This past week the Appcore team got the opportunity to attend one of the industry’s leading cloud events, Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, CA. We spent a lot of time interacting with attendees at the exhibit portion of the event. As a software company with a sole commitment to CloudStack, we heard a lot of questions around the debate between CloudStack and OpenStack. “Do you support OpenStack?” “Why do you only support CloudStack?” “Do you plan to integrate OpenStack into your multi-cloud solution?”
We can all agree that OpenStack has done a great job branding their product. That isn’t hard to do with an annual operating budget of $4–5 mm and enterprises such as Red Hat, Dell, HP and Rackspace backing the project. As you can imagine, many enterprise CEOs believe OpenStack is the right direction.
Big Compute Gives Life to New Data By @Nimbix | @CloudExpo [#BigData]
What’s Big Data without Big Compute? Basically just a large collection of unstructured information with little purpose and value. It’s not enough for data just to exist, we must derive value from it through computation – something commonly referred to as analytics.
With traditional data, we simply query it to derive results; all we need is currently stored within the data set itself. For instance, for a customer database with dates of birth, we may just fetch the list of customers who were born after a certain date. This is a simple query, not a computation, and therefore cannot be considered analytics.
‘Get Your Clouds off the Ground’ By @VZCloud | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Cloud services are the newest tool in the arsenal of IT products in the market today. These cloud services integrate process and tools. In order to use these products effectively, organizations must have a good understanding of themselves and their business requirements.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Brian Lewis, Principal Architect at Verizon Cloud, outlined key areas of organizational focus, and how to formalize an actionable plan when migrating applications and internal services to the cloud.
Service Virtualization Case Study
An education portal application developed by a European non-profit organization links students to the higher education institutions where they wish to study, as well as to the government agency that helps them finance their education. When educational institutions want to develop and test transactions involving this portal, they need access to the behavior of the interconnected government agency’s system—however, this system is not readily available for testing.
Service Virtualization provides these institutions continuous, secure access to the government system behavior that is critical for completing thorough end-to-end tests against the portal application.
HP’s Big Data Services in the Cloud | @CloudExpo [#BigData]
A panel of users and experts unpacks the details from Barcelona, and explores the implications of the delivery of cloud-based HP Vertica OnDemand and HP IDOL OnDemand components within the HP Haven OnDemand suite.
‘Signaling Layer for WebRTC’ By @MatrixDotOrg | @ThingsExpo [#WebRTC #IoT]
WebRTC defines no default signaling protocol, causing fragmentation between WebRTC silos. SIP and XMPP provide possibilities, but come with considerable complexity and are not designed for use in a web environment.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of the Matrix.org, discussed how Matrix is a new non-profit Open Source Project that defines both a new HTTP-based standard for VoIP & IM signaling and provides reference implementations.
Mobile Commerce This Holiday Season By @DigDevScott | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
The growing consumerism of our society is always a hot topic this time of year. Discussions about whether or not retailers should open on Thanksgiving to the monitoring of ‘Christmas Creep’ by various blogs and websites can be seen everywhere.
However what gets lost in the shuffle is the fundamental question involved – what do consumers want? And based upon their behavior and the already strong start to the holiday retail season- the answer appears to be they want to start shopping.
According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), more than 40% of holiday shoppers start to buy gifts before Halloween. A recent study shows that Millennials tend to shop earlier in the holiday season than their generational counterparts. Not only are they more accepting of this trend, a small but growing percentage of the people in that age group actually like early holiday merchandise. It helps them spread out their spending, avoid holiday crowds and the stress of last-minute shopping.
Optimize Your Cloud By @SoftLayer | @CloudExpo [#Cloud] @IBMcloud
Performance is the intersection of power, agility, control, and choice. If you value performance, and more specifically consistent performance, you need to look beyond simple virtualized compute. Many factors need to be considered to create a truly performant environment.
In his General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, discussed how to take advantage of a multitude of compute options and platform features to make cloud the cornerstone of your online presence.
Gartner Data Center Conference: Success in the Cloud & Software Defined Technologies
I just returned from the Gartner Data Center conference in Vegas and wanted to convey some of the highlights of the event. This was my first time attending a Gartner conference, and I found it pretty refreshing as they do take an agnostic approach to all of their sessions unlike a typical vendor sponsored event like VMWorld, EMC World, Cisco Live, etc. Most of the sessions I attended were around cloud and software defined technologies. Below, I’ll bullet out what I consider to be highlights from a few of the sessions.
Building Successful Private/Hybrid Clouds –
- Gartner sees the majority of private cloud deployments being unsuccessful. Here are some common reasons for that…
- Focusing on the wrong benefits. It’s not all about cost in $$. In cloud, true ROI is measured in agility vs dollars and cents
- Doing too little. A virtualized environment does not equal a private cloud. You must have automation, self-service, monitoring/management, and metering in place at a minimum.
- Doing too much. Putting applications/workloads in the private cloud that don’t make sense to live there. Not everything is a fit nor can take full advantage of what cloud offers.
- Failure to change operational models. It’s like being trained to drive an 18 wheeler then getting behind the wheel of a Ferrari and wondering why you ran into that tree.
- Failure to change funding model. You must, at a minimum, have a show back mechanism so the business will understand the costs, otherwise they’ll just throw the kitchen sink into the cloud.
- Using the wrong technologies. Make sure you understand the requirements of your cloud and choose the proper vendors/technologies. Incumbents may not necessarily be the right choice in all situations.
- Three common use cases for building out a private cloud include outsourcing commodity functions, renovating infrastructure and operations, and innovation/experimentation…but you have to have a good understanding of each of these to be successful (see above).
- There is a big difference between doing cloud to drive bottom line (cost) savings vs top line (innovation) revenue expansion. Know ‘why’ you are doing cloud!
- On the hybrid front, it is very rare today to see fully automated environments that span private and public as the technology still has some catching up to do. That said, it will be reality within 24 months without a doubt.
- In most situations, only 20-50% of all applications/workloads will (or should) live in the cloud infrastructure (private or public) with the remaining living in traditional frameworks. Again, not everything can benefit from the goodness that cloud can bring.
Open Source Management Tools (Free or Flee) –
- Organizations with fewer than 2500 employees typically look at open source tools to save on cost while larger organizations are interested in competitive advantage and improved security.
- Largest adoption is in the areas of monitoring and server configuration while cloud management platforms (i.e. openstack), networking (i.e. open daylight), and containers (i.e. docker) are gaining momentum.
- When considering one of these tools, very important to look at how active the community is to ensure relevancy of the tool
- Where is open source being used in the enterprise today? Almost half (46%) of deployments are departmental while only about 12% of deployments are considered strategic to the overall organization.
- Best slide I saw at the event which pretty much sums up open source….
If this makes you excited, then maybe open source is for you. If not, then perhaps you should run away!
3 Questions to Ask Your SDN Vendor –
- First, a statistic…organization which fail to properly integrate their virtualization and networking teams will see a 3x longer MTR (mean time to resolution) of issues vs those who do properly integrate the teams
- There are approximately 500 true production SDN deployments in the world today
- The questions to ask…
- How to prevent network congestion caused by dynamic workload placement
- How to connect to bare metal (non-virtualized) servers
- How to integrate management and visibility between the underlay/overlay
- There are numerous vendors in this space, it’s not just VMware and Cisco.
- Like private cloud, you really have to do SDN for the right reasons to be successful.
- Last year at this conference, there were 0 attendees who indicated they had investigated or deployed SDN. This year, 14% of attendees responded positively.
If you’re interested in a deeper discussion around what I heard at the conference, let me know and I’ll be happy to continue to dialogue.
By Chris Ward, CTO. Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisWardTech . You can also download his latest whitepaper on data center transformation.
AWS slashes data transfer costs, simplifies other cloud pricing
Picture credit: iStockPhoto
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has dramatically cut its rates for several types of data transfers, as well as changing how it prices reserved EC2 instances.
In a blog post published yesterday by Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, the firm is reducing its rates for outbound data transfer, along with data transfer to and from CloudFront, AWS’ content delivery network. Data transfer from AWS to CloudFront is now free of charge.
Prices aren’t going down at the same rate across the board, however; outbound data transfer for the first 10 terabytes (TB) a month is being reduced by a quarter in the US and EU regions, and for the next 40 TB it’s at 6%, however in Asia Pacific these numbers see an increase up to 43%.
Customers in the Singapore region see the greatest benefits, seeing a 37% drop for the first 10TB a month, then 43% for the next 40TB, 37% for the following 100TB and 33% for the next 350TB. Prices for the first 10TB a month take effect after AWS’ free offering is consumed.
“As I have noted in the past, we focus on driving down our costs over time,” Barr wrote. “As we do this, we pass the savings along to you.”
Elsewhere, AWS has also simplified its reserved EC2 instances pricing, meaning customers looking to buy EC2 instances now have a choice of three payment options; all upfront, partial upfront and no upfront. Those who pay all upfront get the best effective hourly price when compared to on-demand, which is available for three years, while no upfront is only offered with a one year term.
Whether it’s storage or infrastructure, this is the latest update in cloud providers offering lower prices in the hope you will part with your hard earned cash. Microsoft announced free unlimited OneDrive to its Office 365 customers – meaning you get unlimited storage even if you have the lowest Office deal – while Google announced one terabyte of free Drive storage to every customer who buys a Chromebook in the holiday season.
You can take a look at the full AWS announcements here and here.