Amazon Web Services

Amazon is announcing a further reduction in pricing for their EC2 platform and if history is any judge of what will happen next, expect Microsoft to follow close behind with price cuts.

Because I already miss Atlanta, this edition of Short Takes focuses on Salesforce and Microsoft, Microsoft’s new AI-focused reorganization, Google’s new enterprise cloud push, Xbox strategy changes, China accuses Samsung of discrimination in Samsung Note 7 recall, and a ton of headline riffs.

Microsoft PowerShell on Linux and macOS—yes, it’s now open source. If you think the world’s gone mad, you might be right. For die-hard Linux-heads, it’s never going to replace Bash, Perl or Python. But for Microsoft-centric dev/ops types, it promises to be a wonderful widget in the toolbag. Especially as more workloads move to “the cloud.”

Google is continuing to expand its infastracutre to better compete with Amazon and Microsoft; Gartner is starting to recognize the company’s new initiatives and has listed them as a visionary.

Microsoft has announced a price reduction for some of its Azure services which mirror a recent price drop by Amazon as both companies compete fiercely for new business.

Amazon just decided to wage war for the enterprise messaging market by announcing Amazon WorkMail, a new cloud-based mail service that will compete with Microsoft Exchange Online and Google Gmail.

Russell Smiths shares simple steps for assigning elastic IP addresses to Amazon EC2 instances.

Russell Smith shows us an easy way to configure Amazon Web Services security groups so that EC2 VPC instances can communicate with each other.

Russell Smith shows us how to get DNS resolution working for Active Directory by creating a new DHCP options set in Amazon Web Services.

Learn how to provision a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM with a static private IP address in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), with the help of Windows PowerShell.