Sunday Reading — October 6, 2019

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Enterprise Te.ch

5 min readOct 6, 2019

The mother of all disruptions: It didn’t get the attention it deserved but on September 25, Amazon announced Sidewalk. While the tech media summed it up as a network for IoT, this is much, much bigger. Amazon is building a network using unlicensed 900 MHz spectrum which can connect everything. From Amazon:

Amazon Sidewalk is a new long-term effort to greatly extend the working range of low-bandwidth, low-power, smart lights, sensors, and other low-cost devices customers install at the edge of their home network. Using the 900 MHz spectrum, we are developing a new protocol we project can increase the connection range of these devices by more than one half mile/one kilometer. With Amazon Sidewalk, customers will be able to place smart devices anywhere on their property and know they’ll work great, even in dead spots where Wi-Fi and Bluetooth don’t reach.

This is a really, really big deal.

Think low cost, low powered connectivity to EVERYTHING. Amazon is building a network to challenge 5G. This is similar to what Sigfox has been doing for years and the implications are truly disruptive to how everything accesses the internet.

Now think about Amazon deploying a mesh of communication satellites and Blue Origin makes much more sense. The new internet for the connection of everything is being built by Amazon.

Brian Roemmele has a fantastic deep dive on Sidewalk here which emphasizes the implications:

I can not overstate enough how important this Echo Network will become. This is Amazon owning the entire stack. Bypassing the ancient cellular network concepts and even the much heralded 5G networks. Sidewalk and Kuiper combined will render much of 5G redundant and even irrelevant. And with every Amazon Prime delivery truck using this service as well as well as doorbells at the front door and Whole Foods down the block, things get interesting very fast.

Not everyone gets it though. Business Insider’s hot take: “Amazon’s new wireless protocol for IoT devices will have trouble finding a customer base”.

No, actually they won’t.

They ARE the customer base. Alexa. Ring. Now Fetch. All are PoC’s of something much bigger.

Libra is dead: Facebook’s tone-deaf and widely criticized announcement of it’s proposed blockchain digital currency, Libra, is dead. It will just take awhile for them to come to terms with it. This week PayPal politely withdrew from Facebook’s Libra Association:

“PayPal has made the decision to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time and to continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratize access to financial services for underserved populations”

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Visa, Mastercard and other financial partners that signed on are “reconsidering” involvement following a backlash from government officials.

He’s dead, Jim.

81% using Multi-cloud: According to Gartner’s survey, multi-cloud is real. From CIO:

Gartner has a more formal definition of multi-cloud: The deliberate use of the same type of cloud services from multiple public cloud providers, says Gartner analyst David Smith. In this construct, a mobile app may dynamically move, via containers or other technologies between AWS or Azure based on prescribed business requirements. These portable apps are managed and monitored for uptime, reliability and security via a single dashboard.
Few enterprises check all of these boxes on Gartner’s multi-cloud rate card because such prescribed, dynamic scaling is hard to do, Smith says. Regardless of how you define multi-cloud, of the 52 percent of 1,200 respondents using public cloud, 81 percent work with one or more public cloud vendors, according to a survey Gartner conducted in November 2018.

This won’t stop the “only one way to cloud” crowd. It’s religion. Cloud is complex and it’s too hard they say. But again… the appeal of adopting cloud technologies isn’t simplicity or cost, it’s agility. We have to stop framing the value of cloud in terms of simplicity or cost. This is, in part, the logic that has caught many companies off guard with new security exposures. You still need infrastructure, security and networking engineers regardless if it’s on-premises, co-located or in a public cloud. Having teams that understand how to manage multiple-clouds isn’t simple or cheap but again, that’s not the point. The value is agility and multi-cloud extends that agility.

Podcast: Go Your Way Episode 1 with Red Hat’s Brian Gracely

In this 1st episode, we speak to Brian Gracely Sr. Director Product Strategy from Red Hat, to uncover the challenges, opportunities, and debate on multicloud. Can IaaS ever truly be multicloud, and what are some cloud application deployment trends?

Listen here!