Cloud Technology News of the Month: October 2022

As the economic outlook gets increasingly grim, cutting cloud expenses becomes a priority even for tech giants. What happened in the cloud world during the last month? Keep on reading to find out! _____ Story of the Month: Solving the cloud skills gap with automation The Gartner analyst Lydia Leong shared that the cloud skills…

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As the economic outlook gets increasingly grim, cutting cloud expenses becomes a priority even for tech giants. What happened in the cloud world during the last month? Keep on reading to find out!

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Story of the Month: Solving the cloud skills gap with automation

The Gartner analyst Lydia Leong shared that the cloud skills gap is a serious blocker to cloud adoption, indicating a “systemic back-off from cloud ambitions, resulting most notably in cancelled or substantially scaled-back cloud migrations as a common market pattern.”

Sure, the demand for cloud-related skills outpaces supply, and many organizations are at a crisis point. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Dealing with the growing complexity and mounting cloud costs gets easier if engineers have the right tools at hand. 

Tailored to cloud-native needs, automation solutions lift the burden of manual configuration and tinkering off engineers’ shoulders, leading to greater productivity that translates into cost savings. 

For example, the adtech company OpenX used automation to both find the most cost-efficient cloud resources and centralize the configuration of its multiple Kubernetes tools. “Centralization […] makes it much less time-consuming than managing multiple tools, aggregating information from multiple sources, monitoring logs, container errors, and so on. That’s probably the best way I can describe our savings in the number of people who we would need to watch for capacity,” described Ivan Gusev, Principal Cloud Architect at OpenX.

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The Business of Cloud

Another cloud-powered company that experienced massive growth during the pandemic is facing trouble. The electronic signature provider DocuSign shares dropped by 65% from the start of the year, reaching almost -80% from their peak in 2021. On another note, Patreon is laying off 17% of its staff, with five security team members among them. Tech giants aren’t immune to the bear market either – Google is slashing projects at its in-house R&D division, Area 120.

Sources: CNBC, TechCrunch, TechCrunch

After losing almost 1 million subscribers in the June quarter and laying off 400 employees this year, Netflix is looking for deeper cost savings. Cloud expenses are at the top of this list as the company enforces cost controls while increasing its subscriber base to 500 million customers globally without breaking its cloud wallet.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Azure now offers a family of Azure virtual machines running on Ampere Arm-based processors, catching up with AWS’s custom Graviton systems and opening the door to more efficient and scalable instances.

Source: Microsoft Azure

Did you know that the state of Virginia has more data center capacity than Europe or China?

Source: The Register

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Security & Outages

There’s a growing trend of hiding phishing attacks behind AWS resources, likely thanks to the legitimizing power of the AWS domain.

Source: The Register

We all learned a lesson from the Log4j fiasco. US senators introduced a bill that will help develop a way to assess and reduce risk in systems that rely on open-source software.

Source: The Washington Post

Microsoft put together anonymized data of real cyber threat activity and discovered that more than 80% of ransomware attacks stem from common configuration errors in software and devices – i.e. human mistakes. Data available from public cloud providers that fight it daily confirms this finding. 

Source: Microsoft Cyber Signals report

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Meanwhile, at CAST AI

To continue the security topic: if Kubernetes vulnerabilities worry you as much as costs, CAST AI now gets you security insights on top of the usual savings report and monitoring. The new feature detects and prioritizes potential issues without extra work.

With K8s config checks and round-the-clock visibility to vulnerability scans and monitoring, it simplifies regular security tasks and aligns you with best practices. Read more in our documentation

The security report is available immediately in all connected clusters – simply enter your CAST AI account and select it from the menu. 

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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.

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CAST AI Blog Cloud Technology News of the Month: October 2022