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<ul><li><keyword id="1118012" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="max-life" source="Orion">Max Life</keyword>’s cloud footprint grew from 18% to a substantial 40% in two years <br /></li><li>With the automation of the policy issuance process, customers can now buy insurance in just 30 minutes <br /></li><li><keyword id="50691" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="digital" source="Orion">Digital</keyword> transformation also ensured that Max Life agent productivity increased by 40% <br /></li></ul>Two years ago, when the pandemic hit, <keyword id="6374257" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="max-life-insurance" source="Orion">Max Life Insurance</keyword> was unprepared – just like any other player in the insurance sector. The company has come a long way since, having embarked on an ambitious transformation journey, with digital at the center of it.<br /><br />The goal was to become a digital insurance company as digital disruption swept the sector. <br /><br />Max Life has been highly successful in chasing this agenda. Two years down the line, more than 80% of Max Life’s business transactions are digitally driven and almost all its recruitment, training and skilling programs are conducted digitally.<br /><br />Cloud has played a critical role in the company’s digital transformation journey. The insurer spotted the need to expand its cloud footprint from 18% two years ago to a substantially higher level in order to stay agile and responsive to market changes. <br /><br />The company partnered with <keyword id="291131" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="aws" source="Orion">AWS</keyword> as its cloud partner to accelerate the transition to be a digital insurance company. Its goal was to have a resilient and future-ready infrastructure, says <keyword id="8921220" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="manu-lavanya" source="Orion">Manu Lavanya</keyword>, Director and Chief Operations Officer at Max Life. <br /><br />“The life insurance industry is going through a significant digital transformation driven by the need for businesses to be extremely agile and flexible. By adopting AWS, Max Life has created a modern, future-ready digital infrastructure to support this transformation. AWS’s advanced cloud capabilities and the agility of the cloud enable us to experiment and innovate at a rapid pace to provide best-in-class customer experiences,” Lavanya said.<br /><cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Making insurance more intelligent" comment="subhead" text="Making insurance more intelligent"><span data-til="noop">Making insurance more intelligent</span></cmsannotation><br />Max Life’s cloud journey has been multi-dimensional, with several AWS public cloud offerings integrated at different levels and functions. <br /><br /><br />The most critical piece is the automation initiatives that Max Life undertook to improve the overall cycle time and customer experience. It leveraged the AWS Cloud capabilities, including storage, compute, and data analytics, to automate the issuance of new insurance policies, which is typically a time-consuming process with multiple verifications and validations. <br /><br /><br />Max Life’s other key focus area was to provide a more personalised and faster experience to its customers, who are now increasingly preferring digital engagement channels. Automated claims and disbursals etc., have become a norm in the market in the last two years. But this is particularly challenging when there is a sudden spike in demand. The month of March, for instance, is usually the busiest month for insurers.<br /><br />Max Life leveraged <keyword id="13589783" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="aws-lambda" source="Orion">AWS Lambda</keyword>, a serverless compute service, and <keyword id="6380508" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="amazon-elastic-compute-cloud" source="Orion">Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud</keyword> (<keyword id="18635" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="amazon" source="Orion">Amazon</keyword> EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, to automatically scale workflows to better manage the load during peak periods. <br /><br />For all of these critical automation initiatives to be successful, it was important for Max Life to bring all its data together. The company, therefore, built a data lake that centrally stores the company’s structured and unstructured data at scale. For this, it leveraged Amazon S3, an object storage service. Not just that, Max Life deployed the AWS serverless data integration service to consolidate and analyse anonymised customer data stored in the lake to get a 360-degree customer view for delivering personalised customer experiences, like specific coverage at lower premiums.<br /><cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Compelling outcomes all across the board" comment="subhead" text="Compelling outcomes all across the board"><span data-til="noop">Compelling outcomes all across the board</span></cmsannotation><br />A digital transformation project of this scale and magnitude was to certainly deliver great results for Max Life. The policy issuance automation initiative, for example, allows customers to now buy insurance in 30 minutes flat, in a hassle-free manner. <br /><br />The overall transformation project has had a positive impact on agent productivity, which has seen a substantial 40% increase, according to Max Life. The centralised data lake helps Max Life to better research and develop new customer services, and improve operational efficiencies. All of this has helped the insurer to improve customer interactions and strengthen customer loyalty.<br /><br />Max Life’s cloud footprint has now grown dramatically from 18% to 40%, with the ability to better handle business spikes that happen during new product launches and other critical initiatives. Most importantly, in its new digital avatar, Max Life provides quicker, frictionless experience to its customers. <br /><br />Automation of the insurance value chain has enabled Max Life to achieve the ambitious goal of making insurance simple and easy to buy. With innovations in products, processes and engagement models, Max Life has managed to stay true to its mission to “inspire people to increase the value of their lives.”<br />

Inside Max Life’s intricate digital transformation journey

<ul class="summary-list"><li>All kinds of startups are rushing into the AI inference market.</li><li>Inference market competition may lower the price of AI, benefiting builders but challenging clouds.</li></ul><p>Jared Quincy Davis and his AI computing startup Foundry sell <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nvidia-competition-sambanova-groq-cerebras-show-faster-inference-speed-2024-9">inference.</a> They don't make chips or build <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-anthropic-ai-bots-havoc-raise-cloud-costs-websites-2024-9">large language models</a>. Foundry has a unique method of making cloud computing more efficient. Instead of selling its technology to cloud providers, the Foundry team decided to become one and use its tech to operate a more efficient cloud.</p><p>Once companies looking to leverage and sell an AI product have trained their models and know that they perform, they're looking for ease, speed, and value whenever generating outputs. Inference-as-a-service providers like Foundry, <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/foundry-ceo-hack-improving-ai-models-gpt-5-2024-8">aim to simplify</a> the process of generating those outputs.</p><p>Foundry offers training and fine-tuning, too, as many cloud providers do, but these days, it seems like anyone with an AI compute-boosting technology is attempting to monetize by selling inference — or more specifically, tokens, the base unit of data in AI.</p><p><a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/cerebras-nvidia-challenger-ai-chip-battle-2024-7">Cerebras</a> sells inference too. The company's core expertise is designing chips for training and inference, but it recently started selling the latter as a service. So does Groq, a chip company formed by two former Googlers, who recognized early that inference was going to get the bigger share of computing. <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nvidia-competition-sambanova-groq-cerebras-show-faster-inference-speed-2024-9">SambaNova Systems</a>, another hardware platform, also sells inference as a service.</p><p>Companies like Lambda, CoreWeave, Together AI, and Crusoe, all close partners of Nvidia, run data centers suited specifically to AI workloads and offer inference services. And then there are the hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure.</p><p>With so many<strong> </strong>companies specializing in inference, suspicion is rising that the cost of inference is about to drop off a cliff.</p><p>"Part of the reason inference is a little commoditizable is customers are kind of paying for tokens at the end of the day," Davis told Business Insider.</p><p>The current market for inference is kind of like the electricity market, Davis said. There are a ton of niche sources you can access if you actually shop around, but not everyone does. Most people just want to flip the light switch and have it work.</p><p>But there is a lot of nuance to sift through for those willing. For some customers, <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nvidia-competition-sambanova-groq-cerebras-show-faster-inference-speed-2024-9">speed is of the utmost importance</a>. Speed has distinctions too, like time to the first token and tokens per second. There's total job completion time and there are different kinds of inference workloads that lend themselves to different computing setups.</p><p>Energy efficiency of the underlying hardware and networking is a big determinant of cost. And cost in inference computing is even more important than in training, Groq cofounder Jonathan Ross recently told BI. Training is an overhead cost, while inference is an operating cost.</p><p>Zoom out from all of the intricacies, and inference is becoming the commodity of the AI age.</p><p>"Some companies just want output and they don't care about infrastructure," Mitesh Agrawal, head of cloud for Lambda, told BI.</p><h2 id="dff58147-0a83-484f-8489-a31c08d0a473"><strong>Commoditizing AI</strong></h2><p>Lambda is in the early stages of an inference-as-a-service offering, but Agrawal said the company is going about it carefully, focusing on providing holistic computing services, and not just tokens.</p><p>Inference profit margins can vary widely, Agrawal said. With general compute — where the customer rents fixed capacity — the margins are easier to manage. When you're charging for usage or input and output of a model, the return is less predictable.</p><p>Organizing multiple users across a finite number of servers takes finesse. Whether or not the cost of operating the hardware is actually covered with room for profit comes down to how well that organization is done, Agrawal explained.</p><p>So why would neoclouds offer the riskier service?</p><p>Agrawal said it's about getting potential customers in the door. Inference-as-a-service customers can turn into more traditional compute customers, and as the slate of competitors grows, relationships, and history grow in importance.</p><p>Lambda's financial models assume that price cuts are coming soon as more players enter the inference space and chips become more efficient.</p><h2 id="59b576b3-4703-4b08-b315-2c7f48e230fb"><strong>A race to the bottom?</strong></h2><p>How fast the demand for inference is growing is up for debate, but in recent public statements, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said on multiple occasions that new models, like OpenAI's o1, require more compute to generate the same number of responses because they run multiple models to check their own work or "reason." Accuracy, it turns out, requires more compute.</p><p>Inference loads are poised to grow, but service providers still anticipate a drop in price from the influx of new players. Davis isn't worried though.</p><p>He recalled Jevon's paradox — an economic principle in which a drop in price or an increase in efficiency leads to more total consumption — like when you widen a highway and traffic gets worse.</p><p>"If I make something 10 times cheaper, people won't spend 10 times less, nor will they even hold their budgets the same. They'll spend more," Davis said. "That makes sense because what are you doing when you make something 10 times cheaper, you're making the ROI better."</p><p>In other words, "it turns out, when you make inference cheaper, people decide to do a lot more inference," Davis said.</p><p>The ride ahead could be "bumpy" though, and not all players are likely to survive the moments of mismatch between supply and demand.</p><p>"As my old boss at Intel Andy Grove used to say, 'Let chaos reign, and then reign in the chaos'," said Sriram Viswanathan, founding managing partner at Celesta Capital and investor in SambaNova Systems.</p><p>He agrees<strong> </strong>the next few years will be wildly competitive for inference providers, but he believes the winners will be decided on merit.</p><p>"The core innovation can't be in the go-to-market, but in the performance and power of the underlying architecture," Viswanathan said.</p><p>Many of the companies selling tokens to break into the AI market aspire to more. The chip designers eventually want to sell chips to hyperscalers rather than inference to AI startups.<strong> </strong>The ultimate version of Foundry's tech is bigger too.</p><p>"If we do our job, right, you know, we will be a core part of how every GPU runs," Davis said. All roads, it seems, run through inference.</p><p><em>Hugh Langley contributed reporting.</em></p><p><strong><em>Got a tip or an insight to share?</em></strong> <em>Contact Senior Reporter Emma Cosgrove at </em><a target="_blank" href="mailto:ecosgrove@businessinsider.com"><em><u>ecosgrove@businessinsider.com</u></em></a><em> or use the secure messaging app Signal: 443-333-9088</em></p>

'Let chaos reign': AI inference costs are about to plummet  

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Amazon</span></p><p class="caption">Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy</p></div><p></p></div></div>When Amazon launched Amazon Web Services in 2006, it <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topple-in-the-cloud-and-where-everybody-else-falls-2017-7">sparked a cloud computing revolution</a>. </p><p>No longer would programmers have to buy, build, and maintain their own servers. Now, developers could pay Amazon by the hour to access exactly the amount of supercomputing power they needed. It totally changed the economics of building software, making it possible for a new breed of companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and others to exist. </p><p>Now, Amazon is changing the game again, in a subtle but important way. Amazon EC2 - the prime computing engine at the core of Amazon Web Services - will begin to charge customers by the second rather than by the hour, the compay <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-per-second-billing-for-ec2-instances-and-ebs-volumes/">said in a blog post on Monday</a>. </p><p>The idea, Amazon said, is to reflect the more modern ways in which developers build apps today. For instance, in 2014, Amazon unveiled a new tool called <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-lambda-explained-2015-11">Lambda</a>, ushering in a trend called "serverless" computing.</p><p>To make a long story short, Lambda provides programmers with even more flexibility. If, for example, a translator app is built using Lambda, the servers to do the translation might not even exist until you hit the okay button, and they disappear again after the process is finished and the result is displayed on your phone. </p><p>The problem is that Amazon was usually still billing Lambda usage on a per-hour basis, with a one-hour minimum. It was still saving customers money, since they didn't have to have those servers permanently set up. But it still meant that customers were paying an hourly rate for a service that they only needed for seconds or minutes. </p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeff_Bezos%27_iconic_laugh.jpg">Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons</a></span></p><p class="caption">Amazon CEO Andy Jassy</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Lambda, and other clever modern programming technologies, are changing the way AWS gets used.</p><p><span>"Many of our customers are dreaming up applications for EC2 that can make good use of a large number of instances for shorter amounts of time, sometimes just a few minutes," writes Amazon's Jeff Barr in a blog post.</span></p><p><span>And so, Amazon is going to a per-second billing model, with some caveats. There's a one-minute minimum, and the new model only applies to virtual servers running the Linux operating system (which means virtual Microsoft Windows servers are sticking to the old way, for now). </span></p><p><span>Still, Amazon is already far out ahead of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, considered to be the second- and third-place players in the cloud game, respectively. It'll be interesting to see if and when these fellow tech titans follow suit.</span></p><p class="tagline">Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/tech-analyst-reasonably-valued-fang-stocks-scott-kessler-2017-9">A top analyst recommends buying Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google shares</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

Amazon just made a huge change to its $12 billion cloud computing juggernaut

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Mike Segar/Reuters</span></p><p class="caption">Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos</p></div><p></p></div></div>One of Amazon Web Services' most potent weapons in the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topple-in-the-cloud-and-where-everybody-else-falls-2015-10">cloud computing wars with Microsoft and Google</a> is also one of its least understood. </p><p>About a year ago, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-new-lambda-cloud-service-is-a-huge-deal-for-developers-2014-11">Amazon introduced Lambda</a>, which it describes as "<span>a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you." </span></p><p><span>That sounds like a lot of buzzwords. But developers and customers like Major League Baseball and Twitter's Periscope absolutely love Lambda because of how it makes running apps simpler. So far, none of Amazon's competitors has come up with anything similar.</span></p><p><span>"As a technologist, there's almost always a 'gotcha,'" says Amazon Web Services General Manager of Product Strategy Matt Wood. "Lambda kind of is as magical as it appears." </span></p><p><span>And it's saving some of Amazon's customers big bucks, with at least one happy Lambda customer saving 80% off their cloud bills. </span></p><p><span>It's just another way that Amazon is extending its lead in the hot cloud computing market, where it's already a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/aws-estimated-to-be-worth-160-billion-2015-11">$7 billion player and growing fast</a>.</span></p><h2><span>Lambda functions</span></h2><p><span>When Amazon Web Services launched in 2006, its first feature was the Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3, which made it much simpler for programmers to store things like files on the web. You just sign up for an account and you have a place to stick files for use in websites.</span></p><p><span>"[Lambda is] the same idea as S3, but applied to computation," Wood says.</span></p><p>Building an app used to require a lot of infrastructure. If you're building a video streaming app, for instance, you need to set up a whole bunch of servers to upload videos, transcode it into the format you want, and play it at different resolutions and sizes depending on the kind of device the customer is using.</p><p>But it also means that you had to build big, complex systems that might sit idle 99% of the time, except for the 1% of the time when you have a new video coming in. </p><p>This is what makes AWS Lambda so special. With a snippet of specialized code, called a "Lambda function," an app can "talk" to the Amazon Web Services cloud, access the functions it needs, and then turn it off afterwards - without the programmer having to worry about a single server.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/quintanomedia/16930072836">Anthony Quintano/ Flickr</a></span></p><p class="caption">Twitter's Periscope live-streaming app uses Amazon Lambda to scan video streams for adult content.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>A developer doesn't even have to do anything. When it detects an event, like a new file getting uploaded to your account, Lambda can automatically execute the appropriate code.</p><p>"No server is easier to manage than 'no server,'" quips Wood.</p><p>For instance, Major League Baseball uses a Lambda function to transcode their videos to get them ready for viewing on their various apps and websites, Wood says, while Twitter's Periscope uses it to scan live streaming user video streams for adult content, shutting them down if it detects a positive.</p><p>Recently, Lambda added support for the popular Python programming language, right next to its original JavaScript iteration, giving it access to a broad base of developers. Wood promises more features and language support is on the way.</p><p>Wood also says that Lambda is a key part of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/aws-launches-iot-platform-2015-10">Amazon Web Services' new "Internet of Things" cloud</a> for connected devices, since this approach works really well with smart appliances that won't necessarily be connected to the Internet 24/7 but still generate a lot of data.</p><h2>Laser-like focus and cost savings</h2><p>The key benefit of Lambda is that programmers get a "laser-like focus" on just building their apps, Wood says. No matter how big or their app gets, Amazon Lambda sets up the appropriate infrastucture behind the scenes.</p><p>Plus, because it's accessing Amazon's massive supercomputing cloud, the performance and response times can often be better than anything a developer could build on their own.</p><p>"It's particularly well-suited for very large scales," Wood says. "As your app grows, the value of Lambda starts to increase."</p><p>There's another cost-benefit beyond the time you save not building infrastructure. Since you don't need to maintain all those big, complex systems when they're not being used, Lambda saves customers money as well.</p><p>For instance, cybersecurity company FireEye kept a cluster of Amazon EC2 virtual servers around for whenever they needed to do data analysis on the huge stash of log files generated by customers, which they kept stored in Amazon S3. But that system was sitting idle most of the time, Wood says. <div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Apple</span></p><p class="caption">Major League Baseball uses AWS Lambda to handle video transcoding, to make sure that apps appear in the right size and resolution on devices like the Apple TV.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Recently, though, FireEye switched that task over to AWS Lambda, replacing that cluster with a bit of code that would run on a regular pre-set schedule. Without all those virtual servers to keep running 100% of the time, FireEye saved 80% on its monthly Amazon Web Services bill.</p><p>"It's not saving pennies," Wood says. </p><p>Still, Wood is quick to say that Lambda isn't intended primarily as a cost-saving tool. Some apps are better suited for the traditional way of doing things: Large database apps or anything for the financial or healthcare industries probably value reliability and uptime over Lambda's flexibility, Wood says.</p><p> </p><p> </p><h2> </h2><p class="tagline">Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-benefits-nyt-report-culture-retail-orders-shipping-2015-8">Maybe working at Amazon is hard for a reason</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="d4eG4ydzr2sR8Qz-S2fyywm5v_r2LOIM" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Amazon explains its secret weapon in the cloud wars

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>AWS</span></p><p class="caption">AWS CEO Andy Jassy</p></div><p></p></div></div></span></p><ul class="summary-list"><li><strong>Last week, Amazon Web Services announced an active open source project called Firecracker, a <span>virtualization technology</span> project that users can download, modify or use for free.</strong></li><li><strong>Generally speaking, Amazon is seen as contributing less code to open source projects than rivals like Google and Microsoft. </strong></li><li><strong>At the same time, Amazon has a reputation for taking open source projects and packaging them up as paid services. </strong></li><li><strong>These dynamics have led to some tension between Amazon and the open source community.</strong></li><li><strong>Launching a major open source project of its own is a signal that Amazon could be ready to engage with the open source community - but it's not slowing down its product strategy, either.  </strong></li></ul><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon Web Services, the retailer's massively profitable cloud computing arm, has a reputation for taking open source software projects developed elsewhere and selling them as paid services. Furthermore, Amazon is <a href="https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-github-2017-be98ab854e87">seen as lagging behind rivals like Google and Microsoft</a> when it comes to contributing to open source. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Altogether, these dynamics add up to a sometimes-strained relationship between Amazon and the open source community. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But last week, at its annual Re:invent conference, Amazon's cloud announced a new project that could signal something of a shift in attitudes, as it launched a service called </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Firecracker. It's open source and available on the popular GitHub service, meaning would-be contributors can download, modify or use the code however they want.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">To be sure, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">AWS does contribute to major open source projects like Linux and Kubernetes, and it has many of its own on GitHub. Still, many developers feel that Amazon doesn't give back enough. In fact, in 2017, </span><a href="https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-github-2017-be98ab854e87"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon only had</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> 134 active employees on GitHub pushing code to only 158 top projects, compared to Microsoft and Google, which have hundreds more employees contributing to hundreds more of the top projects.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And Amazon has been reluctant to adopt major open source projects like Kubernetes, a mega-popular developer technology born out of Google. In late 2017, Amazon </span><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/r-amazon-adopts-open-cloud-technology-as-competition-heats-up-2017-11"><span style="font-weight: 400;">finally jumped on the Kubernetes bandwagon</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> - many months after companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM had already embraced it themselves. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With Firecracker, though, Amazon Web Services could be extending something of an olive branch to the open source world, as it takes technology developed for its own use and turns it into what could be its biggest cloud-computing open source project to date. A </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">spokesperson for the company tells Business Insider to look out for Amazon starting more of its own open source projects and contributing to more projects, too.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"Amazon hasn't been known for contributing a ton of open source. Now, here's capable technologies built in-house, and they're making it available," Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation industry group, told Business Insider. "Things like Firecracker are great indications of Amazon investing in open source."</span></p><h2><strong>What Firecracker does</strong></h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In a nutshell, AWS Firecracker, allows developers to securely launch micro virtual machines (microVMs), a software program that behaves like a completely separate computer. These microVMs can load in a fraction of a second, compared to traditional VMs that can take much longer to load and consume more memory. Users can even run thousands of microVMs at once on the same machine (or machines), letting them run huge apps at large scales. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"We don't want our customers to make hard decisions between security and functionality," Holly Mesrobian, Director of Engineering at AWS Lambda, said on stage at Amazon Web Service's annual conference on Thursday.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon Web Services developed Firecracker internally to increase the speed and efficiency of its other services. With Firecracker, a microVM can be launched in as little as 125 microseconds, and Amazon plans to speed it up next year. Firecracker already runs on Intel processors, and there will be support for AMD and ARM chips starting in 2019.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">To run these microVMs, Firecracker uses the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine, or a virtual machine built on Linux, a popular open source operating system and the biggest rival to Microsoft Windows in the data center.</span></p><h2><strong>A good start, but tensions are still high</strong></h2><p>The general response of the open source community seems to be that the release of Firecracker is a good start, but that there are still reasons to be wary of Amazon.</p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Recently, software company Redis Labs announced it would adopt a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mongodb-and-redis-labs-have-a-new-plan-to-take-on-amazon-2018-10">new licensing clause</a> that would curtail </span><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mongodb-and-redis-labs-have-a-new-plan-to-take-on-amazon-2018-10"><span style="font-weight: 400;">major cloud providers</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> from making money off of its open source projects - a measure taken largely in response to AWS taking the Redis database software and packaging it up as a paid service. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"[It's] good to see Firecracker being open sourced. A good move, although other open source projects continue to be poached on," Manish Gupta, chief marketing officer of Redis Labs, told Business Insider.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">To Gupta's point, Amazon announced at Re:invent that it would take the Kafka open source project and resell it to its customers as a paid service. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"AWS entering the space is a win for Apache Kafka and represents the emerging consensus that Kafka is the de facto standard foundation for a company's streaming platform," Jay Kreps, a co-creator of Apache Kafka and CEO of Kafka-based startup Confluent, said in a statement. "While AWS's offering helps organizations get started with Kafka, we've found this is just the beginning of the journey."</span></p><p><em><strong>Read more:</strong> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mongodb-and-redis-labs-have-a-new-plan-to-take-on-amazon-2018-10">Two software companies, fed up with Amazon, Alibaba and other big cloud players, have a controversial new plan to fight back</a></em></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Still, if AWS continues its strategy of selling open source software, it could validate the smaller companies behind the original software, says Sanjeev Mohan, a senior director and analyst with Gartner.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"I have a theory that the rising tide lifts all ships," Mohan told Business Insider. "The market is exploding. Everyone has an opportunity to do well. Amazon doesn't need to sever relationships with the competitors. In fact, Amazon has given more credibility to that industry."</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Likewise, <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/aws-developing-new-services-amid-open-source-tensions">The Information recently reported</a> that Amazon is developing a </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">new cloud service</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> based on the open source database MongoDB. MongoDB, the company that develops the namesake software, also recently announced <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mongodb-and-redis-labs-have-a-new-plan-to-take-on-amazon-2018-10">a new license</a> of its own for open source projects, although this was more directly in response to China-based cloud providers including Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While Amazon hasn't said anything about a MongoDB-based service, Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB, believes that such a service could serve to demonstrate the excitement around open source. He says he's not too concerned about too much competition, as MongoDB and AWS have a strong partnership. Besides, he says, if AWS does sell such a product, it couldn't match the features or focus of MongoDB's own version.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"It's a testament on how much people like MongoDB. Who knows what will happen? Anything they offer would have to be significantly weaker," Horowitz said.</span></p><h2><strong>The future of Amazon and open source</strong></h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Whether cloud providers selling other vendors' software hurts or helps them, AWS launching Firecracker is another sign this year of the major tech titans investing in open source. It follows <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/github-is-officially-part-of-microsoft-acquisition-closes-2018-10">Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub</a>, IBM <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-red-hat-open-source-upset-2018-10">announcing it will acquire Red Hat</a>, and VMware announcing it would <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vmware-heptio-google-kubernetes-2018-11">acquire Heptio</a>, which works with Kubernetes.</span></p><p>If Amazon is serious about continuing in open source, it's going to have to change its mindset to really thrive, say some in the open source community. </p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"AWS definitely has an evolving relationship with open source," Joe Beda, founder and CTO of Heptio told Business Insider. "Building a business around open source is tricky. It requires a level of trust and understanding who your customers are without upsetting them...The key to be successful is to be open on where you stand."</span></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/psychology-trick-curb-appetite-lose-weight-2016-8">A Harvard psychologist reveals the secret to curbing your appetite</a></h3>        <div>                    </div>    </div>

As tensions with smaller software companies run high, Amazon is extending an olive branch with a new open source project

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>On Tuesday, lots of websites loaded slowly, or not at all, including Business Insider.</p><p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-s3-outage-2017-2">The reason</a> was that Amazon Web Services, a server product from Amazon that quietly powers a surprising number of websites, experienced a major disruption in its S3 product that lasted several hours.</p><p>Amazon gave <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/">a detailed post-mortem</a> on the issue on its website on Thursday, blaming an employee who entered an input command "incorrectly," causing a larger set of servers than was expected to be removed from service. </p><p>Those servers supported other AWS products and services, and it caused a chain reaction which meant that certain critical systems had to be rebooted - and while they were restarting, Amazon's S3 wasn't working as normal.</p><p>And that's why websites including Slack, Quora, and even the US Securities and Exchange Commission were down for much of Tuesday afternoon.</p><p>The service that was affected, Amazon S3, is used by developers to store files, so some websites may have stayed up but were slow to load or couldn't load any images.</p><p>At one point, the "dashboard" where Amazon tells its users which of its services are currently operational because of the S3 technical issue.  </p><p>The issue wasn't an "outage" because the entire system wasn't down, only some services. Amazon said that it has included new safeguards so it won't happen again. </p><p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/">Here's Amazon's full comment</a>: </p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">We'd like to give you some additional information about the service disruption that occurred in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region on the morning of February 28th. The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.  One of these subsystems, the index subsystem, manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region. This subsystem is necessary to serve all GET, LIST, PUT, and DELETE requests. The second subsystem, the placement subsystem, manages allocation of new storage and requires the index subsystem to be functioning properly to correctly operate. The placement subsystem is used during PUT requests to allocate storage for new objects. Removing a significant portion of the capacity caused each of these systems to require a full restart. While these subsystems were being restarted, S3 was unable to service requests. Other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region that rely on S3 for storage, including the S3 console, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) new instance launches, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes (when data was needed from a S3 snapshot), and AWS Lambda were also impacted while the S3 APIs were unavailable.  </p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">S3 subsystems are designed to support the removal or failure of significant capacity with little or no customer impact. We build our systems with the assumption that things will occasionally fail, and we rely on the ability to remove and replace capacity as one of our core operational processes. While this is an operation that we have relied on to maintain our systems since the launch of S3, we have not completely restarted the index subsystem or the placement subsystem in our larger regions for many years. S3 has experienced massive growth over the last several years and the process of restarting these services and running the necessary safety checks to validate the integrity of the metadata took longer than expected. The index subsystem was the first of the two affected subsystems that needed to be restarted. By 12:26PM PST, the index subsystem had activated enough capacity to begin servicing S3 GET, LIST, and DELETE requests. By 1:18PM PST, the index subsystem was fully recovered and GET, LIST, and DELETE APIs were functioning normally.  The S3 PUT API also required the placement subsystem. The placement subsystem began recovery when the index subsystem was functional and finished recovery at 1:54PM PST. At this point, S3 was operating normally. Other AWS services that were impacted by this event began recovering. Some of these services had accumulated a backlog of work during the S3 disruption and required additional time to fully recover.</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">We are making several changes as a result of this operational event. While removal of capacity is a key operational practice, in this instance, the tool used allowed too much capacity to be removed too quickly. We have modified this tool to remove capacity more slowly and added safeguards to prevent capacity from being removed when it will take any subsystem below its minimum required capacity level. This will prevent an incorrect input from triggering a similar event in the future. We are also auditing our other operational tools to ensure we have similar safety checks. We will also make changes to improve the recovery time of key S3 subsystems. We employ multiple techniques to allow our services to recover from any failure quickly. One of the most important involves breaking services into small partitions which we call cells. By factoring services into cells, engineering teams can assess and thoroughly test recovery processes of even the largest service or subsystem. As S3 has scaled, the team has done considerable work to refactor parts of the service into smaller cells to reduce blast radius and improve recovery. During this event, the recovery time of the index subsystem still took longer than we expected. The S3 team had planned further partitioning of the index subsystem later this year. We are reprioritizing that work to begin immediately.</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">From the beginning of this event until 11:37AM PST, we were unable to update the individual services' status on the AWS Service Health Dashboard (SHD) because of a dependency the SHD administration console has on Amazon S3. Instead, we used the AWS Twitter feed (@AWSCloud) and SHD banner text to communicate status until we were able to update the individual services' status on the SHD.  We understand that the SHD provides important visibility to our customers during operational events and we have changed the SHD administration console to run across multiple AWS regions.</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;">Finally, we want to apologize for the impact this event caused for our customers. While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3, we know how critical this service is to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.</p>

Amazon took down parts of the internet because an employee fat-fingered the wrong command

<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div>Amazon upping the pressure on the PC industry with the launch of a desktop app store that lets you subscribe to the business software you need on a monthly basis.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Amazon Web Services head Andy Jassy announced the move at the company's summit in San Francisco today. </span></p><p>Last year, Amazon introduced a product called AWS WorkSpaces. It lets users access what looks like their very own personal computer from any device with an Internet connection. But this PC desktop is actually a virtual version, hosted on Amazon's servers and delivered over the Internet. Companies pay a monthly fee to Amazon of as little as $25/month for each one.</p><p>Virtual PCs could reduce the need for companies to buy new PCs for their employees. Instead, they could have employees access up-to-date business apps from old PCs that couldn't run those apps locally, or from so-called "dumb" terminals that are little more than a graphic display and a network connection. </p><p>It's not a new idea - VMware and Citrix, particularly, have been providing similar solutions (known as "virtual desktop infrastructure," or VDI) for years.</p><p>But Amazon reckons companies are turning to AWS already to replace hardware they used to run in their own data centers. So why not offer customers a way to replace their other big hardware expense - the PCs that sit on every desktop? <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Johnson &amp; Johnson is a major client, reporting that it improves their flexibility and drives down their costs compared with the need to buy and maintain high-performance computers for their employees. </span></p><p>With today's announcement, Amazon is letting the CIOs and IT managers who keep track of those AWS WorkSpaces buy and maintain applications.</p><p>Pick and choose which Windows apps you want to make available to users, paid on the same kind of per-user pricing. The selection includes stuff like Microsoft Office, WinZip, CAD programs, GitHub for developers, and more.  You can even throw in any software your company developed on its own.</p><p><span>As long as the internet connection is stable, users shouldn't be able to tell they're not using a desktop app. M</span>uch like an Apple or Google app store, patching is handled automatically, and in the background, so users are always on the most current version of whatever software without the headaches of massive, constant patching.</p><p><span>Note that while AWS WorkSpaces and similar services could drive PC sales down, they shouldn't really affect the fortunes of Microsoft or the software providers. Every user still needs a license for the software they use. Whether they buy that license directly from the software company, or it comes as part of a deal with a service provider (like Amazon), the revenue going to the software company usually comes out about the same.</span></p><p>Amazon also made a couple other announcements today:</p><ul><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A new Elastic File System service for storing files, which has the potential to bring Amazon into close competition with industry giants like EMC and Netapp. </span></li><li><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A new Machine Learning Service, which will help developers build smarter applications on top of Amazon's huge cloud.</span></li><li><span style="color: #222222; line-height: 1.5em;">The general launch of Amazon's container service, helping customers ride the super-hot wave started by Docker; containers make it easier for developers to move applications between different cloud providers and on-premises services</span></li><li><span style="color: #222222; line-height: 1.5em;">The expansion of its Lambda service that helps developers build applications that can scale to huge sizes in a smarter way.</span></li></ul><p>Finally, the massive size of the AWS cloud came up a lot on stage today. In response to the hypothetical question of just how big a business cloud computing is and will be, Jassy had a reply at the ready.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">"The short answer here is that we're growing really really fast," Jassy says. "<span>Those remaining naysayers better get their heads out of the sand before they're staring at the tailights of their competitors."</span></span></p><p>It's still not disclosing (yet) how much money the massive service is making for Amazon, but usage of its core EC2 virtual server service is up 93% year over year, Jassy said. For a multi-billion dollar business, that's a solid growth curve. Amazon is planning to break out AWS financials in its next earnings report, which drops April 23.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> "Cloud computing is the biggest technology shift of our lifetimes," Jassy says.</span></p><p class="tagline">Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-prime-is-it-worth-it-2014-12">Here's How Much You Have To Buy To Make Amazon Prime Worth It</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="cxaDF3bDpBumNTY2jzHvClJf-TIZtSo-" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Amazon just took another step in its plan to make business PCs obsolete

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Battery Ventures</span></p><p class="caption">Battery Ventures technology fellow Adrian Cockcroft</p></div><p></p></div></div>Battery Ventures technology fellow Adrian Cockroft is almost always the smartest guy in the room. </p><p>Back in 2009, Cockcroft was the Netflix system architect who made the forward-looking decision to <a href="http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&amp;p=irol-newsArticle&amp;ID=1423977&amp;highlight=">move the company into the Amazon Web Services cloud</a>, well before anyone else took it seriously.</p><p>Without that move, Netflix's tremendously popular "Watch Instantly" video streaming service would likely never have happened.</p><p>So when Cockroft said on stage at today's Structure conference in San Francisco that <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-is-so-hard-to-topple-in-the-cloud-and-where-everybody-else-falls-2015-10">Amazon Web Services is growing so fast</a> that it's actually causing big, multinational corporations to consider shutting down their in-house IT infrastructure, it's time to pay attention. </p><p>"There's certainly a massive budgetary switch from data center spend to AWS," says Cockroft. </p><p>Amazon Web Services is the clear leader in the cloud, and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-cloud-grows-even-bigger-2015-7">will be $7 billion business for the retail giant this year alone</a>. Cockroft says that Microsoft Azure is certainly catching up, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-made-its-own-version-of-linux-2015-9">thanks in no small part to its recent love for open source technologies like Linux</a>. </p><p>But Cockcroft says that Amazon could be growing even faster than current analyst projections of 80% per year, mainly because it's been in the game longer and has developed its core infrastructure platform further. </p><p>The end result: Companies like General Electric and Capital One are shutting down their data centers, opting to save cash by outsourcing big chunks of their computing to Amazon. In fact, they say that they get better security on the cloud than they could on their own.</p><p>"I've been saying that for a while now," Cockcroft says.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Werner Vogels</span></p><p class="caption">Amazon CTO Werner Vogels</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Other trends identified by Cockcroft:</p><ul><li>As companies look to move faster in the cloud, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/docker-buys-tutum-for-software-container-management-2015-10">$1 billion startup Docker</a> will only continue to grow, thanks to its signature software container technology. And there's a huge potential for startups that help enterprises use Docker in their own apps. </li><li>"Serverless architecture," like the kind presented by <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-lambda-explained-2015-11">Amazon Web Services' Lambda</a>, will really take off since it makes it much easier for developers to build big apps that scale.</li><li>"Teraservices," or the ability to crunch massive amounts of data right on the same servers where they live, is going to be a big trend in 2016.</li><li>DigitalOcean, a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/digitalocean-raising-83-million-series-b-round-2015-7">hot startup that's in the hard business of competing with Amazon Web Services</a>, is seeing its growth cool off: The more customers the big tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon get, the more they can invest in both price and performance, making it hard to differentiate. </li><li>He calls Dell a "sinking ship" that went private to become a "submarine," EMC a sinking ship that decided to merge with a submarine, and HP a sinking ship that split into two ships to sink slightly more slowly. In other words, he thinks that they can't necessarily compete in the cloud.</li></ul><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With Cockcroft's track record, it's going to be interesting to see how right he is. </span></p><p class="tagline">Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-benefits-nyt-report-culture-retail-orders-shipping-2015-8">Maybe working at Amazon is hard for a reason</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="d4eG4ydzr2sR8Qz-S2fyywm5v_r2LOIM" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

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