Even AWS Is Hit By Inflation, and is Passing that on to you – The Cloud Pod episode #222 in summary

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The Cloud Pod Ep 222

Welcome to episode 222 of The Cloud Pod Podcast! This week we take a look at the latest earnings reports from all the major players, changes to IPv4 costs, Healthscribe, and all the news that’s fit to print. 

  • In General news this week, Microsoft beat expectations and saw an increase of 20% from last year. However, stocks dropped by 3% in after-hours trading and is down 5% since the announcement in July, indicating demand for cloud services has cooled.
  • Alphabet’s revenue grew by 7%. Of course, this is what you’d expect from a company that let go of a LOT of people. Google Cloud’s revenue, meanwhile, is up by 28%. AI workloads have definitely boosted Alphabet’s stock numbers.  
  • Amazon bounced back in the 2nd quarter with surprisingly good earnings. They also have a strong forecast for the 3rd quarter, which the stock market loves. It looks like AWS growth is starting to stabilize.  
  • During earnings, Andy Jassy said, “Every single one of Amazon’s businesses have multiple generative AI initiatives going on right now.”
  • What do leaked court documents tell us about AWS, Azure, and Google’s cloud market shares? The data shows that Azure Revenue may be 25% lower than previous estimates. This means that AWS is probably maintaining a 50% share of Cloud revenue through 2023. It also helps Google Cloud, as its market share isn’t affected much.

Latest Cloud News - AWS Logo

All new AWS regions and availability zones are here! Now Open – AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region. New: AWS Local Zone in Phoenix, Arizona – More Instance Types, More EBS Storage Classes, and More Services.

Effective Feb 1, 2024, AWS will be charging $0.005 (half a penny) per IP hour for all public IPV4 addresses. Beware, if they’re NOT attached to a service, there will be an additional charge! This affects everything, whether managed services or not.

“I get why they’re doing it. You know, with all the cloud providers, all buying up them, there is a scarcity of resources but the same point it adds up quickly…” opined Matt.

AWS says their newly released EC2 Instances powered by Graviton3 processors are performing better and faster than their Graviton2 predecessors.

Amazon’s EC2 P5 instances powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs can accelerate generative AI and HPC applications. Aside from all the specs, what’s truly important is that these GPUs provide a reduction of up to 6X in the timing of training.

“Just the cost of the hardware is phenomenal. I mean, I jokingly priced out a server from Supermicro that had a bunch of these GPUs… And just one of those GPUs is $40,000,” said Jonathan, pointing out how difficult it will be for the average consumer to use their new GPUs.

Amazon’s HealthScribe is a new, HIPPA-eligible service. It does preliminary patient notes by analyzing patient-doctor conversations. This might not be such a great idea, though. Jonathan points out, “They could be used by insurance companies in a bad way.”

Developers will gain the ability to complete tasks with fully managed agents in just a few clicks with Amazon Bedrock. We’re on to you AWS – this is 100% the beginnings of Skynet.

Latest Cloud News - GCP Logo

Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and Open AI are announcing the formation of the Frontier Model Forum. The purpose of this partnership is to promote responsible AI usage through advancing technical evaluations and benchmarks and developing a public library of solutions to support industry best practices and standards.

Listener Survey: What do you all think of the reports that ChatGPT has gotten dumber? Let us know your thoughts! 

Attack Path Simulation is now Generally Available

Attack path simulation is now generally available in Security Command Center Premium. This means you’ll have to pay for this protection, which isn’t a good thing.

Latest Cloud News - Azure Logo

Last, let’s unpack Azure’s continuous cybersecurity whose approach protects, detects, and responds. While it’s learning and adapting, things don’t seem to be working swimmingly. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until this evolution works.

Also, we’d like to say goodbye to Twitter, and hello to X!

The Reinvention of Amazon Bedrock

The Reinvention of Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock is a sophisticated and fully managed service provided by AWS, designed to facilitate the development and scaling of generative AI applications. Some key improvements have been launched at AWS Re:Invent this week. We’ll dive deeper into those later....