cloud

LF Europe’s Project Sylva wants to create an open source telco cloud stack • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in cloud, Enterprise, Europe, linux foundation, open source, telco, telecommunicationsNo Comments

The Linux Foundation Europe (LF Europe) — the recently launched European offshoot of the open source Linux Foundation — today announced the launch of Project Sylva, which aims to create an open source telco cloud framework for European telcos and vendors. This is the first project hosted by LF Europe and is a good example of what the organization is trying to achieve. The project aims to create a production-grade open source telco cloud stack and a common framework and reference implementation to “reduce fragmentation of the cloud infrastructure layer for telecommunication and edge services.” Currently, five carriers (Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom) and two vendors (Ericsson and Nokia) are working on the project. “There’s a whole bunch of Linux Foundation networking projects already that have taken telecommunications into the open source era,” Arpit Joshipura, the general manager for Networking, Edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation, told me. “All those projects are under what is called the [LF] Networking foundation. […] So whatever that work is that is done by the telcos, Sylva is going to leverage and build on top of it with these European vendors to solve EU specific requirements. Those are security, energy, federated computing, edge and data trust.” At the core of Sylva is a framework for a compute platform that can be agnostic to whether a workload is running on the telco access network, edge or in the core. The project aims to build a reference implementation, leveraging all of the work already being done by LF Networking, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (the home of Kubernetes and other cloud-native infrastructure projects), LF Energy and others. All of this, of course, is done with a focus on the EU’s goals around security, data privacy and energy management, but even though the project has this EU focus, the overall ambition is broader and goes well beyond the European Union. Many of these regulations, after all, will make it to other markets as well. “Linux Foundation, Europe allows us to focus more on specific regional requirements, but without those siloes and fragmentation that foster that techno-nationalism, if you want to call it that, by really being able to foster local collaboration and then, pushing that stuff upstream gives us this amazing conduit to go across borders,” explained Gabriele Columbro, the general manager of the Linux Foundation Europe. The vendors joining the project all argue that they are doing so in order to reduce fragmentation as the industry moves to a cloud-centric model and to enable interoperability between different platforms. “The Telco Cloud ecosystem today is fragmented and slowing down our operational model transformation. Despite a transition to cloud native technologies, a real interoperability between workloads and platforms remains a challenge,” said Laurent Leboucher, group CTO and SVP, Orange Innovation Networks. “Indeed, operators have to deal with a lot of vertical solutions that are different for each vendor, leading to operational complexity, lack of scalability and high costs. Sylva, by providing a homogenous telco cloud framework for the entire industry, should help all the ecosystem to use a common technology, which will be interoperable, flexible and easy to operate.”

How OVHcloud’s Octave Klaba is building a different cloud computing company • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in cloud, Enterprise, Octave Klaba, OVHcloudNo Comments

When people think about the cloud computing industry, three names come to mind — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. And yet, smaller cloud companies are still doing well. OVHcloud, a French company that has been around since 1999, is one of them. Of course, cloud computing wasn’t even a thing in 1999. The company has managed to remain relevant after all these years thanks to an opinionated approach to hosting and internet infrastructure. A few days ago, I caught up with Octave Klaba, the company’s founder and chairman. “There is a difference between impossible and unlikely. Maybe we are an unlikely company, but we exist,” he told me. We talked about his long-term vision for OVHcloud, which involves data centers as a service, private 5G networks, satellites and quantum computing. Playing catch-up How do you compete with companies like Amazon and Microsoft when you “only” have 2,800 employees and no side business to finance your cloud division? OVHcloud’s vision could be summed up in two says: leveraging open source as the cornerstone of product innovation, and uncompromised sovereignty. The company’s project of offering data centers as a service is a good example of these two points. “There will be more supermarkets that will use robots. Companies like Auchan or Carrefour will have fulfillment centers that will be robotized. There will be Renault factories with more IoT. There will be airports, container terminals… We will have to bring intelligence and automation to many different places,” Octave Klaba said. And he believes computing resources will have to be closer to the end clients. Companies will decide where their “cloud” is located. He calls that concept “operational sovereignty.” “Today, customers don’t get to choose. They can either opt for our data centers, or for AWS’s data centers that are located I don’t know where,” Klaba said. “Operational sovereignty doesn’t exist today because you don’t get to choose.” We are refactoring our entire data center stack so that data centers can operate autonomously even if they are disconnected Octave Klaba Essentially, OVHcloud wants to be able to provide the best of both worlds. Some clients are looking for the abstraction layer of public cloud infrastructure and the flexibility of on-premise installations. They want to pick their own data center colocation or they want to convert their own data centers into OVHcloud-enabled data centers. With this service, the cloud company brings its own server farms and handles hardware refreshes. It runs its pre-integrated cloud services system on these servers so that it works more or less like your own dedicated OVHcloud data center. And because it’s a service, clients pay a monthly bill. They don’t have to get a loan from their bank to amortize hardware over multiple years. “Some clients have very sensitive and secret data. They want us to operate their data centers without any external connection. Now that’s a challenge,” Klaba said. “So we are refactoring our entire data center stack so that data centers can operate autonomously even if they are disconnected. Everything that is required to run a data center is inside the data center,” Klaba said. And it will eventually be open source. When it’s time to update the software stack, somebody goes to the data center with a NUC mini PC and a USB key. Updates are quickly deployed to all the servers in the data center. “That’s exactly why we became a public company, that’s why I raised €350 million. We are going to open-source our software stack so that you can download and deploy it yourself,” Klaba said. “I want to give it away for free so that you can do my job.” In that case, there would be two main advantages. First, cloud companies keep reinventing the wheel. For instance, all cloud companies offer database-as-a-service products, but they don’t usually share the code behind these services. Everybody keeps developing the same thing over and over again. Second, a strong open-source community is usually more efficient than a private company developing its own proprietary component. OVHcloud wants to be at the center of this community of open-source data center software. “It’s a crazy bet. You only get to make a bet like this once in your life. But we think we are going to succeed,” Klaba told me. Image Credits: OVHcloud Private 5G, satellites and quantum computing When talking about edge computing, Octave Klaba was a bit annoyed about all the hype in the industry. “There’s so much bullshit around edge. So many people talk about edge computing but they don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said. He then gave me an example of what he means by edge computing. Like other cloud computing companies, OVHcloud wants to offer private 5G networks. “There are big warehouses, airports, inland ports, refineries, big factories… They need some sort of connectivity that covers a huge area with low latency and a lot of bandwidth. It has to be secured, easy to deploy and connected to the cloud,” Klaba said. So many people talk about edge computing but they don’t know what they’re talking about Octave Klaba In that industry, OVHcloud competes with traditional telecom companies and manufacturers, but Klaba believes these companies don’t necessarily know how to build something stable, always up-to-date and always online. “Now they have to use Kubernetes and they think: ‘Oh my god, how do I manage Kubernetes,’” he joked. “On the other side, Microsoft, AWS or Google invest a lot in these areas. They are buying companies. They say that they can do everything for you and for free. But then, it’s going to be connected to their infrastructure and they sell you value-added services and charge you for that. That’s an amazing hack,” Klaba said. OVHcloud doesn’t necessarily want to follow the same strategy, but it has developed proofs of concept for private 5G networks. Once again, it’s all about remaining in the race for this market, and for edge computing in general. When it comes to satellites,

Unicorns face 5-1 odds as they wait for public markets to warm • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in battery ventures, cloud, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Newsletter, EC venture capital, Enterprise, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Earlier today, The Exchange dug into changing investor sentiment regarding growth and profitability. A new report looking at cloud and software companies from Battery Ventures ran the math on how investors are rewarding faster growth from less unprofitable companies — dare we say, profitable companies? — with the data indicating that, at least for now, growth is no longer enough to maximize corporate value. For startups busy stacking new revenue with minimal burn, the situation is good news. For companies that raised while money was cheap — and sitting on huge valuations predicated on yesteryear’s valuations — the news that profitability is in vogue again is far from welcome. Many unicorns are likely now trapped between changing investor preferences and a general compression of the value of software companies. Why? Because many a unicorn was minted during the 2020-2021 era on the back of quick revenue growth more than anything else. And, as revenue multiples stretched to the sky during that time period, a great number of startups reached the $1 billion valuation threshold — or a multiple thereof — on the back of small, if quickly expanding, top line. If revenue multiples have come down, that’s bad news for unicorns. If revenue multiples have come down and growth is losing comparative luster to profits, high-burn unicorns that were once valued more for something else are doubly bound by changing market conditions. Even worse, Battery points out a few difficult facts about just how many unicorns might be able to go public in the coming years compared to how many unicorns there are in the market today. There’s a lining of good news in the data for truly standout startups. But for the bog-standard unicorn, there’s more than just storm clouds on the horizon. Why is the math bad? In the last 10 years, Battery counts 200 software companies that went public. In contrast, the venture firm counts more than 1,000 new unicorns minted over the same time frame. That’s a 5-1 ratio of IPOs to new billion-dollar companies.

Are investors really paying more for profits than growth today? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in battery ventures, cloud, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Newsletter, EC venture capital, Enterprise, Startups, The Exchange, VentureNo Comments

What’s better: growing quickly or making lots of money? The answer, in startup terms, is both. But because there is a natural tension between growth (which usually comes with incremental costs, often in advance of new revenues) and profitability (allowing revenue to further extend its coverage of operating costs), most startups lean more on the growth side of the equation. It’s not hard to understand why. Venture investors provide capital that often greatly exceeds a startup’s revenue base, allowing the company to hire and market aggressively — and build, we hasten to add — in hopes of far-larger future scale at the cost of near-term profitability. The tradeoff between growth and profitability is often detailed in the so-called Rule of 40. Indeed, the rubric that combines a growth metric (measured in year-over-year terms) and a profitability result (measured in percent-of-revenue terms) in hopes of the sum meeting or exceeding 40 has generated derivative metrics for companies of a particular age or segment. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Naturally, the Rule of 40 is not something that applies to, say, pre-revenue startups hoping to raise a pre-seed round. It’s a metric that applies to startups that are generating revenues at a sufficient scale to make the numbers reasonable; no one cares if you can meet the Rule of 40 while tripling your revenue from $1 to $3 per year, but if you are expanding your revenues from $1 million to $3 million per year, the rule is likely something you’ll be measured against. Now that venture markets are in retreat and public markets have been revalued, there’s been some push for startups to change their posture, trading some growth now for smaller deficits. A flight to quality, some call it. We’d call it a rebalancing away from quicker growth and staggering losses toward merely rapid growth and less cash burn. Battery Ventures recently dropped a new report (the “State of the OpenCloud 2022”) that includes some fascinating data on the profit/growth conversation. It’s something that we’ve touched on repeatedly here at ZebethMedia as both venture investors and their public-market cognates have shaken up their valuation models.

Rising energy costs are making the cloud more expensive • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in cloud, data center, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, energy, EnterpriseNo Comments

Since winter, around the start of the war in Ukraine, energy costs have risen drastically — particularly in parts of Europe historically dependent on Russian fuel. That’s impacted data centers, which aren’t directly reliant on resources like natural gas but which often draw on power grids and backup generators that generate a portion of their electricity using fossil fuels. According to a July report from power generation supplier Aggreko, data center operators in the U.K. and Ireland have seen their energy bills increase by as much as 50% over the last three years, with the steepest climbs occurring within the last year. Fifty-eight percent of those in the U.K. said that energy bills have had a “significant impact” on their company’s margins. It seems inevitable that the energy premium data center operators are being forced to pay will be passed along to customers. Indeed, it’s already happening. Way back in November 2021, Manchester-based cloud services provider M247 hiked prices a whopping 161%, blaming “unprecedented times in the European energy markets.” Cloud providers OVHcloud, based in France, and Hetzner, based in Germany, both recently announced that they would raise prices by 10% in the coming months to combat soaring energy costs and inflation. In an earnings report, OVHcloud told investors that it expects “electricity costs in 2023 will account for around a mid-to-high-single digit percentage of its revenue, up from mid-single digit in 2022,” Reuters reported. In a conversation with ZebethMedia, Gartner senior director analyst René Buest noted that the era of constantly falling cloud prices has been over for some time. (Google Cloud, for instance, increased the prices of its core services in March independent of rising energy costs.) But she agreed that rising costs — and the associated inflation — have accelerated the upward cloud pricing trend.

Google Cloud gets into web3 act with managed blockchain node service • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in blockchain, cloud, Crypto, developer, Enterprise, google cloud, web3No Comments

Five years ago the blockchain was blossoming in the enterprise, or so many companies had us believe. Back then, companies like SAP and IBM were trying to build blockchain practices, but while the technology sounded good to solve myriad problems in the enterprise, it never really took off. Fast forward to 2022 and the blockchain comes under a new guise with the name web3 as an umbrella term and lots of VC money behind it. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the cloud platform companies want to get into the act. To that end, Google Cloud announced today that it’s launching Blockchain Node Engine, which it’s billing as “a fully managed node-hosting for web3 development.” Earlier this year, the company announced that it was launching a new team dedicated to digital assets, and this tool is part of what has come out of that team’s work. In a blog post announcing the new service from Amit Zavery, GM and VP of engineering and platform and James Tromans, director of cloud web3, the two wrote that blockchain nodes have to work hard, constantly exchanging the most recent blockchain data, so that all nodes stay in sync. It’s a data- and resource-intensive process. Google Cloud hopes to make it easier by offering a managed service to handle node creation, while providing a secure development environment in a fully managed product. From Google’s perspective, it’s a heck of a lot easier to let them do the heavy lifting while you concentrate on building your web3 application. In the pair’s own words, “While self-managed nodes are often difficult to deploy and require constant management, Blockchain Node Engine is a fully managed node-hosting service that minimizes the need for node operations. web3 companies who require dedicated nodes can relay transactions, deploy smart contracts and read or write blockchain data with the reliability, performance and security they expect from Google Cloud compute and network infrastructure,” they wrote in the post. This is nuts and bolts stuff, helping companies to set up a node on supported blockchains and then managing it for the user, so they don’t have to worry about all the management overhead involved. For starters, the company will support Ethereum blockchain, so developers deploying nodes on Ethereum could do it themselves or pay Google to do much of that work for them. Presumably there will be other supported blockchains in the future. While it may feel like a pure crypto play, Tromans says the service is ultimately agnostic and developers can build anything they wish. “We are building foundational primitives to help developers innovate more quickly. Accordingly, Blockchain Node Engine is focused towards [multiple] developer use cases: smart contract development, reading from and writing to the blockchain, etc. How different developers use their fully managed, dedicated blockchain node engine infrastructure will be dependent on their individual use cases,” Tromans told ZebethMedia. The product is available starting today in private preview.

Fermyon raises $20M to build tools for cloud app dev • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 24, 2022Posted in Amplify Partners, Apps, cloud, Dev, Enterprise, Fermyon, funding, Insight Partners, startup, Startups, WebAssemblyNo Comments

Matt Butcher and Radu Matei worked on container technologies for years, “containers” in this context referring to software packages containing all the necessary elements to run in any environment, from desktop PCs to servers. As engineers at Deis, and then DeisLabs once Microsoft acquired it in 2017, their team explored the container landscape and built the package manager Helm as well as Brigade and other tooling. Along the journey, they faced myriad problems with containers — namely speed and cost. The setbacks spurred them and a handful of other DeisLabs veterans to found Fermyon, which today closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners with participation from Amplify Partners and angel investors. Fermyon offers a managed cloud service, Fermyon Cloud, that allows developers to quickly build microservices, or pieces of apps that work independently, but together (e.g., if one microservice fails, it won’t bring down the others). “Fermyon is building the next wave of cloud services atop WebAssembly,” Butcher said, referring to the open standard that allows web browsers to run binary code. “Originally written for the browser, WebAssembly has all of the earmarks of an excellent cloud compute platform … [Its] combination of features got us excited. Fermyon set out to build a suite of tools that enables developers to build, deploy, and then operate WebAssembly binaries in a cloud context.” Butcher argues WebAssembly is superior to containers in a number of respects, such as start-up time and compatibility across operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac plus hardware platforms like Intel and Arm. It’s also more secure, he asserts, because it can safely execute even untrusted code. To explore WebAssembly’s container-replacing potential, Fermyon developed Spin, an open source dev tool for creating WebAssembly cloud apps. Fermyon Cloud is the evolution of this work, providing a platform where customers can host those apps. “Fermyon Cloud empowers developers to deploy … applications written in a variety of languages (such as Rust, .NET, Go, JavaScript) and experience brilliantly fast performance,” Butcher said. “[A]nyone with a GitHub account can create cloud native WebAssembly applications … The developer self-service paradigm reduces the friction of building applications by making it not only possible but easy for developers to write and test their code in a production-grade environment — and then deploy the finished version to that same hosted environment. Fermyon Cloud lets devs create up to five web apps or microservices and run them in a hosted environment for free. In addition to hosting applications, the service delivers release management, log access and app configuration from a web console. With employees now in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, Fermyon’s focus is continuing to build out both its open source and commercial projects, Butcher said. Fermyon Cloud will expand into an “enterprise-ready” commercial offering in the coming months, he added, as Fermyon looks to double its 20-person headcount by mid-2023 — emphasizing product, marketing, developer relations and community roles. “We are well-positioned to weather macro-economic storms due to the financing we’re announcing today,” said Butcher while declining to reveal revenue figures. “[We] have funds to last us several years.” To date, Colorado-based Fermyon has raised $26 million.