More than four in five respondents to a survey from Commvault and CITO Research say they are at least ‘very concerned’ about missing out on new advancements in cloud technology.

The fear of missing out (FOMO) in this space is real. Of the 100 IT leaders polled, more than two thirds said they were worried about keeping up to date with the latest products and iterations across the primary cloud providers. The most popular methods of keeping up to date were through reading tech publications and networking, cited by three out of five respondents. Interestingly, only one in three said they read vendor websites themselves.

A quarter (24%) of those polled said they were a ‘cloud only’ organisation, while 32% said they are ‘cloud first’ with plans to become cloud only, and only 6% said they did not have a specific migration plan. When asked to sum up their cloud journeys in one word, only one respondent proffered the term ‘frustrating’; ‘innovative’ (51%) and ‘exciting’ (35%) were the most popular.

When it came to the biggest barriers in moving apps and data to the cloud, the sheer volume of data was the primary concern, cited by 68% of respondents. This was followed by developing staff skills and acquiring talent (65%) and managing policies across cloud and on-prem data (55%). As one participant in a CTO panel put it: “The number one barrier to moving to the cloud is staff. That is what I hear from everyone. It’s the culture of moving to the cloud.”

“Cloud is changing the essential elements of the way we do business, and changing it for the better,” the report notes. “As cloud advancements continue, keeping up with those developments is important. But it’s equally important to pay attention to fundamentals.”

You can read the full report here (no registration required).

At the AWS Summit in New York, Amazon Web Services focused predominantly around enterprise migration – and launched two new products aimed at taking the difficulty out of data analysis and transfer.

The cloud infrastructure giant announced the launch of AWS Migration Hub, a tool which aims to help organisations migrate their assets from on-prem data centres to Amazon’s cloud, as well as the general availability of AWS Glue, a product first announced in December last year which eases the process of moving data between data stores.

“Companies want to be able to fly from some of the constraints and break free from lock-in, and some of the relationships they have,” Adrian Cockcroft, AWS VP of cloud architecture, told attendees. “What we’ve been hearing from our customers is they want the freedom to build things quickly, unshackle from current database vendors, drive costs down, and have good ways to migrate out.”

This begat a discussion around relational database engine Aurora, AWS’ fastest growing product, which was launched in 2014. This time last year, AWS managed services partner Logicworks, writing for this publication, explained the reason for its success. “As cloud adoption matures, expect more companies to make a (slow) migration over to cloud-native systems,” the company wrote. “Because in the end, it is not just about licensing costs. It is about removing management burden from IT – and choosing to focus engineering talent on what really matters.”

More than 34,000 databases (below) have been migrated since the product’s launch; Cockcroft mentioned that he had given this talk a few times this year, and the number was continually being updated. An example of a company using Aurora to its advantage was Expedia, who performs 300 million writes a day on the engine, tracking how many hotel rooms are available across every hotel in the world.

When it comes to taking everything from a data centre – not just the greenfield apps, not even the mission-critical apps – then that was what AWS Migration Hub was for, Cockcroft added. The product is generally available today, hosted on AWS’ US West 2 zone in Oregon, but with a global reach.

Glue, on the other hand, is positioned as a fully managed data catalogue and ETL (extract, transform, load) service to take the fuss out of those “ubiquitous, and extremely tedious” workloads, as Dr. Matt Wood, general manager for artificial intelligence at AWS, put it.

Wood first riffed on the importance of AWS’ plethora of data handling tools, from the previously mentioned Aurora, to ElastiCache, to Redshift. “This approach, where we have a broad set of tools, each with a deep set of functionality, allows you to find the right tool for the job,” he said. “You don’t see Formula 1 engineers try and fix Formula 1 cars with Swiss Army knives.”

An example from Redshift Spectrum, which enables running SQL queries against exabytes of data in Amazon S3 was presented to the audience (below). Running a complex query against an exabyte dataset took Hive, running a 1000 node cluster, five years – obviously they made some estimates instead of letting it run its course – whereas Spectrum took just over two and a half minutes.

Wood said that up to three quarters of data scientists’ and data warehouse managers’ time was spent running ETL workloads. “Nobody goes to work in the morning and wants to write another ETL script,” he added. Through Glue, and its entirely serverless system and what Wood described as “by far the simplest UI [he had] ever shown to an audience of this size”, AWS aims for that to be a thing of the past.

Wood also discussed the machine learning projects being undertaken on AWS’ infrastructure. “The reason [machine learning] has started to stick in this iteration is that the cloud has enabled machine learning and customers to overcome the single largest point of friction, which is almost always around scale,” he explained. “Much like we did in the early days of AWS… we want to put this magical technology into the hands of every developer.”

Among the most interesting examples of the many companies exploring machine learning (below) were Stanford, who trained a deep learning model to help prevent diabetic blindness, Arterys, who has put together the first FDA-approved use of neural networks in medical imaging, and Wolfram Alpha. The latter, best known as the company to which Siri refers if she is stumped by a question, uses machine learning on AWS to build a computational knowledge engine. “When we’re talking about the challenges of handling inference at scale, with complicated deep learning models, this is the sort of scale you can achieve today through AWS,” said Wood.

Elsewhere, AWS announced a new customer in the shape of Hulu. The media company is moving away from its previous strategy of managing its own infrastructure and data centres – “everything we have, you name it, we built it” as the company put it to attendees – to help cover its various bets, from streaming content, to subscription systems, to live television.

“While we’ve experimented with cloud before, this became our first large scale production deployment,” said Rafael Soltanovich, VP of software development at Hulu.

“Building live TV is really hard, especially when you’re trying to do it in a radically different way,” he added, giving an example of just one of the issues Hulu had to sort out when rebuilding its entire tech stack. Take the Avengers film series based on the Marvel comic book characters, and the unrelated series of the same name, a 1998 film and the 1960s UK TV series. Having the right name, and the right image for each product, is vital to capture the attention of the viewer, Soltanovich said.

The recent Game of Thrones premiere was another example of Hulu’s nimble infrastructure in action; balancing between video on demand and live streams, between data centre and cloud, the company was able to normalise the load on its infrastructure to keep up with ‘massive’ user demand.

You can find out more about AWS Migration Hub here.

Picture credits: AWS/Screenshots

It is not quite available yet – but Intel has shed some light on its plans in the data centre storage space with the announcement of a new form factor which could enable up to one petabyte of storage in a 1U rack unit.

The new ‘ruler’ form factor (above), named as such for self-evident reasons, “shifts storage from the legacy 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch form factors that follow traditional hard disk drives” and “delivers on the promise of non-volatile storage technologies to eliminate constraints on shape and size”, in Intel’s words. The company adds that the product will come to market ‘in the near future’.

1U rackmounts are predominantly 19” wide and 1.75” high, although the depth can vary from 17.7” to 21.5”. As the numbers go up, the height essentially doubles, so a 5U mount can be 19.1” by 8.75” by 26.4”, while 7U, the highest, is 17” by 12.2” by 19.8”. To put one petabyte into perspective, it is enough storage to hold 300,000 HD movies.

Intel also had room for a couple more announcements. The company is targeting hard disk drive (HDD) replacement in the data centre with an updated SATA family of solid state disks (SSDs), aiming to reduce power and cooling as well as increase server efficiency, as well as announcing dual port Intel Optane SSDs and Intel 3D NAND SSDs, replacing SAS SSDs and HDDs. The former is available now with the latter coming in the third quarter of this year.

Bill Leszinske, Intel vice president, said the company was driving forward an era of ‘major data centre transformation’. “These new ‘ruler’ form factor SSDs and dual port SSDs are the latest in a long line of innovations we’ve brought to market to make storing and accessing data easier and faster, while delivering more value to customers,” he said in a statement.

“Data drives everything we do – from financial decisions to virtual reality gaming, and from autonomous driving to machine learning – and Intel storage innovations like these ensure incredible quick, reliable access to that data,” Leszinske added.

According to a study from Intel and HyTrust released in April last year, two thirds of C-suite respondents said they expect increased adoption in the software defined data centre (SDDC) space.

Picture credit: Intel

Google has announced a price cut on its local SSD (solid state disk) storage attached to on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines – to the tune of up to 63%.

The latest move from Google will see costs drop by $0.080 per gigabyte per month in the majority of US regions for on-demand VMs, while the company also announced prices were being lowered on preemptible VMs.

Local SSD is a high performance, physically attached block storage offering, and can be the most viable option for workloads such as caching layers and NoSQL databases, while preemptible VMs only run for 24 hours and can be taken off by the provider – hence the name – if the capacity needs to be used for other purposes.

“At Google we’re always looking to reduce total cost of ownership for our customers, pass along price reductions achieved through technology advancements and adjust our pricing so you can take advantage of technology that will help you innovate, in a manner that’s simple for our users,” wrote product managers Chris Kleban and Michael Basilyan in a blog post.

Slashing cloud prices is not as common a practice as it once was. AWS’ most recent price cuts – the 62nd – was last month, focusing on Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition for EC2. Given the service has been going since 2006, and the 40th price cut appeared over the horizon at the start of 2014, it gives you some idea as to the slowdown.

According to a paper from 451 Research back in April, object storage, rather than VMs, will become the focus of the new cloud price wars. “This is the first time there has been a big price war outside compute, and it reflects object storage’s move into the mainstream,” said Jean Atelsek, 451 digital economics unit analyst at the time.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced it has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) strengthening its open source hand – and two weeks after Microsoft signed up.

The company joins, as Microsoft did, as a platinum member, to help speed up the deployment of cloud-native technologies in its public cloud portfolio.

“As the largest cloud provider, AWS brings years of experience in enabling enterprises to successfully adopt cloud computing and enormous expertise in cloud native technologies,” said Dan Kohn, CNCF executive director in a statement. “We are honoured to have AWS join CNCF as a platinum member, and believe that their participation will help shape the future of enterprise computing.”

Among the other platinum members, of which there are now 16, are Google and IBM, meaning AWS was the last of the ‘hypervisor’ cloud providers to hold out. The Seattle giant continues to be absent from the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s list of members, however – Microsoft confirmed membership in June at the gold level – although the foundation has issued documentation about how to deploy Cloud Foundry on AWS.

AWS has also been part of several open source initiatives over the years, including being part of the Linux Foundation since 2013, contributing to such projects as the Open Container Initiative and the TODO Group, as well as being a founding member of the Core Infrastructure Initiative. Current members of the CNCF, including Ticketmaster and Vevo, are already running Kubernetes in production on AWS.

In a post on Medium, Adrian Cockcroft, VP of cloud architecture strategy at AWS, outlined the rationale behind the move. “Over time, components of cloud native architectures move from being experimental, through competing implementations, to being well-defined external services,” he wrote. “We’ve seen this evolution with databases, data science pipelines, container schedulers, and monitoring tools. This is one place where the CNCF acts as a filter and aggregator.

“For customers who are trying to track a fast-moving and confusing world, it’s helpful to regard CNCF as a brand endorsement, for a loose collection of interesting projects,” Cockcroft added. “It’s a loose collection, rather than a single, integrated cloud native architecture, so there’s no particular endorsement of any one project over another, for members of CNCF, or for users of projects.”

The company announced revenues of $4.1 billion (£3.13bn) for its most recent quarter, with analysts at Synergy Research noting it had managed to gain 1% in market share over the last four quarters in spite of its dominant position. 

If you’re looking for your next break in the cloud computing industry, be warned: salaries are slowing down while job postings soar.

That is the verdict of Experis, a professional IT resourcing provider, whose latest Tech Cities Job Watch looked at the challenges and opportunities in the UK technology job market.

According to the research, which utilised Innovantage’s recruitment software to analyse more than half a million employer websites, the number of cloud roles almost doubled (97.73% increase) between Q216 and Q217, but salaries for permanent roles only went up 2.7% on average. For contractors, day rates have stubbornly remained at £481 year on year.

So why the disparity? According to Experis, the maturation of the industry is partly responsible.

The data infers that, as more and more companies have made the transition to the cloud, fewer roles for building platforms from scratch are becoming available. “Demand for cloud skills is increasingly being driven by organisations looking for more IT professionals to maintain, optimise and enhance their existing cloud platforms,” said Geoff Smith, managing director of Experis Europe.

“As these skills are often less specialist, businesses appear to be finding it comparatively easier to fill vacant cloud positions – causing pay growth in this discipline to slow,” added Smith.

As a result, it is up to professionals to skill up in more nascent areas, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and mobile applications, if they are to stand out. “The diverse cloud requirements that we see as a result of emerging technologies like IoT, big data and mobile are driving the increase in demand, but not all businesses are seeking dedicated or specialist cloud architects,” added Martin Ewings, director of specialist markets at Experis UK & Ireland.

“Where cloud has been embraced, businesses will be seeking IT professionals to maintain rather than build these platforms.”

According to the figures, there were 9,783 permanent cloud-based roles advertised across the UK in the second quarter of this year, representing almost a quarter (24.4%) of all tech jobs including big data, IT security, mobile, and web development, alongside 6,942 contract roles.

Experis added that there are five primary activities which do require specialised cloud knowledge; application development, application deployment, application security, database specialists, and migration specialists. Specific cloud skills in demand this quarter include OpenStack and Rackspace.

You can find out more and read the full report here (registration required).

Read more: The top five in-demand cloud skills for 2017

As organisations move towards more sophisticated multi-cloud environments, leveraging DevOps, containers and more, they will see greater agility, lower cost, and faster time to market.

This is the verdict of digital performance monitoring and management provider New Relic, who gathered more than 500 responses from organisations across the US, UK, Germany, and France. As first reported by ZDNet, the company put its findings in an eBook, ‘Achieving Serverless Success with Dynamic Cloud and DevOps’.

New Relic put organisations into three categories based on their responses; traditional data centre users, static cloud users, and ‘dynamic’ cloud users. The latter are defined as ‘exploiting the cloud in a dynamic way, automatically allocating and de-allocating resources on the fly for maximum agility to deal with spikes in demand and accelerate time to market’, as the report puts it.

Not surprisingly, dynamic cloud users are more likely – 23% more likely, to be precise – to be utilising emerging technologies, such as function as a service (FaaS), containers, and container orchestration.

Even less surprisingly, the differences in where dynamic and static cloud users place their workloads are vast. Dynamic cloud users are at minimum splitting their resources equally between private data centres and the public cloud, with 80% going down this route. This contrasts with only a handful of static cloud users, and an even smaller number of traditional data centre users – although some of the latter were going all-in on public cloud, a situation which eluded the static cloud users polled.

More than anything else, the dynamic cloud is reaping serious dividends. According to the research, these organisations are more likely to see improvements in application uptime – 26% compared to 19% for static cloud – operating costs (21% and 9% respectively) and client satisfaction (36% and 15%).

So what makes organisations ‘dynamic cloud’ users? Use only the resources you need, allocate and de-allocate resources on the fly, and use resource allocation as an integral part of your application architecture. The survey also noted the importance of making sure you’re using multiple cloud service providers; more than two thirds (68%) of dynamic cloud companies said they expected to use three or more vendors in three years, while only 30% of overall survey respondents say they only use a single public cloud vendor today.

“To take advantage of many of the most important benefits of cloud computing, you need to do more than simply move all or part of your application to cloud-based servers in a simple migration,” the report noted. “And while maintaining some of your applications in the cloud and some of them in your own data centres can be an effective part of a migration strategy, it is not a long-term solution to maximise the benefits of the cloud.”

You can read the full eBook here (no registration required).

Cisco says it is ‘deeply regretful’ after admitting losing Meraki customer data from what it described as an erroneous policy change.

The data affected from Cisco Meraki, which offers cloud-controlled Wi-Fi, routing and security, included custom logos, floor plans, audio such as hold music and voicemail greetings, as well as custom enterprise applications. The company’s tagline reads: “Secure and scalable, Cisco Meraki enterprise networks simply work.”

“On August 3rd 2017, our engineering team made a configuration change that applied an erroneous policy to our North American object storage services and caused certain data uploaded prior to 11:20AM Pacific time on August 3 to be deleted,” the company wrote. “The issue has since been remediated and is no longer occurring.

“In the majority of cases, this issue will not impact network operations, but will be an inconvenience as some of your data may have been lost,” the note added. “Your network configuration data is not lost or impacted – this issue is limited to user-uploaded data.”

As noted elsewhere, a fair amount of this data will be in the ‘inconvenient’ rather than ‘disastrous’ category, as hold music and logos can be reuploaded, voicemail intros can be rerecorded, and so on.

Engineers had been working over the weekend to resolve the issues and assess what data could be recovered. The company is expecting to update by the end of August 7 with which resources will be made available to restore functionality.

You can read the full note here.

Interoute has announced it has rolled out a cloud-based storage service based on Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage technology.

The new service, which is part of Interoute’s Virtual Data Centre (VDC) platform, aims to provide customers with ‘fast, reliable and highly durable cloud-based storage for unstructured data, backups and archives at very low cost’, in the company’s own words. It will be available across the entire Interoute platform of 17 virtual data centre zones around the world.

The company cited GDPR concerns from customers explaining the rollout with organisations ‘revisiting the legacy world of physical backup and archiving and demanding a simple, controlled, auditable cloud service’, according to Mark Lewis, Interoute EVP products and development.

“With Cloudian, Interoute is offering its customers choice in limitlessly scalable and cost-effective storage, on a foundation that is proven in some of the world’s largest unstructured data stores,” said Jon Toor, chief marketing officer at Cloudian in a statement.

Cloudian’s mission is to provide what it calls ‘a clear vision to revolutionise object storage’ – storage which allows retaining unstructured data, such as photos, music, and collaboration services – by enabling 100% native AWS S3 object storage in users’ own data centres.

The company secured $41 million in financing in October last year, as this publication reported, adding it aimed to use the capital to help expand its sales and marketing, as well as grow international operations.

Box and Microsoft lead the way on vision and execution in Gartner’s recently released Magic Quadrant for content collaboration platforms – but it doesn’t quite tell the full story.

If you are unfamiliar with the name of the report, there is a good reason. The Quadrant was previously known as EFSS (enterprise file sync and share), with the analyst firm changing the definitions this year to reflect a shift in the market.

As Box puts it, content collaboration platforms ‘go beyond EFSS to also facilitate team collaboration and content workflows’; a point backed up by Tom Grave, SVP marketing at CTERA Networks, who found a place as a niche player in the report. Grave said that as ‘content’ lined up with ‘file’, and ‘collaboration’ lined up with ‘sharing’, it still gave an accurate view of the market but with room to expand.

“It certainly makes sense for us,” he told CloudTech. “I think that file sharing is an accurate term, and content collaboration can be a little more specific and also more specifically aligned with what you’re trying to do. [Employees are] not just sharing files for the sake of sharing them, they’re collaborating.

“Increasingly, organisations are distributed – we’ve got mobile workers all over the globe, systems for collaborating with their peers,” he added. “We definitely support the name and it makes sense – it’s a term that resonates.”

Of the 13 vendors who made the cut, seven made the top right leaders zone; Axway – essentially Syncplicity, which was bought by Axway in February – Box, Citrix, Dropbox, Egnyte, Google, and Microsoft.

Saying that it was a leader in all content markets, Box said it agreed with Gartner’s analysis ‘that the realities of business and technology today are forcing a change in the way organisations think about content.’ “With higher than ever customer expectations and increasing pressure on IT to deliver, content, collaboration and security need to be central to overall IT and business strategy,” Joely Urton, VP outbound marketing at Box, wrote in a company blog post.

Dropbox pointed to its most recent product releases, including the introduction of Dropbox Paper, a teamwork and collaboration tool, and Smart Sync, as an indication of both its success and the changing shape of the market. “By connecting the creation, feedback, organisation, and distribution steps that happen across different tools today, Dropbox is reducing the frustration and miscommunication that can slow teams down,” wrote Rob Baesman, senior director of product management.

As is frequently the case with these reports however – and as Gartner always insists – the top right axis is not the be all and end all. For certain workloads and organisations, each member of the Quadrant has its own strengths.

Similar to Egnyte, CTERA, who last made the report in 2015, narrows its focus on the enterprise market. The company offers two primary products; CTERA Drive, the app, and, crucially, CTERA Gateway, a physical appliance which enables share drives, but is also connected back to the cloud. Gartner says the company is ‘a good fit for organisations with highly distributed users and offices, and priorities on data privacy or data sovereignty.’

As a result, Grave prefers to use the term ‘focus’ instead of ‘niche’.  “That’s the key,” he said. “Any two-person shop can go to Dropbox, or Box, or Google with a credit card and start using their service automatically, and that’s just not our position in the market. We’re not trying to be universal for any individual or very small customer.”

CTERA – who also launched its 6.0 iteration last week – says it hangs its hat on security as well as ‘cloud choice’, or ‘infrastructure choice’ – and this differentiation gives customers who have a particular focus on security options compared with software as a service (SaaS) vendors. “Depending on the profile of the customer, the more important [security] is, and especially when it’s not just broad security, but some of the specifics within security and privacy that different customers care differently to us, they align themselves to us,” said Grave.

“Wherever data sovereignty is involved, where IT has to very specifically know the location of all the data and being able for IT to access it themselves, and giving IT not only the ability to encrypt end to end, but always control encryption keys so there’s no third party they’re delegating or deferring to for managing encryption – those two factors are critical for a certain class of customer, and that would eliminate a lot of software as a service vendors who run in the top right,” Grave added.

You can read a copy of the report from CTERA’s page here (registration required).