At first adopted by enterprises to consolidate physical servers, virtualization is now widely used in cloud computing to offer elasticity and scalability. On the other hand, Docker has developed a new way to handle Linux containers, inspired by version control software such as Git, which allows you to keep all development versions.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Dominique Rodrigues, the co-founder and CTO of Nanocloud Software, discussed how in order to also handle QEMU / KVM virtual machines versions, they have developed a new tool, called Vm_commit, which can create commits, backup any commit, rollback to a previous commit or rebase all the commits up to a given one for any running virtual machine, on the fly.
Start up Cato Networks claims Network Security as a Service first
Check Point founder Schlomo Kramer is launching a new cloud security firm with former Imperva colleague Gur Shatz as demand for traditional on premise firewall security diminishes. Cato Networks will offer a new cloud security concept that’s been dubbed Network Security as a Service (NSaaS).
The Cato Cloud has two complementary layers. One, the Cato Cloud Network, is based on a global, geographically distributed network of points of presence (PoPs). The second, Cato Security Services, is a suite of network security (such as firewalls, VPNs, URL filtering) delivered through the cloud as an integrated managed service.
Cato Networks’ software creates an encrypted network out of all the disparate elements of the connected enterprise, such as branch offices, remote locations, data centres and mobile users. The last two groups in that list have changed the model of security, according to Kramer, since the liquidity of the network has been exacerbated by the virtual nature of systems residing in data centres and the increasing prominence of mobile users. With new virtual machines being spun up in their thousands and mobile workers multiplying in both numbers and computing capacity, firewalls are not the right solution to this moveable vulnerability problem, according to Kramer.
The Internet of Things will only exacerbate security problems, according to a Cato Networks statement. Research commissioned by Cato showed that maintenance, costs and the complexity of managing policies for multiple locations is too challenging for up to 57% of security professionals.
Companies that use a variety of cloud services can tie their hybrid clouds into a secure network and forget about having to maintain firewalls or invest in expensive network security, according to Cato.
Cato would allow retail chains, which typically have hundreds of locations each with a multiplicity of devices, to securely connect directly to the cloud for Internet access.
Cato raised $20 million in financing led by Aspect Ventures and will launch its new cloud security offering around September 2016 with co-founder Kramer investing $4 million of his own money.
Google adds to its Cloud Platform as vendors compete with AWS Lambda
Google has added to its public cloud infrastructure for developers, Cloud Platform, with a new service that allows app writers to set up functions that can be triggered in response to events. The new Google Cloud Functions has drawn comparison with the Lambda offering from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The service was not announced to the public, but news filtered out after documentation began to appear on Google’s web site, offering advice to developers. According to the briefing notes, Google Cloud Functions is a ‘lightweight, event-based, asynchronous’ computing system that can be used to create small, single-purpose functions in response to cloud events without the need for managing servers or programming in a runtime environment. Access to the service is available to anyone who fills out a form on the web site.
Google’s answer to AWS Lambda is the latest attempt to catch up with AWS by filling in the omissions in its own service. In September 2015 BCN reported how Google’s Cloud Platform is being sped up by the addition of four new content delivery networks, with CloudFlare, Fastly, Highwinds Network and Level 3 Communications adding to Google’s network of 70 points of presence in 33 countries as part of a new Google CDN Interconnect programme.
Google has also bolstered its cloud offering with new networking, containerisation and price cuts, BCN reported in November 2015. Google has also recruited VMware cofounder Diane Greene to lead all of its cloud businesses, as reported last year.
Google Cloud Functions run as Node.js modules and can be written in JavaScript. A response could be set up to react to, say, circumstances in a user’s Google Cloud Storage, such as an unwanted type of picture file or title. The service also works with webhooks, which contributes to a speeding up of programming processes and code maintenance.
The prices for Cloud Functions were not listed, as the service is still in Alpha mode.
Meanwhile a new start up, Iron.io, has raised $11.5 million in venture capital to develop its own answer to Lamba and Cloud Functions. Microsoft is also rumoured to be developing its own version of Cloud Functions for Azure, according to a report in Forbes.
Agile Methodologies | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #BigData #Microservices
Many in the industry are searching for new ways to increase productivity and efficiency with Agile approaches to software development. That’s the theme of a new article on CIO.com by Bruce Harpham, who details the many benefits of Agile methodologies in software development and examines key considerations for implementing the practice. Our very own Scott Rose spoke with Bruce on the topic and discussed the ways organizations can employ Agile practices among a global team, where face-to-face is not feasible.
Cirba expands its infrastructure management optimiser to the public cloud
Infrastructure management vendor Cirba has announced a new workload routing and management option for hybrid clouds. The Cirba infrastructure resource juggling service can now support cloud systems from Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM SoftLayer, allowing users to extend their internal management to straddle the public cloud too.
Cirba’s service provides the decision control points which automatically determine where applications can safely run in hybrid environments. It decides where each task runs by conducting detailed analysis of each application’s requirements. It then calculates how best to match them against the available security, cost and technical resources available across. Now the service extends beyond the private infrastructure to include the public clouds.
Though originally designed as an internal system for juggling resources more efficiently, from Thursday Cirba is offering new integrations to Azure, AWS and SoftLayer in order to bring centralised management for enterprise applications across hybrid cloud environments.
Cirba claims that customers will now have extended visibility into applications that are hosted externally. This means the client’s can judge whether their cloud vendor is apportioning the appropriate level of resources, it claims. Clients will also be able to assess these applications against on-premise hosting environments in order to determine whether they should be brought back in-house, claims Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of Cirba. “Without analytics, organisations cannot automate their processes nor can they effectively determine how to meet application requirements without risk or excessive cost,” said Hillier.
Cirba says that the new additions mean that it can now support a range of system that already including internal versions of VMware vCenter, Microsoft Hyper-V, IBM PowerVM on AIX and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation-based environments.
In June 2016 Cirba aims to update its Reservation Console in order to create a centralised policy-based control system for hybrid clouds.
Secure the Power of the Cloud | @CloudExpo @ISC2 #Cloud
Recognizing the need to identify and validate information security professionals’ competency in securing cloud services, the two leading membership organizations focused on cloud and information security, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and (ISC)^2, joined together to develop an international cloud security credential that reflects the most current and comprehensive best practices for securing and optimizing cloud computing environments.
Announcing @AvereSystems to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | #Cloud #BigData #IoT
SYS-CON Events announced today that Avere Systems, a leading provider of enterprise storage for the hybrid cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Avere delivers a more modern architectural approach to storage that doesn’t require the overprovisioning of storage capacity to achieve performance, overspending on expensive storage media for inactive data or the overbuilding of data centers to house increasing amounts of storage infrastructure.
Measuring DevOps | @DevOpsSummit #APM #DevOps #Microservices
How is your DevOps transformation coming along? How do you measure Agility? Reliability? Efficiency? Quality? Success?! How do you optimize your processes? This morning on #c9d9 we talked about some of the metrics that matter for the different stakeholders throughout the software delivery pipeline. Our panelists shared their best practices.
Why 2016 needs to be the year of granularity for cloud
(c)iStock.com/alengo
A recent business conversation led to the establishment of the fact that the data centre business is becoming more cutthroat than ever. Price wars, advanced offerings, upsells and what not are the usual tactics that have been used, but now competing forces are pressuring data centre providers to go beyond the usual and utilise something new.
Data centre businesses are now relying more and more on leveraging strategic footprints, global presence and larger capabilities to educate and work with customers at a local level – in the United States alone, there are an estimated 3 million data centres. With data centre services more abundant than grocery stores, how will the model sustain itself and what will determine the winners from the losers? My answer: granularity.
Granularity needed by MSPs
Managed service providers (MSPs) work day in and day out with end users. The core of their business revolves around providing cloud services and solutions to their customers. This may include computing power, database, hoisting, storage and many other services that are cloud based. MSPs, however, are facing a challenging time as well. For example, their relationship with data centres, where the need for granularity is evermore necessary.
Consider this: IOTA Services, a medium-scale MSP, has over 800 customers. All 800 customers are hosted on a third-party data centre owned by TrueNorth Data Centre. At the end of every month, TrueNorth Data Centre provides an invoice to IOTA Services for all their utilisation of the infrastructure within the data centre. IOTA Services then looks at what aspect of the infrastructure is used by each customer and then splits the invoice based on a homemade logic consisting of multiple Excel worksheets.
This is one of the biggest challenges faced by MSPs overall; the granularity of consumption. Data centres today can really propel into the success domain by helping MSPs deal with their challenges. Providing data and infrastructure services today is not enough and having more control over your information, infrastructure and the consumption of it is key. If data centres reply on MSPs to drive their business, it makes more sense to empower SPs with what they need to drive the business forward.
Ultimate value for end users
MSPs, on the contrary, are now able to completely view the usage of infrastructure and services at the data centre level and can easily make sense of all the services used by each of their customers. This plays a key role at the end-user level where say a small consulting company that uses IOTA Services to host some of their data and exchange server can now see exactly how much it costs from an IT aspect, assuming, of course, there are adequate margins and other business due diligence in place. End users may have proprietary software or nice software solutions they have deployed. Knowing how much in very precise terms becomes invaluable.
More reasons for granularity to be key
As software solutions have evolved, we are now at a time where the consumption of IT is a key aspect in every business. I have spoken about the need for chargeback and empowering IT to charge back the services and solutions they offer in an enterprise environment for this very reason. Unless you have such a unique offering that nobody else offers in the universe, you will face the same economic terms as everyone else.
Be it the economy, the need to lower expenses, the need to improve margins and the absolute need to scale; everyone has the same set of problems. Knowing where you spend, stopping the bleed and optimising the business are just essentials you should be doing anyway. As a business end user, I absolutely do not want to pay for anything that I do not use. This trend of consumption is growing – be it in our personal lives or the workplace. Enabling this value proposition forms the bedrock of business profitability.
Where to go from here?
We are all going to use a lot of data and IT services going forward. Data centres are amazing with the offerings they have, and so are MSPs who are providing much-needed solutions and services to millions of businesses and essentially helping organisations enable and embrace the cloud. Unless we have an element of granularity built into the billing of cloud solutions and services at every level, we are going to face the challenge of not being happy for what we pay. This is purely because human beings love granularity and businesses especially need granularity to make sense of what they are spending. Global economies are not helping either. Whether it is Canada, the United States or China, daily changing market conditions and economic conditions makes conducting business more difficult.
Let’s make 2016 the year of granularity and help bring more knowledge to what we consume. Let’s also engage in a meaningful conversation with our customers, clients, service providers and peers to know more about the consumption model, cloud, chargebacks, and of course granularity. Do you have ideas about cloud granularity? For the sake of value, let’s start a granular conversation.
IoT and Utilities | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #BigData #InternetOfThings
More than a decade ago, the choices were few to address the needs of data gathering and recording. Water and wastewater utilities, for example, had to be able to use a ‘fits all’ unit with set parameters and make their systems adaptable to the technology of the day. Since then, many municipal water systems such as those in Southern Utah, have had to broaden the area from which they gather, use and reclaim water. Most growing areas are even facing the dilemma of higher demands on services while trying to stay within shrinking budgets and manpower cutbacks. This is because in the past, many viewed electronic data gathering as a ‘want’ instead of a ‘need’ until now.