March held a mixed bag of news for those following the cloud networking space. While costs and egress fees announcements by the hyperscalers continued to make headlines, the broader narrative touched everything from AI, to multicloud, to Kubernetes.
Read on for the thought-provoking March stories you may have missed!
SDxCentral
AWS echoes Google Cloud move to waive data transfer fees to address anticompetitive practices
Under growing pressure from regulators, AWS followed Google Cloud’s lead and announced it is waiving fees associated with data transfer out to the internet (DTO) from the AWS cloud. As Emma Chervek reports, a recent investigation by communications regulator Ofcom found egress fees are significantly higher with hyperscalers than at smaller cloud providers, and discourage customers from transferring to other clouds and/or adopt a multicloud model.
Silverlinings
The conversation about egress fees is far from over
As you may have guessed, later in the month Microsoft Azure followed suit in waiving egress fees. But as Diana Goovaerts aptly pointed out, this hardly means high egress fees are a solved issue for hyperscaler customers. According to Gartner, egress fees from everyday data movement still amount to 10-15% of customer cloud bills.
Network Computing
Defining AI's Role in Network Management
Not to let a month pass us by without a mention of AI, John Edwards penned a great piece articulating how network managers will be impacted by this rapidly evolving technology. As he says, “AI is poised to fundamentally change the way networks are monitored and managed.” He goes on to explain how everything from routine and mundane tasks to network operations and management and issues remediation will change with AI. But rest assured, there will still be a place for humans.
Dynatrace
New research from Dynatrace on the state of observability contained interesting multicloud findings. Notably, the average multicloud environment now spans 12 different platforms and services, and 84% say multicloud complexity makes applications more difficult to protect. My takeaway? This is further justification for the convergence of networking and security we’re seeing in the market.
InfoWorld
Is Kubernetes worth it?
In his latest, David Linthicum argues that container workloads have a higher total cost of ownership than they should and may be overapplied. He lays out key considerations when determining whether or not Kubernetes is right for your organization’s needs. Following the inertia coming out of this month’s KubeCon, it’s a conversation – or at least internal dialog – worth having.
What do you think of these stories - any articles you loved that we missed? Are you seeing these trends play out in your organization?