Sunday Reading — September 29, 2019

Published in

Enterprise Te.ch

6 min readSep 29, 2019

Deep Learning≠Deep Understanding: The biggest challenge with AI is the adaptability to the complexities of the real world to deliver accurate outcomes. Early AI successes have been relatively superficial and largely focused on some level of image recognition but general intelligence is still elusive. From MIT Technology Review:

When an AI system doesn’t truly understand its tasks or the world around it, that could also lead to dangerous consequences. Even the smallest unexpected changes in a system’s environment could make it go awry. Already there have been innumerable examples of this: hate speech detectors that are easy to fool, job application systems that perpetuate discrimination, and self-driving cars that have crashed, sometimes killing the driver or a pedestrian. The quest for artificial general intelligence is more than an interesting research problem. It has very real-world implications.

Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis explore the gaps and opportunities for AI and ML in their new book, Rebooting AI. More from MIT Technology Review:

In cognitive science we talk about having cognitive models of things. So I’m sitting in a hotel room, and I understand that there’s a closet, there’s a bed, there’s the television that’s mounted in an unusual way. I know that there are all these things here, and I don’t just identify them. I also understand how they relate to one another. I have these ideas about how the outside world works. They’re not perfect. They’re fallible, but they’re pretty good. And I make a lot of inferences around them to guide my everyday actions.
The opposite extreme is something like the Atari game system that DeepMind made, where it memorized what it needed to do as it saw pixels in particular places on the screen. If you get enough data, it can look like you’ve got understanding, but it’s actually a very shallow understanding. The proof is if you shift things by three pixels, it plays much more poorly. It breaks with the change. That’s the opposite of deep understanding.

How enterprises are leveraging the cloud: Sumo Logic has released it’s annual “Continuous Intelligence: The State of Modern Applications and DevSecOps in the Cloud” report identifies key directions for growth across modern software application stacks. The report is based on anonymized data from more than 2,000 customers and 100,000 users leveraging Sumo Logic’s Continuous Intelligence Platform. The report found ‘significant’ year-over-year growth in enterprise usage of multi-cloud adoption, open source technologies including Kubernetes and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-native services adoption. Key findings from the report:

1. Multi-cloud adoption has grown by 50% since last year. AWS still dominates by marketshare.
2. Kubernetes (K8s) adoption continues to grow. We also see significant K8s adoption in multi-cloud customers.
3. Open source has disrupted the modern application stack with open source solutions for containers, orchestration, infrastructure and application services leading this transformation. 4 in 6 application infrastructure platforms include open source technologies.
4. A typical enterprise uses 15 AWS services from 150+ available. The adopted services are compute, storage, database, and network. Of the ancillary services like tooling and management, few are broadly adopted by enterprises.
5. Serverless has reached a tipping point: 1 in 3 enterprises uses AWS Lambda in production. AWS Lambda is also used a lot in non-production use cases and has become one of the top 10 AWS services by adoption.
6. Significant use of AWS native security and threat intelligence services shows that enterprises are continuing to adopt next-gen and cloud-hosted security technologies

Kubernetes goes to the moon: MRI Technologies is working with NASA to launch the space agency into the era of modern application development using Kubernetes and GitLab. The project is delivering a“modern platform where developers can easily collaborate with non-developers, no complex tooling is required, and context switching is a thing of the past”. From GitLab:

To get there, MRI emphasized collaboration and tried to reach out to the “forward-leaning” customers and individual civil servant developers, engineers and researchers who were eager to contribute. The team adhered strictly to cloud native, Zero Trust and open source approaches and, in the end, came up with a Kubernetes platform that met the space agency’s needs for today and in the future. The technology choices were important, but so was the time spent laying the groundwork for a culture change. “Many modernization proposals try to meet everyone where they’re at,” Marshall explained. “A more opinionated approach allows us to provide a succinct and unified toolchain that all parties can contribute to, evolve, and improve over time.”

Serverless - 15% slower and 8x more expensive: An interesting case study on AWS Serverless costs from CardGames.io:

Our API accepts around 10 million requests a day. That’s ~35$ every day, just for API Gateway. On top of that Lambda was costing around ~10$ a day, although that could maybe be reduced by using less memory. Together that’s around 45$ per day, or 1350$ per month, vs. ~164$ per month for Elastic Beanstalk. That’s 8 times more expensive! I like new tech, and deploying quickly but I’m not gonna pay an extra ~1200$ month for it. Back to Beanstalk!

Meet the NetApp Execs and Experts at NetApp INSIGHT 2019

In addition to the great breakout sessions, training, and social activities, NetApp INSIGHT 2019 Las Vegas is the perfect place to meet the brains and the people behind NetApp technology. It’s your opportunity to get more out of your investments by building relationships with experts and execs that you might not have the opportunity to interact with anywhere else.

Nowadays, a “tech refresh” is more than just replacing old systems with new ones. It’s about looking out to the future of data (and what you can do with it) to drive business outcomes. There’s no better way to do that than by talking to the people who design and build these cutting-edge solutions.

It’s as easy as striking up a casual conversation with someone after their session, in the hallway, or at the INSIGHT Central expo floor. But if you want to have an individual, meaningful experience, I highly recommend you book a one-on-one meeting with NetApp’s executives and technical leadership. Read more…