Containers will continue to make a big noise in 2018 – and Cisco has made its own push with the launch of its own container platform in collaboration with Google Cloud.

The move, which ‘simplifies and accelerates how application development and IT operations teams configure, deploy, and manage container clusters based on 100% upstream Kubernetes’, as the press materials put it, is being played as an extension of Cisco and Google Cloud’s hybrid cloud partnership, previously announced in October. Kubernetes, of course, was originally designed by Google before being donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The list of certified Kubernetes platform and distribution partners is as long as one’s arm, including Alibaba Group, IBM and Microsoft among others. From Cisco’s perspective, its goal in releasing a Kubernetes-flavoured product is around networking, or more specifically, addressing ‘the end-to-end management of container clusters including setup, orchestration, authentication, monitoring, networking, load balancing and optimisation’.

The Cisco Container Platform will be available on software optimised with Cisco HyperFlex, available in April, and software supported on VM infrastructure, bare metal and public cloud, available in the summer.

“As the adoption of Kubernetes has exploded, container orchestration and management have become of paramount importance to customers because they enable application portability and consistency across on-premises and cloud-based environments,” said Eyal Manor, Google vice president of engineering in a statement.

“Cisco Container Platform is optimised in collaboration with Google Cloud to deliver a next-generation open hybrid cloud architecture, and represents an important milestone for our integrated Google and Cisco hybrid cloud solution coming later this year,” added Manor.

You can find out more about the Cisco Container Platform offering here.

How is DevOps going within your organization? If you need some help measuring just how well it is going, we have prepared a list of some key DevOps metrics to track. These metrics can help you understand how your team is doing over time.
The word DevOps means different things to different people. Some say it a culture and every vendor in the industry claims that their tools help with DevOps. Depending on how you define DevOps, some of these metrics may matter more or less to you and your team.

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Enterprises are adopting Kubernetes to accelerate the development and the delivery of cloud-native applications. However, sharing a Kubernetes cluster between members of the same team can be challenging. And, sharing clusters across multiple teams is even harder.
Kubernetes offers several constructs to help implement segmentation and isolation. However, these primitives can be complex to understand and apply. As a result, it’s becoming common for enterprises to end up with several clusters. This leads to a waste of cloud resources and increased operational overhead.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has just secured $5 billion in quarterly revenues – but what are its most popular products?

According to 2nd Watch, a managed cloud provider and AWS partner, the fastest growing AWS products used by their customers in 2017 include data crunching tool Amazon Elastic MapReduce, with a 24% CAGR, network monitoring offering CloudWatch (23% CAGR) and serverless product AWS Lambda at 18%.

The growth means that 92% of customers polled by 2nd Watch are using CloudWatch in their organisations. Amazon Simple Storage, AWS Data Transfer and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud were used by 100% of respondents.

“We are seeing enterprise customers adopt new services at a much faster rate than in years past, product like Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Workspaces and AWS Glue,” said Jeff Aden, co-founder of 2nd Watch. “These products make provisioning, growing and monitoring of AWS incredibly easy, and allow enterprises to focus on their core businesses.

“Large enterprises are capturing the benefits of cost savings, while decreasing their time to market and increasing their ability to make informed decisions,” added Aden.

In total, AWS issued 497 service and feature releases over the most recent financial quarter. New products launched at re:Invent included efforts focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence. The most evident of these was Amazon SageMaker, a service aimed at helping developers build, train, and deploy machine learning models.

Other fast growing AWS products in 2017 included Amazon Chime, an online meeting and video conferencing tool, and AWS Glue, a fully managed ETL (extract, transform and load) data service.

Read more: AWS passes $5 billion in quarterly revenue with a $20bn run rate

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has surpassed $5 billion (£3.6bn) in revenues for the most recent quarter, representing an almost 45% increase year over year and a $20 billion run rate.

The company’s latest financial results show revenues of $60.5bn across the company in the fourth quarter, with particular focus on Alexa. CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement that “we don’t see positive surprises of this magnitude very often – expect us to double down.”

In the company’s highlights section, AWS was mentioned a total of 52 times. Service and feature releases fell just short of 500; the 497 that were released took the year’s total up to 1,430. To put that into perspective, the quarter’s total was more than three times the releases launched by AWS in the whole of 2012.

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon chief financial officer, told analysts that the $20bn run rate for AWS was up from $18bn the previous quarter. “We’re very happy with the performance in the AWS business,” he said.

As it is the first release since re:Invent back in November, product launches featured significantly in the highlights. These included SageMaker, a service aimed at helping developers build, train and deploy machine learning models, as well as products on the artificial intelligence side, including translation and transcription tools.

Of particular interest as well were the heavy-hitting customers the company has secured in the quarter. Some of these, such as Expedia going all-in, and The Walt Disney Company selecting AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider, were announced at re:Invent back in November. Another, Synamtec, was announced in the week leading up to the event, while others included Dow Jones, Experian and Ubisoft, who ‘kicked off major new moves’ to AWS in the quarter.

So what does this mean when compared to other players in the market? Microsoft issued financials yesterday, with its ‘intelligent cloud’ bucket, focusing predominantly on Azure and server products, fetching $7.8bn for the quarter at an increase of 15% year over year. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google Cloud was a $1bn per quarter business and that it was in the company’s opinion ‘the fastest growing major public cloud provider in the world.’

According to Synergy Research, a long-time tracker of the cloud infrastructure players, four of the five largest vendors have gained market share over the last four quarters. The only outlier is IBM, which maintains third place behind AWS and Microsoft, and ahead of Google and Alibaba.

“As demand for cloud services blossoms, the leading cloud providers all have things to be pleased about and they are setting a fierce pace that most chasing companies cannot match,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy. “Smaller companies can still do well by focusing on specific applications, industry verticals or geographies, but overall this is a game that can only be played by companies with big ambitions, big wallets and a determined corporate focus.”

You can read the full Amazon statement here.

How often is an environment unavailable due to factors within your project’s control? How often is an environment unavailable due to external factors? Is the software and hardware in the environment up to date with the target production systems? How often do you have to resort to manual workarounds due to an environment?

These are all questions that you should ask yourself if testing environments are consistently unavailable and affected by outages. Here are three key metrics that you can track that can help avoid costly downtime.

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Digital Transformation (DX) is not a “one-size-fits all” strategy. Each organization needs to develop its own unique, long-term DX plan. It must do so by realizing that we now live in a data-driven age, and that technologies such as Cloud Computing, Big Data, the IoT, Cognitive Computing, and Blockchain are only tools. In her general session at 21st Cloud Expo, Rebecca Wanta explained how the strategy must focus on DX and include a commitment from top management to create great IT jobs, monitor progress, and never forget that their enterprise is in a day-to-day battle for survival.

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• While 94% of supply chain leaders say that digital transformation will fundamentally change supply chains in 2018, only 44% have a strategy ready.
• 66% of supply chain leaders say advanced supply chain analytics are critically important to their supply chain operations in the next 2 to 3 years.
• Forecast accuracy, demand patterns, product tracking traceability, transportation performance and analysis of product returns are use cases where analytics can close knowledge gaps.

These and other insights are from The Hackett Group study, Analytics: Laying the Foundation for Supply Chain Digital Transformation (10 pp., PDF, no opt-in). The study provides insightful data regarding the increasing importance of using analytics to drive improved supply chain performance. Data included in the study also illustrate how analytics is enabling business objectives across a range of industries. The study also provides the key points that need to be considered in creating a roadmap for implementing advanced supply chain analytics leading to digital transformation. It’s an interesting, insightful read on how analytics are revolutionizing supply chains in 2018 and beyond.

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

66% of supply chain leaders say advanced supply chain analytics are critically important to their supply chain operations in the next two to three years

The Hackett Group found the majority of supply chain leaders have a sense of urgency for getting advanced supply chain analytics implemented and contributing to current and future operations. The majority see the value of having advanced analytics that can scale across their entire supplier network.

Improving forecast accuracy, optimizing transportation performance, improving product tracking & traceability and analyzing product returns are the use cases providing the greatest potential for analytics growth

Each of these use cases and the ones that are shown in the graphic below has information and knowledge gaps advanced supply chain analytics can fill. Of these top use cases, product tracking and traceability are one of the fastest growing due to the stringent quality standards defined by the US Food & Drug Administration in CFR 21 Sec. 820.65 for medical products manufacturers.  The greater the complexity and cost of compliance with federally-mandated reporting and quality standards, the greater potential for advanced analytics to revolutionize supply chain performance.

Optimizing production and sourcing to reduce total landed costs (56%) is the most important use case of advanced supply chain analytics in the next two to three years

The Hackett Group aggregated use cases across the four categories of reducing costs, improving quality, improving service and improving working capital (optimizing inventory). Respondents rank improving working capital (optimizing inventory) with the highest aggregated critical importance score of 39%, followed by reducing costs (29.5%), improving service (28.6%) and improving quality (25.75%).

44% of supply chain leaders are enhancing their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems’ functionality and integration to gain greater enterprise and supply chain-wide visibility

Respondents are relying on legacy ERP systems as their main systems of record for managing supply chain operations, and integrating advanced supply chain analytics to gain end-to-end supply network visibility. 94% of respondents consider virtual collaboration platforms for internal & external use the highest priority technology initiative they can accomplish in the next 2 to 3 years.

The majority of companies are operating at stages 1 and 2 of the Hackett Group’s Supply chain analytics maturity model

A small percentage are at the stage 3 level of maturity according to the study’s results. Supply chain operations and performance scale up the model as processes and workflows are put in place to improve data quality, provide consistent real-time data and rely on a stable system of record that can deliver end-to-end supply chain analytics visibility. Integrating with external data becomes critically important as supply networks proliferate globally, as does the need to drive greater predictive analytics accuracy.