The dynamic nature of the cloud means that change is a constant when it comes to modern cloud-based infrastructure. Delivering modern applications to end users, therefore, is a constantly shifting challenge. Delivery automation helps IT Ops teams ensure that apps are providing an optimal end user experience over hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud environments, no matter what the current state of the infrastructure is. To employ a delivery automation strategy that reflects your business rules, making real-time decisions based on a combination of real user monitoring, synthetic testing, APM, NGINX / local load balancers, and other data sources, is critical.

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Google has announced a price reduction for GPUs attached to on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines by up to 36%.

For US regions – Oregon and South Carolina – NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 GPU attached to a VM will cost $1.46 per hour, while the K80 GPU will set users back $0.45 per hour. The P100 and K80 GPUs are also available in Belgium and Taiwan

The company added that organisations such as Shazam and oilfield services provider Schlumberger were among those taking advantage of GPUs to ‘innovate, accelerate and save money.’ Companies can utilise GPUs from Google in various ways; hardware is passed through directly to the virtual machine to focus on bare metal performance, while faster disk performance can be achieved through attaching up to 3TB of Local SSD to any GPU-enabled virtual machine.

Alongside this, Google added it was lowering the price of preemptible Local SSDs by almost 40% compared to on-demand Local SSDs – equating to $0.048 per GB-month in the US.

Google’s focus on making GPUs more affordable is good news for customers, but it’s even better news for NVIDIA. Earlier this month, the company put out a statement saying that every major cloud provider has put out cloud services based on its product. Alongside this, NVIDIA’s most recent financial results found record revenues of $2.64 billion, up 32% from this time the previous year.

“We hope that the price reduction on NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and preemptible Local SSDs unlocks new opportunities and helps you solve more interesting business, engineering and scientific problems,” wrote Chris Kleban, Google product manager in a blog post.

Meg Whitman is to step down as CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), bringing down the curtain on a six-year tenure and overseeing one of the largest corporate breakups of recent years.

Whitman had in July stepped down as chairwoman of HP’s board of directors, remaining chief executive of HPE, and had previously faced speculation about her role as the chief executive’s seat at Uber dramatically became available earlier this year.

Whitman’s replacement will be HPE president Antonio Neri, a 22-year HP veteran who will take over in February. “I said for many years that the next leader of HPE should come from within the company and Antonio Neri is exactly the type of leader I had in mind,” Whitman told analysts, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha, adding the board of directors had approved the new boss. “He is a computer engineer by training, has a deep technology background and is passionate about our customers, partners, employees and culture.”

The news of Whitman’s departure inevitably pushed HPE’s fourth quarter results somewhat into the shade. The company posted Q417 combined net revenue of $7.8 billion, up 5% from the previous year, while full year 2017 revenue was at $28.9bn, down from $30.3bn for FY16.

Yet it may be apt here to assess the various initiatives Whitman has put into place to attempt to turn around HP.

First announced three years ago, Hewlett Packard split into two companies in November 2015; HP Inc, which would focus on printers, PCs, and more on the consumer side, while HPE would be more attuned to the B2B side of data centres, networking, and servers. Whitman told analysts yesterday that the move was “exactly the right decision because it allowed both companies to optimise for strength and invest in core strategies.”

Last year, HPE announced it would merge its enterprise services division with CSC to create a new company, DXC Technology – a move that was finalised in April this year – as well as spinning off its application software business with Micro Focus. On the acquisitions side, HPE has bought networking firm Aruba, hyperconverged infrastructure provider Simplivity, and most recently Cloud Technology Partners to bolster its cloud consulting presence and hybrid IT capabilities.

Analysts continue to position the company at the sharp end of proceedings for cloud infrastructure equipment – a report from Synergy Research in March saw HPE in a three-way tie alongside Cisco and Dell-EMC.

In terms of the company’s position, Whitman said she was proud that HPE was exiting the year with almost $6 billion in net cash as well as ‘reigniting innovation and delivering groundbreaking new technology solutions’. Key to this is ‘The Machine’, a huge single-memory computer which aims to be ‘built for the big data era’ and with a prototype containing 160 terabytes of memory.

This continues to be a key part of HPE’s narrative; a news advisory piece issued by the company last week described the release of high-density compute and storage solutions focused on high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence applications.  “Today, HPE is augmenting its proven supercomputing and large commercial HPC and AI capabilities with new high-density compute and storage solutions to accelerate market adoption by enabling organisations of all sizes to address challenges in HPC, big data, object storage and AI with more choice and flexibility,” said Bill Mannel, HPE VP and general manager of HPC and AI segment solutions.

For over a decade, Application Programming Interface or APIs have been used to exchange data between multiple platforms. From social media to news and media sites, most websites depend on APIs to provide a dynamic and real-time digital experience. APIs have made its way into almost every device and service available today and it continues to spur innovations in every field of technology.
There are multiple programming languages used to build and run applications in the online world. And just like every other language, there is always the need for an interpreter when trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you. This is where APIs come into play, APIs act like the interpreter helping different independent services interact and interpret the data shared with each other.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Synametrics Technologies will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 22nd International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York, NY. Synametrics Technologies is a privately held company based in Plainsboro, New Jersey that has been providing solutions for the developer community since 1997. Based on the success of its initial product offerings such as WinSQL, Xeams, SynaMan and Syncrify, Synametrics continues to create and hone innovative products that help customers get more from their computer applications, databases and infrastructure. To date, over one million users around the world have chosen Synametrics solutions to help power their accelerated business and personal computing needs.

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“We started a Master of Science in business analytics – that’s the hot topic. We serve the business community around San Francisco so we educate the working professionals and this is where they all want to be,” explained Judy Lee, Associate Professor and Department Chair at Golden Gate University, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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“We started a Master of Science in business analytics – that’s the hot topic. We serve the business community around San Francisco so we educate the working professionals and this is where they all want to be,” explained Judy Lee, Associate Professor and Department Chair at Golden Gate University, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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With its giant, gleaming skyscrapers and seemingly endless wealth, Dubai is often viewed as being one of the world’s most hi-tech cities. When it comes to digital innovation, Dubai, one of seven Emirates in the United Arab Emirates, with a population of 2.5 million, has one of the highest levels of ICT adoption in the region, both by the public and government.

Over the past two decades a number of digital transformation initiatives, with titles such as Dubai Internet City and Dubai e-government, have driven adoption of ICT in all aspects of life. So it may come as some surprise to learn that cloud services in the region are lagging behind.

While many businesses, individuals and even government departments are using cloud-based email servers, in the main internal file servers are still the norm when it comes to storing data; as I found when attending Gitex 2017 last month, the leading computing and technology conference in the Middle East.

Speaking to other delegates about the Middle Eastern market at the five-day event in the Dubai World Trade Centre, a few things became clear.

Dubai is ahead in many ways in the adoption of technology, but when it comes to cloud servers it is about four to five years behind.

The appetite for a move to the cloud is there and adoption is slowly increasing, but there are only a small number of services available.

This is set to change with the recent announcement that Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is to open its first data centre region in the Middle East by 2019, with offices in Dubai and Bahrain.

Amazon has also revealed plans to open a new CloudFront Edge location in the United Arab Emirates in 2018.

This is sure to pave the way for other major cloud providers to move their operations into the region.

Before the big boys get in, there are still plenty of opportunities for SMEs to make serious inroads into the Middle Eastern cloud market through the UAE.

However, there are many pieces of the puzzle to put together before this can become a reality.

The first consideration is practicality. An SME, particularly a small company, is going to find it almost impossible to enter the market alone, in particular with government, because of the restrictive registration costs involved and various bureaucratic hoops – generally, it costs around $5k to register with the Emirate Government Finance Departments.

In essence, as an SME looking to break into the Middle East, it is essential to work with a channel partner – value-added reseller (VAR) or value-added distributor (VAD) who already have working relationships with government departments and forward-thinking businesses.

The key word is trust. It’s not going to be enough to have an offering that is attractive in terms of cost and technology; businesses and especially government departments in the region will want reassurances about security, cost and even about your personnel.

There will be many questions that will need to be answered, such as where servers are based, who has access to them, and how are they linked – servers based in the region and staff on the ground is a must. A bit different to Europe where most of us subscribe to cloud services on the assumption that it is safe – uploading our data to the cloud without truly knowing where it is.  Perhaps we can learn something here?

But now is certainly the time to strike if our recent experience is anything to go by.

Dubai recently launched its five-year strategy called Smart Dubai 2021, which aims to take its smart city transformation to “a different level”.

Digital transformation is expected to have a “significant and positive impact” on the city, achieving not only financial savings but also improving the happiness of its citizens – commendably, people and happiness are high on the government agenda in Dubai.

If you have a cloud solution that you are certain can help Dubai achieve these aims and the partners you need to help you deliver it, you will find a willing and receptive audience and the route to a potentially lucrative future in the Middle East. They are ready for us, the question is, are we ready and able to serve this growing market?

Read more: Dubai launches IoT strategy and ‘data wealth’ initiative

DevOps promotes continuous improvement through a culture of collaboration. But in real terms, how do you: Integrate activities across diverse teams and services? Make objective decisions with system-wide visibility? Use feedback loops to enable learning and improvement?
With technology insights and real-world examples, in his general session at @DevOpsSummit, at 21st Cloud Expo, Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk, explored how leading organizations use data-driven DevOps to close their feedback loops to drive continuous improvement.

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