Code that writes itself? Why ever not!

Welcome to the very first edition of Stack’s Monthly Cloud-focused newsletter, What Just Happened in Cloud.

We thought a monthly round-up of all things Cloud would be a good idea for our growing community of Clients coming from the Business, Architect, Developer, Project Manager and Consultant communities. This is exactly that - a curated newsletter that pulls together all the key and interesting stuff from the month on the subject of Cloud into one short compilation.

So you don't have a FOMO on something to talk about in that tech conference next week or for that vendor selection panel you are sitting on. Or indeed for that crucial job interview shortly ;)             

What Just Happened (WJH) is our round-up of ‘all things Cloud’ for the month gone by. We expect to release this on or around 5th of every month, covering the past month.?We cover the business of cloud to the tech of cloud.

See this first newsletter and tell us what you think.

October 2022 has been a busy month with some mega events and some important report releases. A couple of path-breaking deals were also in the picture as did quarterly results that came by this month.

Lets dive right in! ?

Mega events and launches

Google Cloud Next ‘22 just happened and 10 predictions were made for end-2025 – we thought these four predictions from the Developer Keynote were very interesting! ??

• We know automation in SecOps is big, but a prediction of 90% of security operations being automated and managed as code by 2025 is big.
• 90% of data will be actionable in real time using ML. There will be huge implications on this in many industries.
• >50% of all orgs using the cloud will freely switch their primary cloud provider due to multi-cloud capabilities. Will “Cloud Migration Services” be needed at all from Cloud consultants like us?!?
• >50% of all business apps will be built by users who don't see themselves as a professional developer.

Google Cloud Next ’22 also came up with 123 announcements – we think there are some interesting ones out there on developer productivity, hybrid and multi-cloud, data cloud and trusted cloud. Check these out. On customers and partnerships, the Coinbase announcement stood out that they are moving to Google Cloud infra and customers can pay with crypto for their cloud services!

Microsoft Ignite was the other big event in town, with several big announcements made – look them up here in their compiled Book of News.

Going by the number of sub-announcements, it looks like the focus is back on Teams and the Microsoft 365 suite.

Results and Market Ups/Downs

Is the Cloud infra market finally slowing down? Appears so.

The cloud infrastructure market topped $57 billion for the quarter, up $11 billion over the same period last year. That is 24% growth, according to data from Synergy Research. Lower than what it has been in the past, but at a time of economic instability, it continues to perform remarkably well. It’s down from last quarter when the market grew 29%. So perhaps the growth is slowing down.

The major Cloud players all announced growth but seemingly slower than before except, it would appear, Google Cloud. (Courtesy Jamin Ball of Altimeter Capital on Twitter)

• AWS (Amazon): $82B run rate growing 28% YoY (last Q grew 33%)
• Azure (Microsoft): In the $50's billion run rate (estimate) growing 42% YoY (last Q grew 46%)
• Google Cloud (includes GSuite): $27B run rate growing 38% YoY (last Q grew 36%, neither are constant currency)

Deals of Scale

Off-the-scale cloud spend announcements can only come from the US defence and security agencies.

A $1 Billion deal coming up from the US Army to be awarded in July 2023 – dubbed Enterprise Application Modernization and Migration programme.

This comes on the back of U.S. National Security Agency’s award of a $10 billion cloud computing deal to AWS in April this year.

The U.S. Department of Defense is currently evaluating bids from AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle for its $9 billion Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract. ?

What about this?

This interesting piece of news caught our eye. An AI-driven coding tool by GitHub is driving into a bit of controversy by claiming to generate other people's code!

GitHub Copilot – a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet – has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim. We will keep an eye on this one on where it is headed, but here is much more information to dig in.

And a shout-out to comicstrip.com who clearly had seen this coming!

Reports and Playbooks, anyone??

We like these two “State of” reports.

The State of DevOps 2022 Report is quite instructive in that it shows how DevOps has become front and centre of, well, everything to do with Cloud. There are some obvious ones in there but a couple would stand out to those with ground experience on DevOps – that meeting your organization's application development security practices are more cultural than we think, that meeting reliability expectations is key to achieving high levels of organizational performance, etc.

Close on the heels is the 9th State of DevRel 2022 Report which highlights the relatively new trend that is taking root : Developer Relations.        

What stands out? Well, that about 28% of the DevRel professionals are female (5% female for overall developer population otherwise), 19% are neuro-diverse, and the median salary isn’t bad too at $180k median total comp!

The developer-driven economy has been called the next trillion-dollar market, and the majority of developers influence purchase decisions. DevRel is a growth strategy and multi-functional practice that enables developers’ success with products – so give this a deep dive if this is of interest.

Social Chatter

There has been some chatter around Platform Engineering (PE) in social media about its utility, effectiveness and business value. We offer this from the analyst Gartner that provides a sort of first principles view on PE here and follow it up with a good Twitter thread by James Urquhart in 10 tweets – where he answers the question of whether platform engineering is a whole lot of hype or not. Check this out and give him a follow, may be.

So Long.

Until we are ready with the November round-up, have a good one! ?

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