Today’s topics include Google Cloud Services Platform bringing the cloud on-premises, and Samsung announcing its 7.3-inch foldable smartphone.
Google is extending its Cloud Platform beyond the confines of its own data centers, enabling organizations to run its Cloud Services Platform on-premises. The beta of the Kubernetes-based Cloud Services Platform is now available, providing organizations with the ability to run Google cloud workloads on their own hardware infrastructure and manage it in a unified approach with workloads running in the public cloud.
With the regular version of Google Kubernetes Engine that runs on the Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes is already set up and mostly ready to run, with just a few configuration options from users.
For GKE On Prem as part of the Cloud Services Platform, the setup is a little more involved, though Google still does all the “heavy lifting” for users, according to Chen Goldberg, director of engineering for Container Engine and Kubernetes at Google.
At its Galaxy Unpacked 2019 event in San Francisco last week, Samsung wowed the crowd with its long-rumored folding smartphone, the Galaxy Fold, which has a bright display that unfolds to 7.3 inches.
The Fold is definitely innovative, with a 4.6-inch HD+ Super AMOLED display on its front and a large interior display that unfolds into a 7.3-inch QXGA+ Dynamic AMOLED screen.
Priced starting at $1,980— twice the price of a typical flagship handset—the Galaxy Fold will not be a smartphone for everybody, according to IT analysts who spoke with eWEEK about the new device. “The Galaxy Fold will appeal to big-spending status seekers—and to a niche of people willing to pay extra for the flexibility of a folding large screen in their pocket,” said Frank Gillett of Forrester Research.
Another analyst, Tuong Nguyen of Gartner, said that with a nearly $2,000 price tag, Samsung likely does not expect the flagship Fold to drive sales volumes in the U.S. market.