All clouds are not equal. To succeed in a DevOps context, organizations should plan to develop/deploy apps across a choice of on-premise and public clouds simultaneously depending on the business needs. This is where the concept of the Lean Cloud comes in – resting on the idea that you often need to relocate your app modules over their life cycles for both innovation and operational efficiency in the cloud.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at19th Cloud Expo, Valentin (Val) Bercovici, CTO of SolidFire, discussed how to leverage this concept to seize on the creativity and business agility to make it real.

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As the industry matures, cloud computing will increasingly rely on interoperability in order to grow and deliver more value to industry. Assuming this is a fact, what does it mean when eighteen major OpenStack vendors come together to work through the challenges involved with achieving enterprise interoperability?

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It’s a discussion which has rumbled on for years; does a centralised or decentralised model of IT work best? According to new research commissioned by VMware, cloud computing has become key to the decentralisation of IT – and while it may ease the pressure in some areas, security, management and compliance issues remain.

The latest release, titled State of the Cloud, represents the second half of VMware’s study, with the former, The IT Archipelago, being conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the latter by research firm Vanson Bourne.

According to the 3,300 respondents across 20 countries, more than two thirds (69%) said that the management of IT has continued to decentralise over the past three years, while a similar number (65%) of IT-based respondents said they want IT to be more centralised. Three quarters (74%) say IT should be responsible for enabling other lines of business to drive innovation.

On the flip side, more than half (57%) agree that decentralisation has resulted in non-secure IT solutions being purchased, while 56% said it means a lack of regulatory compliance and data protection. Three in five (61%) have concerns that decentralisation results in some duplication of IT spending, while on average businesses are seeing a 5.7% increase on IT spend.

Naturally, VMware has its ready-made solution to the problem in the form of VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture, a product which aims to provide, in the words of the press materials, ‘the world’s most complete and capable hybrid cloud architecture to enable consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility, and governance for all applications, running on premises and off, regardless of the underlying cloud, hardware platform or hypervisor.’ As this publication noted when the move was announced at VMworld back in August, it represented an extension of the company’s hybrid cloud strategy, positioning itself as an enabler for business running on other, more populous, clouds.

The study also looked at regional trends. For EMEA, 57% said decentralisation is making the IT department’s job more challenging, while seven in 10 respondents in Asia Pacific said it makes their organisation more innovative and more responsive to market changes.

As data explodes in quantity, importance and from new sources, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and cloud environments grow with it. Managing data includes protecting it, indexing and classifying it for true, long-term management, compliance and E-Discovery. Commvault can ensure this with a single pane of glass solution – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise.

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Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba has beefed up its cloud operations with the announcement of four new data centres opening by the end of 2016 in Germany, the Middle East, Australia, and Japan.

The German data centre, located in Frankfurt, will be run in partnership with Vodafone, while Sydney will host the Australian data centre with a dedicated team. Japan’s data centre opening will continue Alibaba’s partnership with SoftBank announced earlier this year, while the launch in Dubai is being claimed as the first instance of a global public cloud provider offering services in the Middle East.

“The four new data centres will further expand Alibaba Cloud’s global ecosystem and footprint, allowing us to meet the increasing demand for secure and scalable cloud computing services from businesses and industries worldwide,” said Sicheng Yu, Alibaba VP and general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global in a statement. “The true potential of data-driven digital transformation will be seen through globalisation and the opportunities brought by the new global economy will become a reality.”

Alibaba will join a host of major cloud vendors by putting its flag in Frankfurt as its first European expansion. Of the four largest players, only Google does not have a presence there; Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched in Frankfurt in 2014, with IBM following suit at the beginning of 2015 and Microsoft earlier this year.

In May this year, Alibaba announced it was teaming up with long term partner SoftBank for a cloud partnership in Japan, although it was reported a month later that the Japanese tech company, who had invested in Alibaba since 2000, was selling at least $7.9 billion of shares, reducing its stake in the eCommerce firm to around 28%. Writing for Seeking Alpha in May, Lior Ronen argued that while the partnership might be a ‘tiny development’ for Alibaba now, it would become a ‘significant move’ in the firm’s long term development and competing against AWS.

Figures from Synergy Research, whose analysis into public cloud infrastructure is long standing, puts AWS at 45% of global market share, well ahead of the next three vendors – Microsoft, Google, and IBM – put together. Yet in a note last month the analyst firm singled out Alibaba as a second tier vendor growing “particularly strongly”, although adding it was a “long way” behind Google, which is in turn a sixth of the size of Amazon.

Not surprisingly, Alibaba took the opportunity in the press materials to flex its muscles around its cloud power. During its Global Shopping Festival earlier this month, Alibaba Cloud played a supporting role to help underpin peak traffic of 175,000 transactions per second, the company said. “We want to establish cloud computing as the digital foundation for the new global economy using the opportunities of cloud computing to empower businesses of all sizes across all markets,” said Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud.

The WebRTC Summit New York, to be held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, announces that its Call for Papers is now open.
Topics include all aspects of improving IT delivery by eliminating waste through automated business models leveraging cloud technologies. WebRTC Summit is co-located with 20th International Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo.
WebRTC is the future of browser-to-browser communications, and continues to make inroads into the traditional, difficult, plug-in web communications world.

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Data is the fuel that drives the machine learning algorithmic engines and ultimately provides the business value.
In his session at Cloud Expo, Ed Featherston, a director and senior enterprise architect at Collaborative Consulting, discussed the key considerations around quality, volume, timeliness, and pedigree that must be dealt with in order to properly fuel that engine.

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In IT, we sometimes coin terms for things before we know exactly what they are and how they’ll be used. The resulting terms may capture a common set of aspirations and goals – as “cloud” did broadly for on-demand, self-service, and flexible computing. But such a term can also lump together diverse and even competing practices, technologies, and priorities to the point where important distinctions are glossed over and lost.

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