Category: Cloud

Cloud teams need to work closely with their finance teams to provide visibility into what your organization’s cloud usage is costing and find ways to optimize the spend.

David Linthicum writes at InforWorld

Without cloud spending visibility and insights, you’re basically driving a car without a dashboard. You don’t how fast you’re going or when you’re about to run out of gas. A guessing game turns into a big surprise when cloud spending is way above what everyone initially thought. That sucking sound you hear is the value that you thought cloud computing would bring now leaving the business.

I agree with David and as part of any cloud program there needs to be visibility into what is being used, how much and by whom as well as where to optimize. As David also points out:

The overall objective is to have more business value from fewer cloud computing dollars.

What are you currently using for cloud observability? Do you know your cloud spend? Let me know on Twitter.

As more of us are using multiple clouds to avoid vendor lock-in, it’s nice to see the interoperability between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Steve Rosenbush writing at The Wall Street Journal

The new service connects Oracle’s database service directly to the Azure cloud, eliminating custom work that previously would have been required.

In practice, that means an Oracle database user can move data easily to the Microsoft Azure cloud and have access to Microsoft tools such as Azure Synapse, which analyzes the data, the companies said.

The Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure streamlines the service and should make it less difficult to get started and operate.

The Cloud SecurityTechnical Reference Architecture offers approaches to cloud migration and data protection.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA):

The purpose of the Cloud Security Technical Reference Architecture is to guide agencies in a coordinated and deliberate way as they continue to adopt cloud technology. This approach will allow the Federal Government to identify, detect, protect, respond, and recover from cyber incidents while improving cybersecurity across the .gov enterprise. As outlined in Executive Order 14028, this document seeks to inform agencies of the advantages and inherent risks of adopting cloud-based services as they begin to implement zero trust architectures . The Cloud Security Technical Reference Architecture also illustrates recommended approaches to cloud migration and data protection for agency data collection and reporting.

I am a big fan of reviewing these documents. It helps me determine if I have any blind spots in my cloud deployments.

Frontier, the world’s fastest computer is an Exascale system based on HPE Cray system architecture. This system can do more than 1 quintillion calculations per second. Also not surprising is that this system is powered by Linux and AMD EPYC processors.

The text editor I use is Atom from GitHub but it looks like I’ll need to find a new one since.

From the GitHub blog:

When we introduced Atom in 2011, we set out to give developers a text editor that was deeply customizable but also easy to use—one that made it possible for more people to build software. While that goal of growing the software creator community remains, we’ve decided to retire Atom in order to further our commitment to bringing fast and reliable software development to the cloud via Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces.

This move makes sense to me as GitHub focuses on the the cloud with GitHub Codespaces.