Cloud Technology News of the Month: April 2023

Cloud costs are slipping out of control and execs are on a 💸 hunt.

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

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Story of the Month

Cloud Security Is No Longer The #1 Challenge; Cost Management Is

Flexera’s annual survey of decision-makers revealed that the top priorities of cloud users have changed. 

For the first time ever, security didn’t lead the top cloud challenges list: 82% of respondents said that their top cloud challenge is managing cloud spend. 

Self-estimated wasted cloud spend was at 28%, which is slightly lower than the 32% reported in 2022. 

To put this into perspective, the State of Kubernetes Provisioning Report indicated a higher waste rate for cloud-native applications: 37% of CPUs for cloud-native applications are never used, on average. 

Our data didn’t come from a survey but from an analysis of over 2000 connected clusters. 

Interestingly, Flexera divided cost related challenges into migration issues (understanding app dependencies, assessing the technical feasibility, and right-sizing or selecting the best instance) and post-migration challenges (managing apps and optimizing costs)

Source: Flexera 

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The Cloud in Numbers

Entrepreneurship In The Cloud

$300k – the AWS bill that made someone realize that security and cost control go hand in hand after their account got hacked. 

10x – the cost of an exchange with a large language model like ChtGPT in comparison to standard keyword search, according to Alphabet’s Chairman John Hennessy.

63% – that’s the chunk of tech workers who started their own company post-layoff, according to a recent survey of 1,000 professionals. Most of these new ventures are in cloud computing.

38% – this is by how much the total value of VC deals fell globally between 2021 and 2022.

$400 million – that’s the pile of money the SEO optimization company Ahrefs claims to save by keeping its infrastructure on-premises rather than AWS over three years.

9000 – the number of employees Amazon plans to lay off, with affected units including cloud computing.

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The Business of Cloud

It’s Never Too Late to Embrace The Cloud

Uber has operated its own data centers from the start, but now it’s likely to shift compute and data storage capacity to the public cloud. Google Cloud CEO publicly confirmed the signing of a long-term contract with Uber. The Pragmatic Engineer has a great write-up on that based on conversations with infrastructure engineers at Uber.

Sources: Twitter, Pragmatic Engineer

The future of the film industry is in the cloud. To make Avatar: The Way of Water, the team ran 3.3 billion thread hours on AWS. Hopefully box office results will cover the cloud bill!

Source: AWS

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Security & Outages

Cloud Security Gets Tricky

The White House is worried that “the cloud is becoming a huge security vulnerability.” Hence the plan to regulate the security practices of cloud providers, whose servers are used by customers ranging from mom-and-pop businesses to the Pentagon and CIA.

Source: Politico

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Brought to you by CAST AI

CAST AI automates Kubernetes cost, performance, and security management for hundreds of companies of all sizes. The platform delivers over 60% cost savings for its clients without requiring months of onboarding to see the results. 

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.