Most of the time there is a lot of work involved to move to the cloud, and most of that isn’t really related to AWS or Azure or Google Cloud. Before we talk about public cloud vendors and DevOps tools, there are usually several technical and non-technical challenges that are connected to it and that every company needs to solve to move to the cloud.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Stefano Bellasio, CEO and founder of Cloud Academy Inc., will discuss what the tools, disciplines, and cultural aspects are that enterprise companies are considering to get to the cloud and eventually transform the way they build software and services.
Why the war around the cloud has not even started yet
“CIOs are starting to wake up to the fact that there’s going to be multiple clouds to address multiple workloads and applications,” says Thor Culverhouse, CEO of Seattle-based Skytap, “which tells me the war around the cloud hasn’t even started.”
It makes for an interesting viewpoint, considering the assertion that the market is all but sewn up. Indeed, Gartner, in its most recent Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), has placed Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft on their own as leaders for the second year running.
But Skytap, who made its debut appearance in the niche players section this year, says its area of the market is not covered by AWS and Microsoft – and could even be larger than where the two behemoths are looking.
Founded in 2006, the company, in its own words, offers an alternative to the mindset of ‘forcing customers to rewrite their traditional applications’ for migrating to the public cloud. With Jeff Bezos – yes, you read that right – as its first investor, the original business plan, of renting applications online, was influenced around virtualisation more than cloud. By the time Culverhouse had joined as chief exec in 2013, however, the focus had changed to workloads and applications which couldn’t easily be lifted and shifted into the cloud.
“Investors, and myself, felt like the real pot of gold was really around more traditional legacy workloads in the enterprise that were never really designed to live in what I would call cloud-native platforms, like AWS, Azure, and Google Compute Engine,” Culverhouse tells CloudTech. “If you think about the market itself, they tend to focus really on network application development, so the majority of their wins – almost all of their revenue – is really people building brand new applications that are going to take advantage of their services.”
The market appears to be getting used to this idea. Last month, as this publication reported, Skytap secured $45 million in a funding round led by Goldman Sachs, in a round which Culverhouse says will ‘likely’ be the company’s last before potentially going public. More than sorting out a few unwieldy apps, mind you; the Skytap CEO adds the entire software development lifecycle is sped up for businesses on board.
“The vast majority of enterprises run their core applications either on x86, AIX, so many on mainframe… and so the breadth of those applications can be lifted and shifted into Skytap relatively easily,” says Culverhouse. “Now they can start to do things like agile, and DevOps, and CI/CD, which is basically changing the way they develop software.
“You’re effectively improving the infrastructure and you can also improve the process by which you develop software,” he adds.
As a result, despite the company’s position in the cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant, Skytap does not see itself as a competitor of the AWS and Azures. “What we end up competing with is the on-premise world,” says EMEA general manager Chris Griggs. Culverhouse says the company’s offering is “somewhere between a PaaS and an IaaS”, and that its IP sits on top of the raw infrastructure – the company has an OEM reseller partnership with IBM also utilising its bare metal.
“We like it when we walk into an account and they’ve already started using Amazon and Azure, because it tells us they’ve done the evaluation, they know where the applicability of those services are, and therefore, where the applicability of our services are,” he says. “The more educated the market is, the more educated the CIO is, the better it is for all of us.”
That said, Culverhouse adds there was ‘no question it was an important day’ for Skytap being named in the Quadrant – but there is still a long way to go. “This is an ongoing process as they get to know us better,” he says of Gartner. “I think their criteria is more raw infrastructure as a service oriented, and we’re effectively a service that sits on top of [that] infrastructure.”
The Skytap CEO also takes umbrage with the term ‘niche’ – and it is here that the biggest opportunity reveals itself. “If you think about niche, it sort of suggests that it’s small in nature,” says Chulverhouse, “but Gartner will also tell you in a variety of other reports by 2020 76% of the multi-trillion dollar IT spend is still going to be on-prem, both applications and infrastructure.
“That is not a niche; that’s absolutely huge,” he adds.
Read more: Skytap secures $45m in funding round led by Goldman Sachs
What’s the difference between device edge and cloud edge?
A few years ago, a lot of our systems were highly centralized and they acted as single points of access for different resources. That’s when cloud computing entered the tech world and dramatically transformed these centralized systems into a more distributed and decentralized architecture.
Such an architecture called edge computing takes cloud computing closer to the consumers. In other words, you can visualize this infrastructure to offer the functions of compute, storage and computing in blocks present at the edge of networks.
The obvious advantage with this architecture is that the latency time is reduced because requests and responses don’t have to travel very long. This short latency time has given a big boost to new technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality and augmented reality. Even rapid strides made in the worlds of artificial intelligence and machine learning can be attributed to some extent to the emergence of edge computing.
That said, let’s get to the central question of this piece- what’s the difference between a device edge and a cloud edge?
Broadly speaking, edge computing is in its nascent stages, so many companies are trying to identify a niche for themselves in this growing market. They have come up with two models in edge computing.
Device edge computing
In this model, customers have the choice to run any kind of edge computing software in existing software environments while the hardware is shared with other resources or can be dedicated, depending on the needs of edge computing applications. This model is most ideal for running low-powered devices such as an embedded system on chip software in vehicles.
Also, this is best in cases where sensors have to talk to cloud blocks often, as is the case of machine to machine (M2M) communication. Sensors need to communicate quickly and frequently to update information to these device edges, that in turn can be sent to the cloud. So, in all these scenarios, you need a device edge.
Cloud edge computing
Cloud edge computing, also known as fog computing, is a concept that surrounds the implementation of IoT. For this, a device known as fog computing device or cloud edge gateway is placed between the sensors and the cloud, and this device is what provides connectivity between the two.
In other words, this device analyzes the data first, decides if it needs to be compressed or cut, and the remaining is sent to the cloud. This way, network traffic is greatly reduced. Besides this advantage, you can perform calculations on your data and do real-time processing before sending the data to your cloud storage.
This is most ideal when you have to gather and process large amounts of data in a limited bandwidth situation.
Thus, these are the differences between device and edge computing. The right choice of technology depends on your requirements.
The post What’s the difference between device edge and cloud edge? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Public cloud grows strongly in sluggish data centre infrastructure market
It is something the industry already suspects, but new figures confirm it: the traditional data centre infrastructure market has nosedived over the past two years as private and public cloud roars on.
The numbers (below) come from analysis by Synergy Research, whose latest data shows spending on traditional, non-cloud data centre hardware and software had dropped 18% between the second quarters of 2015 and 2017.
The public cloud market grew 35% during the same period, while the private cloud – or cloud-enabled – grew 16%. The overall market grew by just 5%, to a total now of more than $30 billion.
Leaders in public cloud data centre infrastructure, aside from original design manufacturers (ODMs), are Cisco, Dell EMC and HPE with Cisco on top, while the same three companies lead the private cloud market alongside Microsoft, with Dell EMC out in front.
Each vendor – HPE in servers, Dell EMC for storage, Cisco in networking and Microsoft in server OS – has specific expertise and leadership with different product segments of the market.
“With cloud service revenues continuing to grow by over 40% per year, enterprise SaaS revenue growing by over 30%, and search/social networking revenues growing by over 20%, it is little wonder that this is all pulling through continued strong growth in spending on public cloud infrastructure,” said John Dinsdale, research director and a chief analyst at Synergy.
“While some of this is essentially spend resulting from new services and applications, a lot of the increase also comes at the expense of enterprises investing in their own data centres.
“One outcome is that public cloud build is enabling strong growth in ODMs and white box solutions, so the data centre infrastructure market is becoming ever more competitive,” Dinsdale added.
Showcasing 23 Japanese #DX Companies | @CloudExpo #AI #SmartCities #DigitalTransformation
SYS-CON Events announced today that JETRO will showcase Japan Digital Transformation Pavilion at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) is a non-profit organization that provides business support services to companies expanding to Japan. With the support of JETRO’s dedicated staff, clients can incorporate their business; receive visa, immigration, and HR support; find dedicated office space; identify local government subsidies; get tailored market studies; and more.
[session] Security in a Cloud-First World Is Cloudy | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #Security
Enterprises are moving to the cloud faster than most of us in security expected. CIOs are going from 0 to 100 in cloud adoption and leaving security teams in the dust. Once cloud is part of an enterprise stack, it’s unclear who has responsibility for the protection of applications, services, and data.
When cloud breaches occur, whether active compromise or a publicly accessible database, the blame must fall on both service providers and users.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ben Johnson, Co-Founder and CTO of Obsidian Security, will explore how both groups must do more to make cloud more secure, from leveraging AI to improving APIs, to incorporating cloud into current security programs.
Legacy to Cloud Transformation | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Microservices
The most powerful business benefit for large enterprise organizations migrating to the Cloud is the modernization of their legacy applications.
For example in Canada legacy woes contribute to a perception IT is just there as a maintenance function, not to add strategic value, meaning that they find themselves too busy to innovate.
As Gartner described Canadian CIO’s face a scenario where there is lower buy in to the value of technology and thus a perception it is more of an operational cost not a strategic enabler, the biggest consequence being a lack of investment in upgrades and modernization, vs ‘keeping the lights on’.
Touch Bar Support in Parallels Desktop 13
Throughout the 13 versions of Parallels Desktop® for Mac, we have often brought cool features of macOS® or Apple® hardware to Windows. For example, we made Mac® gestures work in Windows applications in Parallels Desktop 7, and in Parallels Desktop 8 we brought Retina® display support to Windows 7 and Windows 8 (and later to […]
The post Touch Bar Support in Parallels Desktop 13 appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Maximize the Gains from Your APIs Faster | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #DataLake
These days, APIs have become an integral part of the digital transformation journey for all enterprises. Every digital innovation story is connected to APIs . But have you ever pondered over to know what are the source of these APIs?
Let me explain – APIs sources can be varied, internal or external, solving different purposes, but mostly categorized into the following two categories.
Data lakes is a term used to represent disconnected but relevant data that are used by various business units within an enterprise. APIs are created as the easy access points for these siloed data lakes.
[session] Enterprise-Wide Agile Transformation | @CloudExpo @Intellyx #DX #Cloud #Agile
Agile has finally jumped the technology shark, expanding outside the software world. Enterprises are now increasingly adopting Agile practices across their organizations in order to successfully navigate the disruptive waters that threaten to drown them. In our quest for establishing change as a core competency in our organizations, this business-centric notion of Agile is an essential component of Agile Digital Transformation.
In the years since the publication of the Agile Manifesto, the connection between building better software and business agility has been a tenuous one at best. But now that Agile is maturing and Digital Transformation is driving change across enterprises large and small, companies are realizing that their best bet for achieving business agility is to take the best of Agile and apply it across the entire organization.