Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:
- Shaw explores selling ViaWest: Sources 'familiar with the matter' say that Canadian cable company Shaw Communications is exploring options for selling ViaWest. Shaw bought ViaWest three years ago for $1.2 billion.
- Amazon Strategy Teardown. CB Insights has an amazing, detailed analysis of strategy at Amazon. Company history, AI-as-a-Service, acquisition highlights, 'aggressive' growth plans, and initiatives by sector. Wow.
- iRobot: Vacuuming up Microservices on AWS. I like cloud architecture stories. This one just spoke to me -- about microservices and modern applications and services. "Ben Kehoe, Cloud Robotics Research Scientist at iRobot, explains how they built a serverless solution to power microservices that scale to control millions of robots. You’ll learn how they automate and optimize AWS Lambda function and Amazon API Gateway deployments with AWS CloudFormation and Swagger, plus how they inject information during the deployment process to decouple architecture details from the code."
- Will Molten Silicon make Lithium-Ion 'Uneconomic'? Australian company 1414 says it has developed a molten silicon thermal energy storage system (TESS) that can store 500 kilowatt-hours of energy within a 70-centimeter cube. At 36x the capacity of a 14 kilowatt hour Tesla Powerwall 2 the company says it could build a 10 megawatt-hour plant for around AUD $700,000 (USD $528,000), or a tenth of the price of a Tesla battery-based project.
- MIT Mathemetician spins up 220,000 core Google Compute Cluster. Google announced that MIT math professor and computational number theorist Andrew V. Sutherland crafted a 220,000-core workload on Google Compute Engine using preemptable virtual machine instances. Sutherland is already planning an even larger run of 400,000 cores.
- Path to Exascale. At a user forum U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP) director Paul Messina outlined the accelerated timetable with delivery of the first exascale machine now scheduled for 2021. The ECP is a collaborative effort of two U.S. Department of Energy organizations, the Office of Science (DOE-SC) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:
- Inside Amazon Hyperscale. I am a little behind - but catching up on watching AWS re:Invent talks from the event last month. I think the world of AWS VP James Hamilton, and his talk at the event about the inner workings of AWS data center operations is absolutely fascinating. Putting the hyper in hyperscale, James talks about all of the components of their data center architecture, innovation and the things one can do when your unit of measure is in a category of its own. Global network details, 100 waves @ 100G, 32MW data centers with 50-80k servers each, making their own network and compute hardware, machine learning, and just how their massive scale came into being for the cloud giant. Watch the video... or catch up on a much better article on it at Data Center Frontier.
- Number of hyperscale data centers reach 300. Citing research from Synergy Research Group CBR reports that the number of hyper scale data centers is expected to reach the 300 mark this month. The report analyzed the data center footprint of major cloud providers and internet service companies. With an average of 13 data center sites each the U.S. accounted for 45% of the number and China and Japan following at 8% and7% respectively.
- OneWeb raises $1.2B for satellite-based internet. The race to deliver satellite-powered internet is moving fast. After Tesla asked for permission to launch satellites, OneWeb has raised $1.2 billion to fund a "high volume satellite production facility" that will hopefully produce 15 satellites each week.
