Tag Archives: cloud computing

2022 and Beyond – Technologies that will Change the Dialogue

December 28, 2021 John Roese Leave a comment

We are living in a do-anything-from-anywhere economy enabled by an exponentially expanding data ecosystem. It’s estimated 65% of Global GDP will be digital next year (2022). This influx of data presents both opportunities and challenges. After all, success in our digital present and future relies on our ability to secure and maintain increasingly complex IT systems. Here I’ll examine both near-term and long-term predictions that address the way the IT industry will deliver the platforms and capabilities to harness this data to transform our experiences at work, home and in the classroom.

What to look for in 2022:

The Edge discussion will separate into two focus areas – edge platforms that provide a stable pool of secure capacity for the diverse edge ecosystems and software defined edge workloads/software stacks that extend application and data systems into real world environments. This approach to Edge, where we separate the edge platforms from the edge workloads, is critical since, if each edge workload creates its own dedicated platform, we will have proliferation of edge infrastructure and unmanageable infrastructure sprawl.

woman using a computer — Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

Imagine an edge environment where you deploy an edge platform that presents compute, storage, I/O and other foundational IT capacities in a stable, secure, and operationally simple way. As you extend various public and private cloud data and applications pipelines to the edge along with local IoT and data management edges, they can be delivered as software-defined packages leveraging that common edge platform of IT capacity. This means that your edge workloads can evolve and change at software speed because the underlying platform is a common pool of stable capacity.

We are already seeing this shift today. Dell Technologies currently offers edge platforms for all the major cloud stacks, using common hardware and delivery mechanisms. As we move into 2022, we expect these platforms to become more capable and pervasive. We are already seeing most edge workloads – and even most public cloud edge architectures – shift to software-defined architectures using containerisation and assuming standard availably of capacities such as Kubernetes as the dial tone. This combination of modern edge platforms and software-defined edge systems will become the dominant way to build and deploy edge systems in the multi-cloud world.

The opening of the private mobility ecosystem will accelerate with more cloud and IT industries involved on the path to 5G. Enterprise use of 5G is still early. In fact, today 5G is not significantly different or better than WiFi in most enterprise use cases. This will change in 2022 as more modern, capable versions of 5G become available to enterprises. We will see higher performance and more scalable 5G along with new 5G features such as Ultra Reliability Low Latency Communications (UR-LLC) and Massive Machine Type Communicators (mMTC), with dialogue becoming much more dominant than traditional telecoms (think: open-source ecosystem, infrastructure companies, non-traditional telecom).

signal tower — Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels.com

More importantly we expect the ecosystem, delivering new and more capable private mobility, will expand to include IT providers such as Dell Technologies but also public cloud providers and even new Open-Source ecosystems focused on acceleration of the Open 5G ecosystem.

Edge will become the new battleground for data management as data management becomes a new class of workload. The data management ecosystem needs an edge. The modern data management industry began its journey on public clouds processing and analysing non-real-time centralised data. As the digital transformation of the world accelerates, it has become clear that most of the data in the world will be created and acted on outside of centralised data centers. We expect that the entire data management ecosystem will become very active in developing and utilising edge IT capacity as the ingress and egress of their data pipelines but will also utilise edges to remotely process and digest data.

As the data management ecosystem extends to the edge this will dramatically increase the number of edge workloads and overall edge demand. This correlates to our first prediction on edge platforms as we expect these data management edges to be modern software-defined offerings. Data management and the edge will increasingly converge and reinforce each other. IT infrastructure companies, like Dell Technologies, have the unique opportunity to provide the orchestration layer for edge and multi-cloud by delivering an edge data management strategy.

The security industry is now moving from discussion of emerging security concerns to a bias toward action. Enterprises and governments are facing threats of greater sophistication and impact on revenue and services. At the same time, the attack surface that hackers can exploit is growing based on the accelerated trend in remote work and digital transformation. As a result, the security industry is responding with greater automation and integration. The industry is also pivoting from automated detection to prevention and response with a focus on applying AI and machine learning to speed remediation. This is evidenced by industry initiatives like SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation & Response), CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) and XDR (Extended, Detection and Response). Most importantly we are seeing new efforts such as the Open Secure Software Foundation in the Linux Foundation ramp up the coordination and active involvement of the IT, telecom and semiconductor industries.

close up view of system hacking — Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

Across all four of these areas – edge, private mobility, data management and security – there is a clear need for a broad ecosystem where both public cloud and traditional infrastructure are integrated. We are now clearly in a multi-cloud, distributed world where the big challenges can no longer be solved by a single data center, cloud, system or technology.

What to look for beyond 2022:

Quantum Computing – Hybrid quantum/classical compute will take center stage providing greater access to quantum. In 2022 we expect two major industry consensuses to emerge. First, we expect the industry will see the inevitable topology of a quantum system will be a hybrid quantum computer where the quantum hardware or quantum processing units (QPU) are specialised compute systems that look like accelerators and focus on specific quantum focused mathematics and functions. The QPUs will be surrounded by conventional compute systems to pre-process the data, run the overall process and even interpret the output of the QPUs.

Early real-world quantum systems are all following this hybrid quantum model and we see a clear path where the collaboration of classical and quantum compute is inevitable. The second major consensus is that quantum simulation using conventional computing will be the most cost effective and accessible way to get quantum systems into the hands of our universities, data science teams and researchers. In fact, Dell and IBM already announced significant work in making quantum simulation available to the world.

Automotive – The automotive ecosystem will rapidly shift focus from a mechanical ecosystem to a data and compute industry. The automotive industry is transforming at several levels. We are seeing a shift from Internal Combustion Engines to Electrified Vehicles resulting in radical simplification of the physical supply chain. We are also seeing a significant expansion of software and compute content within our automobiles via ADAS and autonomous vehicle efforts. Finally, we are seeing the automotive industry becoming data driven industries for everything from entertainment, to safety to major disruptions such as Car-as-a-Service and automated delivery.

All of this says that the automotive and transportation industries are beginning a rapid transition to be driven by software, compute and data. We have seen this in other industries such as telecom and retail and in every case the result is increased consumption of IT technology. Dell is actively engaged with most of the world’s major automotive companies in their early efforts, and we expect 2022 to continue their evolution towards digital transformation and deep interaction with IT ecosystems.

jonas leupe 81DQcYCS8sQ unsplash — Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash

Digital Twins – Digital Twins will become easier to create and consume as the technology is more clearly defined with dedicated tools. While gaining in awareness, digital twins is still a nascent technology with few real examples in production. Over the next several years, we’ll see digital twins become easier to create and consume as we define standardised frameworks, solutions and platforms. Making digital twin ideas more accessible will enable enterprises to provide enhanced analytics and predictive models to accelerate digital transformation efforts. Digital twin adoption will become more mainstream with accelerated standardisation and availability of solutions and framework, bringing deployment and investment costs down. Digital twins will be the core driver of Digital transformation 3.0 combining measured and modeled/simulated worlds for direct business value across industry verticals.

As a technology optimist, I increasingly see a world where humans and technology work together to deliver impactful outcomes at an unprecedented speed. These near-term and long-term perspectives are based on the strides we’re making today. If we see even incremental improvement, there is enormous opportunity to positively transform the way we work, live and learn and 2022 will be another year of accelerated technology innovation and adoption.

Contributed, Editorial

Six Edge Computing Trends to Watch in 2022

December 27, 2021 Gordon Haff Leave a comment

While many aspects of edge computing are not new, the overall picture continues to evolve quickly. For example, “edge computing” encompasses the distributed retail store branch systems that have been around for decades. The term has also swallowed all manner of local factory floor and telecommunications provider computing systems, albeit in a more connected and less proprietary fashion than was the historical norm.

However, even if we see echoes of older architectures in certain edge computing deployments, we also see developing edge trends that are genuinely new or at least quite different from what existed previously. These trends are helping IT and business leaders solve problems in industries ranging from telco to automotive, for example, as both sensor data and machine learning data proliferates.

Edge computing trends that should be on your radar

Here, edge experts explore six trends that IT and business leaders should focus on in 2022:

1. Edge workloads get fatter

One big change we are seeing is that there is more computing and more storage out on the edge. Decentralized systems have often existed more to reduce reliance on network links than to perform tasks that could not practically be done in a central location assuming reasonably reliable communications. But, that is changing.

server racks on data center — Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

IoT has always involved at least collecting data almost by definition. However, what could be a trickle has now turned into a flood as the data required for machine learning (ML) applications flows in from a multitude of sensors. But, even if training models are often developed in a centralized data centre, the ongoing application of those models is usually pushed out to the edge of the network. This limits network bandwidth requirements and allows for rapid local action, such as shutting down a machine in response to anomalous sensor readings. The goal is to deliver insights and take action at the moment they’re needed.

2. RISC-V gains ground

Of course, workloads that are both data- and compute-intensive need hardware on which to run. The specifics vary depending upon the application and the tradeoffs required between performance, power, cost, and so forth. Traditionally the choice has usually come down to either something custom, ARM, or x86. None are fully open, although ARM and x86 have developed a large ecosystem of supporting hardware and software over time, largely driven by the lead processor component designers.

But RISC-V is a new and intriguing open hardware-based instruction set architecture.

Why intriguing? Here’s how Red Hat Global Emerging Technology Evangelist Yan Fisher puts it: “The unique aspect of RISC-V is that its design process and the specification are truly open. The design reflects the community’s decisions based on collective experience and research.”

This open approach, and an active ecosystem to go along with it, is already helping to drive RISC-V design wins across a broad range of industries. Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, observes that: “With the shift to edge computing, we are seeing a massive investment in RISC-V across the ecosystem, from multinational companies like Alibaba, Andes Technology, and NXP to startups like SiFive, Esperanto Technologies, and GreenWaves Technologies designing innovative edge-AI RISC-V solutions.”

3. Virtual Radio Access Networks (vRAN) become an increasingly important edge use case

A radio access network is responsible for enabling and connecting devices such as smartphones or internet of things (IoT) devices to a mobile network. As part of 5G deployments, carriers are shifting to a more flexible vRAN approach whereby the high-level logical RAN components are disaggregated by decoupling hardware and software, as well as using cloud technology for automated deployment and scaling and workload placement.

Hanen Garcia, Red Hat Telco Solutions Manager, and Ishu Verma, Red Hat Emerging Technology Evangelist, note that “One study indicates deployment of virtual RAN (vRAN)/Open RAN (oRAN) solutions realize network TCO savings of up to 44% compared to traditional distributed/centralized RAN configurations.” They add that: “Through this modernization, communications service providers (CSPs) can simplify network operations and improve flexibility, availability, and efficiency—all while serving an increasing number of use cases. Cloud-native and container-based RAN solutions provide lower costs, improved ease of upgrades and modifications, ability to scale horizontally, and with less vendor lock-in than proprietary or VM-based solutions.”

4. Scale drives operational approaches

Many aspects of an edge-computing architecture can be different from one that’s implemented solely within the walls of a data centre. Devices and computers may have weak physical security and no IT staff on-site. Network connectivity may be unreliable. Good bandwidth and low latencies aren’t a given. But many of the most pressing challenges relate to scale; there may be thousands (or more) network endpoints.

Kris Murphy, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, identifies four primary steps you must take in order to deal with scale: “Standardize ruthlessly, minimize operational ‘surface area,’ pull whenever possible over push, and automate the small things.”

For example, she recommends doing transactional, which is to say atomic, updates so that a system can’t end up only partially updated and therefore in an ill-defined state. When updating, she also argues that it’s a good practice for endpoints to pull updates because “egress connectivity is more likely available.” One should also take care to limit peak loads by not doing all updates at the same time.

5. Edge computing needs attestation

With resources at the edge tight, capabilities that require little to no local resources are the pragmatic options to consider. Furthermore, any approach needs to be highly scalable or otherwise, the uses and benefits become extremely limited. One option that stands out is the Keylime project. “Technologies like Keylime, which can verify that computing devices boot up and remain in a trusted state of operation at scale should be considered for broad deployment, especially for resource-constrained environments” as described by Ben Fischer, Red Hat Emerging Technology Evangelist.

roonz nl 2xEQDxB0ss4 unsplash — Photo by RoonZ.nl on Unsplash

Keylime provides remote boot and runtime attestation using Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and leverages Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) which are common to most laptop, desktop, and server motherboards. If no hardware TPM is available, a virtual, or vTPM, can be loaded to provide the requisite TPM functionality. Boot and runtime attestation is a means to verify that the edge device boots to a known trusted state and maintains that state while running. In other words, if something unexpected happens, such as a rogue process, the expected state would change, which would be reflected in the measurement and would take the edge device offline, because it entered an untrusted state. This device could be investigated and remediated and put back into service again in a trusted state.

6. Confidential Computing becomes more important at the edge

Security at the edge requires broad preparation. Availability of resources, such as network connectivity, electricity, staff, equipment, and functionality vary widely but are far less than what would be available in a data centre. These limited resources limit the capabilities for ensuring availability and security. Besides encrypting local storage and connections to more centralized systems, confidential computing offers the ability to encrypt data while it is in use by the edge computing device.

This protects both the data being processed and the software processing the data from being captured or manipulated. Fischer argues that “confidential computing on edge computing devices will become a foundational security technology for computing at the edge, due to the limited edge resources.”

According to the Confidential Computing Consortium’s (CCC) report by the Everest group, Confidential Computing – The Next Frontier in Data Security, “Confidential computing in a distributed edge network can also help realize new efficiencies without affecting data or IP privacy by building a secure foundation to scale analytics at the edge without compromising data security.” Additionally, confidential computing “ensures only authorized commands and code are executed by edge and IoT devices. Use of confidential computing at the IoT and edge devices and back end helps control critical infrastructure by preventing tampering with code of data being communicated across interfaces.“

Confidential computing applications at the edge range from autonomous vehicles to collecting sensitive information.

Diverse applications across industries

The diversity of these edge computing trends reflects both the diversity and scale of edge workloads. There are some common threads – multiple physical footprints, the use of cloud-native and container technologies, an increasing use of machine learning. However, telco applications often have little in common with industrial IoT use cases, which in turn differ from those in the automotive industry. But whatever industry you look at, you’ll find interesting things happening at the edge in 2022.

Business, Editorial

A Necessity to Optimise & Leverage The Cloud – Lessons From Carsome and 500 Startups

September 15, 2021 Nur Jeevan Leave a comment

Startups have become the norm nowadays. They’ve become a hallmark for not just the tech industry but also a thriving economy. However, when it comes down to it, the startup arena can also become one of the most brutal, unforgiving arenas any founder or individual can find themselves. The world has its eyes on Southeast Asia – Malaysia included – as its startup ecosystem teeters on the verge of another boom. The start-up arena has become one of the largest spaces for investment in the region, attracting some USD$1.48 billion in just Q1 of 2021 alone according to CB Insights. A significant chunk of 40.6% of this investment is driven by early-stage deals.

man in black crew neck t shirt sitting beside woman in gray crew neck t shirt — Photo by Canva Studio on Pexels.com

So, the big question is, what do we do with this data? We’ve heard tonnes of startup stories – so, we’re offering a slightly different perspective. Let’s talk about the tech. Yes, not every startup is an app or tech-related. However, with the rapidly changing needs and challenges now, it has become even more important for startups to be able to adapt and react accordingly – in a word – AGILE. Again, it’s a term we’ve heard or read countless times. That said, it’s become even more important now that they do – it could be the difference between survival and disappearing into the ether.

Fail Efficiently, Innovate Quickly

Like a wise woman once sang – “Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start…”. The world as we know it has changed over the past few decades. In fact, it’s changed in the past few years! The costs of starting a startup have reduced from USD$5 million in 1999 to just over USD$50,000 in 2010 and continue to decline.

The biggest difference? The Cloud. Cloud computing has significantly reduced the capital needed to start-up enterprises and it will continue to do so. Companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) are enabling agility and cost-efficiency. They are enabling startups to take off with no upfront costs but most importantly they encourage startups to experiment and fail fast – allowing them to move forward with innovating their next approach. Each failure allows startups to learn, optimise and eventually succeed.

“The great thing about startups is the ability to start small and learn as you go. So long as you get the foundations right – such as ensuring you are secure by design from the outset – it won’t matter so much if you make the odd misstep along the way, because the consequences will be small.”
Digbijoy Shukla, Business Development Lead, Startup Business Development ASEAN, AWS

Digbijoy Shukla Business Development Lead Startup Business Development ASEAN AWS

These flexibilities are key in startups as it goes without saying – the road to their success is how fast they are able to present and prove their concept. The ability to provision and decommission servers and technological resources quickly and efficiently will help these start-ups further optimise and conserve resources. With this inherent efficiency built in it falls to start-ups and their management to take advantage of the tools at their fingertips to enhance their offering, evolve their approach and embrace the insights they are privy to.

The Right Cloud Computing Partners can determine the Success of Startups

The ability to fail fast and experiment comes secondary to the tools any startup has at its disposal. Cloud computing continues to be a necessity simply because of its robust offerings. Going digital is no more about changing typewriters to desktops, it’s about a set of tools that allow you to create, adapt and react to ensure that the company is meeting its clients’ and customers’ needs.

Khailee Ng Managing Partner 500 Startups

“It’s critical to align yourself with the right partners and support as early as possible. Folks like 500 Startups and AWS aren’t here to be new and trendy, we’ve been part of the core ecosystem infrastructure since the early days.”
Khailee Ng, Managing Partner, 500 Startups

Choosing the right cloud, then, is an essential part of a start-up’s success. It’s like choosing the right business partner, you need someone who believes in your vision and complements your skills with the correct tools. With the number of Cloud providers continually increasing, start-ups are forced to make a choice based on the needs and skill level of their organisation.

In our session with AWS, Khailee Ng, Managing Partner at 500 Startups, stressed that getting the right partner can be akin to getting that first investment. Programs like AWS Activate enable startups to continue experimenting and functioning while upskilling and adapting. It creates a simultaneous process in which founders, staff and enablers are continually interacting and improving. In fact, programmes like AWS Activate essentially provide startups with an infusion of not just credits for experimentation and setting up, it provides a platform for startups to learn and implement the relevant knowledge for their success. AWS also provides technical support which allows non-technical founders to also benefit.

Scale, Pivot and React with Actionable Insights from the Cloud

Being on the Cloud is not always about cost or efficiency. It’s about the amount of data that will be available from the experimentation and even day to day usage of services and products. The data and insights that it gives will invariably determine the direction in which the startup can grow. In fact, if utilised properly, this data can even provide insights into new niches and services that can grow the startup’s user base and open new markets.

In the initial six months, we were a car listings site. We pivoted the business in 2016, based on the data. We then extended our sales online, with customer benefits such as five days money back guarantee. Our (sales) pickup rate became much stronger, as we saw the same level of sales (as what we experienced) before the lockdowns. It’s really all about navigating successfully through this crisis.”
Eric Cheng, Co-Founder and CEO of Carsome, an integrated car e-commerce platform

AWS Article Carsome Stock Photos 002 — Source: Adobe Stock

Take, for instance, Malaysian born startup – Carsome which started as a platform for searching for second-hand cars. The company ended up pivoting to complement its pre-existing service. They expanded to include the sales and purchase of these vehicles based on insights derived from the data generated by their users. They were able to gain insights that highlighted a niche that they could occupy; more importantly, it complemented their existing product. With these insights, they were quickly able to adapt, react and develop an offering that enhanced their product and led to exponential growth. They continue to use this data to enhance their service and ensure user happiness.

Of course, the Cloud doesn’t just provide for actionable insights and agility. It’s also about offloading mundane tasks and leveraging offerings like AWS Sagemaker. Implementing AI and Machine Learning in taking over tasks that can and should be automated will allow startups to focus their workforce on more pertinent tasks that will allow them to differentiate themselves further. Focusing on what is important will allow startups to eventually be able to scale. Of course, this doesn’t mean that vital tasks are offloaded, but it does mean that startups are able to maximise efficiency and optimise their workforce allowing them to flourish.

The Cloud Is Not the Future, It is Now

We keep hearing that the Cloud is the future. In truth, startups and companies that fail to adopt and adapt are bound to be held back by their own inefficiencies and stigmas. It is crucial that we realise that the Cloud is now – it’s not the future; at least, not anymore. Leveraging the Cloud and its many tools is a pivotal skill that startups need to develop. In fact, it would not be unfounded to say that it is a skill that all organisations should already be developing.

We are at a stage in the world where technology has already proliferated every aspect of our lives; from our entertainment to our work and even in our day-to-day lives. Why then are we hesitant to adopt it at scale to increase our own efficiencies and productivity? Why are we hesitant to put technology – already available – to use to increase profitability?

Startups cannot wait to adopt Cloud computing anymore. In fact, they are setting themselves up for failure without the proper Cloud and the willingness to learn how to use it. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to put technology to work for you in this day.

Business, News

Maxis Right Cloud Simplifies Cloud Adoption for Businesses

September 10, 2021 Nur Jeevan Leave a comment

Maxis is working hard on delivering a full complement of services to their customers – be it consumers or businesses. This week saw the launch of one of their newest offerings: Maxis Right Cloud, a one-stop solution for the management of multi-cloud operations developed in-house at Maxis.

Maxis Right Cloud will enable adopters to manage their business clouds from a single platform. Naturally, being a convergent platform, Maxis Right Cloud is cloud-agnostic. This means that it supports not only services from Maxis but also from leading private and public cloud providers like Amazon web services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google. It will allow companies to use a single dashboard to access all the information needed to run the business.

Maxis Right Cloud Press Image — Source: Maxis

The platform is supported end-to-end by Maxis’ very own, in-house expertise. Everything from assessing, designing, migrating, building, securing, and managing cloud infrastructure will be easily accessible on Maxis Right Cloud. Right Cloud is complemented by the company’s competent technical team who have been certified by companies like AWS and Microsoft for their expertise. In addition, the company has also acquired the necessary expertise to complement its workforce from recent acquisitions such as its acquisition of ICMS and Peering One not too long ago.

The Maxis Programmable Network (MPN) provides the backbone for the new offering. The MPN is the first programmable software-defined network with Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) 3.0 certification. This backbone provides a level of scalability and customizability that allows users to be agile and adapt to the fast-changing IT environments without having a lapse in performance.

When it comes to cost, Maxis is looking to adopt a pricing structure similar to leading cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft. Typically, this would entail a pay-as-you-go pay model which should enable SMEs and startups to benefit from the offering.

The introduction of Maxis Right Cloud comes as the latest in series of announcements that gear Maxis to be one of the foremost providers when it comes to converged solutions. The company has been building its capacity to leverage its infrastructure to spur digitization efforts and prepare businesses in Malaysia for 5G adoption.

Business, Contributed, Editorial

Keeping Up with the Pace of Innovation with the Cloud

July 29, 2021 Richard Taylor Leave a comment

When I was a young boy growing up in Jersey in the British Channel Islands, I’d turn on the grainy TV to warm up so I could watch sports with my father and brother. FORMULA 1 racing was the most exciting sport for us, even though the cars often sped by faster than the camera operator and the technology could keep up.

Now, racing is covered in a far richer and more engaging way, especially since F1 launched F1 Insights powered by AWS in 2018, bringing data analytics as a live feed to my screens. Watching on my phone in Singapore, I love the real-time Car Performance Scores, which include thousands of data points streamed every second from every car on the track, giving me a much better understanding of where my favorite car ranks in the field – and what’s driving its performance.

It’s exactly this type of real-time information that businesses need to understand their performance, so they can make decisions rapidly and keep up with market changes. During the pandemic, we have learned that speed matters, whether you’re a digital native or a more traditional organization. As all businesses faced social distancing measures, those who survived the pandemic adopted new ways to do business, and they adapted fast using the cloud.

Some moved faster than others. Some enterprises with legacy systems seem resigned to moving slowly. Even today, I often hear comments like, “It’s just the nature of our size and heritage.”

We must debunk that myth. Speed is not preordained by heritage. Speed is a choice that any organization can make if it is prepared to harness the cloud. As a recent McKinsey article put it: “For CEOs, cloud adoption is not just an engine for revenue growth and efficiency. The cloud’s speed, scale, innovation, and productivity benefits are essential to the pursuit of broader digital business opportunities, now and well into the future.”

Culture Change

Many organizations can look for ways to change their culture and embrace speed, creating an environment that values urgency. In a culture designed for speed, people are actively encouraged to experiment and are rewarded for it. Although, flipping a switch won’t suddenly deliver speed – companies have to build muscle while they learn how to innovate at pace, all the time.

Amazon has been around for nearly 27 years, and to this day we maintain what we call a “Day 1” culture – approaching everything we do with the entrepreneurial spirit of being on the first day of your organization. We do this by giving our teams autonomy, on the understanding that they operate within the guardrails of our culture.

group of people sitting indoors — Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com

We believe the more we can equip people to make high judgment decisions at all levels, the better off we, and our customers, are. We encourage employees to make high-velocity, high-quality decisions by setting the vision and context for teams. Since Amazon was founded in 1994, we’ve consistently operated based on three big ideas that every employee knows. The first is to obsess over customers. This is cemented in our mission statement to be “earth’s most customer-centric company.” The second is that if we focus on the customer it will force us to innovate – to look at new ways of solving problems on behalf of our customers. The third is to be stubborn in sustaining our long-term vision while being flexible in how we get there.

As Jeff Bezos explains, “In a traditional corporate hierarchy, a junior executive comes up with a new idea that they want to try. They have to convince their boss, their boss’s boss, their boss’s boss’s boss and so on – any ‘no’ in that chain can kill the whole idea.” Systems and processes that identify, validate, and approve new ideas from within the business are invaluable in democratizing company-wide idea exploration and driving experimentation in business as usual. For example, at Amazon, we make it easy for those closest to our customers to raise ideas for speedy review. Imagine a time-wasting process or one that results in a poor customer experience. People complain about it regularly, but they know that it can be so hard to implement change, that it’s not worth the effort. The problem is put in the “too hard” basket and no one says anything. Now, imagine actually rewarding teams for suggesting a fix. Imagine if the process was fast and painless and resulted in change. How many great ideas would happen every week?

Thinking Big and Acting Small

Thinking big is the hallmark of innovation. But, as we look to move quickly and embrace greater experimentation, we should also look to de-risk the process. This means recognizing that the most powerful innovations often come through simplification. One small, seemingly insignificant cost or time-saving can drive enormous benefits for both companies and their customers when applied at scale. Thinking big also means starting big ideas with very small, reversible experiments. At Amazon, we look for “two-way doors.” If an experiment fails (as they often do), we can back out of the decision rather than being committed to moving ahead through a “one-way door,” which can be expensive and difficult to undo. This way, you learn quickly with very low stakes.

StockSnap DNA7ILF8DA — Photo by Burst on StockSnap

A great example of innovative thinking in the face of legacy technology is FashionValet. As the modest fashion brand grew, its multi-environment hybrid technology infrastructure was unable to keep up with demand during product launches. In 2019, FashionValet went all-in on AWS to optimize processes and meet growing demand. With Auto Scaling Groups and RDS Aurora features, FashionValet can now run 10x more servers during product launches to meet demand, then scale down automatically with no downtime. Using this technology, FashionValet has also accelerated their product development timeline by 200% and reduced their infrastructure management costs by 75%.

Companies don’t have to bet their business on innovation, but they shouldn’t let legacy thinking hold them back. By actively empowering teams, clearing the path to “Yes,” and using small experiments, companies can build capability to promote high-velocity decisions – helping them operate at the speed of F1.

Business, Contributed, Editorial

5G, Industry, & Collaboration at the Edge

July 27, 2021 Chris Wright Leave a comment

Edge computing is the ability to give life to the transformative use cases that businesses are dreaming up today and bring real-time decision making to last-mile locales. This can include a far-flung factory or train roaring down the tracks, someone’s connected home, or their car speeding down the highway or even in space. Who thought we’d be running Kubernetes in space?

This shows that edge computing can transform the way we live, and we are doing it right now.

Why Collaboration Is Critical

Edge technologies are blending the digital and physical worlds in a new way, and that combination is resonating at a human level. This human resonance might sound like an aspirational achievement, but it is already here. A great example is when we used AR/VR to improve safety on the factory floor.

Continued collaboration, however, is necessary to keep enabling breakthrough successes. Across industries and organizations, we are all highly dependent on one another. Thinking about the telecommunications and industrial sectors, in particular, there is a mutually supportive, symbiotic relationship between these industries—5G development cannot be successful without industrial use cases, which, in turn, are based on telco technologies.

person writing on the notebook — Photo by Startup Stock Photos on Pexels.com

However, numerous challenges remain: reducing network complexity, maintaining security, improving agility, and ensuring a vibrant ecosystem where the only way to address and solve those is by tapping into the collective wisdom of the community.

With open-source, we can unify and empower communities on a broad scale. The open-source ecosystem brings people together to focus on a common problem to solve with software. That shared purpose can turn isolated efforts into collective ones so that changes are industry-wide and reflect a wide range of needs and values.

The collaboration that open source makes possible continues to ignite tremendous change and alter our future in so many ways, making it the innovation engine for industries.

If we collaborate on 5G and edge in this manner, nascent technologies could become exciting common foundations in the same way that Linux and Kubernetes have because when we work together, the only limit to these possibilities is our imagination.

From Maps to Apps and Much More

Do you remember having to use a paper-based map to figure out driving directions? Flash forward to today: Look at the applications we take for granted on our phones or in our homes that allow us to change our driving route in real-time to avoid traffic, or to monitor and grant access to our front doors—to the point that these have shaped how we interact with our environments and each other. Yet not too long ago, many of these things were unimaginable. We barely had cloud technology, we were in the transition from 3G to 4G, and smartphones were new.

holding a smartphone — Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

But there was important work being done by lots of people who were improving upon the core technologies. The convergence of three technology trends, as it turns out, unlocked a hugely disruptive opportunity: a cloud-native, mobile-device-enabled transportation service that picked you up wherever you were and took you wherever you wanted to go.

This opportunity was only possible because each trend built on the others to create a truly novel offering. Without one of these trends, the applications from the ride-sharing apps of the world would not have been the same or as disruptive. Imagine yourself scrambling to find a WiFi hotspot on the street corner, whipping out your laptop outside a restaurant while standing in the rain, or starting your business by first constructing a massive data centre. The convergence of smartphones, 4G networks, and cloud computing has enabled a new world.

Today we are creating the next set of technologies that will become the things so embedded in our lives and so indispensable to our daily habits that we will wonder how we ever got by without them. Are you ready to be wearing clothes with sensors in them that tell you how healthy you are?

The possibilities with edge technologies are equally as exciting. It starts with the marriage of the digital world with the physical world. Adding in pervasive connectivity—leveraging a common 5G and edge platform—we can transform how operational technologies interact with the physical world and that changes everything.

The Future Is Now

We are creating this new world that is hard to imagine, yet it is not so foreign because we have seen how this story has played out before. Expect these new technologies to have profound implications for humanity—in our daily lives, how we interact with one another, and the social fabric of our world.

high angle photo of robot — Photo by Alex Knight on Pexels.com

All of that cannot happen without collaboration.

We have only to look at how open source has empowered collaboration and how working together has helped people across organizations and industries build more robust, shared platforms more quickly and differentiate on top of them—with apps and capabilities built on the foundation of Kubernetes and Linux, for example.

Business, Editorial

Cloud, 5G, Machine Learning & Space: Digital Trends Shaping the Future

June 15, 2021 Nur Jeevan Leave a comment

The world is arguably never going to be the same after the COVID-19 pandemic. The sentiment rings true in many aspects and sectors even now, a year on. However, the effects of the pandemic have spurred our normal to take a digital shift in which more companies are accelerating their digital transformation journeys with some further than others. That said, the adoption of technologies has created waves and trends that seem to be influencing everything in our lives.

In a nutshell, these trends are going to change the way we approach a whole myriad of thing from the way we work to the way we shop. We’re seeing businesses like your regular mom and pop shops adopt cloud technologies to help spur growth while digital native businesses and companies are doing the same to adapt to the ever-changing circumstances. The adoption of technologies and, in particular, cloud technologies, is building resilience in businesses like never before.

Our interview with the Lead Technologist for the Asia Pacific Region at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Mr Olivier Klein, sheds even more light on the trends that have and continue to emerge as businesses continue to navigate the pandemic and digitisation continues.

The Cloud Will Be Everywhere

As we see more and more businesses adopt technologies, a growing number of large, medium and small businesses will turn to cloud computing to stay competitive. In fact, businesses will be adopting cloud computing not only for agility but due to increasing expectations that will come from their customers. However, when referring to “The Cloud”, we are not only talking about things like machine learning, high performance computing, IoT and artificial intelligence (AI); we’re also talking about the simple things like data analytics and using digital channels.

pexels photomix company 106344 — Photo by **PhotoMIX Company** from **Pexels**

Digitization journeys are creating expectations on businesses to be agile and adaptable. That said, businesses with humble beginnings like Malaysia’s TF Value-Mart have been able to scale thanks to their willingness to modernize and migrate to the cloud. Their adoption of cloud technologies has created a more secure digital environment for their business and has augmented their speed and scalability. This has allowed them to scale from a single, mom and pop store in Bentong in 1998 to over 37 outlets today.

The demand for cloud solution is increasing and there’s no deny it. Even businesses like AWS have had to expand to accommodate the growing demands for digital infrastructure and services. The company has scaled from 4 regions in their first 5 years to 13 regions today with more coming in the near future. AWS’s upcoming regions include six upcoming regions, of which four are in Asia Pacific: in Jakarta, Hyderabad, Osaka and Melbourne.

Edge Computing Spurred by 5G & Work From Anywhere

In fact, according to Mr Klein, AWS sees the next push in Cloud Computing coming from the ASEAN region. This will, primarily, be spurred by the region’s adoption of 5G technologies. Countries like Japan and Singapore are already leading the way with Malaysia and other countries close behind. The emergence of 5G technologies is creating a new demand for technologies that allow businesses to have a more hybrid approach to their utilisation of Cloud technologies.

As companies continue to scale and innovate, a growing demand is emerging for lower latencies. While 5G allows low latency connections, some are beginning to require access to scalable cloud technologies on premises. Data security and low latency computing are primary drives behind this demand. Businesses are innovating faster than ever before and require some of their workloads to happen quicker with faster results. As a result, we see a growing need for services like AWS Outpost which allows businesses to bring cloud services on premises, and with their recent announcement at AWS re:Invent, Outposts are becoming even more accessible.

Edge computing is also part and parcel of cloud computing as the mode in which we work continues to change. With most businesses forced to work remotely during the pandemic, the trend seems to be sticking; companies are beginning to adopt a work from anywhere policy which allows for more employee flexibility and increased productivity. That said, not all workloads are able to follow where workers go. With the adoption of 5G, that is no longer the case. Businesses will be able to adopt services like AWS Wavelength to enable low latency connection to cloud services empowering the work from anywhere policies.

The same rings true when it comes to education. The growth experienced in the adoption of remote learning will continue. Services like Zoom and Blue Jeans have become integral tools for educators to reach their students and will continue to see their roles expand as educational institutions continue to see the increased importance of remote learning.

Machine Learning is The Way

As edge computing and Cloud become the norm, so too will machine learning. Machine learning is enabling companies to adopt new approaches and adapt to changing circumstances. The adoption of machine learning solutions has paved the way to new expectations from customers that has and will continue to spur its adoption. In fact, Mr Klein, tells us that businesses will not only be adopting machine learning for automation but also to provide better customer experiences. What’s more, a growing number of their customers are also going to expect it.

Machine Learning’s prevalence is going to grow in the coming years – that’s a given. Customers and users have already had their experiences augmented by AI and machine learning. This has and continues to create expectations on how user experiences should be. Take for instance, services like Netflix have been using machine learning and AI to recommend and surface content to their users. Newer streaming services which lack these integrations are seen to be subpar and are criticised by users.

lenny kuhne jHZ70nRk7Ns unsplash — Photo by Lenny Kuhne on Unsplash

Aside from user experiences, businesses are getting more accustomed to using machine learning to provide insights when it comes to making decision making and automating business operations. It has also enabled companies to innovate more readily. These conveniences will also be one of the largest factors in the increasing prevalence. It will also see increased adoption which will be largely attributed to the adoption and development of autonomous vehicles and other augmented solutions.

Companies like Moderna have been utilising machine learning to help create and innovate in their arena. They have benefitted from adopting machine learning in their labs and manufacturing processes. This has also allowed them to develop their mRNA vaccines which are currently being deployed to combat COVID-19.

To Infinity & Beyond

The growing adoption of digital and cloud solutions is also spurring a new wave of technologies which allow businesses deeper insights. These technologies allow businesses to access insights gained from satellite imaging. Data such as ground imaging and even ocean imaging can be used to gain actionable insights for businesses. Use cases are beginning to emerge from business involved in logistics, search and rescue and even retail.

However, the cost of building and putting a satellite in orbit is nonsensical for a business. That said, we already have thousands of them in orbit and it would make more sense to use them to help gain these insights. AWS is already introducing AWS Ground Station – a fully managed serve that gives businesses access to satellites to collect and downlink data which can then be processes in AWS Cloud.

These trends are simply a glance into an increasingly digitised and connected world where possibilities seem to be endless. Businesses are at the cusp of an age that will see them flourish if they are agile and willing to adopt new technologies and approaches that are, at this time, novel and unexplored.

Business, Computers, News

Even More EPYC with AMD – Stacking Zen 3

March 22, 2021 Darwin Sucipto 1 Comment

Just when we thought AMD is done with being the best at gaming, they proved that one title is never enough. They want to retain their title as the most powerful ever, with a full-stop right after. So, they went ahead and introduced what seems to be the most powerful processing chips in the world, the EPYC 7003 series server processors.

The new EPYC 7003 series is the third-generation server processors by AMD. That also means that it gets the Zen 3 architecture that the AMD Ryzen 5000 series line-up got. That same architecture also means that AMD’s processing core clusters gets to access all of the available cache memory module when necessary, instead of just half of it. Again, if you were doing some research with AMD’s latest Ryzen 5000 with Zen 3 architecture, it might sound like something simple and small. The results are quite significant though.

At least in terms of a server, Zen 3 architecture also allows the cores to process more data at any single time than before. In practical terms, that also means a much faster processor compared to before. Of course, AMD’s implementation also means more efficient power consumption.

The headline figures for EPYC’s flagship is up to 64 cores and 128 threads. With 64 cores, the processor features 256MB of cache, that is the first indication that this is not your regular consumer gaming PC stuff. All cores are clocked at 2.45GHz and can be boosted up to 3.675GHz when necessary.

Of course, these chips are also embedded with extra security measurements and algorithms. In a server, data center, cloud seservice, and virtualisation environment, protecting your data is of utmost importance. Security, in this case, has to start from the processors itself with AMD’s own Infinity Guard suite encryption technologies to keep everything it processes secure.

Of course, you are not going to see the AMD EPYC processors out on the street. These are highly specialised processors made for Artificial Intelligence implementation, data centers, and data backbones for larger organisations. These are the stuff that keeps thigs like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services running for you.

The AMD EPYC processors range from 32 cores to 64 cores. The EPYC processors are usually the base for AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper platforms. There are obviously no announcements made yet on the availability of the prosumer processor platforms at this time. If they are launching a Threadripper soon though, the AMD EPYC processors could probably give you an insight to what you can expect.

Business, Contributed

Beyond the Now: Thrive in 2021 with These Five Trends

January 21, 2021 Frank Feldmann Leave a comment

From shifting to work from home policies to customers’ increasing demand for better services and experience, organizations are finding that they need to transform faster to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We expect technology trends to only continue to evolve as reliance on technology becomes more critical in our current social and economic landscape. To ride out the wave rather than sink in it, forward-thinking organizations in Asia-Pacific (APAC) should rethink their digital transformation strategies based on these trends we expect to see in the coming year.

5G, IoT, Edge computing: The trio for intelligent connectivity

APAC will continue progressing on its 5G journey. While commercial 5G services are already available in nine markets in the region — including South Korea, Japan, and China — another 12 have officially announced similar plans. The increased availability of 5G will help drive the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing to deliver ultra-low latency, high bandwidth network, and effectively support large-scale distribution of endpoints. For example, 5G, IoT and edge computing can be applied to smart fleet management, wherein edge devices can monitor critical vehicle systems and access the 5G network to send alerts, track the flow of goods, plan routes, and facilitate communications between a vehicle and any IoT-enabled entity that may affect or be affected by the vehicle.

We foresee more APAC organizations and cities adopting 5G, IoT, and edge computing in 2021 to become more connected and efficient. Emerging use cases for the three technologies include analyzing sensor data for predictive maintenance and quality control, augmented reality systems for remote operations, and personalized ‘connected experiences’ for customer and supplier engagement.

Security is a growing priority for hybrid cloud

Customers and employees alike now expect business applications and services to be highly available, on-demand and secure. To achieve that, we recommend organizations to embrace hybrid cloud in order to run workloads across any environment (i.e., on-premises, private or public cloud) more easily and quickly. Red Hat’s 2021 Global Tech Outlook found that 77% of APAC organizations surveyed plan to use more than one cloud platform — be it private and public clouds — in the next 12 months, up from 53% in 2020. According to the survey results, the top three reasons for organizations to run their applications across hybrid cloud include improving data security, gaining IT agility, and addressing data privacy concerns.

Security will remain a focus area as organizations progress in their hybrid cloud journey — nearly half of the organizations we surveyed globally cited cloud security as their top funding priority next year. The challenge when it comes to security is that it is made up of different elements such as endpoint, network and data security. One way of overcoming this is by adopting an open security automation framework that unifies the different security practices using a set of automated workflows. By doing so, organizations can gain greater visibility across the entire security function, enabling them to identify threats or remediate cyber attacks faster.

Cloud-native will drive container adoption

Cloud-native applications can respond quickly to change, adapting and evolving with new features and functionalities released incrementally more quickly, reliably and frequently with less risk. As more organizations adopt hybrid cloud to increase the scalability and availability of apps, those that also embrace cloud-native development are in a better position to build and run responsive, scalable, and fault-tolerant apps on any cloud.

Containers are a key technology for unlocking the benefits of cloud-native development. Containers enable applications to be packaged and isolated with their entire runtime environment, making it easier to move them between environments while retaining full functionality. With containers, developers can more easily release and update apps as a collection of loosely coupled services, like microservices, instead of having to wait for one large release. Recognizing that containers can help accelerate innovation, 45% of APAC respondents from the 2021 Global Tech Outlook expect more than half of their workloads to be containerized in the next 12 months.

Automation is on the rise

Customers are demanding more at a faster pace, while IT architectures are ever-changing and built on increasingly complicated technology stacks. Organizations also need to support a work-from-home productivity model during the COVID-19 pandemic. To address these requirements, APAC organizations are increasingly turning to automation to reduce complexity, improve productivity, and lower operating cost. However, they must have an enterprise-wide automation strategy instead of deploying automation in silos in order to fully benefit from the technology.

More organizations are increasingly using automation in conjunction with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create an additional layer of automated insight to optimize business processes. Some APAC banks are already using robotic process automation (RPA) to approve credit card applications, automate payments, and validate claims. Because RPA can augment and mimic human judgment and behavior to replicate rules-based human action, it reduces the time taken for those tasks.

Open culture needs to complement technology modernization

According to a November 2019 study sponsored by Red Hat, 80% of APAC business leaders surveyed rank cultural change and technology modernization of equal importance for digital transformation. Cultural characteristics key for transformation include adaptability, inclusivity, transparency, and collaboration – all of which are open source principles. Organizations that have supported their cultural change initiatives with efforts to modernize their infrastructure and application architecture have been able to quickly develop and deliver new applications, respond rapidly to customer demands, and control maintenance costs.

photo of people doing handshakes — Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com

With APAC businesses recognizing that digital transformation is driven by a change in mindset, we foresee more organizations embracing open principles, processes, and culture next year. By doing so, organizations can nurture collaboration and empower employees to bring their best ideas and selves to work, which can help accelerate innovation and address changing customer and business requirements in an agile manner.

All in all, global events in 2020 have caused organizations to focus on near-term survival goals to support business continuity. As the business landscape continues to evolve, APAC organizations must prepare for the future by adopting flexible, agile and scalable technology solutions. Considering trends such as 5G and edge computing, hybrid cloud and automation can help organizations as they develop or update their digital transformation plans in 2021.

Business, News

Maxis Becomes First Malaysian Telco Accredited as AWS Advanced Consulting Partner

December 21, 2020 Nur Jeevan Leave a comment

Maxis is one of the only telecommunications companies in Malaysia already embracing the cloud. The company embarked on its journey to become a one-stop provider for connectivity and infrastructure for Malaysia back in 2019 with an early partnership with AWS (Amazon Web Services) who is currently the most prolific web service platform in the world. Today, they are announcing that they have successfully achieved new accreditation as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner; making them the only telecommunications company in Malaysia to have done so. This solidifies their claim to being one of the most equipped converged solutions providers in the country.

The new accreditation certifies that Maxis is equipped to provide its customers and partners with the technical support and know-how to migrate and sustain their businesses in the cloud. To achieve this, Maxis has to demonstrate a sustained competency in their workforce equipped and certified by AWS for the many services that their platform provides. This includes taking advantage of the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence components available on AWS.

In addition to this, Maxis is now also offering AWS Direct Connect. AWS Direct Connect allows customers to access AWS directly via a dedicated network connection with one of the many AWS Connect locations using industry-standard 802.1q VLANs. This also allows customers to partition the connection into multiple virtual interfaces easing access to object instances in the AWS public and private clouds while maintaining network separation.

The new accreditation comes on the heels of Maxis having announced key acquisitions that have bolstered the company’s position as one of the most equipped telecommunications companies in Malaysia able to empower businesses in their digitization journey. The company has also been certified in the AWS Public Sector Partner program with over 300 Maxis employees being accredited and undergone comprehensive training by AWS.

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