Erica Pisani, senior software engineer at Netlify, presented at QCon London on what edge is, how running code and serving data on the edge can improve site performance, and how to leverage these options effectively in a site to maximize site performance with minimal architectural changes.

After introducing herself, Pisani started explaining what Edge is. First, she took a step back, presenting the concepts of cloud regions and their availability zones, taking AWS as an example (the same applies to Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure). Pisani describes The Edgeas data centers that are outside of the availability zones.

She gave an example of the edge in a request life cycle before diving into Web application functionality on the Edge using Edge Functions.

Pisani provided a few problem statements and solutions to explain the value of the edge, including code samples.

Problem: High-traffic page that needs to serve localized content.Solution: Transforming a Server Side Render (SSR) page into a static one and inject localized content using an edge function.

Another problem statement and solution Pisani explained showed the benefit of edge functions.

Problem: User session validation should take less time in the request.Solution: User session validation in an edge function.

And the final one she explained was on third-party integration.

Problem: Route a third-party integration request to the correct region.Solution: Use data encoded in a JWT and route from an edge function.

Next, Pisani discussed data on the edge and challenges like limited connections and data consistency. First, she explained connection pooling as a collection of open connections that can be passed from database operation to data operation as needed to face the challenge of limited connections. For example, she mentions that Prisma Data Proxy is a tool that uses connection pooling in a serverless edge function. In addition, she says Cloudflare Durable Objects is a way to face data consistency challenges. And finally, she also mentions Planetscale to meet the data consistency challenges and provides a code sample on how to fetch data using Planetscale.

Lastly, Pisani pointed out a product called AWS Snowball as the "edgiest"of the edge of edge computing in areas like ships, windmills, and remote factories with no or unreliable internet.

She ended her talk with limitations of the edge, like lower CPU time availability, cost, and limited integration with some cloud services.

InfoQ interviewed Erica Pisani about boosting site performance with Edge Computing.

InfoQ: Is the Edge going to have a regulatory problem? What mechanism can one use?

Erica Pisani: Particularly around data being handled and stored within a particular region, it facesa challenge. I'm not sure about what the configuration would look like in other cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Still, in an AWS context, there's a characteristic that makes it slightly more challenging to be compliant with regulations.You cannot specify certain regions to run Lambda@Edge to the exclusion of others, and they can be used in any particular region once deployed. Suppose you want to have only edge locations in the EU to handle EU user data, for instance, rather than edge locations in other regions, and the user making the request is closer to an edge location outside of the EU. In that case, that edge location may be used instead due to being physically closer.CloudFront is the mechanism that is in the best position to help address this since it is what triggers Lambda@Edge functions as part of handling the request. In addition, its Geographic Regions feature allows you to impose geographic restrictions on the types of requests Cloudfront will fulfill when the requests originate from particular locations.I need to familiarize myself with this feature to go into more detail than that, and it may be too blunt of a tool for what is looking to be accomplished, but it can be a simple solution for some types of requests.

InfoQ: Will the development cost of Edge be reduced?

Pisani: Given the increasing interest over the past few years on running web application functionality and hosting data on the edge, the development cost will go down, but to what extent and how quickly is hard to say right now. Like other technologies, we may also see the monetary cost of developing and hosting data and application functionality on the edge go down as time goes by, which will further help justify a move towards the edge for its performance-boosting capabilities.As more tooling becomes available and the edge capabilities of the various cloud providers increase, developing on the edge is as challenging as developing for the origin server today, leading to equivalent development costs for companies. However, with that being said, given that the use cases for the edge are highly focused at the moment, such as setting cookies and custom request headers, the development cost should be manageable to start looking at incrementally adopting the edge today.

Originally posted here:
Living on the Edge: Boosting Your Site's Performance with Edge ... - InfoQ.com

Image source: Getty Images

Written by Stephanie Bedard-Chateauneuf, MBA at The Motley Fool Canada

Growth stocks, with their constant rising trends and promising future prospects, are must-haves in your financial portfolio. Growth stocks are a type of stock that are expected to increase in value at a faster rate than the overall stock market. These stocks typically represent companies that are experiencing strong revenue and earnings growth, often in emerging industries or markets. Growth companies often reinvest their profits back into the business to fund further growth, rather than paying dividends to shareholders. This strategy can be attractive to investors who are looking for long-term capital appreciation, as opposed to short-term income.

If youve got $5,000 to invest or any other amount, buying Lightspeed Commerce and Microsoft is an excellent choice. After taking a dip in 2022 among larger tech selloff, these two growth stocks are back in the green this year. I expect more upside for the rest of the year.

Lightspeed Commerce (TSX:LSPD) is one of the best Canadian tech stocks. The company has a cloud-based point-of-sale, or POS, system. Retailers use these to manage the check-out process. In addition to general retail, Lightspeed also has solutions for restaurants and hospitality. Lightspeed is smaller than competitors like Block or Shopify, so it has more room to grow. In the early days of the pandemic, when retailers were rushing to switch to more advanced checkout systems, Lightspeed had a lot of early success. Its shares went up by as much as 10-fold.

Lightspeed grew its sales from just $57 million in 2017 to $548 million in fiscal year 2022. Analysts expect the top line to grow by about 25% per year going forward. Meanwhile, the company is expected to start making money in 2024. Lightspeeds shares have fallen from an all-time high of more than $125 per share to less than $21. This is enough of a drop to make it a good time for contrarian investors to buy. Shares have gained 4% year to date and has potential for much more upside.

Story continues

Investors are all of a sudden rushing to put their money into companies that use artificial intelligence. The success of the ChatGPT AI platform has gotten a lot of attention from the general public. AI has been a common theme in science fiction for a long time, but recent advances in AI chat and image generation are making it seem more real. There are companies that only do AI, but they tend to be small and not profitable right now.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is a safer choice for AI. After adding AI to its Bing search engine, the company is getting a first-mover advantage. You can expect strong AI to make its way into Office and other core products over time. This will help to change whats popular in the Windows work environment. A lot of computing power is also needed for AI. This is a great reason to use Microsofts Azure cloud hosting service. In other words, Microsoft is in a great position to win on multiple fronts as the use of AI solutions grows.

Microsoft stock is now trading below US$280, which is far from is 52-week high of US$343.11 hit in November 2021. The stock is on the right path, as it has already gained 15% so far this year.

The post Got $5,000? These Are 2 of the Best Growth Stocks to Buy Right Now appeared first on The Motley Fool Canada.

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Fool contributor Stephanie Chateauneuf owns shares of Lightspeed Commerce and Microsoft. The Motley Fool recommends Lightspeed Commerce and Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Got $5,000? These Are 2 of the Best Growth Stocks to Buy Right Now - Yahoo Canada Finance

Key Takeaways

Systems Thinking provides ways to extract simple but useful models of complex things, but I think only a few people think that way. Could be nature or nurture, but we dont try to teach very often.

- Adrian Cockcrofts tweet on 11 Sep 2018.

A recent study on FinOps by McKinsey reveals that 69% of the organizations prioritize tactical initiatives over higher-impact strategic initiatives.

One reason could be that most of those 69% organizations are unaware of those strategic initiatives or unaware of their importance.

So, in continuation to my article on Medium (that explores cloud cost management problems from a socio-technical perspective), here I will analyze via a System Thinking lens how to prioritize the efforts to address those problems.

Any organization, or a part of it, can be considered a socio-technical system because any organization employs people with a certain skill set, who work to achieve set goals, follow laid down processes, use particular technology, operate on a foundational infrastructure, and share certain cultural norms.Thus, Cloud Financial Management is a socio-technical system that needs to be analyzed from a social and technical angle via Systems Thinking. But before diving in, let me introduce some terminology of Systems Thinking.

Cloud Financial Management via Systems Thinking lens

When we analyze a problem, we often try to look for certain points or places where we can focus our efforts to gain maximum leverage on the system to achieve our desired outcome. For example, if you are in a situation to lift a motorbike thats fallen down, you dont pull up from every part that you can hold on to. Instead, you find the best part and a way to hold (based on the bike design and your strengths) to pull up with the least effort and damage.

Similarly, for complex socio-technical systems, Donnella Meadows, in her book Thinking in Systems, proposes 12 places where you can "intervene" to achieve maximum impact. These are known as leverage points or points of intervention.

A system intervention is a deliberate effort to change or improve a systems behavior, processes, or outcomes. It involves identifying problems and implementing changes to improve the overall functioning of the system.

I will explore each of the 12 interventions and elaborate on how each intervention correlates with cloud financial management along with corresponding measures to optimize the spend.

The System Iceberg - seen and unseen interventions

Donella Meadows introduces the 12 leverage points in the increasing order of leverage (from least to highest). We can classify these 12 points into four, namely, Parameters, Feedbacks, Social Design, and Mental Models, based on their area of impact.

While Parameters classification is concerned with relatively tangible parts of the system, Feedbacks are about the systems internal dynamics. And Social Design relates to the social structure within the system. The last one, Mental Models, refers to the values, goals, and mindset of the people involved.

12 Leverage points (from least to highest)

Most organizations are operated on the assumption that setting targets is sufficient. But the reality is that setting targets is the least effective place to intervene. And in some situations, setting targets will become counter-intuitive. For example, number of resources, duration of usage, and price of resources are a few of the parameters that can determine the cost of the cloud system. Setting targets on those parameters is a leverage point.

Optimization measures in this category are enforcing

Parameters usually are not an efficient leverage point that can bring change in the systems behavior unless they contribute to pushing some other higher leverage points like goals. Well cover more of that in the goals section.

Buffers are all about increasing the capacity of the system to handle changes in the in/out flows.

For example, improving the skill level and providing dedicated time or additional staff can increase the buffer capacity of the team.

Optimization measures that can increase the capacity of the buffers are

Creating most of the buffers takes time and isnt easy to change, so this leverage point is kept down on the list.

The structure of the stock-and-flow in a system plays a vital role in how the system operates. This leverage point refers to building or modifying the structure of a system (like infrastructure, products, or processes) to lower the effort of acting on the problem.For example, the structure of teams that manage the cloud, the structure of the cloud, and the structure of accountability among the teams come under this category.

Measures that fall under this leverage point are

The structure of stock-and-flows is rarely quick or simple to change, so this leverage point ends up at the bottom of the list.

Feedback loops - the basic operating units of a system - Donella Meadows

Feedback Loops

Delays refer to the length of time it takes to correct the system in relation to the rate at which the system changes. It plays a vital role in the behavior of the system. Delays will create oscillations between the desired target that you want to achieve and the actual state.

For example, if the cost overrun information is available to your team only at the end of the month, then optimization actions will happen only in a monthly cycle. Similarly, response to the feedback information should also be timely without any delay.

Measures that will reduce delays in the system are

If the systems delays are changeable, changing them can cause high impacts.

Balancing feedback loops are the ones that keep the system state within safe boundaries based on the difference between the actual and desired level of stock. Strengthening the balancing feedback loops is primarily improving the systems self-correcting abilities.

Any balancing feedback loop consists of a goal, an observer to check on deviations from the goal, and a response act.

Here are some measures that can strengthen the systems self-correcting abilities:

A FinOps tool can enable most of the automation mentioned above.

Reinforcing feedback loops are the ones that keep the system growing or collapsing. The more it works, the more it grows to work even more. There are two kinds of reinforcing loops - Vicious cycles, and Virtuous cycles.

In Cloud, a Vicious cycle occurs during a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack, where the attack traffic triggers auto-provisioning of resources which invites more attack traffic that in turn restarts the cycle as more resources are provisioned. This exponential resource usage ends up in a huge bill. Even a performance testing script mistake can cause such a situation.

Steps that can limit the growth of these reinforcing loops are

Implementing effective cloud financial management can trigger a Virtuous cycle where cost savings leads to increased investment in cloud services, which increases its overall value, leading to more motivation to optimize spending and realize even more cost savings.

Any system that has uninterrupted growth will self-destruct. A better way to stabilize the system is to weaken the reinforcing loops.

The flow of feedback information to the right set of people can result in very different outcomes, which are different from parameter adjustment or strengthening/weakening an existing feedback loop. This is about cascading feedback information to those who can act on it immediately and appropriately.

Here are some of the measures you can take to improve the structure of the information flow:

Since this intervention creates accountability by providing the missing feedback information, Donella observes that this intervention is always popular with the masses rather than with the powerful.

Rules form a high leverage point. Standards, guidelines, and policies can be referred to as rules here. For example, the Architecture Board must sign off on the design and architecture beforehand for the coding to start.

A few of the measures that you can employ to make use of this leverage point are

Self-organization is a powerful intervention that enables the system to evolve. It amounts to changing any aspect of the system that has less leverage than this, such as rules, physical structure, information flow, etc.

A few of the measures you can do are

Framing those rules that help develop and maintain self-organization within the system is a powerful intervention. And the power to frame those rules should lie with the team.

Goals are much higher interventions than the stock-flows, feedback loops, or even self-organization because a wrong goal will lead to very different outcomes even when other aforesaid interventions are in place.

So, aligning the system with higher goals will lead to better outcomes.

One of the measures that can improve the purpose of the cost management system is to pursue improving the value of cloud consumption rather than controlling cloud spend.

Based on this higher goal, a change that can be introduced in the hosting strategy is choosing the hosting model based on the role played by the workload in the organizations value chain. For example, a core business process application that is customer facing and is a differentiator shall be hosted on IaaS (even if it incurs more cost). But an application that belongs to a supportive business process in the value chain shall be hosted on PaaS/SaaS (incurring less cost).

Unit economics is a way to measure the value of cloud spend. For example, in a logistics organization, the cloud cost for processing one parcel can show the real cost of the parcel processing even if the number of parcels increases or decreases. Unit cost metrics like per-parcel cost can be leveraged as a north star for optimization initiatives towards improving the value of cloud consumption.

Everything, from goals and rules to delays and parameters of a system, emerges out of a mindset, aka paradigm about that system. Thus, this leverage point, a shift in mindset, can initiate a change in the whole system that lies underneath.

Paradigm change is often viewed as hard to accomplish, but all it takes for mindset change is a moment of realization.

Cloud spend management needs a shift in mindset (that was there while managing on-premises infrastructure).

Here are the measures you can take to bring in the shift in mindset

And some of the misconceptions (mindset) that should be dealt with are

Paradigms arent constant. So, you need to look beyond your current paradigm. In this case, Cloud is your current paradigm, but its not final.

You need to think beyond cloud spend optimization. You need to think of it as infrastructure spend optimization. If you start on that note, you will explore other available options, like what Dropbox did back in 2016 (its present state) - Dropbox shifted its majority of workloads from the public cloud to co-location facilities saving nearly $75M over two years which contributed to increased gross margins from 33% to 67%. For DropBox, the public cloud was cheaper early on but costlier later on when the company grew.

One point to note is that as the effectiveness of the leverage points increases, so does the resistance to change, meaning, an initiative at a higher leverage point will face higher resistance from the system.

In this article, I have talked about where you can intervene to change the course of your Cloud Financial Management system and the effectiveness of each intervention point. But how to intervene is up to you because each system is unique and constantly evolving. All the best!

Excerpt from:
12 Places to Intervene - Rethink FinOps Using a Systems Thinking ... - InfoQ.com

All Domain, Networks / Cyber

WASHINGTON All four vendors who won a spot on the Pentagons Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, worth up to $8 billion, have been awarded the first batch of task orders under the effort, a Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) spokesperson told Breaking Defense.

According to the spokesperson, each of the vendors Amazon Web Services, Google, Oracle and Microsoft received equal task orders, with the value of each task order being $3.8 million to essentially do some early poking and prodding about what JWCC could be capable of.

The first task orders awarded under the JWCC contract allows the JWCC Program Management Office to test cloud service offerings in a sandbox environment, validating several JWCC requirements through real world cloud consumption (e.g., proof of concepts, verification of policy-based controls), the spokesperson said.

The task order was awarded on March 24, and the period of performance includes a one-year base period and two one-year option periods.

DISA Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner mentioned the award briefly today during the Senate Armed Services Committees subcommittee on cybersecurity hearing.

We just awarded the first task order last week and many others are working through the process, Skinner said.

Last December, DoD awarded the four vendors a spot on the multi-cloud follow up effort to the infamous single-source Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract which was scrapped in 2021. The new multi-vendor effort is meant to provide the department with an enterprise-wide cloud capability that spans all classification levels.

DoD is also set to release secret-level offerings of JWCC in a few weeks and top secret-level offerings in the summer, Sharon Woods, director of DISAs Hosting and Compute Center, said March 14.

Thats a capability we really dont have in the department an enterprise top secret cloud environment, Woods said. You know, the intelligence community does, but the departmentis not able to leverage that contract and so that is one of those capability gaps that JWCC is meeting.

She added that DoD is looking at whether the JWCC offerings can fuel individual cloud efforts within the military services. Although each service has its own cloud-focused effort, the Pentagon wants JWCC to be an option and envisions it being the foundation for Joint All Domain Command and Control, DoDs effort to connect sensors to shooters across land, sea, air, space and cyberspace domains.

Read more:
Pentagon awards first set of JWCC task orders to all 4 vendors - Breaking Defense