Huzzah! You succeeded in remaining a human being this year! If you’re still feeling like this guy after the strangest year in decades, wrap yourself in blankets next to the nearest mountain of rich holiday treats and let the sweet world of the cloud take you into a new one.

WHAT’S NEW WITH US

Thankfully, 2020 was a big year for us at Tidal Migrations. Feature-wise, we bookended the year with a PDF Portfolio Report in January and an interactive Portfolio Insights feature in December.

What else is new? Well I’m glad you asked…

WELCOME NEW TIDAL CREW!

Also in 2020, we doubled our team of Migration Hackers, with team members from Halifax, the US, Australia (Kangaroos) and Austria (no kangaroos).

We’ve been super fortunate to bring three new crew members on board this month, and they just happen to be awesome. A huge welcome to Ehren Duisberg, Pranav Malaviya, and Sam King!

TIDAL EVENTS

If you’re looking to fill your calendar for January, never fear - our next All-Virtual Migration Enablement Workshop is on for January 19, 2021! Register now and join us from home while our own David Colebatch walks you through the first 3 phases of the cloud migration process.

Can’t wait? You can sign up for a one-on-one if you like the sounds of a dedicated, private workshop, with our team.

ASK DAVID

“Hey David, I’m getting some push-back from our team regarding analyzing our production databases, the DEV databases should be enough, right?” - Terrance from the United States

Thanks Terrance and I wish that this was an unusual question, however, the fear of impacting production applications and databases with analysis is common.

While it’s true that you should protect your production workloads, it shouldn’t be irrational, in other words, it’s important to understand and determine if there will be any impact on the performance of the production database by performing the analysis.

It is also completely understandable to do a dry run on the development database to see what data would be collected, or evaluate any impact. But, when it comes to planning the migration of the production databases, it’s imperative that you evaluate the production databases, and not use dev as a proxy for prod.

Things like number of connections, disk I/O, the number of integrations, different features and permissions that have accrued over the years will be drastically different between development and production and furnish essential data to plan your migration.

Terrific question Terrance, keep them coming!

David

CLOUD NEWS

In the Works – AWS Region in Melbourne, Australia - This fine island is about to be more connected. AWS is expanding its availability in Australia from their one region in Sydney to Melbourne in 2022. While that may feel like a long wait, you’ve always got Elon’s Starlink to tide you over.
AWS re:Invent 2020 Day 3: Optimizing Lambda Cost with Multi-Threading - For those of you Lambda users, you’ll now be saving some coin. Day 3 of re:Invent revealed Lambda’s abilities in the parallel processing of multiple threads, as well as what that means for your company’s processing power (and pocketbook).
Google enters agreement to acquire Actifio - Enterprise customers can sleep a bit easier with Google’s newest acquisition, who will be upping their data protection game. Even your hybrid infrastructure is taken care of for backup and DR, all the more reason to migrate!
5 Data Trends That Will Take Your Business Forward In 2021, From Google Cloud Leaders - After an avalanche of change this year, four Google Cloud sages lay down some learnings that will help you live in this strange new world, and help your business do its best to “pivot” (we had to say it at least once).
Parsec raises $25M from a16z to power remote work and cloud gaming - This streaming tech startup originally helped gamers access their PCs from other devices, but through the pandemic it turned out these gamers (who are also architects, engineers and video production specialists) could use the same tech to access their workspaces remotely. Parsec for Teams has helped them raise a pretty penny, and opened up some pretty cool avenues in work and play that’ll only continue to blossom.
AWS re:Invent keynote highlights reinvention culture, faster cloud instances, and serverless deployments - Lucky attendees of virtual re:Invent this year witnessed AWS CEO Andy Jassy citing the conference’s namesake in serving up 8 brilliant tactics for a resilient and innovation-rich organization: reinvention. Airbnb, Peloton, and Stripe got shout-outs for being prime examples of badass reinventors.
Microsoft announces plans to establish a new datacenter region in Denmark to accelerate the country’s green, digital transformation - Not just about hygge, Denmark also innovates toward saving the planet in opening their 100% renewable energy-powered datacenter region. Danes will be stepping more lightly with their smaller carbon footprint!

BEST NEWS OF 2020

To fill that extra downtime you’ve planned, we’ve done a bit of a roundup of some news from 2020 that we thought was worthy of re-note!

Red Hat, Cloud Save IBM - Seems like nothing but good things happening for IBM since Red Hat joined the ranks, with Red Hat’s $34 billion division playing a huge part in their Q4 success, and a forecasting a bright and sunny 2020. Hold on to your hats…
Microsoft To Build First Cloud Data Center Region In Mexico - Look out Mexico, Azure’s coming. Along with the data center region, Microsoft is putting labs and virtual classrooms in public universities around the country to step up education on cloud computing there.
AWS launches initiative to accelerate COVID-19 diagnostics, research, and testing - if you’ve been a bit uneasy, AWS is flying in with a cape, making it easier for their customers in R&D to work on better diagnostics for faster, and even at-home, testing for this and future viruses. AWS is supporting these companies with the cloud space, power, and the tech support they need to give everyone a little peace of mind.
Google Cloud’s fully managed Anthos is now generally available for AWS - Google’s on a roll again, as Anthos, their multi-cloud management platform becomes generally available to AWS. Anthos is known for making it possible to write an application once and deploy it anywhere you like. Don’t worry Azure, they’re coming for you too.
Year of modernization: 56% of professionals are working on cloud migrations for 2020 - If you’ve previously been bound by regulatory requirements when migration to the cloud, it may not be for much longer. This year even the strictest of companies are looking at overcoming these barriers to keep pace with the majority of the workforce, and reap the massive benefits of cloud-native operations!
AWS launches Amazon Honeycode, a no-code mobile and web app builder - Magic happened last Wednesday. AWS is making it possible for anybody to build their own custom mobile and web applications - developer or not. Starting a business? Get your whole team aligned with self-made apps for scheduling, to-do lists, etc. Say goodbye to Excel spreadsheets!
Google Cloud’s new BigQuery Omni will let developers query data in GCP, AWS and Azure - Big news for BigQuery! The launch of Anthos-run BigQuery Omni will now allow developers to go multi-cloud, analyzing data locally without having to switch data sets between various cloud providers. Get to your data wherever it may be!
Snowflake files for IPO, taking on Amazon and Microsoft cloud database businesses - This cloud software company from Silicon Valley filed to go public on August 24th, their gross profit having almost tripled since the first half of 2019. Their data warehouse technology residing entirely in the cloud both relies on the big 3 for infrastructure, and competes with them.
Microsoft Azure and AWS’ partnership model will make enterprise software companies dependent on cloud providers - Expect to hear a lot more of these two names around your organization. If you’re a software provider, now you’ll have to purchase cloud storage from one of these two giants if you want to make it big in enterprise. Silver lining: they’ll get the word out about you to all their powerful friends.
Cloud migrations can reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 60 million tons a year - And now for some good news (really!). In case you needed another reason to move to the cloud, it’s going to save the planet from the CO2 of the equivalent of 22 million cars taken off the road. And it looks like CEOs all over are stepping up to the challenge.
Alibaba passes IBM in cloud infrastructure market with over $2B in revenue - For those who remember last month’s newsletter, it looks like Forrester’s 2021 forecast was right on target as Alibaba outran IBM in revenues, despite only entering the market in 2015. Look out Big 3…

That’s all for 2020. Thanks for your friendship this year, and as always, if you’ve had a good time with us this newsletter, let us know by sharing on social media (links below) and keep your friends up to date.

And in case you missed it, check out our November newsletter.

Stay united and see you in 2021!

-Tidal Migrations