Gemini is Yahoo’s native and search advertising platform. To ensure the quality of a complex distributed system that spans multiple products and components and across various desktop websites and mobile app and web experiences – both Yahoo owned and operated and third-party syndication (supply), with complex interaction with more than a billion users and numerous advertisers globally (demand) – it becomes imperative to automate a set of end-to-end tests 24×7 to detect bugs and regression.
In their session at 21st Cloud Expo, Jenny Hung, E2E Engineer Manager at Yahoo Gemini, Haoran Zhao, Software Engineer at Oath Gemini, and Lin Zhang, Software Engineer at Oath (Yahoo), described the technical challenges and the principles we followed to build a reliable and scalable test automation infrastructure across desktops, mobile apps, and mobile web platforms on the cloud. They also shared some best practices for advanced automated testing of web and mobile applications.

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“MobiDev is a software development company and we do complex, custom software development for everybody from entrepreneurs to large enterprises,” explained Alan Winters, U.S. Head of Business Development at MobiDev, 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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Vulnerability management is vital for large companies that need to secure containers across thousands of hosts, but many struggle to understand how exposed they are when they discover a new high security vulnerability. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, John Morello, CTO of Twistlock, addressed this pressing concern by introducing the concept of the “Vulnerability Risk Tree API,” which brings all the data together in a simple REST endpoint, allowing companies to easily grasp the severity of the vulnerability. He provided attendees with actionable advice related to understanding and acting on exposure due to new high severity vulnerabilities.

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From cloud cost management angle, comprehensive cloud cost analytics across multiple clouds as well as granular drill downs into each of the cost elements is very important for tighter cost control and management. As enterprises are adopting cloud across many line of businesses, departments, vertical functions and geographies, an enterprise class cloud analytics tool is a must have for holistic cloud cost management.

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Coca-Cola’s Google powered digital signage system lays the groundwork for a more valuable connection between Coke and its customers. Digital signs pair software with high-resolution displays so that a message can be changed instantly based on what the operator wants to communicate or sell. In their Day 3 Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Chambers, Global Group Director, Digital Innovation, Coca-Cola, and Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, discussed how from store operations and optimization to employee training and insights, all ultimately create the best customer experience both online and in-store.

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Despite the promise of hybrid cloud, many organisations will go into 2018 attempting to work out how to derive real value from it.

As we near the end of 2017, here we examine the top hybrid cloud trends to watch out for in the coming year.

Trend 1: Transforming customer experiences and targeted business outcomes with the Internet of Things

There’s still a great deal of speculation about the potential value that IoT will bring businesses. For IoT to deliver, it’s critical for businesses to stop thinking about IoT as simply a collection of connected sensors and devices. Businesses need to leverage the power that modern analytics systems provide. It’s the combination of the data collected at the edge of the network, the networks themselves, and the big data analysis that comprise true IoT.

IoT projects are already providing tangible benefits to organisations that have approached them with clear business needs in mind, and this is a trend we see continuing in the year ahead.

Trend 2: Hybrid cloud containment is a pervasive issue

Public cloud has largely failed to live up to expectations. Already proving to be more expensive than many organisations originally thought, these costs are continuing to escalate, and most haven’t reduced their headcount. This is because a certain set of skills is needed to run public cloud environments, versus traditional, on-premise operations.

In the next 12 months, we’ll see businesses carefully assessing the return on investment generated by their ‘generation 1’ cloud projects and reducing and/or reviewing their consumption-based opex budgets in favour of what could be developed in-house, this time using more intelligent tools. Rather than continuing to consume public cloud, many organisations will consider building their own private clouds. This approach is already gaining traction in the financial services industry where we’re seeing an increase in open stack implementations for large-scale private environments.

Trend 3: Increasing understanding of the platform economy

Digital marketplaces are changing the face of business. Organisations will recognise the true potential of the platform economy, but they’ll also begin to realise its impact on their operating models, and the fundamental changes that they need to make to be successful.

In the platform economy, the risk shifts from the consumer to the provider. Organisations that operate platforms need to make significant upfront investments to build their platforms, before they receive revenue. This means that they need to change their commercial and pricing models to factor in the new risk that they’re taking on.

Trend 4: Hybrid cloud solutions are becoming verticalised

As we move through 2018, we’ll see more vertical cloud solutions coming to market, as smaller cloud providers look for ways to differentiate themselves from the hyperscalers. In the year ahead, we can expect to see these smaller players investing significantly in industry-specific compliance regimes, to build credibility within their target market.

The result will be hybrid cloud offerings that span the entire spectrum of the XaaS stack, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which deliver a comprehensive solution for specific verticals. These solutions will cover everything from the infrastructure layer, to platform tools that customers’ development teams can use to build new services without the fear of any compliance breaches, to the application that’s delivering the service.

Trend 5: The rise of hybrid cloud management solutions

Businesses will continue to commit to multi-cloud architectures – both public and private, and from several different providers. While there are significant benefits to this approach, it can result in greater management complexity and many organisations’ internal IT teams are finding it increasingly difficult to manage ‘workload sprawl’ within their environments.

As a result, businesses are recognising the importance of having a defined set of management tools to run their operations, and we can expect to see an increase in demand for hybrid cloud management solutions.

In the year ahead, organisations that set out to build hybrid cloud environments will be looking to source and adopt specific workload-centric management solutions that can be run across multiple platforms. These will include hybrid cloud management tools for IaaS – both private and public – as well as PaaS and SaaS.

I also predict that in the year ahead, more businesses will invest in new automation and orchestration software that enable improved application performance and analytics.

Trend 6: Industry skills and talent pool continue to shrink

The talent pool of people available to help organisations architect, implement, and operate hybrid cloud solutions will continue to shrink in the year ahead. As every organisation accelerates its move to become a digital business to remain competitive, software engineering will become the essential trade. In 2018, we’ll start to see this manifesting in a war for talent. There’ll be a significant spike in demand for software development talent graduating from tertiary institutions, as organisations seek the skills they need to build their digital front-ends.

Trend 7: Expectation for service providers to deliver a unified, embedded cyber security posture – across all platforms and services

Organisations that appoint service providers to take on the management of their hybrid, multiple, dispersed, and potentially unrelated IT platforms, will expect them to enable an end-to-end security posture that spans the entire platform.

As we move into 2018, the assumption from organisations is that hybrid cloud is secure. Therefore, they’ll expect their service providers to offer robust security measures that cover on-premise and cloud-based assets, the network, and applications – all built into an intelligent security core.

Providers should be able to demonstrate their understanding of how digital infrastructure, digital workplaces, and cloud environments expose new risks, and be capable of re-evaluating the most appropriate and cost-effective security controls. Organisations should also look for providers that can offer a holistic approach, with robust detection and incident response capabilities, and the ability to act effectively and efficiently, regardless of the location of a security incident.

As we move into 2018, those organisations that take note of these key hybrid cloud trends will reap the benefits and stay ahead of the pack.

“We’re focused on how to get some of the attributes that you would expect from an Amazon, Azure, Google, and doing that on-prem. We believe today that you can actually get those types of things done with certain architectures available in the market today,” explained Steve Conner, VP of Sales at Cloudistics, 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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Data scientists must access high-performance computing resources across a wide-area network. To achieve cloud-based HPC visualization, researchers must transfer datasets and visualization results efficiently.
HPC clusters now compute GPU-accelerated visualization in the cloud cluster. To efficiently display results remotely, a high-performance, low-latency protocol transfers the display from the cluster to a remote desktop. Further, tools to easily mount remote datasets and efficiently transfer that data into the HPC cluster are described, including performance characterization results.

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Oracle has announced its latest financial results with cloud again the backbone of success – although its stock slipped due to a struggling guidance.

Total cloud revenues were up 44% year over year to $1.5 billion, with software as a service contributing almost three quarters of that figure at $1.1bn, a yearly increase of 55%. Platform and infrastructure as a service was at $396 million, representing year over year growth of 21%. In total, cloud revenues represented 16% of Oracle’s total revenues, again up from 12% this time last year.

Proposed guidance for cloud revenue, including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, was at between 21% and 25%, while Mark Hurd, Oracle co-CEO, said that the company expects to sell around $2 billion in enterprise software as a service revenues in the coming four quarters.

The announcement of BYOL – bring your own license – in September reaped dividends, according to co-CEO Safra Catz. “With BYOL, we are seeing a strong increase in our technology install base as customers renew their unlimited license agreement, investing more licenses and options and renew support,” said Catz, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Because BYOL is now available and customers better understand their tradition options to move to the Oracle Cloud, technology new software license revenue is dramatically improving from the declines we were seeing previously.”

Catz added this trend was likely to continue as Oracle rolls out its long-awaited autonomous database – and this was the primary focus of CTO Larry Ellison’s remarks. The elimination of human labour and the price advantages – particularly when compared to Amazon – was nothing different from when Ellison took to the OpenWorld stage in October. The bullishness, however, remains. “We expect this innovative new technology to dramatically accelerate the growth of our PaaS and SaaS businesses and keep our database license business strong as well,” said Ellison.

Total revenues for Oracle in the most recent quarter were at $9.6bn, up 6%. You can read the full set of results here (pdf).