Cloud Technology News of the Month: August 2022

Despite layoffs and shortages impacting the global economy, the cloud industry is set to thrive. What happened in the cloud world this August? Keep on reading to find out!

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Story of the Month: Cloud spending will continue to grow, recession or not

Sure, the hyperscalers are growing slower and enterprise budgets get squeezed, but everyone is still committed to spending (big) on cloud computing. In a Morgan Stanley survey, CIOs agreed that cloud computing would see the highest rate of spending growth in 2022.

If the 2008 recession taught us anything, it's that crises last only a short while. In 2008, trends that gained a lot of traction were open source and cloud computing. Why? Because they give flexibility to IT decision-makers, allowing them to scale the infrastructure up or down as needed.

Paul Gillin recently argued in Silicon Angle that cloud spending seems immune to budget reductions during hard times. Data shows that companies that resist cutting costs and keep innovating emerge stronger and leapfrog their competition, outperforming the market average by over 30%.

Instead of laying off staff, companies should use the slowdown to give their engineers a breather and help them innovate. One way of doing that - and saving up on the cloud at the same time - is automating cloud cost management. 

With such a solution at hand, teams can start saving up big instantly, without having to wait for committed use discounts to make a difference a year or three from now.

Sources: Eric Jhonsa on Twitter, Silicon Angle

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The Business of Cloud

Tech layoffs aren't over and happen for various reasons. It's clear that the market is in a completely different place than it was in 2021 with its lightning-fast deals, sky-high valuations, and overly-enthusiastic investors. Fast Company is compiling a list of tech businesses announcing layoffs, in case you need a reference. 

An 8-K SEC filing from Nutanix revealed that the enterprise cloud company is planning to fire 270 employees, representing 4% of its workforce. Also, Snap just sent a letter saying it’s laying off 20% of its workforce.

Source: Fast Company, Blocks & File

Just in: Snap is laying off 20% of its workforce. The email went out 3 minutes ago to all staff.

Though there were rumors and leaks about layoffs, this is larger than what I would have guessed. More details to come.

— Gergely Orosz (@gergelyorosz) August 31, 2022

Among other global shortages, we're seeing one that poses a serious threat to digital growth: fiber-optic cable. The rising prices of components put a question mark to 5G rollouts and development of data centers.

Source: Ars Technica

News from the semiconductor world! The world was abuzz with Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, but once the Congresswoman landed, she met with the semiconductor giant TSMC to talk about the company's Arizona chip factory - a project considered key to US national security.

Governments worldwide face various hardships in their projects of onshoring semiconductor manufacturing. This brilliant dive into the industry's state from Financial Times shows that the national efforts backed by massive subsidies and investments have one serious issue: they only relate to the visible end of the semiconductor supply chain. 

What about the suppliers of raw materials, chemicals, consumable parts, gasses, and metals, without which chipmaking doesn't work? Replicating this infrastructure inside single countries or regions reveals inescapable bottlenecks in the supply chain.

Source: The Washington Post, Financial Times

Storage isn't getting that much cheaper. And neither is AWS S3.

What's are the implications?

(h/t Peter Cai for the graph) pic.twitter.com/ZdZrgIh8bQ

— Matt Rickard (@mattrickard) March 18, 2021

Storage isn't getting any cheaper - and neither is Amazon S3. 

Source: Matt Rickard

Legacy database vendors fall victim to modern, developer-friendly combinations of cloud and open-source offerings from new industry players. 

Source: InfoWorld

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Security & Outages

The security grapevine is full of chatter about Twilio's recent account compromise, and domains that looked legitimate sent text messages to employees. Also, it turned out that the hackers behind that breach also targeted Cloudflare employees.

Source: Twilio, The Hacker News

The password management service LastPass got hacked again. Its CEO disclosed that  an unauthorized party gained access to some parts of the LastPass development environment via a single compromised developer account.

Source: LastPass

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Food for Thought: Sustainability

The Big Tech in Sustainability Report gave us a glimpse into how Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are handling emissions:

• They all made net-zero commitments, but Microsoft is the most aggressive - aiming to be carbon negative by 2030.
• They also want a slice of the climate tech software market. Microsoft and Google launched carbon accounting software offerings for existing users. 
• Amazon and Microsoft launched funds focused only on climate tech, while Google created an accelerator to serve climate tech startups.

Source: CB Insights

Next-gen graphics cards and processors aren't about energy efficiency at all. "The planet may burn but at least the end will be ray-traced at 8K."

Source: Tech Radar

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Meanwhile, at CAST AI

There’s a way for teams running workloads on GPU-attached nodes to make them more energy-efficient. Whether it’s ML model training to financial analytics, CAST AI's new feature ensures that you stay within budget and keep your setup sustainable.  

Our new feature scales NVIDIA GPU-attached nodes up and down as your needs change and according to your set limits and tolerations. Check out our documentation to learn more.

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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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