Okay. Hello, Cloud gurus, how y'all doing?
Scott Pletcher here on special assignments at Pluralsight global headquarters in
Salt Lake City, Utah. This week,
I'm joining all the members of our Pluralsight developer advocate family as we
scheme up new ways to bring you the educational and entertaining content that
you expect, and as is often the case, when you put us into a room together,
shenanigans will ensue.
So stay tuned for what might just be the strangest episode of this show we have
ever recorded. This is AWS this Week.
In top secret spy news this week,
the national security agency or NSA quietly re awarded a massive
$10 billion cloud computing contract to AWS. Originally,
the NSA did select AWS as a partner of choice for the classified procurement
effort known as wild and stormy. However,
runner up Microsoft protested the decision and requested that the general
accounting office perform a review of the selection process and a 34 page
report released publicly last December.
The GAO agreed with Microsoft and recommended that the NSA reevaluate their
choice.
Apparently the NSA did reevaluate and still decided to go with AWS.
Note that this is different than the Jedi contract,
which Microsoft had apparently won,
but was subsequently canceled by the department of defense. Now,
although it is a few months old,
I did find it fascinating to read through the GAO's report for a glimpse into
how the NSA approached this evaluation.
And just as you might expect with documents involving national security,
it even has parts that have been redacted.
As some of you may also be evaluating cloud computing partners,
you too might find the GAO's report. Interesting,
and we'll include a link down below just because we're cool like that.
AWS has made some significant investments in the manufacturing and industrial
sectors over the past few years,
bringing the power and flexibility of AWS service closer to the shop
floor through projects like IOT Expresslink, Greengrass, and Sitewise,
customers are able to fairly easily connect their industrial controls and
sensors directly to AWS services for data ingestion. Recently,
AWS announced the general availability of AWS IoT TwinMaker,
a service to help with the creation of digital twins.
Just what is a digital twin? Well, here to be my digital twin is Lars Klint,
whom you may recall was my deep fake on that enlightening yet deeply disturbing
episode of Future of Tech.
Think of a digital twin as a sort of consolidation point that makes it easier to
understand use and explain all that captured industrial data.
Take the example of a fuel injector assembly line.
You can have hundreds of sensors collecting thousands of discrete data elements
on each and every part that flows down that line.
Ingesting that data real time into a repository is one thing,
but it is another thing entirely to try to wrap our minds around and visualize
that production process. Here's where a digital twin is useful.
It's a virtual representation of a physical thing. Be it a CNC machine,
a production line, a power substation, or even a whole city.
Once you have this virtual overlay established this opens doors to more advanced
visualizations and simplifies access to all that data with these digital
representations of real world assets,
we can simulate and evaluate proposed process changes,
or maybe use augmented reality to help workers quickly and correctly identify
equipment in need of preventative maintenance. See?
My digital twin agrees.
And for our final story,
I have some exciting news for all you Canadian viewers out there. In fact,
I brought in our resident Canadian,
Mattias Andersson to help translate this story for our French Canadian viewers.
[Speaks French].
This week,
AWS announced general availability of the first Wavelength zone for Canada.
[Speaks French].
AWS has partnered with Bell to open the first local Wavelength zone in Toronto,
Ontario.
[Repeats in French].
AWS wavelength allows customers to deploy compute and storage services right
within their telecom providers' data centers for the least possible latency into
their respective 5g networks and onto all those connected devices.
[Speaks French] Poutine!
And that my friends is all the AWS news that's fit to print this week,
stay safe, take care of one another and keep being awesome, Cloud Gurus.
Cheesys?
Oh!