Category Archives: Azure

AWS, Azure, containers, Docker, Enterprise IT, Google, Opinion

Containers at Christmas: wrapping, cloud and competition

December 11, 2015 Guest Author

As anyone that’s ever been disappointed by a Christmas present will tell you – shiny packaging can be very misleading. As we hear all the time, it’s what’s inside that counts…

What then, are we to make of the Docker hype, centred precisely on shiny, new packaging? (Docker is the vendor that two years ago found a way to containerise applications: other types of containers, operating system containers, have been around for a couple of decades)

It is not all about the packaging, of course. Perhaps we should say that it is more about on what the package is placed, and how it is managed (amongst other things) that matters most?

Regardless, containers are one part of a changing cloud, data centre and enterprise IT landscape, the ‘cloud native’ movement widely seen as driving a significant shift in enterprise infrastructure and application development.

What the industry is trying to figure out, and what could prove the most disruptive angle to watch as more and more enterprises roll out containers into production, is the developing competition within this whole container/cloud/data centre market.

The question of competition is a very hot topic in the container, devops and cloud space. Nobody could have thought the OCI co-operation between Docker and CoreOS meant they were suddenly BFFs. Indeed, the drive to become the enterprise container of choice now seems to be at the forefront of both companies’ plans. Is this, however, the most dynamic relationship in the space? What about the Google-Docker-Mesos orchestration game? It would seem that Google’s trusted container experience is already allowing it to gain favour with enterprises, with Kubernetes taking a lead. And with CoreOS in bed with Google’s open source Kubernetes, placing it at the heart of Tectonic, does this mean that CoreOS has a stronger play in the enterprise market to Docker? We will wait and see…

We will also wait and see how the Big Cloud Three will come out of the expected container-driven market shift. Somebody described AWS as ‘a BT’ to me…that is, the incumbent who will be affected most by the new disruptive changes brought by containers, since it makes a lot of money from an older model of infrastructure….

Microsoft’s container ambition is also being watched closely. There is a lot of interest from both the development and IT Ops communities in their play in the emerging ecosystem. At a recent meet-up, an Azure evangelist had to field a number of deeply technical questions regarding exactly how Microsoft’s containers fair next to Linux’s. The question is whether, when assessing who will win the largest piece of the enterprise pie, this will prove the crux of the matter?

Containers are not merely changing the enterprise cloud game (with third place Google seemingly getting it very right) but also driving the IT Ops’ DevOps dream to reality; in fact, many are predicting that it could eventually prove a bit of a threat to Chef and Puppet’s future….

So, maybe kids at Christmas have got it right….it is all about the wrapping and boxes! We’ll have to wait a little longer than Christmas Day to find out.

Written by Lucy Ashton, Head of Content & Production, Container World

Azure, Backup, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Azure Backup gets fine tuned with speed, cache and retention improvements

December 10, 2015 Business Cloud News

Microsoft’s Azure has promised more speed, lower cache demands and better data retention among a range of improvement to its cloud backup services for enterprise data.

Azure Backup now uses a technology called Update Sequence Number (USN) Journal in Windows to track the files that have changed between consecutive backups. USN keeps track of these changes to files and directories on the volume and this helps to identify changed files quickly.

The upshot of this tweak is a faster backup time. “We’ve seen up to a 50% reduction of backup times when using this optimization,” said Giridhar Mosay, Azure’s Program Manager for Cloud and Enterprise. Individual file server backup times will vary according to numbers and sizes of files and directory structure, Mosay warned.

A new algorithm that computes metadata has slashed the amount of cache space needed for each Azure Backup by 66%. The standard allocation of 15% cache space per volume size being backed up to Azure has proved prohibitive for volumes greater than 10TB. The new algorithm makes the cataloguing of the file space to be backed up a much more efficient process, which creates so much less metadata that it demands only 5% cache space, or less. Azure is now modifying its requirement for cache space to a third of the old level.

Meanwhile the resilience of the system has improved as Azure Backup has increased the number of recovery points for cloud backups. This allows for flexible retention policies to meet stringent compliance requirements such as HIPAA (the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) for large enterprises. The new maximum number of recovery points has increased from 366 to 9999.

Other tweaks include more timeouts across the various phases of backup process to ensure that long running jobs complete reliably. Cloud backups will also run a bit more efficiently as a result of a decoupling of the processes of cataloguing and uploading the backup data. Intermittent failures, in the service to handle incremental backups, have also been identified and resolved, according to Mosay. “We are continuing our journey to make Azure backup enterprise grade,” he said.

application development, Azure, Microsoft

Microsoft Blog: The cloud for any app and every developer

November 24, 2015 GreenPages Blog

The below is an excerpt from a recent post on the Microsoft Azure blog by Nicole Herskowitz.

At Microsoft, our vision for Azure is to enable every developer to be able to create, deploy and manage any application in the cloud, regardless of the tools, technology, architecture or platform they prefer. We continue to innovate in delivering services on Microsoft Azure, often in close partnership with leading innovators across many technologies, to ensure open source and third party offerings have first-class support on Azure. Today we’re announcing new technologies and capabilities that advance our mission to make Azure the preferred cloud for any app and every developer — from back-end cloud services to higher level platform services, to the development process itself.

For building highly scalable back-end services in the cloud many developers are turning to microservice architectures. The independent nature of these microservices offers superior application lifecycle management, performance at scale, 24×7 availability and cost efficiency compared with traditional monolithic architectures for service based apps. Today, we’re announcing the public preview of Azure Service Fabric, Microsoft’s platform for developing and operating microservice-based applications. Service Fabric also brings new innovations to microservice development with support for reliable, stateful services for low-latency partitioned data access at scale, and the Actor programming model which drastically simplifies building high-scale microservice applications.

We’ve already seen strong interest in Service Fabric with over 300 customers and partners already building on the platform during the private preview. With the availability of public preview in Azure, you can now explore the scale-out potential of Service Fabric combined with dedicated Visual Studio tooling. Today, Service Fabric is available on Azure and will extend to Windows Server, Linux and other cloud providers next year providing application portability and hybrid scenarios. To get started, download the SDK, check out our getting started videos and documentation and deploy your application to a cluster live in Azure.

For developers who want to build powerful, enterprise grade web and mobile apps that connect to data in the cloud or on-premises, Azure App Service is a highly productive platform for building scalable apps in .NET, NodeJS, PHP, Python or Java as well as engaging mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows. Azure App Service is one of our most popular Azure services used by more than 60% of customers to host over 700,000 apps. Building on this success, today we announced new capabilities in Azure App Service including:

Single sign-on using EasyAuth across all app types making authentication easy, everywhere
Code-free interface and data design for rapid development of data-driven Node.js apps
API app innovations extended to all app types, eliminating the need for an API gateway

To read the entire post, click here.

Interested in learning about common migration problems with Microsoft Office 365? Download our latest on-demand webinar.

Avere, Azure, Enterprise IT, hybrid cloud, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Avere-Microsoft joint effort enables Azure hybrids

November 16, 2015 Business Cloud News

Enterprise storage vendor Avere Systems is to work with Microsoft so that its Virtual FXT Edge filers can be used with Microsoft Azure.

The hardware maker, which specialises in creating storage devices that caters for hybrid cloud set ups, says the two vendors are collaborating to make it easier and cheaper to get the qualities of the cloud from IT infrastructure that is situated ‘on premise’.

The system aims to simplify the task of creating a system for providing computing power, memory and storage on demand for enterprise IT staff who are not specialists in running cloud services. The Avere technology is designed to make data that is held on network attached storage (NAS) more readily accessible to Azure, so that users don’t experience any latency.

The rationale is that many companies want the liquidity of cloud computing but are not allowed to move their data off the company premises, according to Avere. Its solution was to invent a ‘virtual NAS’ system that is easy for an enterprise IT department employee to install and manage. Meanwhile the system is sophisticated enough to provide multi-protocol file access (including NFS and SMB) and clusters, making it powerful enough to deliver high availability, scalable performance and capacity.

As hybrid cloud systems become the de facto standard for enterprises, it’s important that they are easy enough for IT department employees to manage, according to Nicole Herskowitz, Microsoft Azure’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft Azure.

By adapting the system to work smoothly with Azure, enterprise IT department managers can deploy thousands of Azure HPC instances on-demand to crunch data with low latency and no data migration. This means businesses can tap into hyper-converged infrastructure of Azure with ease, without breaking the bank, Avere claims.

“At Avere, we’ve been dedicated to shattering the myth that organizations can’t have enterprise NAS performance in the public cloud,” said Rebecca Thompson, VP Marketing of Avere Systems, “with Microsoft we’re helping enterprises harness the computing power of Microsoft Azure, which is used by 57% of Fortune 500 companies for big data applications.”

Azure, Datacentre, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Red Hat, Virtualisation

Red Hat launches Cloud Access on Microsoft Azure

November 12, 2015 Business Cloud News

Red Hat has followed its recent declaration of a partnership with Microsoft by announcing the availability of Red Hat Cloud Access on Microsoft Azure.

The Access service will make it easier for subscribers to move any eligible, unused Red Hat subscriptions from their data centre to the Azure cloud. Red Hat Cloud Access will give them the support relationship they enjoy with Red Hat with the cloud computing powers of Azure, the software vendor said on its official blog. Cloud Access extends to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, Red Hat Gluster Storage and OpenShift Enterprise. The blog hints that more collaborations with Microsoft are to come.

Meanwhile, in his company blog Azure CTO Mark Russinovich gave a public preview of the coming Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets offering. VM Scale Sets are an Azure Compute resource that allow users to create and manage a collection of virtual machines as a set. These scale sets are designed for building large-scale services targeting big computing, big data and containerized workloads, all of which are increasing in significance as cloud computing evolves, said Russinovich.

By integrating with Azure Insights Autoscale, they provide the capacity to expand and contract to fit requirements with no need to pre-provision virtual machines. This allows users to match their consumption of computing resources to their application needs more accurately.

VM Scale Sets can be controlled within Azure Resource Manager templates and they will support Windows and Linux platform images, as well as custom images and extensions. “When you define a VM Scale Set, you only define the resources you need, so besides making it easier to define your Azure infrastructure, this also allows Azure to optimize calls to the underlying fabric, providing greater efficiency,” said Russinovich. “To deploy a scale set, all you need is an Azure subscription.”

Example Virtual Machine Scale Set templates are available on the GitHub repository.

Azure, data protection, Druva, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Druva’s data protection service now available on Azure

November 3, 2015 Business Cloud News

Converged data protection firm Druva has allied itself with Microsoft Azure in a bid to expand its cloud presence to a wider public cloud and infrastructure market.

The new relationship gives Druva customers more global options for their data storage, privacy and security needs and a more impressive infrastructure vendor for companies with sensitive compliance and legal issues. Partnering with Azure helps Druva settle any regional data privacy issues that might otherwise dissuade them from using Druva as more companies realise that on-premise storage is becoming unsustainable, according to Druva.

Druva’s new Azure relationship, it says, gives customers have a wider set of choices as they try to decide how to keep up with data growth, security and regionally specific regulation requirements.

Azure will help Druva meet international and industry-specific compliance standards, such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and SOC 2. Among the country standards it meets are the Australia IRAP, UK G-Cloud and Singapore MTCS. Microsoft was also the first to adopt the uniform international code of practice for cloud privacy, ISO/IEC 27018, which governs the processing of personal information by cloud service providers. Microsoft’s data centre locations will give Druva 21 storage regions around the globe, including Canada and China which will help Druva meet data residency needs increasingly specified by clients, it claims.

Customers need stronger data protection and security in the cloud now they’re running sensitive workloads, according to Druva CEO Jaspreet Singh. Microsoft will broaden Druva’s cloud-related options and give customers additional choice for deploying in the cloud securely and conveniently. “Druva has quickly grown to become the de facto standard for data protection workloads in the public cloud,” said Singh.

Azure will extend the data storage footprint of Druva inSync, the analyst endpoint and cloud service data protection system. Druva inSync plans will begin at $6/user per month. Azure support will be generally available in 45 days.

Azure, Dell, Enterprise IT, hybrid cloud, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Dell and Microsoft unveil joint hybrid cloud offering

October 22, 2015 Business Cloud News

Dell has expanded its cloud portfolio with a new hybrid cloud offering with technology jointly developed with Microsoft. The new system is designed to break down the barriers to cloud adoption and offer a simpler but more secure payment system.

According to Dell’s own research, nine out of ten IT decision makers say a hybrid cloud strategy is important to achieve a Future-Ready Enterprise. The recently unveiled Dell Global Technology Adoption Index revealed that 55% of organisations around the world will use more than one type of cloud. The study also identified cost and security as the biggest barriers to adopting the cloud, with complexity being the biggest blockage associated with hybrid cloud.

The new Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft promises customers an on-premise private cloud with consistent Azure public cloud access in less than three hours. Clients are promised minimised downtime with non-disruptive, fully automated system updates that don’t impose themselves on users when not needed. It also offers workload templates to simplify service provision and governance models. The management of multiple clouds will be simplified by an out-of-the-box integration with Dell Cloud Manager (DCM) and Windows Azure Pack (WAP), Dell says.

The Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft is built around the CPS Standard, which combines optimised Dell modular infrastructure with pre-configured Microsoft CPS software. This will include Microsoft’s software stack and Azure Services for back-up, site recovery and operational insights.

Meanwhile the Dell Cloud Flex Pay programme gives customers a new flexible option to buy Dell’s Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft without making a long-term commitment. Cloud Flex Pay will eliminate the risks of being locked into paying for services that aren’t used fully says Dell.

“Customers tell us their cloud journey is too complex, the cost-risk is too high and control isn’t transparent,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of engineered solutions and cloud at Dell. “With our new Cloud Flex Pay program, cost-risk is all but eliminated.”

Azure, Datacentre, Equinix, Microsoft, Microsoft Office 365, News & Analysis, Software as a service, TelecityGroup

Equinix and Telecity to offer Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365

September 30, 2015 Business Cloud News

Data centre operators Equinix and TelecityGroup are both now offering Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 as part of their cloud offerings. Microsoft is understood to be announcing as many as five such partnerships with data centre operators.

Co-location specialist TelecityGroup said it is offering the cloud service to three distinct types of customer, these being enterprise customers, co-location partners and a reseller channel. The reseller channel itself is broken down three groups of telcos, managed service providers and systems integrators.

The nature of the market for Office 365 is broadening, according to Adi Ayyagani, the group head of market development for TelecityGroup. “Once interest was restricted to financial services and a couple of other early adopters, but now enterprises from every vertical market are showing an interest.”

TelecityGroup is offering the Office365 service on its software defined networking Cloud-IX platform. Though a number of operators are reportedly making ExpressRoute for Office 365 available, Ayyagani claimed that the Level 3 MPLS network that underpins Cloud-IX will make all the difference. “It means customers can get the service from anywhere, it’s more robust and there’s a greater level of integration available, so that configuration of the service is a lot simpler for service providers,” said Ayyagani.

The managed service providers, telcos and systems integrators reselling the cloud service will be able to use TelecityGroup’s broad footprint to access almost any market in Europe, the Middle East or African, said Ayyagani.

Meanwhile, global data centre operator Equinix has now announced worldwide availability of the cloud version of Microsoft Office for enterprises. The service improves the levels of data privacy since ExpressRoute enables most Office 365 network traffic to avoid the public Internet. Enterprises that use ExpressRoute in an Equinix data centre also get the benefit of being able to run hybrid and multi-cloud services that didn’t previously scale well over the Internet or over typical WAN works, it says.

“Office 365 customers can now benefit from predictable network performance and the ability to better manage network availability,” said Ross Ortega, Microsoft’s Principal Program Manager for Azure Networking.

Apache, Azure, Database, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Ubuntu

Microsoft selects Ubuntu for first Linux-based Azure offering

September 28, 2015 Business Cloud News

Microsoft has announced plans to simplify Big Data and widen its use through Azure.

In a blog post, T K Rengarajan, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Data Platforms, described how the expanded Microsoft Azure Data Lake Store, available in preview later this year, will provide a single repository that captures data of any size, type and speed without forcing changes to applications as data scales. In the store, data can be securely shared for collaboration and is accessible for processing and analytics from HDFS applications and tools.

Another new addition is Azure Data Lake Analytics, a service built on Apache YARN that dynamically scales, which Microsoft says will stop people being side tracked from work by needing to know about distributed architecture. This service, available in preview later this year, will include U-SQL, a language that unifies the benefits of SQL with the expressive power of user code. U-SQL’s scalable distributed querying is intended to help users analyse data in the store and across SQL Servers in Azure, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has selected Ubuntu for its first Linux-based Azure offering. The Hadoop-based big data service offering, HDInsight, will run on Canonical’s open source browser Ubuntu.

Azure HDInsight uses a range of open source analytics engines including Hive, Spark, HBase and Storm. Microsoft says it is now on general release with a 99.9 per cent uptime service level agreement.

Meanwhile Azure Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio will provide an integrated development environment that aims to ‘dramatically’ simplify authoring, debugging and optimization for processing and analytics at any scale, according to Rengarajan. “Leading Hadoop applications that span security, governance, data preparation and analytics can be easily deployed from the Azure Marketplace on top of Azure Data Lake,” said Rengarajan.

Azure Data Lake removes the complexities of ingesting and storing all of your data while making it faster to get up and running with batch, streaming, and interactive analytics, said Rengarajan.

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