While the idea of converged infrastructure isn’t that new, and we’ve seen some strong efforts from vendors over the last few years to drive more adoption, the uptake from enterprises has been met with some challenges. In 2014, and now in 2015, organizations are not just looking to gain bigger returns on their cloud investments, but
Monthly Archives: August 2015
The Hacked Landscape: Protecting Your Organization from Modern Threats
Security is one of, if not the, top concerns among IT professionals. Every week it seems a new, widely publicized breach occurs. Some vendors claim to have a silver bullet solution that is a cure-all for every security need. But is that the case? In this video, I talk about the current “hacked landscape,” how preventative measures to keeping information safe has changed, and the approach organizations should be taking to security.
Interested in speaking more with Dan about security? Reach out!
By Dan Allen, Solutions Architect
IBM boosts OpenStack cloud presence with Blue Box integration
IBM has integrated Blue Box, which offers managed private OpenStack clouds on-premise, into its own datacentres
Less than a few months after buying the managed OpenStack-based private cloud provider Blue Box IBM announced it has integrated the company’s technology into its SoftLayer infrastructure.
IBM customers now have access to Blue Box’s dedicated cloud offering through its cloud datacentres, which the company is pitching as a way to complement and ease provisioning of resources in the public cloud.
The company also announced that Cloudsoft, an open source application management company, will operate its Application Management Platform (AMP) via Blue Box Cloud.
“I’ve been impressed by the way the IBM and Blue Box engineering teams have collaborated to quickly bring Blue Box Cloud to a worldwide infrastructure platform,” said Jesse Proudman, chief technology officer at Blue Box. “Today, we’ve taken a big step toward our goal of delivering private clouds to customers anywhere in the world—and we’re offering deployment timelines that are unheard of within traditional private cloud.”
Duncan Johnston-Watt, chief executive of Cloudsoft said: “Implementing Cloudsoft AMP on Blue Box Cloud across IBM Cloud datacentres will allow us to meet the increased demand from customers for hybrid cloud solutions built on OpenStack. The combination of Blue Box’s best-in-class OpenStack service and IBM Cloud’s global footprint and legendary private network will enable us to model, deploy and manage our customers’ business critical applications and services worldwide.”
Hybrid cloud enabler Velostrata bags $14m, exits stealth
Velostrata is the latest hybrid cloud vendor to come out of stealth
Hybrid cloud software vendor Velostrata has secured $14m in series A funding as it emerged from stealth this week.
Velostrata has developed proprietary hybrid cloud software that competes with and functions like offerings provided by VMware and OpenStack.
The software lets users shift and manage workloads between different cloud platforms, and claims to make this process as frictionless as possible by decoupling the storage and compute processes.
The company claims decoupling the storage from compute helps make data more secure by enabling enterprises to keep their databases on-premise.
“Our vision for Velostrata is to enable frictionless hybrid clouds for any workload in real time,” said Issy Ben-Shaul, chief executive and co-founder at Velostrata.
“Today, hybrid cloud deployments have largely been limited to corner-cases, because there are just far too many barriers involved for general-purpose use, and in particular, customers don’t want to move their large production data assets permanently to the cloud. At Velostrata, we have developed a breakthrough technology that eliminates those barriers and our unique approach has already transformed the hybrid cloud strategy for our large enterprise users,” Ben-Shaul said.
The company, which was founded last year, plans to use the funding to bolster its sales and go-to-market strategy.
There is certainly no shortage of hybrid cloud tools on the market today, with each vendor pitching their own secret sauce in making hybrid workload management and deployment seamless and pain-free. Velostrata’s offerings seem well suited to some hybrid use cases – cloud-bursting, storage consolidation, DR – it seems like one of the primary hybrid challenges that has yet to be solved is latency, one of the problems that severely limits practical use cases for hybrid (i.e. using hybrid cloud to restore performance and service reliability for anything more than a database) and which has yet to be solved.
“The feedback we’ve received from enterprises in our early adopter program has been tremendous and further establishes that our approach to enabling on-demand hybrid cloud for production workloads is unique in the industry,” Ben-Shaul said.
[slides] Enterprise DevOps Adoption | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Docker #Microservices
In today’s digital world, change is the one constant. Disruptive innovations like cloud, mobility, social media, and the Internet of Things have reshaped the market and set new standards in customer expectations. To remain competitive, businesses must tap the potential of emerging technologies and markets through the rapid release of new products and services. However, the rigid and siloed structures of traditional IT platforms and processes are slowing them down – resulting in lengthy delivery cycles and a poor customer experience.
Log Aggregation Across Dev and Ops | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Docker #Containers #Microservices
The pricing of tools or licenses for log aggregation can have a significant effect on organizational culture and the collaboration between Dev and Ops teams.
Modern tools for log aggregation (of which Logentries is one example) can be hugely enabling for DevOps approaches to building and operating business-critical software systems. However, the pricing of an aggregated logging solution can affect the adoption of modern logging techniques, as well as organizational capabilities and cross-team collaboration. We need to choose our log aggregation tools carefully to make sure that we don’t introduce unintended barriers or silos driven by unhelpful pricing.
Industrial Internet of Things By @EsmeSwartz | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #API #RTC #InternetOfThings
During the last two #IoTuesday Twitter sessions, our chats have centered on what it will take to capitalize on the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunity and what the industry’s collective responsibility is to break down barriers to adoption. Topics ranged from the evolution of the Industrial Internet to consumer IoT applications to the role of APIs and API management. And underlying all of this, how we move from today’s connected devices and vertical siloes to a horizontal IoT marketplace with interconnectivity at its core. In this month’s IoT chat we will be joined by Alex Bakker and Ron Exler, from analyst firm Saugatuck Technology, to continue the discussion on the evolution of IoT, blockers and opportunities.
Cortana on Your iPhone or iPad
synergy |ˈsinərjē| noun the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects: the synergy between artist and record company. The term synergy comes from the Attic Greek word συνεργία synergia from synergos, συνεργός, meaning “working together”. Don’t you […]
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IBM launches Blue Box Cloud
It has been three months since tech giant IBM has purchased private cloud company Blue Box, and IBM has recently announced that it has ported the private cloud software it gained via the acquisition to the IBM SoftLayer cloud. Angel Diaz, VP of cloud architecture and technology at IBM, has stated, “Blue Box is now available in 40 plus data centers around the world. We think the fact that it took us less than 90 days to make the port shows how flexible Blue Box really is.” The managed hosting service removes complexity associated with deploying, updating, and managing an instance of OpenStack from an internal IT organization.
OpenStack, an open source framework that is relatively new, may be able to reduce the licensing costs that are connected with commercial IT management software. Because most IT organizations do not have the ability to not only manage their own but deploy it, they will take advantage of the opportunity to convert to OpenStack and rely on external IT providers. While OpenStack is still being developed, organizations may utilize the Blue Box private cloud on premise or in the Softlayer Cloud. Blue Box Cloud is now available on a global scale. Jesse Proudman, CTO at Blue Box, has said, “I’ve been impressed by the way the IBM and Blue Box engineering teams have collaborated to quickly bring Blue Box Cloud to a worldwide infrastructure platform. Today, we’ve taken a big step toward our goal of delivering private clouds to customers anywhere in the world—and we’re offering deployment timelines that are unheard of within traditional private cloud.” IBM customers will be able to enjoy the better performance and reduced costs that are connected with the private cloud and support offered by public cloud services.
Through development, OpenStack should be easier to master and automation frameworks should become more sophisticated. IBM is focused on not only expanding the usage of OpenStack, but refining the scalability and interoperability. Overall, it is promising. “Implementing Cloudsoft AMP on Blue Box Cloud across IBM Cloud datacenters will allow us to meet the increased demand from customers for hybrid cloud solutions built on OpenStack,” Duncan Johnston-Watt, chief executive of Cloudsoft. “The combination of Blue Box’s best-in-class OpenStack service and IBM Cloud’s global footprint and legendary private network will enable us to model, deploy and manage our customers’ business critical applications and services worldwide.”
The post IBM launches Blue Box Cloud appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Demystifying AWS Spot Instances through three use cases
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Around six years ago, Amazon introduced an EC2 usage option at very low costs: Spot Instances. With EC2 Spot Instances, you can save money, but there’s a catch – they won’t necessarily be available when you need or want to use them. Managing and strategising around such temperamental instances can be challenging, not to mention unsuitable for AWS customers who are looking to provide stable online end user experiences.
Amazon created this type of resource in order to optimise their data center utilisation by leveraging their data centre’s spare capacity. However, if a customer on a higher-priced on-demand, or reserved capacity plan requires an instance, Amazon will take it from the Spot Instance pool to provide it to the higher paying customer. In this article, several use cases will be presented to show how this type of “unreliable” resource can be used to help effectiveness without putting your system at risk.
How Spot Instance pricing works
Before we jump into the use cases, let’s take a look at the ins and outs of Spot Instance pricing. As shown in the scheme below, AWS users can generate a Spot Instance request by bidding on the maximum price that they are willing to pay per hour per instance. If the bid is greater than the current spot market price, the user will get the Spot Instance resource and pay the current spot price. It’s recommended to check the AWS console for the Spot Instance pricing history in order to select a bid price that works for you.
Due to the unpredictable manner of Spot Instances and the potential service interruptions they may bring, you should look into using them for workloads or applications that are not mission critical. In other words, application or workload downtime or even failure should not impact business operations.
Batch processing
Batch jobs are used to upload information at the end of a business day, generating reports, processing documents, and performing other non-interactive operations. The main requirement is processing a large amount of data at one time. These applications rely heavily on the cloud’s large number of processors and are mostly stateless. This means that at any point, an instance could go down and its state could be lost, however when bringing up a new instance, the system continues to function. Other examples of batch jobs that are suitable for Spot Instances are systems that convert file formats such as video encoding. AWS has reported cases of up to 70% cost savings with Spot Instances when compared to On-Demand EC2 Instance pricing for this type of use case when running on on-demand resources.
High performance computing
The second use case is that of high performance computing. This is particularly relevant to the health care and scientific research industries. Image processing such as scanning complex body organ imaging or genome mapping requires a large capacity. Traditionally, with physical data centres, scientists would settle for small capacity. Nowadays, however, with the public cloud and cheap Spot Instances, scientists can provision a cluster of 1,000 servers (rather than five), for example, cutting processing times down from months to hours. Calculations and data processing jobs that traditionally took months or even years to complete can now be distributed among compute nodes for faster processing. Provisioning a cluster of 1,000 Spot Instances is relatively safe considering the fact that removing 10, 20, or even 50 servers from the cluster doesn’t significantly impact performance.
According to AWS, a biotechnology platform company decided to concentrate on making their drug design process more data-driven, efficient and predictable. After just five days of engineering efforts they saw that Amazon EC2 Spot Instances saved them 50%.
Development/testing
The third use case is large scale testing. Test and development accounts for more than 60% of independent software vendors’ (ISV) and enterprises’ IT environments seeing as they can be required to spin up multiple test environments at the same time. These processes are typically automatically scheduled and run infrequently. In order to reduce costs in this situation, implementing Spot Instances can be a very good option.
Although they are an appealing way to decrease costs, Spot Instances are not always an effective option for your development team. For instance, if a developer is working on something and suddenly an instance goes down, the work can be lost. If there are mechanisms in place for backup and recovery when an application fails, the developer should be able to recover the system in a matter of minutes. Ideally, Spot Instances are used for testing purposes such as websites that carry out load testing and monitoring for companies that need to ensure online performance.
Next steps with AWS Spot Instances
Just a few months ago, Amazon announced that they acquired ClusterK, a company that helps Spot Instance failover to On-Demand or Reserved Instances. Amazon continues to invest in developing this capability by continually releasing more and more useful features that help customers utilize Spot Instances in a more effective way. For example, Spot fleets reduce the development costs of using Spot Instances. They enable admins to deal with an entire set of Spot Instances as a unit instead of having to deal with each one separately.
Another useful Amazon feature is its alert capability. When a Spot Instance is about to be automatically terminated, Amazon sends an alert notifying you before the termination is carried out. Spot Instances are an important milestone in the cloud roadmap, and even though they are not hugely popular, Amazon is still investing in developing this area of its services.
AWS is not the only player in the Spot Instance domain. Google recently announced their own offering called Google Preemptible VMs, which, like Spot Instances, can be terminated at any time; however their price is deterministic and available on GCP’s pricing page. This is where Cloudyn comes into the picture. The volatility of Spot Instance prices exemplifies the complexity of a cloud environment. Therefore, continuously tracking usage and monitoring costs are a must when it comes to decision making.