While some vendors scramble to create and sell you a fancy solution for monitoring your spanking new Amazon Lambdas, hear how you can do it on the cheap using just built-in Java APIs yourself. By exploiting a little-known fact that Lambdas aren’t exactly single threaded, you can effectively identify hot spots in your serverless code.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, David Martin, Principal Product Owner at CA Technologies, will give a live demonstration and code walkthrough, showing how to overcome the challenges of monitoring S3 and RDS. This presentation will provide an overview of necessary Amazon Lambda concepts and discuss how to integrate the monitoring data with other tools.
Monthly Archives: May 2017
Nutanix “Platinum Sponsor” of @CloudExpo NY & CA | #IoT #AI #DX #DevOps
DevOps is often described as a combination of technology and culture. Without both, DevOps isn’t complete. However, applying the culture to outdated technology is a recipe for disaster; as response times grow and connections between teams are delayed by technology, the culture will die. A Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has many benefits that provide the needed base for a true DevOps paradigm.
IBM Named “Diamond Sponsor” of @CloudExpo NY and CA | #AI #DX #DevOps
SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM has been named “Diamond Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017 at the Javits Center in New York, New York and and October 31-November 2 in Silicon Valley.
T-Mobile to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | #DevOps #IoT #AI #ML #DX #SmartCities
SYS-CON Events announced today that T-Mobile will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. As America’s Un-carrier, T-Mobile US, Inc., is redefining the way consumers and businesses buy wireless services through leading product and service innovation. The Company’s advanced nationwide 4G LTE network delivers outstanding wireless experiences to 67.4 million customers who are unwilling to compromise on quality and value.
CA “Platinum Sponsor” of @CloudExpo NY & CA | @CAinc #AI #DX #DevOps
SYS-CON Events announced today that CA Technologies has been named “Platinum Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. CA Technologies helps customers succeed in a future where every business – from apparel to energy – is being rewritten by software. From planning to development to management to security, CA creates software that fuels transformation for companies in the application economy.
[video] @Docker & #Kubernetes Keynote | @CloudExpo #AI #Serverless #DevOps
In his keynote at 19th Cloud Expo, Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs, discussed the technological advances and new business opportunities created by the rapid adoption of containers. With the success of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and various open source technologies used to build private clouds, cloud computing has become an essential component of IT strategy. However, users continue to face challenges in implementing clouds, as older technologies evolve and newer ones like Docker containers gain prominence. He explored these challenges and how to address them, while considering how containers will influence the direction of cloud computing.
Why hybrid cloud can work for you – and the three steps to a successful environment
Research from a recent Gartner study predicts that by 2019, “more than 30 percent of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only”. The study considers the idea that “cloud-first, and even cloud-only is replacing the no-cloud attitude” that has dominated corporations in recent years. With there being no preference between public or private cloud, it indicates that organisations are moving in the direction of a hybrid cloud future.
This is in line with conversations we have every day with organisations in the UK, as most indicate that their three-year roadmap includes building a hybrid environment. While “on-premises” environments will not go away completely, there is significant agility and cost savings associated with introducing a hybrid approach in delivering IT resources to key applications and development services.
Everyone throws around the term hybrid cloud, but what does it really mean?
What is the hybrid cloud?
Hybrid cloud is a combination of on-premises and off-premises (or cloud based) IT infrastructure platforms. Enabling an organisation to run applications on multiple platforms increases efficiency and choice, as no one platform is right for everything. A hybrid approach allows an organisation to choose the right platform for the right workload, for the right price. This agility speeds up ‘time to market’ for many organisations, and improves the capabilities to service employees and customers.
This shift is, in some ways, a no brainer in the medium term, however it is not without challenges and risks. It’s difficult for organisations used to ‘on premises’ single vendor or single platform architectures to build, manage and protect hybrid cloud environments. While introducing multiple platforms drives efficiency and choice, it also drives complexity and risk for organisations ill prepared to address this shift in strategy correctly. Given these concerns, if you are considering a move towards a hybrid cloud environment, what should you consider and how do you get there?
Hybrid cloud considerations
There are advantages to choosing a hybrid cloud environment from an efficiency standpoint. Lower costs, pay as you go models, and access to a wide breadth of services summarise some of the broad positive outcomes. These outcomes enable businesses to run tests, build new systems, and adapt faster. Best of all, organisations can be quicker to market.
However, it’s important to consider that the changes required to enable a hybrid cloud can be risky and time consuming, so you may need a different group of tools to protect the environments that are created. To address and avoid risk, protection and immediate recovery is key.
Traditional migration and disaster recovery methods that are based on individual pieces of hardware can be disruptive to the production systems they protect and are no longer adequate in the hybrid cloud or multi-platform world. These traditional replication, migration and recovery tools are by design incapable of protecting applications and environments that may span multiple ‘on-premises’ and cloud platforms.
It’s no surprise that traditional ways of protecting applications in “on-premises-only” environments won’t suffice in the hybrid cloud world. Thus, we believe there are important things to consider when planning the shift towards a hybrid cloud environment that will reduce the risk and prevent environmental exposure and complexity.
Three steps to ensure a successful hybrid cloud environment
Creating a successful hybrid cloud environment in three steps:
Planning: Planning is significantly easier if your environment has a protection, mobility, and testing suite or platform that is agnostic to the infrastructure you’re running your IT on. By design, you can make changes to which platforms you use (on-premises and/or cloud based) with no protection dependencies tied to that individual on-premises or cloud platform. Furthermore, an agnostic platform allows you to avoid introducing organisational risk when making changes, thus providing the agility desired when deciding to move to a hybrid cloud IT environment in the first place.
Testing: Any changes to your environment, whether internal on-premises changes or more complex shifts to cloud based resources, will carry organisational risk. Thus, testing whether changes will be executed smoothly and successfully is the bedrock of any serious hybrid-cloud strategy. Downtime, data loss, and the costs associated with infrastructure changes can be significant risks an organisation moving to hybrid cloud needs to consider. A successful hybrid cloud environment can be enabled by, and will continue to allow for testing capabilities that can assess whether the applications absorbing infrastructure or platform change will remain available through and after those changes occur.
Future proofing: When introducing new platforms into your IT environment, future proofing your decisions is critical. Questions such as ‘can we protect our applications once they are moved to a new private/hybrid/public cloud platform?’ and ‘if this new platform doesn’t meet our expectations, can we move again easily?’ are very important considerations to think through before any changes are actually made.
There are numerous advantages to having a hybrid cloud. If you do your due diligence and take the right steps to get there, you’ll find the rewards can be significant from both a cost as well as efficiency standpoint.
Verizon Sells its Cloud Business to IBM
Verizon announced that it will be selling its cloud business to IBM to help boost the buyer’s presence in the cloud market. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, so we don’t know the exact amount that transpired in the deal.
This is surprising news for many reasons. In February 2016, Verizon said that it wants to continue providing top quality cloud service to its corporate and government customers, and to this end, it is making substantial investments in the cloud business.
But, by end of 2016, it sold 29 data centers to a company called Equinux for $3.6 billion. Right after that, this news that it has sold its cloud and managed hosting services to IBM.
With this deal, Verizon has completely quit the cloud business, though it announced that it will be working with IBM on a range of strategic issues and initiatives. Again, the exact detail of these initiatives have not been disclosed.
So, what prompted Verizon to sell its cloud business and come out of the industry altogether? The answer may lie in the history of its cloud business.
Looking back, we can say that Verizon’s cloud business had a rocky start. It put together a new division after it acquired an offering from Terremark. It built too much on it too quickly as it moved its VMware to Xen. During this time, it also started a new object store and a block store. There was also a compute service that was offered for some time, but it was closed down in February of 2016 because Verizon wanted to focus on its virtual public cloud.
The message throughout was patchy and disorganized. One of the senior brass in Verizon, George Fischer, said that the company had ambitious plans for its cloud division as it wants to become the world’s leading managed services provider. To achieve this lofty goal, it wanted to created an eco-system using the best technology solutions from Verizon and other service providers. Within a few months though, the company sold its data centers.
Not sure what happened in the company during this time for such wild transitions and the gap between its actions and statements made by the top management.
IBM is silent on this deal. There has been no statements whatsoever from this company, though it is the one that stands to gain the most from this deal. IBM is one of the top players in the cloud market, but it is trailing heavily behind Microsoft and AWS. Google is also fast closing in on the cloud market.
To compete with these players, the infrastructure and client base it has obtained from Verizon can give it a big boost. Already, the company is making rapid strides in closing the gap, and this deal can further bolster these efforts.
In some ways, this is better for everyone because a few large players sharing the market is way better than a ton of small players who fight with each other for market share. Such a trend is healthy for the industry as a whole.
The post Verizon Sells its Cloud Business to IBM appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
451 Research report affirms cloud services budget to outstrip overall IT this year
Enterprises expect growth in their hosting and cloud services to outstrip overall IT spending this year, with spending on hosting and cloud to go up 25% on average compared to 12% for overall IT, according to 451 Research.
The findings, which appear in the company’s latest Voice of the Enterprise report, show that the trend is most pronounced in larger businesses. For organisations with 1,000 to 9,999 employees, spend on hosting and cloud is expected to rise 33% compared to only 7.3% for IT overall. For organisations with more than 10,000 employees (20.3% and 5.8%) a similar pattern occurs.
88% of respondents overall expect their hosting and cloud services budgets to go up in 2017 compared to last year, with only 70% expecting their total IT budget to rise.
“We see the pace of investment in hosting and cloud services exceeding investment in IT overall, meaning hosting and cloud services are becoming a focus of IT investment, via both new projects and the migration of existing workloads,” said Liam Eagle, research manager at 451 Research and report author. “Even some businesses that are reducing IT spending overall are increasing hosting and cloud spending, meaning service providers should not overlook companies looking to reduce IT costs as prospects.”
The research argues various factors are impacting the increased adoption of cloud and hosted services, from new IT initiatives, adding resource capacity due to business growth, and, naturally, migrating workloads from on-prem environments to the cloud.
Azure, cited by almost a quarter (24.8%) of budget allocation, leads Amazon Web Services (20.2%), with respondents expecting to increase their budget on both providers in the coming year. This was referenced in a study last month, where the research firm argued Azure was emerging as the ‘predominant primary infrastructure as a service provider in Europe’. Around half of respondents said they were using a vendor outside of the top 10 providers.
“Significant adoption profile differences among different company sizes in terms of adoption rates and drivers reinforce the idea that company size is not just a category difference, but indicative of markets with totally different hosting and cloud services characteristics,” added Eagle.
“This gives providers a compelling business case for specialisation and is one of the reasons the hosting and cloud services market is served by such a wide variety of vendors and vendor types.”
You can find out more about the report here.
Hitachi to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | @HDScorp #DevOps #IoT #IIoT #API #AI
SYS-CON Events announced today that Hitachi, the leading provider the Internet of Things and Digital Transformation, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., offers an integrated portfolio of services and solutions that enable digital transformation through enhanced data management, governance, mobility and analytics. We help global organizations open new revenue streams, increase efficiencies, improve customer experience and ensure rapid time to market in the digital age. Only Hitachi Data Systems powers the digital enterprise by integrating the best information technology and operational technology from across the Hitachi family of companies. We combine this experience with Hitachi expertise in the internet of things to deliver the exceptional insights business and society need to transform and thrive. Visit us at HDS.com.