Ensono, a leading hybrid IT services provider, selected CloudCheckr for the development of a new cost and inventory portal, providing Ensono clients robust cost optimization, inventory tracking and governance capabilities in the cloud.

"We are committed to bringing our clients the most trusted resources for their digital transformation journey, which is why we chose CloudCheckr for the Ensono cost and inventory portal," said Brett Moss, SVP and general manager, hyperscale cloud at Ensono. "CloudCheckr is a market leader, and their cost management portal met the requirements we were looking for in our service offering. With the additional insights, clients will gain a better understanding of what’s running on their IT infrastructure, enabling them to make smarter business decisions."

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced two new arrivals to complement its existing popular Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and make it easier than ever to deploy, manage, and scale container workloads on AWS. Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) brings Kubernetes to AWS as a fully managed service, making it easy for customers to run Kubernetes applications on AWS without the need to become experts in operating Kubernetes clusters. AWS also introduced a new capability called AWS Fargate that allows customers to launch and run containers without provisioning or managing servers or clusters. To learn more about Amazon EKS and AWS Fargate visit: https://aws.amazon.com/containers/.

"While we have over a hundred thousand active Amazon ECS clusters running on AWS and more customers running Kubernetes on AWS than on any other cloud, customers have also asked us to build a managed Kubernetes service like we have with Amazon ECS," said Deepak Singh, GM of Containers and High Performance Computing Services, AWS. "Not only have we delivered on this request with Amazon EKS, but we’ve also made managed containers easier to use than ever before by launching AWS Fargate to allow developers to run containers at the task level rather than having to think about servers or clusters."

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced that customers can now use AWS PrivateLink to access third-party SaaS applications from their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without exposing their VPC to the public Internet. Customers can also use AWS PrivateLink to connect services across different accounts and VPCs within their own organizations, significantly simplifying their internal network architecture. To get started with AWS PrivateLink visit: https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/details/.

Since the introduction of Amazon VPC in 2009, AWS customers have been able to define and control private, secure networks without having to invest in and manage a VPN infrastructure. The vast majority of Amazon EC2 instances now run in Amazon VPCs, and many customers rely on the ability to limit access to their VPC from the Internet as a critical component of their security. However, this presents a challenge when using third-party SaaS applications, as customers often have to make a choice between allowing Internet access from their VPC in order to access these SaaS applications, or not using them at all. With AWS PrivateLink, customers can now connect their VPCs to third-party services in a secure and scalable manner. Earlier this month, AWS introduced the ability for customers to access AWS services over AWS PrivateLink. Now, AWS has extended AWS PrivateLink to support non-AWS services so that customers no longer have to choose between using a third-party SaaS offering or exposing their critical data to the Internet. Traffic between a customer’s VPC and a AWS PrivateLink-powered service stays within the AWS network and doesn’t traverse the Internet, reducing threat vectors such as "brute force" and distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Services supported on AWS PrivateLink are delivered using private IP connectivity and security groups, and function like services that are hosted directly on a customer’s private network.

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced a new Bare Metal instance offering for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and introduced a new Storage Optimized instance family (H1 instances). The new H1 Storage Optimized instances are designed for data-intensive workloads such as MapReduce, distributed file systems, network file systems, log or data processing, and big data clusters. AWS also launched the next generation of General Purpose instances, M5, which have up to 50 percent more vCPUs, 50 percent more memory, and 25 percent more network bandwidth than previous generation M4 instances. To get started with the new Amazon EC2 instances, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

"AWS continues to expand and enhance what was already the cloud’s broadest and most capable compute service," said Matt Garman, Vice President, AWS Compute Services, AWS. "Most of our customers have diverse computing needs, and they’ve told us having the right instance for the right workload really matters. Today, we expand the options we give customers across three dimensions, introducing a brand new capability with Bare Metal instances for the I3 High I/O family, launching a new family of Storage Optimized instances designed for big data workloads with H1, and providing higher performance and lower prices for general purpose workloads with the launch of M5."

"The new integrations make it even easier for Splunk users from IT, marketing, sales, operations and beyond to access and turn AWS data into answers in Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud," said Richard Campione, chief product officer, Splunk. "Splunk is committed to providing a holistic set of AWS integrations that scale to meet our customers’ requirements across every use case in IT, Security, Big Data and IoT. The ultimate goal is to provide our joint customers with end-to-end visibility across their entire infrastructure to empower them to make timely, data-driven business decisions."

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), announced that the National Football League (NFL) has selected AWS’s machine learning and data analytics services to boost the accuracy, speed, and insights provided by its Next Gen Stats platform, the NFL’s player-tracking system. In choosing AWS to power Next Gen Stats, the NFL aims to develop new ways of visualizing the action on the field, uncovering deeper insights into the action on the field, and expanding the fan experience by offering a broader range of advanced statistics. In addition, AWS will become an Official Technology Provider of the NFL.

Through the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags in player equipment and the football, Next Gen Stats captures a variety of real-time location, speed, and acceleration data. The data is analyzed on AWS and used to contextualize movement on the field for fans to see on NFL Media properties, game broadcasts, third-party digital platforms, and in-venue displays. The data is also leveraged by NFL clubs post game as part of their football operations on a weekly basis. The system creates a variety of unique player and team stats for every game such as a receiver’s ability to get open and an offensive line’s ability to protect the quarterback. By leveraging AWS’s broad range of cloud-based machine learning capabilities, the NFL is looking to take its game-day stats to the next level so that fans and NFL Clubs can benefit from deeper insights.

Nokia’s software-defined network (SDN) venture, Nuage Networks, has been chosen by Fujitsu to expand its Cloud Service Fujitsu Enterprise Cloud Service K5. The world’s largest OpenStack cloud service, K5 provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) using both virtual machine (VM) and bare metal services, with the latter managed by OpenStack Ironic, in a global commercial first. The powerful combination of OpenStack and the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) provides Fujitsu and its enterprise customers with massively scalable and highly available virtual networks.

The Nuage Networks next-generation overlay SDN solution will help Fujitsu expand its deployment of its K5 cloud-based services beyond its current data centers in Japan, Europe and North America, to new centers in Singapore and Australia. Starting with the data center in Japan, Cloud Service K5 will enable Fujitsu’s enterprise customers to accelerate their digital transformation by moving their existing server infrastructure into K5 data centers. This allows them to quickly migrate to a cloud-native architecture running on OpenStack Ironic and the Nuage Networks VSP. In addition to ‘on-demand’ delivery of services, it will assure them greater security, manageability and availability of the cloud, as well as full support for non-cloud-native applications running on fully integrated bare metal services.

"We’ve teamed with AWS to add our unique value to Amazon GuardDuty findings, maintaining a dynamic asset model of the customer’s environment and providing prescriptive guidance on how to remediate Amazon GuardDuty findings and adhere to security best practices on AWS."

Confluent, provider of the streaming platform based on Apache Kafka, today announced that Confluent Cloud is generally available and ready for enterprise production workloads with a 99.95 percent service level agreement (SLA). Built by the original creators of Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud operationalizes the Confluent team’s expertise from managing some of the largest streaming environments in production today. The fully managed service helps companies deploy their Customer 360, fleet management, fraud detection, and other real-time, large-scale initiatives.  

Confluent Platform includes Confluent Cloud, Confluent Enterprise and Confluent Open Source, to create a more complete distribution of Apache Kafka intended for large-scale production across a variety of environments. It improves Apache Kafka by expanding its integration capabilities, adding tools to optimize and manage Kafka clusters, and ensuring the streams are secure. With Confluent Cloud, enterprises and developers have the option to build and run applications in the cloud, knowing that the team who created Kafka are maintaining and managing the Kafka clusters.

Key Confluent Cloud features: