Amazon Web Services has made a small but important change to its EKS Anywhere on-prem Kubernetes offering – the option to install it on bare metal servers instead of exclusively inside a VMware vSphere environment.

"Amazon EKS Anywhere on bare metal enables customers to automate all steps from bare metal hardware provisioning to Kubernetes cluster operations using a bundled open source toolset built on the foundation of Tinkerbell and Cluster API," states the cloud colossus's announcement of the offering.

The offering is free, but AWS generously offers service subscriptions.

VMware argues that its own vSphere virtual machine management platform is a fine way to run Kubernetes, as once container-wrangling toolkit underpins mission-critical apps it needs the isolation and manageability afforded by well-managed virtual machines. Virtzilla is not alone in that position.

But in a post discussing the bare metal option, AWS product manager Vipin Mohan wrote: "Running Kubernetes on bare metal infrastructure is complex … Customers said that using a virtualization layer alleviates some of these problems but adds software licensing and support costs."

AWS also feels that customers who run on-prem Kubernetes value hybrid clouds that behave consistently on-prem and off. As EKS effectively runs on bare metal in the AWS cloud, that consistency is now available.

EKS Anywhere on bare metal requires at least two servers: one to host the control plane and another to run workloads. To run the tool in production, AWS recommends three control plane boxes and two workers.

Each machine needs a pair of CPUs, 8GB of RAM and 25GB of storage.

Support for the likes of Redfish or Dell iDRAC is required, although AWS has admitted it's possible to run EKS Anywhere without such Intelligent Platform Management Interfaces – at the cost of not being to upgrade software or automated shutdown and startup of servers.

AWS has validated servers from Dell, HPE, Lenovo and SuperMicro.

One of the rivals for EKS, Google's Anthos, was recently re-invented as a way to bring the G-cloud experience, and hybrid cloud-native applications, on premises.

Those who fancy running Kubernetes on-prem are therefore increasingly spoiled for choice. ®

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.

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.

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.

VMware today revealed details about Project Arctic, the vSphere-as-a-service offering it teased in late 2021, though it won't discuss pricing for another month.

VMware's thinking starts with the fact that organizations are likely to run multiple instances of its vSphere and VSAN products, often in multiple locations. Managing them all centrally is not easy.

Enter vSphere+ and VSAN+, which run in the cloud and can control multiple on-premises instances of vSphere or VSAN. To make that possible, users will need to adopt the Cloud Gateway, which connects vSphere instances to a Cloud Console.

Matt Ramberg is the vice president of information security at Sanmina, a sprawling electronics manufacturer with close to 60 facilities in 20 countries on six continents and some 35,000 employees spread across the world.

Like most enterprises, Sanmina, a big name in contract manufacturing, is also adapting to a new IT environment. The 42-year-old Fortune 500 company, with fiscal year 2021 revenue of more than $6.76 billion, was an early and enthusiastic adopter of the cloud, taking its first step into Google Cloud in 2009.

With manufacturing sites around the globe, it also is seeing its technology demands stretch out to the edge.

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.

Google Cloud's Anthos on-prem platform is getting a new home under the search giant’s recently announced Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) portfolio, where it will live on as a software-based competitor to AWS Outposts and Microsoft Azure Stack.

Introduced last fall, GDC enables customers to deploy managed servers and software in private datacenters and at communication service provider or on the edge.

Its latest update sees Google reposition Anthos on-prem, introduced back in 2020, as the bring-your-own-server edition of GDC. Using the service, customers can extend Google Cloud-style management and services to applications running on-prem.

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.

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.

The major hyperscalers and cloud providers are forecast to spend 25 percent more on datacenter infrastructure this year to $18 billion following record investments in the opening three months of 2022.

This is according to Dell’Oro Group research, which found new cloud deployments and higher per-unit infrastructure costs underpinned capex spending in Q1, which grew at its fastest pace in nearly three years, the report found.

Datacenter spending is expected to receive an additional boost later this year as the top four cloud providers expand their services to as many as 30 new regions and memory prices trend upward ahead of Intel and AMD’s next-gen processor families, Dell’Oro analyst Baron Fung told The Register

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