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Huawei wants to grow public cloud market share
Bloggers explore Huawei's efforts to grow its public cloud market share, workload performance in containers and Cisco's new emphasis on LISP.
Huawei wants to gain public cloud market share and become a dominant public cloud provider, according to Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Current Analysis in Sterling, Va. At its annual Huawei Connect event, the Chinese vendor laid out its plans to grow public cloud market share to compete directly with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM. However, as Shimmin noted, Huawei's plan is not to dominate in the same way as its competitors -- instead the vendor aims to create an open platform that interoperates with other clouds.
Huawei will initially focus its attention on growing public cloud market share among telcos and in its home market, with clients such as China Telecom and China Central TV. Shimmin doubts that Huawei can match other hyperscale cloud providers in scope and scale. Although the vendor recently launched Huawei Enterprise Intelligence AI, Shimmin still sees Huawei's machine learning ranking far behind the AI capabilities of its competitors. "In my opinion, where Huawei is most likely to succeed with its cloud play is in helping partners and customers apply Huawei's significant hardware expertise to trenchant problems like cross-cloud security, AI-scale hardware and IoT edge computing," Shimmin said.
Read more of Shimmin's thoughts on Huawei.
Achieving container workload performance
Dan Conde, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass., said instead of fretting over competition between containers, virtual machines (VMs) and serverless machines, professionals need to focus on the architecture of new applications. Many emerging applications are geared for microservices and depend on new infrastructure to scale and interoperate.
In Conde's view, what really matters with containers and similar technologies is the performance of the workload, not how the workload is actually run. Having choices is vital -- even if it means mixing and matching containers and VMs. The traditional system of underlying platforms and operating systems has been displaced by a much more complicated set of services such as Cassandra, NATS or Apache Spark; cloud platforms; and lower-level offerings such as Apache Mesos or Red Hat OpenShift. "The old notion of a highly curated platform as a service (PaaS) is effectively dead because developers demand choices and the world is changing too rapidly to choose a narrow path. ...The analogy would be the five-year plans of the old planned economies. The current world is too dynamic to go down such a narrow path," Conde said.
Dig deeper into Conde's thoughts on container workload performance.
Cisco emphasizes LISP for enterprise campuses
Ivan Pepelnjak, writing in ipSpace, responded to questions he received from readers asking why Cisco was pushing LISP instead of EVPN for VXLAN-based enterprise systems. While Pepelnjak admitted that he wasn't certain of the exact reasons, he suggested that Cisco and a few other large vendors still see a need for large Layer 2 domains. "It looks like the networking industry is in another lemming rush. Everyone is rolling out VXLAN to solve large VLAN challenges, or even replacing MPLS with VXLAN for L3VPN deployments," Pepelnjak said.
He added that every large vendor is deploying EVPN as a control plane for VXLAN, including Cumulus Networks, Juniper Networks, Cisco and Arista Networks. According to Pepelnjak, LISP is a system searching for a problem that Cisco has chosen to deploy as an additional control plane, without any technical factors driving the decision.
Read more of Pepelnjak's thoughts on LISP.
