What is the one cloud architecture decision you would undo if you could?
Account structure, networking, region choice, managed-service lock-in: the lessons that cost the most are the most useful to others.
Evaluating Cloud Infrastructure this quarter? This page brings together what changed, which companies are most active, what practitioners are asking and how to build a shortlist.
Public, sovereign and private cloud compute, storage and platform services, plus pricing, regions and the providers behind them.
Start with the news. These are the Cloud Infrastructure stories getting the most attention right now, so you know what has shifted before you talk to anyone.
The organizations pulling ahead are not simply adding AI to what they already have. They are designing for a different kind of software. The post Designing agent-first platforms: What changes when agents do the work appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog .
Amazon Transcribe now lets you encrypt your custom vocabularies, custom vocabulary filters, and custom language models at rest with a customer-managed AWS KMS key that you own and control. Previously, these custom resources were always encrypted with an AWS owned key. Now you can supply your own symmetric AWS KMS key when you create or update these resources, so the artifacts Transcribe stores on…
Starting today, Amazon EC2 M8i and M8i-flex instances are now available in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany) region. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The M8i and M8i-flex instances offer up to 15% better price-performance,…
Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8i and R8i-flex instances are available in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany) region. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The R8i and R8i-flex instances offer up to 15%…
Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C8i and C8i-flex instances are available in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany) region. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. These C8i and C8i-flex instances offer up to 15%…
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) outbound identity federation now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints for the OpenID Connect (OIDC) discovery APIs. You can now access the OIDC discovery metadata and JSON Web Key Set (JWKS) verification key endpoints from within your VPC using AWS PrivateLink , without requiring traffic to traverse the public internet. IAM outbound…
Compute (EC2) opened the front door to the first generation cloud. Agents need something different: compute, inference, and data working as one. We built the cloud that delivers all three as one simple, intuitive developer experience for AI-natives. Every era of the cloud has its own unit of work. For the last twenty years, that unit was the virtual machine hour. Customers came for the compute,…
CoreWeave Mission Control brings frontier scale expertise to AI operations. Explore MCP, now generally available, and the Agent in console preview.
Those stories keep returning to the same names. These are the companies we track in this category; each profile has its news, solutions and published reviews.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud computing subsidiary of Amazon, headquartered in Seattle and launching its core services in 2006. It offers on-demand infrastructure and platform services including EC2 compute, S3 storage, databases such as Aurora and DynamoDB, EKS containers, IoT, analytics, Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker for AI, and Trainium and Graviton custom chips.
Microsoft is a global technology company whose enterprise portfolio spans the Azure cloud platform, Microsoft 365 productivity software, Dynamics 365 business applications, security products and developer tools such as GitHub. Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft is one of the largest providers of cloud and AI services to businesses.
Google Cloud is the cloud computing business of Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. It offers Google Cloud Platform infrastructure and services including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery, Spanner and the Vertex AI platform with Gemini models, as well as Google Workspace. It serves enterprises, public sector organisations and startups through global cloud regions.
Oracle is an enterprise software and cloud company known for Oracle Database, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, NetSuite, MySQL and Java. It serves enterprises and governments with databases, ERP, HCM and industry applications, and cloud infrastructure for AI training and inference. Founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, Oracle is listed on the NYSE and headquartered in Austin, Texas.
IBM is a US technology company providing hybrid cloud and AI software, infrastructure and consulting. Its portfolio includes Red Hat OpenShift, the watsonx AI and data platform, IBM Z mainframes and Power servers, IBM Storage, Db2 databases, and automation and observability software such as Instana and HashiCorp Terraform. Founded in 1911 and headquartered in Armonk, New York, IBM is listed on the NYSE.
Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun, is the cloud computing business of Alibaba Group, founded in 2009 and headquartered in Hangzhou, China. It provides public cloud infrastructure including Elastic Compute Service, Object Storage Service, databases such as PolarDB, big data and AI services, and develops the Qwen family of large language models, serving customers in China and internationally.
Huawei is a Chinese technology company that makes telecommunications and enterprise networking equipment, consumer devices, cloud services, data storage and AI processors. Its portfolio includes 5G and optical network infrastructure, CloudEngine switches, OceanStor storage, Huawei Cloud and Ascend AI chips. Founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei and headquartered in Shenzhen, Huawei is privately held and employee-owned through a trade union structure.
Tencent Cloud is the cloud computing business of Tencent Holdings, the Chinese technology company headquartered in Shenzhen. It provides infrastructure and platform services including compute, storage, networking, databases, content delivery, audio and video (real-time communication and streaming), security and AI services, operating data centre regions in mainland China and internationally for enterprises, gaming and media companies.
DigitalOcean is an American cloud infrastructure provider founded in 2011 by brothers Ben and Moisey Uretsky with Jeff Carr, Alec Hartman and Mitch Wainer. It offers simple, developer-focused cloud services including Droplet virtual machines, managed Kubernetes, managed databases, object storage, app hosting and GPU compute for AI workloads, targeting developers, startups and small and medium-sized businesses. DigitalOcean is listed on the NYSE (DOCN).
Akamai Technologies is a US content delivery, cybersecurity and cloud computing company founded in 1998 and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It operates one of the largest distributed edge networks, selling CDN and media delivery, web application and API protection, DDoS mitigation and Zero Trust security, and Akamai Cloud compute built on its 2022 acquisition of Linode.
OVHcloud is a French cloud provider offering bare-metal dedicated servers, public cloud, private cloud based on VMware and other hypervisors, web hosting, domains and managed Kubernetes. It designs its own servers and operates data centres in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, positioning around data sovereignty. Founded in 1999 by Octave Klaba and headquartered in Roubaix, France, it is listed on Euronext Paris.
Cloudflare is a US connectivity cloud company founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco. It operates a global network providing CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, web application firewall, Zero Trust access and SASE services, and a developer platform including Workers serverless compute, R2 storage and Workers AI. Cloudflare has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since 2019.
Vultr is a privately held cloud infrastructure provider founded in 2014 and headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida. It offers cloud compute, bare metal servers, cloud GPUs for AI workloads, managed Kubernetes, managed databases, block and object storage and networking across a global network of data centre locations, aimed at developers and businesses. Vultr is operated by The Constant Company.
CoreWeave is an American AI cloud provider headquartered in Livingston, New Jersey. It operates data centres offering GPU-accelerated compute, storage and networking for training and running AI models, with managed Kubernetes and Slurm services. Founded in 2017 as Atlantic Crypto, it pivoted to cloud computing, listed on Nasdaq (CRWV) in March 2025 and acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases in 2025.
Equinix is a global digital infrastructure company founded in 1998 and headquartered in Redwood City, California. It operates International Business Exchange (IBX) colocation data centres in many metropolitan markets worldwide, along with interconnection services such as Equinix Fabric and Internet Exchange, and xScale hyperscale data centres. Equinix is structured as a real estate investment trust (REIT) and is listed on Nasdaq (EQIX).
Rackspace Technology is a US managed cloud and IT services company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, founded in 1998. It designs, migrates and operates workloads on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and private cloud infrastructure, and provides managed hosting, security and application services. Rackspace is majority-owned by funds managed by Apollo Global Management and is listed on Nasdaq.
Hetzner is a German web hosting and cloud infrastructure provider offering dedicated servers, Hetzner Cloud virtual servers, storage, colocation and web hosting at relatively low prices. It operates its own data centres in Germany and Finland, with cloud locations in the United States and Singapore. Founded in 1997 by Martin Hetzner, Hetzner Online GmbH is headquartered in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria, and privately owned.
Lambda is an AI infrastructure company that provides GPU cloud computing for training and running AI models, including on-demand instances, reserved clusters and private cloud capacity based on NVIDIA GPUs. It also offers the Lambda Stack software distribution and has sold GPU workstations and servers. Formerly known as Lambda Labs, the company was founded in 2012 by Stephen and Michael Balaban.
Scaleway is a French cloud provider headquartered in Paris and owned by the Iliad Group. It offers public cloud infrastructure including virtual instances, bare-metal servers, GPU compute, managed Kubernetes, object storage, databases, serverless and AI inference services from data centres in Europe. Scaleway positions itself as a European sovereign cloud alternative to US hyperscalers.
Fastly is an American edge cloud platform company founded in 2011 by Artur Bergman and headquartered in San Francisco. It provides a programmable content delivery network, edge compute based on WebAssembly, web application and API security, DDoS protection, bot management, image optimisation and observability services. Fastly is listed on the NYSE (FSLY).
Vendor news only tells you half of it. This is what people working in Cloud Infrastructure are discussing and asking each other.
Account structure, networking, region choice, managed-service lock-in: the lessons that cost the most are the most useful to others.
Which best describes your organisation’s direction for the next 12 months?
With the news, the companies and the open questions in view, pick three to five companies whose products match your problem, read their recent stories and put your remaining questions to the community before you speak to sales.
If you want more background, here is more of the recent coverage.
Vultr and VAST deepen their partnership to bring together high-performance cloud compute, Cloud GPUs, and AI-optimized data infrastructure for production AI workloads.
The best model for your business will keep changing. Adopting it should move your business forward, not send your team back to rebuild the architecture around it. The post Ship agents faster with expanded model choice, voice agents, and continuous optimization appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog .
The AI Loop is how your models constantly improve. Learn how ARIA, Mission Control, and Weights & Biases all work together to keep your models and agents improving.
For years, resilience was something you set up once. That kept the lights on, but it treated resilience as a project with an end date rather than a property you maintain. The post Your architecture diagram is not your resilience appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog .
Will OVHcloud join an AI Gigafactory? The national logic, single site, public procurement: why the numbers aren’t adding up yet
Explore GPT-6 Astra, Sol, and GPT-6 Luna in Microsoft Foundry, with scalable model options for production AI agents, complex workflows, and high-volume tasks. The post GPT-6 Astra, Sol, and Luna: For production agents in Microsoft Foundry appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog .
Enterprise AI security without a rebuild. See how CoreWeave IAM and Remote Key Encryption federate the identity and key infrastructure you already have.
AI models are increasingly taking on work that extends far beyond a single prompt: building a feature across a codebase, investigating a complex issue, synthesizing hundreds of pages of information, or working through a multi-step business process. The post Claude Opus 5.5 comes to Microsoft Foundry for long-running coding and knowledge work appeared first on Microsoft Azure Blog .
Following a successful private preview, we’re thrilled to open DigitalOcean Managed Agents to everyone. Teams can now deploy their preferred agent harness (like OpenCode, Codex CLI) or bring their own, connect agents to 16,000+ tools, and help agents do more work at scale without building or maintaining any infrastructure themselves. With native integration to DigitalOcean’s Inference Engine ,…
Explore how AI is reshaping platform engineering, development velocity, infrastructure, and organizational priorities in 2026.
Learn how to deploy Microcks on an OVHcloud Managed Kubernetes cluster and expose it with Gateway API, Envoy Gateway, and cert-manager TLS.