News Roundup: Week of Nov 30, 2020

by | 3 Dec 2020

More and More AWS Local Zones

As announcements from the 2020 AWS re:Invent continue to roll out, one of the earlier announcements we were excited about was the promise of increased local zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami this year with the promise of twelve more zones coming online through 2021. These new local zones are intended to “provide access with single-digit millisecond latency to the vast majority of users in the Continental United States.” This is yet another step towards bringing the cloud down to the ground as more edge compute locations support different instance types, direct connect, and the most-used AWS services.

AWS Brings the Mac Mini to the Cloud

The opener to the 2020 re:Invent conference brought a surprising announcement for Mac and iOS app developers: new EC2 Mac instances powered by the Mac mini. This announcement comes on the heels of the recent M1 Mac mini launch and connects the Mac to the AWS Nitro System. This announcement also means that AWS is bringing Apple’s M1 Mac minis into the AWS data centers within the first half of 2021.

Intel and Google Hybrid and Multi Cloud Improvements

In an announcement via HPCwire this week, Intel and Google are officially collaborating to co-develop “reference architectures optimized for the now generally available ‘Anthos on bare metal’ solution.” This announcement is meant to target “data center and edge computing use cases,” and is another instance of new Intel processors being introduced to cloud computing infrastructure. This collaboration “allows enterprises to run Anthos on their existing on-prem physical servers, deployed on an operating system without a hypervisor layer.”

Salesforce Buys Slack for Over $27 Billion

In one of the largest deals in recent years, Salesforce acquired Slack with a combination of cash and stock that totalled over $27 billion. This latest acquisition comes on the heels of a slew of acquisitions by Salesforce in the past few years. CNBC suggests that “The acquisition will further intensify Salesforce’s rivalry with Microsoft, whose Teams chat and video service has emerged as Slack’s stiffest competitor.” This acquisition might also push companies away from using Slack given Salesforce enterprise-focused reputation.

IBM Cloud Quantum Safety Claims

An article this week from sdccentral reports that IBM is promising quantum-safe cryptography support for key management and application transactions in IBM Cloud. This is another step for IBM towards establishing themselves as a leader in quantum-safe networks. Any TLS encrypted data harvested today is at risk of being decrypted by quantum computers. This leaves any data in transit today vulnerable to these attacks in the future. IBM hopes to deliver quantum-safe cryptography for data in transit in the IBM Cloud, focusing their security strategy  on open-source standards such as CRYSTALS and Open Quantum Safe.