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The Graviton2 in all its ... erm ... glory

Amazon Web Services has flicked the switch for a new instance type powered by the second generation of its custom Arm CPUs the Graviton2.

As we noted at launch, the Graviton2 is built with a 7nm process and offers 64-bit Arm Neoverse N1 CPU cores, each with 1MB of level 2 cache while each chip has 32MB of shared level 3 cache.

The newly-live instance type is the EC2 M6g and comes in eight variants that run from one to 64 vCPUs.

AWS suggests the new instance type is best-suited to application servers, microservices, gaming servers, mid-size data stores, and caching fleets. And its secured testimonials from early users including Netflix, which said We tested the new M6g instances using industry standard LMbench and certain Java benchmarks and saw up to 50% improvement over M5 instances.

M5 instances run Intel Xeon Platinum 8175M CPUs.

Now AWS has its own silicon that can outperform those Xeons in some applications. And thats with one of the wimpier instance types it has planned for the Graviton2. M-series instances are general-purpose compute rigs. The cloud colossus has also promised C-series high-performance instances and R-series memory-optimised instances that use its own silicon. More variants "with local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage will also be available in the coming months", AWS says.

While cheaper cloud servers are lovely, theyre no use if the code your business relies on cant run on em. While plenty of code runs on Arm, Intels ecosystem-creation efforts are extensive, few enterprise products have ported to Arm and those that have, like VMwares ESXi, havent exactly found customers clamoring for the architecture . Which wont trouble those who indulge in the bounty of open source Arm-ware or shops like Netflix content to conduct bespoke development if itll save some coin.

The launch of the EC2 M6g instance is therefore a notable milestone in the evolution of Arm as an enterprise platform. But the story clearly has a long way to run.

As does AWS' use of Xeons: late last week it announced a new set of price cuts for the M-series, C-series and R-series instances when bought using its Reserved Instances or EC2 Instance Saving Plans.

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AWS unleashes custom Arm processor the Graviton2 in new EC2 M6g instance type - The Register

It seems much longer than just a couple of months ago when the spreading coronavirus outbreak began make its presence felt in the tech industry. Like in most of society, it started with calls for social distancing between people and then led to the steady domino effect of vendors canceling major technology shows or announcing that they were moving them online. The first big one to hit was Mobile World Congress, an event in February that tends to draw more than 110,000 people but that also is hosted in Barcelona, in a country that soon was consumed by coronavirus cases and deaths.

It wasnt long before vendors in the United States began canceling their in-person events. There were some that went ahead as planned the RSA 2020 security conference in San Francisco in late February being the most high-profile example, despite companies like IBM and AT&T pulling out but by that time the torrent of show cancellations had begun.

Amazon Web Services decided to do with its annual Summit conference what many others did with theirs make it a strictly virtual event online. And it was a decidedly different event this week. AWS CTO Werner Vogels, known in past Summits for stalking the stage and wiping sweat from his brow as he introduced one new feature after another, instead was on the small screen, beaming in from his home studio. And instead of the parade of new technologies and services being added to the massive numbers already available in the AWS atmosphere, his message was about taking advantage of the forced slowdown brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic to get back to basics and learn new skills, like machine learning, much of which can be done with such AWS services as Well Architected Tool and Amazon Builders Library.

Vogels also touted a range of other technologies, from S3 object storage to the Route 53 and CloudFront DNS web services. He pushed all this because, in his mind, the fallout from the Covid-19 crisis from the massive numbers of employees suddenly working from home to enterprises turning in large numbers to public clouds for business continuity to consumers turning to content streaming companies for entertainment as they stay sheltered inside has proven the resiliency of cloud infrastructures to handle skyrocketing demand for services. As proof, he pointed to a recent Nielsen study that found that on March 13, more than 161 billion minutes of video content was streamed. A year earlier, that number was fewer than 70 billion minutes.

In addition, the new reality brought on by the pandemic is changing business models going forward.

I believe that if nothing else, these past few months have truly ushered in a new era in technology, where we are seeing a fundamental shift in how everyone is viewing not only technology itself, but how to access that technology as well as how we build the technology, the CTO said. Thats what AWS helps you do. In many ways, its accelerating the path to realize a world that we had predicted many years ago. You had video conferencing inside the car from spy movies as far back as the 1960s and 3D printing was seen as pure science fiction in 1980s. It is my assertion that in 2020 and beyond, most organizations are going to be transforming into a completely cloud-based environment. Anywhere I can access any application or service from anywhere at any time.

Indeed, weve written about the rise in demand for public cloud services during the past three months and how in an IT industry that is being hit hard by the economic battering the coronavirus is delivering, some segments the public cloud and cloud-based video conferencing being two are faring well, AWS included. Gartner analysts added another proof point to this, forecasting this week that global IT spending in 2020 decline 8 percent year-over-year due to Covid-19 outbreak. That said, public cloud services spending will see a 19 percent jump this year, as will cloud-based conferencing (a 24.3 percent increase) and cloud-based telephony and messaging (8.9 percent).

Vogels also noted that industries like telemedicine are seeing demand grow and are relying on public cloud infrastructures to help them meet those demands. He pointed to a healthcare startup called Kry, which created its Care Connect online platform enabling video consultations between doctors and patients and which has seen growing demand since the pandemic began. The platform is built entirely on AWS and was launched in less than two weeks.

The focus of the Summit and of Vogels 45-minute talk was primarily on teaching developers and engineers how to build architectures within AWS and leverage the cloud giants services to ensure security, resiliency and scalability. That said, there was some news coming out of the company this week. Among that was the availability of AWS sixth-generation Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) general-purpose instance the M6g which is powered by Graviton2, the latest iteration of the companys Arm-based processor. It was designed by AWS and Annapurna Labs which is owned by Amazon leveraging Arms 64-bit Neoverse N1 cores. The first Graviton-powered EC2 instances were launched in 2018 and first talked about the Graviton2-based instances in December.

As we at The Next Platform have noted, the Graviton processors are among a growing number of Arm-based server chips making their presence felt in a space dominated by Intel and x86 architecture. After years of promise, Arm and its manufacturing partners such as Marvell and its ThunderX2 processors (inherited when it bought Cavium in 2018) and Ampere, a startup led by ex-Intel executives are making inroads. Graviton comes in as the chip developed by the company that owns about 40 percent of the booming public cloud market and is putting them in its cloud instances.

The Graviton2 processors support 256-bit DRAM encryption and include dual SIMD units to double the floating point performance of their first-generation predecessors. To accelerate machine learning inference workloads, they also support INT8/FP16 instructions. The M6g instances come in eight sizes ranging from one to 64 virtual CPUs or as bare-metal instances, come with up to 256 GB of memory, 25 Gb/sec of network performance and 19 Gb/sec of EBS bandwidth. Theyre powered by AWS Nitro System platform.

Also this week, AWS made Kendra, its new enterprise search service, generally available. The company launched a preview of the technology late last year. It was designed to address the challenge of quickly and easily finding information in the fast-growing amounts of data that is being generated. Among the key problems are that most enterprise is unstructured and that its often spread across locations and stored in a range of sites, from regional databases to third-party applications. There also is the challenge of finding the right keywords.

The machine learning-powered Kendra services can index structured and unstructured data stored in a range of backends, including file systems, applications and relational databases, and can understand complex language from an array of domains, such as IT and healthcare. The data is encrypted in flight using HTTPS and at rest with AWS Key Management Service.

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Pandemic Shows The Value Of The Public Cloud - The Next Platform

For those players who were ready to adapt quickly and reap a surge in demand, the e-commerce has been for want of a better term one of the few commercial winners of the COVID-19 crisis.

With retail outlets shut down and consumers essentially locked in, e-commerce has witnessed tremendous growth. There has been a 129 percent year-over-year growth in US & Canadian e-commerce orders as of April 21,and an impressive146 percent growth in all online retail orders.

Of course, while a surge online brought opportunity, it also came with great pressures. With supply chains in disarray, stock has been choked and delivery times have been lengthened; many e-commerce sites like grocery retailer Ocado in the UK cracked under a mass of traffic; other sites had to enforce virtual queueing systems so as not to overrun their domains.

When lockdowns are relieved and lifted, retailers cant expect a flood of customers back into the physical realm. New habits and behaviors are being cut which could linger longer.

According to new research by Kameleoon, 73 percent of consumers say current online experience from brands will change future spending post-lockdown, and 50 percent will spend less or switch from brands that have not met their needs during pandemic

That really means that businesses must focus on ensuring e-commerce experiences are seamless, competitive and flexible in spite of the turmoil.

For retailers with both physical and digital presence, creating a seamless and convenient experience between the two may help entice back a chunk of customers into the store in due course as well continuing to make things as slick as possible will be crucial.

Seemingly every industry, to a degree, has increased their reliance on cloud technology in the past few months, and the e-commerce sector is certainly no exception. Now, cloud computing applications provide the power to ramp up services and customer experiences as a result. And one of those key applications lies in payment.

Acloud-based payment system will not only bring added convenience to customers and retailers, but also provides enhanced data security and reduced costs if implemented the right way.

According toTechnavio, a global market research firm, the scope of global payment gateway systems is predicted to grow by US$23.45 billion between 2020 and 2024.

A key driver of this growth is the spike in the adoption of cloud computing technologies being used in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and their demand for cloud-based solutions to consolidate how they collect digital payments.

Payment service providers can leverage platform-as-a-service models, allowing developers to build, host and launch applications quickly without having to worry about setting up and managing their own server.

As a result, services available now allow consumers to make payments through the tap of a mobile banking app, or scanning a QR code from an e-wallet.

These options are made possible as cloud technology plays a significant role in linking and integrating EFTPOS (electronic funds transfer at point of sale) systems with other services, like Apple Pay.

For consumers who are used to the convenience and ease that technologies bring into their daily activities, they expect their transaction experiences to be seamless and secure. This is where cloud-based technologies and solutions come into play.

The clouds main feature is accessibility; operations in different locations have access to the same data and network.On the one hand, system updates and improved security happen in real-time, and all business users in theory receive the same experience. This is a clear advantage for remote working companies spread across a region, or even around the world.

On the other hand, these systems carry security risks, especially when theres a multitude of entry points, each emanating from various locations or individuals. Consumer data like credit card details, transaction histories, and other personal information are more vulnerable should a data breach happen.

All things considered, business leaders that are familiar with the pros and cons of the cloud will be careful in weighing out their options, looking at the advantages and disadvantages between public, private, and multicloud solutions, assessing and mitigating the risks.

Thebenefits of cloud computing combined with the appeal of digital payments are poised to outweigh the potential risks and adoption, while more than ever, weve seen recently that consumers are ready to embrace new forms of payment.

Last month, areportby The Business Research Company (TBRC) showed that the decline of cash payments in-store was caused by advice from the government bodies and the World Health Organization (WHO) to minimize contact and opt for contactless payment methods whenever possible.

In this respect, the global health crisis has led to a rising demand for digital payments, and the cloud is a major contributor to the development of this future-forward payment method.

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How cloud is accelerating the growth of digital payments - TechHQ

With many of the worlds organizations shifting to a fully remote work model, IT administrators need to completely reimagine their environments to maintain control and security. Cloud-forward admins like Richard Hickson are especially prepared to make the switch, using their backgrounds in cloud identity and access management (IAM) solutions to configure and control remote shops with little friction.

Hickson leverages a collection of remote commands and custom scripts to manage users machines and install applications, and were excited to have him join us for a live webinar to share his remote management toolkit with fellow admins. If your organization struggles to adapt to a fully remote model, join Hickson in this free webinar on Thursday May 21 at 11am ET.

Register Here

Hickson is a UK-based IT consultant and expert, with 15+ years of experience serving a multitude of different sectors including construction, education, advertising, finance, entertainment, and real estate.

He currently offers IT consulting and website SEO services from his hometown in Kent, UK. Hickson is proficient in macOS + Server, Microsoft Windows + Server, G Suite, VMware ESX, Ubuntu Server and Office 365 administration.

Among his many services as an IT consultant, Hickson specializes in shifting clients to cloud infrastructure, using his wizardry with commands and custom scripting to provide remote automation and management to organizations.

In this live digital event, Hickson will share some of the remote command and scripting skills hes developed to guide attendees through the twists and turns of remote device and application management.

Specifically, Hickson will cover:

After the presentation, Hickson will field questions from the audience for the remainder of the event.

Learn more about what youll take away from the webinar here:

Originally posted here:
Live Webinar Preview: Commands & Custom Scripting for Remote Application Installs - Security Boulevard