Modern software design has fundamentally changed how we manage applications, causing many to turn to containers as the new virtual machine for resource management. As container adoption grows beyond stateless applications to stateful workloads, the need for persistent storage is foundational – something customers routinely cite as a top pain point. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Bill Borsari, Head of Systems Engineering at Datera, explored how organizations can reap the benefits of the cloud without losing performance as containers become the new paradigm.

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Gaining visibility in today’s sprawling cloud infrastructure is complex and laborious, involving drilling down into tools offered by various cloud services providers. Enterprise IT organizations need smarter and effective tools at their disposal in order to address this pertinent problem. Gaining a 360 – degree view of the cloud costs requires collection and analysis of the cost data across all cloud infrastructures used inside an enterprise.

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Gaining visibility in today’s sprawling cloud infrastructure is complex and laborious, involving drilling down into tools offered by various cloud services providers. Enterprise IT organizations need smarter and effective tools at their disposal in order to address this pertinent problem. Gaining a 360 – degree view of the cloud costs requires collection and analysis of the cost data across all cloud infrastructures used inside an enterprise.

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The high barrier to entry prevents many companies from tapping into the full potential of machine learning. But what if you could make it more accessible?
We’re in the midst of a data explosion, with today’s enterprises amassing goldmines of information (25 quintillion bytes of data every day, according to some reports). But what exactly are they doing with this data? Considering the volume of data being collected is quickly becoming unmanageable, now is a good time to shift from manual machine learning to a cognitive approach. This enables businesses to better capitalize on their data and facilitate agile decision-making.

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The high barrier to entry prevents many companies from tapping into the full potential of machine learning. But what if you could make it more accessible?
We’re in the midst of a data explosion, with today’s enterprises amassing goldmines of information (25 quintillion bytes of data every day, according to some reports). But what exactly are they doing with this data? Considering the volume of data being collected is quickly becoming unmanageable, now is a good time to shift from manual machine learning to a cognitive approach. This enables businesses to better capitalize on their data and facilitate agile decision-making.

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I recently became a bionic man. I have one good ear and one bad ear as a result of flying around while suffering colds and flus over the years, and with only one good it makes it difficult to hear a conversation in a noisy room, so I went looking for a high tech digital solution.
For the last couple of years I have been watching the start-up, Doppler Labs, as they developed their earbuds that were purported to have great sound, but also to enhance hearing. This month after reading about their latest software release, I ordered a pair to try. There were three reasons I wanted to try Doppler Labs’ HearOne Wireless Smart Earbuds. First because their goal was to enhance hearing for a few hundred dollars, rather than for many thousands of dollars that the hearing aid industry charges, secondly, they were building artificial intelligence (AI) into their earbuds, and thirdly, I could listen to premium audio and talk on my phone with them.

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I recently became a bionic man. I have one good ear and one bad ear as a result of flying around while suffering colds and flus over the years, and with only one good it makes it difficult to hear a conversation in a noisy room, so I went looking for a high tech digital solution.
For the last couple of years I have been watching the start-up, Doppler Labs, as they developed their earbuds that were purported to have great sound, but also to enhance hearing. This month after reading about their latest software release, I ordered a pair to try. There were three reasons I wanted to try Doppler Labs’ HearOne Wireless Smart Earbuds. First because their goal was to enhance hearing for a few hundred dollars, rather than for many thousands of dollars that the hearing aid industry charges, secondly, they were building artificial intelligence (AI) into their earbuds, and thirdly, I could listen to premium audio and talk on my phone with them.

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Microsoft’s recent announcement and product update aimed at helping customers migrate from their VMware environments has, unsurprisingly, not gone down very well with the virtualisation giant.

On Monday, as announced in a blog post earlier this week, Microsoft will announce Azure Migrate, a free service, will become broadly available to all Azure customers. The key use case, and one which Corey Sanders, Azure director of compute, described as a frequent request, is moving on-premises VMware workloads to Azure.

“Many of you are looking to move to the cloud to help your business move faster,” wrote Sanders. “At the same time, we understand that it may not be possible to run your entire business in the cloud.

“The reality is, running your VMware virtualisation stack in the cloud does not address your hybrid requirements,” added Sanders. “For this, you need a broad set of hybrid services and solutions that provide not just connectivity and virtualisation, but true consistency across your cloud and on-premises environments.

“Azure is the only true hybrid cloud that enables consistency across application development, management, security, data, and identity.”

VMware responded to this by saying that as the Azure Migrate service has been neither certified or supported by the company, it could not recommend it for customers.

“Our experience has shown public cloud environments require significant joint engineering to run enterprise workloads,” wrote Ajay Patel, senior vice president product development cloud services at VMware. “Hence, we cannot endorse an unsupported and non-engineered solution that isn’t optimised for the VMware stack.

“VMware does not recommend and will not support customers running on the Azure announced partner offering,” Patel added.

Patel also wrote of the various initiatives VMware already has in place with cloud providers. The most prominent is VMware Cloud on AWS, announced at VMworld back in August. At the time, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said the move was “the ultimate hybrid solution.” Other partnerships include OVH and IBM.

One thing to note here: this may well be an interesting byplay to the AWS-heavy narrative at re:Invent next week.

In a recent survey, Sumo Logic surveyed 1,500 customers who employ cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). According to the survey, a quarter of the respondents have already deployed Docker containers and nearly as many (23 percent) are employing the AWS Lambda serverless computing framework.
It’s clear: serverless is here to stay. The adoption does come with some needed changes, within both application development and operations. That means serverless is also changing the way we leverage public clouds. Truth-be-told, many enterprise IT shops were so happy to get out of the management of physical servers within a data center that many limitations of the existing public IaaS clouds were forgiven. However, now that we’ve lived a few years with public IaaS clouds, developers and CloudOps pros are giving a huge thumbs down to the constant monitoring of servers, provisioned or not, that’s required to support the workloads.

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It was ranked as the most cloud-ready area in the Asia Pacific region – and now one of the largest players in the industry is set to build a region there in 2018.

Google has announced that a new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region will be opened in Hong Kong next year, making it the sixth GCP region in Asia Pacific alongside Singapore, Sydney, Taiwan, and Tokyo, as well as Mumbai, which went live earlier this month.

Including Hong Kong, the total now stands at 18 global locations and 53 zones either open or planned – the Iowa region has four zones instead of the standard three while Singapore and the planned work in the Netherlands currently stand at two.

“A solid cloud infrastructure is the foundation for building a smart city and helping businesses succeed in the digital economy,” said Nicholas W Yang, secretary for innovation and technology at HKSAR Government in a statement. “We are glad that Google is launching the Hong Kong cloud region, a recognition of Hong Kong’s edge and strengths as a data hub.

“This means businesses in Hong Kong, whether big or small, can leverage the latest, well-established technology infrastructure to expand and succeed in the region and globally.”

Last year, the Asia Cloud Computing Association noted Hong Kong as the most mature Asia Pacific cloud nation, overtaking long-time leader Japan. The report gave the country top marks across the board, with particularly high praise on international connectivity, broadband quality and privacy.

“Under the strong industry leadership of the Office of the Government CIO, Hong Kong is continuing its tradition of robust future planning and a strong tech industry by focusing on ensuring Hong Kong’s infrastructure is primed for fast, reliable and secure cloud offerings targeting the entire region,” the report noted.

You can read more about the GCP Hong Kong region by visiting here.