October 28, 2021

141: The Cloud Pod Wears Gaudi Outfits for Amazon’s New Deep Learning Accelerator

1 hour 4 minutes

On The Cloud Pod this week, half the team misses Rob and Ben. Also, AWS Gaudi Accelerators speed up deep learning, GCP announces that its Tau VMs are an independently verified delight, and Azure gets the chance to be Number One for once (with industrial IoT platforms.)

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

JumpCloud, which offers a complete platform for identity, access, and device management — no matter where your users and devices are located.

This week’s highlights

AWS is using Gaudi Accelerators to speed up deep learning models — for nearly $10,000 a month.

Google announces that Tau T2D VMs are now available in preview, and takes the opportunity to report that Phoronix has identified these Tau instances as the best price-performing ones yet.

Azure bags the Number One spot in the Gartner Magic Quadrant category of Industrial IoT Platforms. We’re wondering how much schmoozing Microsoft had to do to pull this off.

Top Quotes

“I guess [AWS Gaudi Accelerators] solve the problem of lack of availability of NVIDIA CPUs. It’s almost impossible to buy a decent graphics card, and I’m sure the cloud providers are suffering horrendously with not being able to scale their machine-learning instances the way they wanted to, because of the chip shortage.”

“We’ve said it for a long time now that with Google coming to the market when they did, it was very easy to take all the major gripes of AWS and Azure and improve on them. And they banged it out of the park. So kudos to them, because it is a much better user experience than [what you get with] the other two cloud providers.”

General News: HashiCorp Increases Access to its Service Mesh

HashiCorp introduces its new Consul API Gateway to help route traffic to applications running on the Hashicorp Consul Service Mesh. This seems like an early release, given its fairly basic capabilities.

AWS: Rolling Out Gaudi Accelerators — Not Architecture

AWS announces AWS Panorama, which is an appliance and SDK that allows users to process video data at the edge of their locations. AWS Panorama was first introduced at the last re:Invent, and is now generally available.

Amazon joins Microsoft, Google, IBM, Honeywell and more in the race to build a quantum computer, partnering with Caltech to open a new center in Pasadena.

4⃣ To save Peter some time in the lightning round, we combined four Amazon DocumentDB updates into one announcement: Users can now enjoy additional support for access control; support for $literal, $map and $$ROOT; capabili

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By Justin Brodley, Jonathan Baker, Ryan Lucas and Matthew Kohn

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