CloudPro #12: Google Cloud TPU v5e, AWS Dedicated Local Zones, VMware Explore 2023, Cisco🤝Nutanix
Bite-sized actionable content, practical tutorials, and resources for cloud professionals.
“Cloud computing is empowering, as anyone in any part of world with internet connection and a credit card can run and manage applications in the state of the art global datacenters; companies leveraging cloud will be able to innovate cheaper and faster.”
– Jamal Mazhar, Founder & CEO, Kaavo
Welcome to a brand new edition of the CloudPro! In this issue, we're turning our focus to Google’s new Cloud TPU v5e and A3 GPUs. Join us as we take a closer look at these releases and what it means for the cloud community.
In this issue, we also highlight AWS Dedicated Local Zones, VMware Explore 2023 key announcements, Cisco’s partnership with Nutanix, and Google’s Duet AI preview.
We know how much you love your weekly dose of our handpicked cloud resources, tutorials, and secret knowledge. That’s why we also discuss how to migrate to Amazon SES, avoid unexpected cloud costs, migrate very large databases into Amazon RDS.
But that’s not all! We’ve also curated the best cloud GitHub repos for you to use and test like dagger, a programmable CI/CD engine that runs your pipelines in containers, and the elastic and reliable serverless data warehouse, databend.
Cheers,
Shreyans Singh
Editor-in-Chief
PS: I hope you will enjoy today's newsletter! I’m all ears for your thoughts – the good, the great, and the "meh." Share your feedback and snag a free Packt eBook (Mastering Kubernetes by Gigi Safyan). It's a win-win! Can't wait to hear what you think!
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Packt Conference: Put Generative AI to Work
⚡ TechWave: Cloud News & Analysis
⚡Announcing Cloud TPU v5e and A3 GPUs in GA: Google is introducing new technology to make artificial intelligence (AI) more powerful and cost-effective. They're unveiling Cloud TPU v5e, designed to be cost-effective and versatile for training and running large AI models. It offers impressive performance at a lower cost compared to its predecessor and can be configured in various ways to accommodate different AI model sizes.
Moreover, Google is simplifying infrastructure management by making Cloud TPUs available in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), a leading Kubernetes service.
Additionally, they're launching A3 VMs powered by NVIDIA's H100 GPUs, optimized for demanding AI workloads. These VMs provide a substantial boost in performance and network bandwidth compared to previous offerings.
⚡Announcing AWS Dedicated Local Zones: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new service called AWS Dedicated Local Zones. These are specialized cloud environments that are exclusively used by a single customer or a specific community. These zones are fully managed by AWS and can be set up in a location specified by the customer, such as a data center.
The primary purpose of AWS Dedicated Local Zones is to cater to organizations in the public sector and other regulated industries that have strict compliance and security requirements for certain types of workloads. In simpler terms, these zones are designed to provide a secure and compliant cloud computing environment for sensitive data and applications.
Singapore's government agency responsible for digital transformation, the Smart Nation and Digital Government Group (SNDGG), has become the first customer to use AWS Dedicated Local Zones. They chose this service to meet their stringent data security and isolation requirements, allowing them to run sensitive workloads in the cloud securely.
⚡VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas key updates and announcements for Cloud Services Providers:
1. Core Infrastructure: Improved resource sharing among CSPs, advanced workload domains, NVIDIA GPU support, and optimized storage.
2. Modern Applications: Enhanced Kubernetes support, application-focused SaaS solutions, and advanced connectivity and security for modern apps.
3. Networking and Security: VMware Cloud Director improvements, IP management, BGP enhancements, and advanced encryption options.
4. Developer Data Services: Big data solutions and a simplified catalog management system.
5. Operations: Robust metering and chargeback tools and compliance solutions for Sovereign Cloud providers.
These updates aim to empower CSPs with better tools and services for their customers.
🌐From the Cloud World:
🌐Google Cloud is expanding its Duet AI project, bringing AI assistance to a wide range of its cloud products and services, including application development, operations, database management, data analysis, and cybersecurity, with a focus on improving productivity and simplifying tasks across these domains.
🌐IBM has introduced watsonx Code Assistant for Z, a generative AI tool that accelerates the translation of COBOL to Java on IBM Z, aiding in mainframe application modernization, with a target release date of Q4 2023.
🌐Cisco and Nutanix have formed a global strategic partnership to simplify hybrid multicloud deployments and accelerate IT modernization, offering an integrated hardware and software platform for running applications and data across various cloud environments.
🌐VMware has previewed Spring AI, an open-source project aimed at simplifying Java application development by abstracting AI components, allowing developers to easily invoke AI models and generative AI for documentation queries, with plans to extend these capabilities to other Spring projects.
🌐Google Cloud has announced AlloyDB AI, an integrated set of capabilities built into AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, aimed at helping developers build performant and scalable generative AI applications using their operational data, offering support for vector embeddings and integrations with the open source AI ecosystem and Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform.
🔍Secret Knowledge: Learning Resources
🔍The shortcomings of serverless computing: Serverless computing, while popular, has shortcomings including cold-start latency, vendor lock-in, debugging and monitoring challenges, and cost management issues that can impact application performance and development efficiency.
🔍Diversify For Success- The Multi-Cloud Advantage: Multi-cloud is an approach that helps organizations overcome challenges like data gravity by enabling data to be available to applications and services in multiple public clouds simultaneously, reducing operational complexity and costs associated with duplicating data.
🔍AlloyDB database provides reduced replication lag for PostgreSQL: AlloyDB, a PostgreSQL-compatible database, has made improvements to reduce replication lag, achieving more than 25 times lower lag than standard PostgreSQL for high-throughput transactional workloads, offering horizontal scalability and enhanced read performance.
🔍Keep your business running with reliable failover solutions from IBM Power Virtual Server: IBM Power Virtual Server offers reliable failover solutions for hybrid cloud disaster recovery, including virtual tape libraries (VTLs) like FalconStor StorSafe VTL, which automate backup processes, scale easily, and optimize performance, making them valuable for maintaining business continuity and securing data in IBM Power Virtual Server environments.
🔍Snowflake Workload Optimization: Snowflake utilizes data pruning and micro-partitioning to optimize the management and processing of large datasets, resulting in improved query performance and efficient data retrieval.
✨ HackHub: Trending Tools
🛠️keptn/keptn: Keptn is a control-plane for continuous delivery and operations enable cloud-native applications to run autonomously.
🛠️carvel-dev/carvel: Carvel provides a set of reliable, single-purpose, composable tools that aid in your application building, configuration, and deployment to Kubernetes.
🛠️datafuselabs/databend: An elastic and reliable serverless data warehouse.
🛠️reactive-tech/kubegres: Kubegres is a Kubernetes operator allowing to deploy one or many clusters of PostgreSql instances and manage databases replication, failover and backup.
🛠️dagger/dagger: A programmable CI/CD engine that runs your pipelines in containers.
⭐ MasterClass: Tutorials & Guides
⭐Strategies and best practices for very large database migrations into Amazon RDS for Oracle: This post discusses strategies and best practices for migrating very large Oracle databases into Amazon RDS, offering options like one-time migration, continuous replication, and periodic refresh, along with recommended tools and methods based on database size, and factors to consider during migration such as network bandwidth and downtime requirements.
⭐5 Microservices Design Patterns Every DevOps Team Should Know: DevOps teams can maximize efficiency in microservices architecture by understanding and utilizing five key design patterns: API gateway, database per service, circuit breaker, event-driven, and saga patterns, which help address challenges such as API management, data isolation, fault tolerance, data consistency, and complex transactions in a microservices environment.
⭐Anomaly Detection- Four steps to avoiding unforeseen cloud costs: To avoid unexpected cloud costs, businesses can implement Anomaly Detection tools that continuously analyze cloud billing data to detect cost spikes early, drive cost accountability, and provide cloud data governance in four key steps: defining the metric, data preparation, data analysis, and defining a reporting strategy.
⭐Migrating to a cloud ESP-How to onboard to Amazon SES: Migrating to Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) allows businesses to improve email communication by following a systematic process, including domain verification, IP warm-up, and monitoring, ensuring reliable and secure email delivery.
⭐Sveltos- Automate Configuration Updates for Kubernetes Applications: Sveltos is an open-source Kubernetes tool that automates updates to configuration settings (ConfigMaps and Secrets) in Kubernetes applications, ensuring they stay up-to-date and secure without manual intervention.
This book is a guide for businesses looking to switch to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for their cloud computing needs. AWS offers tools and services that can help companies grow and innovate, but transitioning to AWS can be challenging. This book provides a step-by-step approach to ensure a smooth transition, helping you make the most of your investment in AWS.
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