The financial services market is one of the most data-driven industries in the world, yet it’s bogged down by legacy CPU technologies that simply can’t keep up with the task of querying and visualizing billions of records.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Karthik Lalithraj, a Principal Solutions Architect at Kinetica, discussed how the advent of advanced in-database analytics on the GPU makes it possible to run sophisticated data science workloads on the same database that is housing the rich information needed to drive trading decisions.
Monthly Archives: June 2017
The VDI Landscape | @CloudExpo #VDI #Cloud #Virtualization
Digital transformation can be exciting, but it also can be painful. Organizations are trying to better support a growing mobile workforce that needs the flexibility to work from anywhere on any device. The ability to do so offers a distinct competitive advantage, as productivity soars. Virtualizing applications and desktops has been an important step toward achieving these productivity gains, but the first generation of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and application publishing solutions not only failed to deliver on cost savings and streamlined IT promises, but they contributed an overwhelming level of complexity that ballooned the operating expenses of these implementations – an unpleasant surprise.
[slides] Cloud, AI and How We Communicate | @CloudExpo @RingCentral #AI #DX #Cloud
A look across the tech landscape at the disruptive technologies that are increasing in prominence and speculate as to which will be most impactful for communications – namely, AI and Cloud Computing. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Curtis Peterson, VP of Operations at RingCentral, highlighted the current challenges of these transformative technologies and shared strategies for preparing your organization for these changes. This “view from the top” outlined the latest trends and developments in AI and Cloud Computing technology innovation for enterprise communications to help you shape your future strategy.
SD-WAN – Symbiosis Without Compromise | @CloudExpo #SDN #Cloud #Storage
WAN infrastructures are highly persistent due to typically enormous investments in their dedicated hardware and management tools. WAN services like MPLS have undoubtedly been beneficial and enduring, but enterprises and IT departments require more flexible and economical solutions to provide employee access to corporate resources and cloud-based applications. SD-WAN promises to fulfill these needs with software-based, cloud-based solutions – running on commercial off-the-shelf hardware platforms – to connect their various branch offices.
A comparison of Azure and AWS microservices solutions
Amazon Web Services introduced their Lambda microservices engine in 2014; and since that time AWS Lambda has been the standard microservices engine for the public cloud. As Microsoft’s Azure cloud has gained in popularity the question on my mind was: will Microsoft also create a Microservices solution?
I recently attended a Town Hall hosted by Microsoft presenting their solution for microservices in the Azure cloud. The session provided a view into Microsoft’s approach and support for this rapidly growing cloud computing technology.
At the beginning of the meeting, Microsoft spent a good deal of time on their container environment including the container types that they now support; Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos DC/OS. As the meeting went on it became apparent that the MS container environment, along with Azure Service Fabric, was the basis for their microservices solution, but that there seemed to be no microservices engine per se.
Being that my experience is more on the AWS side of the cloud computing house I was hoping to form some comparison of Azure and AWS microservices solutions. So without providing a value judgment I will try to compare the two approaches.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a microservices engine that requires no pre-provisioning of resources other than the creation of a template for the Microservices container, including a pointer to the code to execute on activation. Lambda creates the Microservices container at event detection (events can be defined as input to a queue, creation of an object in a storage container or HTTP or mobile app request).
An obvious benefit to Lambda is AWS’ claim to have zero administration, other than the setup, configuration and maintenance of the code. In all microservices constructs, if a persistence model is required the developer is responsible for its creation. The AWS Lambda engine spins down the instance once the code execution is completed.
As part of the zero administration feature when using Lambda no availability solution needs to be defined. Even though Lambda intervenes in the process of deploying the service instance, AWS claims that any possible delay is on the order of a few milliseconds.
MS Containers
Microsoft provides no microservices engine, a la AWS Lambda. Rather, they base the solution, as stated above, on containers and orchestration. Microsoft recommends that for each microservice a pair of primary containers be deployed, for availability. These permanent – as permanent as anything is in the cloud world – primary containers, through the use of Azure Service Fabric or a third party service construct, form a model for the creation of execution containers.
Execution containers are activated, similarly to Lambda, at event detection. The service construct will create and destruct execution containers based on the primary entities and rules configured for them. Again your own persistence model needs to be applied. While Microsoft’s solution does place some administrative burden on the user, this is slight even without a distinct engine.
Conclusion
AWS and Microsoft present two somewhat different approaches to Microservices although at the root of the two solutions the goal is the same. Microservices computing’s goal is to provide an automated, low maintenance platform for rapid spin-up and spin-down of lightweight service instances. Service developers need to weigh aspects of these, or any other, microservices paradigms to determine the best fit for their organization and for the services under development. Some of the aspects that should be inspected are performance, administration, ease of use, service deployment and update, and provider support.
Why automation – driven by cloud technologies – is becoming more critical for organisations
More than half of respondents in a survey carried out by managed cloud provider 2nd Watch say at least half of their deployment pipelines are automated, with 63% saying they can deploy new applications in less than six weeks.
The study, which garnered responses from more than 1,000 participants from US companies with at least 1,000 employees, found that companies embracing cloud automation were able to deploy new applications and workloads faster and more frequently.
Alongside the almost two thirds who said deploying new applications took less than six weeks, 44% said deploying new code to production took a day or less, while 54% say they are deploying new code changes at least once a week. A similar number (55%) say they are measuring application quality by testing everything, while two thirds argue at least half of all their quality assessments, such as lint and unit tests, are also automated.
“The survey results reiterate what we’re hearing from clients and prospects: automation, driven by cloud technologies, is critical to the rapid delivery of new workloads and applications,” said Jeff Aden, 2nd Watch co-founder. “Companies are automating everything from artifact creation to deployment pipelines and process, which includes metrics, documentation and data.
“The result is faster time to market for new applications, and less application downtime.”
Earlier this month, a report from Puppet found particular discrepancies between higher and lower performing organisations when it came to automation. Top performing firms automated 72% of all configuration management processes on average, while lower ranked companies spent almost half (46%) of their time on manual configuration.
Will Nokia Bounce Back with its Cloud Routers?
Nokia, the embattled cell phone manufacturer, has come up with a new set of routers that it claims will lay the foundation for future technologies such as 5G and the Internet of Things.
In an announcement made by the company, it said that Nokia has made ground-breaking innovations that’ll give more opportunities for service providers to build powerful networks. These are powered by the new FP4 silicon, which is the world’s first multi terabit chipset. It is touted that this chipset is six times more powerful than existing network processors, and this could propel faster speeds for networks.
Two products built on these chipsets are 7750 Service Router and 7950 Extensible Routing System. The first one is expected to transmit 144 terabits per second while the latter can transfer 576 terabits in a second, provided they are in a single system.
Nokia said that these new routing platforms make modern networks more adaptable, faster and safer than before, and at the same time, delivers improved network security and intelligence. These platforms can signal the arrival of the next generation of technologies that include deep learning, machine learning, AI, IoT and more.
A common aspect of all these emerging technologies is the need for handling large amounts of data and “teaching” machines to learn from this data. This obviously requires bigger and faster networks and this is exactly where Nokia is placing its bets.
This brings up the big question of why Nokia chose these routers instead of other lines of business?
For starters, this is one area that Nokia that considerable experience and the other is that it forecasts IP traffic to go to 330 exabytes a month by 2022.
This is why with this new platform, Nokia wants to get back into the business and resurrect its brand name and operations. Though Nokia was one of the leading manufacturers of cell phones, it fell out of favor from customers after the emergence of companies like Samsung that were able to get more powerful smartphones to the market within a short time.
So, is this the right product for Nokia? Will it help the company to become an important player in the technology sector in the future?
Apparently not, according to analysts at Wells Fargo who believe that Nokia needs to do a lot more to get back into the networking business. These analysts contend that service providers are not ready to embrace this high-speed chipsets and platforms yet, so it may take time for Nokia to see the implementation of its new products.
Also, these analysts are skeptical about the ability of service providers to put these platforms to the best use. This means, though Nokia’s new platform can transfer a minimum of 144 terabits per second, will the surrounding infrastructure allow it is a big question.
In the meantime, it makes sense for Nokia to focus on more near-term products that can get some money flowing into its coffers while keeping these platforms as its long-term strategy.
The post Will Nokia Bounce Back with its Cloud Routers? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Microsoft joins Cloud Foundry Foundation as gold member, strengthens open source push
Microsoft has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation continuing its push into the open source space, the latter has announced.
The Redmond giant has joined as a gold member – although their logo is yet to appear on the Foundation’s member list at the time of publication – alongside the likes of Accenture, Google, and Huawei.
Platinum members – Cisco, Dell EMC, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, SUSE and VMware – pay $500,000 per annum with a commitment to three years, compared to gold membership which is $100,000 per annum for three years. Yet, as the Foundation’s prospectus document from last year shows, while Microsoft hasn’t gone all in with platinum membership, the company still gets various benefits, as well as the expectation for something in return.
Microsoft gets access to Cloud Foundry’s Global Perception Study, which provides ‘vital information about awareness and adoption of PaaS and Cloud Foundry’, as well as the opportunity to offer an executive candidate for one of two gold seats on the Cloud Foundry board of directors. Gold members are “encouraged to participate in all aspects of the Foundation including code contributions, community development, user education, and Foundation related marketing activities,” the Foundation notes.
“Microsoft and the Cloud Foundry community are deeply aligned around our mutual understanding of enterprise business and technical requirements, and our commitment to help organisations modernise their applications without vendor lock-in,” said Corey Sanders, partner director at Microsoft in a statement.
“By joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we will be able to work with members to contribute to Foundation initiatives and bring a wider range of solutions to Microsoft Azure for our customers and the community.”
The decision from Microsoft to sign up to the Foundation is just the latest step in the company’s move away from the walled gardens of its past. Last year, the company joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member to ‘better collaborate with the open source community’. It’s a brave new world, and as CEO Satya Nadella explained at BUILD last month: “The opportunity for us as developers to have a broad, deep impact on all parts of society, and all parts of the economy, has never been greater.”
[slides] Cloud Sprawl: The Rising Epidemic | @CloudExpo @Citrix #Cloud #Agile #DevOps
Wooed by the promise of faster innovation, lower TCO, and greater agility, businesses of every shape and size have embraced the cloud at every layer of the IT stack – from apps to file sharing to infrastructure. The typical organization currently uses more than a dozen sanctioned cloud apps and will shift more than half of all workloads to the cloud by 2018. Such cloud investments have delivered measurable benefits. But they’ve also resulted in some unintended side-effects: complexity and risk. End users now struggle to navigate multiple environments with varying degrees of performance. Companies are unclear on the security of their data and network access. And IT squads are overwhelmed trying to monitor and manage it all.
[slides] Serverless – The Next Major Shift in Cloud Computing | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Containers #Serverless
In 2014, Amazon announced a new form of compute called Lambda. We didn’t know it at the time, but this represented a fundamental shift in what we expect from cloud computing. Now, all of the major cloud computing vendors want to take part in this disruptive technology.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Doug Vanderweide, an instructor at Linux Academy, discussed why major players like AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Bluemix, and Google Cloud Platform are all trying to sidestep VMs and containers with heavy investments in serverless computing, when most of the industry has its eyes on Docker and containers.