Hey everyone, Happy Monday,
Last week DigitalOcean held its first analyst day since IPO. I’ll write some thoughts about it this week, but James Fish @ Piper Sandler summed it up best saying “While the analyst day gave greater details into customers, go-to-market, and aspirations, it missed the mark on directly addressing key debates, such as the price increase impact, whitespace, competitive concerns, and deeper dive into edge and serverless”, and I tend to agree. I was eager to hear about how DigitalOcean might be thinking about the edge computing opportunity, especially after Akamai’s acquisition of Linode and follow-on commentary around expanding the Linode platform but all we heard was that the company will potentially use M&A to address the gap.
In a couple weeks I’ll be at DCD Connect Silicon Valley participating in the DCD>Debate: Is a complete rethink of the network required to enable edge adoption? If you’re attending, drop me a note, I’d love to meet both new and old friends, especially if you’re a subscriber.
Additionally, if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area or visit often, I’m working on a putting together a meetup for anyone interested in getting together for some great conversations along with good food and drink. Please complete this form if you’re interested in attending.
Let’s get into this week’s update.
Your Weekly Briefing
Cloud Platforms and Infrastructure
Wasabi expanded its cloud storage platform to Singapore, its 12th region globally, and fourth in APAC after its recent expansion into Sydney. The company said it now has customers in 100 countries. Link
Google’s new cloud region in Dallas, TX is now open for business. Dallas is Google Cloud’s 11th region in North America and 34th globally. Link
Alibaba Cloud is expanding its cloud infrastructure into Saudi Arabia through a joint venture with STC and eWTP Arabia Capital. Link
Interesting thoughts about AWS Aurora Serverless v2, essentially saying Aurora is not truly serverless because true serverless should allow you to fully scale down to zero and only pay for the resources you consume. I’m no serverless expert and only recently began paying closer attention to the market considering its potential as a key enabler of edge computing adoption.Link
The team at Vantage published a nice breakdown of AWS NAT Gateways and VPC Endpoints with some insightful commentary on pricing and potential savings. Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, check out AWS Cost leaderboard which shows which AWS services cost the most, informed by the company’s unique vantage point. Link
Cloudflare is developing its next-gen CDN platform under the moniker Project Flame, according to a job posting that also says the future architecture will be based on Cloudflare Workers, the company’s serverless product. Link
Telnyx, a communications platform providing network and voice connectivity services is launching an object storage product and is now accepting beta customers. Link
The 400G Roll Out Continues
MOX Networks joined the 400G party, announcing it is upgrading several routes across the US and Japan with 400G capabilities. Link
Windstream announced a new round of route upgrades supporting 400G capabilities including Ashburn-[Chicago|Denver|San Jose|Los Angeles], Atlanta-[Dallas|Phoenix|San Jose| Los Angeles], Seattle-[Portland|San Jose|Los Angeles], and Chicago-[Dallas|Atlanta]. In addition, Windstream said they are accepting pre-orders for another round of upgrades that will be generally available in the second half of 2022 and includes Chicago-[Atlanta|Miami], Chicago-[Newark|New York|, Atlanta-[Ashburn|Newark|New York], and McAllen, TX-[Dallas|Memphis|Ashburn|New York]. Link
Padtec announced that South Front Networks, a regional US fiber network spanning Minnesota and Iowa with plans to extend north to Grand Forks, North Dakota, and south to Atlanta via Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, and Nashville, will deploy its 800G optical platform (TM800G) to deliver 400G wavelengths across its network. Link
Never-ending Data Center Growth
Equinix acquired land in Mumbai for its third data center in the market adjacent to MB2 with capacity for 1,375 cabs in the first phase, and is targeting completion by Q2 2024 with more than 4,150 cabs when fully built out. Link
Africa Data Centres is expanding into Accra, Ghana (West Africa) with plans to build a 30 MW data center, citing high demand from hyper-scalers, cloud operators and enterprises for capacity in the market. Link
STACK Infrastructure is expanding into Australia via a partnership with Hickory to construct a 72 MW campus (2x36MW data centers) in Western Melbourne and is expected to be completed in early 2023. Additionally, STACK will develop a 28 MW data center in Canberra and a 24 MW data center in Perth to be completed in the second half of 2023. The company also said it plans to announce further expansions in the APAC region in the near future. Link
CoreSite officially announced their expansion into Atlanta and Orlando, which is via the integration of previously acquired data centers—DataSite and ColoAtl—by American Tower, bringing CoreSite’s footprint to 11 markets. Link
Redcentric is buying Sungard’s remaining ~3 UK data centers after the company recently went into bankruptcy. Link
Datavita announced plans to open a metro “data center” with capacity for ~150 cabs inside a commercial office building in the International Financial Services District of Glasgow. Link
Need a new gig?
AWS - Product Manager, Connectivity, Amazon Sidewalk Link
AWS - Principal Product, Cloud RAN, EC2 Edge Link
CoreSite - Vice President, Network Engineering & Interconnection Link
Equinix - Vice President, Physical Interconnection Link
Equinix - Vice President, Colocation Link
Equinix - Senior Director, Corporate Development & Strategy Link
Google - Senior Data Center Real Estate Researcher Link
Roblox - Edge Strategy Manager Link
Snowflake - Principal Product Manager - Cloud Infrastructure and Global Expansion Link
T-Mobile - Principal Product Manager, Cloud & Edge Computing Link
GigaOm says that Nokia outperforms in data center switching
The latest GigaOm Radar for Data Center Switching identifies Nokia as an Outperformer. The report compares the relative value, innovation and maturity based on strategy and execution of Nokia 7250 IXR hardware running SR Linux NOS and the Fabric Services System operations and automation platform with different vendors’ solutions.
Find out why our high-performance hardware, fully programmable NOS and NetOps toolkit earned high rankings for metrics such as automation and support for network design, deployment and operations
Further Reading
It’s Warren Buffett Versus Big Tech in Iowa’s Latest Wind Farm Debate - Bloomberg
The Cloud Killed Infrastructure, Long Live Infrastructure!
Chinese hackers exploited years-old software flaws to break into telecom giants
Cutting Through the Edge Computing Hype - Spirent
Netflix Open Connect Pledges Expanded Local Access For Over 100M Internet Users
Akamai CEO Tom Leighton on edge computing, cloud, security - Protocol
AUCloud Illuminates Sovereign Bridge Across Australia - AUCloud
2022 SRE Survey | Catchpoint
HTTP RFCs have evolved: A Cloudflare view of HTTP usage trends
Is Zero Trust Living Up to Expectations? - by Bruce Davie