Category: Rants

There’s a word in “Gen AI” that I want you to concentrate on: generative.

Next I’d like you to think about areas in your organisation where you can safely generate (and review what’s generated). This is probably not safe in your invoicing, product testing & QA, CRM records, etc. Those systems all use something else: facts. Facts cannot be generated.

The inordinate amount of hype around GenAI, including finance people on the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC Australia) talking about the demise of one company because “Gen AI can now do what their product tech was” is well out of proportion.

Have you noticed how the hyper about the Metaverse has dropped off?

And blockchain?

These are all great technologies, but lets face it, in the majority of cases they have very little to do with the core business of what your organisation does – unless you’re in the arts and creative industries.

There are fantastic demos from Adobe where they generate additional image content. There are prose, poems and fiction being generated. All of which is circling around and creating content from existing examples. It may look fresh, but its generated from existing input, but without human intuition, insight, or intelligence.

We see “director of GenAI” as a job title, but I think that will last about as long as “director of blockchain“.

These technologies do have a place – I called out Adobe above, and you may use their software – but remember, the advantage is to Adobe’s product, and probably not yours. You likely don’t work for Adobe (I’m not picking on them, but the data is in: most of the world does not work there). You’re likely to be a few layers down in the value chain. You’ll benefit from it, but I don’t think you’re going to be training your own LLMs. Someone else will, and they’ll charge you for it or figure out a way to recoup the expense by some method.

But remember, its generated. I can use GenAI to give me tonight’s lottery numbers. While plausible, they are unlikely to be correct.

The traditional Gartner tea-leaves view of hyperscalar cloud providers was renamed in 2023, from “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services” to “Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services”. But the players are all the same as in 2022:

In grey are the 2022 results, and in blue is the 2023.

• Alibaba slips a whole quadrant, with a large drop in its completeness of vision
• Oracle rises a whole quadrant to join the leaders, but only just
• Tencent dropped its ability to execute.
• IBM picked up substantially, but still a niche player (but they are also the worlds largest AWS Consulting Services Partner when counted by AWS certification numbers (21,207), followed closely by Tata Consulting Services (21,200))
• Huawei regressed its completeness of vision, but marginally improved its ability to execute
• Google rose to now start approaching AWS and Microsoft.
• Microsoft improved its ability to execute
• AWS dropped its “completeness of vision” slightly

There’s only really three legitimate global hyperscalar contenders: AWS, Microsoft and Google, in that order. The rest are focused and founded within the great firewall of China, or IBM.

Over the 2023 end of year, I moved home. A long process of three years of construction and I have a shiny new pad. And of course back in 202, I had done diagrams for the cabling and access points that I would require. I had used the Ubiquity Networks Design Centre, design.ui.com, to lay out the plan: two floors of primary residential, with WiFi access points around the outer walls.

I wanted the flexibility of also having some ethernet patches, so it made sense (to me) to use the Unifi In Wall access points, as the provide a 4 port switch (and one of those ports is pass-through PoE). I also anted to ensure good WiFi coverage from the far rear of the property by a proposed swimming pool: no excusing for whinging about coverage for iPad users when lounging by that end of the property.

In the period that passed, Ubiquiti released the U6-IW device to replace the IW-HD, and the Enterprise U6-IW which ups the game to include a radio on the 6GHz spectrum in addition tot he existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz.

This is now all in place. The topology now looks like this:

The core of this is still my original Unifi Dream machine, and a 24 port Enterprise switch: you’ll note that most ports are actually used. Nearly everything plugged directly to the core switch is PoE: security cameras and In Wall access points.

Nice, so lets fire up 6HGz (form newer devices) and see what we can do. I went to edit the existing Wireless network definition, and ticked the “6Hz” option. At this time, the WiFi security instantly changed from “WPA2/WPA3” to only WPA3.

This instantly dropped half my devices off the network . Even the newest of home “wifi” appliances – dishwasher, garage doors, ovens, home security systems, doorbell intercoms can not handle WPA3. Indeed, lets look at these devices:

• Miele oven (2023): WiFi 4
• DeLonghi Coffee machine (2023): WiFi 4
• Bosch Dishwasher (2023): WiFi 4
• Fronius 10kW solar inverter (2023): WiFi 4
• iRobot Roomba J7+ (2022): WiFi 5

These are all new devices, and yet the best Wifi they support means I’ll have to leave 802.11n enabled for the next decade or longer (until I replace them with something newer).

So now I have two WiFi networks: the primary ESSID that is 6GHz and WPA3, and a secondary “compatible” ESSID that does not permit 6GHz, but does support WPA2.

These device manufacturers are only listing “WiFi” in their sales messaging. None of them are going the next level of calling out which WiFi version they support, and what version of WPA. It’s time that manufacturers catch up on this, and enable consumers to select products that are more secure, and not products that force deprecated protocols to be used.

I have been tinkering with AWS since 2008, and delivering AWS Cloud solutions since 2010, and in this time, I’ve seen many cloud trends come along, and messaging subtly change from all of the hyperscale IaaS and PaaS providers.

This year, we’re seeing more talk about Optimisation. In the 2023 earnings calls, we heard:

• Microsoft: “Customers continued to exercise some caution as optimization … trends … continued”
• Google: “slower growth of consumption as customers optimized GCP costs reflecting the macro backdrop”
• AWS: “Customers continue to evaluate ways to optimize their cloud spending in response to these tough economic conditions.”

We have also seen the messaging around Migration to cloud evolve to “Migrate & Modernise”. This is putting pressure on the laziest, simplest, and least effective of the “Seven R’s of cloud migration”, being “Rehost” and “Relocate”.

Why is this?

Rehost takes the existing spaghetti of installed software, and runs it in exactly the same way on a hyperscale cloud providers concept of a virtual machine. And in true least effort approach, if you had a virtual machine with 64 GB of RAM previously (even if only 20% utilised), then you would select the closest match in a simple rehost/reinstall.

If you had 10 application servers on 24×7, then you still get 10 cloud virtual machines, 24×7, even if you only need that peak capacity for one day of the year.

And even more interesting is paying licensing fees for a virtualisation layer you don’t need to be paying for (and get a different experience when you do).

Not very efficient. Not very smart. But least effort.

So why do organisations do this?

That is easy: It’s complicated to do well. It takes time, experience, and wisdom.

This technology industry is full of individuals who think their job is to make nothing change. Historically, many IT service frameworks were designed around slowing the rate of change, diametrically opposed to DevOps. And organisations that see the cost of technology operations, not the value of it.

Cost has been driven down so much that the talented individuals have left, and only those who remain (who perhaps couldn’t geta job elsewhere) are keeping the lights on. They don’t have the experience, knowledge or wisdom to know what good looks like, they just know what has, for the last 30 years, been “stable”.

And while some engineers are keen to learn new things, and use that, many senior stakeholders have in their mind “what’s the least we can do right now”.

So when it comes to a cloud migration, they see “least change” as “least risky”, not “more costly”.

In 2023 at the AWS Partner summit, AWS representatives quoted that “only some 15% of workloads that will move to the cloud, have now done so”. They furthered that that 15% now requires some level of modernisation.

Again, 10 years ago, many organisation moved large workloads in lift-and-shift method to the same number of instances of the day. Perhaps the m3.xlarge in AWS or similar elsewhere. And then the people who knew what Cloud was, departed the scene, leaving an under experienced set of individuals to keep the lights on and change nothing.

I once did a review of an 3 party Analytics package running on 4 m3.xlarge instances; they had acquired a 3 year Reservation, and kept the instances running 24×7. They didn’t use them all the time. They had never done any changes (not even OS patching). They were running a RedHat 7.x OS.

Two cycles (yes, 2) of newer instance families had been released in that period: the m4, and then m5.  Because of the Linux kernel in that version of RedHat, they were prevented from moving these virtual machines to a newer AWS EC2 instance family due to lack of kernel support.

In reality, they were fortunate, as they had run a version of RedHat that finally (after 20+ years) supported in-place upgrades. The easiest path ahead was to snapshot (or make an AMI of each individual host), then in-place upgrade to the latest RedHat release, and then during a shutdown of the instance (stop), adjust the instance family to the m5 equivalent. This alone would save them something like 20% of cost. They could then do a Reservation (my recommendation was for one year, as things change…) and they would have ended up at over 80% cost reduction – and faster performance.

Of course, far cleaner is to understand the installation of the 3^rd party analytics software, the way it clusters, and replace each node with a clean OS, instead of keeping the craft from bygone installations.

And beyond that would have been the option to not Reserve any instances, but just turn them off when not in use.

But they hadn’t.

Poor practices in basic maintenance and continual patching and upgrades meant they had a lot of work to do now, rather than already be up to date.

I’ve seen a number of Partners in the Cloud ecosystem get recognised and rewarded for the sheer volume of migrations they have done. And despite these being naive lift-and-shift, and looking good for the first 6 months, the bill shock starts to set in. And over time, the lack of maintenance becomes an issue.

Even with the “Re-platform” pattern of migration (adopting some cloud managed services in your tech stack), and adopting perhaps something like a Managed Database service, can have its catches. Selecting a managed version of perhaps Postgres 9.5 back 5 years ago, would have put you in trouble, when 9.6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 came out, because as newer versions came out, older versions were deprecated, and eventually unavailable. If you weren’t adequately addressing technical debt and maintenance tasks as part of your standard operations, then you’re looking at possible operational trouble.

One clever tactic to address this is to have engineers who are familiar with more contemporary configurations, experts in the field (whom you can spot by the 6+ concurrent AWS Certification they hold) who can perform a Well-Architected Framework Review. This is typically short 1 week engagement for a professional consulting company, borrowing experienced talent into your business that can give you clear addressable mitigations covering many facets, including cost.

If you previously did a Lift & Shift, and found it expensive, perhaps your organisations ability to bring expertise to bear on the work is missing. If you don’t know where to start, then start asking for expertise.

So why are all the cloud providers talking about Optimisation? Because they know their customers can do better, on the same cloud provider. And they would rather have a customer optimise their spend and stay, rather than now migrate & modernise to a competitor, and start the training and upskilling process again.

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the AWS Sydney Summit 2023, along with my colleague and friend, Elliot Segler, on behalf of Akkodis.

A Partner Day was arranged that ran on Monday 3rd April – I’ll avoid details on that here at this time to focus on the main Customer Summit – the Big Event.

This was really the first major in-country Summit since the “end” of the Covid-19 pandemic – the 2022 version was much smaller, and that was only announced as a small in-person event just a few weeks before it was held. Thus in 2022 this event only had a small crowd; this year, attendance tickets were capped at 5,000.

In 2019, some 19,000 people attended over two days.

I’ve been fortunate to never miss an AWS Summit in Australia, and it gives me insight into the state of the Cloud when comparing year-on-year.

Cameron also spoke about the move to sustainable computing, Canva signing The Climate Pledge, and Canva racing to integrate AI models into their service offering, such as magic erase.

We also saw Nicole Sheffield from Wesfarmers “One Digital” service who spoke about the implementation of their digital platform that offers customer-facing digital services across the Wesfarmers portfolio. This is significant, as Wesfarmers had, in 2014, been quite alarmed at Amazon entering Australia.

The exhibitors were split between Consulting Services partners, and ISV partners. Those ISVs had a distinct developer tooling flavour to them, but we also saw Canva talking to end customers about their product, and both Bespoke and Lumnify (formerly DDLS) training providers discussing their educational schedules and offerings.

Early in the morning I took a photo of the Builder lab, set up for individuals to undertake self-paced digital training – which was full for the rest of the day:

In Financial Services, Australian bank (and one of the Big Four) Westpac provided their take on some of the cloud security approaches. This is notable to me as one of their staff in 2013 said they would “never use Public Cloud”; they seem to be doing well putting Public Cloud to good use.

Suncorp (finance, insurance and banking) also spoke about their exit strategy from their existing data centers using AWs as a target platform.

This year there were no major service announcements or releases at this Summit, but then these days the major announcements happen almost every few days anyway! In previous years, the Summit has always had a sort of “revolution” (when major new concepts or services were released, such as AI services) or “evolution” (incremental updates announced for existing services). This year the theme was more “steady-as-she goes” and stable.

What’s clear is that commentary around Lift & Shift migrations are now evolving to Migrate & Modernise (which is what I have always focused on – deeper expertise and a better short and long term outcome). This isn’t surprising, as often naïve Lift & Shift has left customers with workloads costing more and unable to take advantage of key cloud attributes, such as scalability or cloud-platform-managed-services to reduce TCO.

Of course, those who implemented cloud-native solutions, and paid close attention to Cloud Operating Models (and tech team org structures) with an eye to the Well-Architected Framework have enjoyed optimised and reliable operation.

AWS claimed that perhaps only 15% of all workloads that will eventually run in the cloud, is now doing so. Of course, that 15% requires the maintenance, care and attention to ensure it remains operational, and optimal.

So where are we in the Cloud evolution timeline? I suspect we’re in the middle of furious catch-up by software providers who now are focusing on adopting IaaS and PaaS to take their legacy solutions, and reimplement them as cloud-native SaaS. More vertical-specific SaaS products are coming to market.

The individual services within the cloud are maturing. ARM-based Graviton chips continue to uphold Moore’s Law (RIP Gordon Moore, 2023). IPv6 is progressing, but as noted by one of my fellow Partner Ambassadors and long term friend, Greg Cockburn, the rate of change in modern IPv6 networking appears to be slowing (with notable exception, VPC Network Firewall now supporting IPv6 only subnets). I suspect the major requests are now satisfied; workloads that want to be dual-stacked to the outside world are fully supported. Of course, many ISPs, telcos and carriers are continuing to slowly adopt IPv6 for their consumers; some advanced end user providers in Australia have been Telstra, Internode (ironically part of iiNet who dropped the IPv6 ball in 2013, and thus part of Vodafone), and Aussie Broadband.

From speaking to people, it did appear that a 5,000 person cap had limited many people from attending, particualy those who live in the same Australian state of New South Wales who may have left booking a ticket too late, and missed out. Perhaps in 2024 we’ll see another increase (and who knows).

Meanwhile, outside around Darling Harbour, much construction happens, watched over by warships and tall ships.

And in case you’re wondering, its a long way from Perth (where I live) to Sydney, and the Great Circle line directly between the two cities takes us far over the Southern Ocean: