
In our last installment of Follow the CAPEX™ (motion picture rights are still available), we looked at the gargantuan CAPEX spending by the three hyper-scale public cloud companies: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. That previous post compiled CAPEX spending for the cloud leaders back to 2001 and let us speculate about when they got serious about…

I am late to updating the geographic view of Gartner’s Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Magic Quadrant. Here is the update for 2017 (see 2016, 2015): Commentary: 1\ The Seattle region (aka the Leaders quadrant) is unchanged. This supermassive region may turn into a black hole, warp the space-time continuum, and consume most of the…

The capital expenditures (CAPEX) going into the cloud are Sagan-esque, with billions upon billions being spent on sprawling complexes of interconnected datacenters scattered across the planet. The hyper-scale public cloud operators (Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft) operate BFGCs (big, uh, freakin’ global computers) at immense industrial scale, with townships of well-ventilated warehouses that collectively hold…