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Those who implement cloud computing in general, and AWS in particular, are often confused by the role that managed services providers play.  Cost and simplicity are driving the movement to leverage AWS through managed services providers as enterprises look for more ways to consume AWS services.  These services are easier to mix and match with existing applications, and provide a better and more effective way to leverage AWS.

Managed services providers can place a well-defined layer of infrastructure, management, and governance between the cloud provider, in this case, AWS, and those who consume AWS as a managed service.  Managed service providers get enterprises on-boarded quickly to AWS, and avoid initial issues that many enterprises encounter when going directly to AWS.

What’s more, managed services providers offer another layer of support, including guidance around on-boarding applications, and other best practices you should employ. Proactive monitoring of AWS services, including working around outages and other infrastructure issues, allows to you maintain an uptime records far better than if you leverage AWS directly.

The management of costs is another benefit, including the ability to monitor the use of resources in terms of cost.  You can monitor the utilization of resources, and model the cost of levering these resources over time.  Or, even monitor cost trends, and predict AWS costs into the future for budgeting and cost forecasting.

Managed services providers typically offer security and governance capabilities, which can augment the governance and security capabilities of AWS.  This means you can set polices and implement security that spans your AWS and non-AWS applications.

The value of leveraging managed services providers as a path to AWS comes down to a few key notions:

First, it gives you the ability to remove yourself from having to deal with AWS directly.  Managed services providers can quickly set up your environment, and manage that environment on your behalf.  This means quicker time-to-value, and more business agility as well.

Second, you have the ability to monitor costs more proactively.  There are no big billing surprises at the end of the month, and you have the ability to do better cloud expenditure planning.

Finally, AWS is only part of your infrastructure.  Typically, you need to manage services inside and outside of AWS.  Managed services providers allow you to manage both traditional applications, as well as those hosted in AWS and other public cloud providers, using the same management, security, and governance layers.

As time moves forward, I suspect that more enterprises will turn to managed services providers as a way of moving to AWS in a managed AWS capacity.  The lower risk and lower costs are just too compelling.

The post Managed AWS: Fusing Managed Services Expertise and AWS Power appeared first on Cloud Computing News.

BOULDER, Colo., Sept. 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — VictorOps, the leading collaboration and incident management platform for DevOps teams, is hosting a webinar that will discuss how to take full advantage of your project post-mortems with or without a template.

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The cloud is proving to be a useful tool for businesses both large and small. What started out as an innovative idea has quickly transformed into a vital component of many business practices. As time goes on, demand for cloud storage has only increased with each passing year as more and more data is being stored in data centers around the world. While only 7% of data was stored in the cloud in 2013, that number is expected to increase to 36% by 2016. With growing demand comes fierce competition among the many cloud vendors out there, and as is the case with most business competition, that has led to falling prices and a better product. As prices continue to fall, some are even wondering if one day cloud storage will even be offered for free. It’s an intriguing possibility but one that is accompanied by a number of complications.

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The IT infrastructure of modern businesses require a number of seemingly never-ending cycles to track assets. As these assets go through different stages of usefulness or functionality, IT teams must constantly manage the process, which takes them away from other more important tasks and saddles them with mundane contractual obligations, maintenance reviews, cost-analysis and procurement paperwork. What’s the alternative to opening your IT komodo to a myriad of vendor pitches and the scrutiny of the finance department? Obsolescence.
No self-respecting IT person would allow their infrastructure to dissolve into obscurity and place the business at risk. Enter the domain of Infrastructure Lifecycle Management or ILM. ILM is a method of keeping the IT infrastructure aligned with a business so that it’s functional from the time it’s implemented through its retirement. The ever-present and constant specter of ILM does have the benefit of ensuring effective asset management, configuration, deployment and disposal while setting up the technology standards and maintaining continuity. However, there are many assets – with varying dates of obsolescence to contend with.

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Nigel Beighton, VP Technology, Rackspace, discusses the five most common cloud problems customers face, and how businesses can overcome these.

1.      Support

The most common cloud services complaint is the lack of support and management that comes when businesses are embarking on any level of cloud migration.

Businesses need to consider their wider approach to cloud operations first and ask themselves if they are going to run it internally, 24×7 or get someone else to do the hard work of scaling, automation controls and data recovery when needed.

Businesses that have a trained staff-base can do this internally, but many don’t so an understanding and sympathetic support layer cannot be overvalued.

When choosing a cloud provider, it’s crucial to know that the service delivered will offer scalable flexibility so that the customer can get on with their core business without worrying about day-to-day operations. A low-cost cloud infrastructure with no additional support will mean that the onus is always on the customer should they encounter any issues and this all means downtime which can impact your business.

In light of this, it is important to choose a provider that will offer you the appropriate level of managed cloud service with one-to-one, 24/7/365 support and monitoring. You should be able to work with your provider to ensure the infrastructure is able to cope with both expected and unexpected levels of traffic and, if there are issues, your provider should be accountable for any downtime under the Service Level Agreement (SLA) established.

2.      Reliability

In terms of reliability, it all comes down to picking a provider that is reputable and proven. Understanding the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is crucial as some providers guarantee a 100% network uptime rate and reimburse users for any downtime. What’s important is that users try services before they commit. That way, if there are affected components within the operation of the cloud service or a server is lost, you can rest assured that the right support will be there to manage and compensate for any issues.

3.      Performance

When considering the hosting of your website, a common problem is that many businesses focus on what they need now, rather than what they need in the future. In many instances, performance ultimately ends up being higher in the cloud because there is more available capacity and scalability. In other cases (most notably running a database server), performance may be less than on a traditional server.  It is prudent for users to benchmark their application in the cloud to determine when you’re likely to have peaks in demand and take into consideration the different hosting solutions to suit your requirements.

If performance is a major determining issue, a ‘hybrid’ cloud can often be the right hosting solution, allowing the user to bring together the best of both worlds: the scalability and cost efficiencies of cloud computing and the performance of dedicated servers. A hybrid cloud solution means businesses can quickly add or ‘scale’ capacity for busy periods and reduce it when demand dies down, keeping IT costs to a minimum by only paying for the services they use. This removes the need to make large, and often risky, one-off investments, without having to compromise performance.

4.      Flexibility

Flexibility can be a difficult hurdle to overcome, with many customers fearing loss of control as they shy away from the risk of getting ‘locked-in’ to one single solution. Different types of clouds offer different levels of customisation and flexibility. Clouds that implement standard technology stacks and are participating in cloud standardisation efforts are the most suitable choice to enable application mobility. The uptake of open clouds has gained huge momentum and the future will very likely involve federation between public-to-public as well as public to on premise/hosted private clouds. There are lots of options out there to fit a range of needs, it’s just a case of researching and talking to providers about what they can offer.

 5.      Moving everything to the cloud

Moving everything to the cloud can be a real challenge as, while cloud is here to stay, it will not replace all traditional hosting or on-premise deployments.

Rather, it will complement them. There will always be situations where security requirements, flexibility, performance or control will preclude the cloud. Taking a strategically intelligent approach to those elements of data and processing that are best suited to traditionally hosted or on-premise servers, while also planning for hybrid connection to greater depth of cloud is the way forward.

Cloud computing has grown, developed and evolved very rapidly over the last half decade and it is widely agreed that a closed, single-source, proprietary and unsupported cloud model is not necessarily a good idea. Given the option, firms can usually see that an open, multi-protocol, standards -based managed cloud option makes a lot of sense.

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Fujitsu has a long and demonstrated history delivering world-class solutions that enable businesses to succeed in a highly competitive market and ever-evolving technology landscape. The Fujitsu Cloud ISV Partner Program is one more way we’re delivering exceptional value to our customers, where we focus on helping companies transform and deliver their solutions in an “as-a-service” model from our cloud. Our aim is to work closely with leading solution providers to take full advantage of not only our platform and tools, but the underlying shift in how the market consumes technology solutions today. With the Fujitsu Cloud ISV Partner Program, we offer the chance for solution providers to step into a leadership role and maximize the benefits of the latest cloud technology, including not only the transformation and delivery of their solutions as SaaS, but also for support in areas like sales, marketing, professional services, and across innovative operating and revenue models that support a “zero cost” option for the partner.

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General Electric (GE) has been a household name for more than a century, thanks in large part to its role in making households easier to run. Starting with the light bulb invented by its founder, Thomas Edison, GE has been selling devices (“things”) to consumers throughout its 122-year history. Last week, GE announced that it is officially leaving that job to others. While the lighting division will stay, GE will now turn its attention to selling industrial machinery and analytics as a service to other companies.
GE’s transformation to focus on building industrial machines such as aircraft engines, locomotives, gas-fired turbines and medical imaging equipment has been underway for quite some time. But for those that grew up with GE, the company’s catchy slogan, “We bring good things to life,” used between 1979 and 2003, is synonymous with what the brand stood for. Who could have imagined in 1979 when its advertising firm first came up with that memorable catchphrase how well the slogan would capture where GE was headed in the era of the industrial Internet and the Internet of Things (IoT)? GE has been systematically moving to secure its place in both of these fields. Wind turbines, locomotives, jet engines and other industrial machines are all examples of products that have successfully transitioned to being sold as a service.

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Having just joined a large technology company with 20 years of history, it would be suicidal to believe that I can immediately move the entire organization to the DevOps mindset and model. For those not familiar with the term, “Eventual Consistency” is a model used in distributed computing to ensure high availability. In this context, it’s a model for replicating best practices and automation across IT teams and business units.
The logical place to start with automation is the on-boarding of a new employee. That process should be as seamless and streamlined as possible, with a pristine source of truth. The goal is to populate a list of attributes and replicate them out to the various systems, and that’s applicable to either a new employee or an existing one who changes roles. Core infrastructure deployment is also at the base of the DevOps stack. Automate the provisioning of compute, network, and storage, and provide continuous insight into the utilization.

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As more applications and services move “to the cloud” (public or on-premise) cloud environments are increasingly adopting and building out traditional enterprise features. This in turn is enabling and encouraging cloud adoption from enterprise users. In many ways the definition is blurring as features like continuous operation, geo-distribution or on-demand capacity become the norm. NuoDB is involved in both building enterprise software and using enterprise cloud capabilities.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Seth Proctor, CTO at NuoDB, Inc., will discuss the experiences from building, deploying and using enterprise services and suggest some ways to approach moving enterprise applications into a cloud model.

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