Constellation Insights

Twitter eyes more enterprise business with premium APIs: While Twitter has long provided APIs (application programming interfaces) for its data at no charge, it also offers enterprise-focused tools based on its acquisition of Gnip back in 2014.

But that two-item API menu has had a functional gap, one Twitter is trying to fill with new "premium" APIs. The free ones provide basic querying and data access, while the enterprise versions offer the full history of Twitter information along with more real-time access. Here's how Twitter describes the value proposition of its premium APIs:

The new premium APIs bring the reliability and stability of our enterprise APIs to our broader developer ecosystem for the first time. They include a clear upgrade path that scales access and price to fit your needs. We’ve built these new products to enable innovation — whether you’re just getting started and building a proof of concept, or are an established company experimenting with new products and ideas. 

Launching today in public beta, our first premium offering is the Search Tweets API, which provides access to the past 30 days of Twitter data. Soon, we’ll add an additional endpoint that will enable access to the full history of Twitter data, going all the way back to @jack’s first Tweet in 2006.

Premium APIs also deliver more tweets per request, greater query complexity and richer metadata. They're offered under monthly contracts, with access available in usage-based tiers. Pricing begins at $149 per month but scales up to $2,499 per month.

Twitter has already posted an API roadmap, which can be viewed here.

POV: The Twitter firehose remains a crucial data source for developers, both in the startup and enterprise realm, as well as CxOs. Twitter's failure to provide a middle-ground level of API access to its data until only now has been a sore spot. Developers have found themselves quickly running up against the free APIs limits, only to be unable or unwilling to invest in Twitter's enterprise-level tooling. With ad revenue struggling, Twitter needs new revenue; it's an open question as to whether premium APIs will generate it quickly, with the answer coming down to awareness, price point, perceived value, and the level of trust between Twitter and developers.

Google's Cloud Spanner goes global: This year, Google introduced Cloud Spanner, the distributed database platform that underpins services like AdWords. While generally available, Cloud Spanner was limited to regional deployments. That's not the case any longer, as Google has rolled out multi-region configurations of the database:

With this release, we’ve extended Cloud Spanner’s transactions and synchronous replication across regions and continents. That means no matter where your users may be, apps backed by Cloud Spanner can read and write up-to-date (strongly consistent) data globally and do so with minimal latency for end users.

Additionally, when running a Multi-Region instance, your database is able to survive a regional failure. This release also delivers an industry-leading 99.999% availability SLA with no planned downtime. That’s 10x less downtime (< 5min / year) than database services with four nines of availability.

POV: While Cloud Spanner's capabilities are impressive, one has to wonder where its relevance is save for very large enterprises running highly complex workloads. To that end, Cloud Spanner may be battle-tested within Google but remains a new product in the commercial sense.

So far, Google's named references for Spanner include SaaS vendors such as Marketo. The marketing automation provider had actually moved its underlying database platform to a non-relational store some time back in order to gain needed scalability, but ran into problems over time since its products are so aligned with transactional data. Cloud Spanner is providing traditional relational characteristics along with the scale Marketo needs for its services, a spokesman said. Other references include Evernote, which is converting 750 MySQL instances into a single Cloud Spanner instance, according to a statement.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation provides Kubernetes coherence: The influential industry group Cloud Native Computing Foundation has announced a certification and interoperability program for Kubernetes, the increasingly popular open source project for software container orchestration.

Some 32 certified Kubernetes distributions and platforms are availble under the program, which uses a testing suite to validate submissions for conformity with standards. They include offerings from Alibaba, Canonical, Apprenda, Cisco, Cloud Foundry, Docker, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and SAP, among many others.

POV: Kubernetes originated at Google and over the past three years has become one of the fastest-growing open source projects ever. Containers underpin the next generation of cloud architectures, so some level of cohesion among industry players is to be expected, but the level of cooperation evidenced by the certification program's success is nonetheless remarkable.

Moreover, the sheer amount of critical mass it provides around a single, interoperable version of Kubernetes makes the prospect of a fork almost unthinkable. This is one case where enterprises will benefit from the shared interests of many vendors, who will have to compete based on the quality of services and value-added features.