JANUARY
Microsoft cuts Azure storage pricing, going after Amazon
Microsoft, not content with battling Google in cloud productivity software, is now officially hell-bent on knocking Amazon Web Services off its perch in the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service market. Starting March 13, Microsoft will be cutting pricing for Windows Azure Block Blobs Storage and Disks/Page Blobs Storage by up to 20 percent, matching what AWS charges its East Region customers for its S3 and Elastic Block Store services, Steven Martin, Microsoft's general manager for Windows Azure, said in a blog post Friday.
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FEBRUARY
AWS in fight for Aussie IT talent
The hunt for Australian IT talent is heating up with Amazon Web Services looking to airlift Aussie engineers to its Seattle HQ as part of a global grab for up to 100 developers. The public cloud giant is running a one-week hiring blitz in Melbourne later this month to grow the US-based team for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2.
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MARCH
Amazon slashes pricing for cloud services
A day after Google slashed pricing for its cloud services, Amazon Web Services responded with some price cuts of its own. Effective April 1, AWS will cut Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) pricing by 10 percent to 40 percent for M1, M2, C1 and CC2 instances, AWS Senior Vice President Andy Jassy said Wednesday in a keynote at the AWS Summit in downtown San Francisco.
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APRIL
Amazon "dirtiest" cloud provider: Greenpeace
Greenpeace has slammed Amazon Web Services in its April 2014 report, "Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet". The report rated the environmental impact of 19 global web companies across a number of factors, including their use of renewable energy and transparency.
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MAY
Amazon introduces professional-level AWS certification
AWS pros can now take their mastery of the industry-leading public cloud platform to the next level, Amazon said Wednesday in introducing a higher tier of certification for its partners. "Amazon Professional Level AWS exam will allow VARs to improve and validate their advanced technical skills and knowledge so customers can be certain of their proficiency," Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, blogged.
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JUNE
Amazon busts into VMware's heartland
Amazon may be locked in a steel cage match with Microsoft and Google over cloud service pricing, but it's saving some of its energies to put pressure on its biggest enterprise rival: VMware. Last Friday, Amazon rolled out AWS Management Portal for vCenter, a tool that lets VMware admins manage virtual machines running on Amazon EC2 using the same software and interface they use to manage VMs on private clouds.
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JULY
Amazon posts biggest loss since 2012
Amazon has posted its biggest loss in two years, losing $126 million in the latest quarter. On average, analysts had expected a loss of a mere $66.7 million, according to Bloomberg. The poor year-on-year results come despite worldwide revenue growing by 23 percent, to $19.34 billion
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AUGUST
Amazon Web Services loses top Aussie architect
Simon Elisha, the first technical recruit at Amazon Web Services in 2011, has resigned to take up a role at big data and platform-as-a-service vendor Pivotal. Elisha has been appointed Pivotal's CTO and senior manager of field engineering, Australia & New Zealand.
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SEPTEMBER
HP gets closer to AWS cloud by acquiring Eucalyptus
Hewlett-Packard is acquiring Eucalyptus, an open source private startup that's helmed by former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos and has close ties to Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus sells software for building private clouds that support AWS's application programming interfaces (APIs), which means customers can move workloads back and forth between their data centres and the AWS EC2 public cloud. This scenario is known as "hybrid" cloud and it's the path many enterprises are taking to the cloud.
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OCTOBER
AWS steps up after Azure Australia launch
Amazon Web Services has responded after Microsoft yesterday said Azure has superior data redundancy capabilities and is the only IRAP-compliant public cloud provider in Australia. At the Azure Australia public launch yesterday, Microsoft's local data centres were revealed to be located in Sydney and Melbourne, with the vendor's executives consistently emphasising the "geographic redundancy" that this brings.
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NOVEMBER
AWS leans on channel in fierce cloud war
Amazon Web Services says it now has more than one million active customers. To keep the ball rolling, it's relying on partners to help enterprises and public sector agencies move to its public cloud. "Moving into 2015, we plan to more than double our investments in our APN Partners with the most significant set of updates, enhancements, and new benefits to the APN since its inception," said Terry Wise, AWS director for worldwide partner ecosystem.
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DECEMBER
Sydney welcomes AWS Zocalo
Amazon Web Services has made its new Zocalo collaboration and file sharing service available in Sydney from today. A representative for AWS announced the availability in the web services giant's developer forums (registration required). Until today, local Zocalo users had been hosted on the Oregon AWS instance on the west coast of the United States. Read more:
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