A Great Week: Edition 4

Hello Friends.

Hope you are doing fantastic.

I am having an amazing and busy week.

This 4th edition is brewing with some good stuff.

Let's go.

Did you hear about this security vulnerability in AWS Glue?

Last week we saw an AWS glue security issue reported and created a bit of stir. Everyone gets a little on the edge these days as a security issue is found. We saw this with the Y22k over the New Year a few weeks back.

The security firm which detected this vulnerability claimed the exposure could have led to a malicious act to other tenant's outside the originating tenant boundary. AWS’s VP of engineering confirmed the vulnerability but denied this level or severity of the exposure. While AWS came out with its own press release, to get a complete picture read this article. A patch has been applied for this vulnerability since then.

The trend in Cloud Computing to watch in 2022/23: Verticalized cloud solutions

The acceptance for the cloud has created a $300+ billion market already and it is growing about 25% YoY. The competition is intense is an understatement.

Top players like AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, salesforce are focused on their market shares.

Challenger & new players are making headway with specific solutions and focusing on niche segments.

In 2022/23, We will see cloud providers go into verticalization of their solutions for differentiation in their offerings.

Today enterprises look at these services from various providers akin to a salad bar. They pick, chose, and apply the right dressing. The onus is on them to pull a great recipe together.

On the other hand, Hyperscalers are pitting their individual services against each other in scale, cost, and maturity.

Verticalization will help them not position a single service -an S3 or a lambda function, but offer a portfolio of services together for a verticalized solution.

There are already major forces at play and some examples emerging:

1. Goldman Sachs and AWS have been collaborating on data management & analytics solution for fintech. read here
2. IBM is positioning its financial cloud with a complete focus on data, security & all aspects of financial services. read here
3. Microsoft goes GA of Microsoft financial service cloud. Read here
4. Recently Databricks announced a retailed focused solution based on their "lakehouse" framework read here
5. Oracle acquired Cerner for $28B which is clearly about oracle's focus on healthcare and capturing a huge opportunity in that vertical. Read here

Wordle

I have been playing Wordle for the past few days with my daughter past dinner. It’s a simple word puzzle game of forming 5 letter words but is capturing everyone's attention. It is equally cool that they are not monetizing all the attention via on-page ads. If not already, you must try it out.

Multi-cloud and its perils

Here are some slides articulating the challenges of multi-cloud environments and their adoption. Today an average customer has at least 2 cloud vendors as part of their strategy.

In the coming days, expect a deeper dive into this topic. If there is something you would like to know, leave that in the comment.

My Reading List:

1. The art of writing online by Nicolas cole. I found Nicolas on Twitter and got hooked on his writing style and bringing clarity of thoughts. His book is proving to be a solid guide on my writing efforts. Read 25% through the book, but already worthwhile. If you engage in any type of writing and would like to improve, it's a great book to read.
2. Reading and pondering over cal Newport's various articles. the superstar effect is extremely interesting. The punch line is - Being better is not enough, you need to be different. It is one of those pieces which will inspire you to stop and take stock and recalibrate the direction you may be taking while putting in a lot of effort.

Like this small effort?

Cheers!