Cloud Technology News of the Month: February 2023

Tech layoffs continue, but is the cloud industry taking a hit? 🤔 Keep reading to find out what happened in the cloud world last month.

_____

Story of the Month

Gartner Sees The Light On Reserved Cloud Capacity

The 2008 financial crisis and following recession inspired many cloud migrations in search for savings. 

But this time around – as John-David Lovelock, distinguished vice-president analyst at Gartner argues – the cloud is actually becoming more expensive, driven by inflation and energy price spikes. 

Many companies get themselves locked into long-term subscriptions with upfront payments in exchange for hefty discounts.

But Lovelock warns that if the cloud service pricing increases, these upfront payments may no longer cover the full term of the cloud subscription. 

This is just one of the many dangers of reserved cloud capacity.

_____

The Cloud in Numbers

Layoffs Accelerate Among Billion-Dollar Investments

Source: Yahoo Finance

6% – that’s the chunk of Google workforce let go in January 2023. Compare this to Microsoft’s 5%, Amazon’s 6%, and Meta’s 13% in recent deep cuts. 

$10 billion – this is how much Microsoft poured into OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT that brought generative AI to the limelight this year. 

45% – this is part of Kubernetes clusters running in the cloud, a jump from 31% in 2021. Cloud-hosted Kubernetes is set to overtake on-premises deployments in 2023.

$591 billion – the worldwide spending on public cloud in 2023 as forecasted by Gartner, a 20.7% uptick from 2022’s $490 billion.

29% – that’s how much of Ireland’s electricity data centers will consume by 2028.

$35 billion – the size of AWS’s investment into its Virgina data centers by 2040. 

_____

The Business of Cloud

Finding Balance in the AI Hype

Organizations need to take a long hard look at the value of cloud-based AI. It’s so easy to face cloud budget overruns when playing around with AI models.

Source: InfoWorld

Speaking of cloud budgets gone wild, here’s a story of how one AWS bill went from $0 to $12,989.60 overnight – to the owner’s surprise. 😱 Spoiler alert: this story has a happy ending. 

Source: The New Stack

An analysis of how Liberty Mutual saved c. 20% on cloud expenses by deploying FinOps strategies.

Source: CIO Dive

_____

Security & Outages

There’s Space For ChatGPT Here, Too!

Orca Security announced a ChatGPT extension to process security alerts and helps users by sharing step-by-step remediation instructions. That was fast! ⚡

Source: Orca Security

_____

Brought to you by CAST AI

CAST AI helps engineers to fully automate Kubernetes and reduce their cloud costs by 65% on average. The platform was created for DevOps teams to save time, eliminate manual tasks, and gain full visibility into their Kubernetes costs and security. 

_____

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.