This week in DevOps we have announcements from AWS for EBS and CloudFormation. GoogleCloud acquired Looker and Azure previews shared disks for clustered applications. Hashicorp did not make any major new announcements this week.
AWS
AWS::EBS – Announcing multi-attach for provisioned IOPS (io1) volumes
Traditionally EBS volumes could be attached to a single EC2 instance. With this announcement io1 volumes can now attached to up 16 instances at a time with full read/write permissions. The volumes do not enforce data ordering or consistency, this is left to the writing application.
Consistency can be achieved by only allowing writes from applications which enforce write ordering. Alternatively volumes can be attached as read only to all instances except one which is used for writes. This is similar to the way reads are scaled on SQL databases like Postgres and Mysql where there is a single master writer (or pair of synced writers) and N number of read only replicas.
Encryption for multi-attached volumes is supported and snapshots can be taken from any instance to which the volume is attached.
AWS::CloudFormation – Stacksets now support multiple accounts in an organization
In the past it could be pretty difficult to run CloudFormation stacksets across multiple accounts. With this change you can now manage Stacksets at the organizational level and roll out CloudFormation enabled services across multiple accounts and regions at once. This will be particularly useful for maintaining organization wide IAM policies.
AWS::Serverless – New serverless lens in the Well Architected Framework
The AWS well architected framework helps you craft more efficient and performant cloud designs. This announcement adds serverless to the framework and allows you to analyze your serverless environment for improvements.
GoogleCloud
GoogleCloud::Looker – Google Cloud completes Looker acquisition
With this acquisition Google Cloud seems to be making a play for better multi-cloud support and analytics. StackDriver is Google Cloud’s current answer to metrics, monitoring and analytics and it garners mediocre reviews at best. Given these facts it’s fair to speculate that StackDriver might get rolled into Looker or vice versa and become the new defacto standard for Google Cloud.
GoogleCloud::Layoffs – The Wall Street Journal claims layoffs are happening at GoogleCloud
This one is a bit out of scope for this newsletter but I thought it was worth including given Google’s history of shutting down services without notice. The Wall Street Journal claims that Google Cloud has laid off a small percentage of its workforce. While unlikely to result in a Google Cloud shutdown anytime soon, it’s a disturbing pattern which has historically preceded shutdowns of many products at Google.
One has to wonder if Google is taking their foot off the gas with Google Cloud to focus on something else given their lethargic growth compared to Azure and AWS. If that’s the case it could have major implications for companies considering moving to Google Cloud or migrating workloads there.
There’s another version of the story from MarketWatch without a paywall here.
Azure
Azure::SharedDisks – Shared disks for clustered applications is now in preview
Azure claims this is the industries first shared cloud block storage, which feels like a bit of technicality given that AWS has had Elastic Block Storage for many years and technically rolled out shared volumes before this announcement. The two systems are not exactly the same thing but seem to offer similar functionality.
This offering seems to be a drop in replacement for applications which currently rely on SANs for ultra low latency shared storage. Shared Disks supports Global Filesystem 2 (GFS2) compatible applications out of the box along with most other clustered file system formats.
While in preview you must write to Microsoft Azure here to get access.
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