Building Blocks | April 2023

In this edition

• Combined power of AI and cloud: Are enterprises moving towards it or drifting away?

• Zenoss launches real-time Kubernetes monitoring, KWOK is available, and OpenKruise accepted as CNCF Incubating

• The Cloud Security Paradox: Balancing innovation with protection

• Behind the Scenes at AWS – DynamoDB UpdateTable Speedup

• All things DevOps implementations

Welcome to the April edition of Building Blocks. Read on as we dissect the best of trends, news, and opportunities in the DevOps, Cloud, and Platform Engineering space.

IN FOCUS

Combined power of AI and cloud: Are enterprises moving towards it or drifting away?

With the advent of cloud computing, AI has become more accessible to organizations of all sizes, providing them with the computing power necessary to process large amounts of data and run complex algorithms. Now, we are witnessing a trend of two powerful technologies merging into a single entity.

Open AI collaborated with Microsoft to leverage the power of Azure to build the popular AI ChatGPT. Last month, Microsoft announced that GPT-4 is available in preview in Azure OpenAI Service. This allows organizations to take advantage of the same underlying advanced models to build their applications by leveraging Azure OpenAI Service.

"Coursera is using Azure OpenAI Service to create a new AI-powered learning experience, enabling learners to get high-quality and personalized support throughout their learning journeys." - Seth Hain, SVP, Research and Development at Epic

Nvidia is taking the world of AI by storm with its latest offering: the DGX cloud. With this service, companies can now access Nvidia’s powerful AI supercomputers through popular cloud platforms like Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The service allows any enterprise to access its own AI supercomputer using a simple web browser, removing the complexity of acquiring, deploying and managing on-premises infrastructure

Last year, IBM unveiled Vela, an AI supercomputer built on the IBM cloud to help its scientists create and optimize new AI models.

Although we are seeing a growing trend of organizations leveraging the cloud to build their AI capabilities, some organizations are choosing to follow the “tried and true” path of building traditional supercomputers for AI and drifting away from the cloud.

The possibilities are endless and the innovation potential is limitless as we continue to explore the full potential of this game-changing combination. We have to wait and watch to see whether on-prem with quantum computing create magic here or AI with a multi-cloud approach dominates the space!

"We are at the iPhone moment of A.I. DGX Cloud gives customers instant access to NVIDIA AI supercomputing in global-scale clouds." - Jensen Huang, Founder & CEO, NVIDIA

TOOLS

Open-source tools to explore

• Ambient service mesh: Ambient mesh is designed for simplified operations, broader application compatibility, and reduced infrastructure cost.

• KWOK: KWOK is a toolkit to set up a Kubernetes cluster of thousands of nodes in seconds.

• OpenKruise: OpenKruise is an extended component suite for Kubernetes focused on application automation.

IN ACTION

The Cloud Security Paradox: Balancing Innovation with Protection

Hackers are quickly finding flaws in organizational cloud infrastructures despite perceptions that the technology is ironclad against cyberattacks.

Why are these breaches happening if the cloud is still far more secure than traditional systems? Cloud misconfigurations have turned out to be the leading cause for data breaches. Other reasons are unauthorized access, insecure interfaces or APIs, and weak password security.

How are organizations preparing themselves to combat a future breach?
Last month, Wiz’s Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) and SentinelOne’s Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) joined forces to provide advanced cloud security solutions for organizations, reducing risk through superior threat detection, prevention, investigation, and response capabilities.

"As more organizations are moving into the cloud, it becomes a much more attractive target for these threat actors, and they’re spending more time and resources trying to get into that environment." - Adam Meyers, SVP of Intelligence, CrowdStrike

Similarly, Banyan Cloud joined Cloud Security Alliance to protect cloud misconfigurations and customer data privacy on all cloud platforms. These are some examples of great partnerships to forge the shield to protect against cloud data breaches.

The three pioneers in the cloud world follow different approaches to providing security tools and features to their customers. Google’s shared responsibility model – “shared fate” includes default configurations designed to ensure security basics, blueprints to help customers configure products and services, and secure policy hierarchies to automatically enable the policy across the infrastructure.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cloud workload protection (CWP) across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Last month, Microsoft announced GA of Microsoft cloud security benchmark v1. This benchmark not only includes information about securing Azure but also offers a few monitoring features for Amazon Web Services.

AWS being the oldest and dominant vendor offers a broad range of security tool sets for various categories ranging from IAM, detection, network and application protection, and more.

As the allure of the cloud grows stronger, so do the risks of cyberattacks and data breaches. This makes it crucial for organizations to revisit and strengthen their cloud security strategies so that they can safeguard valuable information from the clutches of tech-savvy hackers.