Today’s topics include how people on the internet reacted to violent protests in Charlottesville, Va., Oracle’s new release of the Exadata database for the cloud; Amazon Web Service’s latest cloud migration services, and Google’s updated cloud speech API for Android app developers.
Fringe political groups have been gravitating to the internet as a place where they can communicate and organize. This is what happened when a group of right-wing organizers decided to hold their rally in Charlottesville to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
Shortly after the violent clashes that accompanied the rally subsided, an alleged Nazi sympathizer ran down counter-protesters with his car, injuring 19 and killing one. Later, the Nazi website, the Daily Stormer, published a description of the victim that was so objectionable that GoDaddy announced that it was yanking its domain registration.
At this point it’s too early to tell whether the demise of Daily Stormer was at the hands of the domain registrars who cancelled the registration, or of Cloudflare, which was the hosting provider. But what is clear is that the forces that oppose those hate groups are mounting a public opinion campaign against the ISPs used by those groups.
For more than three decades, Oracle was all about all-Oracle, all the time. There were myriad restrictions: Oracle required you to buy their hardware in order to run Oracle software.
Only Oracle’s middleware worked with its apps and you needed to work with Oracle technical support services. But cloud computing has forced Oracle to loosen up its Oracle-only business policies.
The company announced that it’s highly proprietary Oracle Exadata database can now run any application a customer wants on the Oracle cloud infrastructure. Note that it still has to run on the Oracle cloud—not AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure—so there is still a modicum of restriction involved.
“Customers using our infrastructure are able to bring applications to the cloud never previously possible, without the cost of re-architecture, and achieve incredible performance throughout the stack,” Oracle Cloud Vice President of Product and Strategy Kash Iftikhar told eWEEK.
Amazon Web Services announced a series of new services this week at the company’s AWS Summit in New York City, including migration, Glue data transformation, Macie machine learning security and CloudHSM Hardware Security Module offerings.
While many organizations have chosen to build new applications on AWS, Adrian Crockfort, vice president of cloud architecture at AWS said during his keynote that many organizations are also choosing to move entire data centers to the cloud.
In an effort to help make the move to the cloud easier, AWS today announced the AWS Migration Hub. The new AWS migration hub includes discovery, server and database migration, as well as tracking and management features for organizations looking to move to the public cloud.
Google has added several new features to its Cloud Speech Application Programming Interface for developers seeking to integrate speech recognition capabilities into their Android applications.
The updates add support for long-form audio clips and increase the number of languages for which speech recognition is now available.
The goal is to give developers more functionality and control for adding speech recognition to their products and services, Google product manager Dan Aharon said in an announcement on Google’s cloud platform blog.