2022 Cloud in Review, ChatGPT does your AWS Certs, the 'big deal' lands, re:Invent 2022, and some.

Welcome to our final 2022 edition of What Just Happened in Cloud newsletter! We thank all our subscribers for such a warm reception and sign-ups to our first edition last month.

This edition must start with a long blog alert – so here is a TL;DR to help you skim through – or to stop over and explore any rabbit holes - as you wish. ?

We cover in this edition:

• 2022 in Review for cloud computing – 3 key points
• ChatGPT – I check out if I can fake an AWS certification, hear ‘her’ speak on a podcast. Finally ask how much Cloud does 'it' use :)
• The big Pentagon deal
• What Just Happened in AWS re:Invent 2022 – top comments and takeaways
• Open Source became bigger in 2022 than you can imagine. Checkout the crisscrossing arrows of the programming languages, hail to JavaScript. (And to TypeScript)
• 2022 Kubernetes Vulnerabilities Report covered if you are Cloud security minded today
• End with talking about a company that raised close to $200M this month, in this market.

?So then.

Good time to look at 2022 in retrospect and ask, what factors shaped the enterprise cloud market this year?

• Factor #1 was not surprisingly the supply chain disruptions seem to have caused some trouble going by this article . Dozens of Azure data centers around the globe were operating with limited capacity for customers. Reuters also reported that one cause of slowing cloud revenue growth in August was a lack of some physical components key to finishing server builds. Add talent shortage to the mix in supply chain disruptions and it was a difficult time, as we ourselves in Stack can attest to. ?
• ?Factor #2 that shaped the Cloud market in 2022 was what is being called the Data Discretion aspect. Few enterprises are effectively leveraging their data - inside or outside of the cloud – and this has caused serious repercussions. The author in this article cites a few points as to why. All these in 2022 led to many firms that adopted cloud not getting the kind of performance and capabilities they expected. Many enterprises just move data to the cloud and hope for the best. Nothing actually changes with this unless there is a plan to use the data moved. There is no regard for data integration, and access to data is still a core problem that has yet to be solved. Enterprises do not leverage their own data to make their own business decisions. What then for a solution to this? Not easy and not something for this newsletter right now, but the hint is in the foundation. Check out this blog from a practitioner of Cloud for many years, David Knott , where he describes his approach in his 2021 blog.
• Finally, it seems obvious but has implications for the next few years - AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure have dug in with their market shares. They may be fighting each other for market share, but their competitors are losing ground. It is tough and risky even to switch a live service from one cloud provider to another. If a company thinks about switching, then consider costs like acquiring new expertise or rebuilding apps. Contracts also often prohibit customers from moving without leaving fees. Some customers are leaving the cloud (indeed) and others are going multi-cloud (‘silos on the cloud’ way?), a ray of light is perhaps the EU’s proposed data act, which has cloud-switching provisions.

ChatGPT- How much Cloud does it use?!

The rage in the last few weeks has been ChatGPT, some even declaring the end of Google as we know it. Unlikely you’re unaware about it, but if you are, then it’s a AI-based large language model, coming from OpenAI .

Four quick and interesting things on ChatGPT then.

First, if you have any doubts about its intelligence, check this tweet out - I dread to think of the sanctity of these certifications now!

ChatGPT is an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, no less.

Second, here is a cool podcast interview with the chatbot itself – voice provided by software and sounding somewhat like a very studious school student (a girl-equivalent to young Sheldon?)! Must listen for fun.

Third, OpenAI's recent pitch to investors predicts that the organization will earn $200 million in revenue next year and $1 billion by 2024. It only costs around a penny to generate about 20,000 words of text and about 2 cents to create images with written prompts. Go figure what this means for …a whole lot of things.

That low unit cost point brought me to the exact question I put to ChatGPT - how much compute, storage and analytics does it use? Back came impressive (if somewhat cleverly vague) responses. The chatbot needed several jabs to give me the response I needed, all iterations showing an intelligent mix of levels of detail, simplicity, and shrewd. Read the answer yourself. ?

What’s the big deal?

For December 2022, it has to be the Pentagon deal . They are all in.

Google, Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft have all been awarded Pentagon’s cloud deal of up to $9 billion combined, through 2028. All four of the technology companies have won indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, or IDIQ, contracts, meaning that they can involve an indefinite number of services for a specific period of time. Originally, the Pentagon had awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, to Microsoft in 2019. Amazon and Oracle both challenged the award legally.

In simple terms, the result was good news for Oracle, a company that is not considered to be one of the top providers of cloud-based computing services. Oracle earned $900 million in revenue from cloud infrastructure in the quarter ending August 31, while Amazon's cloud subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, earned $20.5 billion in the third quarter.

Give Jordan Novet of CNBC a follow on Twitter if you don’t already, he’s great observer of all things Cloud.

AWS re:Invent 2022

On the back of Google Cloud and Azure annual events that we covered in our last newsletter , it was AWS’s turn in November to bring out its shiny objects.

Over 2000 announcements to be specific, grouped into 25 categories ranging from typical Cloud staples such as Migration, Compute, Storage and Database, to the newer areas of IoT, Blockchain and VR/AR. Instead of drinking from the AWS hose pipe, I turned to Forrester for the comments from their 14 analysts covering the event. Their analysis provides a good summary.

GitHub’s State of Open-Source Software (OSS) 2022

The much-awaited State of OSS 2022 report from GitHub was out last month. ?With some staggering stats as in the graphic, OSS has come a long way. ?The report uncovers three big trends:

1. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) picks up, with developers using the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), Shell, and Go programming languages heavily in 2022.
2. Big tech builds big open-source communities, with some of the biggest open-source projects on GitHub in 2022 being commercially backed. This shows that investments are being made in open source that reflect its importance. And in turn new OSS communities are springing up, compelling other organizations to start open-source program offices (OSPO) to coordinate OSS strategies.
3. First-time OSS contributors favour commercially backed projects, with Flutter ?to?Next.JS ?and?React ?to?VS Code , we have seen company-led open-source projects become an integral part of the developer ecosystem on GitHub.

One of the great graphics of the Report is how programming languages have been trending over the last few years. Take a look:

2022 Kubernetes Vulnerabilities Report

All the main K8s vulnerabilities from 2022 consolidated into one article here. Why bother with K8s vulnerabilities?

During 2022, Kubernetes became a popular choice for managing software infrastructure, especially among small and large organizations. However, this popularity also made it more vulnerable to attacks. Additionally, when Kubernetes is used in combination with other cloud-native components, it can create a more complex infrastructure with more attack surfaces and a larger scope for vulnerabilities.

Check out this article and the Red Hat article referenced in it.

Finally, Snyk who?

The Developer Security company that managed to raise $195M in this market, that’s who.

Despite the headwinds in the markets this year, they were able to still grow over 100% in new logos and in revenue. Snyk is in the business of finding and automatically fixing vulnerabilities in your code, open-source dependencies, containers, and IaC, powered by their security intelligence apparatus.

That's it for this edition. If you stuck around to this point of the newsletter, thank you for joining us with your subscription this year. Do give us feedback with your comments, including what you’d like covered in it in 2023.

I am joined by my colleagues at Stack to wish you a Merry Christmas and a HNY!