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A new year has begun. While it’s fun to predict what might happen in a coming year, we’re comfortable admitting we have no idea. Instead, we used the end of last year to reflect on what had happened in 2019 and the beginning of this year reflecting on where we are right now and how we want to respond.
2019 was a year of endless contradiction and cascading change. Even the nature of change itself changed last year. We saw turmoil. Peace. Violence. Progress. Uncertainty. Optimism. Pessimism. It was just as easy to lose your compass as it was to think it was business as usual, as the blur started to resemble a static landscape. It’s hard to imagine our society being more polarized, whether it be in politics, sports, our feelings on the cloud, or absolutely anything taking place on social media. But, we also made progress. In spite of our polarization, our humanity has grown. We are increasingly able to recognize the intrinsic value in each other, regardless of our differences. We are more aware that being inclusive makes us stronger. And we’re ever so slowly learning how to grasp with the fact that we’re all human beings, subject to their inherent limitations and better off because of them.
If 2019 was a year of change for sake of change, 2020 will be a year of change for sake of avoiding change. Humanity is going to want to find some ground truth. What is our new baseline? What is normal? What makes sense? And what does any of this matter in a newsletter about the cloud?
Here’s what we see as ground truth in 2020:
The public cloud is now the default. Not because it’s better (it is, but that’s not why). It’s the default because that’s where and how the workforce wants to work. We covered this in our post, Now is the Time for the Public Cloud. Have fun hiring young talent and telling them they have to work in a data center environment because the cloud isn’t secure enough yet.
AWS is better than your cloud provider. Unless your cloud provider is AWS. Google has some niche features and an excellent Kubernetes implementation (it helps that they built their cloud platform, then built Kubernetes, then open sourced it), but it has no customers. Azure has lots of customers, but most are using it for Office 365 and some basic enterprise functions. Trust us, building modern cloud-native infrastructure in Azure isn’t easy. Yet, anyway. So long as AWS is building custom hardware to optimize their environment while other cloud providers are just striving for low-level feature parity, AWS will be hard to beat. At least in 2020.
Regulation is coming, and it will likely produce unexpected results. We don’t have much opinion on regulating tech, because there’s enough people with enough opinions already. But, 2020 will be the year where regulation begins. One possibility on the table is a breakup of Amazon, forcing them to sell AWS. This would be interesting to say the least, particularly because they are the only major cloud provider who isn’t making its software licensing terms friendlier if you use them. Whatever happens, expect volatility. Hopefully, it’s just in the realm of social media, which we wouldn’t shed a tear over. But, it could go further. Much further.
Security in the cloud is different, as we’ve covered in our post on the topic. The last two years have demonstrated a number of academic, esoteric attacks on cloud anti-patterns that many of us use every day. This year, we expect nation states, organized crime and sophisticated script kiddies to skill up and start attacking cloud users head on. It’s time to get your security technical debt retired. Ultimately, the cloud provides a far more secure environment to build in. But, it’s up to you to take advantage of what it has to offer.
There is a shortage of skilled cloud engineers and developers, but not for the reasons you think. We talked about the Cloud Skills Gap Myth last year. In 2020, it’s up to employers to acknowledge the fact that pre-existing wizard skills are few and far between in the workforce. We need to be inclusive and focus on training a highly motivated latent workforce that very much wants to be building the applications of the future.
Of course, ground truth is complicated. We offer no predictions on what all this means. Just an acknowledgement that this is our starting point as we enter a new year.
-Cris
Route 53 Resolvers, Revisited
Back in February, we talked about Route 53 Resolvers, an exciting new announcement from re:Invent in 2018. Since, AWS added support for using Resource Access Manager to share resolver rules across accounts, which can help offset the somewhat painful costs associated with Route 53 Resolvers.
In our original post, we demonstrated using Route 53 resolvers in CloudFormation. This post will consider a similar example in Terraform and demonstrate using RAM.
re:Invent is AWS’ annual exhaustive and exhausting product announcement bonanza. While features and services are released year-round, the best is always held for the week after Thanksgiving. Because the week has to cover the coming year, services are often announced months before they’re ready for preview and often as much as a year before they’re “Generally Available”. We’ll do our best to highlight when you’re likely to be able to take advantage of each announcement.
We’re all so prone to Google anytime we need to know anything, but Kubernetes changes with the wind, and the docs are often a year ahead of the version we’re on. This post shows how to use the kubectl command line to find the syntax and definitions you need to know.
This is the sort of thing that will make Kubernetes make sense as a compute framework in the public cloud. Rather than waiting for your nodes to get flooded by a large queue, this auto scaler lets you anticipate it, scaling automatically when your queue gets too large.
This is a story written by people who run Kubernetes clusters with more nodes than most people have pods. But, it is an excellent deep dive that shows that even in a containerized world, we still must master the underlying OS if we’re going to thrive.
Prometheus is a TSDB, toolset and ecosystem that provide immense capabilities for making your applications more observable. It’s also a pain in the ass. This article covers some of the terminology around storage, which in turn will help you navigate some of the documentation.
We’re just kidding. Use EKS, which has storage support natively. The “roll your own” storage landscape in Kubernetes is a dumpster fire at the moment, and you already have your own dumpster fires to deal with.
Infrastructure as Code is the idea of expressing your cloud-based infrastructure entirely through code, whether it be Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or any of the dozen or so other fine choices. But, IaC can go further and define the tools you use to manage your infrastructure. This post is a good reminder of everything you can automate. And keep in mind, automating one time tasks is consistency’s alter ego.
Lambda has supported custom runtimes since last year, allowing people to write their Lambda code in languages AWS does not officially support yet. This is a great list of the wide range of custom runtimes you can take advantage of.
A high-level overview of the differences and similarities of ECS and EKS. If you understand one of these but not the other, this will help you bridge the gap.
The Rhythmic team had a great time celebrating at our annual holiday party this past month. It had us all reflecting on the growth we have seen this past year, having added 5 new members to our team in 2019. Each and every person contributes something unique and positive to our company’s dynamic and we are grateful for all of them and what they bring to the table.
We are looking forward to another great year helping our clients thrive in the cloud and grow their own businesses. Their success is our success.
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