For better or worse, big data has irrevocably altered the digital landscape. The explosion in variety, velocity, volume and value of information presents an abundance of previously unimaginable opportunity. But it also creates a number of challenges that need to be successfully navigated.
This reshaped technical world poses the following question to organizations: do you risk presenting, stale, incorrect or erroneous data to your customers? Because, with 2.5 quintillion bytes of data now being created every day, finding a way to manage and harness such potential is a new experience for everyone. And if you don’t take advantage, your competitors will.

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In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Carl J. Levine, Senior Technical Evangelist for NS1, will objectively discuss how DNS is used to solve Digital Transformation challenges in large SaaS applications, CDNs, AdTech platforms, and other demanding use cases. Carl J. Levine is the Senior Technical Evangelist for NS1. A veteran of the Internet Infrastructure space, he has over a decade of experience with startups, networking protocols and Internet infrastructure, combined with the unique ability to iterate use cases, bring understanding to those seeking to explore complicated technical concepts and increase revenue across diverse sales channels.

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Net Neutrality rules were originally enacted to ensure that all Americans would have equal access to a free and open Internet. We can argue about what Net Neutrality rules did and did not accomplish in a moment, but now I want to explore the most sensational of all the post–Net Neutrality fears: the death of the Internet.
If you’re still reading, you know that the FCC voted to repeal Net Neutrality rules (aka the Open Internet) and replace it with the “Restoring Internet Freedom” order. The outcry from the Open Internet camp has been loud, hyperbolic, hypothetical, and mostly based on the fundamental principles of “what if.” For some background and my personal “what if?” musings, read this.

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Just a few years ago, not many predicted cloud computing would reach the heights we’ve seen in 2017 – 79 percent of companies now run workloads in the cloud (split almost evenly between public and private clouds). With the cloud bar constantly being raised, where do we go from here? Here are five predictions for the future of cloud computing in 2018.

True hybrid clouds emerge

Hybrid cloud is all the buzz. The ability for enterprises to have applications run in different infrastructures – public and private clouds and on-premise with common orchestration and management tools – is enticing. Multi-cloud, with different workloads running in different clouds and being managed separately, will become the dominant mode in 2018, while true hybrid clouds will start to emerge.

There are already key technology developments and partnerships forming to make this a reality. For example, Azure and Azure Stack from Microsoft provide a uniform set of infrastructure and API capabilities across public and private clouds; the partnership between VMware and AWS; and the teaming up of Cisco and Google. These mashups will create hybrid clouds that truly blend environments and further improve operational agility, efficiency and scale.

Kubernetes dominates container orchestration

The fight for container orchestration dominance has been one of the cloud’s main events for roughly the past two years. The three-way battle between Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos has been fierce.

Come 2018, however, Kubernetes is poised to take the container orchestration title belt and also become increasingly mainstream with mission critical, scalable production deployments. Its rich set of contributors, rapid development of capabilities and support across many disparate platforms make it a clear victor.

And it has the help of some very powerful friends: Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have launched a managed Kubernetes services. IBM has announced its private cloud will support Kubernetes in its Bluemix public cloud; AWS is lining up behind it as well and has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a platinum member

All this combined pushes Kubernetes into more mainstream deployments with continued growth in large production workloads next year.

Analytics get an AI upgrade

AI is everywhere. It’s in our homes with Amazon Echo. And in 2018, it’ll be embedded more tightly in IT analytics systems making IT proactive versus reactive.

Through predictive analytics, IT and application owners will receive actionable information and recommendations. Add to that the ability to automate their response, and the power of AI becomes more relevant.

Analytics systems will have insight into the behaviour of the infrastructure, apps and clients. It will recognise anomalous performance or security behaviour and when an app or server is going to fail. Once that behaviour is noticed, automation can kick in to remediate the potential problem, i.e. firing up another server or load balancing the app. It’s like your infrastructure can say “Alexa, spin up another server.”

Serverless computing adoption spreads

One of the benefits of cloud is ease of use for spinning up additional resources and its pay by use consumption model. Nowhere is that more evident than in serverless computing. Previously, the unit for additional compute resource was an instance or VM. Now a “function” has become an even smaller unit of “use.” Putting the onus of managing and scaling up resources on demand on the cloud provider is cost-efficient and takes the heavy lifting off IT. And paying based on a consumption model makes it gentler on already strained budgets.

Currently available in the public cloud, next year will see serverless computing start to appear in private cloud deployments as well. While it won’t become mainstream, wider adoption will happen in the short term.

Serverless computing, coupled with the continue maturation of cloud, puts pressure on server and hardware vendors to transform their business models to maintain relevance in the new virtual, elastic and automated cloud-powered world.

Custom cloud instances proliferate

As cloud adoption grows, compute instance types will become further segmented and optimised for specific use cases; enabling improved performance and new use cases. Next year will see growth in the number of application-specific instance types within clouds – from big data and AI-optimised instances to high network performance and very large memory types. Custom optimised applications that take advantage of these capabilities will start appearing.

Bonus prediction: Kiss cloud security concerns goodbye

Security is noticeably absent from our list of cloud predictions. Why? Simple. It’s time to move on.

Yes, security is always important, and even more so in the cloud. But it’s no longer the hindrance it was when cloud was early stages. Over the years, cloud and services available on the cloud have matured. There is more security built in. More tools are available from vendors. Compliance in the cloud has caught up. As with all IT, it’s imperative to think about security capabilities, policies and governance when deploying clouds or making a major change to your infrastructure, but in 2018 cloud will no longer be considered not secure by default.

In the cloud world, things move swiftly. That’s just a snapshot of what we think will be the major trends of 2018. There will certainly be more big headlines in cloud as more people find innovative ways to consume it.

(c)iStock.com/MarkRubens

The upcoming holiday season certainly seems to have brought some festive cloudy cheer in one corner of the world, with two Australian cloud and data centre companies being acquired by Oracle and Equinix respectively.

Aconex, a Melbourne-based cloud software provider which aims to manage teams in the construction industry, has been bought by Oracle for $1.2 billion US (£899m) to create ‘the world’s most comprehensive cloud offering for managing all aspects of construction projects’, as Oracle puts it.

The Redwood giant already has offerings in this space under the umbrella of the Oracle Construction and Engineering Cloud. Oracle acquired Primavera, a project portfolio management (PPM) software provider, in 2008, with the company’s applications being used in a wide range of industries, including construction, while added to this mix last year was Textura, acquired by Oracle for $663m.

Leigh Jasper, Aconex founder and CEO, said the Aconex and Oracle businesses were ‘a great, natural fit and highly complementary in terms of vision, product, people and geography.’ “With the addition of Aconex, we significantly advance our vision of offering the most comprehensive cloud-based project management solution for this $14 trillion industry,” said Mike Sicilia, SVP and GM of Oracle’s construction and engineering global business unit.

A bit further up, in Sydney, data centre provider Metronode is to be acquired by Equinix for $1.035 billion AUD (£594m). The company has 10 data centres in seven locations across Australia, from Adelaide, to Brisbane, Canberra and Illawarra, with two in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.

Equinix already has a presence in the latter two, with the company saying the acquisition will ‘further strengthen the leadership position of Equinix in the Asia-Pacific region and support its ongoing global expansion.’ The deal will bring the total number of global Equinix sites to 52 across five continents.

“With this acquisition, companies operating across Australia will have access to the largest network of highly interconnected data centres in the world,” said David Yuile, Metronode CEO. “Metronode is excited to become part of an industry-leading company and further help our customers to build their digital infrastructure and drive competitive advantage in the digital age.”

According to the most recent study from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), Australia dropped a place to be the fourth most cloud ready Asia Pacific nation. The country scored well in terms of privacy, broadband connectivity, freedom of information and intellectual property protection, but struggled in terms of international connectivity. Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand had overtaken Australia for data centre risk.

Both deals are expected to close in the first half of 2018. You can find out more about the Oracle/Aconex deal here and the Equinix/Metronode acquisition here.

The rule of thumb for network security today is that there is no perimeter anymore. An outsider can easily become an insider once perimeter security is breached. Every day, attackers find new ways to breach enterprise perimeter security through ransomware, malware or phishing through social engineering.
This is not to suggest that all is lost. Rather, organizations can defeat cybercriminals, in part, by better managing what has already been put in place. As an example of what can go wrong if that doesn’t happen, consider the following story.

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Gemini is Yahoo’s native and search advertising platform. To ensure the quality of a complex distributed system that spans multiple products and components and across various desktop websites and mobile app and web experiences – both Yahoo owned and operated and third-party syndication (supply), with complex interaction with more than a billion users and numerous advertisers globally (demand) – it becomes imperative to automate a set of end-to-end tests 24×7 to detect bugs and regression.
In their session at 21st Cloud Expo, Jenny Hung, E2E Engineer Manager at Yahoo Gemini, Haoran Zhao, Software Engineer at Oath Gemini, and Lin Zhang, Software Engineer at Oath (Yahoo), described the technical challenges and the principles we followed to build a reliable and scalable test automation infrastructure across desktops, mobile apps, and mobile web platforms on the cloud. They also shared some best practices for advanced automated testing of web and mobile applications.

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«MobiDev is a software development company and we do complex, custom software development for everybody from entrepreneurs to large enterprises,» explained Alan Winters, U.S. Head of Business Development at MobiDev, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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Vulnerability management is vital for large companies that need to secure containers across thousands of hosts, but many struggle to understand how exposed they are when they discover a new high security vulnerability. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, John Morello, CTO of Twistlock, addressed this pressing concern by introducing the concept of the “Vulnerability Risk Tree API,” which brings all the data together in a simple REST endpoint, allowing companies to easily grasp the severity of the vulnerability. He provided attendees with actionable advice related to understanding and acting on exposure due to new high severity vulnerabilities.

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