Vendor Lock-in: We think its a myth.

The Myth Of Vendor Lock-in The cloud has revolutionized how businesses operate, but we often get stuck in weeks-long project delays trying to avoid vendor lock-in. This article highlights whether this is something you should be concerned about, or if your efforts are best focused elsewhere. I guess it is best to start on what vendor lock in actually is. Understanding Vendor Lock-in Vendor lock-in occurs when a customer becomes reliant on a specific vendor’s products or services, making it difficult or expensive to switch vendors.  The business risk here is usually either: That one vendor could raise prices, and you would be stuck paying the higher price (VMware/Broadcom comes to mind) Vendor has multiple outages, or poor support (VMware/Broadcom comes to mind) The vendor goes bankrupt, or is acquired by a competitor, and your business along with it The Cloud Hyperscaler Landscape Cloud hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have significantly mitigated the risks of vendor lock-in. Here’s why: Open Standards, Open Source, and Interoperability: Hyperscalers increasingly embrace open standards and APIs, Containers, and Kubernetes is one example with every cloud having multiple ways to run standard docker containers, and these can be moved between clouds, with no changes. Each cloud does have proprietary services, especially when we look at databases, but the effort to migrate and modify these is typically way lower than it has been in the past.  Using one of these databases to avoid vendor lock-in with AWS/GCP/Azure can also just mean you are locked into MongoDB, or an open source DB that is hard to move from. Bankruptcy: If any of these vendors does go bankrupt it will be a slow process, Google, Microsoft or Amazon are some of the wealthiest companies in the world, so I think we can discount this. Data Portability: Hyperscalers offer tools and services to simplify data migration and portability. While moving large datasets can still be complex, the process is becoming more manageable, hyperscalers will often fully or partially fund the migration from a competitor. In addition highly performant network connections between clouds are available or even physical devices to move the largest of datasets quickly. Market Competition: The intense competition among cloud hyperscalers drives down prices, there has only been a few times where some services increased in cost. This competition is not likely to reduce in the near term.  Mitigating Vendor Lock-in Concerns While the risks of vendor lock-in are lower with cloud hyperscalers, if this is a concern there are a few steps to mitigate the effort if you ever do need to migrate: Design for Portability: Architect applications and data structures with portability in mind from the outset Avoid Proprietary Services: Minimize reliance on vendor-specific databases that lack equivalents on other platforms Conclusion The cloud hyperscaler era has resulted in strong competition which has significantly diminished the concerns of vendor lock-in. Open standards, data portability, and market competition have allowed businesses to focus less on lock-in and more on transforming their business. While some level of lock-in will always exist, it is about choosing where you are locked in, if you go all open source, and build your own servers you will be locked in to using this stack. We believe the focus should shift from fearing vendor lock-in to strategically leveraging the cloud’s capabilities to drive innovation and business growth.

Using AI for Document Processing

Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the world’s imagination with its impressive ability to generate human-like text and engage in conversations, often blurring the lines between human and machine. While these “cool” applications have gained widespread attention, their practical value beyond chatbots has remained somewhat elusive. However, one area where AI is quietly making waves is in the realm of document processing. AI agents, equipped with advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, can read and understand thousands of words in mere seconds. This opens up a world of possibilities for streamlining and automating tasks that previously consumed countless hours of human labor. The potential to reduce the time spent on document processing is enormous. Consider the following fields: Legal: Lengthy contracts summarised, legal precedents found, and arguments summarised. Healthcare: Alayze records, review literature and research to support diagnosis, or simplify text for patient understanding. Finance: Analyse financial statements, reports, and filings to identify risks and inform investment decisions. Beyond these obvious industry specific use cases any organisation that is dealing with documents can benefit from some AI help to improve efficiency and reduce costs.   Enter Google Cloud Google Cloud Document AI uses advanced character recognition to extract data from your documents, creating highly accurate document processors to extract, classify and split documents. Googles highly scalable infrastructure can ingest your companies documents and analyze them instantly, this can be used for: Better understanding your customers: Information from clients SMS, Emails, and documents are often siloed, understanding all this data can be used to help gain better understanding of your customers and their behaviors. Reduce Fraud: Most fraudulent documents contain subtle issues that are often not noticeable to the human eye, but AI can detect these things (much like we can detect issues with AI generated images easily) reducing revenue lost to fraudulent documents. Report Writing: Hand writing documents has always been time consuming, and we typically rely on templates, AI takes this to the next level, writing entire reports based on data you have on your clients in seconds.   While the “cool” factor of AI chatbots may have captured our initial attention, the true value of AI lies in its ability to transform industries and improve our lives. As AI agents continue to evolve and mature, their impact on document processing and other fields will only grow, ushering in a new era of efficiency and productivity.

Google Cloud Organization Policies: A Comprehensive Guide

In the dynamic landscape of cloud computing, maintaining a robust security posture is paramount. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a powerful tool in its arsenal: Organization Policies. What Are Google Cloud Organization Policies? Organization Policies are a set of hierarchical constraints that you can apply across your entire GCP organization, folders, or projects. They enable you to: Why Organization Policies Matter for Your Security: Org policies let your engineers and developers deploy new services but maintain a compliant and secure environment by ensuring: Key Organization Policy Use Cases: The full list of Org Policies is avaiable on the Google Cloud site but a few examples are: Implementing Organization Policies: Step-by-Step Guide Best Practices for Organization Policies: In summary Google Cloud Organization Policies empower you to elevate your cloud security posture through proactive, centralized controls. If you are worried about your Google Cloud security Aviato offer Google Cloud Security Assesments and can help with the implementation of Org Policies.

Video Post: AI with BigQuery And SQL

Stop waiting to unlock the power of AI! 🤯 You already know SQL… and that’s ALL you need.   Transcript if you have a lot of data stored on Google Cloud for analytics it’s probably going to be stored in B query now everyone’s trying to do Ai and their training models using pre-existing models spending a lot of money on data scientists but I’ve got some great news if you’re using be query be query has be query ml built into it this lets you run AI against your B query data set by using SQL now SQL is the language used by all the people doing queries or database administrators now it’s very simple to use and you probably already have the skills so you don’t need to go and hire expensive data scientists and AI Engineers to gather insights from your data I’m going to break down some of the models that are built into B cre ml to see if these are going to solve business problems for you first one is linear regression this is predicting how much you’ll sell based on past data so if you’re planning stock Staffing trying to run promotions more accurately this is for you it’s built- in can be run with sequel the next one is logistic regression this is sorting things into categories so let’s say you want to sort customers into categories um to see whether they’re going to buy from you again um or if products are faulty putting them into categories saying these products are likely going to be faulty so you can see the use cases for business the next one is K means clustering this finds hidden groups within your customer base so you can Target marketing campaigns towards them the next Matrix factorisation suggesting which customers might be likely to buy an it this is kind of what you’ll see when you get predictive things on websites saying and you might also like to buy X I think we’re up to the fifth one PCA or principal component analysis this is simplifying complex data to find the most important pattern helping you spot Trends and make more informed decisions the last one I’ve got is time series so predicting future sales based on past data helping you predict demand and make sure you have enough stock based on things that have happened in the past so all of these models are already build into big query ml as I said and can be accessed using SQL queries which you likely already have the skills for in your organisation to enabling your organisation to make AI enabled decisions without spending an absolute Fortune if you want help with any of this Reach Out aviato Consulting can help you thanks

Video Post: Google Cloud Vertex AI & Hugging Face

Who Really Owns Your App?   Transcript did you know that most app developers in Australia don’t let you own the IP that they develop for you let me break that down for you you pay someone to write an app for you they let you use it licensed to use it commercialize it change it but you don’t actually own the intellectual property now what would happen if someone else had a similar idea to you went to the same app developer they could sell the code that you paid them to develop this other person doubling their money the next day all they need to do is change the colors and logo maybe make a few slight changes and you’re going to have a competitor now the app developers made a ton of cash on this cuz they’ve sold the same thing twice and only done the work once but you’ve got a competitor that’s going to compete with you and I don’t think that’s really fair and that’s not what we do at aviato at aviato if you pay us to develop your app you own the intellectual property we aren’t going to steal it and use it elsewhere and we’re not going to sell it to a competitor a few days after we finish your project so that then you have someone to compete with in the marketplace if you are looking to get an app developed this is really something that you should be checking with the app developer that you’re going to use reach out to us if ou do want to get an app developed Thanks

Video Post: Who Really Owns Your App?

Cut Costs, Boost Performance with Vertex AI Transcript have you been seeing all of the graphs and tables on LinkedIn comparing all of the current AI models it’s a little bit overwhelming obviously Chad gbt 4 is better than Chad gbt 3.5 but people start comparing Google Gemini and Gemma in versions Pro and Ultra and then they have 1.5 in Pro and Ultra then anthropic come on the scene with Claude 3 which also comes in three different models called Hau son Opus now I’m confused um I’m sure you’re confused and for most businesses they just want to get the best model that’s going to serve their purposes the best what we do is we deploy all of our AI on Google Cloud now Google cloud has access to the Google models Gemini The Meta models from Facebook llama it also has the anthropic models so clawed through in addition to this it has a ton of other different models that you can swap out fairly quickly so you can test and see which model is going to give you the best results for your use case and everyone’s use case is going to get better results from different models now if the models that I’ve spoken about and is about 70 or so on Google Cloud aren’t doing what you want you can go and use models from hugging face now you’ve probably never heard of hugging face hugging face is where people share models that they’ve built or train themselves or fine tuned so someone can take an open source model let’s say llama 3 from meta they can make it do something else for a specific news case and they can share it for anyone to use there’s currently 617,000 models on hugging face and we can very quickly integrate those with Google clouds of vertex AI to solve you all unique use cases if you go to hugging face and look at the models and just go to the categories you’ll be blown away there’s things in there from depth estimation super cool use case image classification video question answering audio classification tabular regression and one that I haven’t played with yet but super interesting robotic if you have a business problem and think you’d like to try and see if we can solve with AI reach out to meet aviato Consulting we happy to help you with this and using the power of Google switching out those models to get the best results for your business at the best price thanks 

Navigating the AI Maze

The AI landscape is exploding with a dizzying array of models, from the Large Language Models (LLMs) most of us have experimented with like Llama 2 or 3 from Meta, Claude 2 from Anthropic, and Bard (now Gemini) from Google, and the original ChatGPT. Each boasts unique capabilities, from generating different creative text formats to translating languages and answering your questions in an informative way. To make this even more confusing we have models that excel at robotics, tabular regression, image generation, or depth estimation. Choosing The Right Model For Your Business While this abundance offers exciting possibilities, it also presents a significant challenge: choosing the right model for your specific needs, and doing it within your budget. The pricing models for these vary greatly Gemin 1.0 advanced, to 1.5 Ultra is a 10x cost differential. For businesses, this creates an impossible puzzle: how do you select the optimal model without getting lost in the ever evolving AI arms race? And how do you do this within your budget? The answer lies in flexibility. Instead of locking into a single model, businesses need an adaptable infrastructure that allows them to test their business use case against one model, evaluate the performance and then try another, without rebuilding the solution. Additionally as new models are released, testing these to see if there is an uplift to the value of the model quickly, is going to give you the competitive advantage over others that need to rebuild their solution. This ability to quickly swap out models offers several key benefits: Architecture Architecting a solution that works for your business can be easily acheived on Google Cloud with Vertex AI, but this will exclude you from using ChatGPT or other models not avaiable on Huggingface.co LLMs on Google Cloud Vertex AI Google Cloud’s Vertex AI provides the perfect platform for achieving this flexibility. It allows businesses to seamlessly deploy, manage, and experiment with various LLMs through a unified interface. If you are not happy with the 50 or so models they have, you can deploy one from Huggingface.co which has over 600,000 models to choose from. The alternative solution for the non Google customers could be to write a common API, which would give you the flexibility to swap out models, or use Chat GPT which is one model that you cannot find on either Google or Huggingface.co Any LLM With a Common API Either option empowers you to leverage the strengths of different models, test each of them against your unique problems, and stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Aviato Consulting, a Google Cloud Partner, specializes in helping businesses navigate the complexities of AI and implement flexible LLM solutions on Vertex AI. Our expertise ensures you harness the full potential of AI, maximizing its value for your specific business needs.

Video Post: Don’t hire a team of developers

Don’t Hire A Team of Developers Transcript so you’re looking to get a mobile app built and you need to hire a team of developers I’m Ben from Aviato Consulting and I’m gonna tell you why that’s not the best way to do things if you have a great app idea but lack the in house expertise you can build a development team from scratch but it’s super expensive you need a user interface designer to help your apps look good you need a front end developer to actually build the frontend of the ad and a backend developer to talk to any databases or APIs and then you’re probably gonna need a fourth person to oversee the first three by the time you hire those people I think I can have your app released maybe not fully finished but at least released for a fraction of the cost this is where we excel we’re flexible on demand development team you pay us monthly and you can cancel it anytime we’re literally developers as a service from my experience working at Google it made sense to specialise in deploying our apps on Google Cloud as well that means the app you get is powerful secure and reliable we also write all of our apps in flutter again by Google which means we write the code a single time and deploy that to web, Android and iOS cutting down the development time and cost so to summarize with us you get speed we understand the pressure launch quickly and our streamline process gets your app to market fast host effectiveness you only pays the development hours you need known as enter into long term contract and you get our Google Cloud expertise making sure the app is scalable secure and reliable

Video Post: Cut Your App Development Costs In Half

So you want to cut your app development costs in half? Transcript so you want to cut your mobile app development costs and time in half I’m going to tell you how to do it now I don’t want to get too technical but language choice is critical Here If you hired a carpenter to build you something they would use timber If you hired a boiler maker they would use metal and if you hire a developer that may have spent the most of their career developing apps in Java they’re going to write your app in Java and that may not be the best choice at avat Consulting we worked backwards we figured we want to be the best mobile app development studio and we chose the best language for that and that’s flut up the reason this works for you is we write our code one time and it works across web Android and iOS devices the only other thing that partially does this is react native any other languages you kind of writing two or three apps that’s how we can do this so much cheaper and faster than our competitors and we’re not alone if you look at other companies using flutter and you can see this on flutter. dev BMW Google eBay combank Square tons of other companies and not only writing new apps but rewriting their old apps in flutter because they need one development team to keep that up running rather than having one for apple and one for Google devices even Google who release flut are reboting a ton of their apps in flut because it’s so responsive and cost effective at avat Consulting we’re experts in building high performance beautiful and cost effective apps if you would like to learn more about how flut can benefit your business comment below and let’s build something amazing

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