2021 BRN Discussion, page-33015

I have never been so positive about the next 12 months of any business dealing in my life as I am about Brainchip and what will come together in 2022. The following article points out one of the many bleeding obvious reasons why the demand for AKIDA technology solutions has become insatiable according to Rob Telson and why Peter van der Made is predicting an explosion of sales. Remember the ability to operate unconnected is just one feature in what might be called the second tier of features available with AKIDA technology solutions. The one shot learning is the margin of victory. The miniscule power useage is the margin of victory. The next to no heat generation so as to eliminate any need for external cooling is the margin of victory. These three are the first tier features but if you read the following recent Popular Science article you will understand why the second tier feature of operating unconnected might also be looking for promotion to Tier one and margin of victory status.
My opinion and the authors only DYOR
FF

AKIDA BALLISTA

Recent AWS glitches illustrate the power, and fragility, of cloudcomputing

Charlotte Hu 10hrs ago

In the first two weeks of this month, Amazon WebServices (AWS) hit some bumps that caused two outages: a bigger, morewidespread one on December 7, and a smaller, more localized one on Dec. 15.Both catalyzed disruptions across a range of websites and online applications,including Google, Slack, Disney Plus, Amazon, Venmo, Tinder, iRobot, Coinbase, and The Washington Post. These services all rely on AWS to provide cloud computing for them—in fact, AWS is the leading cloud computing provider among other big players like Microsoft Azure, Google, IBM, and Alibaba.

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In the first two weeks of this month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) hit somebumps that caused two outages: a bigger, more widespread one on December 7, anda smaller, more localized one on Dec. 15. Both catalyzed disruptions across arange of websites and online applications, including Google, Slack, Disney Plus, Amazon, Venmo, Tinder, iRobot, Coinbase, and The Washington Post. These services all rely on AWS to provide cloud computing for them—in fact, AWS is the leading cloud computing provider among other big players like Microsoft Azure, Google, IBM, and Alibaba.

To understand why the impact was so big, and whatsteps that companies can take to prevent something like these disruptions inthe future, it makes sense to take a step back and take a look at what cloudcomputing is, and what it’s good for.

So what is cloud computing and AWS?

Whenever you connect to anything over the internet,your computer is essentially just talking to another computer. A server is atype of computer that can process requests and deliver data to other computersin the same network or over the internet.

But running your ownserver isn’t cheap. You have to buy the hardware box, install it somewhere, and feed it a lot of power. In many cases, it needs internet connectivity too. Then, to ensure that data is received and sent with minimal delays, these servers need to be physically close to its users.

Additionally, you have to install software thatneeds to be updated regularly. And you have to build fail-safe mechanisms that will switch over operations to another server if a main server malfunctions.

[Related: Facebook has an explanation for its massive Monday outage]

“The thing that companies like Amazon noticed isthat a lot of [computing infrastructure] is not really specific to the serviceyou're running,” says Justine Sherry, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

For example, the code running Netflix doessomething different compared to the code running a service like Venmo. TheNetflix code is serving videos to users, and the Venmo code is facilitatingfinancial transactions. But underneath, most of the computing work is actuallythe same.

This is where cloud providers come in. They usuallyhave hundreds to thousands of servers all over the country with good bandwidth.They offer to take care of the tedious tasks like security, day-to-daymanagement of the data center operations, and scaling services when needed.

“Then you can focus on your [specialized] code.Just write the part that makes the video work, or the part that makes thefinancial transactions work. It's easier, it's cheaper because Amazon is doingthis for lots and lots of customers." Sherry explains. “But there are alsodownsides, which is that everyone in the world is relying on the same couple ofCostco-sized warehouses full of computers. There are dozens of them across theUS. But when one of them goes down, it's catastrophic.”

What went wrong with AWS on Dec. 7 and 15 Whatcaused the AWS outages appeared to be related to errors with the automatedsystems handling the data flow behind the scenes.

AWS explained in a post that the December 7 error was due to a problem with “an automated activity to scale capacity of one of the AWS services hosted in the main AWS network,” which resulted in “a large surge of connection activity that overwhelmed the networking devices between the internal network and the main AWS network, resulting in delays for communication between these networks.”

[Related: A Look Inside the Data Centers of “The Cloud”]

This autoscaling capability allows the whole systemto adjust the number of servers it's using based on the amount of users on thenetwork. “The idea there is if I have 100 users at 7 am, and then at noon,everyone is on lunch break Amazon shopping and now I have 1,000 users, I need10 times as many computers to interact with all those clients,” explainsSherry. “These frameworks automatically look at how much demand there is andcan dedicate more servers to doing what's needed when it's needed.”

Later on December 15, a status update issued by AWSsaid that the outage was caused by “traffic engineering” incorrectly moving“more traffic than expected to parts of the AWS Backbone that affectedconnectivity to a subset of Internet destinations.”

Big data centers have lots of internet connectionsthrough different internet service providers. They get to choose where onlinetraffic gets routed, whether it’s over one cable through AT&T, or anothercable through Sprint.

Their automatic "traffic engineering"decides to reroute traffic based on a number of conditions. “Most providers aregoing to reroute traffic mostly based on load. They want to make sure thingsare relatively balanced,” Sherry says. “It sounds like that auto-adaptationfailed on the 15th, and they wound up routing too much traffic over oneconnection. You can literally think of it like a pipe that has had too muchwater and the water is coming out the seams.” That data ends up getting droppedand disappears.

Despite some prevalent outages over the past fewyears, Sherry argues that AWS is “quite good at managing their infrastructure.”Inherently, it’s very difficult to design perfect algorithms that cananticipate every problem, and bugs are an annoying but regular part of softwaredevelopment. “The only thing that's unique about the cloud situation is the impact.”

[Related: Amazon’s venture into the bizarre world of quantum computing has a newhome base]

A growing number of independent companies areturning to third-party centralized services like AWS for cloud infrastructure,storage, and more.

“If I pay Amazon to run a data center for me, storemy files, and serve my clients … they're going to do a better job than I can doas an university administrator or as an administrator to a small company,” saysSherry. “But from a societal perspective, when all of these small individualactors decide to outsource to the cloud, we wind up with one really bigcentralized dependency.”

Back to basics?

During the time AWS went out, Sherry could notcontrol her television. Normally, she uses her phone as a remote control. Butthe phone does not directly talk to the TV. Instead, both the phone and the TVtalk to a server in the cloud, and that server is orchestrating thatin-between. The cloud is essential for some functions, like downloadingautomatic software updates. But for scrolling through cable offerings availablefrom an antenna or satellite, “there's no reason that needs to happen,” shesays. “We're in the same room, we're on the same wireless network, all I'mtrying to do is change the channel.” In short, the cloud can offer convenienttech solutions in some instances, but not all.

[Related: This Is Why Microsoft Is Putting Data Servers In The Ocean]

One account of a marooned technology that struck her most as an unnecessarily roundabout design was a timed cat feeder that had to go through the cloud. Automated cat feeders have been around a long time before the cloud. They’re basically paired to an alarm clock. “But for some reason, someone decided that rather than building the alarm clock part into the cat feeder, they were going to put the alarm clock feeder in the cloud, and have the cat feeder go over the internet and ask the cloud, is it time to feed the cat?” Sherry says. “There's no reason that that needed to be put into the cloud.”

Moving forward, she thinks that application developersshould review every feature that’s intended for the cloud and ask if it canwork without the cloud, or at least have an offline mode that's not ascompletely debilitating during an internet, data center, or even poweroutage.

“There are other things that are probably not goingto work. You're probably not going to be able to log in to your online bankingif you can't get to the bank server,” says Sherry. “But so many of the thingsthat failed are things that really should not have failed.”