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, Oracle plans to build a dozen data centers in massive cloud expansion. Oracle announced a huge data center investment plan this week as it tries to play catch-up in the cloud.
And without further delay, here we go with this week’s links:
Walmart goes to the cloud to close gap with Amazon | CBNC
Even a company as successful as Walmart has had trouble competing with Amazon in online retail. It decided to build its own data center, an enormous five-year investment, but this report says it’s starting to pay off with three consecutive quarters of impressive online sales.
Servers? We don’t need no stinkin’ servers! | ZDNet
We are moving into a so-called serverless world, where instead of renting a server and paying for it whether you use it or not, you only pay when there is a transaction processed on the server. The underlying server is still there, but you don’t have to maintain it. It’s much more efficient for developers who pay based on these event triggers
Cloud bills will get loftier | WSJ
There is a lot of building go on these days among the world’s largest cloud vendors as companies build data center capacity around the world to be closer to their customers. Someone is going to have to pay for this expansion and the WSJ thinks it’s going to be the consumer.
How to talk to your cloud provider | Nelson Hillard
It’s important to talk to cloud providers and let them know what you need, whether that’s around specific functionality or negotiating your cloud contracts. This article suggests you should communicate with them in a way you can maintain records of the contacts if needed.
Think3 is new $1B fund that wants to buy up SaaS startups so founders can go build again | TechCrunch
A firm opened up a $1B fund last week to buy low-to-mid tier SaaS companies, then fund the founders in new projects. It does sound a bit unusual to buy a company and redirect the founders to other businesses, but this is the idea behind this fund.
Photo Credit: Ron Miller. Used under CC 2.0 license.
