Cloud Technology News of the Month: July 2021

The cloud scene is moving fast even when we’re all busy enjoying the summer. Here’s another portion of fresh cloud technology news at your doorstep. 

This series brings you up to speed with the latest releases, acquisitions, research, and hidden gems in the world of cloud computing – the stuff actually worth reading. 

Without further ado, here’s what the cloud world has been up to this July.

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Story of the month: Kubernetes costs are rising, but companies still aren’t tracking them properly

Many companies running Kubernetes still struggle to monitor costs, despite their cloud bills growing higher than ever. 

The CNCF and the FinOps Foundation carried out a microsurvey to check how businesses manage Kubernetes and cloud costs today. They found that cloud and Kubernetes-related bills continue to grow – over 35% of respondents saw their bills jump to more than 20% during the last year!

At the same time, companies aren’t monitoring these costs with enough accuracy to make informed estimations and eliminate cloud waste. 

While nearly 45% of surveyed businesses said their monitoring strategy relied on estimations, almost 25% admitted to having no monitoring in place – at the same time declaring that the ability to accurately predict their monthly bill before it arrives was “Very important.” 

Back in the day, provisioning was easy. But with VMs that are cloud instances and dynamic Kubernetes setups, traditional cost management tactics don’t cut the chase anymore. 

Reporting is important, but it’s just one side of the coin. The other is what you do with your findings: the actual optimization. We covered this topic in more detail on our blog: Cloud cost reporting alone isn’t going to cut your AWS bill.

Source: CNCF

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The Business of Cloud

The Pentagon canceled its JEDI cloud computing contract with Microsoft that could have been worth a smashing $10 billion, choosing to pursue deals with other cloud service providers (with Microsoft still on the table) and citing the evolution of the cloud landscape as the reason why. Is the Pentagon going multi cloud?

Source: Yahoo

Pentagon cancels $10 billion JEDI cloud contract https://t.co/6ULbHh5sBw

— Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi) July 6, 2021

Speaking of Microsoft, the company will now provide Windows in the cloud and stream it to local devices while running the legacy apps. Some enterprise customers might find that handy – instead of installing software and managing security on hundreds of desktops, you can get away with one configuration (in theory). But why stick to desktop when the cloud works so much better in a web browser?

Source: Microsoft

Cellular networks are transforming to commodity hardware with the cloud. Consider this: AT&T decided to move its 5G management systems to Azure, Vodafone launched a massive pilot program, and Ericsson is partnering with Google Anthos to develop new solutions at Ericsson’s Silicon Valley D-15 Labs. 

Source: LightReading

Zoom agreed to buy the cloud call center service provider Five9 for some $14.7 billion in an all-stock transaction. The 20-year-old company is set to become an operating unit of Zoom after the deal closes in the first half of 2022.

Source: TechCrunch

I am convinced that a small and dedicated group of twitter devs could tweet hot takes about a completely made up AWS product, idk AWS Infinidash or something, and it would appear as a requirement on job specs within a week

— Twirlip of The Mists (@jna_sh) June 30, 2021

A fake AWS product called Infinidash went viral in a prank gone awry on an industry scale. “It could have come out of thin air. I wanted to express this, and I’ve always found AWS’s product brands impenetrable, so it seemed like a natural home for the idea,” – said the man behind the mayhem.

Source: The Register

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Research into the cloud

AWS use is still on the rise, a massive survey of almost 32,000 developers showed. Here are a few highlights:

• 37% of respondents involved in infrastructure development use Kubernetes (a slight decline from 40% last year)
• 64% of surveyed devs use Amazon Web Services (AWS), 25% Google Cloud, and 22% Microsoft Azure. Compare that to 62%, 30%, and 25% in last year’s survey.
• While Azure usage is higher in larger companies, Google Cloud is the top choice among individual and small company users. What about AWS? It peaked right in the middle among companies with 51-1,000 employees.

Source: The Register

But then there’s a new report from Gartner showing that AWS’s growth rate trailed behind its peers in 2020.

AWS recorded a 29% gain in revenue – compared with a 41% jump for the entire market and an impressive 60% surge for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Why are companies choosing AWS’s competitors? Microsoft offers better integration with legacy infrastructures and is a one-stop relationship for enterprises already using its software. And Google is accelerating thanks to its AI tools and focus on open-source technologies like Kubernetes.

Source: BusinessLive 

Pulse and Red Hat teamed up to survey 100 enterprise tech leaders about Kubernetes. Which workloads are they deploying on containers? When do they choose hybrid cloud environments? A good source for anyone interested in how enterprises are using Kubernetes today.

Source: RedHat

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New in CAST AI

Using AWS kOps? Here’s how to save up

Our team recently released a brand-new product: cloud cost optimization for kOps used with AWS! If you use this self-managed Kubernetes service and want to save up, connect your kOps cluster and start saving. 

And here are some new product features hot off the press:  

• Our Savings Estimator and Autoscaler can target a higher variety of instance types when recommending Spot Instances, allowing you to unlock even more savings.
• Audit log is now much more detailed and available for EKS and kOps clusters.
• We introduced an annotation and label that protects a node from being considered for eviction and deletion.
• Users can now set the minimum and maximum values of CPU and RAM for nodes to be added to a cluster in the Unscheduled pods policy. This will limit the possible pool of nodes that CAST AI considers. 
• We have added the support of kOps 1.11, 1.15, and 1.17.
• Clusters can now be sorted based on the name, region, or status.

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