The “Digital Era” is forcing us to engage with new methods to build, operate and maintain applications. This transformation also implies an evolution to more and more intelligent applications to better engage with the customers, while creating significant market differentiators.
In both cases, the cloud has become a key enabler to embrace this digital revolution. So, moving to the cloud is no longer the question; the new questions are HOW and WHEN. To make this equation even more complex, most of the time we are dealing with complex portfolios, many including hundreds of legacy applications.

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Networks have become large, complex entities that are increasingly difficult to manage and control. Security, audit, risk and compliance professionals know that their organizations rely on them for effective risk management, control and governance processes that are essential to the safety of their network environment. Yet compliance and security are more challenging than ever before as additional layers are added to this environment.
One of the challenges lies in the fact that there is an ongoing, huge access gap in network security and compliance – and it has been residing within the environment for more than 20 years. This tool, known as the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, grants privileged access to all types of production environments.

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Some journey to cloud on a mission, others, a deadline. Change management is useful when migrating to public, private or hybrid cloud environments in either case. For most, stakeholder engagement peaks during the planning and post migration phases of a project.
Legacy engagements are fairly direct: projects follow a linear progression of activities (the “waterfall” approach) – change managers and application coders work from the same functional and technical requirements. Enablement and development mirror one another, progressing from proof-of-concept planning to final product delivery. Exceptions, if any, become change requests.

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As you move to the cloud, your network should be efficient, secure, and easy to manage. An enterprise adopting a hybrid or public cloud needs systems and tools that provide:
Agility: ability to deliver applications and services faster, even in complex hybrid environments
Easier manageability: enable reliable connectivity with complete oversight as the data center network evolves
Greater efficiency: eliminate wasted effort while reducing errors and optimize asset utilization
Security: implement always-vigilant DNS security

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You know you need the cloud, but you’re hesitant to simply dump everything at Amazon since you know that not all workloads are suitable for cloud. You know that you want the kind of ease of use and scalability that you get with public cloud, but your applications are architected in a way that makes the public cloud a non-starter. You’re looking at private cloud solutions based on hyperconverged infrastructure, but you’re concerned with the limits inherent in those technologies.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the availability of C5 instances, aimed at more compute-intensive workloads for the EC2 cloud.

The C5 instances – three from the sharp end in Amazon’s compute class, behind G2, P2 and F1 – were introduced as the newest iteration back in November last year at the company’s Re:Invent show. The C5 promises 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors and double the vCPU and memory capacity – up to 72 vCPUs and 144 gibibytes of memory – when compared with previous C4 instances.

Applications the C5 instances are better equipped to handle include batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, video encoding, and multiplayer gaming. The instances will be available in three regions; US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland), with support for additional regions in the pipeline.

Alongside this, AWS dropped a few customer names into the mix. One customer is particularly well-known – having been analysed by this publication on several occasions – and is arguably the poster child for AWS itself. Netflix said it saw up to a 140% performance improvement in industry standard CPU benchmarks compared with C4.

For the high performance computing side, Alces Flight offers researchers on demand HPC clusters, or ‘self-service supercomputers’ in minutes. The company, a member of the AWS Marketplace, said C5 had a ‘direct benefit’ for its user base ‘on both price and performance dimensions.’

The press materials also made mention of a new hypervisor which AWS is rolling out for C5 instances to ‘allow applications to use practically all of the compute and memory resources of a server, delivering reduced cost and even better performance.’

According to this page, accessed by CloudTech earlier today (screenshot), and first spotted by The Register, the new hypervisor for Amazon EC2 “is built on core Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology, but does not include general purpose operating system components.”

KVM’s best known user in this sphere is Google. In January this year, the search giant issued a blog post advocating seven methods they use to security harden the KVM hypervisor. As Ariel Maislos, CEO of Stratoscale, pointed out in this publication last year, AWS has long been partnered with Xen for its hypervisor needs.

The FAQ page added that all new instance types will ‘eventually’ use the new EC2 hypervisor, but for now some new instance types will use Xen ‘depending on the requirements of the platform.’ Yet, as The Register reports, references to KVM have been disappearing from the company’s pages.

The cloud-first enterprise is gaining in prominence, through multi-cloud strategies, losing data centres, and adopting cloud-native infrastructures.

That is the key finding from a new report released by hybrid cloud IT operations management provider OpsRamp. The study, which polled IT leaders in companies with 500 or more employees, also found that public cloud services are grabbing a bigger share of IT budgets, and that security – again – is the primary reason for reticent companies sitting it out.

While the areas the paper covers have been commonly reported in this publication, it is interesting to see the trends all in one place. More than half of respondents say they have been using public cloud for more than three years, with 7% saying they have done for more than seven. Despite this, only 29% of those polled said their level of cloud adoption was ‘mature’, compared with 50% for ‘developing’ and 21% for ‘emerging’.

When it came to benefits of cloud-native infrastructure, scalability and flexibility, cited by 62% of those polled, came out on top, ahead of reduced capital investments (47%) and consumption-based pricing models (47%). More than half (53%) added that 30% to 50% of IT budgets would be cloud-based in the near future, while an additional 27% said more than half their IT budget would be.

“The survey results are consistent with what we’re hearing from customers and partners,” said Varma Kunaparaju, OpsRamp co-founder and CEO. “Cloud is becoming a bigger part of their IT portfolio, they’re likely to use more than one cloud platform, and oversight and management of cloud services is paramount.

“We expect these trends to accelerate over time, as the cost, scalability and flexibility advantages of cloud services become even more obvious.”

As far back as 2015, this publication wrote that ‘multi-cloud was the new holy grail of cloud computing’. The survey results showed that this was essentially a reality today; three quarters of respondents said they expect to work with different cloud providers for their business needs, with Microsoft Azure – not for the first time – the most popular, ahead of Amazon Web Services and Google.

You can read the full report here.