Kubernetes is a new and revolutionary open-sourced system for managing containers across multiple hosts in a cluster. Ansible is a simple IT automation tool for just about any requirement for reproducible environments.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Patrick Galbraith, a principal engineer at HPE, will discuss how to build a fully functional Kubernetes cluster on a number of virtual machines or bare-metal hosts. Also included will be a brief demonstration of running a Galera MySQL cluster as a Kubernetes application.

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The battle for retailers’ cloud dollars continues apace, with grocer Albertsons the latest organisation to pledge its allegiance to Microsoft.

According to a CNBC report, Microsoft has signed a three-year deal to make Azure Albertsons’ preferred public cloud. The retailer, who owns the Safeway and Vons supermarket chains, will deploy the Microsoft 365 suite to employees as well as explore projects involving artificial intelligence, the report added.

Albertsons has been active in piloting technology projects in recent months. In May, BoiseDev reported the company was ‘experimenting with Amazon Go-like technology’, while earlier this month Coinstar announced new machines where users could buy bitcoin at selected Safeway and Albertsons stores.

This makes Albertsons the fourth major retailer since July to sign up with Microsoft for a strategic cloud partnership. In August, it was announced Walmart had made Microsoft its preferred cloud provider in a five-year deal, while this month has seen Kroger and Walgreens Boots Alliance partner with Microsoft.

Kroger’s partnership focuses around ‘redefining the customer experience’, as the companies put it in a press release. Two pilot stores in Ohio and Washington are set to be equipped with smart technology systems, powered by Azure, with the aim to improve customer experiences through digital, connected shelf displays. The companies are also putting together what they call ‘retail as a service’ (RaaS), a commercial offering aimed at other retailers.

For Walgreens, the pharmaceutical firm is embarking on a migration similar to Albertsons, rolling out Microsoft 365 to its staff, as well as moving the ‘majority’ of its infrastructure onto Azure. Albertsons will also continue to run some workloads in its own data centre infrastructure, per CNBC.

Analysis

The cumulative effect has led many in the industry to put two and two together and assume that, due to its heavy retail presence, retailers want to house their cloud infrastructure away from industry leader Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In the case of Walmart, it was blatant. In 2017, it was reported that Walmart had insisted partners and vendors move away from AWS if they wanted to retain their business. As columnist David Auslander – who for full disclosure is now at Azure but was working for Cognizant at the time of the article – wrote for CloudTech at the time, Microsoft and Google ‘might be the only clear winners’ in the Walmart-AWS row.

Albertsons’ approach appears to be subtler, but still noting this aspect. CIO Anuj Dhanda told CNBC the company went with Azure because of its ‘experience with big companies, history with large retailers and strong technical capabilities, and because it [wasn’t] a competitor.’

Yet a note of caution needs to be sounded before going full-steam ahead with this trend. Analyst firm 451 Research, which regularly conducts a Voice of the Enterprise survey focusing on IT trends and spending at large organisations, said it ‘hasn’t seen definitive evidence’ and that the Walmart case, with Microsoft and Google continuing to fuel the narrative, may have clouded people’s judgement.

“It’s easy to get the impression that retailers are fleeing AWS,” Jean Atelsek, digital economics unit analyst at 451 Research told CloudTech in an email. “Microsoft’s big cloud partnership with Walmart last summer seems to be the example that everyone wants to universalise to the entire cloud space. However since a lot of retailers also sell through/on AWS, they’re less likely than Walmart to see Amazon (and by extension AWS) as the devil.”

It’s worth noting here that AWS still has a panoply of leading retail customers, with Ocado, River Island and most notably Under Armour all on board. Indeed, the largest retailer on AWS’ books is arguably itself. In November AWS chief executive Andy Jassy wrote on Twitter that Amazon’s consumer businesses were moving fully off Oracle’s data warehouse and onto Amazon Redshift. The move came after Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison repeatedly noted how Amazon was a paying customer when speaking at events or to analysts.

Ultimately, while Albertsons’ move to Microsoft reinforces a trend, it’s a more general one around IT, Atelsek added. “What this really reflects is the diversification we’ve seen throughout IT, not only into different public clouds – multi-cloud – but also in corporate data centres [with] hybrid,” she said. “Many of the big retailers have armies of in-house engineers and developers to maintain an edge in adapting their IT to evolving customer expectations.

“No doubt the challenge from Amazon as an online, and now brick-and-mortar retailer and distributor has added to this urgency. But cost engineering and platform capabilities will trump any perceived disadvantage of using a competitor’s cloud infrastructure, especially in segments with razor-thin margins such as groceries,” added Atelsek.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Financial enterprises in New York City, London, Singapore, and other world financial capitals are embracing a new generation of smart, automated FinTech that eliminates many cumbersome, slow, and expensive intermediate processes from their businesses. Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 23rd CloudEXPO, June 24-26, 2019 at Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA will find fresh new content in full new FinTech & Enterprise Blockchain track.

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Clare Hopping

Concerns about security, downtime and latency, budgets, and general unfamiliarity with cloud technologies continue to create hesitation for many organizations that truly need to be developing a cloud strategy. Hybrid cloud solutions are helping to elevate those concerns by enabling the combination or orchestration of two or more platforms, including on-premise infrastructure, private clouds and/or third-party, public cloud services. This gives organizations more comfort to begin their digital transformation without a complete overhaul of their existing infrastructure – serving as a sort of “missing link” for transition to cloud utilization.

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As you know, enterprise IT conversation over the past year have often centered upon the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system. In fact, Kubernetes has emerged as the key technology — and even primary platform — of cloud migrations for a wide variety of organizations.

Kubernetes is critical to forward-looking enterprises that continue to push their IT infrastructures toward maximum functionality, scalability, and flexibility.

As they do so, IT professionals are also embracing the reality of Serverless architectures, which are critical to developing and operating real-time applications and services. Serverless is particularly important as enterprises of all sizes develop and deploy Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives.

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Businesses understand the importance of providing seamless customer journeys, but we’ve seen a growing spate of digital service outages and software performance problems in recent months. There have been online banking outages that have left customers unable to pay bills on time, while problems with major payment systems have left shoppers unable to use their bank cards at the checkouts.

These problems seriously disrupt peoples’ ability to live their day-to-day lives, so they’re becoming a growing concern for businesses and consumers alike. So, if businesses understand the importance of providing seamless customer journeys, why are outages happening more often?

The complexity conundrum

The soaring complexity of technology ecosystems is the biggest contributor to the rise in software performance problems. Modern digital services reside in complex hybrid multi-cloud environments, spanning multiple platforms and technologies. They’re powered by applications running in dynamic microservices and containers, creating constant change. A single web or mobile transaction now crosses an average of 35 different technology systems or components, compared to 22 just five years ago. With digital transactions crossing such a diversity of components in a dynamic technology stack, it’s gone beyond human capability to manage performance effectively. They struggle to maintain visibility into everything that’s happening in their environment, and to find the root cause of any performance problems that arise quickly.

Unfortunately, this trend is showing no signs of slowing. Digital ecosystems are becoming even more complex, and IT teams are under more pressure than ever to quickly identify and resolve the root cause of any problems before customers feel any impact. If they fail to do so, the spate of digital performance problems and service outages that we’ve seen recently will only occur more often.

Taking the guesswork out of performance

There’s a number of reasons why it’s become impossible for businesses to manage the complexity of their digital ecosystems manually. Firstly, new technologies, infrastructure and platforms are constantly being layered onto IT stacks, requiring more monitoring tools to provide visibility and enable IT teams to manage performance. However, the digital ecosystems that have arisen around these IT stacks are highly dynamic. Whilst this creates the agility that businesses need to thrive, it also makes it impossible for humans to stay on top of performance using traditional monitoring tools.

On top of this, traditional monitoring tools are bombarding teams with alerts, most of which are just white noise. Given that it’s impossible for humans to overcome this challenge manually, organisations need to be able to automate as many IT operations processes as possible. They need the ability to automatically detect issues in real-time and, most importantly, use AI to pinpoint the root cause with precision. These capabilities can help organisations onto the path of auto-remediation, so their monitoring system can detect problems and apply fixes to prevent or resolve the issue before it escalates into a full-blown outage.

No turning back

While moving to the cloud has made businesses far more agile, it’s added exponential complexity to their digital ecosystems. This has had a huge impact on organisations’ ability to successfully monitor performance and rectify any issues quickly and efficiently. AI is crucial to combatting the problem. It can make the process of detecting and rectifying software performance problems much faster and more effective. Ultimately, this will enable IT teams to provide more consistent and positive user experiences, relegating the nightmare of major outages to the past.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Artificial intelligence is positively affecting our world in previously unimaginable ways across many different industries. The use of AI is particularly interesting in the cybersecurity industry because of its unique ability to scale and prevent previously unseen zero-day attacks and for automating complicated analysis and processes at machine speed. But just in the way drug cartels built their own submarines and cellphone towers to evade law enforcement, so too will cyber-criminals build their own AI systems to carry out malicious attacks.

AI is a force for good and has demonstrated great success thus far in security applications; but AI can also be used for evil. Malcolm Harkins, Chief Security and Trust Officer at Cylance, will cover the basics of AI technology, how AI is currently being used for evil and suggested ways to combat AI attacks.

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Organizations are always trying to evolve to meet customer demands and get ahead of their competition. Just recently organizations started moving secure applications and workloads to the public cloud. In this presentation, we will focus on one enterprises’ journey to the public cloud. How we built and secured our very large and scalable public cloud environment, and the cutting edge tools used. As organizations migrate to the public cloud to meet business requirements, security and compliance are an afterthought. This causes massive pains when audit time comes around. What organizations need is a new approach. In this presentation, we will focus on the best practices for implementation, whether it be open source or commercial.

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Throughout 2018, many global enterprises turned to networking technologies such as software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) to cost-effectively meet burgeoning bandwidth demands without having to sacrifice simplified WAN management and better application performance.

This trend will continue into 2019 as enterprises with a global presence embrace networking technologies such as SD-WAN as a key tool to leverage the benefits of the cloud and unleash their business’s potential.

As I celebrate my first year as part of the Aryaka team, during which our organisation has welcomed new customers in several sectors throughout EMEA, here are my four top tips to European business on breaking down barriers in global connectivity and making the digital transformation of their networks a smooth one throughout 2019.

Navigate the connectivity consolidation of 2019

Acquisitions of SD-WAN vendors spiked over the last 12 months, marked by the purchase of Viptela and Velocloud by Cisco and VMware respectively.

Now that Oracle has purchased Talari, further market consolidation in 2019 will be anything but a surprise. It will take some digging to differentiate between new players, and the more established service providers, but enterprises will soon realise they need more than what a general SD-WAN box provider offers, and so it will be vital to be able to know the difference.

Though telco providers are more open than ever to offering SD-WAN services in addition to their portfolio, the solutions tend to look very much the same. Providers will need to demonstrate longevity and truly act as a business support function.

Specialist vendors providing a network designed for cloud management and bandwidth scaling will become prized as quality connectivity becomes essential for collaboration over continents.

Vendors with an edge-based solution will fall behind as enterprises become increasingly savvy as to what a quality SD-WAN service should provide.

Our advice? Be sure to understand the difference between network provision and usable bandwidth; not all SD-WAN solutions are equal.

Breaking through digital deadlock

IDC predicts that by 2022, 80 percent of all revenue growth will depend on the move to digital operations. This means global businesses must escape the ‘digital deadlock’ we now see trapping the enterprise between legacy network systems and new connectivity methods. As they struggle to smoothly make the leap, it’s up to providers of new solutions to support these businesses in engineering digital network infrastructure and reconfigure applications.

We especially see this in retail as the sector deals with the rise of online purchasing and an equivalent increase in network traffic.

The best thing businesses can do to address this digital deadlock is to ensure from the start that any new network is capable of scaling on demand and can work in harmony with existing systems during any period of transition.

Say goodbye to MPLS

Speaking of transition, this is something that has been on the telecoms cards for a while now. Despite serving us well for many years, MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) will finally bid us farewell as a viable business communications solution in 2019. By the end of the year, all forward-thinking businesses will have taken up a network as a service (NaaS) to facilitate growth and have moved into a period of transition with technologies such as SD-WAN.

MPLS providers that recognise the situation will integrate with SD-WAN technologies through partnerships or acquisitions, taking advantage of the fact that many organisations will rely on a transitional period of the two services coexisting rather than an overnight re-haul.

One sign we’re seeing of this is the strategic investment by telecoms companies into SD-WAN, despite SD-WAN services cutting into their MPLS revenue. During a merger for instance, SD-WAN becomes a business enabler, supporting immediate scale and expansion. No wonder merging enterprises increasingly shun the three to six month wait for MPLS lines to be commissioned.

Our advice to support mergers, acquisitions and expansion in 2019:  move from an MPLS service to a scalable solution as soon as you can and ask your new service provider for realistic advice on how they will support you through a smooth switchover.

Harness the power of SD-WAN to enable your other solutions

IDC found in June only 35 percent of its European customers currently use SD-WAN technology; 20 percent will adopt the service in the next two years.

We will see many more AI and big data relationships with SD-WAN as customers realise the value the technologies can bring to each other. The relationship between the two is a true marriage; big data is useless if it cannot be analysed whilst AI is somewhat futile if it has nothing to assess. This year we saw security vendors making their way into the space, purchasing SD-WAN as they seek to secure and analyse the data that they collect on the cloud.

The cloud in 2019 will continue to be as important as ever. Aryaka this year celebrates a decade of building private networks that support businesses all over the world to scale and grow. In 2019, the cloud will be the answer to any vendor looking to do the same.

Read more: SD-WAN infrastructure market to hit $4.5bn by 2022, says IDC

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.