Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: cloud computing

  • Retreat from the cloud

    Retreat from the cloud

    Despite the benefits, there’s a number of risks of having your data or applications hosted on cloud services. The three most important are costs, availability and portability.

    Having spent the last three days at EMC World in Las Vegas, the cost factor in public cloud services is clear for larger enterprises and many companies – including the soon to be merged EMC and Dell – are basing their business plans on corporations and government agencies bringing at least some of their IT function back in-house.

    Smaller companies too are at risk from high costs as a myriad of cloud services can quickly become a big drain on a small business’ finances.

    Availability has long been a problem with cloud services as they are at the mercy of internet access and, more importantly, subject to the whims of companies’ policies. Two good examples being Amazon’s arbitrary deleting of users’ kindle licenses and Google’s Real Names debacle.

    In the last two days another version of this has arisen where a musician found Apple Music had deleted his collections, while there are claims this ‘bug’ this may be due to clumsy user interfaces it shows the risks in entrusting key data to the cloud.

    Which leads us to the most critical point with cloud services – portability. Many online businesses are working on the basis of locking customers into their services.

    Most founders asset they want to lock customers in by offering the best services but it’s not hard to see as these companies grow, the urge to use proprietary formats or convoluted exporting tools to keep clients on the platform becomes stronger.

    Cloud services aren’t going away but all of us are going to have to take precautions and understand the risk. And backup locally as often as possible.

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  • Getting academics onto the cloud

    Getting academics onto the cloud

    Offering free products to students and academics has long been a tactic used by software companies to build their market presence. The current fight for dominance in the cloud is seeing the same tactics being used.

    Last week I had the opportunity to talk to Amazon Web Services’ Glenn Gore about his company’s academic support program.

    Part of that conversation ended up in a story for The Australian about how researchers are now using cloud computing services and it’s worthwhile looking at how AWS are using this program to cement their products’ market positions.

    “We work with the majority of universities across Australia,” Gore said. “It’s part of an international focus around how we support the education sector in general.”

    In some respects AWS’s behaviour isn’t new, for years Microsoft, Autodesk and Adobe have had programs offering free or deeply discounted products for academic or student use. The success of those schemes in becoming defacto industry standards is no small reason why these companies have dominated many sectors.

    Microsoft themselves have the similar Bizspark program for tech startups and it’s easy to see how that initiative is helping push Azure’s adoption into a field that has been dominated by AWS.

    One of the drawbacks though with cloud computing services is the risk of ‘sticker shock’ where customers end up with big bills. One of the universities I spoke to in researching the story recounted how 0ne of their faculties was presented with a huge AWS invoice because their engineers didn’t provision the services correctly.

    This is where AWS’s team steps in with advice for researchers, “in the case of Koala Genome Project use the on-demand model, the standing pricing model for the cloud,” recounts Gore in pointing out the nature of their work could use spot-pricing to take advantage of cheaper prices in off-peak times. “As a result of making that one change they were able to do eighty percent more research.”

    Getting more research time is always attractive for researchers and Dr Rebecca Johnson who leads the Australian Museum’s part of the koala consortium was particularly effusive about the support from AWS staff,

    “What we have been able to access via this partnership with AWS is compute time and compute capacity that we just would not have had access too,” Dr Johnson said in a media release. “It would have cost us thousands and thousands of dollars to create and we just would not build such a computer system these days. You would not create your own computer infrastructure as we would only use a fraction of it anyway. So, it is great for us to piggy back off these already built systems.”

    Being a relatively small institution, the Australian Museum is a good example of how cloud computing can work for those without the resources of big universities or corporations in the same way small businesses and startups can access resources formerly only available to enterprises.

    Amazon’s programs though show the Microsoft model of getting students and startups onto their systems early pays dividends. It’s good for academic institutions but one wonders whether it’s also another form of vendor lock in.

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  • Cloud computing’s elusive gold

    Cloud computing’s elusive gold

    Alphabet, aka Google, and Microsoft yesterday announced their quarterly results and despite both making healthy profits the numbers show the online world is a tough place to make money.

    Microsoft’s stockholders took a five percent hit to their wallets after the company announced weaker than expected results for the last quarter.

    Notable in the results were the stunning sales growth of its cloud services with Azure boasting a 120% year on year on year increase.

    Yet Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud division which includes Azure saw its profits fall nearly 13%, showing the company’s products may be making inroads against Amazon Web Services but making profits in that market is very tough indeed.

    Similarly Alphabet’s results still show the company is sill totally dependent upon the advertising river of gold for its profits.

    Particularly concerning for Alphabet is its ‘other bets’ division doubled its sales but saw losses increase by 20%. Overall Google’s advertising revenues made up 89% of Alphabet’s total revenues this quarter compared to 90% last year.

    While both companies have very healthy profits – about five billion dollars this quarter for each – Alphabet’s continued dependence on Google advertising and Microsoft’s declining profitability should be a worrying sign for shareholders in both companies.

    Both companies show that despite the apparent riches of the technology sector, making profits is getting tougher. Shareholders of both companies should be watching carefully for any disruption to either business.

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  • What happens when machines start to learn

    What happens when machines start to learn

    Computer programming is one of the jobs of the future. Right?

    Maybe not, as Japanese industrial robot maker Fanuc demonstrates with their latest robot that learns on the job.

    The MIT Technology Review describes how the robot analyses a task and fine tunes its own operations to do the task properly.

    Fanuc’s robot uses a technique known as deep reinforcement learning to train itself, over time, how to learn a new task. It tries picking up objects while capturing video footage of the process. Each time it succeeds or fails, it remembers how the object looked, knowledge that is used to refine a deep learning model, or a large neural network, that controls its action.

    While machines running on deep reinforcement learning won’t completely make programmers totally redundant, it shows basic operations even in those fields are going to be increasingly automated. Just knowing a programming language is not necessarily a passport to future prosperity.

    Another aspect flagged in the MIT article is how robots can learn in parallel, so groups can work together to understand and optimise tasks.

    While Fanuc and the MIT article are discussing small groups of similar computers working together it’s not hard to see this working on a global scale. What happens when your home vacuum cleaner starts talking to a US Air Force autonomous drone remains to be seen.

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  • Amazon Web Services and the new rules of business

    Amazon Web Services and the new rules of business

    The one company that has driven both the adoption of cloud computing and the current tech startup mania is Amazon Web Services.

    Later this week AWS celebrates its tenth birthday and Werner Vogels, the company’s Chief Technical Officer, has listed the ten most important things he’s learned over the last decade.

    The article is a useful roadmap for almost any business, not just a tech organisation, particularly in the importance of building systems that can evolve and understanding that things will inevitably break.

    Importantly Vogels flags that encryption and security have to be built into technology, today they are key parts of a product and no longer features to be added later.

    Most contentious though is Vogels’ view that “APIs are forever”, that breaking a data connection causes so much trouble for customers that it’s best to leave them alone.

    Few companies are going to take that advice, particularly in a world where changing business needs mean APIs have to evolve.

    There’s also the real risk for businesses that their vendors will depreciate or abandon APIs leaving key operational functions stranded, this could cause major problems for organisations in a world that’s increasingly automated.

    Vogel’s commitment to maintaining APIs may well prove to be a competitive advantage for Amazon Web Services in their competition with Microsoft Azure, Google and an army of smaller vendors.

    Werner Vogel’s lessons are worth a read by all c-level executives as well as startup founders looking to build a long term venture, in many ways they could define the new rules of business.

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