Edition #18: Buy with prime, Dropbox's disaster readiness tests, AWS wins a $10B NSA contract, and more
Hello Friends,
I hope all of you are well.
As I recovered from COVID, this past week has been better. The fatigue and post COVID recovery is no joke, but we are taking each day as it comes.
Hope all of you are staying healthy and safe.
Here we go with this week's newsletter and cover 5 topics.
Why is "Buy with Prime" a big deal?
Lessons in disaster readiness from Dropbox.
50 hours of Azure lessons and certification material
Protecting Critical infrastructure in 2022/23
AWS wins $10B NSA contract
Amazon announces "Buy with prime". Why is this a big deal?
Amazon Prime revolutionized the retail, supply chain, customer experience, and customer expectation space. Amazon got rewarded. It became one of the fastest-growing companies of our time.
Amazon has now come up with a feature called 'buy with prime'. Companies would be able to bring a 'buy with prime' button to their website. Customers can buy a product from a band using Amazon's distribution experience. It's a pretty big deal.
Amazon prime has 150 million subscribers. We have gotten so used to frictionless shopping and same-day or 1-day delivery. There is a trust and reliability factor too.
"Buy with prime", Amazon is extending its distribution network, supply chain, and the last mile delivery services to brands at scale.
Amazon will compete and hurt companies like Shopify.
Shopify provided a web store, order management, and payment capture for businesses.
"Buy with Prime" is sure to bring a new wave of disruption to eCommerce.
Dropbox's Disaster readiness tests are at a scale that is second to none
Dropbox has been working on disaster readiness tests and documenting its experiments. Now they have published details of their massive scale tests from late 2021.
For context, dropbox has 700 millions+ users and exabytes of data.
Dropbox moved out of AWS in 2015 and started building its infrastructure. Its storage and services began concentrating on the San Jose Datacenter. This DC is close to the San Andreas fault line. Dropbox wanted to make its service fault-tolerant if a natural disaster were to strike.
This began the journey of building solutions and testing to see if They can achieve that vision at scale.
On Nov 18, 2021, Dropbox was able to completely take off San Jose DC offline for 30 mins without causing any impacts to their global services. Phew!
It is a technological feat. It demonstrates technical acumen a detail-oriented approach and persistence for excellence.
The lessons learned, tools built, and knowledge from this journey at is priceless.
They had caused an outage for 47 minutes in 2020 While testing one of their 'Active-active' deployments.
link [ https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/disaster-readiness-test-failover-blackhole-sjc ]
50 hours of MS Azure learning content
I bumped into this training bundle.
Azure is gaining significant ground and hence attracting a lot of technology talent.
This bundle covers ten courses and excellent training for $39. It covers training for AZ-103, AZ-203, AZ-300, AZ-301, and AZ-900. The bundle covers main concepts, Azure Infrastructure solutions, design solutions, and a lot more.
link [ https://academy.zdnet.com/sales/the-complete-2020-microsoft-azure-certification-prep-bundle-2 ]
How to protect from critical cloud infrastructure failures
In the past 5 years, we have seen rapid growth in public cloud adoption. Pandemic accelerated the pace. On the other side, We have seen significant outages from AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook in 2020 and 2021. These providers are becoming too big to fail. In the coming days, industries will get deep-rooted as Cloud vendors verticalize solutions.
Here are 3 ways to prevent disruption from downtime or major infrastructure outages.
-> Consider creating a fallback or replica infrastructure on a second cloud provider. These can be costly and complex but improve your odds of surviving a critical failure within your primary cloud provider.
->Invest in DR-As-A-Service providers. Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, iLand, IBM, and Sungard Availability Services are some of the top players on the Forrester Wave.
-> Conduct business impact analysis for Cloud and your SaaS applications. Conduct a Potential Risk Vs Risk tolerance matrix for your top business applications.
AWS won a $10B NSA contract beating Microsoft
The new contract is code-named "Wild and Stormy".
AWS won the contract in 2021. Microsoft protested against it. The decision was re-reviewed. AWS has re-awarded the contract now.
The bid is for NSA's hybrid compute initiatives to modernize the processing and analytics requirements.
The project was code-named 'JEDI' before. There has also been a history of conflicts between AWS and Microsoft for the bid.
These contracts have been canceled, awarded, canceled, challenged, and re-awarded. With significant value and working with the highest government office, the name "wild and Stormy" does suit very well. Wishing AWS good luck with the win.
Cheers
Saurabh