How to save 50-90% on compute with spot instances

Some telco execs are worried about runaway costs when using the public cloud. Not me! That’s because I know the best way to control costs is by building an excellent FinOps practice where you're constantly optimizing spend. And I’m already hearing about telcos taking this approach?too. Innovative MVNO giffgaff saves an estimated 50-90% on compute costs by using AWS Spot Instances, which is spare compute capacity offered at a deep, deep discount. (Azure and Google Cloud have similar options?too.) The trick? Being able to turn on a dime and move your workloads with less than two minutes warning.?Read more about this cutting-edge, cloud-cost optimization strategy in my latest blog.

giffgaff is 1,000 times faster with AWS

In 2020, MVNO giffgaff went all-in on the public cloud. COO and CTO Steve McDonald shares how this move revolutionized the company’s release process, allowing it to go from 26 software releases a year to more than 16,000. Listen NOW on?Apple Podcasts,?Spotify, or the?TelcoDR website.

Catch me at?TelecomTV’s Cloud Native Telco Summit?on September 13-14. I’ll also be dropping an exclusive announcement on September 5, in advance of the event. If you remember?the last time I did this, you know you don’t want to miss it!?Mark your calendars and?register here.

Team Totogi is booking our flights for?TM Forum’s DTW - Ignite, running September 19-21 in Copenhagen. We’ll be rolling out some exciting stuff during the event, so if you’ll be there, DM me on?Twitter?or?LinkedIn?and let’s meet!

Turn 5G OFF? OMG, the HORROR. ?? Last week an article in The Washington Post claimed that 5G was an?overhyped technology bust, and that consumers need to learn their lesson. I hope telco execs didn’t read it, because it was a whole bunch of sour grapes. The author first suggested that readers should turn 5G off to SAVE BATTERY LIFE on their phone, then went on to share the stat that telco consultants estimate that Americans pay about $7 billion to $8 billion more per year on their phone bills from people switching to more expensive unlimited 5G data plans. Guys, we gotta figure out how we are going to monetize the building of killer networks AND we need to do it pronto. My company Totogi?wakes up every day trying to do just that, starting by using AI and ML to automatically design plans and more. Check it out!

Stop worrying about the public cloud and start loving it, said Gartner’s Alain Waite at Gartner’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney. Sure, there’s risk of outages (like the recent outage AWS suffered in the US-east-1 region), but service disruptions are becoming less frequent, and less severe. Plus, the hyperscalers have tons of failover options that cater to your budget and application needs. And lock-in? Get over it! Every technical decision has always involved lock-in at some level, which you accept in exchange for capabilities you can’t get elsewhere. He says that going all-in on a hyperscaler is preferable over constructing some sort of multi-cloud monstrosity, and I?agree. So lean in!

How cool is this? AWS announced that its?Modular Data Center (MDC) got drafted by the US Department of Defense?(DoD). Offering self-contained data centers with built-in AWS infrastructure, MDCs will provide the DoD with compute and storage for large-scale workloads in “Disconnected, Disrupted, Intermittent or Limited (DDIL) environments.” From what I can tell, it’s basically designed to be able to drop a data center into the middle of a war zone. All you have to do is add power and networking for AWS Outposts, and bada-bing-bada-boom, you got yourself a data center.?My only question is: if I’m a Prime customer, does it come with free shipping?

GenAI, GenAI, GenAI. You can’t open Twitter or watch the news without some story about how GenAI is the future of everything.?McKinsey says about half of its employees are using GenAI?for all kinds of things, from coding and customer engagement, to content creation and synthesis. Still wondering how to incorporate it into your business? This article offers up McKinsey’s five-step approach for organizations looking to adopt GenAI. Heck, we’re using it at TelcoDR to help us with our Telco in 20 assets and over at Totogi to help us write PRs and design plans. It totally rocks!

Want more AI??Google just opened its generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) platform to everybody. This is a HUGE announcement about a treasure trove of tools and models for enterprise developers—including the PaLM 2 word-completion model, the Codey code-generation model, and more than 60 others. There’s also the Vertex AI platform that helps developers tune, launch, and manage models in production. Its Generative AI Studio makes building custom GenAI apps faster.?The announcement also details a few real-world examples of what companies have built with the tools. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says, “AI is the most profound technology that humanity has been working on.” Whoa. All I know is, you need to be using this new technology on the regular.

Here are?10 ways to build applications faster with Amazon CodeWhisperer, a product that was part of the big bundle of GenAI tools that AWS announced in April. These tools are awesome. While expert coders may not need this support, this is a GREAT addition for green, newbie developers up through your average devs who need support in writing higher quality code. Using these kinds of tools in your IT department can raise the capabilities of your team, which is like topgrading?without the hassle of hiring more capable talent.?You're welcome.

One size does not fit all when it comes to databases, says Koa Labs. From the one-size-fits-all approach of the late 20th century that enterprises adopted to simplify management of tech (which is basically how Oracle got to where it is today), to today’s database offerings from the public cloud vendors, it's now so much easier for you to pick the right database for the job (and you should). For example, at?Totogi?we use AWS DynamoDB (key-value store) database for our low latency, high transaction processing needs for charging EDRs, and AWS Neptune (a graph database) to store our plans and tariffs. Because we don’t have to manage the stack, it’s easy for us to pick the right tool for the job and just use the tech. When you use the public cloud, your IT department?can do this?too!

Bain has some bad advice for telcos:?start offering information and communication technology services to enterprises.?I’m pretty sure they’ve already tried that approach (and failed—for example, see?Verizon’s purchase of Terremark for $1.4B in 2011). If you’re going to do this, I would not try to build a public cloud on my own. It’s capital intensive, requires a shit-ton of people, and leaves you with an asset that’s difficult to divest when you’re done with it. (Verizon ended up selling Terremark to IBM in 2017 for an undisclosed sum). Realize that there’s no way you can compete with the public cloud: the hyperscalers already have a nearly 20-year head start and offer infrastructure as well as innovative software services. Hell bent on this approach? Then consider dropping in AWS Outposts or Azure’s Stack to build a proprietary cloud that leverages the scale and innovation of the public cloud. That’s how you can make both ideas work,?where the enterprise workloads will be?basically?on public cloud tech (but in your data center). That way, when you invariably decide to give up on this approach, it'll be ready to move right into the?hyperscaler region of your choice.

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