
Issue #18: Dec 15 - Dec 17
Leaders in Cloud DBMS and AI Infrastructure named by Gartner and Forrester, AWS’ CDK v2 release, results of moving from Intel to AMD-powered EC2, Google’s plans for a Digital Twin solution, Verizon’s partnership with Google to deliver smart factory solutions, and more.
Trends & Analysis
AWS posits automation as the key to the right security posture in the cloud
AWS announced new automation capabilities in AWS Inspector, reiterating its stance that more automation leads to better security. A Fugue and Sonatype report says 36% organisations suffered serious cloud data leak over the last year, citing misconfiguration as a key source of vulnerability.
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Cloud cost management alone won’t help control cloud costs, optimization automation is the right way to go
A new guide to cloud cost optimization says that changing cloud costs and resource demand, building visibility into multi-cloud, and manual efforts are major shortcomings of traditional cloud cost management approaches; cost optimization automation minimizes engineer time and promises results amidst these challenges.
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Updates & Tips
Microsoft named leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud DBMS, Google declared leader in AI Infrastructure by Forrester
Microsoft believes its end-to-end data platform offering, and the best of SQL and NoSQL offerings won the position; Google cloud reiterates its win with its AI infrastructure offerings like TPU pods and Google Kubernetes Engine, and its new Vertex AI platform for MLOps.
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AWS more than just a cloud - it is also an IT services provider, says analyst
AWS’ strong focus on owning the value chain positions it as more than just a cloud provider - instead, as an IT Services provider, says industry analyst. Strong focus on chips customized for workloads, consumption-based offerings, and rapid move to ARM key propositions from AWS.
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Yet another AWS outage in US-West-1 and US-West-2 takes down part of the Internet for 30 mins
The outage affected incoming and outgoing traffic from the affected regions, whereas in-region services remained largely unaffected; AWS’ video streaming service Twitch also went down during the 30-min outage.
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Google Cloud’s senior team on why it has “8 out of 10 top customers in almost all verticals"
Moving away from a product engineering focus, Google Cloud has made three significant changes: productized industry solutions, packaged solutions that come with “pre-built connectors” and signed up partners with industry expertise. Read more here.
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AWS joins Google Cloud with a new availability zone in Jakarta
Amidst Microsoft’s announcements of a new region in Indonesia, and GCP’s presence in Jakarta, AWS has announced a new availability zone in the fast-sinking Indonesian capital.
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VMware Carbon Black leverages AMD-based EC2 instances to achieve 30% cost savings
AMD-powered EC2 instances 10% cheaper than Intel, and offer improved performance for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters - resulting in a 30% cost reduction on switching from Intel to AMD-based EC2 instances with a single line change for VMware Carbon Black.
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An argument why Oracle Cloud growth numbers could threaten Google’s ‘World’s Hottest’ title in Cloud Wars
Oracle posted 30% revenue growth across Oracle Fusion cloud apps, 50% growth in infrastructure revenue, and 86% growth in consumption revenue for OCI - however, overall growth remains at 22%, potentially dragged down by low-performing legacy hosting services at Oracle.
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AWS CDK v2 now generally available, along with Construct Hub
Cloud Development Kit v2 is hinged on productivity, simplifies dependency management, and will potentially free up time for developers. Construct Hub, which is a shared code library for building CDK apps, is also generally available along with CDK v2.
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Wins & Partnerships
Irish Bank AIB signs €65mn deal with IBM to support rapid digitization
The partnership will see IBM bring z15 compute platform, Cloud Pak solutions, and RedHat OpenShift capabilities to empower better fraud detection, and high-performing, highly-available, and secure digital services for customers.
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Verizon’s automated, smart factories solutions to be powered by Google Cloud
Verizon partnered with Google Cloud to leverage its 5G capabilities, and the CSPs compute power to deliver autonomous robots and smart factories solutions; Ericsson, which supplies telecom components to Verizon, to be the first to implement the 5G smart factory solution.
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Nationwide moves modernized website to Azure in partnership with Contino
The move is enabling financial services player Nationwide to serve a better experience to end-users, with higher availability and better upgradeability. The company plans to move more workloads to Azure in the future.
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Simplifying architectural decisions to build resilient, compliant, and highly available cloud-native apps in Oracle Cloud
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s ten guiding principles simplify architectural decisioning and governance of cloud-native apps; see how Banco de Chile’s mobile banking app, composed of 33 microservices, leverages them to drive its data transformation strategy.
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