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AWS says it will cloudify your mainframe workloads

Buyer beware, say analysts, technical debt will catch up with you eventually

Dan Robinson Thu 9 Jun 2022 // 22:30 UTC

AWS is trying to help organizations migrate their mainframe-based workloads to the cloud and potentially transform them into modern cloud-native services.
The Mainframe Modernization initiative was unveiled at the cloud giant's Re:Invent conference at the end of last year, where CEO Adam Selipsky claimed that "customers are trying to get off their mainframes as fast as they can."
Whether this is based in reality or not, AWS concedes that such a migration will inevitably involve the customer going through a lengthy and complex process that requires multiple steps to discover, assess, test, and operate the new workload environments.

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Now Amazon debuts an AI programming assistant – CodeWhisperer

Did they get GitHub Copilot to write it?

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 22:34 UTC

Amazon at its re:Mars conference in Las Vegas on Thursday announced a preview of an automated programming assistance tool called CodeWhisperer.
Available to those who have obtained an invitation through the AWS IDE Toolkit, a plugin for code editors to assist with writing AWS applications, CodeWhisperer is Amazon's answer to GitHub Copilot, an AI (machine learning-based) code generation extension that entered general availability earlier this week.
In a blog post, Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, said the goal of CodeWhisperer is to make software developers more productive.

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Oracle cloud growth up 19% but it's still a market minnow

Acquisition of health data specialist Cerner adds $15.8b to Big Red's debt

Lindsay Clark Tue 14 Jun 2022 // 14:30 UTC

Oracle has impressed the markets with strong revenue growth for cloud infrastructure and applications-as-a-service.
However, Oracle is still struggling to gain a larger share of the global cloud market, where it lags behind AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Big Red's total revenue for Q4, which ended May 31, hit $11.8 billion, up 5 per cent on the same period a year ago. Total cloud revenue, including infrastructure and software-as-a-service, reached $2.9 billion, up 19 percent. Cloud ERP Fusion revenue increased 20 percent while NetSuite ERP cloud revenue grew 27 per cent.

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AWS sent edgy appliance to the ISS and it worked – just like all the other computers up there

Congrats, AWS, you’ve boldly gone where the Raspberry Pi has already been

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 24 Jun 2022 // 07:57 UTC

Amazon Web Services has proudly revealed that the first completely private expedition to the International Space Station carried one of its Snowcone storage appliances, and that the device worked as advertised.
The Snowcone is a rugged shoebox-sized unit packed full of disk drives – specifically 14 terabytes of solid-state disk – a pair of VCPUs and 4GB of RAM. The latter two components mean the Snowcone can run either EC2 instances or apps written with AWS’s Greengrass IoT product. In either case, the idea is that you take a Snowcone into out-of-the-way places where connectivity is limited, collect data in situ and do some pre-processing on location. Once you return to a location where bandwidth is plentiful, it's assumed you'll upload the contents of a Snowcone into AWS and do real work on it there.

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AWS buys before it tries with quantum networking center

Fundamental problems of qubit physics aside, the cloud giant thinks it can help

Brandon Vigliarolo Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 00:52 UTC

Nothing in the quantum hardware world is fully cooked yet, but quantum computing is quite a bit further along than quantum networking – an esoteric but potentially significant technology area, particularly for ultra-secure transactions. Amazon Web Services is among those working to bring quantum connectivity from the lab to the real world.
Short of developing its own quantum processors, AWS has created an ecosystem around existing quantum devices and tools via its Braket (no, that's not a typo) service. While these bits and pieces focus on compute, the tech giant has turned its gaze to quantum networking.
Alongside its Center for Quantum Computing, which it launched in late 2021, AWS has announced the launch of its Center for Quantum Networking. The latter is grandly working to solve "fundamental scientific and engineering challenges and to develop new hardware, software, and applications for quantum networks," the internet souk declared.

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Elasticsearch server with no password or encryption leaks a million records

POS and online ordering vendor StoreHub offered free Asian info takeaways

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 16 Jun 2022 // 08:13 UTC

Researchers at security product recommendation service Safety Detectives claim they’ve found almost a million customer records wide open on an Elasticsearch server run by Malaysian point-of-sale software vendor StoreHub.
Safety Detectives’ report states it found a StoreHub sever that stored unencrypted data and was not password protected. The security company’s researchers were therefore able to waltz in and access 1.7 billion records describing the affairs of nearly a million people, in a trove totalling over a terabyte.
StoreHub’s wares offer point of sale and online ordering, and the vendor therefore stores data about businesses that run its product and individual buyers’ activities.

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ZTE intros 'cloud laptop' that draws just five watts of power

The catch: It hooks up to desktop-as-a-service and runs Android – so while it looks like a laptop ...

Laura Dobberstein Fri 24 Jun 2022 // 00:45 UTC

Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE has announced what it claims is the first "cloud laptop" – an Android-powered device that the consumes just five watts and links to its cloud desktop-as-a-service.
Announced this week at the partially state-owned company's 2022 Cloud Network Ecosystem Summit, the machine – model W600D – measures 325mm × 215mm × 14 mm, weighs 1.1kg and includes a 14-inch HD display, full-size keyboard, HD camera, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. An unspecified eight-core processors drives it, and a 40.42 watt-hour battery is claimed to last for eight hours.
It seems the primary purpose of this thing is to access a cloud-hosted remote desktop in which you do all or most of your work. ZTE claimed its home-grown RAP protocol ensures these remote desktops will be usable even on connections of a mere 128Kbit/sec, or with latency of 300ms and packet loss of six percent. That's quite a brag.

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Oracle shrinks on-prem cloud offering in both size and cost

Now we can squeeze required boxes into a smaller datacenter footprint, says Big Red

Lindsay Clark Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 15:48 UTC

Oracle has slimmed down its on-prem fully managed cloud offer to a smaller datacenter footprint for a sixth of the budget.
Snappily dubbed OCI Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer, the service was launched in 2020 and promised to run a private cloud inside a customer's datacenter, or one run by a third party. Paid for "as-a-service," the concept promised customers the flexibility of moving workloads seamlessly between the on-prem system and Oracle's public cloud for a $6 million annual fee and a minimum commitment of three years.
Big Red has now slashed the fee for a scaled-down version of its on-prem cloud to $1 million a year for a minimum period of four years.

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Amazon can't channel the dead, but its deepfake voices take a close second

Megacorp shows Alexa speaking like kid's deceased grandma

Richard Currie Thu 23 Jun 2022 // 13:46 UTC

In the latest episode of Black Mirror, a vast megacorp sells AI software that learns to mimic the voice of a deceased woman whose husband sits weeping over a smart speaker, listening to her dulcet tones.
Only joking – it's Amazon, and this is real life. The experimental feature of the company's virtual assistant, Alexa, was announced at an Amazon conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa AI, described the tech as a means to build trust between human and machine, enabling Alexa to "make the memories last" when "so many of us have lost someone we love" during the pandemic.

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Mega's unbreakable encryption proves to be anything but

Boffins devise five attacks to expose private files

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 20:58 UTC

Mega, the New Zealand-based file-sharing biz co-founded a decade ago by Kim Dotcom, promotes its "privacy by design" and user-controlled encryption keys to claim that data stored on Mega's servers can only be accessed by customers, even if its main system is taken over by law enforcement or others.
The design of the service, however, falls short of that promise thanks to poorly implemented encryption. Cryptography experts at ETH Zurich in Switzerland on Tuesday published a paper describing five possible attacks that can compromise the confidentiality of users' files.
The paper [PDF], titled "Mega: Malleable Encryption Goes Awry," by ETH cryptography researchers Matilda Backendal and Miro Haller, and computer science professor Kenneth Paterson, identifies "significant shortcomings in Mega’s cryptographic architecture" that allow Mega, or those able to mount a TLS MITM attack on Mega's client software, to access user files.

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