Open clouds vs the big three

Yes, the major public clouds offer a lot. But what you may not know are the limitations, and how open clouds make the difference.

Coiled, a DataOps and AIOps platform that seeks to increase access to scalable computing, today announced that it raised $21 million in series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Alongside the financing, Coiled unveiled Coiled Cloud, which lets data scientists build machine learning models using Python tools on a laptop, then transfer the model to any cloud environment to avoid vendor lock-in. 

Enterprises‌ ‌have‌ ‌long struggled‌ ‌to‌ ‌collaborate‌ ‌well ‌around‌ ‌their‌ ‌data. This hinders their ability to adopt‌ ‌applications‌ ‌like‌ ‌AI, but the ‌evolution‌ ‌of‌ ‌‌DataOps‌ and AIOps ‌could‌ ‌solve that problem. Research firm Gartner calls them major trends encompassing steps in the data and machine learning lifecycles. DataOps is the automated, process-oriented methodology to improve the quality and reduce the cycle time of data analytics, while AIOps is the application of AI in IT operations — a combination of big data and machine learning.

Matthew Rocklin — the creator of Dask, a Python framework for deploying open source libraries like Pandas, NumPy, Jupyter, XGBoost, and Scikit-Learn — cofounded Coiled in 2020. He describes the New York-based company as the result of “deep collaboration” between enterprises in operations support systems and Python, with the goal of integrating Python and operations support systems into enterprise environments.

Above: Cluster information in the Coiled web interface.

Image Credit: Coiled

“The Coiled team are passionate open source developers, maintainers, and advocates that are helping customers harness the power of distributed computing while making it easy and approachable,” Rocklin said in a blog post. “I started out as a scientist at Sandia National Labs and developed a deep respect and admiration for people who take on the complex challenges facing the world today in research, business, and science. Coiled exists to take complexity out of their day-to-day jobs so they can focus on solving those problems.”

Product lineup

Coiled offers two products to customers: the new Coiled Cloud and Coiled Enterprise.

Coiled Cloud, which runs primarily on Amazon Web Services, takes care of deploying containers, hooking up the requisite networking automatically. Coiled offers a web interface and Python environment that runs from other web services and automated jobs, managing GPUs and CPUs to allow mixing and matching with architectures and libraries such as Facebook’s PyTorch.

As for Coiled Enterprise, it runs in the cloud as well as on-premises and allows customers to work on their own personal devices as well as GPU servers in their infrastructure. Coiled Enterprise can create containers that can move between environments and manage server clusters — setting when the clusters run, for how long, how many processor cores each team member can use, and how long cores can be active. Coiled Enterprise also enables the sharing of work across team members and provides built-in telemetry and authentication to prevent unauthorized access and generate reports.

Above: Monitoring performance using Coiled’s dashboard.

Image Credit: Coiled

Coiled Enterprise includes optimization services starting at 2 hours per month for Python libraries like Rapids, Scikit-Learn, and XGBoost, plus training credits for custom machine learning model training. Coiled Enterprise also includes discounted pricing on Coiled Cloud and access to run Coiled on on-premises hardware and synchronize containers in the cloud.

One Coiled customer, Zebra Medical Vision, says they were able to get an initial reduction across their data curation, automated experiments, and other pipelines from 66 hours to 15 minutes using Coiled products. To date, more than 100 million tasks have been hosted on Coiled, the startup claims, including from data science teams at Capital One and Anthem Health.

Coiled’s latest funding round, which saw participation from IA Ventures and FirstMark, brings its total raised to $26 million to date. Previously, the company closed a $5 million seed round led by Costanoa Ventures.

Open clouds vs the big three

Yes, the major public clouds offer a lot. But what you may not know are the limitations, and how open clouds make the difference.

Presented by AdColony

When 98.5% of your business is based on advertising and a genuine threat comes from another business that isn’t a direct competitor of yours, you’d probably consider that a crisis. In response to this crisis, Facebook took out a full-page ad in the New York Times.

It’s not just Facebook that made noise and tried to out-engineer Apple’s guidelines. A coalition of major Chinese developers attempted to fingerprint devices via the CAID (Chinese Advertising Identifier), but Apple responded with a fast and detailed slap down of the attempt.

Facebook’s full-page ad and larger PR campaign was more subtle than the CAID, but it’s a move that has been seen as desperate, particularly because of the primary argument that they were standing up to Apple “for small businesses everywhere,” when, in fact, the biggest impact will be their own bottom line. For them, nearly billions of dollars is at stake.

And it’s all because of one company and their decision to give consumers a choice. Apple claims that users should know when their data is being collected and shared across other apps and websites, and they should have the choice to allow that or not.

“App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14 does not require Facebook to change its approach to tracking users and creating targeted advertising, it simply requires that they give users a choice,” Apple said in a statement.

What Apple is doing here is calling out the fact that, for lack of federal government regulation that protects consumers from what they believe to be a violation of privacy, Apple will go ahead and do it for them using the sheer power and ubiquity of its own platform.

But is Apple’s move really about protecting consumers?

Sure, by touting “Privacy. That’s iPhone,” in a massive ad campaign and hoisting it up on a pedestal like they would a new piece of hardware, it can feel like privacy is their product.

Apple has been using privacy as a differentiating factor in its market positioning for the past decade. Now, as part of that, they are hawking consumer choice. But ultimately what this comes down to is that Apple has a different vision of the future of the internet.

For Apple, their vision is of a clean, curated web where content — at least the content that they are responsible for distributing — is from trusted sources, high-quality and is primarily paid for up-front or through subscriptions, not through advertising.

This isn’t new news. Anyone who follows Apple could see this coming. In 2015, Apple Music became a subscription, then we saw streaming video (Apple TV+) and gaming (Arcade) added to the mix. And now, of course, there’s the bundle option of Apple One.

So it’s not surprising that analysts believe this is the road they are heading down. The fast pace of technical innovation means consumers want to own the latest and greatest, and subscriptions offer flexibility to upgrade at a lower upfront cost. Additionally, Millennials and Gen Z tend to have a rent versus buy mentality, which applies not just to cars and homes but music and video streaming.

It’s safe to say that Apple stands alone when it comes to their vision of the internet

It’s not just about philosophy, of course. Apple can say that they believe in privacy, a clean internet where you pay for premium content via subscriptions. But what it comes down to is they sell hardware, not software.

Facebook and Google, on the other hand, are software companies. So of course they believe that the internet — and everything that lives on and around it, including content in mobile apps — should be free. For them, advertising is the “ultimate tax” you pay to access content.

And, while you previously paid tax solely with your attention, it’s now paid with data. Thanks to documentaries like The Social Dilemma, as well as the massive increase in malware/spyware on the internet and cybersecurity hacks, consumers are becoming more aware of how deep that cost really is.

In many ways, we are going back to the early days of the web where context was king and media was valued when it came from a trustworthy source, but in that world consumers need to pay up…with money.

So — when Apple asks you if you want to be tracked across apps and websites, what they are really asking you is “How do you want to pay for your content?”

We’re already seeing verticalization from ad networks and MMPs in an effort to combine information under the umbrella of “first party data” so as to not qualify their behavior as tracking under Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework. The other question is whether the CAID will see widespread enough adoption.

Alasdair Pressney is Director of Product Strategy – Advertiser Products at AdColony.

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