Is your application too difficult to manage? Do changes take dozens of developers hundreds of hours to execute, and frequently result in downtime across all your site’s functions? It sounds like you have a monolith! A monolith is one of the three main software architectures that define most applications. Whether you’ve intentionally set out to create a monolith or not, it’s worth at least weighing the pros and cons of the different architectural approaches and deciding which one makes the most sense for your applications. The proper design pattern can save your organization time and money, and can make your engineers a whole lot happier. But how will you know which is right for you? Read on to figure out if a monolith, microservices, or self-contained system makes the most sense for your development team.

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The next big thing in the world of technology is Internet of Things (IoT). This is a technology that enables the smooth flow of data and communication across ordinary devices like your alarm clocks, refrigerators, cars and more. In fact, self-driving cars are becoming a reality sooner than we think is possible, and much of this has to do with advancements made in cloud and IoT.

So, what’s the connection between cloud and IoT?

Simply put, cloud infrastructure is the base technology that’s driving IoT including self-driving cars. All devices that want to communicate with each other need a common place to store and access data, and this is what cloud infrastructure provides. Regardless of the nature of the device and the function it performs, it can access and store data in the cloud.

This easy accessibility to data is what makes communication possible in the first place. For example, let’s say, your refrigerator has to monitor the level of available milk, and if it goes below a threshold, it has to automatically order it for you by communication with the app on your smartphone. In addition, this data has to be stored for analysis, so you know how often you’re buying milk and how much you’re spending on it.

All this communication and data exchange happens through the cloud infrastructure. Likewise, your wearable and self-driving cars also need cloud infrastructure to communicate across devices.

For now, we’ve established that cloud infrastructure is essential for self-driving cars and IoT in general. The next question is how we can extract value from it.

This depends on the way a company plans to monetize its infrastructure. Let’s take another example here. We have self-driving cars that are connected to a smartphone. As you drive through a shop, you get a notification that a list of items in that shop are on sale. You may want to stop and check it out or even buy from it. When this sale happens, the car company will get a commission on the sale value.

With such a strategy, the car company is able to get more value for its infrastructure than merely just stopping after a sale is done. In this sense, cloud is likely to create a continuous stream of revenue for the company. The above example is just one way of monetizing the cloud. If you think through and look closely, the options are endless as your cars can act as a central place of communication for the many activities you do.

In fact, these benefits are not just limited to the car manufacturer alone. The economic benefits can flow across different organizations operating across different sectors. In the above case, the economic benefits will accrue to the store, its suppliers and more. Overall, it can change the way we think and buy different commodities, and over time, the economic benefits will add up.

However, the underlying driver of this change is cloud infrastructure and this is why it is essential for self-driving cars.

The post What self-driving cars have to do with the Cloud? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Almost all of the luxury brands that we work with are somewhere on the long and winding road between multichannel and omnichannel. For outsiders, this seems to be a small step but in reality, this is an extremely complex transition. In the luxury industry, multichannel often means that the brands have created an online channel (sometimes completely outsourced) that is often developed and managed completely separately from the offline channel (brick-and-mortar stores) with only limited integration. Both channels use their own order and warehouse management platforms, logistical systems, and sometimes even ERP and CRM systems.
Brick-and-mortar stores offered a luxurious shopping experience where customers could touch and feel the merchandise and provide immediate gratification. The online channel tried to attract customers with wide product selection, low prices, and additional content like product reviews and ratings.

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While I am all for traditions like Thanksgiving turkey and Sunday afternoon football, holding onto traditions in your professional life can be career limiting. The awesome thing about careers in technology is that you constantly have to be on your front foot. Because when you’re not, someone, somewhere, will be and when you meet them, they’ll win. One tradition that has a limited lifespan at this moment is waterfall-native development and the security practices that go along with them. While the beginning of the end might have first been witnessed when Gene Kim and Josh Corman presented Security is Dead at RSA in 2012, we have more quantifiable evidence from the 2017 DevSecOps Community Survey. When asked about the maturity of DevOps practices in their organizations, 40% stated that maturity was improving, while 25% said that it was very mature across the organization or in specific pockets.

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Hyperscale operators are ‘aggressively’ growing their share of cloud service markets, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The analyst firm identifies 24 companies in all which meet its definition of ‘hyperscale’ – not surprisingly including the four main infrastructure players, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM, and Google – and argues these companies accounted for more than two thirds (68%) of the overall cloud infrastructure services market.

Back in December, Synergy noted that hyperscale providers operated more than 300 global data centres between them, expecting this number to surpass 400 by 2018. Of that figure, almost half (45%) of data centres were in the US, with China (8%), Japan (7%) and UK (5%) trailing far behind. The company says the current figure is now approaching 320.

This time around, the focus is on the growing dominance of the biggest players in cloud infrastructure markets, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and private hosted cloud services. By comparison, in 2012 hyperscale operators accounted for 47% of each of those markets.

As Synergy puts it, the ‘scale of infrastructure investment required to be a leading player in cloud services or cloud-enabled services means that few companies are able to keep pace with the hyperscale operators…and they continue to both increase their share of service markets and account for an ever-larger portion of spend on data centre infrastructure equipment.’

“Hyperscale operators are now dominating the IT landscape in so many different ways. They are reshaping the services market, radically changing IT spending patterns within enterprises, and causing major disruptions among infrastructure technology vendors,” said John Dinsdale, research director and a chief analyst at Synergy. “Our latest forecasts show these factors being accentuated over the next five years.”

(c)iStock.com/rzoze19

The term “hybrid cloud” has grown in popularity among established technology vendors, but one could be forgiven for thinking it’s a convenient “cloudwash” for companies to showcase progress while delaying an inevitable shift to public cloud. I say that because to focus exclusively on cloud overlooks the reality that almost every CIO in an established enterprise today is contending with legacy as much as the need to embrace new technologies. Some critical data centre hosted systems just don’t move to cloud so easily.

It’s all simply IT, which is why I call the effective combination of public cloud, managed service provider cloud, and dedicated infrastructure “hybrid IT”. It is by no means intended as a “catch-all”, so I feel I owe it to the reader to explain precisely what I mean and how established companies are successfully exploiting the benefits of such choice on their terms.

Hybrid is about choice

At its core, hybrid is about choice: Choice to work with the appropriate combination of an organisation’s on-premises infrastructure, managed services, private cloud and public cloud infrastructure and services. With the right knowledge and information, companies can optimise IT to balance cost, risk and agility.

The first question to ask concerns value. Hybrid IT allows companies to choose the infrastructure or service that delivers the best value for them at that time. Over time, the value delivered could change and an application that is hosted on-premises could be migrated to a cloud IaaS or SaaS. Changes in cloud services (functionality and price), availability of skills, geographic requirements or software / hardware maintenance needs can all trigger the push-pull of value delivered.

Global presence is a big pull factor for cloud. Throughout the past two years the hyperscale cloud providers have battled for global coverage supremacy, opening data centres in important legal jurisdictions and population centres.  Here cloud offers low-latency local infrastructure that is becoming vital to companies to improve the experience of their global customers. It also presents options for data sovereignty and regulatory compliance.

Don’t forget the workload: It is common for business critical applications to have resource, locality, dependencies, or indeed hardware requirements that mean they are both complex and costly to migrate to cloud. Some companies will choose to outsource to a specialist to reduce their support costs, and may consider a cloud migration as factors change over time.

Hybrid IT allows enterprises to exploit legacy investment

Most clients we work with have legacy systems that are core to their business and have run for 10 years or more. These legacy systems often run on platforms such as mainframes, IBM i and previous-generation enterprise servers that cannot be transferred to a public cloud or a commodity Windows/Linux environment.

Hybrid IT has allowed them to continue maximising their return on investment in functional legacy systems, while migrating applications to the public cloud that are easily refactored for that environment. This prevents enterprises being hindered in their ability to adapt and innovate, while also freeing up capacity in legacy infrastructure to absorb increased demands.

Hybrid IT mandates integration

No-one can deny the benefits of cloud when it comes to flexibility and future capital savings, but the cost associated with a wholesale cloud migration can vastly outweigh the benefits. It is also important to note the complexities associated with transferring applications and data to the cloud. Some systems simply aren’t suited for cloud environments and others require significant re-engineering.

Here’s the rub: New systems of differentiation and innovation are usually best placed in public cloud environments, and built cloud-native, but these can rely on transactions and datasets residing in legacy systems, for example a retail website that relies on back-office inventory management. The successful hybrid IT solution must cater for this integration, and in doing so an enterprise with legacy technology gains the agility to transform without going all-in to public cloud.

Success in hybrid also mandates integration of IT real estate. I have spent more than 15 years helping companies make sense of each wave of cloud, and there are many common mistakes that result from a simple truth: It’s all IT and it all needs managing wherever it runs. If an established IT department doesn’t pay the same attention to developing its toolset, skills and processes for cloud management as it does on-premises management, then things will go wrong. Furthermore, those tools and processes must be integrated. Only then, can you benefit from the choice and flexibility of hybrid IT.

Keeping pace with new technology deployment and management is unsustainable for all but the largest IT departments. As cloud service choices continue to expand an increasing number of businesses are seeking specialist help from managed service providers who are able to provide the integration, specialist tooling and skills needed to address the complexity and breadth of hybrid IT and make it work for businesses.

Journey’s end?

Hybrid is about the long-term evolution of IT estates. Almost every company has IT distributed across multiple infrastructures and service providers, and companies that embrace the Hybrid IT management challenge are empowered to move forward.

As technology becomes ever more critical to business, the world is not going to get simpler. The ultimate goal must be to deliver a single, consistent service experience across the combination of hybrid IT environments you choose, enabling an organisation to adapt and change with business and technology needs.

Automation, a key pillar of the DevOps movement, frees IT operations to focus on higher-levl work and collaborate with cross-functional teams. But what if your automation is so good that developers don’t need you anymore? Mike Gualtieri of Forrester Research coined the term NoOps in his controversial blog post “I don’t want DevOps. I want NoOps.” In the post, Gualtieri says, “NoOps means that application developers will never have to speak with an operations professional again.”

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