Avoiding the cloud is becoming impossible for technologists. From casual smartphone meme-seekers to Fortune 500 companies, billions of people engage with cloud-hosted data dailywhich means technologists jobs will inevitably touch the cloud, as well. Personal photos, business documentseven low-code services crafted by non-engineers at businesses everywhereall live in the cloud.

The web itself is a tangle of cloud-hosting. When a service such as AWS goes down for even a few minutes in a specific region, global panic ensues. Just this year, content delivery networks Akamai and Fastly crashed, bringing the web to its knees. Fastlys scenario proved just how tenuous and fragile the web (and cloud) can be; a single user triggered a specific sequence of events that ultimately resulted in an undetected bug crashing the whole network. Akamai, which delivers websites hosted on Amazons AWS platform, failed in July, crippling major websites like Home Depot and Delta.

Despite these highly publicized failures, the cloud continues to expand its reach. How will the cloud evolve, and how will that impact jobs both in the near- and long-term? We spoke to several experts on how they feel cloud-based jobs (and the discipline itself) may change over the next decade.

Quimby Melton, co-founder and CEO at data privacy firm Confection, says, Given the vast performance and storage demands of the modern world, and given that each is only likely to accelerate in the years to come, I cant imagine a plausible bearish case for cloud computing.

Solutions Architect at cybersecurity firm Exabeam,Keith Biggin, agrees, telling Dice: There is little doubt that the need for cloud specialists is growing rapidly. The benefits to organizations of moving to the cloud are potentially enormous. Historically, the cost burden of maintaining infrastructure and systems can be substantially reduced in the cloud, making it attractive to both IT and finance teams.

That growth, however, means that technologists who specialize in the cloud must learn constantly, and keep up-to-date on the biggest cloud platforms latest features, pricing, and quirks. The various leading platform vendors all have their own ways of management and developing within them, Biggin continues. Add to that the speed at which they all change and improve means its almost impossible to be fully skilled in all the leading cloud platform providers. Specialists are now focusing on specific platforms out of necessity of the roles they have. This is leading to a steady increase in the need for people across all areas of cloud architecture and engineering.

Biggins comments underscore a critical point: though weve become highly reliant on the web, weve not yet perfected it. Theres a lot of work to be done in building, maintaining, and iterating on cloud buildouts. Gartnerpredictsthat, by 2026, the cloud will consume 45 percent of all IT spending, up from less than 17 percent in 2021.

Mark Cusack, CTO of data warehousing company Yellowbrick, suggests that, as the cloud matures, so will its jobs:

Were seeing data warehouses acquiring more abilities to process semi-structured and unstructured data and providing machine learning functionality, while at the same time data lake approaches are gearing up to tackle data warehousing workloads. It seems inevitable that these approaches will come together.Data lakehouseson the market claim to do this today, but they are not there yet. Over the next 10 years, I believe well see a simplification of the current cloud landscape through the emergence ofdistributed clouds. Distributed clouds take the hardware and software stacks in the public cloud and deploy them everywhere, including at the network edge. When that happens, well be able to seamlessly deploy analytics anywhere based on data gravity, data sovereignty and data latency needs, opening new IoT use cases in many industries.

To Cusacks point, many experts we spoke with suggest the next phase of the web is about fully understanding the cache of data accumulated over the past 10-15 years. We tend to romanticizemachine learningfrom companies like Google or IBM; now we need to see whether those machine-learning services can actually deliver what they promise in terms of discovering and mining key data for insight.

Alex Feiszli, CEO of enterprise cloud solutions startupGRAVITL, says that most tech jobs will involve cloud skills sooner or later:In 10 years, I think well have moved into a more abstract version of the cloud. Different cloud vendors will mesh together along with private data centers, edge servers, and IoT. We are beginning to see this now, but a new ecosystem is emerging around hybrid/multi/edge cloud solutions. Basically, anything that can merge different environments together and make them all easily manageable.

The average enterprise has over five clouds in production now, Feiszli adds: Thats a big headache to deal with. In addition, many companies who have gone all-in on a single cloud are just now realizing the need to move some of those services back to on-prem or to a different cloud.

Lorna Mitchell, head of developer relations at Aiven, thinks the cloud is a pretty safe trend to bet on: I think whats next will mean moving beyond doing what we already know, but in the cloud instead of the datacenter. Instead, well be compiling our applications from a lively marketplace of next-generation services that will form the cloud platform of the future. Having so many ways to bring services together means well also need to get better at using standard ways to integrate all these new shiny things to create something amazing.

Technologists should also pay attention to the emergence ofdistributed clouds.With the emergence of distributed clouds, there will be a need to re-think how data and analytics work in a geographically disparate world, Cusack notes. Perhaps well see job postings for distributed cloud developers, who are responsible for building applications that span all the way from the IoT edge to the cloud center. DevOps, FinOps and SecOps roles will also need to expand to address the automation, cost control, and security and governance challenges that will emerge in future distributed clouds.

The cloud is in a state of rapid expansion and experiencing growing pains. As companies increase their headcounts and new firms spring up to tackle specific issues related to cloud computing and data, the field will only expand. While experts see cloud-centric jobs evolving, none consider these cloud jobs to be at risk of a reduction in force.

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Cloud Data Growth Will Affect Jobs in 2021 and Beyond - Dice Insights

In recent years, cloud storage solutions have grown increasingly popular among both individuals and large companies. This is naturally due to the many benefits they offer.

Storing data in the cloud simply involves storing it on servers that are owned and operated by an outside party. For companies and organizations, this minimizes the need to invest in servers, rent out space in which to keep said servers, and hire employees to maintain them. For individuals, cloud storage solutions allow them to free up space on their own computers. For both, cloud storage keeps data safe, ensuring users can easily access it, even if a virus or other threat damages or wipes out their data.

All these benefits have contributed to the steady growth of the cloud services market. That growth doesnt show any signs of stopping in the near future. On the contrary, experts predict that by 2020, the global cloud storage market will have a value of $390.33 billion.

Along with the benefits already listed, a number of factors are influencing the continuing growth of cloud storage and services. First, its becoming increasingly common for workforces to be dispersed throughout the globe. During the pandemic, more and more businesses were forced to adopt remote work policies, resulting in employees working from many different locations. However, reports indicate that remote work was becoming more common even before the pandemic.

This is one of the chief reasons the cloud storage market is growing at such a fast pace. Cloud services often facilitate easy collaboration among workers who may not share the same physical office.

The rise of other technologies and innovations that rely on or enhance the effects of cloud computing, cloud services, and cloud storage may also account for the markets fast growth. Examples include Internet of Things tech and machine learning.

For instance, thanks to advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning systems, which can analyze data virtually 24/7, companies and organizations across a range of industries are increasingly prioritizing large-scale data analytics when making key decisions. Naturally, they need a means of storing large amounts of data. Cloud storage provides the ideal solution. By storing data in the cloud for current and future analysis, organizations arent limited to analyzing only the data which they can store on their own servers.

Security issues and breaches are also driving cloud storage adoption. Reputable cloud storage providers emphasize security to a degree that a companys in-house IT team simply might not be capable of. Thus, many are using cloud storage solutions with the specific intention of guarding against data loss and leaks.

It would be impossible to cover all the factors contributing to this trend in a single short article. Full reports can be (and have been) written on the subject. In general, though, its apparent that cloud storage solutions are going to become even more ubiquitous in the future. This will result in massive growth for the already thriving cloud storage market. Investors, entrepreneurs, and all others in a position to benefit from such growth should pay attention.

Read more:
Cloud Storage Market to Potentially Reach Worth of $390.33 Billion by 2028 - FinSMEs

High Performance Computing (HPC) is known as a domain where applications are well-optimized to get the highest performance possible on a platform. Unsurprisingly, a common question when moving a workload to AWS is what performance difference there may be from an existing on-premises bare metal platform. This blog will show the performance differential between bare metal instances and instances that use the AWS Nitro hypervisor is negligible for the evaluated HPC workloads.

TheAWS Nitro systemis a combination of purpose-built hardware and software designed to provide performance and security. Recent generation instances, including instance families popular with HPC workloads such as c5, c5n, m5zn, c6gn, andmany othersare based on the Nitro System. As shown in Figure 1, the AWS Nitro System is composed of three main components: Nitro cards, the Nitro security chip, and the Nitro hypervisor. Nitro cards provide controllers for the VPC data plane (network access), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) access, instance storage (local NVMe), as well as overall coordination for the host. By offloading these capabilities to the Nitro cards, this removes the need to use host processor resources to implement these functions, as well as offering security benefits. The Nitro security chip provides a hardware root of trust and secure boot, among other features to help with system security.The Nitro hypervisor is lightweight hypervisor that manages memory and CPU allocation.

With this design, the host system no longer has direct access to AWS resources. Only the hardened Nitro cards can access other resources, and each of those cards provides software-defined hardware devices that are the only access points from the host device. With the I/O accesses handled by Nitro cards, this allows the last component, the Nitro hypervisor, to be light-weight and have a minimal impact to workloads running on the host. The Nitro hypervisor has only necessary functions, with a design goal of being quiescent, which means it should never activate unless it is doing work for an instance that requested it. This also means there are no background tasks running consuming any resources when it is not needed.

Figure 1. The AWS Nitro System building blocks.

The Nitro system architecture also allows AWS to offer instances that offer direct access to the bare metal of the host. Since their initial introduction in2017,many instance families offer *.metal variants, which provide direct access to the underlying hardware and no hypervisor. As in the case where the Nitro hypervisor is used, the Nitro cards are still the only access points to resources outside of the host. These instances are most commonly used for workloads that cannot run in a virtualized environment due to licensing requirements, or those that need specific hardware features only provided through direct access.

With both the option of bare metal instances and Nitro virtualized instances, this provides a method to show the performance differential between HPC application performance on bare metal vs running on the AWS Nitro hypervisor.

You can read the full blog to see how different HPC applications perform on Amazon EC2 instances with AWS Nitro hypervisor vs. bare metal instances.

Reminder: You can learn a lot from AWS HPC engineers by subscribing to the HPC Tech Short YouTube channel, and following the AWS HPC Blog channel.

Read more here:
Bare Metal Performance in the Cloud - HPCwire

How the Film Industry is Leveraging Cloud Computing? Lights, Camera, Action and Cloud

The film industry has undergone many technological changes such as 3D, 4D, and even 5D. But it is not the end. Cloud computing is now emerging in the field of film technology. But a question arises about how cloud computing is helping the film industry. Cloud computing and film are two different things, where one deals with saving and transferring data from one place to another, and the other deals with entertaining people. These two different aspects are closer than our imagination.

Cloud computing allows centralization of data, information, and processes and serves easy access and perfect outline for films. This results in better decision-making, improved movie experience, and integrated operations.

Real-Time Discussions

In todays world, a films production crew, director, participating service partners, and castes are global. Cooperating among these teams becomes difficult as the physical transfer of data and film reels is a time-consuming process. But having access to the files remotely makes the process easy and saves time. This is where cloud computing benefits the film industry. Cloud computing helps in making real-time discussions which saves time, effort as well as money.

Remote Computing Power

For accumulating all the individual elements of a film including audio combinations, visual effects, and video filters to create the finished product, heavy computing power is required. The memory and processing power needed for making the final frames is much higher than what is available on standard computers. Cloud computing can be used to complete projects much rapidly by using remote computing power for the furnishing processes.

Security

Pre-release privacy causes a 19% decrease in revenue than piracy that occurs post-release. Cloud computing technology offers refined solutions to such security issues to the film industry. By creating private clouds, the film industry doesnt have to worry anymore about other studios gaining access to their system.

Streamline Operations

Starting with film distribution from theatrical planning, booking, and settlements to building a smoother customer-centric approach, cloud computing enables assessment of similar films to an individual theatre performance, giving distributors insights to secure a successful release.

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How the Film Industry is Leveraging Cloud Computing? Lights, Camera, Action and Cloud - Analytics Insight