:
Forget Windows; Microsoft is now all about the cloud | Computerworld
Microsoft was once all about the Windows and Office franchises. Those two products drove revenue and profits for a couple of decades, but the company knew it couldn’t live on the desktop forever — and it is officially a cloud company now.
Microsoft wins lucrative cloud deal with intelligence community | Bloomberg
Speaking of the Microsoft cloud business, the company announced a huge deal with the federal intelligence community this week to provide cloud services for the country’s most security-conscious agencies. The deal is reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars and could help position Redmond for the big Pentagon deal currently under bid.
Pentagon defends plans for cloud contract that rivals call a lock for Amazon | Seattle Times
Meanwhile that winner-take-all Pentagon deal is still getting heat as rivals see it strictly designed for Amazon to win it. Whether you agree with single vendor approach or not — and many people including some of the vendors don’t — there is more than one company positioned to win this deal.
AWS CEO: We’re customer-focused, not competitor-focused | CNBC
In a short video interview on CNBC, a well-prepared AWS CEO Andy Jassy talked about his company’s focus on customers and their requirements, which he said really separates him from his rivals. Whether that’s the differentiator or something else, they still dominate the market.
How the cloud vendors are battling to democratise AI for developers | ComputerworldUK
Cloud vendors certainly recognize that every customer wants to inject AI into its applications and they want to help provide the tools to do that. That would put AI-fueled applications within reach of more developers, effectively democratizing it. But the bottom line is AI and machine learning are resource intensive and these services sell resources.
Photo Credit: Ron Miller. Used under CC 2.0 license.
