Cloud Technology News of the Month: September 2023

TL;DR

• Cloud prices are on the rise despite servers getting cheaper 😱
• Arm is preparing for its massive IPO 💸
• The hunt for GPUs isn’t over (and people started using mind-boggling tactics) 🥷

Keep reading to discover what happened in the cloud last month.

PS. We’ve been named a 2023 Gartner® Cool Vendor; download a complimentary copy of the report here. 

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Story of the Month

Server Prices Drop, Cloud Costs Rise

The US government’s inflation rating – the Producer Price Index (PPI) – showed that the cost of computers and servers is dropping by 3.9% month-over-month. And yet, cloud services are getting more expensive, by 2.3% since Q3 2022, to be exact. 

What stands behind the rising cloud prices?

Some point to higher labor costs, others to the rise of gen AI, which providers are embedding into their offerings.

Unfortunately, our research showed that price hikes affected the most cost-efficient compute service: spot instances.

We conducted an in-depth analysis of spot instance pricing over the past 12 months, pulling data from every public cloud region for AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.

Our analysis revealed a bunch of interesting trends in the pricing strategies, showing high price increases in specific regions.

Read our analysis here.

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The Cloud in Numbers

All About AI 

$60-70 billion – Arm’s target valuation in one of the largest IPOs in recent years, recently filed on the Nasdaq exchange.

$40 billion – this is how much Nvidia was willing to spend on Arm, but the Federal Trade Commission sued to stop the deal.

$4.5 billion – valuation of Hugging Face, the NYC-based company that develops tools for building applications using ML, after raising $235 million in funding.

2% – the percentage of all greenhouse gas emissions generated by the cloud industry, roughly the equivalent of the airline industry.

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The Business of Cloud

Chip Stories

Google Cloud released a Pricing API for its cloud services to help teams track and reduce their cloud costs. Link

Advanced Micro Devices recently took its collaboration with AWS to the next level with the launch of new Amazon EC2 instances powered by 4th generation AMD EPYC processors, meaning better performance and greater efficiency for various applications. Link

The hunt for GPUs isn’t over. The NY Times published an entertaining article on the extraordinary measures startups take to obtain these critical chips (like repurposing old video gaming chips). And then we got this viral post exploring the supply and demand of GPUs, particularly Nvidia H100s. Link

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Security & Outages

Everyone Wants One Thing

90% of respondents in the 2023 Cloud Security Report said that having a single cloud security platform to configure and manage security across all of their cloud deployments would be helpful. Who wouldn’t want that?

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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.