Apronomics: January, 2023

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Apronomics, is a play on the word ‘macroeconomics’ which seeks to provide a general perspective in three specific domains. Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3. This is monthly and sometimes twice a month TL;DR “too long; didn’t read” digital glance that serves as a quick consumption style for those looking for hot topics in Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3.

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CLOUD

  • AWS: Expected to reach 100B in 2023, despite economic uncertainty. AWS will announce its fourth-quarter earnings on Feb 2, 2023. A breakdown of AWS 12mo earnings in 2021, Q1:18.44B, Q2:19.74, Q3:20.54, Q4:17.78. (Link)
  • Azure: Multiyear, Multibillion dollar partnership with OpenAI, best known for ChatGPT, to accelerate AI breakthroughs. As the exclusive cloud provider powering OpenAI, Azure will look to commercialize OpenAI and offer the technology in its native Azure services. (Link)
  • Snowflake: Acquires Myst, a time series forecasting company. Myst offers an AI platform that helps index a sequence of data points over a period of time. This allows historical data to forecast future behaviors. (Link)

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

  • Meta: Confirms that it is acquiring Luxexcel, a smart eyewear company. Meta will likely leverage the company’s technology to produce AR glasses. This acquisition aligns with Meta’s corporate strategy when it comes to AR and VR advancements. (Link)
  • Amazon: Sidewalk, Amazon’s long-range, low-bandwidth IoT mesh network has four new device manufacture partners to bring smart devices to offer developers. (Link)
  • Microsoft: Acquires Fungible, a company that offers scale-out capabilities for data center infrastructure with low processing power also known as low-power data processing units (DPU). (Link)

WEB3

  • Ava Labs: Has partnered with AWS to support its Web3 node operations. Ava Labs makes it simple to deploy high-performance solutions for Web3. (Link)
  • Polygon: $MATIC Completes a hard fork upgrade to minimize gas fees. Although gas fees will continue to increase during peak demand, they will be aligned with Ethereums gas dynamics. (Link)
  • U.S. Gov: The U.S. government seeks to set a basis for legislative and regulatory control of cryptocurrencies. One way the U.S. government considers jurisdiction over cryptocurrencies is through the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not the SEC. (Link)

Mike

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What’s the difference between GCP and AWS Regions?

On By MikeIn AWS, Cloud, GCPLeave a comment

To understand the global infrastructure of a cloud provider, consider a coffee shop. If an event such as a flood, or power outage impacts one coffee shop location, customers can still get their coffee by visiting a different location only a few blocks away.

A cloud provider’s global infrastructure provides high availability that consisting of several components: Region, Zone, and Edge locations. 

A Region represents independent geographic areas that hosts cloud services. Each Region is isolated from each other unless you allow traffic out of that Region. Thinking back to our coffee shop analogy, all the coffee shops in the Northeast could be considered Northeast Region Coffee. If all Northeast coffee shops went out of business, it wouldn’t affect any Coffee shops located in the Northwest. And a Region consists of Zones. 

A Zone is where cloud resources are deployed generally consisting of two or three independent data centers located tens of miles apart from each other but close enough to have low latency or in our case coffee shops. Let’s say there are three coffee shops in town, one of the coffee shops loses power, however the other two coffee scops can still service customers in town. Zones provide high availability to cloud services and applications in the cloud.

An Edge location is part of the cloud provider’s network also known as Point-of-Presence that places cloud services closer to the user improving the user’s experience and convenience. 

Choosing where your applications are located affects qualities like user experience, availability, durability, and latency. 

GCP and AWS terms

Comparing Regions and Zones in Google Cloud and AWS

Google and AWS both use Regions to provide Cloud services to customers. 

One difference is that Google will have at least three Zones in each Region, whereas AWS uses Availability Zones to provide high availability. Every region will have at least two availability zones in an AWS Region.

Google Cloud infrastructure is based in five major geographic locations: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Google Cloud currently supports 106 Zones in 35 regions

AWS Cloud infrastructure functions in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia

The AWS Cloud spans 96 Availability Zones within 30 Regions.

The Google and AWS networks have many of the same attributes with some slight differences! Regardless of which cloud provider you use selecting a region should include four key factors.

  1. Compliance
  2. Proximity to your customers
  3. Available Services within a Region
  4. Pricing

Mike

“Global Locations – Regions & Zones  |  Google Cloud.” Google, Google, https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/. 

Indeglia, Shaun. “GCP Networking- Regions and Zones.” Medium, Google Cloud – Community, 11 Nov. 2022, https://medium.com/google-cloud/gcp-region-and-zones-4eb4bf1f99ab. 

“Select Geographic Zones and Regions  |  Architecture Framework  |  Google Cloud.” Google, Google, https://cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/system-design/geographic-zones-regions. 

“Whitepapers.” Amazon, Earthpledge Foundation, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/global-infrastructure.html. 

Apronomics: December, 2022

On By MikeIn Apronomics1 Comment

Apronomics, is a play on the word ‘macroeconomics’ which seeks to provide a general perspective in three specific domains. Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3. This is monthly and sometimes twice a month TL;DR “too long; didn’t read” digital glance that serves as a quick consumption style for those looking for hot topics in Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3.

apronomics-dec-2022Download

CLOUD

  • AWS: Secured a $723,878,930 five-year fixed-prices agreement with the Department of Navy (DoN). This agreement provides DoN access to AWS’s Commercial Cloud environment, AWS Profession Services, and AWS training and certifications courses (Link)
  • AWS: AWS re:Invent 2022 delivered to a different audience. With possible recession fear looming, AWS aimed their success stories and use cases at the C-suit hoping the executives would invest their traditional computing dollars in AWS. Operations could be exponentially cheaper however, AWS needs to tell the customer how to do it not just talk about it (Link)
  • Oracle: “triple-digit” bookings growth in IaaS and will invest $2.4 Billion quarterly to meet future growth. Oracle had acquired Cerner to focus on the healthcare sector which helped contribute to their growth alongside their Fusion Cloud and NetSuite businesses (Link)

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

  • HPE: Hewlett Packard Enterprise express interest to buy Nutanix. Nutanix offers customers a software-defined hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) which competes with the HPE solution, SimpliVity (Link)
  • PAN: Palo Alto Networks recently announced its intent to acquire Cider Security for $195M. Cider’s App Sec Platform “InCider” secures a customer’s code from source to deployment offering risk identity and vulnerability across a company’s code, IAC, and supply-chain. PAN may be looking to expand Ciders offering as part of Prisma Cloud (Link)
  • Cisco: Cisco announces three security enchantments for AWS Security Lake, AWS Verified Access and AWS Control Tower

WEB3

  • Fleek: A Web3 developer platform has raised $25 Million in Series A funding. Funds will allow Fleek to focus on building out edge networks, bringing content closer to the user via their decentralized content delivery network (CDN) (Link)
  • Yuga Labs: A blockchain technology company responsible for the Board Ape Yacht Club and Otherside will appoint Activision Blizzard President and COO Daniel Alegre as new CEO beginning the first half of 2023 (Link)
  • Solidity and Clarity: As the demand for Web3 picks up developers are shifting their development stack to include new languages like Solidity and Clarity. Both are used to bring smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps) to blockchain. Solidity is used for Ethereum while Clarity is used for Bitcoin (Link)

Mike

Apronomics: November, 2022

On By MikeIn ApronomicsLeave a comment

Apronomics, is a play on the word ‘macroeconomics’ which seeks to provide a general perspective in three specific domains. Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3. This is monthly and sometimes twice a month ‘Digital Glance’ (DG) which provides a practical yet quick consumption style for those looking for hot topics in Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3.

apronomics-nov-2022-1Download

CLOUD

  • Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (Link)
  • AWS: AWS re:Invent – November 28 – December 2, 2022 (Link)
    • Emerald sponsors: Accenture, Cisco, Datadog, Deloitte, Intel, MongoDB, TrendMicro, VMware
  • Microsoft: Announced its ISV Success Program for Microsoft Partners which offers software providers the ability to sell their software via the Commercial Marketplace (Link)
    • “In 2021, marketplace transactions grew an estimated 70% to $4 billion, which is 3x faster growth than the public cloud at large”
    • Customers can purchase software solutions and retire every dollar against their cloud consumption commitment

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

  • Cisco: Plans to provide networking, cyber security, and general IT training to 25 million people over the next 10 years (Link)
  • Dynatrace: Announced its observability “Data Lakehouse”, (Grail) at Dynatrace Innovate
    • Grail is a causational (cause and effect relationship) data lakehouse with a massively parallel processing (MPP) analytics engine, leveraging Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) a new query language (Link)
  • Cato: Cato Network Reaches $100M ARR in just Five years (Link)
    • “Cato provides the world’s most robust single-vendor SASE platform”
    • Cato has become the fastest growing Enterprise Network Security Startup
  • VMware: Takes advantage of ‘cloud adjacency infrastructure’ by partnering with Equinix offering VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal, a new offer that will enable enterprises to use VMware’s software environment as a cloud service on Equinix’s bare-metal cloud (Link)

WEB3

  • Google: Announced its Cloud’s Blockchain Node Engine; a fully managed node-hosting service helping scale Web3 development. Google announced that is working with Solana ($SOL) to launch dedicated Solana nodes in the cloud as early as next year (Link)
  • FTX: Impure business practices lead to the collapse of the second-largest crypto exchange underscoring the importance of truly decentralized systems

Mike

Apronomics: October, 2022

On By MikeIn ApronomicsLeave a comment

Apronomics, is a play on the word ‘macroeconomics’ which seeks to provide a general perspective in three specific domains. Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3. This is monthly and sometimes twice a month ‘Digital Glance’ (DG) which provides a practical yet quick consumption style for those looking for hot topics in Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3.

Apronomics-Oct-2022Download

CLOUD

  • Google: Hacking Google Series (Video)
  • Google: Google cloud and Coinbase Launch New Strategic Partnership to drive Web3 Select customers, starting with those in the Web3 ecosystem, to pay for its cloud services via select cryptocurrencies (Link)
  • Google: Google closes $5.8B Mandiant acquisition (Link)
  • Microsoft: Microsoft Ignite – October 12-14, 2022 (Link)
  • Microsoft: Cisco and Microsoft together deliver outcomes to customers. Cisco was a big focus at Microsoft Ignite this year. Microsoft Teams will have the ability to run Teams natively on certain Cisco collaboration devices and will be manageable in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center (Link)
  • Zesty: secured $75M Series B funding. Zesty aims to reduce cloud costs while ensuring app performance (Link)

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

  • Flexera: 2022 – State of the tech spend had some interesting and not-so-surprising data points. (Link)
    • Significant reduction in Customer data centers in the next 24 months – 24% of respondents
    • Top 3 Vendor spent by Organization – Microsoft, AWS, Oracle
    • Managed Service Provider use in top three categories – Cybersecurity, Big Data, Cloud Operations
  • Zscaler: Acquires ShiftRight. With this acquisition, Zscaler hopes to address alert fatigue for SecOps professionals and be able to give customers the ability to investigate their paid SIEM service “log streaming” (Link)
  • Nile: A startup company led by Cisco’s former development chief Pankaj Patel and co-founded by John Chambers initial offer is a network-as-a-service (NaaS) solution and is hosted on AWS (Link)

WEB3

  • Chainlink: SmartCon 2022 (Sept. 28-29) connects Web2 and Web3 industry leaders and an expansive ecosystem to explore Web3 innovation
    • Chainlink Co-Founder Sergey Nazarov kicked off the flagship SmartCon 2022 conference with a keynote, “Building a Web3 World Powered by Cryptographic Truth. Learn more – Chainlink Fundamentals

Mike

Cisco Solutions for AWS Cloud Modernization

On By MikeIn AWS, CloudLeave a comment

If you missed my prior blog on app assurance check it out!

Forecasting cloud spend and assuring application performance

It’s challenging to know all the native cloud solutions available to use, it’s even more challenging to know which Cisco solutions are available for use with AWS. 

You will find that there are solutions that repeat or even overlap portions of the AWS Migration stages. For example, in the Discovery stage of cloud migration, the tool you’d likely use for Application Discovery / Infrastructure Discovery is Application Dynamics (AppD). 

It’s important to know that this is not an extensive list, nor should this be used in a silo; rather these are the most relevant products for a migration.

Below is a reference to the relevant Cisco solutions associated with the AWS Cloud Migration journey. Business outcomes will evolve as a customer matures in the cloud and so will the solutions to meet those outcomes. 

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“A Process for Mass Migrations to the Cloud” Orban, Stephen, 2008. Retrieved September 6, 2022, from https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/214-2/.