Wouldn’t it be great if there were tiny robots that kept track of what you were thinking, then helped you implement your plans automatically? Well, if you’re an admin responsible for monitoring infrastructure, they exist. They’re called chatbots, and they are the key to leveraging ChatOps in order to optimize your monitoring and incident management workflow. This post explains what chatbots and ChatOps do and why they’re so valuable for organizations that are adopting DevOps practices.

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Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across supply chain networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation’s open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost and time for product recall as well as advance trade. Are you curious about Blockchain and how it can provide you with new opportunities for innovation and growth?
In her session at 20th Cloud Expo, René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, will discuss the basics of Blockchain, and explore real world use cases across a variety of industries.

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Effective collaboration and communication are highly valued by the DevOps culture, and it’s been like that for a reason. It is an industry where even departments within the same company tend to distrust one another, and where distributed offices full of crucial roles are the norm. Thus, any possible positive improvement in the interaction between people is welcomed, especially for an organization where several moving parts need to collaborate in order to create a product on time and within a budget limitation. You need to master communications if you want to master DevOps. Getting your operations and development teams to work together is the concept on which the success of DevOps hinges. These DevOps tips can help you lay out the basis for a DevOps communication plan that’s sustainable.

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University College London (UCL), ranked consistently as one of the top five universities in the world, is London’s leading multidisciplinary university with more than 10,000 staff , over 26,000 students as well as more than 100 departments, institutes and research centers. With 25 Nobel Prize winners and three Fields medalists among UCL’s alumni and staff, the university has attained a world-class reputation for the quality of its teaching and research across the academic spectrum.

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To more closely examine the variety of ways in which IT departments around the world are integrating cloud services, and the effect hybrid IT has had on their organizations and IT job roles, SolarWinds recently released the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2017: Portrait of a Hybrid Organization. This annual study consists of survey-based research that explores significant trends, developments, and movements related to and directly affecting IT and IT professionals.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that CA Technologies has been named «Platinum Sponsor» of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place in November in Silicon Valley, California.

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Digital transformation continues to dominate boardroom discussions as businesses increasingly realise the organisational and cost efficiencies that digitisation can provide.

The concept reflects technology’s role in both shaping and stimulating strategic decision-making, with its ability to automate and simplify business processes, improve customer relationships, enhance productivity, and reap cost savings. In fact, IDC predicts that by the end of 2017, two-thirds of CEOs of global 2000 enterprises will have digital transformation at the centre of their corporate strategy.

However, it can be a challenge for organisations to implement a digitisation strategy against a background of increasingly complex day-to-day IT operations, which often involve managing both cloud and on-premises IT infrastructure. For many, application programming interfaces (APIs) are an essential component of merging the old and the new IT platforms, capturing vast amounts of data and ultimately achieving their digital transformation strategy.

The most common description of an API is a set of functions and procedures that allow applications to access the features or data of an operating system, application or other service to extend its capability or even create an entirely new feature. APIs are everywhere in our personal lives – whether that’s watching YouTube, posting on Facebook or purchasing something online from Amazon. APIs enable our digital lives.

The potential of APIs to deliver business advantage cannot be underestimated, either. APIs are igniting a cultural shift within many organisations, enabling the integration of diverse IT systems, building more collaborative and self-service IT environments, and deriving revenues from existing IT assets.

Analyst firm Gartner claims APIs can minimise the friction often caused by organisations implementing a ‘bimodal’ IT strategy – where legacy applications run alongside more innovative digital solutions. It says APIs are the layer through which ‘Mode 1’ and ‘Mode 2’ can connect, bridging the gap between core data and functionality, and a more experimental, innovative application.

APIs can also help simplify engagement with customers, while at the same time providing them with instant, valuable data insights into their business.

Here at iland we have prioritised the integration of APIs into our secure cloud platform to provide our customers with a simple way to engage with and manage their virtual machines and applications in the iland cloud.

For example, customers can access a wealth of data, reports and services via a single pane of glass. Using VMware’s vCloud Director multitenant platform as a foundation, iland’s custom console taps into more than twenty third-party services, such as the VMware vCenter solution, the VMware NSX Manager solution, Salesforce, and Veeam Software.

Customers can make API calls directly to iland’s console and cloud infrastructure, and access the enormous amount of performance, capacity, security and workload metadata that is stored there. Via a user-friendly interface, customers can quickly provision services, set role-based security, and analyse granular performance and capacity patterns. Through the console’s transparent billing capabilities, they get insight into expenses and ways to reduce costs, and they can also make feature recommendations via the console to improve the solution.

Everything in the interface can be automated through iland’s API or software development kits (SDKs), so customers can automate routine operational tasks without having to invest heavily in automation up-front. Also, because the iland cloud provides SDK for Java, Python, Erlang, and Golang, most of its API consumers can use their favourite language to jump right in and get started.

APIs also enable organisations to automate routing operational cloud management tasks – it’s popular with training companies who frequently spin up classroom templates, for example. The API makes it easy to spin up 100 classroom labs for a week, then spin down the labs when the class session has concluded.

In addition, customers can use APIs to integrate with their existing management tools. With our technology, for example, users can access monitoring data and integrate it with their existing monitoring or management tools, thereby extending their pre-existing tools into the iland Cloud.

Additionally, organisations are using APIs to add automation within a disaster recovery (DR) environment. For example, a customer can upload a virtual desktop template to iland and then automate the deployment of hundreds of copies of that desktop when a DR event is declared. Some DR customers are also using APIs to manage their DNS changes, so that their public services are migrated from production to DR in a failover event.

Finally, users can leverage APIs in a development or test environment; they can use scripts to simply power down the environment in the evenings or at weekends, and power back on in the morning, thereby saving money.

For cloud service providers, value added resellers (VARs) and system integrators (SIs), it’s becoming clear that true API integration is the new value-add. If companies want to build sustainable, profitable businesses in the new world of digitisation, they should consider developing skills that enable them to leverage the power and flexibility of APIs.

A 2016 report claims 44 percent of IT decision-makers believe building and managing APIs is fundamental to IT’s ability to complete digital transformation projects more quickly, and the same number said API reuse would significantly speed up digital transformation.

As digital transformation projects pick up pace, APIs will play an integral role in managing and optimising hybrid IT environments across both cloud and on-premises which is becoming the new reality in most businesses today. 

Read more: Why 2017 is quickly becoming the year of the API economy

Oracle’s penchant for calling out its rivals in the cloud arena has got something of a response: James Hamilton, distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), has taken issue with a comment made by Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd around the speed of the Redwood giant’s data centres.

Speaking to Fortune, Hurd said in response to a question about its capability and spend on data centres compared to other players in the market: “If I have two times faster computers, I don’t need as many data centres. If I can speed up the database, maybe I need one fourth as many data centres.”

According to the Fortune article, citing analysis from the Wall Street Journal, the three biggest public cloud vendors – AWS, Microsoft, and Google – spent between them approximately $31 billion on data centre capacity. Oracle, by comparison, spent about $1.7 billion.

AWS currently has 42 ‘availability zones’ – data centres, in other words – worldwide across eight regions, including the AWS GovCloud. Each geographic location has at least two zones, with Northern Virginia having the most with five, while new regions are being planned for Paris, Ningxia, and Stockholm.

Oracle’s complete list is more difficult to pin down, although the company said in January it had gone up to 29 geographic regions globally with expansions back in January, with regions in Reston, Virginia, London and Turkey available by mid-2017 and further plans for APAC, North America and the Middle East in 2018. It’s worth noting however that, as per a previous Fortune article, each Oracle region contains three domains, all with their own independent power and cooling, so if one failed the other would keep operating.

Hamilton’s response, on his personal blog earlier this week, disagreed with Hurd’s recent comments. “Of course, I don’t believe that Oracle has, or will ever get, servers 2x faster than the big three cloud providers,” he wrote. “I also would argue that ‘speeding up the database’ isn’t something Oracle is uniquely positioned to offer.

“All major cloud providers have deep database investments but, ignoring that, extraordinary database performance won’t change most of the factors that force successful cloud providers to offer a large multi-national data centre footprint to serve the world,” Hamilton added.

Hamilton also argues that, while the ‘most efficient number of data centres per region is one’ and there are some gains in having one large facility, it’s not wise to put all your eggs in one basket. “One facility will have some very serious and difficult-to-avoid full facility fault modes like flood and, to a lesser extent, fire,” he wrote. “It’s absolutely necessary to have two independent facilities per region and it’s actually much more efficient and easy to manage with three.

“2+1 redundancy is cheaper than 1+1 and, when there are three facilities, a single facility can experience a fault without eliminating all redundancy from the system,” Hamilton added. “Consequently, whenever AWS goes into a new region, it’s usual that three new facilities be opened rather than just one with some racks on different power domains.”

This has been rumbling on for the past several months; or specifically, since September last year, when Oracle launched its next generation data centres at its OpenWorld event, where Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief technology officer, said “Amazon’s lead is over” in infrastructure as a service.

Last month, when Oracle announced a $1.2 billion cloud quarter as part of its latest financial results, Ellison continued the theme. “Let’s say, generation two or Oracle’s infrastructure as [a] service cloud now has the ability to run customers’ largest databases, something that is impossible to do using Amazon Web Services,” he told analysts. “Many Oracle workloads now run 10 times faster in the Oracle cloud versus the Amazon cloud. It also costs less to run Oracle workloads in the Oracle cloud than the Amazon cloud.”

Hamilton’s relationship with AWS goes back further than when he joined the company in 2008; he cited the launch of S3 (Simple Storage Service) in 2006 as ‘game-changing’ and a factor in moving from his then employer.

India is one of the hottest growing economies in the world today, and its cloud storage industry is thriving as well. Almost every major cloud provider has a presence in India due to its robust economy and a burgeoning middle class.

In the light of such a scenario, the mandates released by the government of India is important to understand for all service providers and the companies that depend on it for their storage and computing needs.

One of the most important mandate was that all government data should be stored only within the territorial region of India, but other private and public data can be stored across one or more discrete sites in foreign countries. This mandate is in tune with what other countries have been doing and in many ways, it’s also a sensible move.

The current political environment of India and its relationship with surrounding countries also have a bearing in this decisions. For example, India and its neighbor Pakistan have been in a state of pseudo-war for the last six decades and there have been instances of terrorist attacks and infiltration bids that have made it necessary for India to protect itself.

On the other hand, it has been having a territorial dispute with China for the last few decades and recently, the visit of Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader to the disputed areas have increased tensions with China. In a nutshell, India is surrounded by issues from both its neighbors and this is becoming a cause of worry.

When government data is stored outside its borders, there’s always a possibility for it to fall in the hands of other countries, who can use it to their advantage. To prevent that from happening, the government of India has released this mandate.

Currently, many government departments rely on cloud service providers for a variety of services. This includes both foreign and homegrown companies. There are eleven companies that provide cloud services and they are Microsoft, Hewlett Packard (HP), IBM India, Tata Communication Services (TCS), Sify Technologies, CrtlS Data Centers, Barat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Net Magic IT Services.

These companies handle some of the most complex and high traffic sites in the world such as the Indian Railways, tax submissions, form filings and more. Such high volumes of traffic Surprisingly, top names such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud are missing from this list of companies that service the government departments.

In many ways, these details released by the government throws light on many aspects. Firstly, there’s still a ton of opportunities as cloud adoption is still only in the nascent stages at the government level. Many of the state governments and local corporations have not embraced the benefits of cloud computing. Secondly, this means there’s opportunity for both big and small players in this sphere to have a bigger role in providing services. Thirdly, all this augurs well for the Indian economy as a whole.

The post The Government of India’s New Mandate on Cloud Storage appeared first on Cloud News Daily.