The Big Three cloud providers, AWS, Microsoft, and Google, are going like gangbusters. The most likely reason is two letters: AI. The first quarter of 2024 saw the strongest growth since the third quarter of 2022. Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services topped $76 billion during Q1 2024, up by $13.5 billion (a 21% increase) compared with Q1 of 2023. The Big Three cloud providers now account for 67% of global cloud spending. Amazon still retains its lead at 31%, but its share is shrinking compared with Microsoft (25%) and Google (11%), which showed stronger year-on-year growth ..read more

Both extremely promising and extremely risky, generative AI has distinct failure modes that we need to defend against to protect our users and our code. We’ve all seen the news, where chatbots are encouraged to be insulting or racist, or large language models (LLMs) are exploited for malicious purposes, and where outputs are at best fanciful and at worst dangerous. None of this is particularly surprising. It’s possible to craft complex prompts that force undesired outputs, pushing the input window past the guidelines and guardrails we’re using. At the same time, we can see outputs that go beyo ..read more

Red Hat has unveiled Podman AI Lab, an extension to the Podman Desktop graphical interface that lets developers build generative AI-powered applications in containers. Announced May 7, Podman AI Lab is intended to make it easier to develop with AI in a local environment. The Podman AI Lab extension supports the adoption of generative AI for building intelligent applications or enhancing their workflow using AI-augmented development capabilities, Red Had said.  To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

Microservices architectures solve some problems but introduce others. Dividing applications into independent services simplifies development, updates, and scaling. But it also gives you many more moving parts to connect and secure. Managing all the network services—load balancing, traffic management, authentication and authorization, and so on—can become stupendously complex. The term for this networked space between the services in your Kubernetes cluster is service mesh. A Google project, Istio, is all about providing a way to manage your cluster’s service mesh before it turns into a bramble ..read more

The recent discourse around the security of cloud computing in the banking sector, highlighted by Nicholas Fearn’s piece in the Financial Times, paints a somewhat grim picture of the cybersecurity landscape when it comes to banks moving to cloud computing. Not to pick on just this article, but I’ve seen this as a trend in the past few years, as the value of cloud computing has been called into question more and more. This is a change from just a few years ago when it was verboten to criticize “the cloud.”  What happened between then and now? Enterprises saw the weaknesses of cloud computi ..read more

When we set out to rebuild the engine at the heart of our managed Apache Kafka service, we knew we needed to address several unique requirements that characterize successful cloud-native platforms. These systems must be multi-tenant from the ground up, scale easily to serve thousands of customers, and be managed largely by data-driven software rather than human operators. They should also provide strong isolation and security across customers with unpredictable workloads, in an environment in which engineers can continue to innovate rapidly. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

As a seasoned advocate and expert in cloud computing and generative AI, I’ve observed the immense transformative potential these technologies offer. Yet, we’re doing things just as stupidly as we did in the early days of cloud computing. If you have not noticed lately, enterprises are running around in circles to fix mistakes they made 10 years ago in migrating and building new cloud-based systems. Repatriation is shorthand for “whoops!” The lack of planning and understanding has led to huge bills that nobody expected, and CIOs are attempting to mitigate. This means instead of focusing on inno ..read more

How do we ensure that the code we’re installing is, at the very least, the code that a vendor shipped? The generally accepted solution is code signing, adding a digital signature to binaries that can be used to ensure authorship. At the same time, the signature includes a hash that can be used to show that the code you’ve received hasn’t been altered after it’s been signed. Code signing is increasingly important as part of ensuring software bills of materials and reducing the risks associated with malware hijacking legitimate binaries. Signing is necessary if you’re planning on using services ..read more

In its latest The State of Cloud Cost in 2024 report, CloudZero illuminates the serious implications of cloud cost management and its effect on business stability and job security. The conclusions are interesting. CloudZero’s survey, which drew insights from 1,000 finance and engineering professionals, underscored a crucial element in cloud cost management: the pivotal role of engineering teams. These are not just the “nerds” who operate the technology but key players who can significantly influence cost outcomes. According to the survey, 81% of respondents indicated that cloud costs were effe ..read more

At the end of March 2024, Mike Stonebraker announced in a blog post the release of DBOS Cloud, “a transactional serverless computing platform, made possible by a revolutionary new operating system, DBOS, that implements OS services on top of a distributed database.” That sounds odd, to put it mildly, but it makes more sense when you read the origin story: The idea for DBOS (DataBase oriented Operating System) originated 3 years ago with my realization that the state an operating system must maintain (files, processes, threads, messages, etc.) has increased in size by about 6 orders of magnitu ..read more