Companies are migrating infrastructure to the cloud in order to achieve advantages and agility that they need to remain competitive. However, they may have difficulty achieving one extremely important benefit of cloud computing as they attempt to run their MySQL databases in the cloud – scalability in true utility fashion. Similar to the power utilities we are all familiar with, this entails the ability to get what you need, when you need it and pay for only what you use, even during peak demand.

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When it comes to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), some organisations struggle between the choice of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. They’re both solid IaaS platforms that give organisations access to vast computing resources around the world, but deciding which one is best for you depends on many factors.

At a quick glance, both offerings might look similar on paper, but there are key differences between them that you might not discover until you try them out or talk to someone who has. Luckily, IT pro users of both platforms have been vocal about their preferences and the pros and cons of each.

What sets AWS and Azure apart?

While AWS was the first major player in the cloud computing game, IT pros generally agree Azure has largely closed the gap. However, it’s still a commonly-held belief that AWS maintains a lead for organisations that need to run “web scale” applications that support a lot of users. Famously, popular services such as Netflix and Airbnb use AWS EC2 to provide their services to their customers across the globe.

On the other hand, many IT pros say Azure is easier to use out-of-the-box and more user-friendly, especially for Windows admins in smaller organisations that use cloud servers to replace their local machines and don’t need to host highly scalable apps. And the ease of setup and integration of Azure virtual machines with other Microsoft products makes the transition to cloud infrastructure smoother for many.

That said, both providers continually improve their offerings, adding new capabilities and lowering prices all the time, so comparing one versus the other is somewhat of a moving target. So to get the latest on AWS vs Azure, we talked to IT professionals in Spiceworks, who ultimately set up and manage IaaS cloud services, to share the merits of each platform and their opinions on the Microsoft and Amazon IaaS offerings. Here’s what they had to say.

Cost: Both providers offer a variety of differently-sized instances at relatively comparable price points to fit the needs of organisations of all sizes. Azure instances each include a fixed amount of storage, but with AWS, you’ll need to purchase storage separately at an additional cost. That said, many IT pros agree that AWS storage is highly customisable to their needs which is a plus, but the pricing is not as straightforward as Azure.

Costs on both platforms vary depending on the performance, capacity, amount of data you need to transfer, and whether you need advanced features such as load balancing and auto-scaling. How often you use your cloud instances also figures into cost, with one big pricing difference between Azure and AWS being that Microsoft charges for usage by rounding up to the nearest minute, while Amazon rounds up to the nearest hour.

Support Plans: Microsoft and Amazon both offer different levels of tech support depending on how quickly you need issues resolved and if you need a dedicated account manager or tech support for integrations with third-party plugins if something goes wrong. One big difference is that Azure support plans are billed using a flat monthly fee, but AWS support fees vary on a sliding scale tied to monthly usage, so support costs can grow quickly if you are a very heavy user.

Reliability and uptime: Both Azure and AWS strive for greater than 99.95% service availability, with each provider giving credit back to customers if uptime drops below that figure. While both services have been reliable, both have experienced periodic outages that affected popular services like Netflix, Office 365, and more.

Setup and user-friendliness: Azure is known for being convenient for Windows admins because they don’t have to learn a new platform. Azure also makes it simple to integrate on-premises Windows servers with cloud instances to create a hybrid cloud environment. Additionally, Azure instances work seamlessly with Microsoft cloud services such as Azure Active Directory and Azure SQL Database.

On the other hand, AWS is known for providing a more highly configurable, feature-rich offering that has a bit of an initial learning curve. However, once you learn the platform, IT pros agree that AWS offers a lot of power, flexibility, and room for customisation with support for a huge number of third party integrations. Additionally, if you aren’t a heavy Windows Server user, AWS is known for being a great platform for hosting Linux instances.

Making the choice between AWS and Azure

Decidingwhich cloud provider is right for you all comes down to your needs. Perhaps the best way to figure out which one you prefer is to start a free trial with both providers to experience what each platform is like hands-on.

And if the cost of using IaaS is a big concern, you can use cloud calculators online that can help estimate how much you’ll spend on IaaS each month so you know what you’re getting into. Additionally, cloud cost monitoring tools can help track your actual IaaS usage and alert you if cloud costs are getting out of control so you can better regulate your monthly spending.

In the end, IT professionals generally agree that Azure or AWS are both great choices for IaaS providers. Now it’s up to you to figure out which works best for your organisation.

Editor’s note: The verdicts were an aggregate of 160 IT professionals’ opinions on Azure and AWS taken from product reviews within Spiceworks.

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A new survey from memory and storage providers Crucial argues almost half (47%) of IT professionals are planning to upgrade their server memory in the next 12 months as virtualisation workloads bite.

Given who is providing the survey data, the results aren’t exactly a surprise. But some of the statistics are illuminating.

Taking its findings from 350 IT decision makers in the US and central Europe, on average IT professionals are running 29 virtual machines per physical server. Yet – and here’s the rub – if they needed to run more virtual machines, two thirds (66%0 would need to add more memory, compared to 42% who would need more servers.

Almost three quarters (73%) of IT managers are using at least 64 gigabytes for big data and analytics applications in their organisation, the most of anyone surveyed. More than half said similarly for databases (58%), content hosting (55%), email (55%), file sharing (51%), and content creation (50%). Going up to the next step of 128GB, the trends are broadly the same. Again, big data and analytics topped the list (44%), ahead of email (33%), databases (32%), and file sharing (31%).

Around half (48%) of respondents said unexpected issues, such as unpredictable workload demands or rapid user base growth, is one of the biggest challenges they face when dealing with server workload constraints.

Michael Moreland, worldwide product manager at Crucial, argues the need for future-proofing when it comes to workloads. “It’s possible for IT professionals to get the most out of their IT budget by identifying high growth, business critical applications and then installing future-proofed 32GB modules to deliver optimal quality of server and scalability at a typically lower price than that of multiple lower-density modules,” he said.

“By installing enough memory, IT professionals can deliver optimal quality of service today and for the foreseeable future. Server memory is a long-term investment that’s never just about the here and now, it’s about predicting future workloads,” he added.

If you want to find out more, Crucial has put together an infographic around the issues surrounding memory and virtualised apps, which can be found here.

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Cloud services platform provider Interoute has launched a new virtual data centre zone in Stockholm, following the launch of similar zones in Istanbul and Singapore earlier this year.

The move represents the “growing regional demand for fast local cloud services” in the Nordics, with Interoute already employing 100 workers in the region with offices in Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm.

One Interoute customer looking to reap the benefits of better and quicker access to data is Stockholm-based medial application services provider MedSciNet. Andrius Preibys, MedSciNet CTO, explained how having a data centre in Stockholm ensures performance with compliance. “Our online software as a service allows customers to access their data in real-time, and begin data analytics almost immediately after the last patient has been included”, said Preibys. “Therefore, control over data and where it is located is critical to us for compliance purposes.”

With the new Stockholm build, Interoute currently has 17 virtual data centres across three continents; two in Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore), two in North America (Los Angeles and New York) and the remainder in Europe. Speaking to this reporter at the Cloud and DevOps World Forum in June, Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie discussed the reasons for moving to Istanbul and Singapore in particular.

“We’ve got lots of bigger customers who are European based, but global – a lot of them will have an Asian presence,” said Finnie. “They’ll want to run services natively in a region, and so [the move] is to support that, but also we’ve now got a model on this digital platform approach that will combine network and cloud, and those are very portable. It’s much lighter in terms of putting a full service set into a region.”

With all the excellent training available on television today, we are all now well prepared to deal with the coming Zombie Apocalypse. Our failure as a society lies, however, in our misunderstanding of the nature of the cybersecurity challenge. This failure threatens us all and our survival will depend on society’s ability to deal with the evolution and maturation of the changing enterprise cybersecurity challenge.

If you’re completely oblivious to the living dead threat, a zombie apocalypse refers to a widespread (usually global) rise of zombies hostile to human life. The zombies will engage in a general assault on civilization where victims may become zombies themselves. This causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis. The spreading phenomenon swamps normal military and law enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilized society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness.

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According to the latest forecast from 451 Research, three in five enterprise workloads will run in the cloud by mid-2018, up from two in five (41%) today.

The analyst firm argues there will be strong growth in particular enterprise workload categories, including data and analytics and business applications. In the same timeframe, almost a quarter (23%) of enterprise workloads will be software as a service (SaaS), compared to 12% for IaaS. 451 argues that IaaS will be the highest growing segment, and despite the ‘hype and attention’ associated with it comprises only 6% of workloads today.

Almost two in five (38%) of the 1,200 global IT professionals surveyed said they have a cloud-first policy, with the most common events leading to increased cloud usage including mergers and acquisitions, as well as software upgrades, hardware refreshes, and data centre capacity expansions.

“The predicted doubling of IaaS usage is the highest growth expectation for any type of cloud and points to significant revenue potential for vendors in this space,” said Andrew Reichman, research director of 451 Research and author of the report. “Because cloud delivers increasing agility and flexibility to better fit ever-changing business needs, IaaS and SaaS allows organisations to focus their efforts on their business, rather than on maintaining costly and complex data centres and infrastructure.

“If used properly, it has the potential to dramatically improve efficiency and results of business technology usage,” Reichman added.

These figures dovetail nicely with a forecast made by Huawei at its Connect event earlier this week, where the Chinese telco argued that by 2025 all enterprise IT would be ‘cloudified’, and that 85% of all enterprise applications would be based in the cloud.

The 451 Research report, ‘Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation’, can be found here (registration required).

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With an increasingly open IT ecosystem, there are three key principles for all businesses, from SMBs to enterprises, to make the most of their lot: cooperation over competition, benefit sharing, and creating a bigger market rather than fighting for a larger share.

That was the verdict of Guo Ping, rotating CEO of Chinese telco Huawei, at the company’s Huawei Connect event. “Essentially, marketplace advantages will come from within an organisation, as has traditionally been the case, and also externally from the ecosystem in which they operate – forming a combination of both competitive and ecological advantages,” said Guo in the third day’s keynote.

“The ICT ecosystem will be more open, dynamic, and symbiotic. Every enterprise, big or small, can take part in this interdependent, symbiotic, and regenerative community of common interests, as long as it has its own unique value and makes its own unique contribution,” Guo added.

The previous days have seen a plethora of announcements from the Chinese vendor, with Connect being the first time that Huawei had ‘publicly given a comprehensive look at its cloud strategy’. The overall theme of Connect was “shape the cloud”, and Huawei predicts that by 2025 all enterprise IT will be ‘cloudified’, while 85% of enterprise applications will be based in the cloud.

There were plenty of numerical analogies floating around too; cloud 2.0 was used not infrequently to describe the future of IT, while another announcement prognosticated upon bank 3.0 – first noted in a 2012 book by Brett King, and used here to annotate a new financial cloud solution from Huawei and Infosys.

Ken Hu, another of Huawei’s rotating CEOs, argued that the coming 10 years will envisage the era of cloud 2.0. “Cloud is changing everything,” Hu said. “We view change as a process of rebirth. For any business in the cloud 2.0 era, change brings hope. And through action, we can create the future.”

Huawei announced enterprise cloud solutions with partner Accenture, alongside research from Forrester around digital transformation, while the Chinese giant also announced its latest excursions into the world of all-flash storage, unveiling System OceanStor Dorado V3, bolstered with support from Intel, Oracle, and Brocade. 

There is growing need for data-driven applications and the need for digital platforms to build these apps.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Muddu Sudhakar, VP and GM of Security & IoT at Splunk, will cover different PaaS solutions and Big Data platforms that are available to build applications.
In addition, AI and machine learning are creating new requirements that developers need in the building of next-gen apps. The next-generation digital platforms have some of the past platform needs and many new requirements. He will provide reference architectures for next-gen platforms and sample apps that can be built on this platform.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Hitrons Solutions will exhibit at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Hitrons Solutions Inc. is distributor in the North American market for unique products and services of small and medium-size businesses, including cloud services and solutions, SEO marketing platforms, and mobile applications.

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Security certainly feels a lot more like a journey than a destination. This is especially true with APIs becoming a critical piece of any mobile or web application. With so much information being shared through APIs, teams need to ask themselves: how can you effectively secure your API?
While the security demands of developing and maintaining APIs will continue to evolve, there are a few key areas your team should be focused on if you have have responsibility for an Application Programming Interface (API).

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