In 2014, Amazon announced a new form of compute called Lambda. We didn’t know it at the time, but this represented a fundamental shift in what we expect from cloud computing. Now, all of the major cloud computing vendors want to take part in this disruptive technology.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, John Jelinek IV, a web developer at Linux Academy, will discuss why major players like AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Bluemix, and Google Cloud Platform are all trying to sidestep VMs and containers with heavy investments in serverless computing, when most of the industry has its eyes on Docker and containers.
Slack’s five-year-long fight against email is about to get more complicated
19 Feb, 2019
After just five years on the market, Slack has become one of the most popular workplace communication apps, garnering over 10 million daily active users in 150 countries around the world. However, executives tell us that the platform plans to expand its business footprint even further in the years to come.
Slack has experienced rapid growth in terms of its users and as a company. About 500,000 organizations use Slack today, as well as 85,000 premium business subscribers – which includes 65 of the Fortune 100. That’s an increase of over 50% in the past year alone.
That hasn’t happened by accident. Slack has been somewhat aggressively asserting its dominance in a market that’s relatively saturated, and it’s clear it has no plans of slowing down. The company sees itself as an all-encompassing workplace communication platform, one that will act as a portal for all the various other services you might use. You won’t need any other application, because Slack will have them all.
That’s the message, and it’s one Slack is acting upon. The company unexpectedly announced the takeover of Astro, a startup developing an email platform with a built-in smart assistant, only to then announce it would be swiftly killing off its email component. Somewhat ironically, it’s clear Slack is gearing up to introduce its own email features despite years of railing against the seemingly outdated form of communication. What’s unclear is whether that’s a separate platform integrated with the Slack app, or features built right into Slack itself.
Freemium Foundation
The company will achieve this omnipotent status, it says, by taking advantage of its «freemium» model and the «virality» it ensures.
Slack can be used for free, with more features available for a monthly per-user fee. With the free version, you search up to 10,000 messages, make one-to-one video calls and install up to 10 apps and integrations – meaning you can get a pretty productive workday out of Slack without paying anything.
Perhaps more importantly, though, the free package also introduces many people to the platform and increases the odds that someone hears about it through word of mouth. Because the freemium model introduces so many people to the platform, there’s not a lot of barriers to entry.
Stuart Templeton, Slack’s Head of UK, explains to Cloud Pro that it’s this accessibility that’s proving to be a critical first step in introducing new users to the platform.
«As a company that goes to market in a ‘freemium’ way, I don’t think you can underestimate the power of virality,» says Templeton. «Our job is to ensure people have heard about [Slack] and are getting success, because that success drives monetisation, but it also drives viral adoption as well.»
Of the 8 million daily active users that Slack now boasts, 3 million of these are paid. These stats are reflected in the UK Slack market, which Templeton heads, with 45% of UK users now paying a monthly subscription, making it the country with the highest monetisation rate in Europe.
Virality
That’s one success Slack can shout about, but it’s not one that can inherently translate to growth. For that, it hopes to rely on the ‘viral nature of positive experiences’ – in other words, happy customers will tell their friends.
«We believe we’ve got an addressable market of around 600 million knowledge workers,» says Templeton. «So, we’ve got an enormous opportunity ahead of us.»
He explains that when successful paying customers share their positive experiences with other Slack users, they encourage others to become paying customers as well. Thus, the interconnectedness of Slack inherently boosts its business footprint.
It’s this idea of positive experiences that has led the company to become heavily invested in frequent software updates, including features like allowing Slack users to manipulate how often and where they receive notifications.
Templeton explains that because ‘Slacking’ is messaging-based, some users might initially feel overwhelmed with notifications. In a nod to Slack’s yet-to-be-confirmed email ambition, he believes that messaging on the platform should be thought of as similar to sending emails – the idea that users shouldn’t feel obligated to instantly reply to messages.
«It’s very important that people know we’ve got focus mode, that you could turn off your notifications by channel, that you can turn them off completely,» explains Templeton. «But, if you want to get a notification, it’s really important that you get it and that you get it on any device.»
Avoiding downtime
Another way Slack strives to improve customer satisfaction is through integrations. According to Templeton, there have been 8.8 million app installations from the Slack directory to date. It currently has about 1,500 apps available for download, and 95% of paid teams are using integrations.
«It can be from website visitors hitting the marketing channel to take friction away from marketing work, or leads to salespeople being rooted to the right place so they can respond to customers faster, or bug notifications coming from ServiceNow or Jira into Slack to make people work faster.»
This makes it easier for people to communicate and ultimately get their work done, Templeton argues, and while this is inherently what Slack, as a collaboration tool, is supposed to do, it is also serving as an important marketing strategy for the company.
Yet, in order for this business model to work, Slack users have to be having a positive experience. The company has been fortunate in that downtime has become a fairly rare occurrence – there has only been one major outage in the past year, although connectivity was restored in a matter of hours.
It’s also managed to avoid any major data breaches, aside from the discovery of a vulnerability in 2017 through its bug bounty programme, and the platform was one of the first to introduce sweeping data protection changes as part of the introduction of GDPR in May 2018.
Melting the Iceberg
Templeton compared Slack’s future to an iceberg. As the company’s customers continue to grow, its integrations and features – its strongest marketing assets – will do the same.
«If there’s a water level on that iceberg, of course below that water line, you’re going to have to go into those business applications to get your jobs done,» he said. «Over time, you’re going to see that water line drop, so that you can surface more and more sophistication into Slack, which will further take the friction out of people’s work.»
Slack prides itself on its ability to offer an unrivalled suite of integrations for its users, yet it’s clear that it has some way to go before the platform becomes ubiquitous in business collaboration. In order to address that hurdle, Slack will need to branch out, starting first with better support for email platforms.
Slack as the ‘email killer’ never quite materialised, but, as the old saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them.
How channel partners are set to drive new cloud computing growth
The worldwide cloud computing infrastructure market had another strong quarter in Q4 2018, as spending grew 46 percent to nearly $23 billion. The total outlay on cloud infrastructure in 2018 exceeded $80 billion – that's up from $55 billion in 2017 according to that latest market study by Canalys.
This investment makes cloud computing services one of the most important sectors in the IT industry, not just by the rate of growth, but also due to its expanding size.
Cloud computing infrastructure market development
Amazon Web Services (AWS) remained the dominant cloud service provider in Q4 2018; its market share of customer spend unchanged at 32 percent. Microsoft Azure grew its share to 16 percent against 14 percent in the same period a year ago. Google Cloud reached 9 percent for the first time, while Alibaba Cloud maintained its 4 percent share.
IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, NTT Communications, Tencent Cloud and OVH rounded out the top 10 cloud service providers.
"Cloud infrastructure services provide the core components needed to support digital transformation initiatives around building new customer experiences, deploying IoT to transform processes, using big data and analytics for better insights, and embedding machine learning and AI for automation,” said Matthew Ball, principal analyst at Canalys.
Market dynamics have changed over the last 12 months, with more businesses opting for multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments to use the strengths of different cloud service providers and deployment models dependent on application and data requirements, compliance, cost and performance.
The role of channel partners in cloud services is growing in importance as a direct result of these trends. In particular, understanding customer requirements, recommending services, deployment and integration, as well as simplifying the billing and management of multiple cloud services.
According to the Canalys assessment, cloud service providers are placing greater emphasis on building channel programs to support the growing network of partners beyond the largest systems integrators, especially as they extend to mid-market and SMB customers.
Canalys expects the share of cloud business supported by or with channel partners to increase in 2019. Cloud service providers must therefore find new ways to improve their own differentiation to partners and raise the maturity of their channel models.
Outlook for cloud channel partner innovation
Canalys expects a greater focus on rewarding partners with specialist expertise around specific cloud deployments, such as SAP HANA, analytics or security; on partners developing unique services on top of cloud; and on those driving customer adoption of cloud services.
Cloud service providers should build trust with their channel partners and not implement initiatives or change terms and conditions that drive more direct sales, according to Canalys. Instead, they must offer superior marketing resources that enable channel partners to differentiate hybrid multi-cloud service capabilities in this very competitive marketplace.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.
Serverless and Container Orchestration | @KubeSUMMIT #CloudNative #AWS #Docker #Kubernetes #Serverless
Here to help unpack insights into the new era of using containers to gain ease with multi-cloud deployments are our panelists: Matt Baldwin, Founder and CEO at StackPointCloud, based in Seattle; Nic Jackson, Developer Advocate at HashiCorp, based in San Francisco, and Reynold Harbin, Director of Product Marketing at DigitalOcean, based in New York. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
CloudBees Makes Kubernetes a Reality for Enterprise DevOps | @KubeSUMMIT @CloudBees #Serverless #Kubernetes
CloudBees,
Inc., the hub of enterprise Jenkins and DevOps, today announced a
major investment in Kubernetes technology across all areas of the
business. CloudBees has made Kubernetes a key part of its long-term
strategy by fully supporting it in CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise,
acquiring key Kubernetes talent and joining the Cloud Native Computing
Foundation. With today’s news, CloudBees offers the industry’s first
Kubernetes-based, enterprise-ready continuous delivery solution,
CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise, delivering multi-cloud portability.
Japan DX Pavilion at @CloudEXPO Silicon Valley | @JETROUSA @IDE_JETRO #Cloud #CIO #IoT #DevOps #Blockchain #SmartCities
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.
51 Useful Docker Tools | @KubeSUMMIT #CloudNative #DevOps #Serverless #AWS #Docker #Kubernetes #Monitoring
Docker is sweeping across startups and enterprises alike, changing the way we build and ship applications. It’s the most prominent and widely known software container platform, and it’s particularly useful for eliminating common challenges when collaborating on code (like the «it works on my machine» phenomenon that most devs know all too well). With Docker, you can run and manage apps side-by-side – in isolated containers – resulting in better compute density. It’s something that many developers don’t think about, but you can even use Docker with ASP.NET.
How to Sponsor @CloudEXPO Silicon Valley | #Cloud #IoT #Blockchain #Serverless #DevOps #Monitoring #Docker #Kubernetes
At CloudEXPO Silicon Valley, June 24-26, 2019, Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with expanded DevOpsSUMMIT and FinTechEXPO programs within the DXWorldEXPO agenda. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.
Healthcare firms go for the hybrid cloud approach with compliance and connectivity key
It continues to be a hybrid cloud-dominated landscape – and according to new research one of the traditionally toughest industries in terms of cloud adoption is now seeing it as a priority.
A report from enterprise cloud provider Nutanix has found that in two years’ time, more than a third (37%) of healthcare organisations polled said they would deploy hybrid cloud. This represents a major increase from less than a fifth (19%) today.
The study, which polled more than 2,300 IT decision makers, including 345 global healthcare organisations, found more than a quarter (28%) of respondents saw security and compliance as the number one factor in choosing where to run workloads. It’s not entirely surprising. All data can be seen as equal, but healthcare is certainly an industry where the data which comes from it is more equal than others. Factor in compliance initiatives, particularly HIPAA, and it’s clear to see how vital the security message is.
Yet another key area is around IT spending. The survey found healthcare organisations were around 40% over budget when it came to public cloud spend, compared to a 35% average for other industries. Organisations polled who currently use public cloud spend around a quarter (26%) of their annual IT budget on it – a number which is expected to rise to 35% in two years.
Healthcare firms see ERP and CRM, analytics, containers and IoT – the latter being an evident one for connected medical devices – as important use cases for public cloud. The average penetration in healthcare is just above the global score. 88% of those polled said they see hybrid cloud to positively impact their businesses – yet skills are a major issue, behind only AI and machine learning as an area where healthcare firms are struggling for talent.
It is certainly an area where the largest vendors have been targeting in recent months. Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced in September a partnership with Accenture and Merck to build a cloud-based informatics research platform aiming to help life sciences organisations explore drug development. Google took the opportunity at healthcare conference HiMSS to launch a new cloud healthcare API, focusing on data types such as HL7, FHIR and DICOM.
Naturally, Nutanix is also in the business of helping healthcare organisations with their cloud migrations. Yet increased maturity across the industry will make for interesting reading. The healthcare IT stack of the future will require different workloads in different areas, with connectivity the key. More than half of those polled said ‘inter-cloud application mobility’ was essential going forward.
“Healthcare organisations especially need the flexibility, ease of management and security that the cloud delivers, and this need will only become more prominent as attacks on systems become more advanced, compliance regulations more stringent, and data storage needs more demanding,” said Chris Kozup, Nutanix SVP of global marketing. “As our findings predict, healthcare organisations are bullish on hybrid cloud growth for their core applications and will continue to see it as the ideal solution as we usher in the next era of healthcare.
“With the cloud giving way to new technologies and tools such as machine learning and automation, we expect to see positive changes leading to better healthcare solutions in the long run,” Kozup added.
Photo by Hush Naidoo on Unsplash
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.
How new cloud agents are increasing confidence in the public cloud
By now, articles espousing migrating to the cloud are a dime a dozen. You can find everything from simple how-tos to complete lift and shift project plans being touted as the best way to migrate. At face value, the advantages and cost savings of moving enterprise applications to the public cloud are easy to grasp. Why wouldn’t your enterprise leverage the scale and power of the cloud, which grows as your business grows, without the huge capital investment of adding to an existing data centre?
Regardless of where a company is in this transition, there are a few cloud myths that always seem to rear their ugly head. One of my personal favourites is, “We don’t need to use security/network tools in the cloud because we’ll never have those issues in the cloud.” To some extent this is correct (I have yet to see a malfunctioning ethernet card that causes issues with a subset of my cloud instances). However, this doesn’t mean a plethora of connectivity snafus and end user application issues have subsided. They’ve simply changed and diagnosing the root cause is now more difficult.
While the cloud simplifies infrastructure provisioning and management, the new challenges that present themselves must be solved before full-scale cloud deployment takes place. Some of the integrated cloud tools can assist, such as flow logs or any of the infrastructure monitoring elements. But all of these elements come at a cost as you expand them wider across your environment.
Part of the answer to this security challenge is to gain full visibility into the data you host in the cloud. Network engineers need to determine how they will gain access, visibility and control of their data before moving enterprise applications to the cloud because, once there, they lose access to the traditional tools used in the data centre to diagnose these problems.
Packet capture to the rescue
In the data centre, there are numerous proven solutions for network security that translate perfectly to the cloud. In the DC, physical choke points are used for various network and security services. This architecture is easily migrated to the cloud, but now one must focus on “logical” choke points. Another key element in DCs and retained in the cloud is to “log everything.” Today’s log and log management capabilities in the cloud outpace on-prem solutions. However, the cloud lags the physical world when it comes to packet capture.
In the data centre, full packet capture and analysis are a key factor in troubleshooting performance issues or forensically identifying security threats. Full packet capture is like having an 80-inch 4k picture-in-picture screen running your favorite programming 24/7. They provide much more detail than application logs or network flow logs. When a security team is trying to replay the exact data which was exfiltrated or identify the delay in an application, these logs don’t suffice. So what should a network security team do?
How can one stay ahead of security breaches or network issues, understanding every single packet matters for the security and performance of your business? To achieve this level of insight in the cloud, you need three things:
- Accurate packet-level history of network activity so the security team can recreate events and look at related packets to identify exactly what happened and when
- 100% packet capture of traffic that will help detect a threat or identify a network performance issue in real time
- A network monitoring tool that copies packets of all sizes and types and provide complete visibility
To acquire, process and distribute cloud packet traffic to your monitoring tools, IT teams are turning to next-generation cloud agents. These highly specialised agents instrument the cloud and enable packet monitoring and analysis in detail.
Because they are cloud-native, modern agents can continuously stream virtual machine network traffic to a network packet collector or analytics tool. With cloud agents, users can acquire packet traffic from any public cloud provider and cloud compute resources.
Cloud agent technology is designed to filter and process the packets; then replicate and distribute the information to the tools and teams that need it. The agent can send traffic to any routable IP address including tool destinations like IDS and DPI security tools, as well as to load balancers that front scalable tool clusters. The agent can even send packet traffic to your on-premises systems via Express Route or Direct Connect.
Lastly, cloud agents will cut down on data transport charges while increasing the life and utility of the tools and teams already in place. These easy-to-deploy, flexible agents literally help connect the apps and resources in the cloud and maximise your access, visibility and control of the data placed there.
The public cloud offers incredible opportunity for your enterprise and with the right formula, you can get full packet capture, analysis and distribution using born-in-the-cloud, for-the-cloud agents. If it’s confidence and security you’re thinking about as you consider how to fully leverage the cloud, consider how cloud agents can serve as the policy driven, cloud networking solution to activate and enable your security and monitoring tools.
Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.