According to this year’s Internet Trends Report, the cloud is steadily expanding and companies are spending more on these services. Businesses are opting to use these third-party services rather than build their own internal tool because they are often easier and less expensive to deploy. There’s no need to assign IT resources and purchase necessary hardware to deploy a new software solution, so the business unit can sign a contract and start using a solution almost immediately.
This interactive map from Automic helps make the continuous delivery landscape clearer
Confused about the extent of the DevOps landscape? Fear not – a new map issued by business automation software provider categorises more than 150 products to help organisations compose a ‘coherent continuous delivery (CD) toolchain’.
The interactive map, as becomes clear on first glance, takes its cue from various subway systems around the world, which makes for a clearer look than the classic marketing technology landscape supergraphic, the most recent of which came in at a mind-boggling 5,381 solutions.
From cloud infrastructure and platform as a service, to NoSQL database providers, to messaging and collaboration, 19 ‘lines’ are provided, with a link to their website and a short description of what they do.
If the product is one Automic supports, such as VMware’s vCloud Air, there is a link to the marketplace page – you didn’t think this was truly altruistic, did you? – but as the company explains, there is a need to simply what is an ever-expanding market.
“Making sense of the huge variety and number of tools available for the modern software development process can be confusing,” said Chris Boorman, CMO of Automic in a statement. “The Continuous Delivery Map clarifies the role each of these tools plays within a CD context, and demonstrates how orchestration, which is at the heart of this guide, is critical to a successful modern software delivery practice.”
Plenty of research has reached this publication around how the benefits of DevOps are alluring to organisations, but not being fully acted upon. ‘More of the same’ was the headline of a piece back in March, when automation software provider Quali trawled around AWS re:Invent, Cisco Live, VMWorld, and more to discuss strategy with delegates. More than half (54%) of those polled said they had no access to self-service infrastructure, with the most cited tools being Jenkins, on the continuous integration line, and Docker, on the ‘containerology’ line.
Automic was acquired by CA Technologies in December last year for €600 million, with the latter’s various products, from Flowdock, to TDM, to Agile Central, pervading the map.
You can explore and take a look at the map here.
What Is Java #DevOps? | @DevOpsSummit #CloudNative #Serverless #AI #DX
DevOps sees the coming together of practices, philosophies, and tools that allow you to create services and applications very quickly. This means that you can improve on your apps and evolve them at a much faster rate than those developers who are using traditional software development processes. We’ve talked about DevOps, in general, a great deal, but today, we’re going to dig a little deeper and take a look at Java DevOps specifically.
Demystifying Machine Learning | @CloudExpo #AI #ML #Analytics
Are machines really intelligent? Learn the answer and how it can affect your business. It’s machine-learning 101 for curious business leaders out there.
Autonomous cars taking us on our favorite and most efficient routes, virtual assistants serving up the exact data a doctor needs to diagnose an illness or that an engineer needs to identify a faulty part, customer support bots that are always available to answer your questions and book your appointments accurately and quickly. All of these use-cases are either here or will be soon, and they all rely on Machine Learning to be successful. But how do the machines learn? There’s a lot of market confusion out there, and it’s important to take a step back and understand what we’re talking about and why.
Mark Troester
?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedpress.me&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+progress-blogs
When “IoC” Meets “SoC” | @DevOpsSummit @Cavirin #DevOps #DevSecOps
Not very long ago, in my IT consulting career, I used to be responsible for the launch of mission-critical applications that help enterprises leap into the cutting edge of the digital business revolution. There were a lot of hard skills required for leading such a mission that involved getting the system architecture and software design right early, mentoring and managing the engineering resources, and tracking the progress to the satisfaction of the business analysts who put together the requirements and the stakeholders who funded the projects. Those skills, while hard, were largely deterministic and manageable vs another set of skills required to ensure that the built applications come alive in production environments, and run reliably and securely thereafter. This other set of skills often pit the application developers against the infrastructure administrators and InfoSec professionals.
Is Wall Street Moving to Cloud?
The benefits of cloud are there for everyone to see. Right from improving productivity to reducing costs, cloud has been providing a ton of advantages to companies. With so many benefits, it’s only right that companies want to make the most of them. Wall Street is no exception to this rule.
Many large financial institutions that are a part of Wall Street have started thinking of using the cloud to get a competitive advantage in a fairly tough market. They want to make the most of cloud to drive innovation and to stand out as a preferred institution among customers.
Some companies like CapitalOne have been using cloud services for some time now, while others like JP Morgan and ANZ Bank have announced that they will be moving to a cloud platform fairly soon. Other smaller companies are likely to follow suit too.
Reliable sources confirm that these financial institutions are considering the top three players, namely, Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft, for this shift to the cloud. Long years of effort in laying an extensive and strong infrastructure is touted to be the reason to consider only these three providers.
All the three companies have an expansive network and have all the necessary tools and services in place to cater to Wall Street. Using this infrastructure, JP Morgan and other financial institutions are improve their technical capabilities and in the process, drive up efficiency and bring down costs.
In many ways, it’s a surprise that the larger financial institutions haven’t turned to the cloud yet. Small organizations like credit unions moved their operations to the cloud a few years ago, but the larger organizations have started this move just now.
Why?
Security was one of the major concerns that held back these companies from making a shift because even the smallest of breaches can prove to be an expensive affair. But now, cloud security has improved and there’s more confidence in the cloud than ever before.
Also, the fact that hackers were able to breach into the so-called “secure” systems of these companies led them to reconsider their choices, and soon they found that cloud is a tenable option. They not only get other benefits such as improved productivity and lesser costs, but also the security is at least on par with what they have, if not better.
To top it, regulators are also going easy on the idea of moving data to the cloud because they also understand that this is the future and it’s only right for banks to make this transition too.
This is why asset managers, insurance companies and large banks are running different tests, talking to vendors and even modifying their existing policies to ensure that their transition to the cloud is smooth and easy.
Overall, wall street is moving to the cloud soon and it won’t be long before customers can enjoy more services while banks stand to gain financially and from an operational standpoint through this transition.
The post Is Wall Street Moving to Cloud? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
British Medical Journal expands to China with help of Alibaba Cloud and Datapipe
More and more companies are trying to get a foothold in China as part of their international expansion – and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) is one, having worked with managed cloud services provider Datapipe to enter the Chinese market using Alibaba Cloud.
Datapipe has been working with Alibaba as a global managed service provider of its cloud arm since 2016, and was also named the leading Asia Pacific managed cloud company by Frost & Sullivan. For BMJ, the concept was straightforward, needing a partner on the ground in China with knowledge of the market to take advantage of Alibaba’s local public cloud infrastructure.
“We have now fully realised the strategy that we first mapped out two years ago, when we started our cloud journey,” said Alex Hooper, BMJ head of operations. “In the first year, we were able to fully virtualise our infrastructure using Datapipe’s private cloud, and in the process, move to a new, agile way of working. In this second year, we have embraced public cloud and taken our services over to China.”
This is not the BMJ’s first dalliance with Datapipe; the company had previously used the managed service provider to help refresh its legacy technology stack, moving from one release a month on average to up to four times a day, with Sharon Cooper, chief digital officer, describing the working relationships between dev, ops, test and business needs as ‘unrecognisable’ from before.
As regular readers of this publication will be aware, Alibaba is making concerted cloud strides. Last month, with the publication of its financial results, CEO Daniel Zhang said its cloud business “continues to enjoy high growth at scale” and the recent passing of the one million customer mark is “merely a starting point.”
Writing for this publication last month, Alibaba Cloud noted the importance of not falling into various traps when moving into the Chinese market. “China is a highly competitive market, and consumers expect a smooth and secure online experience,” the company wrote. “The flexibility, scalability and security offered by the cloud provides an optimal solution to boost your website in China’s competitive online space.”
You can find out more about Datapipe’s integration with Alibaba Cloud here.
Cloud research roundup: Big numbers from the big four
Recent research reports from around the industry saw a range of interesting cloud market results and predictions emerge, underlining the real world momentum behind the cloud story. The big four – AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google – dominate the market and their fortunes drive much of the analysis. But what’s also clear is that there’s still plenty of room for even more growth both domestically and internationally.
Public cloud – a thriving oligopoly
In the cloud infrastructure services (public cloud) market, the big four continue to prosper, according to market research firm, Synergy.
In a sector worth $11bn a quarter globally, AWS remains well out in front of its rivals, commanding a bigger market share than Microsoft, IBM and Google combined.
According to Synergy, market share among these four was largely unchanged in the last four quarters, with the exception of Microsoft who saw an increase of 3%. And despite being a dynamic industry, it’s a similar trend to two years ago when AWS held a similarly dominant position.
Neither Google or Microsoft break out the figures for their respective public cloud offerings, but Amazon does specify numbers for AWS. In their 2017 Q2 figures recently released, AWS posted a $916m profit in the three months ending in June, against revenues of $4.1bn and a 58% sales growth.
Let’s give this some context – Alphabet’s entire Q1 2017 revenue (of which Google Cloud is a non-specific part) was $24.75bn. So, while public cloud is big money, there’s almost certainly plenty more to be made, with Synergy expecting overall growth rates of over 40% per year going forward.
A booming global market
Global spending on public cloud services will reach $226bn by 2021, according to IDC.
These are huge numbers, but to put them in perspective, Apple, the most profitable company in the world, brought in revenues of $233bn, according to Forbes 2016 rankings. Microsoft, a massive worldwide success story and employer of nearly 100,000 people, generated $85.3bn in the same year, a figure just ahead of the entire revenue of the worldwide information security market.
The US will account for 60% of worldwide public cloud revenues ($163bn in 2021). The industry’s leading the charge are professional services (sector growing at 21.5% pa), media (21%), retail and telecoms (both 20.9% annual growth).
IDC say that much of the spending growth in these industries is coming from “new projects and initiatives from functional areas like customer service and sales”.
But the UK lags behind on cloud adoption… maybe
Research by Fuze suggests only 10% of UK businesses have successfully managed to move their entire organisation to the cloud. That compares to 45% of US organisations, who have completed their cloud migration.
On the one hand, this perspective assumes that an ‘all in’ cloud strategy is the only desirable end game. But earlier in the year, the Cloud Industry Forum found that the overall cloud adoption rate in the UK stood at 88%, but the vast majority of companies would follow a hybrid strategy for some time to come.
Allure of cloud causes skill shortages in ‘traditional’ IT roles
The momentum behind the cloud market also appears to be hovering up talent and skills from more traditional on-premises roles, according to 451 Research. More than 65% of organisations in the survey found recruiting for roles across traditional servers and converged infrastructure to be “increasingly difficult”.
451 expect the rise of cloud migration to further diminish the pool of people available for roles dedicated to server administration. They report that, “69.7% of respondents said that current candidates lack skills and experience [for on-premises roles]; plus a lack of candidates by region and high salaries point to a shrinking set of available talent.”
All of this research confirms what we already know: the cloud market is gargantuan and the potential for expansion is constantly growing. As organisations continually look to adopt increase the rate of cloud adoption, the vendor choices are small, but as everyone will tell you the rewards can be endless.
The Future of Automation | @DevOpsSummit #AI #ML #DX #DevOps #DigitalTransformation
We’ve all read the dystopian fiction, watched those apocalyptic movies and heard a myriad of prophetic warnings heralding our obsolescence. Surely now we’re just a couple of years from flipping the switch on a Skynet of our own making and condemning mankind to the annals of history.
Actually, we’re not entirely sure what the future holds, but it’s probably not fire and brimstone. For detractors and naysayers of technology, could there be a more fitting image than Terminator 2’s opening shot? A hulking, skeletal, humanoid machine crushing a human skull beneath its foot. Listening to ‘techno-skeptics’ can sure make it feel as though that’s the end which inevitably awaits us. If we continue down our current path of imbuing machines with increasing levels of autonomy, learning abilities and artificial intelligence, eventually we’ll inadvertently construct our own obsolescence – if not destruction! We must be careful, unless we want to find ourselves subjugated by a machine army…
Tara Seppa, Microsoft: How to Leverage Digital Disruption