In Cloud Computing This Week [June 19th 2020]

Hello Cloud Land, we've read all the cloud computing news again this week, so you don't have to.  

Not a massive amount of news this week on the Cloud Computing front. Some new gadgets and faster VM offerings are amongst the highlights.

Enjoy.

AWS Snowcone 

This week AWS launched Snowcone, a small, rugged, lightweight, secure edge computing, edge storage and data transfer device.

The smallest member of the AWS Snow family of physical edge computing devices for rugged or disconnected environments.

AWS Snowcone weighs 4.5 pounds and includes 8 terabytes of usable storage. It is small (9″ long, 6″ wide, and 3″ tall) and rugged, and can be used in a variety of environments including desktops, data centers, messenger bags, vehicles, and in conjunction with drones. Snowcone runs on either AC power or an optional battery, making it great for many different types of use cases where self-sufficiency is vital.

You can use Snowcone for data migration, content distribution, tactical edge computing, healthcare IoT, industrial IoT, transportation, logistics, and autonomous vehicle use cases. You can ship data-laden devices to AWS for offline data transfer, or you can use AWS DataSync for online data transfer.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-aws-snowcone-small-lightweight-edge-storage-and-processing/

AWS Lambda functions can now mount EFS 

AWS Lambda functions can now mount an Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), a scalable and elastic NFS file system storing data within and across multiple availability zones (AZ) for high availability and durability. In this way, you can use a familiar file system interface to store and share data across all concurrent execution environments of one, or more, Lambda functions. EFS supports full file system access semantics, such as strong consistency and file locking.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-a-shared-file-system-for-your-lambda-functions/

 

Amazon EKS Now Supports Inf1 Instances 

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) has quickly become a leading choice for machine learning workloads. It combines the developer agility and the scalability of Kubernetes, with the wide selection of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types available on AWS, such as the C5, P3, and G4 families.

As models become more sophisticated, hardware acceleration is increasingly required to deliver fast predictions at high throughput. This week AWS were very happy to announce that AWS customers can now use the Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, for high performance and the lowest prediction cost in the cloud.

See AWS Serverless Architecture Diagram

A primer on EC2 Inf1 instances
Inf1 instances were launched at AWS re:Invent 2019. They are powered by AWS Inferentia, a custom chip built from the ground up by AWS to accelerate machine learning inference workloads.

Inf1 instances are available in multiple sizes, with 1, 4, or 16 AWS Inferentia chips, with up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 19 Gbps EBS bandwidth. An AWS Inferentia chip contains four NeuronCores. Each one implements a high-performance systolic array matrix multiply engine, which massively speeds up typical deep learning operations such as convolution and transformers. NeuronCores are also equipped with a large on-chip cache, which helps cut down on external memory accesses, saving I/O time in the process. When several AWS Inferentia chips are available on an Inf1 instance, you can partition a model across them and store it entirely in cache memory. Alternatively, to serve multi-model predictions from a single Inf1 instance, you can partition the NeuronCores of an AWS Inferentia chip across several models.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-eks-now-supports-ec2-inf1-instances/

GCP make TLS1.3 default for all new and existing Cloud CDN and Global Load Balancing customers. 

Transport Layer Security, or TLS, is a family of internet protocols that Google has played an important role in developing. Formerly known as SSL, TLS is the main method of securing internet connections between servers and their clients. Google first enabled TLS 1.3 in Chrome in October 2018, at the same time as Mozilla brought it to Firefox. Today, the majority of modern clients support TLS 1.3, including recent versions of Android, Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Edge browser, as well as BoringSSL, OpenSSL and libcurl. Support for TLS 1.3 is wide-ranging, and brings performance and security benefits to a large part of the Internet.

Given this, GCP recently rolled out TLS 1.3 as the default for all new and existing Cloud CDN and Global Load Balancing customers. TLS 1.3 is already used in more than half of TLS connections across Google Cloud, nearly on-par with Google at large.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/tls-1-3-is-now-on-by-default-for-google-cloud-services

GCP Apigee Adapter for Envoy in beta

Envoy has become ubiquitous as a high-performance pluggable proxy, providing improved networking and observability capability for increased services traffic. Built on the learnings of HAProxy and nginx, Envoy is now an official Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, and has many fans—including among users of GCP's Apigee API management platform. 

To help you integrate Envoy-based services into your Apigee environment, Google this week  announced the Apigee Adapter for Envoy in beta. Apigee lets you centrally govern or manage APIs that are consumed within your enterprise or exposed to partners and third parties, providing centralized API publishing, visibility, governance, and usage analytics. And now, with the Apigee Adapter for Envoy, you can extend Envoy’s capabilities to include API management, so developers can expose the services behind Envoy as APIs. Specifically, the Apigee Adapter for Envoy lets developers:

• Verify OAuth tokens or API Keys

• Check API consumer based quota against API Products

• Collect API usage analytics

Now, with the availability of the Apigee Adapter for Envoy, organizations can deliver modern, Envoy-based services as APIs, expanding the reach of your applications.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/api-management/announcing-api-management-for-services-that-use-envoy

 

GCP Filestore now supports high performance with Filestore High Scale

This week GCP announced the beta launch of Filestore High Scale, the next step in the evolution of Google’s file storage product, which includes Elastifile’s scale-out file storage capability.

Google completed its acquisition of Elastifile in August 2019, and have integrated the technology into Filestore to add both scale and performance, and make it easier for you to move workloads to cloud. The new Filestore High Scale tier adds the ability to easily deploy shared file systems that can scale out to hundreds of thousands of IOPS, tens of GB/s of throughput, and hundreds of TBs. Whether migrating traditional applications, modernizing existing applications with Kubernetes, or scaling to meet the performance demands of big compute workloads, Filestore can now address these challenges.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/high-performance-cloud-file-storage

Azure announce new general purpose VMs with 2nd Gen Intel Xeon CPUs 

This week, Microsoft announced the availability of new general purpose and memory-optimized Azure Virtual Machines based on the 2nd generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8272CL (Cascade Lake). This custom processor runs at a base speed of 2.5GHz and can achieve all-core turbo frequency of 3.4GHz. It features Intel® Deep Learning Boost Technology, Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512), Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, and Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology.

With this announcement, they introduced two new Azure Virtual Machines families, one of which represents a brand-new product category in the Azure portfolio:

• The Azure Ddv4 and Ddsv4 and Edv4 and Edsv4 virtual machines, which include a local data temporary disk (now generally available)
• The Azure Dv4 and Dsv4 and Ev4 and Esv4 virtual machines, a new category of virtual machines, which rely on remote disks and do not provide temporary local storage (now in preview).

The new virtual machine (VM) sizes deliver up to roughly 20 percent CPU performance improvement compared to their predecessors, the Dv3 and Ev3 VM families.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-general-purpose-and-memoryoptimized-azure-virtual-machines-with-intel-now-available/

2020 IDG Cloud Computing Study Released.

The latest IDG report into cloud computing seems to reaffirm what we are seeing, with cloud adoption gaining momentum.  IDG report 92% of organisations have some portion of theit IT infrastructure in the cloud. 55% currently use multiple public clouds, with 21% reporting using three or more.

Close to half (46%) cloud based applications were purpose built for cloud, and 54% moved to cloud from an on-prem environment. 32% of IT budgets are allocated to cloud spend in the next 12 months.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/06/18/2050275/0/en/The-Shift-to-Cloud-Computing-Persists-as-Organizations-Use-Multiple-Public-Clouds.htm