Weekly CloudNews: Almost everything is in the cloud

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Almost everything is in the cloud—and experts are worried

Robert Stevens, Fortune, October 24, 2022

“For seven hours last December, huge chunks of the internet shut down without warning. For companies, the damage was severe. The culprit? A single outage in Amazon’s cloud computing servers in Northern Virginia, where several million square feet of computers buzz throughout the night for customers as diverse as ESPN and McDonald’s. The incident, by no means isolated, reveals how much companies and governments outsource computing power to a handful of centralized services. Just three companies, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, command about two-thirds of cloud infrastructure.

“Vili Lehdonvirta warns that these cloud providers have become so powerful that they already rival the power of nation-states, and that the organizations that rely on them are leading themselves to internet serfdom. The obvious solution to the threat of technological dependency would be to stop using the cloud so much and return to the decentralized computing that prevailed in the 1990s, during which companies ran their own servers. But that is easier said than done. Nor is there much incentive for organizations to avoid the cloud in the short term. Meanwhile, the leading cloud companies are piling up the money and consolidating their dominance. Amazon alone commands a third of the cloud computing market, and last year sourced 74% of its $24.8 billion profit line from AWS. The money will continue to pour in: Research firm Gartner predicts that customers will spend $600 billion on its services by the end of next year.” READ MORE

DevOps Burnout? Try Platform Engineering

Luca Galante, TheNewStack, October 20, 2022

“Are we in the middle of the Great DevOps Burnout? This report from Haystack says yes. Eighty-three percent of the 258 software engineers surveyed reported feelings of burnout from high workloads, inefficient processes, and unclear goals and targets. Only 26% of participants reported working solely on product development, whereas 74% reported working on operations tasks in some capacity. There is a growing conversation in the DevOps community about whether developers can or want to take on operations tasks. The cognitive load on developers in setups like these is overwhelming and creates a variety of organizational inefficiencies. Here, experienced backend engineers take on infrastructure tasks and help less experienced developers on their team with DevOps work. This additional responsibility prevents them from focusing on developing features and delivering the most value to the company.

“For many organizations, the key is platform engineering, designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud native era. Platform engineers build what is often called an internal developer platform, which covers the operational necessities of the entire life cycle of an application. Platform engineering tries to enable true DevOps by following a Platform as a Product approach to strike the right balance between maintaining developer freedom and finding the right level of abstraction. Platform teams pave paths of least resistance, called golden paths, for developers using the platform, drive standardization by design and connect various parts of the toolchain together to build a coherent and improved developer experience. This enables self-service capabilities for the organization while abstracting away the unnecessary complexity that contributes to cognitive load. Internal developer platforms are also associated with a lower change failure rate, which means fewer late-night shifts or weekend work for engineers being on call.” READ MORE

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