In recent years, the environmental sustainability of IT has become a significant concern for investors and customers, as well as regulatory, legislative and environmental stakeholders. This concern is expected to intensify as the impact of climate change on health, safety and the global economy becomes more pronounced. It has given rise to an assortment of […]
One of the most significant differences between cloud and traditional (i.e., non-cloud) software is how resiliency is built into the applications. When architecting a cloud application, the onus is on software developers to architect resiliency in their application architecture. Conversely, in a more traditional application, data center teams, infrastructure engineers and software developers work together […]
Generative AI has created a surge in demand for large-scale clusters of GPUs. AI models need training, and this is vastly accelerated by using GPUs. These clusters parallel process many mathematical functions within the neural network software architectures that enable generative AI to classify and predict. However, clusters of this size are expensive and require […]
Over the past decade, three tech giants have solidified their dominance in the cloud computing market: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Estimates suggest that by the end of 2023, these companies collectively controlled around two-thirds of global cloud spending, a notable increase from 47% in 2016. As AI became a key […]
Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the world’s first hyperscale cloud provider, and it remains the largest today. It represents around one-third of the global market, offering more than 200 infrastructure, platform and software services across 34 regions. To efficiently deliver so many services at such a scale, AWS designs and builds much of its own […]
Over the past year, demand for GPUs to train generative AI models has soared. Some organizations have invested in GPU clusters costing millions of dollars for this purpose. Cloud services offered by the major hyperscalers and a new wave of GPU-focused cloud providers deliver an alternative to dedicated infrastructure for those unwilling, or unable, to […]
The public cloud’s on-demand pricing model is vital in enabling application scalability — the key benefit of cloud computing. Resources need to be readily available for a cloud application to scale when required without the customer having to give advance notification. Cloud providers can offer such flexibility by allowing customers to pay their bills in […]
Low latency is the main reason cloud providers offer edge services. Only a few years ago, the same providers argued that the public cloud (hosted in hyperscale data centers) was suitable for most workloads. But as organizations have remained steadfast in their need for low latency and better data control, providers have softened their resistance […]
Cloud providers divide the technologies that underpin their services into two ”planes”, each with a different architecture and availability goal. The control plane manages resources in the cloud; the data plane runs the cloud buyer’s application. In this Update, Uptime Institute Intelligence presents research that shows control planes have poorer availability than data planes. This […]
Hyperscale cloud providers have opened numerous operating regions in all corners of the world over the past decade. The three most prominent — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure — now have 105 distinct regions (excluding government and edge locations) for customers to choose from to locate their applications and data. Over […]