Summary Bullets:

• With AWS’ first-time attendance, all three cloud giants were present at FinOps X this year.

• The cost of AI will impact FinOps budgets.

No one is “running” in FinOps, said FinOps Foundation executive director J.R. Storment during last week’s June 19-22, 2024 FinOps X keynote speech. Storment described new community project stages as either being in the crawl, walk, or run phase, depending on their technology evolution and adoption rates. The FinOps X conference has only been around since 2022 but is quickly garnering a following, not only of technology and cloud leaders, but also various personas dedicating careers to the emerging space. Workers range from traditional IT operations professionals to non-IT workers coming from accounting and finance backgrounds as part of a reskilling trend happening in this sector. FinOps, short for financial operations, refer to sets of cloud cost management tools. The practice encompasses a relatively new operational framework and initiative being more broadly recognized among enterprises undergoing digital transformations by migrating applications to the cloud and/or creating cloud native apps.

Summary Bullets:

• Microsoft and AWS continue to invest in GenAI partnerships.

• OSS technologies begin to disrupt the GenAI space.

Cloud giants, used to pulling out all the stops in the ongoing cloud wars, are now directing a good amount of efforts (and budget) at the generative AI (GenAI) arena. Microsoft has set its sights on global dominance in the GenAI space with a new $1.5 billion investment in an Abu Dhabi (UAE) AI initiative. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completed its final round of $4 billion in funding to partner Anthropic, striving to gain a foothold following Microsoft’s mega OpenAI investment.

Summary Bullets:

• Google leads mega developer conference with its engineering-driven developer reputation.

• Key dev tools include Google’s Gemini Code Assist and Vertex AI Agent Builder.

Google was heavily scrutinized during the Google Cloud Next conference, particularly after 2023’s fumble during its foray into the generative AI (GenAI) space when, during a public GenAI demo, Google Bard returned a highly publicized inappropriate response. The company’s clear directive during its mega developer conference, Google Cloud Next, was to demonstrate its key role in the industry’s hottest emerging technology alongside GenAI and hyperscaler leaders. Its strategy: appeal to its strong following of enterprise developers where it has long established an engineering-driven reputation (through innovations such as cloud-native’s greatest open-source software technology to date, Kubernetes). Its messaging was around a Google Gemini-backed development initiative to make coding, platforms, and operations superior.

Summary Bullets:
• Developers naturally flock to familiar forums to collaborate and learn about new technologies
• Early open-source software (OSS) projects leading the industry include OpenLLaMA, PyTorch, Nvidia Triton, and Ray/KubeRay

Never before have enterprise developers needed more access to emerging and unfamiliar technologies then during this era of app modernization and generative AI (GenAI). The sea change that GenAI has imposed on the industry has prompted a resurgence in the importance of having OSS alternatives available to developers.
Continue reading “OSS Projects to Help Spur GenAI Adoption” →

Summary Bullets:

• Developer buzz around enhanced OSS technology will heavily impact observability solutions.

• eBPF’s kernel-level OS access ensures deeper visibility into system events and processes.

Little-known open-source software eBPF improves on observability’s modern monitoring techniques through deep visibility into systems, detection of problematic issues, reduction of downtime, and a boost in performance and security of applications.

Summary Bullets:
• GlobalData predicts 2024’s killer app will be medically-related.

• VCs have indicated a major shift in investments from LLMs to the application layer in 2024.

Following a year of investment upheaval resulting from the dawn of ChatGPT and generative AI (GenAI), Silicon Valley based venture capitalists (VCs) have indicated that major funding will now shift to the application. VCs and leading cloud platform providers invested heavily in 2023 for LLMs–infrastructure services that are computational and capital-intensive to build. This year, attention will be turned to the application layer of GenAI innovation.

Continue reading “GenAI’s Killer App in 2024 Will Arm Citizens With Medical Knowledge” →