How much does it cost to make an app is almost as popular a question as it is confusing.
No one tries to learn the exact costs of, say, making a movie: people realize that there’s an overwhelming amount of variables involved on which they depend.
But almost every day a new inquiry is posted on a tech forum, Quora, or Reddit as to how much it’d take to build a mobile business app.

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“NetApp is known as a data management leader but we do a lot more than just data management on-prem with the data centers of our customers. We’re also big in the hybrid cloud,” explained Wes Talbert, Principal Architect at NetApp, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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While some developers care passionately about how data centers and clouds are architected, for most, it is only the end result that matters. To the majority of companies, technology exists to solve a business problem, and only delivers value when it is solving that problem. 2017 brings the mainstream adoption of containers for production workloads.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ben McCormack, VP of Operations at Evernote, discussed how data centers of the future will be managed, how the public cloud best suits your organization, and what the future holds for operations and infrastructure engineers in a post-container world. Is a serverless world inevitable?

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Targeted attacks on the network of a business can be big trouble. A business should know where to look and what to look for to stop the attacks.
Businesses are aware of the dangers of hackers. They know that a hacker can steal private information that hey store on their computer networks. They recognize that hackers can create problems for the business and the business’s computer systems through a variety of different ways.

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These days, no matter what task you’re trying to accomplish within your online properties, chances are there’s at least one cloud solution that provides it. However, with so much of our personal and business data living now online, there’s perhaps no functionality more important than cloud security. With cyber attacks more prevalent than ever, it’s imperative that organizations – regardless of their size and scope – protect both themselves and their clients from nefarious individuals who prey on unsecured networks and data.

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Cloud computing innovation will power enterprise transformation in 2018. Cloud growth is also driving a rapid rise in the storage market, exacerbating the enterprise challenge around storage cost and complexity. The business reason behind this marketplace reality is the proliferation of real-time data from the web, mobile devices, social media, sensors, log files, and transactional applications. Big Data has also found a home on the operational side of many market verticals in applications ranging from fraud detection to the processing of video evidence.

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MongoDB, an open-source document store and most popular NoSQL database on the market today, offers a variety of advanced features to administer security over your MongoDB deployments. In this tutorial post, we’re going to show you how to set up role-based access control (RBAC) to manage user access across your MongoDB systems for reIndex, mongodump and mongorestore.
If you’re the administrator of your MongoDB databases, you’ve likely received requests to provide an individual user with the capabilities to perform a certain action(s). MongoDB’s security features are fairly mature now, and allow you to create and assign very granular role-based access control.

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“Calligo is a cloud service provider with data privacy at the heart of what we do. We are a typical Infrastructure as a Service cloud provider but it’s been designed around data privacy,” explained Julian Box, CEO and co-founder of Calligo, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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It has been a little over a month since Amazon and Google switched some of their cloud services to per-second billing and so the first invoices with the revised billing are hitting your inboxes right about now. If you are not seeing the cost savings you hoped for, it may be a good time to look again at what services were slated for the pricing change, and how you are using them.

Google Cloud Platform

Starting with the easiest one, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you may not be seeing a significant change, as most of their services were already billing at the per-minute level, and some were already at the per-second level. The services moved to per-second billing (with a one-minute minimum) included Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and App Engine VMs.  Moving from per-minute billing to per-second billing is not likely to change a GCP service bill by more than a fraction of a percent.

Let’s consider the example of an organization that has ten GCP n1-standard-8 Compute Engine machines in Oregon at a base cost of $0.3800 per hour as of the date of this blog. Under per-minute billing, the worst-case scenario would be to shut a system down one second into the next minute, for a cost difference of about $0.0063. Even if each of the ten systems were assigned to the QA or development organization, and they were shut down at the end of every work day, say 22 days out of the month, your worst-case scenario would be an extra charge of 22 days x 10 systems x $0.0063 = $1.3860. Under per-second billing, the worst case is to shut down at the beginning of a second, with a highest possible cost for these same machines (sparing you the math) being about $0.02. So, the best this example organization can hope to save over a month with these machine with per-second billing is $1.39.

Amazon Web Services

On the Amazon Web Services (AWS) side of the fence, the change is both bigger and smaller.  It is bigger in that they took the leap from per-hour to per-second billing for On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot EC2 instances and provisioned EBS, but smaller in that it is only for Linux-based instances; Windows instances are still at per-hour.

Still, if you are running a lot of Linux instances, this change can be significant enough to notice.  Looking at the same example as before, let’s run the same calculation with the roughly equivalent t2.2xlarge instance type, charged at $0.3712 per hour. Under per-hour billing, the worst-case scenario is to shut a system down even a second into the next higher hour. In this example, the cost would be an extra charge of 22 days x 10 systems x $0.3712 = $81.664. Under per-second billing, the worst case is the same $0.02 as with GCP (with fractions of cents difference lost in the noise). So, under AWS, one can hope to see significantly different numbers in the bill.

The scenario above is equally relevant to other situations where instances get turned on and off on a frequent basis, driving those fractions of an hour or a minute of “lost” time. Another common example would be auto-scaling groups that dynamically resize based on load, and see enough change over time to bring instances in and out of the group. (Auto-scale groups are frequently used as a high-availability mechanism, so their elastic growth capabilities are not always used, and so savings will not always be seen.) Finally, Spot instances are built on the premise of bringing them up and down frequently, and they will also enjoy the shift to per-second billing.

However, as you look at your cloud service bill, do keep in mind some of the nuances that still apply:

• Windows: GCP applies per-second billing to Windows; AWS is still on one-hour billing for Windows.
• Marketplace Linux: Some Linux instances in the AWS Marketplace that have a separate hourly charge are also still on hourly billing (perhaps due to contracts or licensing arrangements with the vendors?), so you may want to reconsider which flavor of Linux you want to use.
• Reserved instances: AWS does strive to “use up” all of the pre-purchased time for reserved instances, spreading it across multiple machines with fractions of usage time, and per-second billing can really stretch the value of these instances.
• Minimum of one-minute charge: Both GCP and AWS will charge for at least a minute from instance start before per-second billing comes into play.

Overall, per-second billing is a great improvement for consumers of cloud resources…and will probably drive us all more than ever to make each second count.

With AWS re:Invent done and dusted for another year, naturally the majority of coverage has focused on the initiatives coming out of Amazon’s headquarters. There were plenty of them too – more than 20 announcements in Andy Jassy’s keynote alone, with topics ranging from machine learning, databases, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Yet plenty more news came from the event’s many partners. First up was something of a continuation, between Amazon Web Services and VMware. First announced last year and made available in August, the two companies’ collaboration, VMware Cloud on AWS, has been extended and expanded. More VMware capabilities have been plugged in, more AWS services are being supported, and availability will be expanded from the US West region, in Oregon, to now include US East in Virginia.

“The momentum for VMware Cloud on AWS is growing rapidly, and VMware and AWS are delivering major new capabilities after only three months of availability while enhancing our strategic relationship with new integrations across our platforms,” said Mark Lohmeyer, VMware vice president and cloud platform business unit general manager. “Customers of VMware Cloud on AWS will be able to migrate application portfolios to the cloud even more rapidly with Hybrid Cloud Extension and AWS Direct Connect, while maintaining the optimal levels of performance, scale, and availability required for mission-critical apps.”

Elsewhere, digital performance and app monitoring provider Dynatrace announced that organisations can monitor performance at the code level across a wider variety of AWS Lambda services. In what is described as an industry first, Alois Reitbauer, vice president at Dynatrace, explained: “Today, people buy and transact business via voice, not just on their laptop or mobile device. Monitoring these transactions at a user level is critical, as without it, you have an increasingly big blind spot.

“It’s similar with IoT; you now have millions of devices that are driving the code that’s being executed in AWS Lambda, so organisations need automated real-time discovery and continuous visibility to deliver proactive performance management and avoid IoT failures,” Reitbauer added.

Stratoscale, on the other hand, is looking more at running and scaling cloud-native applications on-premises. In what was again seen as a first for the industry, the company’s latest product, Chorus, enables app development teams to build cloud-native applications without being limited to the public cloud. The product supports Kubernetes, load balancers, and object storage.

Outside of product announcements, much of the partner news at re:Invent focused around companies getting on board with AWS’ metrics. A new program for AWS’ partner network announced at the event was the AWS Networking Competency, aimed at advanced partners who already provide specialised solutions to help customers adopt, develop and deploy on Amazon’s cloud. Among the 18 partners first announced were Colt, Equinix, and Dome9 Security. Colt said that to achieve recognition partners needed to demonstrate ‘deep AWS expertise’ and be able to ‘deliver solutions seamlessly.’

Read more: AWS takes a musical approach at re:Invent with machine learning, serverless and IoT key