Cloud Technology News of the Month: October 2023

TL;DR

1. The US government is getting interested in major AI players 🥷
2. AI infra a top priority of data center operators 🤖
3. AWS sunsets EC2 classic instances 🌄

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

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Story of the Month

Cloud Spending Shrinks

According to Synergy Research, the rate of growth in cloud spending in Q2 2023 was 18%, down from 20% in Q4 2022. 

The cloud industry is still growing, but at a slower pace, and investment is shifting to match the need for AI model training, currently the top priority for data center operators. 

Maximizing GPU utilization is at the top of everyone’s mind, and teams can use GPU autoscaling solutions to achieve a higher ROI from these precious resources.

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The Cloud in Numbers

Making Money in the Cloud

$4 billion – that’s how much Amazon is investing in Anthropic in its quest to become a major player in the AI scene. 

100 – this is the number of jobs AWS 6 new data centers in Ohio will generate, showing how few humans these facilities need.

11% – rate of decline for server shipments compared to 2022, according to Omdia, 

$10.3 billion – the worth of GPUs Nvidia sold to data centers in Q2 2023.

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The Business of Cloud

New Rules of the Game

The US government is looking into methods to monitor anyone who may be using a large amount of cloud resources to train AI models. Regulations might be in the works that would oblige public cloud providers to notify authorities whenever a customer acquires a quantity of computing resources that exceeds a given threshold. Link

AWS has now officially retired its EC2 classic instances. Launched in 2006, EC2 Classic was actually deprecated in 2013, but the provider kept supporting existing instances for a decade. Still, the last EC2 classic instance was shut down in August. This seems to be more of an exception than a rule; to quote the AWS CTO, “Retiring services isn’t something we do at AWS. It’s quite rare.” Link

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Security & Outages

Massive Data Exposure

Microsoft’s AI research team accidentally exposed a large cache of private data on GitHub, according to the cybersecurity company Wiz. The data in question – 30,000 Microsoft Teams messages – was promptly removed. Link

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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.