iTWire - Enterprise Cloud

AWS to boost Australian cloud infrastructure

2023-04-04T10:18:56+10:00

Amazon Web Services plans to spend $13.2 billion to expand its cloud infrastructure in Sydney and Melbourne between 2023 and 2027.

The company said the investment is needed to meet growing customer demand for its services in Australia.

To put the sum into perspective, AWS spent more than $9.1 billion in its Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region between 2012 and 2022.

In addition, AWS launched its Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region in January 2023.

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"For over a decade, AWS has invested billions of dollars into Australia through infrastructure and jobs, and worked closely with the public sector, and local customers and partners, to be a force multiplier across the nation," said AWS managing director for Australia and New Zealand Rianne Van Veldhuizen.

"We are committed to positive social and economic impact, investing in local community engagement programs, workforce development initiatives, cloud infrastructure, and renewable energy project investments. Our plan to invest more than $13 billion into the country over the next five years will help create more positive ripple effects, further solidifying Australia's position in the global economy."

Amazon has pledged to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2030, and is on track to achieve this goal by 2025.

In Australia, it is committed to take at total of 262MW from utility-scale renewable projects located in Suntop and Gunnedah in New South Wales, and one that is under development in Hawkesdale, Victoria.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said "Economic and infrastructure investment from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services helps create jobs, advances digital skills, boosts innovation, and uplifts local communities and businesses. The Australian Government acknowledges AWS's investment into the nation over the past decade, and welcomes its planned investment over the next five years, the full-time jobs supported annually, and contribution to the nation's GDP."

Tech Council of Australia CEO Kate Pounder said "Investments from tech companies like AWS in Australia have an outsized positive impact on the wider economy. Not only do they bring the direct financing and jobs, but their cloud infrastructure has also enabled the growth of a globally competitive Australian software sector, which has become one of the most successful new industries created in Australia in decades. The support for digital skilling also enables our workforce to learn from leading tech companies, with spillover benefits across the Australian economy. The tech sector will be a key driver of future prosperity in Australia, and AWS's contribution will help propel us forward."

AWS's Australian customers include Atlassian, Australian Bureau of Statistics, National Australia Bank, NSW Health Pathology, Qantas, Swoop Aero, and WA Department of Education.

Uber selects Oracle Cloud to accelerate innovation and drive profitability

2023-02-14T22:36:36+11:00

Ride-sharing company Uber has entered into a seven-year strategic cloud partnership with Oracle, migrating its most critical workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The move enables Uber to modernise its infrastructure, which will deliver new products to market more rapidly and bring increased profitability.

Uber says as it continues to grow and enter new markets it is increasingly important to focus resources on its core strengths and strategic initiatives. By migrating some of the company’s most critical workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Uber will be in a position to modernise its infrastructure while also accelerating its path to profitability.

“Uber is revolutionising the way people, products, and services move across continents and through cities,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. “To deliver on that promise for customers while building value for shareholders, we needed a cloud provider that will help us maximise innovation while reducing our overall infrastructure costs. Oracle provides an ideal combination of price, performance, flexibility, and security to help us deliver incredible customer service, build new products, and increase profitability.”

Oracle states the new strategic partnership, along with recent analyst reports, serves as a robust validation of OCI’s strategy and product vision. Oracle says customers want both flexibility and best-in-class price-performance infrastructure across a global footprint, and that only OCI can provide it. Uber can now take advantage of these capabilities.

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One important differentiator of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure against its competitors is its ability to provide far more flexibility around machine sizing, with customers selecting CPU, RAM, and disk that suits their requirements rather than being subject to machine sizes that suit the hyperscaler's server packing. iTWire previously reported that Gartner's magic quadrants over the previous three years showed a major shift in OCI's ranking from niche player to visionary.

“Uber is expanding into a ‘go anywhere, get anything’ platform, and the company needed a cloud partner that shares a relentless focus on innovation,” said Oracle CEO Safra Catz. “This landmark competitive win for OCI is further validation of the momentum and acceleration we are experiencing in the market. Enterprises, governments, and startups around the world are recognizing the differentiation of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and experiencing our performance, security, and economic benefits versus other hyperscalers.”

The strategic partnership also sees other areas of collaboration; Oracle will become a global Uber for Business client, selecting Uber as a preferred rideshare for its employees travel and eating across the globe.

Further, Uber and Oracle will continue to co-innovate on other retail and delivery solutions that will evolve out of the partnership.

NetApp 2023 cloud and data trends for ANZ

2023-02-01T01:18:18+11:00

With the new year underway, 2023 will deliver several significant developments for the industry on the cloud and data fronts. cloud storage and data fabric provider, NetApp, has a watch list for cloud trends, courtesy of NetApp ANZ VP and MD Matt Hurford.

Matt Hurford predicts the following.

Addressing the ICT skills gap

While the Federal Government and the local tech sector have a shared commitment to achieving 1.2 million tech jobs in Australia by 2030, the skills gap among ICT talent is expected to intensify over the coming year.

The shortage of technical talents can undermine the adoption of emerging, cloud-based technologies. Managing multiple clouds and on-premises environments together can be tricky and inefficient. As businesses continue to prioritise digital transformation and hybrid multi-cloud adoption picks up, IT leaders will need to ensure their teams are sufficiently upskilled to narrow to the gap.

Going into 2023, we expect more organisations to leverage AIOps to simplify and standardise their operations, reducing their need for workload-specific skills. Solutions that integrate data and cloud infrastructure under a unified controlled pane will empower ICT talents with generalist skillsets to perform specialised tasks, and mitigate the impact of the critical skills gap.

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Delivering a better hybrid multi-cloud experience for enterprises

Organisations have increasingly moved to hybrid, multi-cloud environments to accelerate their digital transformation and drive growth, even in uncertain times. Already, 84 per cent of APAC enterprises (ref. 1 below)have adopted a multi-cloud approach. However, many enterprises realised their cloud is not living up to its full potential due to complexity; siloed, disparate environments; security risks; and rising costs.

Public cloud spending in APAC is expected to continue its rise by 28 per cent YoY (ref. 2 below) in 2023. In NSW, the state government expects all its agencies to be using the public cloud for a minimum of 25 per cent of their ICT services by the end of this year.

While this continued migration to the cloud is not surprising, sustained supply chain challenges are pushing buyers to look beyond on-prem hardware to ease procurement challenges. Moving forward, more organisations will take a strategic approach that seamlessly connects a mix of cloud and on-prem environments.

In the next phase of the evolved cloud, enterprises will turn to a unified control plane to remove management complexity, stay secure against evolving cyber threats, be sustainable, and cut costs through automation, whether their data resides on the cloud or on-prem. This will put organisations in a position to focus on innovation and drive their business.

Achieving true sustainability

Eighty per cent of Australian organisations recognise that technological innovation has a key role to play in improving environmental sustainability (ref. 3 below). In order to reach their net-zero targets, IT vendors will need to work towards creating greener value chains and showcase solutions that can drive sustainable outcomes for both customers and partners. When we consider the massive carbon footprint of global data storage, of which only 32 per cent of all data created is ever used (ref. 4 below), efficient management must be top of mind.

At NetApp, we are helping our customers minimise their environmental footprint by moving on-prem storage to greener public clouds. We also have industry-leading tools to audit consumption, locate waste, and automatically set guardrails to stop overprovisioning through a single control pane. This reduces carbon emissions and saves operational costs.

Pre-empting quantum hybrid computing’s impact on cybersecurity

While quantum hybrid computing is still some time away from mass adoption, it is emerging as a very real threat to cybersecurity. If Australia is to become “the most cyber-secure country in the world by 2030”, as quoted recently by Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security Claire O’Neil, companies need to think about data protection now more than ever. Bad actors are increasingly sophisticated, and companies need to be equally sophisticated when it comes to their security measures.

The industry is already exploring how quantum hybrid models can help protect sensitive data more effectively and drive the development of new encryption protocols and algorithms. It is encouraging to see such forward-thinking, and stakeholders exploring a cloud-based approach to solve security issues that once seemed unsolvable.

When it comes to cloud technology, we know the only constant is change. Companies must be forward-thinking about how and where they manage their data, security, and their hybrid, multicloud infrastructures. We can’t keep the next local, national, or global crisis from happening, but with a strong cloud strategy, the impact can be mitigated.

References

1 State of Cloud Strategy Survey, Forrester and HashiCorp, 2022.

2 Asia/Pacific* Public Cloud Services to Reach US$165.2 Billion in 2026, according to IDC Forecast, IDC, 2022.

3 Accelerating the journey to net zero, Microsoft, 2022.

4 Rethink Data Report, IDC and Seagate, 2020.

AWS launches Melbourne region

2023-01-24T12:11:33+11:00

Cloud giant Amazon Web Services has launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region, its second infrastructure region in Australia.

The new region comprises three availability zones – data centres that are sufficiently separated to ensure continuity of operation, while being close enough to provide low latency for applications that use multiple zones for fault tolerance.

It also provides lower latency in general for customers located closer to Melbourne than Sydney.

Customers welcoming the new region include fintech Littlepay, property settlement platform provider Pexa, ANZ Bank and RMIT.

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"We plan to deploy our AWS targeted workloads and applications through the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region on day one and want to make it our long-term primary AWS location," said ANZ group executive of technology Gerard Florian.

"The lower latency and higher performance we expect of the new AWS Region in Melbourne will help us improve our customer experience and accelerate our cloud adoption."

RMIT vice president and deputy vice chancellor of research and innovation Professor Calum Drummond said "The launch of an AWS Region in Melbourne gives us the additional capacity to assist researchers, students, and academics to deliver world-class research outcomes that benefit society.

"We recently launched RMIT University's AWS Cloud Supercomputing facility, known as RACE. RMIT researchers are using RACE to advance battery technologies, photonics, and geospatial science. The low latency and high throughput of the AWS Region in Melbourne, combined with our high-bandwidth private fibre network, will enable researchers and students to innovate beyond the limitations of traditional on-premises data centres."

Equinix Australia was among the AWS partners welcoming the announcement.

Managing director Guy Danskine said "Melbourne is building its reputation as a world-class hub for digital business, attracting continued investment in the core infrastructure necessary to compete and thrive as a global city."

He added "With many organisations accelerating their digital transformation journey, accessing public clouds locally provides a range of benefits, such as network efficiency and cost reduction, increased data security and enhanced collaboration – essential to enabling innovation, increasing agility, and providing an optimised customer experience.

"The new AWS Melbourne region ensures its customers now have proximate architectural options modernising their IT infrastructure in a resilient and secure manner, and they can more easily deploy next generation applications which require technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence."

AWS plans to invest $6.8 billion in Australia by 2037 through the new region.

An economic impact study prepared for AWS estimates that this projected spending will support more than 2,500 full-time jobs at external businesses annually, and will add approximately $15.9 billion to Australia's GDP by 2037.

"Australia has a strong history of technical innovation, and the launch of a second AWS Region in Australia provides even greater resilience and enables more customers to develop cloud-based applications that help fuel economic development across the country," said AWS vice president of infrastructure services Prasad Kalyanaraman.

"The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region adds to our ongoing infrastructure expansion and investments in Australia since we launched the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012. We are proud to deepen our investment by driving local job creation, building cloud skills, and creating opportunities for growth and collaboration with our local customers and AWS Partners."

AWS ANZ managing director Rianne Van Veldhuizen said "Since we launched the AWS Sydney region in 2012, we've had hundreds of thousands of customers use local infrastructure to lower cost, decrease time to market, and innovate faster. Today, we're expanding this further.

I'm excited to announce AWS Melbourne region is here. It will bring cloud closer to our Victorian customers so they can store data securely, be more resilient, and deliver even lower latency. For the AWS Melbourne region, we are investing AUD 6.8 billion into the Victorian economy and support more than 2,500 jobs annually across the broader ecosystem by 2037. At AWS, we're committed to moving Australia forward and are eager to collaborate with you, our customers and partners on this launch.

Victorian Minister for Trade and Investment Tim Pallas said "We know how important access to secure cloud infrastructure is to Victorian businesses, and providing more choice will deliver a boost to the economy, support innovation, and help to create new jobs locally."

Gartner magic quadrant shows same leaders but under the surface it's Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that's gaining

2022-12-29T13:35:03+11:00

AWS has rightly cheered its continued recognition by Gartner as the leader in its annual magic quadrant research report for cloud infrastructure, but a deeper look shows the real news is the leaps and bounds Oracle is making.

AWS has been named the leader for its 12th consecutive year with Gartner noting the company has the greatest breadth and depth of any provider in the market for cloud infrastructure and platform services (CIPS).

Microsoft and Google are similarly celebrating their recurring position in the leader quadrant, both having made some gains in AWS’s space - which, while still comfortable in the top place, is not pulling away.

However, Oracle and its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, platform is the real news here.

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After all, it's no surprise to anyone that AWS is the leading hyperscaler and that Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are coming next. But it may well surprise you that Oracle - launched in late 2016 - has jumped from niche player to visionary, and is seeing relentless growth.

You can see the 2022 Magic Quadrant here. If you're on mailing lists from the big cloud providers you’ll likely have seen it already, because, understandably, they’ve been keen to flag their leading roles.

However, iTWire has overlayed the 2022 quadrant against the 2020 quadrant to give an interesting picture of what’s changed over the last two years, and this is much more interesting, in my view. And here is where we see the OCI leap.

Gartner reports this is against Oracle's historically dim reputation in some quarters due to tough compliance enforcement, aggressive sales, and inconsistent support. In other words, OCI’s growth is driven primarily by those finding appeal in the offering, vs. those who have an affection for Oracle and opt for OCI from brand loyalty.

It's clear Oracle is doing something right to achieve the growth it is seeing, and the reality is Oracle is out-innovating the competition in certain areas.

One of these is the sovereign cloud. This special subset refers to isolated in-country platforms with independent authentication, storage, and compliance requirements that Governments mandate. The competition has sovereign cloud offerings and in fact, within Australia AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Macquarie Telecom, NEXTDC, and Equinix, among others including Oracle, are all certified strategic providers by the Federal Government.

However, in general, it's Gartner's considered opinion that the AWS approach is “timid” while Oracle - used to working with Governments worldwide for several decades - has made sovereign cloud a clear and developed strategic policy.

A second factor, and in my view a significant one, is Oracle’s greater flexibility in virtual machine sizing than any of its competitors.

When you choose an AWS EC2 or an Azure virtual machine you select a pre-defined configuration of CPU cores and RAM. These increase together, meaning if you require a certain amount of RAM for, say, an in-memory cache you must also take the higher number of CPU cores that come with it, regardless of how computationally intensive your requirements may be.

Oracle started life offering flexible sizing from inception. You can explore this in the OCI cost estimator by selecting compute, and then options present themselves for you to dial up or down the number of CPUs and RAM to suit your own purposes. There are some caveats; you have a cap on the total amount of RAM and CPUs, and the amount of RAM per CPU, but for the most part it’s a choose-your-own-adventure if you have a reason to venture beyond the pre-made shapes available.

An example in practice is iLiveIT; this business delivers hyper-personalised customer experiences. Think, for instance, of your electricity bill or some other invoice. Instead of receiving the same old form as everybody else, iLiveIT can send a video explainer walking through your specific bill and providing recommendations for different plans or other content relevant to, and tailored to, your circumstance. iLiveIT COO Riaan Groenewald previously explained to iTWire that they evaluated other cloud providers but it was Oracle’s flexible shaping that enabled them to do what they do by mixing and matching CPU and RAM as needed, to provide raw power at a cost-effective price.

I'd been curious about this in the past. It makes sense, after all, that AWS (say) provide machines in specific configurations to optimise their use of the underlying hardware. Let’s say you have a physical server in your rack that has 128 cores and 512GB RAM. So, you could offer 64 virtual machines with two cores and 8GB RAM, or 32 virtual machines with four cores and 16GB RAM, or 16 virtual machines with eight cores and 32GB RAM - or other configurations and ultimately pack these into the hardware like Tetris building blocks.

By contrast, if you allow the user to pick the amount of RAM and CPU they want it becomes much more difficult to utilise your hardware optimally. Well, so I’d have thought.

Wanting to understand this, I previously raised it with OCI VP product Karan Batta. That was back in 2018 but his words always stuck with me; he said what I thought was true, but “we put the customer’s interests above our needs.”

“Why be constrained by shapes and sizes? Oracle Cloud’s underlying secret sauce is the bin packing - all of our virtualisation stack, I/O virtualisation, business logic runs outside the machine. It’s a separate piece of silicon allowing us to provision whatever the customer needs. The customer simply picks their number of cores and quantity of RAM and they’re done,” Batta explained.

I spoke with Batta again in 2020 who told me, at that time, OCI had made available the Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPU on bare metal instances - an intense processor for complex AI models and deep learning systems. "We have the largest, most performant, and most cost-effective A100 offering in the cloud because we offer double the memory and more local storage than competitors. This is the GPU instance customers have been waiting for to move to the cloud and deliver important breakthroughs,” he said.

I've spent a lot of time speaking with AWS executives and product teams, and have announced many AWS products. This is also true for Azure. However, my own personal experience is while these companies speak about their impressive, and ongoing, release of new features, it’s only been Karan Batta from OCI who has enthused effusively and passionately about the underlying hardware of their platform. Gartner highlights that OCI is out-innovating competitors and it’s my sincere belief the hardware side is a significant part of this.

There is more to say; Oracle has a commitment to on-premises cloud delivery for Governments and large enterprises who need the flexibility of cloud but the security of on-prem, and there is its always-free tier which offers more items for free for longer than the competition.

Putting it all together this is why the real news in Gartner’s latest magic quadrant isn’t that the top dog is still the top dog; it’s that OCI has moved significantly and is on the rise.

(You'll note Alibaba Cloud has also made significant gains, and iTWire also wants to highlight that success. However, Alibaba is a riskier choice for those doing business outside China and South-East Asia. Further, Alibaba’s lead in the region is likely to diminish due to regulatory influence combined with highly-active Chinese competitors such as Huawei, which appears in Gartner's quadrant for the first time in 2022, and Tencent.)

Title image credit: giografiche from Pixabay

Thales and AWS bring CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager integration to support digital sovereignty

2022-12-02T10:16:06+11:00

Thales has announced its CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager integration with the AWS External Key Store, itself introduced only this week at AWS re:Invent 2022 as part of the AWS Key Management Service. The integration allows organisations to retain control of encryption keys when migrating sensitive data to the cloud.

The AWS External Key Store was developed with Thales since its inception, and combined with CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager offers organisations looking to move critical workloads to the cloud a way to maintain sovereign control of sensitive data throughout their digital transformation journey.

“We’ve had a strong technical collaboration with Thales on the development of the AWS External Key Store specification from the very beginning, in part due to their long history of expertise developing hardware security modules and key management services,” said AWS general manager Key Management Service Ken Beer. “The cloud has become a critical point of operation across businesses, and our combined expertise provides a way of helping organisations address specific needs and know they’re getting industry-best security controls in the process.”

According to the Thales 2022 Cloud Security Study, encryption is the number one choice to protect data in the cloud. However, only about one-third (29%) of respondents report total control of their keys to encrypted data in the cloud. User-controlled encryption and key management in hybrid IT are essential safeguards to enforce digital sovereignty in a modern data-driven world governed by privacy compliance mandates, regulated sectors, or general IT security recommendations such as the Shared Responsibility Model and the NIS2 Directive.

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CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager ensures AWS External Key Store customers can satisfy these urgent regulatory requirements by leveraging strong encryption and data security methods that allow organisations to manage their data separately from the cloud service provider. Such a safeguard, also known as Hold Your Own Key (HYOK), enables organisations to maintain key ownership separate from the cloud data store.

“Varying data protection regulations across countries have presented a challenge for global organisations migrating to the cloud,” said T-Systems Cloud Service VP AWS Powerhouse Heleen Herselman. “The CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager simplifies this challenge and ensures we remain compliant while taking advantage of all the benefits of leveraging cloud services. The ability to lean on Thales’ solution has become especially important, as we, and other organisations, increasingly rely on multi-cloud environments.”

CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager is an industry-leading multi-cloud encryption key life cycle management solution that supports all major public cloud service providers. With a marked increase in multi-cloud adoption, this solution allows users to centralise key management across all clouds.

“This is the first integration on the market to solve a major pain point for AWS cloud customers: how can they utilise protected data in the AWS cloud while retaining encryption keys outside the cloud,” said Thales VP encryption products Todd Moore. “As an industry leader in key management solutions, we are proud to offer an encryption solution that provides the ability to maintain external control of keys and cryptographic operations using those keys. CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager is at the forefront of advanced digital sovereignty. We’ll continue to introduce cutting-edge security and compliance features that support organisations in their digital transformation journeys.”

The Thales CipherTrust Cloud Key Manager integration for AWS External Key Store is available today.

AWS announces it will be water positive by 2030 returning more water than it consumes

2022-11-29T22:26:28+11:00

AWS announced at its annual AWS re:Invent conference it will be water positive by 2030, returning more water to communities than it uses in direct operations.

AWS is naming this "water+", and states it has already begun work on this path. Further, as part of its commitment, it will report annually on its water usage effectiveness metric, or WUE. WUE is calculated quite easily by dividing annual water usage by the energy consumption of the computing equipment and is measured in litres per kilowatt hour, or L/kWh.

Additionally, AWS will report on new water reuse and recycling efforts, new activities to reduce water consumption in its facilities, and advancements in new and existing replenishment projects.

To get to water+ by 2030 AWS is driving four strategies: improving water efficiency, using sustainable water sources, returning water for community reuse, and supporting water replenishment projects.

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The announcement also adds to Amazon's commitment of $US 10 million to Water.org to support the launch of the Water and Climate Fund, which will deliver climate-resilient water and sanitation solutions to 100 million people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This donation will provide three billion litres of water each year to people in water-scarce areas, and will directly empower one million people with water access by 2025.

AWS Australia and New Zealand managing director Rianne van Veldhuizen said, “Water is one of our world’s most precious resources and AWS is committed to conserving and reusing water in our direct operations. I’m proud AWS is working with non-profit and public organisations to support water availability and improve water security for people and the environment. It’s still only day one of our water positive journey and we’ll continue to innovate and collaborate to drive new ways to continue leading on global water stewardship.”

A full overview of how AWS will meet water+ by 2030 is described here and Amazon explains it will return more water than it uses by 2030 here:

Splunk helps SA Health enhance patient outcomes

2022-11-22T22:14:59+11:00

Splunk has awarded SA Health with the Splunk Asia Pacific innovation award for best practices, recognising the organisation's platform design, implementation, collaboration, and leadership in the health sector.

The award was not given lightly; SA Health, along with Splunk, Hannan and Partners, and Chamonix IT Consulting, has designed and built one of the largest and most advanced Splunk deployments in Australia.

The result is a blend of Splunk Cloud, Splunk Enterprise Security, and Splunk IT Service Intelligence giving vast service visibility, increased operational efficiencies, and a technology skills uplift for approximately 100 staff.

SA Health is the first Splunk customer to receive this award, which focuses on organisations that innovate and leverage the Splunk platform to its fullest.

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“SA Health has delivered outstanding deployment of the Splunk platform, impacting the health sector so positively in a moment when it was more critical than ever. We couldn’t be more proud to recognise them for the exceptional platform implementation and collaboration,” said Splunk area vice president of Australia and New Zealand Ernie Hug. “Splunk has demonstrated continuing investment into South Australia, not only growing our team locally but also further expanding with new resources. This is an important result of this commitment to the state.”

With this implementation, SA Health has become the national leader in Splunk IT Service Intelligence design and use in the health sector, and now can monitor the health of over 20 critical sites and services that are the most vital digital services for the state's health system.

“It’s an honour for SA Health to be recognised on a global stage as we strive to continually improve our health services and enhance patient outcomes,” said SA Health chief digital officer Bret Morris. “In much the same way as a modern clinician relies on data to gain immediate insight into patient health, the Splunk platform allows us to have a deeper insight into the overall health of our digital environment and provide a more meaningful, insightful and available digital service across the health sector.”

Some of the initiatives by SA Health were the creation of a Centre of Excellence (CoE) and education programs to develop critical cyber skills for the state.

Pictured: Bret Morris (left) and Ernie Hug (right)

Terraform gains visibility, self-service, and compliance upgrades

2022-10-07T12:00:45+11:00

HashiCorp has announced the general availability of Terraform 1.3 and introduced significant enhancements to help users consistently provision and manage any cloud, infrastructure, and service.

These capabilities include day one provisioning, day two management, and beyond. If your organisation manages cloud infrastructure but isn't using Terraform, it's definitely time you checked it out. The only way to manage cloud infrastructure at scale is via automated provisioning and managing, building your workflows and security in from the beginning. While alternate cloud-specific products exist, provisioning and managing infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment brings its own set of challenges, and this is where Terraform is uniquely placed to give your organisation a single multi-cloud automation solution.

Not only does this include scripting your environment in the first place, but detecting drift - once the infrastructure is provisioned it can be challenging to ensure the actual state of resources always reflects the recorded, desired state and health. What worked at the time of provisioning - including configuration and IAM - may not continue working properly post-deployment.

HashiCorp has announced drift detection to continually check infrastructure state to detect changes and provide alerts. Announced today, continuous validation also expands checks on your infrastructure beyond configuration drift - it provides long-term visibility and checks of your infrastructure's health and lets users add assertions to ensure these pre- or post-conditions are continually passing validation. Terraform will notify users when an assertion fails, minimising risk, downtime, and costs.

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Additional announcements include no-code provisioning. The 2022 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey found skills shortages were ranked as the top multi-cloud barrier for technology practitioners and decision-makers. Traditionally, provisioning something immediately useful with Terraform requires knowledge of infrastructure or networking as well as familiarity with HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), which can create a barrier to adoption.

The introduction of the private registry for Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise made it easy to publish validated and approved modules that can be reused throughout the organization. But this degree of self-service only goes so far, as developers still have to select a module based on its contents, add it to a version control repo, create a workspace in Terraform Cloud, and provision the module from that workspace.

Given all of this, HashiCorp wanted to offer greater self-service capabilities with a new no-code provisioning workflow. In addition, letting users avoid these various processes could reduce the number of people you need to train in Terraform.

Thus, announced today, Terraform now offers no-code provisioning - allowing administrators and module publishers to manage a catalogue of no-code-ready modules for users like application developers to deploy directly to workspaces. Developers can self-serve infrastructure from the Terraform private registry by selecting the no-code-ready module they need, entering the required variables, and deploying directly into a new workspace - all without writing HCL. Platform teams can now spend less time servicing repetitive internal requests and spend more time building on existing work to drive innovation and support the business.

End users can now find no-code modules from their organization’s private registry.

Additionally, HashiCorp announced managed open policy agent (OPA) for Terraform Cloud. As organisations grow in size and infrastructure complexity they face increased risks of security breaches and non-compliance with regulatory compliance. HashiCorp previously released Sentinel, a policy as code framework, and in August of this year, HashiCorp added Sentinel policies to the Terraform Registry so that experts can create and share reusable policies with the rest of their organisation.

Today's announcement introduces managed Open Policy Agent (OPA) for Terraform Cloud, which extends the policy as code features of Terraform Cloud to support OPA, based on the Rego policy language. Support for OPA in Terraform allows customers who have already standardised on OPA to bring those policies along with them into Terraform Cloud. OPA works alongside Sentinel to increase the number of supported ways for customers to adopt a policy as code framework for secure multi-cloud provisioning.

Now you can see if your OPA policies have passed or failed within Terraform Cloud.

Other announcements include

availability of the Azure Provider Automation tool
ServiceNow ServiceGraph connected
Terraform Plugin framework (beta)

You can sign up to Terraform for free and also learn more via a Set up a No-Code Provisioning Workflow with Terraform Cloud webinar on Tuesday 1 Nov 2022.

AWS expands cloud infrastructure with new AWS local zones in Brisbane and Perth plus 25 other countries

2022-02-17T10:58:54+11:00

AWS has announced over 30 new local zones will be constructed, delivering single-digit millisecond latency performance at the edge of the cloud, including two in Australia, in Brisbane and Perth. These will complement the existing Sydney region, the upcoming Melbourne region, and edge locations in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth.

The AWS announcement comes after the successful launch of AWS local zones in 16 US cities. AWS is now expanding the local zone concept to 30 more cities, two in our own backyard here in Australia. The deployment will occur over the next two years.

An AWS local zone is an infrastructure deployment placing AWS compute, storage, database, and other services at the edge of the cloud near large population, industry, and information technology centres. What this means in practice is AWS customers can deploy applications that require single-digit millisecond latency closer to end users or on-premises data centres.

The AWS local zone allows customers to use core AWS services locally while seamlessly connecting to the rest of their workloads running in AWS regions with the same elasticity, pay-as-you-go model, APIs and toolsets.

AWS regions have been hugely successful in providing low-latency applications for most situations, but more demanding applications requiring ultra-low latency can now benefit from AWS infrastructure physically closer to users or data centres. Such applications might be engineering simulations, media, entertainment, live video streaming, real-time gaming, augmented and virtual reality, or machine learning inference at the edge.

Thus, the new AWS local zones in Brisbane and Perth will provide Australian customers in those areas single-digit millisecond performance. The other local zones will be launched across 25 countries over the next two years.

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“We know that delivering ultra-low latency applications for a seamless user experience matters for many businesses and industries, so we are excited to bring the edge of the cloud closer to more customers in Australia to help meet their requirements,” said Iain Rouse, director and county leader worldwide public sector, AWS Australia and New Zealand. “AWS Local Zones will empower more public and private organisations, innovative startups, and AWS Partners to deliver a new generation of leading edge, low-latency applications to end users, taking advantage of the cost savings, scalability, and high availability that AWS provides. The new AWS Local Zones are a continuation of our investment to support customers of all kinds and commitment to accelerate innovation by bringing cloud infrastructure to more locations in Australia.”

“Telstra is working with leading enterprise and government customers to drive transformation for the digital economy. We leverage our network infrastructure, and combine it with our edge, cloud, security, and Telstra Purple-delivered professional services, along with apps and devices to deliver digital innovation to customers in mining, agriculture, transportation, supply chain, retail and many other industries,” said Angela Logothetis, group owner for cloud, edge and industry networks, Telstra. “AWS is one of Telstra’s strategic partners and the expansion of AWS Local Zones in Perth and Brisbane will enable us to deliver the benefits of local public cloud services to more organisations in more industries - simplifying the experience and delivering greater agility to customers.”

“AWS Local Zones have the potential to deliver significant local capability for organisations in Brisbane, and enhance the speed at which we can deliver digital initiatives to benefit our citizens,” said Sandra Slater, CIO, Queensland department of transport and main roads (TMR). “Queensland TMR strategically collaborated with AWS to establish our mass migration approach to the cloud and help implement our digital business strategy to meet Queenslanders’ growing expectations for better user experiences. In working with AWS, we’ve already reduced operational expenses, unleashed data analytics capabilities, benefitted from rich security features, and enabled greater team collaboration and innovation. Access to low-latency infrastructure in Brisbane can help us to improve programs like the Cooperative and Automated Vehicle Initiative which leverages sensors, cameras, radar trackers, and other tools to help prepare for the arrival of new vehicle technologies with safety, mobility and environmental benefits on Queensland roads. These technologies generate huge amounts of data. Over 12 months, TMR’s pilot involving 350 cooperative vehicles generated about 10TB of data, with three million real-time messages processed on AWS.”

“Today’s announcement from AWS brings us even closer to our goal of delivering a digital platform set to transform experiences for our students and staff here in Western Australia,” said Jason Cowie, CIO, Curtin University. “AWS Local Zones will give us more access to compute, storage, and other services, without needing to forgo speed. Our project is unique in that we want to build a fully digital platform that shapes the next generation of experiences for our Curtin community. To build the future requires great talent and collaboration and we’ve chosen to do this with AWS and their partners because of their skills and capabilities. We welcome their continued investment in Western Australia and the flow on effect this will have for the local IT industry and the organisations that benefit from it.”

Over the next two years, new AWS local zones will launch in Amsterdam, Athens, Auckland, Bangkok, Bengaluru, Berlin, Bogotá, Brisbane, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Chennai, Copenhagen, Delhi, Hanoi, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Kolkata, Lima, Lisbon, Manila, Munich, Nairobi, Oslo, Perth, Prague, Querétaro, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Toronto, Vancouver, Vienna, and Warsaw.

“The edge of the cloud is expanding and is now becoming available virtually everywhere,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of infrastructure services, AWS. “Thousands of AWS customers using U.S.-based AWS Local Zones are able to optimise low-latency applications designed specifically for their industries and the use cases of their customers. With the success of our first Local Zones in 16 U.S. cities, we are expanding to more locations for our customers around the world who have asked for these same capabilities to push the edge of cloud services to new places. AWS Local Zones will now be available in over 30 new locations globally, providing customers with a powerful new capability to leverage cloud services within a few milliseconds of hundreds of millions of end users around the world.”

“Netflix is poised to become one of the world’s most prolific producers of visual effects and original animated content. To meet that demand, we are hiring the best artistic talent from all over the world. These artists need specialised hardware and access to petabytes of images to create stunning visual effects and animations,” said Stephen Kowalski, director of digital production infrastructure engineering, Netflix. “Historically, artists had specialised machines built for them at their desks; now, we are working to move their workstations to AWS to take advantage of the cloud. In order to provide a good working experience for our artists, they need low latency access to their virtual workstations. AWS Local Zones brings cloud resources closer to our artists and have been a game changer for these applications. By taking advantage of AWS Local Zones, we have migrated a portion of our content creation process to AWS while ensuring an even better experience for artists. We are excited about the expansion of AWS Local Zones globally, which brings cloud resources closer to creators, allowing artists to get to work anywhere in the world and create without boundaries.”