Justin Trudeau Sends an HQ2 Love Letter to Amazon

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No tax breaks, but Canada offers a valuable perk: Universal healthcare. Canadian cities are going all out to woo Amazon’s second headquarters, including a “Dear Jeff” letter from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the company’s CEO Jeff Bezos. In his letter, which comes on the final day of a competition for cities to make their […] Read more »

Amazon Alexa is so smart it’s stupid

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The Amazon Alexa platform is on a roll, now crammed with more than 15,000 “skills,” up from 10,000 in February, as reported by Voicebot. While this sounds amazing, the reality is that the vast majority of Amazon Echo customers don’t know 99.999 percent of those skills exist. Worse, there seems to be no viable way […] Read more »

Amazon, VMware rumored to be developing data center software

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware are reportedly in talks about possibly teaming up to develop data center software products, according to The Information, which cited anonymous sources. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t have much if any detail on what that product would be. The speculation is it might be a stack-like product, since VMware already […] Read more »

Amazon Web Services sets a lure for Java programmers

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Amazon Web Services has long offered an SDK to make it easier to access its web services from Java. Now it has another lure for Java programmers: James Gosling, the father of Java. Gosling revealed his new employer on his Facebook page with the words: “It’s time for a change. I’m leaving Boeing Defense (nee […] Read more »

IDG Contributor Network: Can Amazon be stopped?

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Prime retail space is going vacant. The latest example of yet another retailer closing its doors is Payless Shoe Source. Payless has filed Chapter 11 and will be closing 400 stores. It’s ironic really, because their whole premise is Americans want to pay less for shoes, but the retailer can’t match the price or experience […] Read more »

After Amazon outage, HealthExpense worries about cloud lock-in

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Financial services companies as popular targets of cybercriminals for the obvious reason — they’re where the money’s at. And health care companies have medical records, which are very valuable on the black market since the information there can be abused in so many ways, and doesn’t expire. HealthExpense, which provides health care payment services to […] Read more »

Amazon shows why you shouldn’t put all your tech eggs in one cloud basket

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When Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service at Amazon’s US-EAST-1 data centers went down, things went bad. Very, very bad. How bad? Popular sites such as Quora, Business Insider, Netflix, Reddit and Slack either crashed entirely or were broken. By SimilarTech’s count, over 124,000 sites were affected. A college student told me, “It’s knocked out my […] Read more »

Battle of the clouds: Amazon Web Services vs. Microsoft Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform

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Amazon Web Services is the consensus leader of the IaaS public cloud computing market according to industry watchers, but they credit Microsoft for closing the gap with Azure and say Google with its Cloud Platform has made considerable strides as well. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here […] Read more »

Apple, Microsoft and Amazon offer fairer deal on cloud storage

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Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have agreed to give cloud storage subscribers fairer contracts after intervention by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority. Such cloud storage services are typically used to store photos, videos, music or digital copies of important documents. If the services shut down or vary their capacity or prices without notice, customers can […] Read more »

Amazon Chime goes after WebEx, Skype for Business and more

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Companies looking for a new video- and teleconferencing system have a fresh face to turn to in the market: Amazon Web Services. On Monday, the public cloud provider announced the launch of Amazon Chime, a new service that’s designed to compete with the likes of WebEx, Skype for Business and GoToMeeting. It’s a powerful swing […] Read more »

How to find, view, and delete everything the Amazon Echo and Google Home know about you

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Has Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Google Home taken up residence in your home? If not, you’re probably at least considering adding one of these digital helpers. They are supremely useful after all, providing assistance with everything from weather forecasts to smart-home control. All you need to do is ask. To read this article in full […] Read more »

How Amazon Kinesis can help you leverage real-time data

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This contributed piece has been edited and approved by Network World editors The more real-time data about customers, processes or competitors you can capture and analyze, the better you’ll be able to react quickly to important events.  Amazon Kinesis is a cloud tool we really like because you can use it to leverage your business’ real-time […] Read more »

How Rackspace will stay alive in cloud: Stop competing with Amazon, start partnering

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In August, 2016 months of speculations ended when Rackspace announced that an investment management group would purchase the 18-year-old company. Rumors have been swirling that the company may be acquired, but instead Rackspace took the route that Dell, Riverbed and BMC have and went private. To read this article in full or to leave a […] Read more »

MySQL face-off: Amazon outscales Google

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Many web applications have been built on an open source stack that included MySQL. Despite its limitations, MySQL managed to become the world’s most widely used open source RDBMS. What limitations, you ask? Out of the box, MySQL does not scale all that well and, in particular, cannot handle a lot of simultaneous clients compared […] Read more »

Does Oracle have a shot in the public cloud vs. Amazon and Microsoft?

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Larry Ellison has voiced fighting words at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference this week, announcing that Amazon Web Services’ lead in the IaaS market is over and that AWS will have “serious competition going forward.” But does Oracle actually have a shot versus AWS and the company many see as the second place vendor, Microsoft? “It depends,” […] Read more »

$29 for This Premium 4-Course Training on Amazon Web Services- Deal Alert

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AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is the premier cloud computing platform that services companies worldwide. Master this in-demand platform, and you’re certain to command a hefty paycheck. Unsure where to start? The AWS Mastery Bundle is a 4-course bundle certain to make you an authority on all things AWS–and turn you into a certified cloud […] Read more »

With Amazon Kinesis Analytics, devs can analyze real-time data with SQL

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Amazon launched a new tool on Thursday aimed at helping developers build applications that offer insights from a firehose of data in real time. Kinesis Analytics will let users set up SQL queries that run on data that’s constantly updating, expanding the reach of the popular data analysis language beyond traditional database applications.  Once a […] Read more »

Facebook’s beefing up its huge army of Messenger bots as Google and Amazon catch up

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The bot revolution is happening fast for Facebook. After launching third-party bots in April offering everything from forecasts to your boarding pass, the social network says there are now more than 11,000 bots active on Facebook. To celebrate, Facebook is adding a bunch of new features that could show up on your favorite bots soon—if developers […] Read more »

Microsoft and Amazon look to scoop up SAP workloads headed to the cloud

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As SAP holds its annual Sapphire Now user conference in Orlando this week, two of the leading IaaS providers are making the case for running SAP apps on their public clouds. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined SAP CEO Bill McDermott during the Sapphire keynotes on Tuesday to announce a broad partnership between the two companies […] Read more »

Apache Spark 2.0 Preview, Google’s Amazon Echo Rival: Big Data Roundup

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Apache Spark 2.0 preview is released for Databricks customers. Google preps a stationary personal assistant like Amazon Echo. MarkLogic revs up security and encryption. We have all this and more in our Big Data Roundup for the week ending May 15, 2016. InformationWeek: Cloud Read more »

Amazon discovery service marks on-premises apps for assimilation

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Sometimes the hardest part of performing a cloud migration is figuring out what has to be migrated in the first place. That’s one idea behind Amazon’s now generally available AWS ADS (Application Discovery Service), which polls existing on-premises systems and determines what apps they’re running as a prelude to migration. Originally announced in April, ADS is […] Read more »