Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Why Amazon’s multi-billion dollar AI alliance with Anthropic isn’t the game-changer it needs to remain king of the cloud – Fortune

When Amazon announced Wednesday that it had showered the hot AI startup Anthropic with an additional $2.75 billion to complete the $4 billion investment it had announced last fall, the company positioned the news as a royal win.

Amazons AWS, the king of cloud computing (with nearly a third of global market share), was deepening its partnership with Anthropic, the number two prince (Harry, not William) of generative AI foundation models. Under the pact, Anthropic will use AWS as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, and train and deploy its future AI models on Amazons homegrown chips, while AWS customers get access to future generations of Anthropics AI technology.

Look more closely however, and the deal seems less like a sign of Amazon perpetuating its cloud dominance into the Gen AI era, and more like a hint at how vulnerable the company has become in a shifting landscape.

Amazon, considered a laggard in the race to deploy generative AI technology,reallyneeds Anthropics highly-touted models, including the most recent Claude 3. At the same time though, Amazon is hitching its cart to an AI startup that, while boasting impressive technology, will not instantly distinguish or differentiate Amazon from the competition since Google is also an Anthropic partner.

Pairing up with Anthropic is a necessary and beneficial move for Amazon. But with the AWS empire under siege, the question is whether the deal is too little too late.

AWS continues to be the reigning champion of the cloud business, with 31% global market share in 2023s fourth quarter. But the race is getting tighter. Microsoft Azure, AWSs biggest cloud competitor, has edged closer with 24%, while Google Cloud has 11%. Both Microsoft and Google have seen cloud growth thanks to their Gen AI offerings the former with its powerhouse partnership with OpenAI, and the latter with its Bard and Gemini AI momentum.

According to Forrester principal analyst Tracy Woo, Amazons Gen AI efforts have not been very impressive. It took three, four months [for Amazon] to come up with any sort of generative AI-specific announcements [in 2023], Woo told Fortune, adding that the results were really lackluster.

The announcements at Amazons Re:invent conference in December 2023 including Amazon Q, a generative AI work assistant, and next generation AWS-designed chips should have been a resounding response to show that youre firmly back as the number one cloud provider that everyone looks to, Woo said. Instead, it was underwhelming especially given the competition with Microsoft, and its alliance with OpenAI.

Amazon announced the equivalent of a shiny engine, wheel and pane of glass for the windows, while Microsoft came out with a Rolls Royce marketing its Copilot offering for Azure and OpenAI models like a car that flies, it goes in the water, it is incredible.

Microsofts bread-and-butter has always been software packages and solutions that slot perfectly into the enterprise workflow, so its not surprising that the company made such a strong showing. But Amazons underwhelming announcements underscored how mismatched the cloud competitors remain when it comes to the software side of things.

The AWS strong suit has always been infrastructure. And leveraging that skillset to differentiate is one way Amazon could try to get an edge. But theres danger there too, thanks to the rise of Nvidia, whose GPUs rule the roost, and are only getting better with Blackwell, the new Nvidia AI chip announced at its GTC conference.

While its possible for Amazon to pull off an infrastructure cloud play, said Woo, the company would have to do things differently.

Everyone builds on CUDA, she said. So to ask everyone to rearrange their software architecture so they can cater to these AI-based TPUs that AWS has come up with is a huge ask.

At this point, AWS is arguably behind in both AI infrastructure and AI software, but no one should count out the cloud king, Woo emphasized. While Amazon missed the boat on recognizing that the cloud race was no longer at the infrastructure but had moved up the stack to AI-powered software solutions she added that with AWS, anything is possible.

I see this as a little bit of a desperation call from [Amazon CEO Andy] Jassy responding to his shareholders, she said. [AWS CEO] Adam Selipskyreally understands the market and so I have a lot of confidence that he can steer the ship in the right direction. Of course, Amazon has never been identified as the AI cloud king so they have a huge uphill battle ahead of them, she added. But I think they are resilient. They are an aggressive company that moves aggressively they are not fat and happy.

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Why Amazon's multi-billion dollar AI alliance with Anthropic isn't the game-changer it needs to remain king of the cloud - Fortune

Russian businesses get shut out from Microsoft cloud services at the end of this month new EU sanctions come into … – Tom’s Hardware

To comply with the EU regulations outlined in December 2023, Microsoft will cease the provision of cloud services to Russian organizations at the end of this month. This was originally meant to happen on March 20, but extra time has been given to impacted organizations to migrate to alternative solutions.

As a result of the above implementation of EU sanctions, organizations in Russia will no longer have access to best-in-class Microsoft products including Office 365 apps, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Azure, SharePoint, Visual Studio, SQL Server, as well as LinkedIn apps and Media Player development kits.

There have been no reports indicating that Microsoft will be restricting its cloud services to individuals, and hence they remain accessible to the general Russian public for now. Meanwhile, the Russian government has made efforts to promote domestic alternatives to ensure the continued smooth operations of private companies and organizations.

The Russian Ministry of Digital Transformation, Communication, and Mass Media anticipated this kind of move by foreign cloud service providers like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. Thus, last year it started to advise Russian organizations to make the transition to domestically made alternatives.No specific domestic alternatives were named or pointed to - so we don't know how the affected organizations will cope. The EU regulations specifically mention imposing a ban on providing software for managing a wide range of essential business operations.

This latest imposition of sanctions comes as a result of Russia's war against Ukraine, and the aggression which has continued for over two years. Sanctions are usually used against countries in such situations with some success. Typically some tech products avoid sanctions by being shipped via third-party distributors and sold in Russia, but other important sanction policies cannot be circumvented, such as the SWIFT ban preventing online transactions via banks.

On the hardware side of tech, reports suggest that China and Russia still enjoy component imports for chipmaking equipment, PCs, and servers. Interestingly the sanctions have also provided profits for scalpers from other nations, and we have seen some smugglers get caught, their goods confiscated, and facing likely legal proceedings.Meanwhile, it is thought some Russian entities subscribe to Microsoft cloud services using foreign accounts or using other bypass methods.

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Russian businesses get shut out from Microsoft cloud services at the end of this month new EU sanctions come into ... - Tom's Hardware

Cloud Computing, AI, and Data Trends in Latin America: Cloud Remains at the Center of Digital Transformation – PR Newswire

DUBLIN, March 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The "State of the Cloud in Latin America: Maximizing Business Success through Cloud Computing, AI, and Data" report has been added toResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

In Latin America, businesses increasingly adopt cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies to support their strategic business growth. Despite a projected slower economic growth in 2024, digital transformation remains robust. Companies seek external partners to assist them in their journey toward full digitization. Sustainability is also gaining relevance, leading businesses to choose technologies that promote energy efficiency and emission reduction.

These are among the key findings from the 2023 Cloud User survey of Latin American businesses. The data is derived from respondents operating in the 4 largest markets in the region: Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia.

Key Topics Covered:

Key Findings

Enterprise Cloud Adoption in Latin America

Cloud Remains at the Center of Digital Transformation

Sustainability Gains Prominence in Latin America

Latin America's Emerging Third-party Collaborations

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/t9k8gl

About ResearchAndMarkets.com ResearchAndMarkets.com is the world's leading source for international market research reports and market data. We provide you with the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends.

Media Contact:Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [emailprotected]

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SOURCE Research and Markets

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Cloud Computing, AI, and Data Trends in Latin America: Cloud Remains at the Center of Digital Transformation - PR Newswire

Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Udemy Announce New Partnership to Supercharge the Next Generation of … – PR Newswire

The partnership seeks to help millions of current and aspiring developers upskill on key Kubernetes disciplines to enhance their level of cloud native proficiency

PARIS, March 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/ --KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, has partnered with Udemy (Nasdaq: UDMY), a leading online skills marketplace and learning platform. Announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024, this new partnership will endorse content to support CNCF's audienceof more than 233,000 project contributors and millions of current and aspiring cloud native developers across the globe to help them prepare for various CNCF certification exams.

"Cloud native technology has become the backbone of what runs the world's infrastructure," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. "Thousands of leading organizations from Spotify to Zendeskrely on cloud native technologies to drive innovation and scale infrastructure. Udemy has a vast catalog of relevant course content and we believe that togetherthrough the endorsement of courses created by CNCF Ambassadors and project maintainers who are also instructors on Udemywe will enable developers to upskill quickly and keep pace with innovation."

Through this new partnership, developers will be able to leverage Udemy's high-quality technical course content, including a comprehensive library of cloud native content and customized learning paths, to prepare for many of the organization's certification exams, including the prestigious Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

As the need for cloud native developers continues to increase, a recent study by CNCF revealed that almost 55% of developers were able to land a new job as a result of training and certification courses. Additionally, 67% of respondents said it made them feel more engaged and fulfilled in their work.

"As one of the world's largest IT certification training providers, with more than 10 million enrollments in IT certification training courses over the past year alone, Udemy is uniquely positioned to help developers and organizations grow at scale," said Greg Brown, President and CEO at Udemy. "We couldn't be more excited to partner with CNCF to upskill and empower the next generation of cloud native developers together."

In fact, more than 840,000 Udemy learners have enrolled in a Kubernetes course over the past 12 months. Additionally, as learners prepare for certification exams, demand for Kubernetes certification preparation courses is up 18% year-over-year, with more than 140,000 enrollments across the Udemy platform.

To get started with the CNCF-endorsed courses on Udemy, developers can visit: https://business.udemy.com/cncf-endorsed-content/.

About Cloud Native Computing FoundationCloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit: http://www.cncf.io.

Trademark DisclaimerThe Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademarkusage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

About UdemyUdemy(Nasdaq: UDMY) transforms lives through learning by providing flexible and effective skills development and validation. Through the Udemy Intelligent Skills Platform and its community of instructors, millions of learners gain expertise in a wide range of technical and professional skills from generative AI to leadership. The Udemy marketplace provides learners with thousands of up-to-date courses in dozens of languages, offering a variety of solutions to achieve their goals. Udemy Business empowers enterprises to offer on-demand learning for all employees, immersive learning for tech teams, and cohort learning for leaders. Udemy Business customers include Fender, Glassdoor, On24, The World Bank, and Volkswagen. Udemy is headquartered in San Francisco with hubs in Ankara and Istanbul, Trkiye; Denver, USA; Dublin, Ireland; Gurugram, India; and Melbourne, Australia.

Safe Harbor NoticeThis press release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include all statements other than those of historical fact, including information concerning our future operating results and financial position, anticipated future expenses and investments, the timing and impact of our new product initiatives, business strategies and plans, market growth, market position and potential market opportunities, and the impact of acquisitions and business alliances. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations, plans, and assumptions, which we have made in light of our experience in the industry, as well as our perceptions of historical trends, current conditions, expected future developments, and other factors we believe are appropriate under the circumstances, taking into account the information currently available to us. These statements are only predictions based upon our current expectations and projections about future events. Various factors, including those identified in the "Risk Factors" section of our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), could cause our actual results, level of activity, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Additional factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in forward-looking statements can be found in our other filings with the SEC which are available, free of charge, on the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov. Any forward-looking statement made by us in this presentation speaks only as of the date of this letter and is expressly qualified in its entirety by the cautionary statements included in this letter. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or review any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise, except as may be required by any applicable laws. You should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements.

Media ContactsJessie Adams-Shore The Linux Foundation [emailprotected]

Ellen D. Kiehl Udemy [emailprotected]

Investor ContactDennis Walsh Udemy [emailprotected]

SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation

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Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Udemy Announce New Partnership to Supercharge the Next Generation of ... - PR Newswire

45 New Members Join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation – PR Newswire

As the community convenes at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Paris, CNCF welcomes continued investment from organizations around the world

PARIS, March 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ --KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe The Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced today that 45 new members have joined the Foundation. Together with hundreds of organizations spanning continents and industries, these new members will help drive cloud native innovation to respond to the diverse and pressing challenges organizations face.

"Every quarter it is inspiring to see the number of diverse organizations who are contributing to and leveraging cloud native technologies, and who endeavor further involvement with the community," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF. "Without the investment from these forward-thinking companies, we would not be able to achieve what we have thus far in building an incredible ecosystem around Kubernetes, responding to challenges we didn't even know existed when we started in 2015. We look forward to working together with these new members."

About the newest Silver Members:

About the newest End User Member:

About the newest End User Supporters:

About the newest Nonprofit Member:

More information is available about End User support and membership.

The CNCF End User Community group regularly meets to share adoption best practices and feedback on project roadmaps and future projects for CNCF technical leaders to consider.

Additional Resources

About Cloud Native Computing FoundationCloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit http://www.cncf.io.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademarkusage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media ContactJessie Adams-Shore The Linux Foundation [emailprotected]

SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation

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45 New Members Join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation - PR Newswire

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Member Akamai Upgrades Its Membership to Gold – PR Newswire

The distributed cloud provider increases its investment in the cloud native ecosystem, earmarking $1 million in credits forCNCF compute infrastructure projects

PARIS, March 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ --KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced that Akamai has increased its membership to Gold. As part of its increased investment, Akamai will contribute $1 million in infrastructure credits for Foundation projects.

Akamai operates the world's most distributed cloud platform, built for companies that want to deliver better experiences by running workloads closer to users, devices, and sources of data. Akamai's cloud platform is designed to meet the needs of modern applications that require higher performance, lower latency, and true global scalability that current cloud architectures were not built to provide. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences making life better for billions of people, billions of times a day.

"Cloud native design is critical to building a more distributed and open cloud," said Ari Weil, Chief Cloud Evangelist at Akamai. "Increasing our commitment to the cloud native community is a key part of our effort to build an open platform for developers and support projects that help businesses build and scale edge-native applications. Cloud native technologies give our customers the flexibility to bring software to our platform that best fits their workload requirements and approved architectures, versus those prescribed by a more centralized, platform-centric provider."

Akamai has deep, established roots in the open source community. Akamai is both a consumer of and contributor to open source projects, and has been, since its inception. Akamai has contributed to the Linux kernel to make it more secure and participated in projects that have won the Levchin Prize for cryptography. Akamai also maintains Fingerbank, the industry's largest device fingerprinting repository, as open source. Akamai developers are active contributors to several CNCF-hosted projects, including Envoy and Trousseau. And in 2022, Akamai acquired Linux cloud pioneer Linode, followed by Ondat in 2023, a cloud-based storage technology provider with a Kubernetes-native platform for running stateful applications anywhere at scale. The cloud company is certified as part of the CNCF Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program. Its Linode Kubernetes Engine is a fully-managed K8s container orchestration engine for deploying and managing containerized applications and workloads.

"We are pleased to welcome Akamai's upgrade to Gold," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. "Investments from organizations like Akamai help ensure that the cloud native community can continue to grow, collaborate, and drive innovation across industries."

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visitwww.cncf.io.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact Jessie Adams-Shore The Linux Foundation [emailprotected]

SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation

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Cloud Native Computing Foundation Member Akamai Upgrades Its Membership to Gold - PR Newswire

Here’s The Annual Public Cloud And SaaS Bill In 2024: Report – CRN

Many businesses are spending between $1.2 million to $24 million on public clouds each year, while annual SaaS spending is typically between $600,000 and $12 million. CRN breaks down new customer spending results on public cloud and SaaS costs based off a new Flexera report.

Nearly one-third of cloud customers are spending over $12 million per year in public cloudssuch as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloudwhile another one-third of organizations are spending between $2.4 million to $12 million each year.

Thats according to Flexeras new 2024 State of the Cloud Report, which surveyed over 750 IT professionals and executive leaders mostly representing enterprise companies headquartered in the U.S.

Looking at yearly Software as-a-Service (SaaS) spending, roughly two-thirds of businesses are paying between $600,000 and $12 million annually, while 22 percent of organizations are spending over $12 million.

[Related: Nvidias 10 New Cloud AI Products For AWS, Microsoft And Google]

Flexeras findings shed light on just how much businesses are paying for SaaS and public cloud solutions typically from leading cloud computing providers AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

CRN takes a deep dive into specific data results from Flexeras new report on just how much businesses are spending annual on cloud computing and SaaS, as well as generative AI (GenAI) adoption of cloud providers AI tools.

As public cloud adoption continues to accelerate in 2024, Flexera asked its 753 respondents who mostly worked at companies with 1,000 to 10,000 employees how much they spend yearly on public clouds.

Approximately 10 percent are spending $600,000 or lower, 12 percent are spending between $600,000 and $1.2 million, while another 12 percent are spending between $1.2 million and $2.4 million.

Moving up the spending range, 16 percent of respondents report public cloud spending between $2.4 million and $6 million, 15 percent spend between $6 million and $12 million, and 10 percent are spending between $12 million and $24 million.

At the top of the spending tier, 11 percent of businesses are spending between $24 million and $60 million, while 8 percent of respondents report spending over $60 million on public clouds annually.

Click through for information annual spending on public clouds, SaaS and generative AI.

The annual spending levels on public cloud between enterprises and SMBs differ vastly.

Well over half of SMBs61 percentare spending less than $1.2 million annually on public clouds, compared to only 15 percent of enterprise.

Less than 10 percent of SMBs are spending over $6 million annually on the public cloud. Comparatively, over half of enterprises53 percentare spending at least $6 million or more on an annual basis.

Flexera said there was a 21 percent increase in 2024 year over year in organizations spending $1 million or more per month on public clouds.

Flexera said SaaS adoption is at an all-time high, but businesses face challenges such as cost management.

Regarding annual spending on SaaS, approximately 12 percent of respondents are spending $600,000 or lower, 14 percent are spending between $600,000 and $1.2 million, while another 14 percent are spending between $1.2 million and $2.4 million.

Moving up the spending range, 17 percent of respondents report SaaS spending between $2.4 million and $6 million, 17 percent spend between $6 million and $12 million, and 7 percent are spending between $12 million and $24 million.

At the top of the spending tier, 6 percent of businesses are spending between $24 million and $60 million on SaaS, while 9 percent report spending over $60 million on SaaS annually.

Similar to public cloud spending, theres a large difference in the annual amount of money enterprises are spending on SaaS compared to SMBs.

Approximately 45 percent of SMB companies spend $600,000 or less on SaaS each year, compared to only 5 percent of enterprises.

Another 38 percent of SMB companies are spending between $600,000 to $2.4 million in SaaS. Comparatively, 38 percent of enterprises spend between $2.4 million to $12 million each year on SaaS.

There are basically no SMBs who are spending over $12 million per each on SaaS, while 26 percent of enterprises are spending over $12 million annually.

Interestingly, 11 percent of enterprises are spending more than $60 million each year on SaaS.

Generative AI is one of the most popular topics in the tech industry this year. The largest cloud providers in the worldAmazon, Google and Microsoftare pouring millions of dollars into creating new GenAI solutions helping to fuel the AI boom.

Flexera said in the face of ongoing economic uncertainties, many organizations are investing in transformative initiatives such as generative AI.

One-quarter of respondents say they are already using GenAI services from cloud providers extensively.

About 22 percent are using GenAI public cloud services sparingly.

Most respondents, 38 percent, are currently experimenting with GenAI public cloud services.

Fourteen percent of businesses reported not using any GenAI public cloud services.

Overall, nearly half of all respondents are using some form of GenAI cloud service.

For the second year in a row, managing cloud spend topped cybersecurity as the top challenge facing all organizations leveraging cloud computing.

This shift is likely due to organizations becoming more comfortable with cloud security, while the increased use of cloud services leads to increased spend. Flexera said managing this spend has become a priority for organizations.

Approximately 84 percent of businesses reported better managing cloud spending was their biggest cloud challenge, followed by 81 percent who said security.

Other top cloud challenges facing organizations today are a lack of resources and expertise, as well as managing software licensesboth at 78 percent.

Cloud governance, regulatory compliance, cloud migration and managing multiple clouds were also high on the list of customers top challenges in 2024.

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Here's The Annual Public Cloud And SaaS Bill In 2024: Report - CRN

Microsoft is now blocking Russian firms from using its cloud services – TechRadar

Microsoft will stop providing cloud services to users in Russia later this weeks as part of the sanctions package imposed on the country by its Western peers.

The company has set up a dedicated Telegram channel to support its clients, and urged everyone to make backups of their data as soon as possible.

Power BI, and Dynamics CRM are just some of the tools that will no longer be available to Russian customers from March 20.

As per the reports, Elena Volotovskaya, VP for investments at Russian IT company Softline, confirmed the news, saying all Microsoft clients received a warning letter earlier this month.

Volotovskaya also said that other major global cloud providers, Amazon, and Google, will soon follow in Microsofts footsteps for the same reason, and that local companies should switch to local service providers, if they havent done so already.

While disruptive, this news shouldnt come as much of a surprise to anyone in Russia, claims general director of the Basalt SPO company, Alexey Smirnov. The 12th sanctions package, part of which is the removal of Western cloud services, was adopted on December 19, 2023, so Russian firms had roughly three months to prepare for the inevitable.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago, Ukraines western allies (the U.S., the majority of EU countries, and more), have been pressuring Russia into giving up on its special military operation through economic sanctions, while giving Ukraine significant military aid in weapons and ammunition.

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Arguably the biggest disruption in the Russian market was caused by the countrys removal from the SWIFT financial transaction processing system. The two biggest card and payment service providers, Visa and MasterCard, have also quit the market.

Via Windows Report

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Microsoft is now blocking Russian firms from using its cloud services - TechRadar

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces CERN as the Top End User Award Winner – PR Newswire

During KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, research leader CERN is recognized as an exceptional end user of cloud native technologies

PARIS, March 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and one of the world's largest and most respected centers for scientific research, has been awarded the CNCF Top End User Award. Two times a year, CNCF recognizes the significant contributions made by CNCF End User members across the cloud native ecosystem.

Since 2020, CERN has been a CNCF end user member and has been significantly involved in the cloud native community. CERN's infrastructure is responsible for storing and processing over 1 exabyte of data. At the core of its cloud native strategy lies Kubernetes, which allows the orchestration of containerized workloads across CERN's infrastructure. The laboratory has also embraced CNCF projects, including Prometheus, Argo, FluentD, CoreDNS, and Harbor, which have supported the management of over 500 clusters with thousands of nodes.

"CERN's innovative use of cloud native technologies is a shining example of how open source and collaboration can drive cutting-edge research," said Taylor Dolezal, head of ecosystem, CNCF. "By leveraging Kubernetes and other CNCF projects at an immense scale, CERN demonstrates the power of cloud native to tackle the world's most complex challenges. We are thrilled to recognize their outstanding contributions with the Top End User Award."

Adopting cloud native technologies has significantly impacted CERN's ability to operate at hyperscale. The adoption of projects beyond Kubernetes has facilitated the integration of CERN's identity, networking, monitoring, and storage services, highlighting CERN's commitment to cloud native principles. CERN's initiatives, like exploring a rootless stack or promoting advanced workload scheduling primitives for integrating High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources and enhancing container management, demonstrate its forward-looking approach to leveraging cloud native technologies to address future scientific and operational challenges.

"CERN is deeply committed to promoting innovation and collaboration within the cloud native ecosystem and has made multifaceted contributions to the CNCF community," said Ricardo Rocha, Computing Engineer at CERN as well as a member of the CNCF End User Technical Advisory Board (TAB) and CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC). "By transitioning from a "build-it-yourself" culture to one emphasizing collaboration, CERN has actively engaged with the CNCF community, sharing its wealth of knowledge and best practices. This engagement has allowed CERN to focus more on its core mission of scientific research while contributing to the collective advancement of cloud native technologies. We are very honored to have been awarded this recognition and take this opportunity to thank the CNCF and the cloud native community for helping us push the boundaries of our computing infrastructure."

CERN has also participated in CNCF events and programs, including the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Through CNCF Online Programs, CERN hosts sessions on managing large-scale cluster deployments, sharing valuable insights into the team's challenges, solutions, and learnings with the broader community.

CNCF's end user ecosystem is home to many innovative and active members, including two runner-ups for this year's award: Expediaand Shopify.

CERN is one of more than 150 organizations in the CNCF End User Community, which meets regularly to share adoption best practices and feedback on project roadmaps and future projects for CNCF technical leaders to consider.

Additional Resources

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry's top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world's largest cloud computing and software companies and innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit http://www.cncf.io.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media ContactJessie Adams-Shore The Linux Foundation [emailprotected]

SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation

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Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces CERN as the Top End User Award Winner - PR Newswire

Oracle and NVIDIA to Deliver Sovereign AI Worldwide – NVIDIA Blog

GTCOracle and NVIDIA today announced an expanded collaboration to deliver sovereign AI solutions to customers around the world. Oracles distributed cloud, AI infrastructure, and generative AI services, combined with NVIDIAs accelerated computing and generative AI software, are enabling governments and enterprises to deploy AI factories.

These AI factories can run cloud services locally, and within a countrys or organizations secure premises with a range of operational controls, supporting sovereign goals of diversifying and boosting economic growth.

As AI reshapes business, industry, and policy around the world, countries and organizations need to strengthen their digital sovereignty in order to protect their most valuable data, said Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle. Our continued collaboration with NVIDIA and our unique ability to deploy cloud regions quickly and locally will ensure societies can take advantage of AI without compromising their security.

In an era where innovation will be driven by generative AI, data sovereignty is a cultural and economic imperative, said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. Oracles integrated cloud applications and infrastructure, combined with NVIDIA accelerated computing and generative AI services, create the flexibility and security nations and regions require to control their own destiny.

Turnkey Solutions to Help Customers Meet Data Sovereignty The combination of NVIDIAs full-stack AI platform with Oracles Enterprise AI deployable across OCI Dedicated Region, Oracle Alloy, Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud, and Oracle Government Cloud offers customers a state-of-the-art AI solution that provides greater control over operations, location, and security to help support digital sovereignty.

Countries across the globe are increasingly investing in AI infrastructure that can support their cultural and economic ambitions. Across 66 cloud regions in 26 countries, customers can access more than 100 cloud and AI services spanning infrastructure and applications to support IT migration, modernization, and innovation.

The companies combined offerings can be deployed via the public cloud or in a customers data center in specific locations, with flexible operational controls. Oracle is the only hyperscaler capable of delivering AI and full cloud services locally, anywhere. OCI services and pricing are consistent across deployment types to simplify planning, portability, and management.

Oracles cloud services leverage a range of NVIDIAs stack, including NVIDIA accelerated computing infrastructure and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, including newlyannounced NVIDIA NIM inference microservices, which are built on the foundation of NVIDIA inference software such as NVIDIA TensorRT, NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server.

Sovereign AI Pioneers Avaloq, a leader in wealth management technology, selected OCI Dedicated Region to bring a complete OCI cloud region into its own data center.

OCI Dedicated Region aligns with our commitment to ensure maximum control over data residency while providing access to the latest cloud infrastructure, said Martin Bchi, chief technology officer at Avaloq. This supports us as we continue to drive the digital transformation of banks and wealth managers.

TEAM IM, a leading New Zealand information management services provider, chose Oracle Alloy to build New Zealands first locally owned and operated hyperscale cloud known as TEAM Cloud.

Organizations in New Zealand are increasingly eager to harness the power of the cloud while safeguarding the integrity of their data within their own shores by leveraging a unique hyperscale cloud solution, said Ian Rogers, chief executive officer of TEAM IM. With Oracle Alloy and the possibility of integrating the NVIDIA AI platform into our cloud services, weve been able to become a cloud services provider that can assist public sector, commercial and iwi organizations in navigating the intricacies of the digital landscape and optimizing their digital transformations.

e& UAE, telecom arm of e& group, is collaborating with Oracle to enhance its AI capabilities and intends to deploy NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU clusters within its OCI Dedicated Region.

OCI will enable us to deploy NVIDIA H100 GPU clusters within our own OCI Dedicated Region, hosted at e& UAE data centers, said Khalid Murshed, chief technology and information officer (CTIO) of e& UAE. This type of localization will allow us to accelerate AI innovation across the UAE and helps us develop new Gen AI applications and use cases at scale. This is in line with e& UAEs transformation efforts to pioneer innovation and shape the future of technology with our focus on driving excellence in AI to provide unparalleled customer experiences.

OCI Supercluster and OCI Compute Boosted with NVIDIA Grace Blackwell To help customers address the ever-increasing needs of AI models, Oracle plans to take advantage of the latest NVIDIA Grace Blackwell computing platform, announced today at GTC, across OCI Supercluster and OCI Compute. OCI Supercluster will become significantly faster with new OCI Compute bare metal instances, ultra-low-latency RDMA networking, and high-performance storage. OCI Compute will adopt both the NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip and the NVIDIA Blackwell B200 Tensor Core GPU.

The NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip will power a new era of computing. GB200 delivers up to 30X faster real-time large language model (LLM) inference, 25X lower TCO, and requires 25X less energy compared to the previous generation of GPUs, supercharging AI training, data processing, and engineering design and simulation. NVIDIA Blackwell B200 Tensor Core GPUs are designed for the most demanding AI, data analytics, and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

NVIDIA NIM and CUDA-X microservices, including NVIDIA NeMo Retriever for retrieval- augmented generation (RAG) inference deployments, will also help OCI customers bring more insight and accuracy to their generative AI copilots and other productivity tools using their own data.

NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Comes to DGX Cloud on OCI To meet escalating customer demand for increasingly complex AI models, the companies are adding NVIDIA Grace Blackwell to NVIDIA DGX Cloud on OCI. Customers will be able to access new GB200 NVL72-based instances through this co-engineered supercomputing service designed for energy-efficient training and inference in an era of trillion-parameter LLMs.

The full DGX Cloud cluster buildout will include more than 20,000 GB200 accelerators and NVIDIA CX8 InfiniBand networking, providing a highly scalable and performant cloud infrastructure. The cluster will consist of 72 Blackwell GPUs NVL72 and 36 Grace CPUs with fifth-generation NVLink.

Availability Oracle and NVIDIAs sovereign AI solutions are available immediately. To learn more, go to the Oracle sovereign AI page.

Additional Resources

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Oracle and NVIDIA to Deliver Sovereign AI Worldwide - NVIDIA Blog