Cloud Technology News of the Month: July 2023

TL;DR

• The gen AI ??boom has had massive impact on the GPU market.
• 80% of security professionals feel good about their existing tooling and processes, despite 50% reporting a data breach. ??
• Also, AWS introduced a lifetime account limit for customers using the Reserved Instance Marketplace.

Keep reading to find out what happened in the cloud over the last month.

Story of the Month

GPU Shortage Is a Fact

Whether it’s broken supply chains or the sudden gen AI explosion, one thing is clear: getting a GPU-powered virtual machine is hard.?

Even if you’re fishing in the relatively large pond of the top three cloud providers.?

What’s there to do when you’re facing a quota issue and can’t get enough GPUs for your project? You have three options:

1. Buy your own hardware?– painfully expensive, and you get no guarantee that GPUs will be available from Nvidia or resellers.
2. Get GPUs from multiple cloud providers?– sounds interesting, but consider the pain of managing several cloud providers at the same time (and they all experience shortages).
3. Use automation to fish in a bigger pond?– when choosing instances manually, you might miss out on opportunities for snatching up the golden GPUs from the market. Automation considers everything there is.?Find out how this works.?

The Cloud in Numbers

$1 trillion?–?Nvidia’s market cap?broke past it?following a series of AI product launches, for a moment placing the company among the only other trillion-dollar US giants: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft.

$100 million?– this is how much?AWS?is?pouring into?its Generative AI Innovation Center, a program that forges better connections among AI experts and customers.

50%?–?Nvidia?said its Q2 revenue would be more than?50% above previous estimates, a nice surprise for investors.

14%?– this is how much traffic?Stack Overflow?lost supposedly due to folks switching to ChatGPT, according to?Similarweb.?

The Business of Cloud

AWS Makes Some Costly Changes

AWS?introduced a?lifetime account limit?for customers using the Reserved Instance Marketplace: now it’s 5000 RIs or $50k. Are those limits ever going to increase? Only time will tell, but many doubt that.?Link

For the past year and a half,?AWS?somehow missed out on a billing point:?data transfer for Multi-Region Access Points. Many teams might get pretty shocking bills.?Link

Security & Outages

Confidence In Tooling Isn’t Everything

A?new report?revealed that more than 80% of security professionals feel that their existing tooling and processes?sufficiently protect them?against a well-orchestrated attack on their cloud environment. At the same time,?50% reported a data breach?due to unauthorized access. Security is a tough game in the cloud!

This series explores the most attention-grabbing cloud technology news, bringing you up to speed with the latest releases, acquisitions, research, and hidden gems in cloud computing – the stuff actually worth reading.