Computing – JEB's Blog

AWS Cloud Certifications in the Partner Community, 2024

I track the capability of the consulting services partners by a number of attributes. Here is what the top 9 look like, by count of AWS Certifications, for the last two years until November 2024:

A bit of a gap on Accenture data, but still interesting

It appears that Accenture is ín danger of losing its dominant position as the worlds largest AWS Cloud consulting services partner, perhaps sometime in the next three to six months; TCS is accelerating up from what was 6th position in 2022, currently in 2nd position.

It appears that DXC was lagging the others, but has now caught back up.

Now lets look at an aggregate total of the top 20 partners’ certifications, excluding Accenture (due to missing data), and see what the ecosystem growth is like:

This looks like there is continuing growth of the number of certs held, growing 57.3% over two years.

Looking at the AWS Partner Competencies achieved for those top 9 (by certifications held) :

I find it interesting to derive the focus and attention these organisations are placing on their AWS Cloud skills validation in their workforce.

For many of these, the long trail is the set of individuals who only hold the one certification, which often is the Cloud Practitioner – Foundational cert. This level of validation is aimed at being non-technical, often achieved by sales, marketing, and management folk who do not have the delivery capability to competently deploy a Lambda function or set a security group! However, its beyond my visibility to be able to remove this cert from the totals I can see. This means that the true delivery capability may be very different for these organisations.

IPv6 progress on AWS at the end of 2024

When I worked at AWS in 2012-2014, I championed the adoption of IPv6. I’ve spoken about Ipv6 many times on this blog, at AWS User Group Meetings, and with my colleagues at work. We’ve deployed solutions dual-stack for clients where there hasn’t been any cost implications in doing so.

Over time, a number of “What’s new” posts have shown where IPv6 capability has been added. Now after 10 years since I departed AWS, I though I would look at the rate of IPv6 announcements and see =how it stacked up over time.

Clearly we can see an uptick in announcements from 2021 onwards. Additional managed services are still adopting; perhaps the rate of change is leveling out now.

My own little server

In 2004, I was living in London, and decided it was time I had my own little virtual private server somewhere online. As a Debian developer since the start of 2000, it had to be Debian, and it still is…

This was before “cloud” as we know it today. Virtual Private Servers (VPS) was a new industry, providing root login to virtual servers that individuals could rent. And so I started being a client of Bytemark, who in turn offered me a discount as a Debian Gnu/Linux developer. With 1 GB of RAM, the initial VPS was very limited, but I ran my own mail server (with multiple domains), several web site s(all with SNI TLS enabled web sites, my own DNS server, and more.

Several years back I took the move to migrate my domains from being self-hosted on a VPS, to using AWS Route53. It was a small incremental cost, but I had long since stopped playing around and experimenting with DNS, and I wanted something that had high availability then a single virtual machine.

I have run a blog on my web site since the mid 1990’s (30+ years now), and WordPress has been my main platform since the late 2000s. This is WordPress now (2024), however a few years back I slotted AWS CloudFront in front of my origin service, to provide some level of global caching.

Several of the websites I run have also moved off to Amazon CloudFront, in particular all my small MTA STS web sites that serve just one small text file: the Mail Transport Agent Strict Transport Security policy document.

I still run my own mail server, with Exim4, PostgresQL, DoveCot Spamd, ClamD, etc. It lets me experiment with low level stuff that I still enjoy.

I have a few other services I want to move out of my VPS and into individual cloud-hosted platforms, but not everything is ready et. However a recent review of my VPC costings, and a forced migration from ByteMark (ioMart) to a new organisation UK Hosting, forced me to reconsider. So I took the inevitable change and migrated the entire VPS to AWS EC2 in Sydney, closer to where I am most of the time.

And so it comes to pass after 20 years, thank you to the team at Bytemark for my UK VPS.

Australia to get Top Secret rated AWS Cloud Region

In 2013 I was presenting to representatives of the South Australian government on the benefits of AWS Cloud. Security was obviously a prime consideration, and my role as the (only) AWS Security Solution Architect for Australia and New Zealand meant that this was a long discussion.

Clearly the shared responsibility model for cloud was a key driver, and continues to be so.

But the question came up: “We’re government, we need our own Region“. At that time, the US had just made its first US GovCloud in August of 2011. I knew then that the cost for a private region then was around US$600M, before you spun up your first (billed) workload.

The best thing about public cloud is, with the safeguards in place around tenant isolation, there are a whole bunch of costs that get shared amongst all users. The more users, the less cost impact per individual. At scale, many things considered costly for one individual, become almost free.

Private AWS Regions are another story: there is not a huge client base to share these costs across. With a single tenant, that tenant pays 100% of the cost. But then that tenant can demand stricter controls, encryption and security protocols, etc.

This difference will perhaps be reflected in the individual unit costs (eg, per EC2 instance per hour, etc).

Numerous secret regions have been created since 2013, such as the Mercury Veil Project for the CIA’s secret AWS Cloud Region.

Today we have two more interesting private regions currently being commissioned: the previously announced European Sovereign Region, and today, the Australian Secret Region at an initial AUD$2B cost.

After 11 years, the cost of a private (dedicated) Region has seemingly increased 333%.

If you thought cloud skills were getting passe, then there’s a top secret world that’s about to take off.

The Sky Is Falling — For Alibaba Cloud Customers in India and Australia

If there is one thing that Cloud customers look for, it is long term availability and stability of the Cloud.

Not only cannot it not go down, but it needs to be long-term sustainable for the provider to operate. And so it comes as some surprise to me that Alibaba has decided to shutter its Regions in India and Australia, according to an article on The Register.

To me this is a clear signal that Alibaba does not want important, long term engagements with customers, anywhere. If they can close these Regions and tell their customers to get out or lose their data, then they can do this in any other Region.

The cost to play the Cloud Provider game is high, and the optics are critical.

This reminds me of the statements made by Google in 2018 , as CNBC reported:

In early 2018, top executives at Alphabet debated whether the company should leave the public cloud business, but eventually set a goal of becoming a top-two player by 2023, according to a report from The Information on Tuesday.
CNBC

Any kinds of indication that the Cloud Provider is not committed long term (multi decade) to being a cloud provider is going to limit the customers trust. of course, the providers then just address the optics by providing statistics slide and diced in such a way as to how them in a favourable light, or including stuff that’s not really cloud in their revenue reporting lines, like software licences.

It’s best to stick to independent industry analysts views of the leaders in the Cloud market place, and to understand the perspective of global versus within a specific country.

If there are any soon-to-be-former Alibaba clients in India or Australia who are now somewhat alarmed at the rug pull from under them, please reach out and I can put you in touch with teams of experts who can help migrate your workloads. See also, my AWS Cloud Migration Consideration series.