Cloud Technology News of the Month: April 2022

The second quarter of what’s shaping up to be the most surprising year so far has brought some interesting advancements in the cloud business.

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.

What happened in the cloud world this April? Keep on reading to find out!

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Story of the Month: The race for containers

Over the last couple of years, AWS customers have embraced containers, moving from “we’re interested” to “we could think about running significant chunks of our business on it,” according to Deepak Singh, AWS VP of Compute Services.

Containers are now the default way most AWS users build new applications on the platform – and their use is accelerating.

No wonder, today speed can make or break a company as it races against competitors in an economy struck by high inflation rates and supply chain struggles. 

Almost 90% of Kubernetes developers use cloud-managed services instead of running self-managed clusters. This is a 19% increase from 2020.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) turns out to be the most widely adopted cloud-managed orchestration solution in more than one industry report. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation found out that 33% of developers use ECS, and 32% pick Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Interestingly, the third place (30%) falls to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) launched nearly three years after GKE.

Then again, Amazon ECS is supposedly falling out of favor due to its reliance on proprietary AWS technology. Check this guide to find out more about how developers manage Kubernetes on AWS.

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The Business of Cloud

In case you’ve been wondering, Amazon isn’t going to spin off its AWS cloud division anytime soon. Instead – as its CEO Adam Selipsky admitted – the company is going to make some acquisitions to keep its reign over the cloud services market.

Source: The Register

Boeing is entering into a cloud mega-deal with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The aviation giant will be going through a digital makeover to offer its airplane designers and software developers better tools for the job.

Source: Bloomberg

Meanwhile, Microsoft announced the public preview of its brand-new virtual machines powered by the Arm-based processors called Ampere Altra that can supposedly deliver up to 50% better price-performance when compared with machines based on IBM x86.

Source: Microsoft

The chip story never ends, does it? Microsoft along with many other companies have long enjoyed chip supply chains running through China. Now, they’re forced to pay the price. The sweeping lockdowns across the country confined millions of people to their homes, and companies on the other side of the globe are suffering. 

TSMC became a household name during the pandemic and things are looking up for it in 2022 as it registers record earnings beating the highest analyst estimates. The chip manufacturer somehow convinced customers that their chips are worth the money and increased its pricing by 10% between quarters.

Finally, 3M’s semiconductor coolant plant in Belgium was closed indefinitely due to stricter local environmental regulations. Why should we care? Well, the plant is responsible for at least 80% of the global semiconductor coolant output.

Sources: Bloomberg, Bloomberg, Business Korea

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Security & Outages

Last month was a busy one for Atlassian. At least 400 customers globally couldn’t access key services, including Jira and Confluence, because of a maintenance script fail that accidentally disabled several cloud services. The outage lasted an entire week, showing that it pays to tread carefully in cloud maintenance.

Source: ZDNet

Hundreds of thousands of Indians saw their sensitive data leaked due to a data breach at CashMama,  India’s currently-defunct money lending platform. How did that happen? Well, this is another S3 bucket left explored to the world. Back in 2020, CashMam operators were arrested for blackmail, harassment, coercion, and financial fraud. No wonder they found little time to take proper care of their S3 buckets.

Source: India Times

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Food for thought

Here’s an unusual business diversification scenario. A Japanese data center company uses empty wastewater tanks to farm eels. Before you start laughing, let us remind you that Japanese eels cost some $32,350 per kilogram! This actually isn’t the first outside-the-box idea coming from this company, as it already uses recovered snow as its source of cooling to slash its carbon footprint and cooling costs. 

Source: Tom’s Hardware

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Meanwhile at CAST AI

Here are some new product features hot off the press:  

• Two new modules for connecting GKE clusters to CAST AI are now part of the Terraform Registry. They add to the already released modules supporting EKS cluster onboarding. Take the first step to reducing your cloud complexity and check them all out here.   
• A new version of CAST AI’s Terraform provider (v0.18.0) is now also available. Get it from the Terraform Registry or find out more on GitHub.  

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