With over 720 million Internet users and 40–50% CAGR, the Chinese Cloud Computing market has been booming. When talking about cloud computing, what are the Chinese users of cloud thinking about? What is the most powerful force that can push them to make the buying decision? How to tap into them?
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Yu Hao, CEO and co-founder of SpeedyCloud, answered these questions and discussed the results of SpeedyCloud’s survey.
Opinion: Why there is no such thing as managed IaaS
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By Jason Deck, SVP of Strategy, Logicworks
The age of managed infrastructure is coming to an end. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) have spent the last decade developing platforms that eliminate the manual, time-consuming maintenance of hardware, network, and storage, and enabling infrastructure to be controlled via software, i.e. infrastructure as code.
But contrary to what you might expect, enterprises are still managing IaaS. Buildout and maintenance tasks in AWS can be performed via API call and can therefore be automated, but many still choose to maintain AWS manually, instance by instance. Or perhaps worse, they purchase a “portal” to orchestrate IaaS. And these are very expensive and potentially risky choices.
What is the value of infrastructure?
As the vast majority of businesses become digital (software) companies, the value of infrastructure is only its ability to support business-critical applications that change frequently. Therefore, the best possible infrastructure is reliable and quick to spin up or destroy.
In the old world, the only way to make infrastructure more reliable was to throw more people and dollars at the problem. More people to monitor things like CPU utilization and replicate data, either in-house or outsourced to a managed service provider; more dollars to buy better hardware, live backups, and so on.
In IaaS, such concerns are irrelevant. AWS monitors hardware, CPU usage, network performance, etc. AWS can be programmed to take snapshots on a regular schedule. If you use a service like AWS Aurora, Amazon’s managed database service, you get replication, upgrades, and management built-in. If you want to improve reliability or disposability, AWS does not offer “premium hardware”; instead, you must architect your environment in new ways and rely on automation to improve SLAs. In other words, you must treat AWS resources like objects that can be manipulated with code.
In this new world, you do not care about CPU utilization. Your metrics of success are not measured in minutes of downtime. If you architect IaaS correctly, you should never have downtime. Instead, your KPIs are things like: How many times did we push changes to our infrastructure as code base? How many infrastructure changes produced errors? How long does it take to go from cloud architectural plan to delivering an environment?
Cloud automation is what drives better availability, better cost management, better governance, better time-to-delivery. So whether an enterprise chooses to build an automation team in-house or outsource it to an next-gen service provider, it should be at the top of enterprises’ cloud priority lists.
Cloud automation in action
IaaS gives you the tools to control infrastructure programmatically. In other words, you can manipulate infrastructure resources with code rather than through the AWS console or by manually typing in the CLI. This fits in with the larger vision set out in Agile philosophy, particularly the art of maximizing work not done; if you can automate, you should.
What does this look like in practice with AWS? Teams that want to spend less time on manual infrastructure maintenance usually do one or all of the following:
- They use the fully managed cloud services that AWS already provides (likeAWS Aurora or AWS Redshift) as much as possible
- They automate the buildout of infrastructure resources using a templating tool (like AWS CloudFormation)
- They automate the install/configuration of the OS with a configuration management tool
- They integrate infrastructure automation with their existing deployment pipeline
- They prepare for the future of IT where serverless compute resources likeAWS Lambda abstract away infrastructure orchestration entirely
The impact of this model is enormous. When you take full advantage of AWS services, you minimize engineer effort, reduce risk by automating things like backups and failover, and get built-in upgrades. When you automate infrastructure buildout and configuration, you enable rapid change, upgrading, patching, and self-healing of AWS resources without human intervention. Engineers never modify individual instances directly; instead they modify templates and scripts so that every system change is documented and can be rolled back, reducing the risk and effort of change.
When you move to this model, you are building infrastructure as code, not managing infrastructure. Your engineers are now essentially “developers” of infrastructure software. This requires a new set of skills and an entirely new outlook on how engineers should spend their time.
The cost of managed infrastructure
Unfortunately, many enterprises still throw people and money at cloud availability and agility issues. They create (or buy) “orchestration portals” that tell them about instance performance and storage utilization and resource usage. They use the same security processes, i.e., spend many weeks of each deployment cycle manually testing infrastructure and keep compliance checklists in spreadsheets. They use only the most basic AWS services, perform manual upgrades and updates, and in the case of an issue, they nurse individual instances back to health. In other words, they still manage infrastructure.
What is the real cost of this model? A recently released report by Puppet found that high performing IT teams — that prioritize automation, high deployment velocity, and the “work not done” principle — spend 22% less time on unplanned work and rework than low-performing IT teams. High-performers have a change failure rate of 7.5%, compared to medium-performers with a change failure rate of 38%. Mean time to recover is 1 hour for a high-performing organization and 24 hours for a medium-performer. If you multiply mean time to recover by the average cost of downtime at your organization, the real cost of not prioritizing automation becomes unjustifiable.
What could your engineers do with 22% more time? What could they do if they were not constantly firefighting broken virtual machines — and could instead blast away the instance and rebuild a new one in minutes? They would spend more time on new projects, the products that drive real business value and revenues.
It is true that automation itself takes time and money. It also takes expertise — the kind that is hard to find. Yet infrastructure automation is the inflection point that jumpstarts organization’s DevOps efforts. These factors make it an ideal service to outsource; it is a skills gap that enterprises are struggling to fill, and a non-disruptive place where MSPs can provide value without replacing internal DevOps efforts. An next-generation MSP that has already developed proprietary infrastructure automation software is an ideal fit; just beware of companies that sell “Managed IaaS” that is just monitoring and upgrades, because they will not help you escape from infrastructure management.
The future of infrastructure as code
We are entering a world where infrastructure is not only disposable, it is invisible.The best way to manage infrastructure is not to manage infrastructure at all, but instead to develop an automation layer composed of AWS services, 3rd party tools, and your own custom-built software. No matter how your market changes or the state of IT in five years, investing now in automation will allow you to adapt quickly.
Major cloud providers are pushing the market in the direction of management-less IT, and it is only a matter of time before the market follows. Chances are that adherents of the “management” model will linger — both internal teams and external vendors — that want to patch and update machines with the same reactive, break/fix approach they used in the 90’s and 00’s in managed datacenters. When companies gain AWS expertise and realize how little value infrastructure management adds, IT will evolve into an infrastructure as code provider. Value creation is moving closer up the stack, and IT must follow.
The post There is No Such Thing as Managed IaaS appeared first on Logicworks Gathering Clouds.
Creating a Mobile Campus Has Never Been So Easy
At the advent of BYOD, not many people thought that it would revolutionize the network world. Today, mobile devices have gone from being simply a part of the network, to dominating the network infrastructure in almost every industry, including education. Due to their low cost and convenience, mobile devices have become a go-to device for […]
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Is 2016 Half Empty or Half Full? | @CloudExpo #IoT #Cloud #Mobile #Security
With 2016 crossing the half way point, let’s take a look at some technology trends thus far.
Breaches: Well, many databases are half empty due to the continued rash of intrusions while the crooks are half full with our personal information. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), there have been 522 breaches thus far in 2016 exposing almost 13,000,000 records. Many are health care providers as our medical information is becoming the gold mine of stolen info. Not really surprising since the health care wearable market is set to explode in the coming years. Many of those wearables will be transmitting our health data back to providers. There were also a bunch of very recognizable names getting blasted in the media: IRS, Snapchat, Wendy’s and LinkedIn. And the best advice we got? Don’t use the same password across multiple sites. Updating passwords is a huge trend in 2016.
Parallels Access and macOS Sierra
It is great time to be a user of Apple devices – upgrades to each of the three OSes today: MacOS, iOS, and WatchOS, plus updates to all the betas. The servers in Cupertino must be close to melting down from so many downloads from all over the world. It is also a great time […]
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Boeing and Ryanair looking to take advantage of cloud and big data platforms
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The airline industry has traditionally been ripe for technological innovation – and a couple of examples have hit CloudTech’s inbox with regard to how different providers are currently utilising big data and cloud.
Boeing has announced an agreement with Microsoft to build a cloud-based platform for its range of analytics tools, aiming to transition many of the airline’s commercial aviation applications into the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Among the applications ready to move into the cloud include real-time information on purchasing and leasing aeroplanes and engines, as well as route planning, managing inventory, and maintaining fleets. The airline claims that through use of its apps by customers, crew scheduling costs have gone down by as much as 7%.
“Boeing’s expertise and extensive aviation data resource, coupled with Microsoft’s cloud technology, will accelerate innovation in areas such as predictive maintenance and flight optimisation, allowing airlines to drive down costs and improve operational efficiency,” said Kevin Crowley, Boeing vice president of digital aviation. “Together, two companies that changed their industries are teaming up to accelerate the digital transformation of aviation through the use of analytics-based applications, cloud technologies, and large-scale integration.”
Elsewhere, Ryanair is using visual analytics to improve route management, reservations, and in-flight services. The low-cost flight provider is working with data analytics provider Qlik to build an overview of its business, and according to Shane Finnegan, senior BI developer at Ryanair, the use of two Qlik products – Qlik Sense, for easy to digest data visualations, and QlikView, for more in depth analytics – has helped in identifying and addressing issues much closer to real-time.
“Ultimately, we want to find the best ways to make our customers happy on-board, while being able to offer them the lowest fares on the market – and Qlik gives us the foundation to make educated decisions which will make that notion a reality,” said Finnegan.
Ryanair is looking to expand its initial collaboration with Qlik to potentially feature improving in-flight retail, as well as better targeted flight offerings, optimising the supply chain by understanding the anticipated group of passengers on a given flight.
Cloud and big data is not the only area in which airlines – and airports – are trying to take advantage. Delta has started to implement improvements around the Internet of Things (IoT), predominantly around the manufacturing and maintenance of planes, while Miami International Airport has launched the MIA Airport Official mobile app, which gives contextual information to passengers based on their location around hundreds of beacons installed at the airport.
Transferring Parallels Desktop to a New Mac
Guest blog from support team member: Ajith Mamolin Are you planning to upgrade your Mac or get a new one? Or just getting a replacement? Congrats, and heres to hoping your new Mac is even more powerful than your last one! As you are reading this blog, there is a good chance you have Parallels Desktop installed. Let’s walk […]
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Announcing @LeaseWeb to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #API #IaaS #Cloud
SYS-CON Events announced today that LeaseWeb USA, a cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, 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.
LeaseWeb is one of the world’s largest hosting brands. The company helps customers define, develop and deploy IT infrastructure tailored to their exact business needs, by combining various kinds cloud solutions.
IBM makes cloud progress but reports another quarterly decline
IBM revenues continued to fall for a 17th consecutive quarter despite beating analyst expectations and demonstrating healthy growth in its cloud and data business units, reports Telecoms.com.
The company reported a drop in revenues for Q2 of 2.8% to $20.24 billion, though this was an improvement on analyst expectations of $20.03 billion, encouraging shares to rise 2.6% to $164 after hours. The business units which the company deems strategic imperatives, cloud, analytics and engagement, gained 12% year-on-year, though this wasn’t enough to counter the impact of legacy technologies on reported earnings which fell to $2.5 billion from $3.45 billion in 2015. Overall, revenues are now roughly 25% lower than the numbers reported in 2011.
“We continued to deliver double-digit revenue growth in our strategic imperatives,” said CFO Martin Schroeter on the company’s earnings call this week. “Over the last 12 months, strategic imperatives delivered $31 billion in revenue, and now represent 38% of IBM.
“Growth was led by cloud, where our revenue was up 30% to $3.4 billion in the quarter, and over $11.5 billion over the last year so good progress in cloud. Looking at revenue from a segment perspective, the strongest growth came from cognitive solutions led by our analytics and cognitive capabilities and security.”
Schroeter was keen to emphasise the impact Watson is having on the business, as the team continue its journey to redefine Big Blue in the age of cloud computing. Numerous customers were listed as wins for IBM in the cognitive computing sector, as IBM continues to champion Watson as a platform to bring together the digital business with digital intelligence to improve decision-making and add intelligence to products and processes. Watson will continue to be the jewel in the crown of Big Blue as the company moves towards the new digital era.
Despite revenues continuing to fall the team has made a number of positive launches throughout the quarter. Quantum computing is now available on the IBM cloud, the team launched a new partnership with Box to counter the impact of EU-US Privacy Shield on its international business, and an expanded partnership with VMWare expanded the reach of its security portfolio.
In terms of the specific segments, revenues in the cognitive team rose 4%, though this is down from 9% growth in the previous quarter, solutions software revenue was up 6% for the quarter, SAS was another area which recorded triple digit growth and Schroeter claims IBM’s security business outperformed the market by three times. The IBM interactive experience unit also demonstrated healthy growth, as the team continue its journey into an entirely new market for Big Blue.
“We have opened over 30 digital studios around the globe including new studios in Singapore and Seoul,” said Schroeter. “We also completed the acquisition of Aperto, a digital agency in Berlin with over 300 employees and a roster of enterprise clients such as Airbus and Siemens.”
One area which has caught the headlines in recent weeks is the impact of Brexit on the fortunes of the technology sector. Despite concerns from various corners of the industry, it would not have appeared to have a significant impact on the long-term vision of IBM.
“I don’t think that Brexit coming at the end of the quarter helped us at all, but we obviously finished kind of right where we expected to finish,” said Schroeter. “And when we look at our full view of the year, we don’t see an impact, if you will, that has any real materiality on us.
“What I typically observe in these kinds of instances is that our discussions with our clients have to go through a process of reprioritization. So as they reprioritize, the length of time that takes depends a lot on how much uncertainty they’re faced with. And obviously, the political leadership in Europe and the UK can help reduce that uncertainty, but we didn’t see – again, we don’t think it helped but it didn’t cause us to change our guidance.”
While revenues have continued to fall for the tech giant, it would appear to be heading in the right direction. The strategic imperatives business units are now accounting for a larger proportion of the overall figures, now 38%, indicating the tide may be turning for IBM. Schroeter also highlighted the team are not happy relying solely on the progress of Watson, as IBM has acquired 20 companies in the last twelve months, which are now beginning to contribute in a more significant manner.
Although progress is starting to be seen, it would be worth noting it has not been an entirely smooth ride for IBM. There have been numerous new product launches and advances into new market segments, though this has come at a cost of more than 70,000 redundancies over recent months. While there has been a slight increase in share price following the announcement, it would be worth noting previous performance has had an impact on IBM. Shares in Big Blue have dropped 17% since CEO Virginia Rometty took over in January 2012 while the S&P 500 index rose 70% during the same period.
Security still viewed as a barrier to progress – Dell
A recent survey from Dell demonstrates security is still seen as a hindrance to innovation as companies aim to develop a more digitally orientated proposition for the market, reports Telecoms.com.
While a substantial 89% of the respondents highlighted their organization was in the middle of a digital transformation project, 76% agree security is brought into the equation too late in the development process, with 85% saying they actively avoid bringing security experts in due to the belief they will slow or even scupper the project.
“This survey produced some eye-opening results and reinforces what we’ve been hearing directly from our customers,” said John Milburn, GM of One Identity Products at Dell. “Organisations face challenges securing their digital transformations and recognise that their current security measures are exposing the business to risk.
Security has been one of the biggest talking points within the telecommunications and technology industry, generally due to a lack of understanding. Until recently, security challenges would appear to have been pushed to the side as there have not been any clear routes to success. It would seem companies are not willing to allow security concerns to stop progress, instead aiming to secure products retrospectively.
The survey demonstrates attitudes towards are still relatively negligent. While numerous CEO’s and board members have highlighted security would be considered at the top of the agenda, surveys such as this tell a different story, much to the disappointment of security professionals and vendors alike. One conclusion which could be drawn from the survey is security is still considered a barrier to success when driving towards innovation. In fact 37% of respondents agreed with the statement “it is likely that the security team will delay or block a new initiative presented to us today”, and 49% agreed with “our security team does have a reputation for blocking projects based on the past, but now we do a better job of enabling the business”.
“Our goal is to provide our customers with solutions that address these needs. When done right, security can enable organisations to aggressively adopt new technologies and practices that can have a direct, positive impact on revenue, profits, employee productivity and the customer experience. Done right, security also helps CISOs open their own ‘Department of Yes,’ empowering them to deliver the strategic projects and innovative initiatives that drive businesses forward.”
Security is, and will continue to be, a paramount facet of any organization, though the implications which can be drawn from this survey suggest there is still some way before organizations would consider themselves secure. One encourage factor from the survey is 91% of respondents agreed if the security team was given more resources they could do a better job. What is unclear is whether CEOs and other board members will follow up on the promise security will receive more investment.