You want to start your DevOps journey but where do you begin? Do you say DevOps loudly 5 times while looking in the mirror and it suddenly appears? Do you hire someone? Do you upskill your existing team? Here are some tips to help support your DevOps transformation. Conor Delanbanque has been involved with building & scaling teams in the DevOps space globally. He is the Head of DevOps Practice at MThree Consulting, a global technology consultancy. Conor founded the Future of DevOps Thought Leaders Debate. He regularly supports and sponsors Meetup groups such as DevOpsNYC and DockerNYC.

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For decades we have feared the cloud.  During my time working counterintelligence for the FBI, we feared the Internet so much that agency computers functioned solely on an isolated intranet connected via hard cables.

It’s no wonder to me that that government has still not embraced the unlimited processing power cloud computing affords.  But despite the fact that utilisation of the cloud has become ubiquitous – we store our photos and memories, email accounts, business files and our very identities there – many companies fear the cloud: how can I control and secure my information if I give it to someone else?

This concern has made cloud computing one of the more polarising issues for IT professionals.  Many opponents of the cloud point to the fact that not all cloud services are equal in their dedication to security:

• Poor configuration of the cloud can lead to circumvention of internal policies that classify sensitive data and protect access to it
• Not all cloud services offer strong authentication, encryption (both in transit and at rest) and audit logging
• Failure to isolate a user’s data from other tenants in a cloud environment together with privacy controls that are not robust enough to control access
• Failure to maintain and patch to ensure that known flaws are not exploited in the cloud service

According to the 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Overview (Ponemon Institute, June 2017), the average total cost of a data breach is $3.62 million. The average cost for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information is $141.  While these costs decreased overall from 2016 to 2017, the numbers remain astronomical, particularly to small businesses who may be unable to recover from data breach liability.  No industry is safe from cyberattacks and cyberattacks continue to grow, year after year.

Cloud security must grow and evolve to face these threats and provide a bulwark of defence for the consumers that leverage the efficiencies and advantages cloud services provide.  In addition to offsetting the fear highlighted above through good security practices by the cloud security vendor, cloud services can take security one step further.  Cloud services can not only secure data within the cloud, but can leverage the transformative cloud industry to secure the endpoint users that use the service.

Cloud security is the future of cybersecurity

Cyberattacks like the WannaCry/NotPetya pandemic and the extraordinary growth of ransomware are often launched by sophisticated attackers – sometimes state sponsored – that bowl over traditional and legacy security.  The modern attackers are cyber spies that use traditional espionage tactics, together with innovative and disruptive malware to bypass passive, defence-based security measures.  To defeat such attacks, security must transform itself into an active profile that hunts today’s attacks as aggressively as it predicts the threats of tomorrow.

To predict and defeat attacks in real time, cybersecurity must move to the cloud. The cloud can leverage big data and instant analytics over a large swath of end users to instantly address known threats and predict threats that seek to overwhelm security. 

Cloud security must create a collaborative approach that analyses event streams of normal and abnormal activity across all users to build a global threat monitoring system.  Because many different users leverage the same cloud environment, cloud security is particularly suited to building a collaborative environment that instantly predicts threats through a worldwide threat monitoring system and shares threats among all users under the cloud umbrella. 

Cyberattacks continue to disrupt our way of life with innovative new approaches to seeding malware and stealing our data.  Security must in turn actively work to disrupt the cyber spies, attackers and terrorists through a collaborative security approach that leverages the big data and analytics that thrive within the cloud.  We’ve come a long way from my days on the FBI Intranet.  It’s time to fully embrace the future of security.  That future is within the cloud.

The good news is that the future of cloud security is now.   Predictive security in the cloud has innovated security in a manner that will frustrate cyber spies for years to come. This technology collects and analyses unfiltered endpoint data, using the power of the cloud, to make predictions about, and protect against future and as-yet unknown attacks.  This means predictive security in the cloud can identify attacks that other endpoint security products miss, and provides visibility into attacks that evolve over time.  In other words, it gives you the ability to hunt threats before the attacker begins to hunt you.

This new approach to security will not just level the playing field between the attacker and security teams, it will shift the balance in the opposite direction and provide security with an advantage.  Cyberattacks rely on stealth and surprise to disrupt, destroy and steal – the tools of a spy. Predictive security in the cloud works like a counterintelligence agency that hunts the spies before they attack.  This innovative approach is the next generation of security.

Amazon and Microsoft have joined IBM and Google in reporting its quarterly numbers – and the good news just keeps on coming for the hyperscalers and the cloud market in general.

Amazon announced total revenues of $51 billion (£36.9bn) in the first quarter, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) contributing $5.4bn (£3.94bn), or 10.6% of all revenues. This compares favourably with this time last year, AWS hitting $3.66bn of total revenues of $35.7bn in Q117, with AWS passing $5bn for the first time in the previous quarter.

The canned quote attributed to CEO Jeff Bezos, unlike previous quarters, singled out AWS; Bezos saying it ‘had the unusual advantage of a seven-year head start before facing like-minded competition…and the team has never slowed down.’

Fielding a question from an analyst after announcing the results, Brian Olsavsky, Amazon chief financial officer, said AWS revenues, as well as enterprise migrations, were accelerating. “What is driving the growth, we believe… [is] the value that we create for AWS customers,” Olsavsky said. “We have the functionality and pace of innovation that others don’t. We have partner and ecosystem that others don’t, and we have proven operational capability and security expertise that’s highly valued to the AWS customer base.”

Microsoft, which is not quite as explicit as Amazon in its cloud reporting, posted total revenue figures of $26.8 billion. Of its main revenue buckets, Microsoft’s intelligent cloud segment – believed to be related to Azure and server products – increased 17% to $7.9bn (£5.7bn), while productivity and business processes, which focuses more on Office 365, was at $9bn, again with a 17% increase.

While specific revenue figures for Azure were not mentioned, the company said Azure had grown 93% in revenue year over year.

Speaking to analysts after the figures were posted, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella cited cloud security as an area where the company was a ‘clear leader’, as well as discussing the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) within infrastructure.

“Our architectural advantage of a consistent stack from the cloud to the edge is resonating with customers, with Azure revenue growth of 93% this quarter,” said Nadella. “Recent CIO surveys affirm our leadership position in hybrid, developer productivity, trusted security and compliance and new workloads such as IoT and AI at the edge.”

As this publication reported earlier this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s cloud arm was ‘growing well’ and that larger, more strategic deals were being struck. Again, specific figures are not disclosed, but for Q1 Google’s ‘other’ revenues bucket – of which Google Cloud is a part – hit $4.35bn, a 35% increase on the previous year. For the second consecutive quarter, IBM’s revenues went up – albeit only in constant currency – to $19.1bn of global sales, with cloud revenues rising 20% year over year.

Analysis

Good results all round, therefore; but what is driving the change? It’s all about AI, machine learning and – to a lesser extent – blockchain, fuelling the new ‘cloud wars’ and becoming the next generation of cloud-enabled services.

AWS says ‘tens of thousands’ of customers are using its machine learning services with active users going up by more than 250% over the past year. Those who attended re:Invent in November would have been made more than aware of AWS’ push in the area, including SageMaker, a modular service which aims to help developers build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Dow Jones, NFL, and Expedia – the latter announcing at re:Invent they were all-in on AWS – are all confirmed machine learning customers.

The keynote theme of Google’s report was around how AI was ‘unlocking new opportunities for everyone’. Pichai cited Google Photos, Lens and the Google Assistant as products which were getting better all the time, but again the importance of getting developers onside, this time with TensorFlow, was cited. TensorFlow Hub, Pichai explained, was launched to “make it easier for developers to share and reuse models so that we can work together to tackle even more problems and get to better ideas faster.”

From Microsoft’s side, the company says more than one million developers are already on board with Cognitive Services, the company’s set of APIs and SDKs to make applications more intelligent. IBM, for its part, has introduced several offerings to ‘accelerate client journeys to AI’, as SVP and CFO Jim Kavanaugh put it, including a more conversational, enhanced Watson Assistant.

In terms of where the runners and riders are, AWS continues to trounce the rest of the field, according to analyst firm Synergy Research. The company notes that even though the market has almost tripled in size over the past few years, AWS’ grip on one third of the total cloud infrastructure services market remains. Microsoft’s growth, eating into AWS’ dominance, has slipped somewhat, with the Redmond giant taking 13% of share, with IBM, Google, and Alibaba Cloud making up the top five.

“Cloud growth in the last two quarters really has been quite exceptional,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. “Normal market development cycles and the law of large numbers should result in growth rates that slowly diminish – and that is what we saw in late 2016 and through most of 2017. But the growth rate jumped by three percentage points in Q4 and by another five in Q1.

“That is good news for the leading cloud providers, whose historically high levels of capex are helping to ensure that they are the main beneficiaries of that exceptional market growth,” Dinsdale added.

Bobby Hellard

Keumars Afifi-Sabet

Kin Lane recently wrote a couple of blogs about why copyrighting an API is not common. I couldn’t agree more that copyrighting APIs is uncommon. First of all, the API definition is just an interface (It is the implementation detail … Continue reading →

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Enterprises are universally struggling to understand where the new tools and methodologies of DevOps fit into their organizations, and are universally making the same mistakes. These mistakes are not unavoidable, and in fact, avoiding them gifts an organization with sustained competitive advantage, just like it did for Japanese Manufacturing Post WWII.

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Recently, REAN Cloud built a digital concierge for a North Carolina hospital that had observed that most patient call button questions were repetitive. In addition, the paper-based process used to measure patient health metrics was laborious, not in real-time and sometimes error-prone. In their session at 21st Cloud Expo, Sean Finnerty, Executive Director, Practice Lead, Health Care & Life Science at REAN Cloud, and Dr. S.P.T. Krishnan, Principal Architect at REAN Cloud, discussed how they built an Alexa-powered voice application for both patients and nurses. Patients got answers for common questions, it provided service feedback and registered complaints. Nurses can register patient health metrics. They were only able to do this because of cloud-based technologies. The cloud enabled them to complete this complex project while ensuring compliance with HIPAA and other privacy regulations.

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Here are the Top 20 Twitter Influencers of the month as determined by the Kcore algorithm, in a range of current topics of interest from #IoT to #DeepLearning. To run a real-time search of a given term in our website and see the current top influencers, click on the topic name. Among the top 20 IoT influencers, ThingsEXPO ranked #14 and CloudEXPO ranked #17.

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The modern-day enterprise is conscious of the environment, and with many corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, you will of course find recycling schemes or even smart lights that switch themselves off when no one is in the room, all in order to save energy. But when we look at the biggest energy drain of any organisation, our IT system, we rarely consider measures we can take to reduce this.

As the most likely cause of major power, data centres are the first place to look when considering energy use. According to research from the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), datacentres already consume over 3% of the world’s total electricity and generate 2% of our planet’s CO2 emissions. For context, that’s the equivalent of the entire global aviation industry or a small city.

The concept of a ‘green data centre’ is nothing new and great technological strides have already been made in recent years to minimise the environmental footprint, and many facilities have. But there’s still plenty of work that could – and more importantly should – take place. And not simply to tick a CSR box either, there are tangible business benefits too, such as lower energy bills.

So with this in mind, what can enterprises do to reduce data centre energy wastage? Here are a few areas to focus on as a starting point.

Using a containment system

Excessive heat is often the main culprit when it comes to power waste within data centres. It requires a lot of power to keep systems cool, and often data centres mix hot and cold air in order to keep them at the ideal temperature. This can however limit the capacity of the cooling system, which results in a power drain, and causes it to run less efficiently.

This can be resolved by fixing air tiles into the cold aisle of the system. Not only does this make the cooling more productive, it also raises return temperatures, allowing your computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units to operate more efficiently.

Virtualise servers and storage

Within data centres you will often find a dedicated server for each application, which can be incredibly inefficient, for both energy use and budget.

With virtualisation, you can share servers and storage onto one shared platform, whilst still maintaining a level of segregation between data, operating systems and applications.

This runs more efficiently, saves space, and reduces the number of power consuming servers, which is great for cost and for reducing energy waste.

Turn off idle IT equipment

It might seem obvious, but leaving equipment on idle uses more energy than you think. IT systems are often used far less than capacity allows. Servers for instance tend to only be around 5-15% utilised, for PC’s 10-20%.

When these systems are left on but unused, they still consume a large amount of the power needed to keep them running at full capacity.

To remedy this, it’s important to make an assessment of the equipment used, how often it is used, and whether it could benefit from being powered down during quieter periods of its use.  It may be a minor action, but it’s the cheapest and easiest way to save energy and it can be actioned today.

Move to a more energy efficient UPS system

At the heart of most data centres lies its uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system, an electrical unit which is used to support critical mainstream IT and communications infrastructures when mains power fails or supply is inconsistent.

Previously these units were part of the energy consumption problem. These large, standalone towers used older technology that could only achieve optimised efficiency when carrying heavy loads of 80-90%.

Such fixed-capacity units often tended to be oversized during initial installation to provide the necessary redundancy, meaning they regularly ran inefficiently at lower loads, wasting huge amounts of energy. These sizeable towers also pumped out plenty of heat so needed lots of energy-intensive cooling.

However, the technology has developed rapidly in recent years, and now your UPS system could be part of the solution.

Just as cooling equipment has improved, so too has UPS technology. Modular systems – which replace sizable standalone units with compact individual rack-mount style power modules paralleled together to provide capacity and redundancy – deliver performance efficiency, scalability, and ‘smart’ interconnectivity far beyond the capabilities of their predecessors.

The modular approach ensures capacity corresponds closely to the data centre’s load requirements, removing the risk of oversizing and reducing day-to-day power consumption, cutting both energy bills and the site’s carbon footprint. It also gives facilities managers the flexibility to add extra power modules in whenever the need arises, minimising the initial investment while offering the in-built scalability to “pay as you grow”.

If cutting carbon costs and reducing energy consumption within your data centre is at the top of your agenda, these small adjustments can be made quickly and cheaply, and could see your IT energy wastage drastically improve.