Cloud Optimisation all the rage in 2023

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 3rd 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.

AWS Sydney Summit 2023

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.

The floorplan of the AWS Sydney Summit 2023
The exhibitor floor at the ASW Sydney Summit 2023
AWS Managing Director A/NZ, Rianne van Veldhuizen, opens the Summit
Cameron Adams, founder of Canva, shared some of their AWS Cloud architecture.

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:

The Builder Lab (taken first thing in the morning before it opened)

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.

Warships and Tall Ships in Darling Harbour, 2023

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:

3,300 kms from Sydney to Perth

AWS Local Zone: Perth Launch

In the last few days, the AWS Local Zone service launched in Perth.

Articles in the media are claiming this is a significant uplift:

AWS has officially opened a new cloud infrastructure region in Perth.

Kate Weber, IT News

Only problem, this is not a Region (big R) in the AWS vernacular, but a single Availability Zone, attached as an adjunct to the AWS Sydney Region (ap-southeast-2).

Media Statements and press releases are designed to excite the media, but the reality is a little more circumspect. The Local Zone does add local compute (EC2) and block storage (in the form of EBS) within Perth. However, its what many would expect that leads a local zone to be perhaps a little limiting.


First up, the compute is only certain, limited types. The same with the EBS volume types. You may be forced to use more expensive compute and storage, because the cheaper instance sizes or EBS types are not available.

Second, the costs for the Compute and Storage is more expensive than in the full Region, where economies of scale and usage patterns drive down costs. You may see up to a 50% overhead on the same 4xLarge instance type compared to Sydney.

Third, some basics like IPv6 support is not (yet?) supported. That may upset your VPC conventions.

Fourth, you may have wanted close access to managed services, like RDS (databases), or even Workspaces (desktop) and AppStream (application virtualisation). Well, that’s back in the main Region, not in the Local Zone, and at 50ms across Australia, that may be a bit too far, which means you’re back to the stone age of running databases on Instances yourself.

Fifth, being a single AZ, you wont get any multi-AZ resilience that you’re comfortable with an a full Region.

Sixth: the Local zone’s operation is tied to the designated Region: issues in ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) may impact management (control plane) or availability (data plane) of that AZ. Your CloudFormation has to execute in Sydney to stand up a stack.


In essence, a Local Zone needs to be looked at from the Well-Architected Framework perspective, and utilised accordingly.

Once you have reconciled those issues, there is the bright side: compute in cloud, managed in a uniform way, without having to deploy an Outpost and have a datacentre for the Outpost to run in.

Many organisations do want Cloud services locally, and for some high volume, low latency, idempotent, loosely coupled, edge processing, this may be perfect.

An AWS Local Zone is also a small stepping stone to perhaps being a full Region one day, as was seen in Osaka, Japan. It just takes demand to validate the point.

Its 10 years since AWS opened first its point of presence (CloudFront, Route53) in Australia, and then the Sydney Region. We’re on the cusp of a second Local zone up in Brisbane, and a second Australian Region – yes, a full Region – in Melbourne.

It’s the new Region that suddenly opens up Multi-region application architecture, which, for public sector in particular, has not been permissible for data jurisdiction purposes (even if that is just a desire and not a mandated legal requirement).

AWS Consulting Services Partners and Certifications, December 2022

I had previously posted about AWS Consulting Services Partners and Certifications in July 2022. Its been six months, so I decided to run the numbers again.

This time, there were 945 partners in the data set, up from 882 in July by 62 new organisations or a 7.1% increase.

What was clear is that much of this growth is at the lower levels but we can also see some growth in the larger buckets of certs, with two exceptions.

The 100-200 category saw a drop in the number of partners in this space, but only by 5 organisations. Similarly, the 200-300 space remained stable at 43 organisations, but I know of several businesses that have migrated from the 200+ to 300+ category. so others have moved into this grouping from the lower levels.

1+20+50+100+200+300+400+500+1000+2000+
Dec 2022276262158107432614251519
Jul 202224425214811243258201218
ASW Certifications held by Consulting Services partners in the AWS Partner Finder

Is at the 400-500 grouping that an increase of 75% has been seen, from 8 organisations to 14.

Furthermore, raw data shows that there are 9 organisations who would fit in a 5000+ certification grouping – who combined would have 117,317 AWS certifications.

The largest? 36,098 certifications goes to Accenture, followed by 14,740 at IBM, and Deloitte on 14,605. Deloitte would be #2 if they grouped Deloitte Shanghai and Deloitte Tohmatsu together. Similarly, NTT is in the partner data as 5 separate organisations.

Cert CountConsulting Services Company Name
36098Accenture
14750IBM
14605Delitte
12790Cognizant
10994Capgemini
9673Tata Consutling
6517Kyndryl
6423Infosys
5467Wipro
4527EPAM
Top 10 by Certification count, December 2022

Increased AWS IPv6 Announcements

IPv6 has been something I have long championed, ever since establishing the first tunnels in the last 1990’s when I was working at UWA. Its also something I was pushing to AWS Service Delivery teams when I worked at AWS in the early 2010s, and in my time at Ajilon/Modis/Akkodis, I have set IPv6 as a stretch goal for all AWS projects to support as a standard.

What’s interesting to see is the increase in IPv6 related announcements from ASW in the What’s New page by year:

Number of IPv6 related posts on AWS What’s New page, as at 19 Dec 2022.

It’s clear that IPv6 is now a first class citizen. Coverage is pretty strong, and customers not only can, but in my opinion should, be targeting dual stack solutions, or in some use cases, IPv6-only deployments.

As System Operators (Sys Admins), DevOps and Developer folk, you should be fully comfortable with another transport protocol. Any considerations around addressing should be minimal. In the on-premises desktop/end-user-compute environment, your internal networks are possibly all IPv4 only, but your corporate proxy should now be dual-homed. (It should also be supporting TLS 1.3 and HTTP/3).