Cloud Technology News of the Month: July 2023

TL;DR

1. The gen AI 🤖boom has had massive impact on the GPU market.
2. 80% of security professionals feel good about their existing tooling and processes, despite 50% reporting a data breach. 🤔
3. Also, AWS introduced a lifetime account limit for customers using the Reserved Instance Marketplace.

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

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Story of the Month

GPU Shortage Is a Fact

Whether it’s broken supply chains or the sudden gen AI explosion, one thing is clear: getting a GPU-powered virtual machine is hard. 

Even if you’re fishing in the relatively large pond of the top three cloud providers. 

What’s there to do when you’re facing a quota issue and can’t get enough GPUs for your project? You have three options:

1. Buy your own hardware – painfully expensive, and you get no guarantee that GPUs will be available from Nvidia or resellers.
2. Get GPUs from multiple cloud providers – sounds interesting, but consider the pain of managing several cloud providers at the same time (and they all experience shortages).
3. Use automation to fish in a bigger pond – when choosing instances manually, you might miss out on opportunities for snatching up the golden GPUs from the market. Automation considers everything there is. Find out how this works. 

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The Cloud in Numbers

$1 trillion – Nvidia’s market cap broke past it following a series of AI product launches, for a moment placing the company among the only other trillion-dollar US giants: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft.

$100 million – this is how much AWS is pouring into its Generative AI Innovation Center, a program that forges better connections among AI experts and customers.

50% – Nvidia said its Q2 revenue would be more than 50% above previous estimates, a nice surprise for investors.

14% – this is how much traffic Stack Overflow lost supposedly due to folks switching to ChatGPT, according to Similarweb. 

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The Business of Cloud

AWS Makes Some Costly Changes

AWS introduced a lifetime account limit for customers using the Reserved Instance Marketplace: now it’s 5000 RIs or $50k. Are those limits ever going to increase? Only time will tell, but many doubt that. Link

For the past year and a half, AWS somehow missed out on a billing point: data transfer for Multi-Region Access Points. Many teams might get pretty shocking bills. Link

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Security & Outages

Confidence In Tooling Isn’t Everything

A new report revealed that more than 80% of security professionals feel that their existing tooling and processes sufficiently protect them against a well-orchestrated attack on their cloud environment. At the same time, 50% reported a data breach due to unauthorized access. Security is a tough game in the cloud!

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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.