The rise of Alibaba Cloud, to become a major player in cloud infrastructure, is a fascinating one.

Between 2014 and 2016, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) saw the top right box change not one iota. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was out on its own, followed by Microsoft, then a gap to the rest. 2014 had a swarm of ‘visionary’ players, but by 2016 only Google remained to take third place.

Last year, however, things changed. The top right of course remained the same, but alongside IBM and Oracle – a fellow debutant and another company who has recently speculated to accumulate in this space – Alibaba Cloud joined Google in the visionaries category. Crucially, Alibaba placed highest out of the three in terms of ability to execute. Indeed the analyst firm, in a separate study, put Alibaba in third place for public cloud IaaS back in September.

Why the change? The rise reflects Alibaba Cloud’s push for expansion outside China – and as Yeming Wang (left), general manager of Alibaba Cloud Europe explains, it’s a plan for the whole of Alibaba Group as well. “To go global is definitely a corporate level of strategy,” he tells CloudTech.

Naturally, there are a couple of reasons behind this. One is political, the other technological. On the first point, Wang notes how China is opening its doors more. In November this year, the country will launch the China International Import Expo (CIIE), the first national expo dedicated to imports, while China is estimated to import $24 trillion of goods in the coming 15 years.

On the technological side, the rise of multi-cloud makes perfect sense for Alibaba. The trend is inexorable. According to Cisco, cloud traffic will represent 95% of total data centre traffic by 2021. As cloud workloads become bigger and more sophisticated, and as business needs advance, having a single public cloud vendor isn’t going to cut it. Yet according to recent analysis from IDC, fewer than 10% of European organisations are on board with a multi-cloud strategy.

“It is naturally the customer choice – [customers] prefer to have more than two, or even more than three public cloud providers,” says Wang. “This is a very natural evolution. For the first part, it’s about whether to go cloud, and then later on it will be how to manage multi-cloud.”

Companies who choose Alibaba as one course of their multi-cloud meal do so for various reasons. Avoiding vendor lock-in is fairly standard. Wang says Alibaba has ‘invested a lot of internal resources’ to facilitate multi-cloud technology for their customers, both at infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) levels. For global businesses, ensuring a full geographical infrastructure from west to east is also key. But there is another interesting point of comparison.

“Today, we have a lot of clients asking to adopt Alibaba as a second or third public cloud provider,” says wang. “Alibaba Cloud, from a user experience point of view, is quite similar to AWS. That is why we got some comments from different clients – they say ‘okay, if the guys are AWS certified or [an] AWS expert, then you’re halfway to being very familiar with Alibaba also.’

“This gives them a lot of flexibility regarding the practical adoption,” adds Wang.

Alibaba Cloud’s recent expansion has been predominantly Europe-based with some exceptions -opening a data centre region in Indonesia being one of them. At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Alibaba – with the claim of being the fastest growing cloud provider in the world on its booth – announced a major European expansion, with a wide variety of products available, from bare metal services to big data and AI, across the continent.

Wang says it is the start of things to come. “It’s the first time Alibaba released new products together with our international portal and domestic portal,” he says. “Regarding the product feature development point of view, [there are] very strong signals that Alibaba starts to develop new products and new features to the global market – not just the Chinese market.”

This also extends to events. Back in October, CloudTech reported one of the keynote speeches of Alibaba’s Computing Conference in Hangzhou, where it was revealed the company’s ambitions, along with its partners, was to move from one million to 10 million customers. The conference was held over four days with more than 50,000 participants, according to Wang. Plans are in place for another event focusing more on the international market, albeit with less scale than the flagship conference.

Ultimately, this is one of the key goals for Alibaba, and Wang. “We want more people, consumers, users, to know Alibaba Cloud,” he adds. “Sometimes, people know the name, but don’t know it’s a real technological, powerful company.”

Picture source: www.alibabagroup.com

Wayne Williams

No matter how well-intentioned, security software can be a pain when it comes to blocking downloads and access to software, especially if you know for sure that what you’re trying to use is completely safe.

Even the best security tools can get this wrong from time to time, leaving users wondering whether it was worth installing the software in the first place.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to rein in over-zealous security suites, or at least prove them wrong.

Get a second opinion about a threat

Sometimes Avast, Kaspersky, Malwarebytes and other security software flags a program as being infected, when it’s actually perfectly clean – an error known as a false-positive. If you’re in any doubt – perhaps you read about the download in a reputable internet magazine – you should seek a second opinion from VirusTotal instead.

This powerful, online service (which is owned by Google) lets you upload a suspicious file, or copy and paste the potentially malicious URL, to check for threats using more than 60 popular antivirus scanners and URL-blacklisting services. If the item comes back clean, or is only flagged by a couple of engines, then it’s safe to install.

If uploading a suspicious file sounds like too much hassle, the free program Winja provides an easy-to-use front end for VirusTotal that lets you use it like any standard antivirus scanner.

Run software blocked by Windows

Windows Defender SmartScreen springs into life when you try to install an unknown piece of software from an unrecognised source, and sometimes challenges programs from smaller, lesser-known developers. The error message in Windows 10 informs you that “Windows Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognised app from starting. Running this app might put your PC at risk.”

It then provides a ‘Don’t run’ button for you to click, with seemingly no way around this block. If, however, you’re completely sure the program in question is safe, you can force Windows to run it. Click the ‘More info’ link under the error message, and a ‘Run anyway’ button will appear. Click this, and Windows will install or run the software without any further warnings.

You can also grant a program permission to open before you run it. Right-click the EXE file and select Properties. At the bottom you’ll see a section relating to Security. Tick the Unblock box, then Apply and OK that window. You will now to be able to run your program.

If you find that SmartScreen regularly blocks programs you want to install, you can disable the feature altogether. Type ‘Windows Defender’ into the search box and launch the Windows Defender Security Centre.

Click ‘App and browser control’ and under ‘Check apps and files’ change the setting from ‘Warn’ to ‘Off’. This page also lets you disable SmartScreen in Microsoft Edge.

Find out what other users think

If a program you’ve already installed is causing problems with your security software – such as your firewall blocking its access to the internet – one of the best ways to check it for malware is using Should I Remove It. This handy free tool scans all your installed programs and provides you with a list that ranks them in order of how highly it recommends you uninstall them. Programs flagged red represent a potential security risk and should be removed immediately, while green ones are safe to keep.

You can visit the Should I Remove It website for a full explanation of what the program in question is, and how many other users have removed it. However, just because other people remove a piece of software, doesn’t mean it’s bad – they may simply have found a better alternative.

Tweak your security settings

If your antivirus software has gone as far as quarantining a program you’ve downloaded, it’s usually possible to unblock it but we don’t recommend doing so. If there’s even the smallest shred of doubt, you should leave the ‘infected’ file where it is and follow your security software provider’s official procedure for querying a potential false positive. That way, you’ll know that the file has been verified by experts before you run it.

If, on the other hand, a program you know to be safe is being blocked by your firewall, then it’s possible to unblock it. Instructions for doing so will depend on the firewall you’re using. In Windows Firewall, for example, click ‘Allow programs [or apps] to communicate through Windows Firewall’, then ‘Change settings’ and select the program you want to unblock.

Deselect bundled junk automatically

A lot of freeware programs come bundled with unwanted extras these days, which may – rightly or wrongly – trigger alerts in your security software. Provided you have your wits about you when installing a program, you can usually spot and reject these extras (choosing the ‘Custom’ install option rather than the ‘Recommended’ choice is always advisable), but an easier way is to use Unchecky.

This free tool runs in the background and monitors all installations, automatically rejecting and unticking any extras and offers that are nothing to do with the main program.

Stop Chrome blocking safe websites

Chrome automatically blocks websites that contain “dangerous and deceptive content” – typically malware, scripts, or phishing links. It usually does a good job of this but occasionally harmless sites get blocked by accident. When that happens, you can bypass the warning to access the content you want. To view a blocked website, click the Details link and select ‘Visit this unsafe site’. The page should then load.

Google will attempt to strip out any unsafe content, but if you want to see the entire site, click the Content Blocked icon at the right of the address bar, and select ‘Load full site’. To download an “unsafe” file using Google’s browser, click the menu button in the top right, open Downloads, locate the file you want and select ‘Recover malicious file’.

Finally, if you want to disable these alerts entirely, Go to More, Settings, click Advanced and under ‘Privacy and security’, toggle the ‘Protect you and your device from dangerous sites’ switch to off.

Report false positives

You can help anti-malware companies reduce the number of false positives their software flags up by reporting files erroneously identified as threats. Most security software developers will provide a way for you to submit files, so they can avoid misidentifying them as malware in future.

Sophos, for example, has a form you can access here. Avast (which also owns AVG) lets you report a suspected false positive here, while Symantec’s form can be found here.

Image: Shutterstock

Your job is mostly boring. Many of the IT operations tasks you perform on a day-to-day basis are repetitive and dull. Utilizing automation can improve your work life, automating away the drudgery and embracing the passion for technology that got you started in the first place. In this presentation, I’ll talk about what automation is, and how to approach implementing it in the context of IT Operations. Ned will discuss keys to success in the long term and include practical real-world examples. Get started on automating your way to a brighter future!

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Maggie Holland

Since virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and remote desktop session host (RDSH) technology has been available, vendors have offered on-premises solutions. Because these companies have made a name for themselves, most people familiar with the VDI space assume that the vendors who’ve been in the game for a long-time must lead sales in desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solutions as well.

That’s a reasonable assumption, but it happens to be wrong – and the reason says something important about what the cloud has done for VDI technology. It’s something every CIO needs to know.

In reality, Amazon WorkSpaces’ flavour of DaaS generates at least 10 times more revenue than the two leading on-prem vendors combined on public cloud infrastructure. That’s pretty amazing, since Amazon WorkSpaces was launched just a few years ago.

Satya Nadella told me a few years ago that running IaaS clouds at scale could only be accomplished by a few companies – a prescient statement indeed

About 10 years ago, on-premises VDI/RDSH solutions generated approximately $3 billion in revenue. Today, the growth rate for on-premises solutions is in the mid-single digits according to most analyst reports. That’s why legacy providers are shifting to broader “workspace suites,” which bundle various elements together to drive up margins and growth rates.

These product bundles are not yet ready for platform prime time in terms of practical implementation and architecture hygiene. But bundles sell, so keep expecting workspace bundle “stuffing” to continue; the question is will customers actually realize value, and how long will it take? In contrast, DaaS on public cloud captured about $500M in revenue in 2017 with a growth rate of around 30 percent. So, conservatively, within three years, DaaS will capture more than $1 billion annually.

Since traditional VDI/RDSH vendors have been successful with on-prem deployments, it makes sense that they would keep moving into the high-growth DaaS space, as they have been trying to do for several years. Despite those efforts, Amazon WorkSpaces has become the market volume leader and relegated the legacy VDI players to tier 2 status in DaaS. How was Amazon able to displace the big guys? Let’s dig deeper.

Inherent difficulty and complexity

Satya Nadella said something interesting about cloud competition during a conversation we were having a few years back. He commented that running infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds at scale could only be accomplished by a few companies, which has certainly turned out to be a prescient statement. That’s because the operational learning, skill and discipline it takes to provide these services can only evolve over time and with plenty of experience; it also requires a corporate culture that is adept at change and staying in front of new technology. This is one reason many attempts at DaaS have failed; getting the IaaS infrastructure to work is extremely difficult – it’s why most VDI/DaaS providers try to offer their solutions on public cloud infrastructure.

If DaaS were a simple matter, the legacy VDI vendors would have much greater market share on public cloud infrastructure. Just take your existing on-premises solution and host it on a public cloud, right? Wrong. There are many factors to consider, including architecture, on-boarding, support and enterprise requirements.

Here’s what systems theorist John Gall has to say about it: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a simple system.”

Anyone who’s tried it will tell you that on-premises VDI is notoriously complex, costly and hard to scale. So, logically, just moving those existing VDI architectures into hosted cloud environments is going to have limited success and will very likely result in lots of service outages. Additionally, if your architecture has to serve the needs of legacy solutions as well as public cloud infrastructure, you end up making compromises and adding complexity.

An ineffective service model

Because of the inherent complexity in legacy VDI systems, the standard business model is to sell expensive, high-touch support contracts and professional services add-ons to assist these customers with all that complexity. The reality is that many hard-working and noble professional services and support personnel are spread thinly across too many products and accounts. This results in a poor-quality customer experience. However, these are healthy revenue streams for central business units not aligned to product business units.

Consequently, there is not a lot of vendor incentive to change the model, which results in lots of customer frustration and their inability to realize value from these solutions. So, while there are valid reasons for advanced professional services and many value-add opportunities for partners, the legacy business model is flawed; it does not represent the best interests of customers and it will not work in a service model.

A word about Windows 10

Amazon WorkSpaces has enjoyed rapid adoption from a certain segment of customers who need a very basic solution. However, issues remain. For example, Amazon WorkSpaces does not offer Windows 10 on virtual machines on shared hardware. Amazon WorkSpaces only offers Windows Server with Desktop Experience turned on or you have to bring your own license and procure dedicated hardware through AWS to support Windows 10. You can see the frustration this causes customers here on the AWS forums.

Microsoft has a SAC (Semi-Annual Channel) that it is using to quickly evolve Windows Server. So, enterprise customers who stay on Windows Server remote desktops will have to stay on the LTSC (Long Term Servicing Channel) with the same Windows 10 branch if you want to stay in synch. If you don’t keep these in synch (i.e. your physical Windows 10 environment stays up to date), then you have to test your entire application infrastructure against multiple environments, increasing complexity.

Now, is this a wise method of moving to the cloud for your Windows 10 strategy? There are rumours that Windows 10 may offer this RDSH-type functionality natively in the future, but one can only speculate at this juncture. This is the most logical evolution to reduce application complexity for customers.

Anyone who’s tried it will tell you on-prem VDI is notoriously complex, costly, and hard to scale

It makes more sense to avoid unnecessary complexity later on by using Windows 10 natively in the cloud. Staying current with Windows 10 versions, which are updated twice a year, is much simpler in the cloud than it is for physical PCs or laptops. In effect, with Windows 10, you can no longer only update every five to seven years and still expect to take advantage of new innovation. Staying current is a continual process moving forward and, irrespective of solution choice, enterprise customers need to face this reality.

Toward a customer-centric architecture

Psychology and common sense reveal time and again that the human brain moves away from confusion and toward clarity. That’s why legacy VDI, awkwardly repackaged for the cloud, causes such frustration and discomfort. This is a service that does not translate well; VDI meant to operate from the cloud must be built from scratch for the cloud.

With simplicity as its founding principle, a truly cloud-native, multi-tenant architecture is foundational to meeting modern customer expectations. Legacy service contract models must be abandoned and replaced by a product that works and puts customer success first. Ultimately this is what will earn customer trust and move the needle on DaaS adoption.

Today, the cloud is where everyone wants to be; there is no place like it, and nothing makes your clients happier. Okay, that may be a bit of a stretch – but it’s also fair to say that not everyone can dive into the cloud with their current architecture. Many times, it takes a complete re-engineering process in order to carry a company – or even a simple product – into any cloud.

Here are three areas to think about to ensure you do not carry out a disastrous cloud migration.

Rush it and think ‘agile!’

Go with the flow and just migrate: how hard can that be? We are all familiar with the phrase ‘failure to plan is planning to fail’ – and most cloud migrations break in terrible ways due to failure to plan. All that is needed is a few engineers to move components from one place to the other, then everything is plugged together and – voila – it magically works, because it is the cloud, a magical place where everything seems to fall seamlessly into place. Right?

Perhaps not. There is another way. The old school way, the real engineering way, where you make use not only of system administrators, but instead run different teams with a central project manager who keeps things on track and acts like the glue that keeps the team communicating and working with each other like a well-oiled machine.

Communication is a critical step. We all dislike meetings, but if we do not communicate, we will run into massive issues. It is important that at least one person from each team has some facetime with a person from another team; also, a once a week global meeting to see how things are moving.

Thinking from first principles – an age-old concept recently popularised by Elon Musk – is good, but learning what others did and how they worked is extremely useful. Using agile principles is nice; holding stand up meetings in 10 minutes is nice; having a scrum master is good; but the old methodology of a PM with a Gantt chart keeping track of things and documenting everything is known to work wonders.

Above all, go slowly and design a solid foundation: an architecture in which the engineers can give their feedback and build on good ground. Trust the engineers. They will stand to suspicion on technical difficulties. If not, they will be the ones paying for it – trust them.

Lift and shift

Lift and shift is very popular nowadays. Why? Some people think moving to the cloud means moving from one data centre to another, cheaper and with more resources. It’s distributed, with nicer dashboards, but it’s just another data centre.

Needless to say, this is not the case. This is only re-hosting. This is how the process usually goes:

• Create an inventory of resources
• Instantiate the same resources in cloud X
• Create the failover, high availability and/or disaster recovery solutions
• Upload all the data and watch everything fall apart

A bigger problem is that it sometimes ‘works’, but there is no improvement. Moving to cloud is adopting a new paradigm: it means implementing cloud orchestration, automation, a different form of resilience, and of course everything as a service (XaaS); using third party components instead of implementing your own.

Once in the cloud, you do not need to install products such as Icinga or Nagios; monitoring is already there as a service. It’s the same for most LAMP stack components – it’s everything as a service! As the old quote goes – simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Move to an immature cloud

Don’t forget to run a checklist on things that might be needed. As an example:

• How many X as a service do I have? What is my uptime?
• Do I have redundancy? Regions?
• How many availability zones and domains do I have? Where? Are they real?
• What about security and restrictions?
• Compliance and data regulations – is my data safe?
• Popularity – is this cloud here to stay? Long term?
• Third-party vendors – is there an app, support, solution, consultants’ market?

Conclusion

There are many things which need to be considered before moving to cloud. This gives a glimpse of what is needed, but do not be discouraged: the benefits are tenfold. Moving to the cloud is no longer being ahead but riding the wave; and not being in the cloud soon will certainly mean falling behind.

PC Pro

Progressive Web Apps – or PWAs – are websites that you can run as apps on your computer, phone and tablet. They look and work exactly like a normal app, but there’s nothing to install – they run in their own browser-like window. Crucially, they’re not dependent on an internet connection, so they work offline too.

What’s the benefit?

PWAs are potentially safer than normal apps and programs because they don’t need to be installed on your device – thereby eradicating the risk of accidentally downloading malware. They also take up less storage space, because most of the app’s data is stored on a server rather than on your PC, phone or tablet. You never need to manually update a PWA – this is done automatically by the app’s developer. And they always work the same way, regardless of the operating system or type of device you’re using. So, you could use the same apps on your Android phone, Windows PC, iPad, or any other device that supports them.

How do they work?

The idea behind web apps isn’t new. Apple’s iPhone used them extensively when it first launched. The ‘progressive’ part refers to newer web technologies they use to deliver a smooth, safe, more app-like experience. The three main technologies involved are Cache API, Service Workers (which caches data to allow the apps to work offline) and Web App Manifest (which stores other data about the app, such as its settings). HTTPS encryption, meanwhile, ensures that connections can’t be intercepted.

Offline Wikipedia is one of the PWAs you can now use

In practice, when you use a PWA, you shouldn’t notice any difference compared with a normal app. You launch it by clicking or tapping a shortcut on your home screen or PC desktop. It then runs in its own window, and works as if it were installed on your device, with no delay, even if you have a weak internet connection (or if you’re offline). PWAs can provide notifications and carry out other background tasks, just like standard apps currently do.

What devices can I use them on?

You can already run PWAs on many current Android devices. Try them by going to pwa.rocks via Chrome on an Android phone or tablet and tapping one of the PWAs featured there, such as Offline Wikipedia, Flipboard and the mouth-watering Progressive Beer (“the ultimate guide to beer all around the world”).

Once the web page loads, tap the menu button (three dots), select ‘Add to Home screen’, then tap Add in the message that pops up – you should now find a shortcut to the PWA version of the site on your Home screen.

What about on my computer?

Not yet, but you shouldn’t have long to wait. Microsoft believes that “PWAs are key to the web’s future”, announcing last month (www.snipca.com/27088) that you’ll soon be able to run them in Windows 10 – available via the Windows Store. This may arrive as part of the Spring Creators Update, due in a few weeks. Apple is lagging a bit behind, though it recently added to its Safari browser support for some of the web technologies required to run PWAs. Many experts took this as a sign that the company is working on iPad and iPhone support too.

Bobby Hellard

By 2021, 500 million sensors are set to be deployed worldwide, nearly 40x as many as exist today. In order to scale fast and keep pace with industry growth, the team at Unacast turned to the public cloud to build the world’s largest location data platform with optimal scalability, minimal DevOps, and maximum flexibility. Drawing from his experience with the Google Cloud Platform, VP of Engineering Andreas Heim will speak to the architecture of Unacast’s platform and developer-focused processes.

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