Bring the world’s best IaaS to the world’s best PaaS.
In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Animesh Singh, a Senior Cloud Architect and Strategist for IBM Cloud Labs, and Jason Anderson, a Cloud Architect for IBM Cloud Labs, shared their experiences running Cloud Foundry on OpenStack. They focused on how Cloud Foundry and OpenStack complement each other, how they technically integrate using cloud provider interface (CPI), how we could automate an OpenStack setup for Cloud Foundry deployments, and some of the best practices for configuring a scalable environment.
Monthly Archives: December 2014
‘The Year of DaaS’ By @IndependenceIT | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
After a couple of false starts, cloud-based desktop solutions are picking up steam, driven by trends such as BYOD and pervasive high-speed connectivity.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, cut through the hype and the acronyms, and discussed the emergence of full-featured cloud workspaces that do for the desktop what cloud infrastructure did for the server. He also discussed VDI vs DaaS, implementation strategies and evaluation criteria.
‘The Consumption Cloud’ By @Solgenia_Corp | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
The consumption economy is here and so are cloud applications and solutions that offer more than subscription and flat fee models and at the same time are available on a pure consumption model, which not only reduces IT spend but also lowers infrastructure costs, and offers ease of use and availability.
In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, discussed this shifting dynamic with an example of a top European Telco provider. Find out how they are leveraging the power of acloud-based consumption model services to offer more value to the mass market and enable a new revenue model that embraces the true meaning of the Third Industrial Revolution.
Moving Customers to the Cloud with @HarbingerSys | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
“At Harbinger we do products as well as services. Our services are with helping companies move their products to the cloud operating systems. Some of the challenges we have seen as far as cloud adoption goes are in the cloud security space,” noted Shrikant Pattathil, Executive Vice President at Harbinger Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
‘Managing Recurring Revenue’ By @AriaSystemsInc | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Recurring revenue models are great for driving new business in every market sector, but they are complex and need to be effectively managed to maximize profits. How you handle the range of options for pricing, co-terming and proration will ultimately determine the fate of your bottom line.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Brendan O’Brien, Co-founder at Aria Systems, session examined:
How time impacts recurring revenue
How to effectively handle customer plan changes
The range of pricing and packaging options to consider
‘Data Privacy: US vs Europe’ By @CiscoCloud | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
It’s time to face reality: “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus,” and in today’s increasingly connected world, understanding “inter-planetary” alignments and deviations is mission-critical for cloud.
In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Evelyn de Souza, Data Privacy and Compliance Strategy Leader at Cisco Systems, discussed cultural expectations of privacy based on new research across these elements
Transactional Consistency with @NuoDB | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
“NuoDB is a transactionally consistent SQL database that does scale out, that does all the things you want in a cloud. If you want more transactional throughput, if you want higher availability if you want to run in multiple data centers this is a technology that can scale and still provide a single logical consistent database,” explained Seth Proctor, CTO of NuoDB, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
‘Safeguarding Data in the Cloud’ By @Vormetric | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
As enterprises look to take advantage of the cloud, they need to understand the importance of safeguarding their confidential and sensitive data in cloud environments. Enterprises must protect their data from (i) system administrators who don’t need to see the data in the clear and (ii) adversaries who become system administrators from stolen credentials. In short, enterprises must take control of their data: The best way to do this is by using advanced encryption, centralized key management and cutting edge access controls and policies.
When an outside party owns, controls, and manages infrastructure and computational resources, how can you be assured that sensitive data remains private and secure, that your organization is protected from damaging data breaches, and that you can still satisfy the full range of reporting, compliance and regulatory requirements?
Companies ploughing money into SaaS investment but still aware of the risks
Picture credit: iStockPhoto
A survey from analyst house Gartner has found key drivers for software as a service (SaaS) include redirection of in-house staff to other responsibilities, as well as quick deployment and faster access to innovation.
The research, which polled across 10 countries in May and June this year, found that respondents were still not fully satisfied by going all in to the cloud, instead opting for a mix of SaaS and on-premises.
Even though Gartner expects the traditional deployment model and usage for on-premises software is going to almost half from 34% now to 17% by 2017, issues such as data loss, data breaches, and unsecure APIs remain a problem, as well as privacy and the fear of government snooping. As a result, adoption of private cloud (46%) was cited more than public (24%). Public cloud isn’t always the best model for all use cases within companies, and CIOs appear to be aware of this.
“CIOs are focused on using the cloud to establish a modern, innovative IT environment with operational agility and business advantage as key outcomes, whereas business leaders still see the cloud as a means to save costs and may not yet have full appreciation for the business benefits or strategic opportunity of using cloud services,” Gartner explains.
Gartner also argues that SaaS and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors are looking at PaaS as a ‘natural extension for growth’. “Although SaaS and IaaS are fairly consolidated, PaaS is still open for expansion,” said research director Fabrizio Biscotti.
“Of all the cloud technological aspects for which respondents indicated investments, BPaaS (business process as a service), IaaS and SaaS are the most mature and established from a cloud landscape perspective, while PaaS is the least evolved,” he added.
Adam Gross, VP product for cloud developer platform Heroku, told CloudTech earlier this week that there is an “energy and excitement” concerning PaaS today, particularly with new agile technologies pervading the enterprise.
“Clearly a lot of what platform as a service is about is providing new levels of abstraction, and with that abstraction comes new kinds of simplicity,” he said. “People are really starting to understand that this is the new way applications are going to be built and delivered across the board.
Back in October, Gartner said cloud would underpin the majority of technology trends in 2015.
Heroku delivers Performance Dynos to Europe, shows relevance of PaaS market
Picture credit: Heroku
Heroku, the Salesforce-owned developer platform, has announced the availability of its Performance Dynos toolset for its European customers, signalling a greater intent for expansion on the continent.
Performance Dynos enables companies to build and run large scale apps, as it contains 12 times the memory of a single Heroku Dyno. The move for European expansion was a natural one; in 2014 the number of apps built on Heroku in Europe went up by nearly 180%.
As a result, it gives companies the option to give their apps greater performance and lower latency, as previously Heroku’s European customers had Performance Dynos available within US infrastructure. It also provides the freedom to scale up and down even in extreme cases for ‘overnight success’ Internet companies.
One example of this instant reward is ad-resistant social network Ello, which runs on Heroku. From barely any traffic, in September the site was clocking up a reported 31,000 invites an hour.
Adam Gross, VP product of Heroku, explains the importance of the move. “[Heroku] speaks to the particular demand that large-scale web and mobile properties have as they quickly achieve scale,” he tells CloudTech. “As we have a lot of startups, and especially large scale enterprise customers in the US, this is a technology we developed to really help democratise that capability.
“[Ello] is really a great example of the kind of customer that Performance Dynos was built to support,” he continues. “We know that if we can handle an Ello, and if we can help them scale from virtually nothing to being an overnight success and a huge Internet property, then we can have that same technology be appropriate for a European retailer in the Christmas shopping season, or a media company dealing at the height of a sporting event.”
European expansion isn’t just a priority for Heroku; it’s a priority for Salesforce overall, who launched its first UK data centre back in May this year. The continent was Salesforce’s fastest growing region in the fiscal Q3. With more and more cloud vendors opening up European data centres, not least because of data sovereignty concerns, it’s no surprise Europe is a key market for Heroku.
Performance Dynos isn’t just for startups, however. Enterprises are increasingly looking to more agile platforms and development tools, such as Node.js. “Where we’ve found a lot of success with our enterprise customers is helping them safely adopt some of the more cutting edge consumer Internet technologies,” Gross explains.
“There’s this perception that the enterprise is more about older school, more traditional technologies. Frankly we see more Node in our enterprise customers than maybe any other segment.” This isn’t a trend just seen at Heroku towers; mobile backend provider FeedHenry is seriously looking at integration following its acquisition by Red Hat, while Node was also a key factor in Progress Software acquiring Modulus back in June.
More pertinently, there have been great levels of success in the arena of open app platforms. Docker, which has partnered with Amazon, Microsoft and Google among others, is a classic example of that, although there were hair-raising security vulnerabilities clocked last week.
Gross argues the landscape makes platform as a service (PaaS) more relevant than ever.
“Clearly a lot of what platform as a service is about is providing new levels of abstraction, and with that abstraction comes new kinds of simplicity,” he says. “People are really starting to understand that this is the new way applications are going to be built and delivered across the board.
“I think it’s going to be really exciting for developers and companies as they more broadly see the benefits you get from using PaaS,” he continues. “You can feel an energy and excitement in the infrastructure community that you don’t always feel. It’s really quite fascinating.”
You can find out more about Heroku’s new regions here.