There’s a wave of layoffs and executive step-downs running through the industry, that’s for sure. As the tech meltdown progresses, cloud companies are taking a hit. What happened in the cloud world this June? Keep on reading to find out!
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Story of the Month: Has the Tech Bubble Finally Burst?
So far, the companies we’ve seen struggle - like GoPuff or Robinhood - were ones operating on the seam between high tech and other sectors. But now tech businesses face trouble too. The cloud security firm Lacework is laying off 20% of its staff.
Most of these companies grew really fast and their cloud bills followed. Robinhood’s technology and development spend was up 248% YoY in 2021, likely including cloud expenses. Roblox Cost of Goods Sold for Q1 2022 was $0.136B, a 38.49% increase YoY that is in part driven by the steadily rising infrastructure costs (including AWS services).
And now we have one more story that illustrates the bubble burst really well: Tiger Global.
https://twitter.com/intelligencer/status/1543041574334042112
As of June 2022, the investment firm lost $25 billion, a record figure even in the world of hedge funds. “The poster child” of the current tech meltdown, Tiger Global made a bunch of investments that increased the prices of speculative tech stocks. Once those positions started dropping, being at the center of this growth bubble was (and still is) bad news.
Take a look at the most talked-about Tiger investments: Peloton, Roblox, Uber, Robinhood, Warby Parker, and Carvana. Some of them noted losses of over 90%.
Many startups that expanded fast during the pandemic are now paying a steep price for their unchecked growth. Since most of them run on the cloud, optimizing their infrastructure expenses is likely to make the biggest impact on their bottom line.
Sources: Protocol, New York Magazine
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The Business of Cloud
Broadcom's recent acquisition of VMware has been affecting its existing customers, and the transition proves to be challenging.
Source: The Register
Amazon’s retail CEO Dave Clark is resigning after 23 years. Is this connected with the company’s overbuild in the last years or the role he lost to Andy Jassy?
Source: The Verge
During the last few decades, the US has been losing its dominance over the semiconductor industry. If things continue the way they’re going, we’re looking at the loss of the foundational building block of modern technology. This insightful piece dives into the major causes of this issue and suggests a solution.
Source: SemiAnalysis on Substack
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Security & Outages
Security is a concern for Kubernetes and container-based projects, according to Red Hat’s latest Kubernetes security report. Here are the key findings:
- 93% of respondents experienced at least one security incident in their Kubernetes and container environments in the past 12 months (sometimes resulting in losing customers or revenue). 38% have had a major vulnerability in the past 12 months.
- 55% of respondents delayed or slowed down application deployment due to security concerns.
- 53% detected a misconfiguration in Kubernetes in the past 12 months.
- 78% have a DevSecOps initiative either in the beginning or advanced stages.
- 43% consider DevOps as the role most responsible for Kubernetes security.
Source: 2022 State of Kubernetes Security
https://twitter.com/ryankaz42/status/1532042636458176512
Over the past year, Microsoft Azure experienced 6 “nightmare” cloud security flaws. Security researchers agree that cross-tenant vulnerabilities emerge as a new type of risk customers need to be aware of (even if the cloud was supposed to be free of it).
Source: Protocol
Podcast enthusiasts couldn’t listen to their favorite shows for over 8 hours due to an outage on Megaphone, the podcast hosting platform Spotify owns. What happened? The company failed to renew Megaphone’s security certificate. Yes, it’s that simple.
Source: The Verge
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Food for Thought
The latest StackOverflow Developer Survey is here and tells us a lot about the cloud landscape from the perspective of engineers.
AWS is still the most used cloud platform for all respondents and Professional Developers. Azure stole the second-place spot from Google Cloud.
And significantly more Professional Developers use AWS and Azure compared to people learning to code. Here we see a different usage of cloud platforms - Heroku is a top choice among them (35%). Interestingly, Google Cloud is also part of this list 31% of devs learning to code use it, as opposed to 26% of Professional Developers.
Source: Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022
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Meanwhile at CAST AI
If you’ve ever wondered how to benefit from automated cloud cost optimization but still remain in control, here’s something that delivers just that: updated rebalancing!
Rebalancing helps your cluster reach the most cost-efficient state by replacing suboptimal nodes with better ones, and moving your workloads automatically.
Previously, you’d optimize the entire cluster. Now, you can pick the specific nodes you’d like to swap. You can also taint the new nodes to avoid moving workloads to them before the node creation process ends. Read more.
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