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It’s perhaps the most captivating myth of cloud: autoscaling. A major selling point, the promise of autoscaling is that the amount of computing resource automatically scales based on load. It can handle those unexpected traffic spikes better, automatically, with no human intervention. Workloads just know for example when your website has been mentioned on a television show or in a major magazine, demand spikes, and the cloud compensates. The cloud becomes a nimble, always-on, semi-sentient member of your IT staff with extraordinary reflexes and reacts accordingly.

That cloud nirvana doesn’t really exist though, or rather for most, is out of reach.

Why? Well, there are dozens of reasons, from the technological to the practical. And unfortunately, it’s this promise that IT leaders are often sold on – the belief that autoscaling is easy, quick to set up and always ensures 100 percent uptime. The truth about autoscaling, as with most technological promises, is it’s a little more involved.

We often say we want autoscaling, when, in our heart of hearts, we all know that there are so many ways a system could seem to be spiking, but that spike may in fact have nothing to do with demand. It could be an attack. It could be a runaway process. It could be some middling attempt at recursion by a newbie developer. The list goes on.

For this mythical self-scaling automatic magic-cloud to exist, it would not only have to be amazingly responsive, but it would also have to be intelligent enough to triage, in those moments, the reason for the spike and respond – or not- accordingly. Few humans have that skill, let alone distant, application-unaware computing systems.

So autoscaling isn’t a little more involved, it’s actually a lot more involved. And it’s also not exactly ‘auto’. It is in fact complex, time consuming and demands a great deal of technical knowledge and skill. To create a truly automated and self-healing architecture that scales with little or no human intervention requires custom scripts and templates that can take months for a skilled team to get right, and many organisations have neither the time nor those resources to make it work.

So, what’s the next best thing? Alerting to a potential demand spike so a real live human can assess the situation (major television show or print magazine timing, marketing email blast data, and some knowledge of whether the last patch might be at fault) and make an intelligent scaling decision.

But, as has been often pointed out, people aren’t actually doing that. Instead they are just over-provisioning. Why? Well, in part because resizing instances or VMs in most clouds is a taxing process. Often, it requires downtime and restarts in new, larger instances. And then, when the hullabaloo about your artisanal locally-grown alpaca friendship bracelets passes, you need to re-set the whole thing again to a smaller size.

IT people are busy. They don’t have time for this either. Couple it with the fact that they are chastised when systems are under-provisioned or fail, that re-starting a system may land it on an unfortunate server filled with noisy neighbors, and that all of this is happening at the scale of dozens or hundreds of servers at a time – and this feels like a great time to just over-provision everything and leave well enough alone.

There is an alternative. Managed clouds – like the iland cloud – are different. iland’s managed cloud doesn’t establish instances; instead, you get an entire resource pool of CPU, RAM and Storage – just like your on-premise cluster – and without turning VMs on or off, you have the ability to add and remove resources on the fly or re-assign resources to different VMs as required.

A managed cloud is not exactly like having an autonomic self-motivated mega-computer presciently rejiggering your RAM, but most of us also aren’t eager to invite HAL9000 to our staff meetings. Instead, you can achieve a happy middle ground of cost-savings and ultimate control – and that feels like an IT myth whose time has come.

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Analyst house IDC has released two forecasts in quick succession examining the cloud infrastructure landscape, and found that EMEA cloud IT infrastructure revenue grew 17% to $1.3 billion (£1bn) in the first quarter of this year.

IDC expects this particular market to hit more than $10bn by 2020, creating 46.4% of total market expenditure, while total cloud-based EMEA infrastructure spend on server, disk storage and Ethernet switch, grew by four percentage points compared to this time last year.

Overall, private cloud represented $0.8bn in the first quarter, with public cloud at $0.6bn and traditional IT at $4bn. Year over year private cloud growth was 20.8%, compared to public cloud at 13.4% and traditional IT at a 6.9% decrease.

IDC tracked Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp and Oracle among others for the survey, and found some interesting regional highlights. For Western Europe, growth in cloud infrastructure was distributed almost equally between enterprise storage (42%) and servers (45%), while CEMA (Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) represented 15% of overall EMEA cloud investments this quarter.

Yet this could change. While the first quarter’s figures naturally did not account for the result of a UK referendum, IDC warned that the second quarter could be an eye-opener, with the research firm expecting a ‘challenging transition’ ahead if the UK activates the process of withdrawing from the EU. “Our forecast for the UK may be adjusted downward in the following quarter,” said Kamil Gregor, IDC European infrastructure group research analyst. “Other EMEA markets are expected to remain largely unaffected.”

The result of the EU referendum has had effects on other parts of business infrastructure. Now that the UK has returned a Brexit vote, and assuming the formal process to leave the EU will be initiated, it doesn’t mean businesses should avoid data best practices in line with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to commentators.

Elsewhere, IDC predicted that spending on IT infrastructure for cloud environments in 2016 will be strong despite a first quarter slowdown. Total spending will increase by 15.5% in 2016 to reach $37.1bn. 

Microsoft took another step toward being king of the cloud hill when it announced in January that it was releasing its Azure stack to the public. There are many technical reasons why this is cool, but more importantly, it’s the psychological advantage this gives Microsoft.
Google has always had the ability for developers using its stack to develop locally on the same tools that run in Google App Engine. It recently forked its environments, so now the local and cloud environments are slightly different for some of the configurations — I can’t tell you how many nights I have lost sleep because of environments being slightly different! Development and hosting are two completely different things. What Microsoft did is one-upped Google and Amazon.

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“Being the one true cloud-agnostic and storage-agnostic software solution, more and more customers are coming to Commvault and saying ‘ What do you recommend? What’s your best practice for implementing cloud?” explained Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist at Commvault, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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The cloud competition for database hosts is fierce. How do you evaluate a cloud provider for your database platform?
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Chris Presley, a Solutions Architect at Pythian, gave users a checklist of considerations when choosing a provider.
Chris Presley is a Solutions Architect at Pythian. He loves order – making him a premier Microsoft SQL Server expert. Not only has he programmed and administered SQL Server, but he has also shared his expertise and passion with budding DBAs as a SQL Server instructor at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario. Drawing on his strong disaster-recovery skills, he monitors production environments to swiftly detect and resolve problems before they arise. A self-described adrenaline junkie, Chris likes tackling the biggest database problems and putting out the toughest fires – and hitting the road on his motorcycle.

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Organizations planning enterprise data center consolidation and modernization projects are faced with a challenging, costly reality. Requirements to deploy modern, cloud-native applications simultaneously with traditional client/server applications are almost impossible to achieve with hardware-centric enterprise infrastructure. Compute and network infrastructure are fast moving down a software-defined path, but storage has been a laggard. Until now.

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“We’re a global managed hosting provider. Our core customer set is a U.S.-based customer that is looking to go global,” explained Adam Rogers, Managing Director at ANEXIA, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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