Cloud Technology News of the Month: May 2023

Surprised to see growth amid so much loss in the industry? 🤔

Keep reading to find out what happened in the cloud over the last month.

Story of the Month

The Real Cost Of Gen AI And Large Language Models

As the gen AI buzz continues and teams play around with APIs, leaders have to answer a difficult question: can the value AI delivers cover its cost?

AI in cloud-based applications comes with a hefty price tag, from infrastructure expenses and data preparation to training, inference, and maintenance. a16z has seen companies spend more than 80% of their total capital raised on compute resources!

But even if you have the budget, this isn’t the end of the potential hurdles. Companies trying to ride the AI wave can’t find enough specialized virtual machines to build and run AI software.

Greater and smarter cloud resource utilization is a solution to both of these problems. 

Luckily, cloud solutions can help lower the cost of training and inference on many fronts, especially if you use Kubernetes. 

A pharma company that uses EKS to run thousands of pods scaling to 10k CPUs for processing millions of patient records per batch run saved 76% on its cloud bill thanks to GPU optimization and spot instance automation.

The Cloud in Numbers

Interesting Times Ahead For The Cloud Industry

• $191 million – Google Cloud’s profit, interesting to see the provider become profitable. 🔥
• 27% – the YoY growth of Azure and other cloud services revenue noted by Microsoft, which reported earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations. 
• 9000 – the size of Amazon’s second round of layoffs, including the company’s cloud unit and the largest cloud service provider in the world.
• 9-15% – this is by how much Azure pricing for all cloud services will increase in the UK and Europe starting April 1, 2023. 
• $181.7 billion – the global semiconductor CAPEX in 2022, which isn’t enough considering the shortages facing teams experimenting with AI.
• 280 trillion – that’s how many objects Amazon S3 holds, imagine the egress costs of moving all this data out of there 🤯

The Business of Cloud

It’s Never Too Late to Embrace The Cloud

AWS announced seven new S3 storage services on the 17th anniversary of the service’s launch. Source

But then there’s the question of egress costs. Holori did some digging and saw numbers that are pretty disturbing. Source

Source: Holori

Nice overview of trends in the cloud industry from R. Scott Raynovich, the Founder and Chief Analyst at Futuriom: cloud repatriation, governance, visibility, and cloud cost management are on the rise. Source

The US Congress didn’t extend a tax provision that lets companies fully expense R&D costs, causing some businesses to face income tax bills rising by as much as 400% and draining their cash flow. Source

Security & Outages

AI Enters The Security Universe

Interesting news from Google Cloud – the company injected a bunch of security services under the umbrella brand of the Google Cloud Security AI Workbench. It includes the security-specialized large language model Sec-PaLM that will generate reports in VirusTotal’s malware analysis. Source

This series explores the most attention-grabbing cloud technology news, bringing you up to speed with the latest releases, acquisitions, research, and hidden gems in cloud computing – the stuff actually worth reading.