Google Gemini

 

Yday, Google announced a major rebrand of Bard, its artificial intelligence chatbot and assistant, including a fresh app and subscription options. Bard, a chief competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is now called Gemini, the same name as the suite of AI models that power the chatbot.

Google CEO wrote in his note - "A new state of the art"

In December, we took a significant step on our journey to make AI more helpful for everyone with the start of the Gemini era, setting a new state of the art across a wide range of text, image, audio, and video benchmarks. However, Gemini is evolving to be more than just the models. It supports an entire ecosystem — from the products that billions of people use every day, to the APIs and platforms helping developers and businesses innovate.

The largest model Ultra 1.0 is the first to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects — including math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics — to test knowledge and problem-solving abilities.

Today we’re taking our next step and bringing Ultra to our products and the world.

AWS IPv4

Starting 1st Feb 2024, AWS Free Tier covers for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, 12 months free, to include 750 hours of public IPv4 address usage per month. 

AWS Free Tier for Amazon EC2 applies to in-use public IPv4 address usage. Usage beyond 750 hours per month of in-use public IPv4 address will be charged at $0.005 per IP per hour as announced in this AWS News blog. 

There is no change in pricing for idle public IPv4 addresses that you allocate in your account but don’t attach to an EC2 instance. IPv4 addresses that you own and bring to AWS using Amazon BYOIP will continue to be free. 

Azure vs AWS 2023

With the recent learnings/working experiences, one question stroked my mind - Azure vs AWS.

An interesting article is available at https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cloud-computing-tutorial/aws-vs-azure, based on last year 2023

In a nutshell, Azure and AWS are both well-respected members of the cloud domain. Azure holds about 29.4% of all installed application workloads while AWS stands at 41.5 percent.

GCP certification levels

 

Google Cloud certifications are typically categorized into three main levels: Foundation, Associate and Professional.

1. Foundation

The foundational certification validates your comprehensive understanding of fundamental cloud concepts. It requires knowledge of Google Cloud's products, features, services, tools, use cases, and benefits, with no specific technical prerequisites. Upon successful completion, the individual is certified as a digital cloud leader, qualified to work in any organization.

2. Associate level

This extends beyond a broad understanding of cloud features. It ensures that the credential holder possesses the essential skills to deploy, operate, oversee, and sustain projects on the Google Cloud platform.

3. Professional level

The professional certification enables individuals to evaluate essential technical responsibilities associated with specific and advanced roles. It equips candidates with advanced and specialized expertise in the design, implementation, and management of Google Cloud products.

2024 Multi cloud

We're shifting our gear towards true multi cloud strategy.  

The primary driving factor is due to personal 3:4:3 (3 years: 4 quarters: 3 months) on cloud technology passion. Last couple of years, blessed focus on AWS and Azure in terms of work experience and industry certifications.  

This year, effort is towards Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

To kick start the multi cloud learning, here is the summary of Top-3 cloud platforms in the industry namely Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google GCP

 Happy New Year 2024!

AWS reinvent 2023

On 22nd November 2023, Generative AI was the focus at AWS's biggest annual cloud event, as well as news, keynotes, and innovation talks.

Details are available at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/top-announcements-of-aws-reinvent-2023/ 

AWS ECS idempotency

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports idempotency for task launches, allowing you to safely retry task launches without side effects. This feature helps ensure that timeouts or connection errors do not result in the launch of more instances than you originally intended, saving you time and money.

Idempotent operations allow requests to be retried with no additional side effects. You can now ensure that at most the desired number of tasks are launched as part of a RunTask API request by adding the following input to the request —client-token abcd. 

With an idempotent request, after requested tasks are successfully launched, subsequent retries using the same client token “abcd” within the same Amazon ECS cluster will not launch any additional tasks. When you use the AWS SDK or the AWS Management Console, a client token is automatically generated and added to RunTask requests (and used in any subsequent retries) if you do not pass one explicitly. 

Amazon ECS now supports idempotency for task launches on AWS Fargate, Amazon EC2 instances, and Amazon ECS Anywhere in all AWS regions. To get started with adding idempotency to RunTask API requests, see the ECS documentation at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/APIReference/ECS_Idempotency.html