标签：#Cloud

AWS recently announced CDK Mixins, a new AWS CDK feature that lets developers add reusable capabilities like security, monitoring, and configuration to AWS resources. Mixins work across different construct types, making infrastructure code more flexible and reusable. By Renato Losio

A quick note on the links below. The DigitalOcean and Vultr links in this article are referral links. If you sign up via them, you get a free credit on your new account (currently $200 over 60 days for DigitalOcean and up to $300 for Vultr) and the author of this article gets a small referral credit too, at no extra cost to you. AWS does not run an equivalent referral program, so the AWS links are normal links. The review below is the author's own evaluation; the credits do not change the recommendations. If you have ever spent a workday watching your website refuse to load, you are not alone. In a recent outage , a single building in Northern Virginia hosting one of Amazon's availability zones (the cloud-industry term for one campus's worth of servers in one region ) got too hot. The hardware shut itself down. AWS calls this a thermal event. Customers around the world have other names for it. Big enterprises ride out outages like this. They have multi-region setups, dedicated SRE teams, and SLA credits that will refund a small fraction of their monthly bill. Small and mid-size businesses do not. They lose a day of revenue, scramble to reassure customers, and then read a post-mortem in a few weeks that explains what went wrong in language that does not help them recover the lost revenue. The cloud was supposed to make small businesses look big. After each new outage, it is fair to ask: is AWS actually the right cloud for small businesses at all? Two providers worth a serious look, DigitalOcean and Vultr , are simpler, cheaper at the entry level, and built around use cases that more closely match what a small business actually needs. Here is what each one does, where AWS is still the right answer, and how to decide. Why AWS hits small businesses harder than big ones When a giant company has an AWS outage, three teams kick into gear. There is the engineering team that fails workloads over to a backup region. There is the customer-success team that updates the status p

I run a content site, do-and-coffee.com . Like everyone else, it gets scraped by AI crawlers. Instead of blocking them, I did something else: I put a paywall in front of the site that returns HTTP 402 Payment Required to bots, with machine-readable payment instructions. If a crawler pays a cent in USDC, it gets the article. If it doesn't, it gets the 402 and nothing else. Then I let it run for 30 days and watched. Here's what actually happened — and it's not the number you'd put on a pitch deck. TL;DR A Cloudflare Worker sits in front of the site. AI crawlers get 402 + x402 payment requirements ; humans and search bots pass through free. Payment is USDC on Base , $0.01 per article, verified and settled through Coinbase's CDP facilitator. 30-day result: 5,811 crawler requests, 5 paid, 5,806 served a 402. Revenue at $0.01/article ≈ $0.05 . The interesting part isn't the revenue. It's who paid: GPTBot paid 4 times out of 48 requests; ClaudeBot paid once out of 651. Architecture do-and-coffee.com/blog/article/* ─▶ x402 Worker (Cloudflare) │ has X-PAYMENT-RESPONSE? ───────────┤─▶ yes ─▶ proxy origin (200) KV cache hit (payer:url)? ─────────┤─▶ yes ─▶ proxy origin (200) no X-PAYMENT? ─────────────────────┤─▶ 402 + payment requirements has X-PAYMENT? ────────────────────┘ │ ├─▶ CDP /verify (is the signed payment valid?) ├─▶ CDP /settle (waitUntil: confirmed — on-chain) └─▶ on success: KV.put(payer:url, receipt, ttl 24h) ─▶ proxy origin The worker speaks the x402 protocol: a 402 response carries an accepts array describing exactly how to pay (scheme exact , network base , asset USDC, amount, payTo wallet). A compliant agent reads that, signs a USDC payment, and retries with an X-PAYMENT header. The worker verifies and settles it through Coinbase's facilitator, then proxies the real article. How it works The 402 response When there's no payment, the worker builds the requirements and returns 402: function buildPaymentRequirements ( resourceUrl : string , env : Env ): Payment

When a platform started with total developer autonomy, teams felt overwhelmed and ended up solving the same problems in completely different ways. The company shifted to enablement over support, working together with teams intensively, and helping teams feel confident and capable, turning the right way into being the easiest way. By Ben Linders

OpenAI's GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, and Codex are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, one month after OpenAI revised its exclusive Azure arrangement. Pricing matches OpenAI's direct rates with usage counting toward AWS commitments. Codex shifts to pay-per-token billing with no seat fees. GPT-5.4 is the first OpenAI model available in AWS GovCloud. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

In 2025 Google Cloud added G4 , powered by NVIDIA's RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs to their offering, allowing them to offer hardware not only for AI applications, but also for other applications, such as rendering, simulations or gaming. A single G4 instance with one accelerator ( g4-standard-48 ) comes equipped with 48 CPU cores, 180 gigabytes of RAM and 96 gigabytes of GPU memory. This is a lot of resources for a single cloud workstation, that only the most demanding workstreams would utilize. Most professionals who require a graphics accelerator to do their job, don't really need this much compute power for day to day tasks. It wasn't financially reasonable to pay for a G4 instance, when you weren't utilizing all the resources you paid for. If only there were smaller machine types… If only you could share that one very powerful GPU between multiple virtual machines… Introducing fractional VMs! During Google Cloud Next 2026, Google announced GA for fractional G4 VMs and was the first provider to bring vGPU functionality to RTX PRO 6000 accelerators. vGPU stands for virtual graphical processing unit . Just like VMs (virtual machines) are a way to split one physical computer into smaller, independent systems, vGPU allows for a single physical accelerator to be split into 2, 4 or 8 virtual accelerators! The new fractional machine types ( g4-standard-24 , g4-standard-12 , g4-standard-6 ) now allow you to perfectly match the compute capabilities to your needs! Who is it for? The existence of those new machine types makes it much more cost-efficient to move many GPU-dependent tasks to the cloud. Replacing physical workstations in offices with cloud infrastructure is not a new thing , but till now, Google Cloud didn't offer a good platform for those who needed workstations to process images, post-process videos, simulate physics or render 3D graphics. Those users now can get exactly the hardware they need, allowing their companies to move away from maintaini

When I built whatsmy.fyi , I assumed I'd need a geolocation provider: MaxMind, ipinfo, ip-api, pick your poison. They all mean the same thing: an external dependency, an API key, a quota, added latency, and someone else's server seeing your users' IPs. Then I found out Cloudflare Workers makes the whole category unnecessary. The cf object Every request that hits a Cloudflare Worker carries a request.cf object, populated at the edge before your code even runs. No lookup, no latency, no key. Here's what's inside: { asn : 34984 , // ISP's autonomous system number asOrganization : " Superonline " , // ISP name city : " Istanbul " , region : " Istanbul " , country : " TR " , continent : " AS " , isEUCountry : undefined , // "1" if EU, undefined otherwise latitude : " 41.01380 " , // string, not number! longitude : " 28.94970 " , postalCode : " 34000 " , timezone : " Europe/Istanbul " , colo : " IST " , // which CF datacenter handled this clientTcpRtt : 12 , // user's RTT to the edge, in ms httpProtocol : " HTTP/3 " , tlsVersion : " TLSv1.3 " , tlsCipher : " AEAD-AES128-GCM-SHA256 " } That last group surprised me most: you get the user's HTTP protocol, TLS version, and actual TCP round-trip time for free. Try getting that from a geo API. A complete IP endpoint in ~30 lines export default { async fetch ( request ) { const cf = request . cf ?? {}; const ip = request . headers . get ( " CF-Connecting-IP " ); return Response . json ({ ip , city : cf . city ?? null , country : cf . country ?? null , isp : cf . asOrganization ?? null , asn : cf . asn ?? null , timezone : cf . timezone ?? null , lat : cf . latitude ? parseFloat ( cf . latitude ) : null , lng : cf . longitude ? parseFloat ( cf . longitude ) : null , protocol : cf . httpProtocol ?? null , tls : cf . tlsVersion ?? null , rttMs : cf . clientTcpRtt ?? null , }); }, }; That's the entire backend. No database, no GeoIP file to update monthly, no vendor. The gotchas (learned the hard way) 1. Coordinates are strings. lati

Azure API Management shipped a Unified Model API that lets clients speak one format while APIM transforms requests to Anthropic, Vertex AI, and other backends. Content safety policies now cover MCP tool calls and Agent-to-Agent payloads alongside LLM traffic. Token metrics expanded to track reasoning, cached, and audio tokens across providers. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Building a "paste a YouTube link, get a transcript" feature sounds trivial until you deploy it to a server. The moment your request comes from a datacenter IP instead of a residential one, YouTube responds with LOGIN_REQUIRED or quietly serves nothing. Here's how VidTranscriber handles it. The problem There are two ways to get text from a YouTube video: Existing captions — if the uploader (or YouTube's auto-caption) provides them, you can fetch the caption track directly. Fast, free, no transcription needed. Transcribe the audio — pull the audio stream and run it through a speech-to-text model (Whisper-family). Works for any video, but costs compute. Both start with talking to YouTube from your server — and that's where it breaks. YouTube aggressively gates datacenter traffic: the watch page and InnerTube API return LOGIN_REQUIRED , and naive audio fetching gets reCAPTCHA'd. The approach The fix is to separate where the request originates from where the work happens : A Cloudflare Worker handles the user request and orchestration. Caption/audio fetching is routed through a path whose egress isn't treated as a bot — so the LOGIN_REQUIRED wall doesn't trigger. Captions, when available, become the primary path (no transcription cost). Only when there are no usable captions do we fall back to downloading audio and running Whisper. Long jobs go onto a queue (Cloudflare Queues) so the request returns immediately and the transcript streams in as it completes. Why captions-first matters Most "transcript generator" traffic is for videos that already have captions — talks, tutorials, news. Serving those from the caption track is instant and free, which means the expensive Whisper path is reserved for the minority of videos that actually need it. That's the difference between a tool that's cheap to run and one that isn't. What's still hard IP reputation drifts — what works today can get throttled tomorrow, so the extraction path needs monitoring and fallbacks. Caption quality

If you've ever spun up an EC2 instance for a side project, accessed a remote work desktop from your personal laptop, or stored files on Google Drive without thinking about the physical hard drive it lives on, you've used virtualization. As the foundational technology behind all modern cloud computing, virtualization transformed how we build, deploy, and manage IT infrastructure—cutting hardware costs significantly for enterprises and making on-demand scalability a reality for teams of all sizes. In this guide, we'll break down exactly what virtualization is, how it powers the cloud, the 6 core types of virtualization, and best practices to implement it safely and efficiently. Table of Contents What is Virtualization in Cloud Computing? Core Virtualization Concepts You Need to Know Role of Virtualization in Cloud Computing 6 Key Types of Virtualization (With Use Cases) Top Benefits of Virtualization for Teams of All Sizes Virtualization vs. Related Technologies Virtualization vs. Cloud Computing Virtualization vs. Containerization Common Virtualization Challenges and Mitigations Real-World Virtualization Use Cases Virtualization Best Practices Conclusion References What is Virtualization in Cloud Computing? Virtualization is a technology that creates virtual, software-based representations of physical hardware (servers, storage, networks, etc.) and abstracts these resources from the underlying physical machine. A software layer called a hypervisor separates operating systems and applications from physical hardware, allowing multiple isolated, self-contained systems called Virtual Machines (VMs) to run simultaneously on a single physical host. Each VM has its own virtual CPU, memory, storage, and network interface, and operates independently of other VMs on the same host. For cloud providers, this technology is the backbone of all on-demand infrastructure services, allowing them to share physical hardware across thousands of customers securely and efficiently. Core Vi

Good news for Claude devs deploying on Google Cloud. Claude Fable 5 is now in General Availability (GA) on Google Cloud. You can now access Fable 5 , as well as other Anthropic models - including Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 - on Agent Platform . Read more here -> [ blog ] Happy building!

Terraform can provision an AWS EC2 instance and set up a Python virtual environment in a single, reproducible run — the whole workflow is declarative and version‑controlled. 📑 Table of Contents 💻 Terraform — How to Provision an EC2 Instance 🔧 AWS Provider — Configuring Credentials 🐍 Python Environment — Setting up a Virtualenv on the Instance 📦 Installing Python and venv 📦 Activating and Using the Environment 📦 User Data — Automating Installation with Terraform 🟩 Final Thoughts ❓ Frequently Asked Questions How do I store the Terraform state securely? Can I use a different Linux distribution for the EC2 instance? Is it possible to attach an Elastic IP to the instance? 📚 References & Further Reading 💻 Terraform — How to Provision an EC2 Instance A Terraform configuration file describes the desired state of AWS resources; applying it makes the real cloud match that state. First, install Terraform (version 1.5.0 or newer). The binary is a single executable, so the operating system loads it directly into memory and the process performs HTTP requests to AWS endpoints. $ terraform version Terraform v1.5.0 on linux_amd64 + provider registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/aws v5.12.0 Next, create a main.tf that declares an aws_instance resource. The provider block authenticates with AWS using either environment variables or a shared credentials file. # main.tf terraform { required_version = ">= 1.5.0" required_providers { aws = { source = "hashicorp/aws" version = "~> 5.12" } } } provider "aws" { region = "us-east-1" } resource "aws_instance" "app_server" { ami = "ami-0c02fb55956c7d316" # Amazon Linux 2 instance_type = "t3.micro" # User data will be defined later user_data = data.template_file.init.rendered tags = { Name = "terraform-ec2-python" } } Running terraform init contacts the provider registry, downloads the provider plugin, and stores it under .terraform . The generated .terraform.lock.hcl file records exact plugin checksums, guaranteeing that subsequent runs use the same

If you are just getting started with Azure CLI and Bash scripting, this post is for you. I will walk you through how I automated the creation of Azure resource groups for multiple environments using a single Bash script — something that was taking a cloud admin several manual steps every week. This is Project 2 in my TechRush Cloud Engineering bootcamp series. If you want to see where this journey started, you can read my previous post where I tackled deploying a web app across two Azure regions for the first time . That project involved real blockers — quota limits, CLI version mismatches, and a deep dive into Azure Resource Providers. This one went smoother, and I think that is because the previous project was the hard school. The Problem Imagine a cloud administrator who has to create five resource groups every single week, one for each active project: Project-A-RG Project-B-RG Project-C-RG Project-D-RG Project-E-RG Every week. By hand. Management's response was simple: automate it. But here is where the task gets more interesting. Instead of creating one flat resource group per project, the better approach is to create four resource groups per project — one for each environment: Dev Test UAT Production This matters because each environment needs its own access controls, cost tracking, and lifecycle rules. You do not want your Development environment sharing a resource group with Production. Keeping them separate is a real-world cloud best practice, not just a bootcamp exercise. What You Will Need Before running this script, make sure you have the following set up: Azure CLI installed on your local machine. You can follow the official installation guide . An active Azure account . A free account works fine for this. A terminal that runs Bash — Linux, macOS, or WSL on Windows. Understanding the Design The core idea behind this script is parameterization . Instead of hardcoding project names, the script accepts a project name as input and uses it as a prefix for ev

Amazon Web Services has recently announced the general availability of the next generation of Amazon OpenSearch Serverless, with a redesigned architecture that enables 20 times faster resource provisioning than the previous serverless architecture, true scale-to-zero capability, and up to 60% lower cost than a provisioned cluster for peak loads. By Gianmarco Nalin

The era of passive data analytics is over. Today, the most forward-thinking data teams aren't just...

Martin Kleppmann discusses the urgent need for technological sovereignty in modern infrastructure. Exploring the shifting landscape of global tech dependencies, he shares how engineering leaders can leverage multi-cloud architecture, de facto API standardization, the AT Protocol, and local-first development paradigms to reclaim user agency and build highly resilient systems. By Martin Kleppmann

Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, its Azure-based platform for deploying autonomous AI agent teams in scientific R&D. The platform powered the development of Majorana 2, a topological quantum chip with 1,000x reliability improvement and 20-second qubit lifetimes. Microsoft now targets a scalable quantum computer by 2029, halving its original timeline. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Today, June 8th, InfoQ celebrates 20 years. This is not a comprehensive history, but a deliberately selective look at the technologies and practices InfoQ identified early, where they sit on the adoption curve in 2026, and how that curve may evolve over the next five to ten years. By InfoQ

One of the first cloud concepts many people encounter while learning AWS is EC2 . The name sounds technical. The documentation is extensive. And the number of configuration options can make it feel like something fundamentally different from a regular computer. But while trying to understand cloud computing, I found myself repeatedly coming back to a simple thought: At the end of the day, an EC2 instance is just another computer. That realization helped me understand cloud infrastructure much more clearly. The Intimidation Factor When people first open the AWS console, they encounter terms such as: EC2 VPC Security Groups Elastic IPs Auto Scaling It is easy to feel that cloud computing is an entirely different world. But before diving into those concepts, it helps to ask a simpler question: What is an EC2 instance actually providing? Starting with the Name EC2 stands for: Elastic Compute Cloud The important word here is: Compute AWS is essentially renting computing resources. When you launch an EC2 instance, AWS allocates: CPU Memory (RAM) Storage Networking to a virtual machine that you can access. In other words: You are renting a computer that lives inside AWS's infrastructure. Comparing It to a Personal Computer Consider a typical laptop. It contains: A processor RAM Storage An operating system Network connectivity Now consider an EC2 instance. It also contains: Virtual CPUs RAM Storage An operating system Network connectivity The location is different. The concepts are the same. The Main Difference: Ownership The biggest difference is not technical. It is operational. With a personal computer: You own the hardware. The machine sits near you. You maintain it. With EC2: AWS owns the hardware. The machine runs in a data center. AWS manages the physical infrastructure. You only manage the virtual machine running on top of it. Why Linux Knowledge Transfers This was one of the most interesting observations during my learning. If an EC2 instance runs Linux, many of th

Quiet Defaults, DNSSEC Cracks, and Agents in the Data Plane I read the AWS Nitro V6 TCP timeout change twice before I believed it. Default went from 432,000 seconds to 350 seconds. Five days to six minutes. On the newest instance family. Quietly, in release notes most people won't read until something breaks. That sort of set the tone for May. No flagship launch to anchor the month around. What there was a lot of: defaults moving in places vendor press releases don't celebrate. Post-quantum crypto pushing into campus boot chains. Every cloud vendor shipping some flavor of agentic-networking pattern. The .de TLD briefly breaking because of DNSSEC. None of it announced loudly. All of it the kind of thing that breaks production at 2am if you weren't paying attention. What Moved This Month Three things, fast. Post-quantum crypto left the VPN tunnel. Cisco's full-stack PQC for campus and branch is the next chapter after April's PQ IPsec story — boot, firmware signing, supply chain attestation, and transport-layer crypto all moving together. If your campus has mixed-vintage gear (which is basically everyone), this is multi-year partial coverage with no clean switchover. Agentic networking became a real category. Cloudflare's Town Lake / Skipper writeup and Claude Managed Agents , Palo Alto's Portkey-based unified AI Gateway , and AWS's Bedrock AgentCore connectivity patterns all dropped this month. The right question stopped being "can my agent reach the model" and became "what IAM blast radius does this agent have if it gets prompt-injected." DNSSEC had a rough month. The .de TLD broke briefly, the DNSSEC root key was rolled, and Cloudflare also debugged a QUIC CUBIC death spiral that was hiding in plain sight. The Internet's core had a louder month than usual, and not in a good way. 1. Agentic AI Is Now Actually A Networking Problem An agent in production isn't a fancy chatbot. It's a thing that calls APIs, reads logs, accesses SaaS data, and sometimes writes back to sy