The cloud is important for business and it is big business for service providers. For example, Amazon’s quarter one earnings report revealed that AWS sales grew 41 percent, bringing in $7.7 billion in revenue and making up 13 percent of Amazon’s total revenue for the quarter. Apple’s has a big reliance on AWS, as data reveals that iCloud’s existence depends entirely on a $30 million/month contract with AWS.
Google recently launched Anthos, its new connected multi-cloud platform, puts the company in direct competition with Apple services, as well as with Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure. To add to this corporate ventures, Google also premiered its new cloud-reliant video game platform, Stadia. Todd Matters, Chief Architect and Co-Founder of RackWare surveys the situation in conversation with Digital Journal.
Digital Journal: What is the significance of the launch of Google’s Anthos?
Todd Matters: Google Cloud has not fared well competitively for the public cloud business. Anthos is an interesting development that attempts to carve out a place for Google in public cloud. It’s an opportunity to deploy greenfield applications and tie them to Google Cloud with development tools and services. Google Anthos will, no doubt, gain some supporters and generate some business with its open source capabilities, but it’s doubtful that Anthos will substantively move the needle on Google’s public cloud position.
In general, open source will be important for hybrid cloud as companies set up private clouds. Of course, early attempts to deploy private clouds proved difficult for most companies whether they were using open source or not. During this time, the open source initiatives were too volatile for stability and reliability of private cloud. If the new open source initiatives can stabilize and standardize implementation and strategies for execution, open source will be vital for private and hybrid clouds to succeed. But, whether the community can do this is still an open question.
DJ: How dependent is Apple upon AWS? Does this leave Apple vulnerable?
Matters: Apple is most definitely dependent on AWS, which is why they are working on their own cloud infrastructure. A private cloud for Apple would be the ideal complement to their AWS strategy. This could process more sensitive applications for Apple, while AWS would provide overflow and compute for less sensitive apps. Apple would become less dependent on AWS as a result.
DJ: Following the launch of Stadia, do you think cloud-based gaming will become more popular?
Matters: Cloud-based gaming is certainly becoming more popular. Since gaming can be extremely compute- and network-intensive, the main questions to ask are, “What types of gaming can be run in the cloud at present?” and “Can clouds keep up with those demands of gaming?”
Once this is addressed, companies can begin research. This is important because some cloud environments charge for network bandwidth, which would compromise the margins for gaming companies as users increase.
