This Google AI/Bard event will be live streamed on YouTube tomorrow morning, February 8th at 8:30 ET. I plan to attend and report. They also plan to talk about how other Google products, like Google Lens, Translate, Shopping and Maps will be integrated. Shall we be smartening the whole Cloud? Seems interesting, even if some are calling it very reactive. - FAD
Streaming from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLWXJ22LUEc
An arms race. Important point, Clouds bring the data, feed the results.
Big Tech companies use cloud computing arms to pursue alliances with AI groups in Arstechnca
Deals between Big Tech and "generative AI" startups raise competition concerns.
MADHUMITA MURGIA, FINANCIAL TIMES
Big Tech companies are aggressively pursuing investments and alliances with artificial intelligence startups through their cloud computing arms, raising regulatory questions over their role as both suppliers and competitors in the battle to develop “generative AI.”
Google’s recent $300 million bet on San Francisco-based Anthropic is the latest in a string of cloud-related partnerships struck between nascent AI groups and the world’s biggest technology companies.
Anthropic is part of a new wave of young companies developing generative AI systems, sophisticated computer programs that can parse and write text and create art in seconds, that are rivaling those being built in-house by far larger companies such as Google and Amazon.
The technology behind products including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a chatbot that can converse with users through text, requires enormous amounts of computing power—expensive infrastructure controlled by the same handful of tech giants.
“[This] is exactly the type of scenario that the Federal Trade Commission has said they’re going to focus on,” said William Kovacic, a former Republican chair of the US antitrust agency and a professor of antitrust law at George Washington University. ... '
New domains, one answer to supply chains there.
AWS sets its sights on space for the future of cloud capabilities By Mike Moore published about 3 hours ago
AWS wants to make the world a better place, from space
Cloud computing has revolutionized all kinds of business and workplace environments, but one of the biggest players in the industry now hopes it can help accelerate the next big breakthroughs in space as well.
Speaking at the recent AWS re:Invent 2022 event, Clint Crosier, the company’s director of aerospace and satellite, outlined how the company is heavily backing the use of cloud computing in space.
At a panel session alongside Peggy Whitson, astronaut and director of human space flight at Axiom, Crosier described, “what we at AWS call the making the world a better place from space mission.” ... '
Brought to my attention last week. Notably Cloud aspects.
'Retbleed' Speculative Execution Attack Affects AMD, Intel CPUs
By The Hacker News, July 18, 2022
The most serious attack vector for Retbleed is likely through cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform, each of which operate massive numbers of servers.
The "Retbleed" flaw discovered by Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi at ETH Zurich in Switzerland targets older AMD and Intel central processing units as a channel for Spectre-based speculative-execution attacks.
Retbleed is engineered to circumvent "return trampoline" (Retpoline) branch target injection countermeasures.
"Retbleed aims to hijack a return instruction in the kernel to gain arbitrary speculative code execution in the kernel context," explained Wikner and Razavi. "With sufficient control over registers and/or memory at the victim return instruction, the attacker can leak arbitrary kernel data."
To mitigate the potential threat, AMD has unveiled Jmp2Ret, while Intel has recommended employing enhanced Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation, even if Retpoline mitigations are implemented.
From The Hacker News
Considering a major rework of smarthome.
How The Migration From Cloud to Edge Powers Tomorrow’s Smart Homes
Carsten Gregeren in Datanami
The edge is here to stay. The next generation of data processing is growing from strength to strength – reaching $274 billion in value by 2025 – with major benefits including better data management and security, lower connectivity costs, and reliable, uninterrupted connection. Edge computing, in my mind, is the logical successor to cloud computing, and it’s especially exciting to consider the implications for the Internet of Things (IoT).
As devices more often process data at the edge rather than in the cloud, experts believe the evolution will pave the way for increased artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics. The one-two punch of smarter devices with faster edge connections looks set to change our interactions with devices entirely. Consider, for example, door locks with instant facial recognition or smart induction stoves that automatically change cooking temperature. Increasingly, more autonomous devices will be able to make decisions on the behalf of users.
Let’s look at how the great cloud to edge migration powers the smart homes of tomorrow.
Smarter Devices, Smarter Homes
The concept of smart homes has always captured the popular imagination. However, it might not be the stuff of science fiction for much longer. Devices like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home have grown rapidly in just a few short years and consumers are becoming more accustomed to smart devices within the modern home.
Smart home or home automation is the process of automatically controlling different appliances or devices and programing them to replace several human interactions for handling essential functions. The connected sensors and devices are operated via IoT supported platforms, providing connectivity and control to them worldwide.
By 2025, IDC estimates that there will be more than 55 billion connected devices, with 75% of them connected to an IoT platform. And more of these devices are finding their way into the home. However, with more devices comes more data. IDC estimates that connected IoT devices will soon generate up to 73 zettabytes of data. Today’s centralized cloud networks may become overloaded with traffic due to such a spike in data. Therefore, edge computing’s distributed IT architecture may help to combat the impending data rush by transferring information to the network periphery.
In addition to storage benefits, smarter devices are also driving this migration from cloud to edge. Consider that devices are more often loaded with AI-optimized chipsets. These chips are smaller, more economical and less power-consuming. As a result, they enable devices to handle far more processes internally rather than externally, reducing the need to offload unnecessary processes to the cloud. ... '
Wal-Mart Adds Cloud Capabilities and takes control
ACM TECHNEWS
Walmart Amps Up Cloud Capabilities, Reducing Reliance on Tech Giants
By The Wall Street Journal
Retailer Walmart said it has deployed a system for transitioning between cloud providers and its own servers, saving millions of dollars and offering other companies a means of becoming less reliant on technology behemoths. The hybrid cloud taps third-party platforms from Microsoft and Google, and an internal server network implemented in Walmart outlets nationwide.
The company said it has 10,000 edge nodes deployed throughout the U.S., while custom software allows the operation of back-end functions across any cloud system. Walmart also said the system has saved it up to 18% in annual cloud spending, has reduced cloud outages, and has boosted the speed in which particular applications can be accessed.
From The Wall Street Journal
-Always like indicative measures of use, could use more than there is here.
Are Blockchain and Decentralized Cloud Making Much Headway?
There continues to be chatter about such elements of Web 3.0 stirring up the cloud scene, but the impact thus far may be limited to niche use cases.
Joao-Pierre S. Ruth, Senior Writer May 09, 2022
There is some debate about potential benefits of hosting cloud computing on a centralized or decentralized network, and whether the blockchain might pose some relevance on such a front. The answer seems to be a definite maybe -- under certain circumstance
Avivah Litan, vice president and analyst with Gartner, says blockchain enables decentralized cloud computing, which can stir up some hype of new approaches to compute and Web 3.0. “In that sense, it is disruptive to the centralized guys,” she says. “It’s not going to disrupt the industry overnight; I don’t see it happening that quickly.”
Decentralized cloud computing may be an alternative that might even make sense for some non-blockchain applications, Litan says. Still there can be reluctance within organizations to move workloads fast in this direction, she says. However, with certain applications, such a move can be a way to save money.
Dipping into this arena means accepting a nebulous, almost amorphous form of cloud computing. Blockchain’s decentralized architecture typically means never running in just one environment, Litan says. “If you look at a blockchain of 10,000 nodes, you can run your nodes anywhere you want.” With Bitcoin or Ethereum miners who are mining, she says, they can set up their nodes on-prem or any on cloud they choose. In that sense, it is not centrally controlled by any one player, Litan says. ....'
A cloud is a slippery thing.
What is a Distributed Cloud? by 7wData
Excitement regarding the possibilities of the cloud has never been greater, and that sentiment shows no sign of reversing or plateauing in the foreseeable future. While there is plenty to be enthusiastic about regarding the various cloud deployment models that are well-established, such as multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, new approaches to cloud computing are also starting to emerge.
One of these, the distributed cloud, may be particularly intriguing to many enterprises going forward, due to its potential for minimizing latency and enabling more comprehensive control of cloud assets.
The term distributed cloud refers to when an enterprise uses public hybrid multi-cloud services—offered by a primary cloud service provider—that run in a variety of different locations. These may include the user's on-premises data center or edge locations, public cloud infrastructure, third-party data or colocation centers, or even the data centers of other cloud providers. Distributed cloud operations are managed by the originating provider from a single control plane, to bring consistency and cohesion to the deployment.
In a cloud deployment that operates as a distributed system, different clouds can serve different purposes. For example, one cloud might have meticulous security safeguards in place to house data that must be protected according to the stringent guidelines of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Another could be dedicated to supporting software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that an organization uses heavily, which require considerable bandwidth and need as low latency as possible to operate most effectively. .... '
Have no heard from this direction of late.
Teradata Puts New Cloud Architecture to the 1,000-Node Test By Alex Woodie
Teradata says the recent 1,000-node test that it ran on AWS not only shows the scale that its new cloud architecture can achieve, but also demonstrates the analytic flexibility required by its new target market, the Global 10,000.
Teradata is a company on the move, and it’s moving both in terms of what it makes and whom it makes it for. It’s no longer developing tightly coupled, on-prem data warehouses for the largest corporations in the world. Instead, it’s creating de-coupled analytic software that runs anywhere–on prem, in the cloud, or in multiple clouds–and its market has widened considerably, from the Fortune 500 to the Global 10,000.
This background is important to understand why the Teradata Innovation Lab spent the time to take Teradata Vantage (the name of its cloud-based offering) for a 1,000-node spin. According to Teradata Chief Product Officer Hillary Ashton, the AWS cluster was more than twice as big as any production cluster run by a Teradata customer.
“We have some of the largest customers on-premises on the planet, so I think it’s a really great indication of where we’re heading in the future,” Ashton told Datanami. “Obviously it gives our large enterprise customers the comfort that our future is big enough for the largest enterprise workloads.”
The test, which took about four weeks to run and was announced one week ago, utilized 100 TB of data and simulated thousands of concurrent SQL queries submitted by more than 1,000 simulated users. The workload itself was a mix of quick-hitting operational queries that demanded fast response times, as well as more complex and longer-running decision support system (DSS) queries.
There are some details of the test missing, including the specific EC2 instance types that were used (Teradata says there were two types used), and the total cost of the system. The company says it will share more details in a white paper that will be published in a couple of weeks. But don’t expect pricing information, as this test was never intended to be a public price-performance benchmark. .....'
Note below, attacks on cloud services. Microsoft comments.
Latest Russian Cyberattack Targeting Hundreds of U.S. Networks
Reuters, By Susan Heavey. October 25, 2021
Microsoft warns the Russia-based agency Nobelium has targeted hundreds of U.S. companies and organizations, specifically "resellers and other technology service providers" of cloud services, in its latest cyberattack. The software giant, which alerted 609 customers between July 1 and Oct. 19 that they had been targeted, informed The New York Times that only a small percentage of the latest attacks succeeded. U.S. officials verified the operation was underway, with one anonymous official calling it "unsophisticated, run-of-the mill operations that could have been prevented if the cloud service providers had implemented baseline cybersecurity practices." Microsoft blogged that the latest attack again confirms Russia's ambition "to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling—now or in the future—targets of interest to the Russian government." ... '
Did IBM Lose the Cloud and was Emphasis on Watson to Blame? Interacted with them during the early Watson days and there was quite an investment in that.
How IBM lost the cloud in Protocol
Insiders say that marketing missteps and duplicated development processes meant IBM Cloud was doomed from the start, and eight years after it attempted to launch its own public cloud the future of its effort is in dire straits.
The words stunned IBM's cloud executives in November 2013. Former CEO Ginni Rometty had just told them that Watson, IBM's dubious crown jewel, should run on the company's own Power chips inside SoftLayer, IBM's recently acquired cloud-computing division.
There was one big problem: SoftLayer, like all major cloud efforts at that point, only used x86 chips from Intel and AMD.
What came next can only be described as a scramble, according to sources who worked for IBM at the time. After throwing together a barely working demo for IBM's Pulse conference in February 2014, where Rometty publicly announced the news, executives quickly convened in Texas, home to SoftLayer. They realized fulfilling Rometty's pledge would be daunting: They would have to rewrite parts of the Watson code base for the cloud, and quickly find, and then configure, enough Power servers to run alongside the all-x86 SoftLayer environment.
So began IBM's experiments with cloud computing, imperiled from the start by a maniacal focus on selling Watson at the height of its public awareness and doting obedience to a customer base that still didn't trust the cloud.
IBM was once — and still is, for people whose main sources of information about technology are television ads during sporting events — an American innovation icon, a company that literally created what we now think of as information technology. Its fortunes have risen and fallen with broader trends in computing, but around the time of that meeting in late 2013, its business and technology reputation began a steady decline that it has yet to avert. .... '
" ... supporting the client journey to the cloud that can help map aligning the optimal portfolio of cloud capabilities ...
Apptio’s SaaS solutions will be a decision engine to help clients migrate workloads and applications with Red Hat OpenShift ...
BELLEVUE, Wash., and ARMONK, N.Y., October 12, 2021 – Apptio, Inc., a leading provider of technology business management (TBM) SaaS applications, and IBM (NYSE: IBM), today announced a collaboration to help clients improve hybrid cloud technology decision-making and drive adoption of Red Hat OpenShift and IBM’s open hybrid cloud approach.
According to analyst firm IDC, “there is a need to support the client journey to the cloud that can help map aligning the optimal portfolio of cloud capabilities (e.g., private, public, hybrid) needed to achieve business and IT objectives, offering different pathways to the cloud for migration and modernization of applications.”1 To help inject flexibility and agility into their operations, enterprises must determine which applications and workloads should be migrated and how that may impact the business. The collaboration will combine data-driven insights from Apptio to help clients make informed migration decisions and capitalize on the capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift to run and manage applications in the computing environment that best suits their business goals, including on-premises infrastructure and across cloud destinations including IBM, AWS, Azure and others. ... '
Thoughts on vulnerability of the cloud.
Russia’s Hacking Success Shows How Vulnerable the Cloud Is
The cloud is everywhere. It’s critical to computing. And it’s under attack.
By Bruce Schneier, a fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Trey Herr, the director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen at a press conference concerning a hacking campaign tied to the Chinese government at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington on Sept. 16, 2020.
Russia’s Sunburst cyberespionage campaign, discovered late last year, impacted more than 100 large companies and U.S. federal agencies, including the Treasury, Energy, Justice, and Homeland Security departments. A crucial part of the Russians’ success was their ability to move through these organizations by compromising cloud and local network identity systems to then access cloud accounts and pilfer emails and files.
Hackers said by the U.S. government to have been working for the Kremlin targeted a widely used Microsoft cloud service that synchronizes user identities. The hackers stole security certificates to create their own identities, which allowed them to bypass safeguards such as multifactor authentication and gain access to Office 365 accounts, impacting thousands of users at the affected companies and government agencies.
It wasn’t the first time cloud services were the focus of a cyberattack, and it certainly won’t be the last. Cloud weaknesses were also critical in a 2019 breach at Capital One. There, an Amazon Web Services cloud vulnerability, compounded by Capital One’s own struggle to properly configure a complex cloud service, led to the disclosure of tens of millions of customer records, including credit card applications, Social Security numbers, and bank account information.
This trend of attacks on cloud services by criminals, hackers, and nation states is growing as cloud computing takes over worldwide as the default model for information technologies. Leaked data is bad enough, but disruption to the cloud, even an outage at a single provider, could quickly cost the global economy billions of dollars a day.
Cloud computing is an important source of risk both because it has quickly supplanted traditional IT and because it concentrates ownership of design choices at a very small number of companies. First, cloud is increasingly the default mode of computing for organizations, meaning ever more users and critical data from national intelligence and defense agencies ride on these technologies. Second, cloud computing services, especially those supplied by the world’s four largest providers—Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Google—concentrate key security and technology design choices inside a small number of organizations. The consequences of bad decisions or poorly made trade-offs can quickly scale to hundreds of millions of users. ... '
Don't know this method, provably it says, reviewing later. Much more technical at the link.
SeKVM Makes Cloud Computing Provably Secure
IEEE Spectrum,Charles Q. Choi, June 7, 2021
Columbia University researchers say they have designed the first hypervisor that can ensure secure cloud computing. SeKVM is a secure version of the popular KVM open source hypervisor that cuts the verification workload through what the researchers call microverification. Microverification reduces a hypervisor to a small core and an array of untrusted services, then demonstrates security by verifying the core exclusively; the core lacks exploitable vulnerabilities, and mediates the hypervisor's interactions with virtual machines (VMs) so one compromised VM cannot impact others. The researchers developed microverification-based MicroV software to authenticate large commercial-grade multi-processor hypervisors. Columbia's Ronghui Gu said, "SeKVM will lay a foundation for future innovations in systems verification and lead to a new generation of cyber-resilient systems software." ...
Was just pointed out to me, seems a good resource.
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) leads the industry in offering cloud security-specific research, education, certification, events and best practices. ...
Welcome to the Cloud Security Alliance
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. ... "
Very high performance supercomputing on the cloud is adding to the ability to research, design, simulate, test, manufacture, deliver.
Going to the Moon via the Cloud
The New York Times, Craig S. Smith, May 25, 2021
The wide availability of high-performance computing accessed through the cloud is fostering creativity worldwide, allowing the Firefly Aerospace startup, for example, to build a rocket for lunar flights using high-performance computing simulations. Although the latest supercomputers can run 1 quadrillion calculations per second, they are prohibitively expensive and have huge space and power needs; less powerful but more nimble networked computer clusters can nearly equal supercomputers' capabilities. Moreover, most cloud computing firms supply access to high-performance computing hardware with more versatility than supercomputers. High-performance cloud computing company Rescale estimates roughly 12% of such computing is currently cloud-based, but that number—approximately $5.3 billion—is expanding 25% annually. Cloud services are growing increasingly popular among research and development groups and applied science fields, amid spiking demand for computing resources.
From a former employer of mine. Don't understand the details as yet. See that it is to be presented shortly. A proof? See also the paper mentioned below for additional details.
Columbia Team Builds Hacker-Resistant Cloud Software System By Columbia University
Columbia University researchers have developed a system that guarantees — through a mathematical proof — the security of virtual machines in the cloud.
They discuss the system in "A Secure and Formally Verified Linux KVM Hypervisor," to be presented at the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy on Wednesday (May 26).
"This is the first time that a real-world multiprocessor software system has been shown to be mathematically correct and secure," says Jason Nieh, professor of computer science at Columbia. "This means that users' data are correctly managed by software running in the cloud and are safe from security bugs and hackers."
The work is the first to verify the widely-used KVM hypervisor, which is used to run virtual machines by cloud providers. "We've shown that our system can protect and secure private data and computing uploaded to the cloud with mathematical guarantees," says Xupeng Li, a Ph.D. student and co-lead author of the paper.
From Columbia University
What's next?
What Serverless Computing Is and Should Become: The Next Phase of Cloud Computing
By Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Anurag Khandelwal, Joao Carreira, Neeraja J. Yadwadkar, Raluca Ada Popa, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, David A. Patterson
Communications of the ACM, May 2021, Vol. 64 No. 5, Pages 76-84 10.1145/3406011
In 2010, some of us co-authored a Communications article that helped explain the relatively new phenomenon of cloud computing.4 We said that cloud computing provided the illusion of infinitely scalable remote servers without charging a premium for scale, as renting 1,000 servers for one hour costs the same as renting one server for 1,000 hours, and that economies of scale for the cloud provider allowed it to be surprisingly inexpensive. We listed challenges to cloud computing, and then predicted that most would be overcome so the industry would increasingly shift from computing inside local data centers to "the cloud," which has indeed happened. Today two-thirds of enterprise information technology spending for infrastructure and software is based in the cloud.8
We are revisiting cloud computing a decade later to explain its emerging second phase, which we believe will further accelerate the shift to the cloud. The first phase mainly simplified system administration by making it easier to configure and manage computing infrastructure, primarily through the use of virtual servers and networks carved out from massive multi-tenant data centers. This second phase hides the servers by providing programming abstractions for application builders that simplify cloud development, making cloud software easier to write. Stated briefly, the target of the first phase was system administrators and the second is programmers. This change requires cloud providers to take over many of the operational responsibilities needed to run applications well.
To emphasize the change of focus from servers to applications, this new phase has become known as serverless computing, although remote servers are still the invisible bedrock that powers it. In this article, we call the traditional first phase serverful computing. .... "
Brought to my recent attention:
Enhancements within Netvisor ONE and the Adaptive Cloud Fabric™ Resonate with Customers, Supporting Larger, Seamlessly Interconnected Fabrics and a Dynamic Packet Broker Solution
SANTA CLARA – April 27, 2021 – Pluribus Networks, the leader in SDN automation and disaggregated networking, today announced the general availability of release 6.1 of its Linux Netvisor® ONE network operating system (OS). Recognized by the Financial Times as one of the 500 fastest growing companies in the Americas for a second consecutive year in 2021, Pluribus continues to demonstrate architectural innovation at a rapid pace, including feature enhancements that deliver affordable and highly automated data center fabrics for private cloud deployments.
Netvisor ONE 6.1 includes enhancements to the Adaptive Cloud Fabric™ that enable Pluribus customers to build bigger, faster fabrics with more services and even simpler operations, and also features the industry’s most flexible and scalable packet broker solution for network monitoring, security monitoring and visibility. R6.1 also further extends the Pluribus switch portfolio with support of multiple new Edgecore switches for 10/40/100 GbE deployments and delivers a highly automated BGP EVPN implementation for brownfield interoperability ...."
Useful details on the topic, with many links by a former IBMer who we worked with. A good follow. Below the intro paragraph.
A collection of observations, news and resources on the changing nature of innovation, technology, leadership, and other subjects.
The Current State of Cloud Computing By Irving Wladawsky-Berger
In June, 2008 I gave a talk at a conference on The Promise and Reality of Cloud Computing. In his closing remarks, the conference organizer noted that most everyone had agreed that something big and profound was going on, but they weren’t quite sure what it was they were excited about. “There is a clear consensus that there is no real consensus on what cloud computing is,” he said. A few months later, The Economist published a special report on cloud computing with several articles on the subject. In the lead article, technology editor Ludwig Siegele started out his definition of cloud computing by first giving a very succinct history of computing:
“In the beginning computers were human. Then they took the shape of metal boxes, filling entire rooms before becoming ever smaller and more widespread. Now they are evaporating altogether and becoming accessible from anywhere. Computing has constantly changed shape and location - mainly as a result of new technology, but often also because of shifts in demand. Now, … it is turning into what has come to be called a ‘cloud’, or collections of clouds. Computing power will become more and more disembodied and will be consumed where and when it is needed.” .. '
