Seemingly every tech vendor seems to have a cloud strategy, with new products and services dubbed “cloud” coming out every week. But who are the real market leaders in this business? Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article shows Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS. Research firm Gartner’s answer lies in its Magic Quadrant report for the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.
It is interesting that missing from this quadrant figure are big-name companies that have invested a lot in the cloud, including Microsoft, HP, IBM and Google. The reason is that report only includes providers that had IaaS clouds in general availability as of June 2012 (Microsoft, HP and Google had clouds in beta at the time).
Gartner reinforces what many in the cloud industry believe: Amazon Web Services is the 800-pound gorilla. Gartner has also found one big minus on Amazon Web Services: AWS has a “weak, narrowly defined” service-level agreement (SLA), which requires customers to spread workloads across multiple availability zones. AWS was not the only provider where there was something negative to say on the service-level agreement (SLA) details.
Read the whole Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article to see the Gartner’s view on clould market today.
1,065 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Growth in the cloud infograph
http://www.slideshare.net/CiscoSP360/growth-in-the-cloud?ref=https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-37800
Tomi Engdahl says:
iCloud Drive now available for PCs, before Mac release
In other news, hell has frozen over
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2371239/icloud-drive-now-available-for-pcs-before-mac-release
APPLE HAS RELEASED its iCloud Drive storage service to Windows PC users before making it available to those on OS X.
While iOS 8 offers up the option to upgrade to iCloud Drive, Macbook owners have been warned not to do so until OS X Yosemite is released, as Mavericks doesn’t have support for the feature. Only those involved in Apple’s Mac OS X Yosemite beta programme have been cleared to upgrade to iCloud Drive.
To enable the feature, install iCloud for Windows from Apple’s support webpage and reboot your PC. Afterwards, you’ll see the option to enable iCloud Drive
While it’s an odd decision for Apple to make iCloud Drive available to Windows users first, Apple has made sure the Windows service isn’t as fully featured as its Mac OS X and iOS versions
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Raid-Proof Hosting Technology Behind ‘The Pirate Bay’
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/09/22/0213229/the-raid-proof-hosting-technology-behind-the-pirate-bay
Ernesto reports at TorrentFreak that despite its massive presence the Pirate Bay doesn’t have a giant server park but operates from the cloud, on virtual machines that can be quickly moved if needed. The site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers, up four machines from two years ago, in part due to the steady increase in traffic. Eight of the VM’s are used for serving the web pages, searches take up another six machines, and the site’s database currently runs on two VMs. The remaining five virtual machines are used for load balancing, statistics, the proxy site on port 80, torrent storage and for the controller. In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB. One interesting aspect of The Pirate Bay is that all virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers.
The Pirate Bay Runs on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines
By Ernesto
on September 21, 2014
C: 62
Breaking
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proof-virtual-machines-140921/
With several million daily visitors The Pirate Bay is one of the 100 most-visited websites on the Internet. Despite its massive presence the website does not have a giant server park. Instead, it operates from the cloud, on 21 virtual machines that can be quickly moved if needed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud? We prefer, er, reselling tech, say tech resellers
But managed services gets the industry’s thumbs-up
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/09/24/canalys_reselling_survey/
Good old fashioned kit and licence reselling remains the primary way local tech suppliers pay the bills, with IT services still accounting for less than a quarter of revenue generation.
This is according to a Canalys survey, which probed 352 channel businesses across the globe to ascertain the impact that classic product sales, alongside off-premises hosting and managed/public cloud services, are having on their top and bottom lines.
More Reading
Microsoft vs the long arm of US law: Straight outta DublinNO SALE! Rackspace snubs all buyout offers, appoints new CEOCitrix rips up and rebuilds CloudStack businessCloud? Nah, we’re not bothering with that, say HALF of enterprisesDragons’ Den man and co-CEO to work for FREE at loss-making Outsourcery
“Product resell is still the most important business model for over 60 per cent of channel partners,” said research director Rachel Brindley.
Margin erosion, the need to reduce reliance on post-sale vendor handouts (rebates) and customers wanting to change the way they buy and consume technology, are heaping more pressure on tech suppliers to change the way they operate.
Some 96 per cent of the companies surveyed said they have sold some form of tech as a service. For the “majority” of those questioned, the delivery model comprises less than 25 per cent of overall annual turnover – but two thirds predicted that by 2017 services will go the other way.
Public cloud is proving to be less popular among channel types than perhaps Microsoft, Google or AWS would like, the survey showed.
“Channel partners see the top two cloud opportunities as productivity applications, such as email, and infrastructure-as-a-service, both of which are under growing margin pressure. Higher-value applications are not yet seen as the primary opportunities”.
“Vendors developing-go-to-market strategies for cloud must ensure they are not increasing competition with their established partners, but recognise that this is typically delivered as part of a hybrid IT offering,” said Alex Smith, senior analyst.
Cloud security and unearthing skilled consulting staff are the areas causing sleepless nights for 40 per cent of suppliers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS to Reboot a Substantial Number of EC2 Instances
http://www.rightscale.com/blog/rightscale-news/aws-reboot-substantial-number-ec2-instances
Today Amazon Web Services (AWS) notified its customers that it will be rolling out an urgent patch to hosts causing a maintenance reboot of EC2 instances over the next several days starting on September 26, 2014, at 2:00 UTC/GMT (September 25, 2014, at 7:00 PM PDT) and ending on September 30, 2014, at 23:59 UTC/GMT (September 30, 2014, at 4:59 PM PDT).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon cloud readies GLORIOUS GLOBAL REBOOT
Xen vulnerability fingered
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/25/amazon_readies_global_glory_reboot/
Amazon will tomorrow begin a bloody global reboot of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) compute instances after it found a bug said to be within the Xen virtualisation platform.
The rolling minutes-long reboots would be completed by 30 September. Amazon did not name the reason for the upgrade, widely thought to be a security issue affecting underlying hosts.
Technology news site ITNews cited an unnamed source who said the reboot was due to an unspecified vulnerability in the open source Xen-108 platform.
Tomi Engdahl says:
By | Paul Kunert 25th September 2014 09:23
IT crisis looming: ‘What if AWS goes pop, runs out of cash?’
Public IaaS… something’s gotta give – and it may be AWS
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/09/25/public_iaas_crisis/
The big public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) players may be on the brink of a crisis as cataclysmic as the 2008 banking crash, as they slash prices while spending billions on building out and staffing their operations.
Or so claimed Steve Brazier, CEO at channel beanie Canalys, who warned resellers steering their customers in such a direction to be very careful about the financials of their cloudy suppliers.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars has been spent on building out public cloud infrastructure. We don’t know anybody in the world who is profitable,” he told an audience of 900 at the Channels Forum 2014.
The economics of the market is “somewhat like” the classic “pyramid scheme”, with providers launching services, making promises around performance, winning more customers, building more data centres, adding technicians, and cutting prices to beat the competition.
Brazier said maintaining that approach was only possible “if you are getting new customers to sign up faster than your prices are going down”.
Canalys estimates Amazon Web Services lost $2bn in the last four quarters, and the parent is forecasting losses of between $410m and $810m this quarter.
“We believe most if not all of that is related to AWS,” he said. The division cut prices by 36 per cent in Q2 and this hit revenues at a time when cap-ex increased 51 per cent to $1.29bn.
“It is a difficult situation for them.”
Neither Microsoft nor Google break out the financials for their public infrastructure clouds but the analysts said it suspects the dynamics are “very similar”. Rackspace, one of the “early pioneers” of public IaaS is trying to exit the sector and beef up its managed services biz.
The CIA runs on AWS, “what happens if AWS goes pop, runs out of cash? A very serious issue. They’ll have to be rescued, bank bail outs or Federal bail outs just like with the banks”.
The public IaaS sector is still in its early stages
“there are still economics to be worked out and profitability equations to be guaranteed from a vendor perspective”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco: Hand us the keys. We’ll drive Intercloud into telcos, Google
And Azure, of course… Just a couple of quarters
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/25/cisco_woos_azure_google/
Cisco will announce tie-ups between its Intercloud platform and the major public cloud vendors over the coming quarters, the network giant’s EMEA partner boss said today.
Snagging the likes of incumbent telecoms operators, and ensuring full bi-directionality with the likes of Azure and Google is crucial if it is to establish its Intercloud Fabric as the default platform for moving workloads between data centres, while promising CIOs and partners that security and policy restrictions will not be compromised.
Cisco has characterised the existing public cloud services as islands between which it is hard to shift workloads – much as there were once networks which were cut off from each other in the pre-internet era. And what connected those islands in Cisco’s view? Well, Cisco.
Schacher said it had already thrown a bridge into Amazon Web Services, and workloads could be moved between customers’ data centres and AWS. It recently announced a tie-up with IBM’s Softlayer cloud operation, but this is still being spun-up.
He said that it could already connect into Amazon and Google, but “the question is how much appetite there is there to use global Intercloud much more bidirectionally.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is the Private Cloud a Real Cloud?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/private-cloud-real-cloud
Consider this traditional scenario: in today’s competitive world, dynamic business requirements need flexible and rapid provisioning of IT resources. Along with flexibility, traditional IT environments need new resources to support the dynamic workloads of applications. It is a very likely scenario where separate business units within the same organization manage their own computing resources, such as hardware, software, storage, networking and applications, creating silos of computing infrastructure. Power, space and cooling of corporate data centers are some of the major challenges faced by organizations today. Applications running on increased-capacity hardware are not able to utilize available resources in an efficient manner in traditional data centers. In addition to this, expert human resources are needed to maintain and manage the whole environment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How vCloud Hybrid Service is Different: 10 Cloud Capabilities on vCloud Hybrid Service that Don’t Exist on AWS
http://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/2014/06/vcloud-hybrid-service-different-10-cloud-capabilities-vcloud-hybrid-service-dont-exist-aws-2.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle launches upgraded cloud platform with its database and Java available as a service
https://gigaom.com/2014/09/28/oracle-launches-upgraded-cloud-platform-with-database-and-and-java-available-as-a-service/
While Oracle has a cloud platform that it’s been trying to spread to the masses for a few years, the biggest deal regarding the new cloud upgrade is supposedly the ability for people to use Oracle’s database in the cloud or on-premise in their own environment.
Oracle detailed on Sunday evening its upgraded cloud suite that includes the ability for customers to use its flagship database in the cloud as well as on-premise. Executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison talked about the new platform during his keynote session at Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference.
“This new Oracle in the cloud allows you to move any database from your datacenter to the cloud like pushing a button,” said Ellison.
Oracle’s cloud platform consists of a software-as-a-service (SaaS), a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in which all three are needed by Oracle to better serve its customers who have been clamoring for the company to provide cloud services, explained Ellison.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT crisis looming: ‘What if AWS goes pop, runs out of cash?’
Public IaaS… something’s gotta give – and it may be AWS
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/25/public_iaas_crisis/
Canalys Channels Forum 2014 The big public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) players may be on the brink of a crisis as cataclysmic as the 2008 banking crash, as they slash prices while spending billions on building out and staffing their operations.
Or so claimed Steve Brazier, CEO at channel beanie Canalys, who warned resellers steering their customers in such a direction to be very careful about the financials of their cloudy suppliers.
The economics of the market is “somewhat like” the classic “pyramid scheme”, with providers launching services, making promises around performance, winning more customers, building more data centres, adding technicians, and cutting prices to beat the competition.
Brazier said maintaining that approach was only possible “if you are getting new customers to sign up faster than your prices are going down”.
Canalys estimates Amazon Web Services lost $2bn in the last four quarters, and the parent is forecasting losses of between $410m and $810m this quarter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry: Oracle’s now a CLOUDY biz. Ignore everything I said before
Former CEO insults rivals and bigs up the Oracle cloud in Openworld keynote
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/29/larry_ellison_oracle_cloud_keynote/
Despite once declaring that the cloud was “complete gibberish”, “insane” and “idiocy”, former Oracle head honcho Larry Ellison has announced that the firm is now ready to be the foundation of the cloud for its customers.
Speaking at the company’s Openworld conference, Ellison said it wasn’t enough for Oracle to be dealing in software-as-a-service like Salesforce.com, or infrastructure-as-a-service like Amazon. Oracle needs to be everything cloudy all at once.
“We definitely have a build and buy strategy that works together to increase our portfolio in the cloud to offer our customers better solutions,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry Ellison: Our cloud rules
Oracle releases some cloud products, dismisses the competition
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2372840/larry-ellison-our-cloud-rules
ORACLE KICKED OFF its Openworld user event with a raft of new cloud computing products and services, but CTO Larry Ellison was more interested in insisting to everyone that the firm he founded is actually the biggest cloud firm around.
“We have more SaaS applications than any other SaaS company,” Ellison gloated while standing in front of a slide highlighting the firm’s more than 2,000 new SaaS customers this year, and 725 new Fusion SaaS customers.
“Virtually every important cloud service on the planet earth runs on the Oracle database. There’s only one that doesn’t, I’ll name them, it’s Workday.”
“Salesforce run on our Java, our database. SAP Hana powers the cloud. Whose cloud are they talking about? Ariba runs on Oracle. SuccessFactors runs on Oracle. They [SAP] just bought Concur, they’re moving to Oracle. I have no idea what runs on Hana, but it ain’t their cloud, it runs on Oracle.”
Ellison described the latest version of the Oracle cloud as “a complete set of platform services to allow you to build all these cloud applications” with the Oracle database at its heart.
“Firms expect to move their databases and applications to the next-generation of technology without you having to change a single line of code,” Ellison explained.
“You can now move any Oracle database to the cloud by pushing a button. You can move any Java application with a push of a button from on-premise to our WebLogic Java platform without changing a single line of code, and it gets modernised. You can move any application – including old PeopleSoft or JD Edwards applications, it doesn’t have to be Java – to our infrastructure as a service by pressing a button without changing a single line of code.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Database-as-a-Service with OpenStack Trove
http://www.buildyourbestcloud.com/451/database-service-openstack-trove
Have you ever installed or configured an enterprise database? I have, and it can be quite a chore. Fortunately, cloud solution providers know this, and the result is Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), of which there are generally two different forms.
The first is simply a virtual machine image of a database installation, where you still need to configure the database for your needs (and sometimes you still even need to handle the installation).
The second is truly as a service, where the cloud provider offers a database service, never directly exposing you to the physical or virtual instances behind the service itself. In this scenario, the vendor manages the service including security, elasticity, and multi-tenancy; everything we’ve come to expect in the cloud. However, with many of these services it’s hard to avoid vendor lock-in.
Fortunately, OpenStack helps to address this issue with an open-source DBaaS solution called Trove.
To begin, Trove offers a REST API to provision instances and manage the service itself. It leverages this API and others to plug into OpenStack. It also uses other aspects of OpenStack for its operation, such as Nova’s message bus for reliability, a REST-based Task Manager for distributed administration and lifecycle management, and an API Server web service to manage the underlying datastore.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Value proposition of PaaS
It’s simple: Bring your own code. What makes it so special then?
http://embeddedexperience.blogspot.fi/2014/09/value-proposition-of-paas_29.html
Have you ever had a new business idea but hesitate to try it out due to the risk related to the initial investment? If your business is related to internet services, maybe PaaS can help you.
Perhaps the biggest promise of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the user’s ability to try new things out with minimum risk. Just take an instance, deploy your code, and pay per use. If it’s aint working as a business, then just quit it, and you didn’t lost much.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Thirty Companies Buy Into Cisco’s ACI-Dependent Cloud of Clouds
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/09/29/cisco-cloud-of-clouds-adds-30-partners-and-potential-aci-cutomers/
Cisco has secured a lot of new partners in its $1 billion initiative to build a Cisco cloud of clouds, a global network of data centers operated by a mass of service providers offering nearly every cloud service imaginable.
The company said on Monday that 30 new partners (scroll down for the full list) have signed on since it first announced the Intercloud initiative in March. They include data center and cloud providers, as well as “cloud aggregators,” resellers and software vendors.
Hooking the ecosystem on ACI
Cisco has taken a very different approach to tackling the cloud services market than other incumbent IT vendors have. HP, for example, has been building its own cloud services business, acting itself as the provider. Dell’s strategy has been to act as a reseller of other providers’ cloud services and do cloud consulting. IBM bought SoftLayer and made that its cloud services business.
Instead of becoming just another service provider, the networking giant decided to build out a global Cisco cloud platform based on OpenStack and, to a large extent on its own proprietary technology (ACI). While it will also be providing a lot of cloud services itself, a big part of the strategy is selling the technology that enables Intercloud into the massive ecosystem of partners the company is hoping to build.
Cisco will even finance partners’ purchases of its gear needed to participate in Intercloud. Cisco Capital has set aside $1 billion to loan to companies that want to buy and implement ACI.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud computing technology relevant to global change is probably difficult to exaggerate, because of large enterprise applications, but also the majority of the regular smartphone users take advantage of cloud services in their lives on a daily basis. On the company’s cloud services do not always lead to nothing but joyful screams as the users shadow marking is difficult to manage.
Knowledge-intensive companies the workers are accustomed to using the cloud in their free time. As the smartphone pictures are updated directly from Dropbox, iCloud, One Drive or Google Drive, a cloud of ease for users has become a part of everyday life.
IT decision-makers phenomenon may produce gray hair. Their work in order to facilitate users are willing to be flexible in certain cumbersome they experience security principles. The end result is a personal cloud service full of the company’s operations are important documents that have gone into the cloud the employee perceived the company itself offered by cloud services cumbersome – or even completely non-existent.
Only a few companies to offer employees use their own cloud service that would compete with the ease of use of the properties or commercial services.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/blogit/uutiskommentti/kenen+pilvea+teilla+kaytetaan/a1015662
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google unveils Drive for Education with free, unlimited storage and ‘Classroom’ integration
http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/09/30/google-unveils-drive-education-free-unlimited-storage-automatic-file-encryption/
Google Apps for Education just got a little bit sweeter: In the coming weeks, new and existing customers will have access to Drive for Education, an academic version of its online storage solution.
Drive for Education follows Drive for Work and boasts unlimited storage, support for individual files up to 5TB in size and automatic encryption. “Every file uploaded to Google Drive is encrypted, not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers,” Ben Schrom, PM Google Apps for Education said.
The service will be bolstered with Google Apps Vault, a compliance-focused tool for administrators, before the end of the year. Google is also promising a swathe of reporting and auditing tools, as well as an Audit API for tracking files.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rackspace Joined Amazon in Patching, Rebooting Cloud Servers
About a quarter of Rackspace’s 200,000-plus customers were impacted when the cloud provider had to patch a flaw in the Xen hypervisor.
– See more at: http://www.eweek.com/cloud/rackspace-joined-amazon-in-patching-rebooting-cloud-servers.html#sthash.QrRBj1WT.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your move, AWS and Microsoft: Google’s cutting basic cloud compute prices 10 percent
https://gigaom.com/2014/10/01/googles-at-it-again-cutting-basic-cloud-compute-prices-10-percent/
Google’s taken another whack at compute pricing; expect Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to respond.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry Ellison: Who’s the DINOSAUR NOW, cloudy rivals?
‘We’re just getting started,’ Ellison warns incumbents
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/02/ellison_oow_explainer_cloud/
There’s more to cloud than putting an ad on the back of The Economist, as a relatively contrite Larry Ellison and Oracle tried to demonstrate this week.
His PR people rattled out the product news at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, California, like he, or they, were trying to prove something.
“We are just getting started,” Ellison added. “Database is by far our largest software business and database will be by far our largest cloud business.”
“We have so many ISVs who would like to see their apps as multi-tenant and move it on to 12c…Our ISVs and our customers have been waiting for this.”
He claimed 30,000 “computers” (servers) on Oracle cloud, with 62 million “discreet” users and 23 billion transactions a day.
For comparison purposes, Amazon is thought to have at least 450,000 servers at last guestimate, Microsoft has claimed more than one million servers and Google was thought to be at at leaset 900,000. All of which puts Oracle a long, long way behind.
The promise for Oracle is that it becomes the Microsoft of the Oracle camp – that is, giving the company’s existing customers a cloud platform without Jeff Bezos’ fingerprints all over it.
“We do a lot of innovation at the infrastructure level. All the way down to the silicon,” Ellison said.
But what of price? Yes, that, too. “We will sell at the same price as Amazon, or Microsoft, or Google or anybody else in the infrastructure business,” Ellison claimed. “Our job is to do it with better security and better reliability at the same price.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google announces 10% price cut for all Compute Engine instances, Google Drive has passed 240M active users
http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/10/01/google-announces-10-price-cut-compute-engine-instances-google-drive-passed-240m-active-users/
At its Atmosphere Live event today, Google shared some important Google Cloud Platform news. The first comes in the form of a price cut for Google Compute Engine and the second is a milestone for Google Drive.
Urs Holzle, Google SVP of Technical Infrastructure, announced a 10 percent price reduction for all Google Compute Engine instances types, across all regions
During the company’s Cloud Platform Live in March, executives declared that cloud computing should be priced in accordance with Moore’s Law. Google says it “set a new standard for economics in the public cloud” when it slashed prices for both compute and storage, causing Amazon to quickly react and do the same thing for its AWS platform.
Holzle argues that Google can lower prices once again as a result of a decrease in the underlying cost of hardware. Furthermore, the company sees major efficiency gains that come from running your own service and managing your own data centers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Desktop, schmesktop: Microsoft reveals next WINDOWS SERVER
Run it in Azure today, sysadmins, and get ready for lots of hybrid hype
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/03/desktop_schmesktop_microsoft_reveals_next_windows_server/
Windows 10 has hogged the limelight this week, but Microsoft has also revealed a Technical Preview of Windows Server and its System Centre control freak.
The releases aren’t unexpected: Windows Server’s last full version emerged in 2012 and while substantial updates have landed in the years since, Redmond’s increasing ardour for Azure means a Windows Server refresh with lots of extra hybrid cloud bits sounds like a fine idea.
And that’s more or less what Microsoft is talking up in its posts about the preview, as the new OS is described as “the core of our cloud platform vision”.
Microsoft says the following are the biggies it’s revealing so far:
Rolling upgrades for Hyper-V clusters to the next version of Windows Server without downtime for your applications and workloads. This includes support for mixed versions as you transition your infrastructure.
New components for our software-defined networking stack that enable greater flexibility and control, including a network controller role to manage virtual and physical networks.
New synchronous storage replication that enhances availability for key applications and workloads plus storage Quality of Service to deliver minimum and maximum IOPS in environments with workloads with diverse storage requirements.
Enhanced application compatibility with OpenGL and OpenCL support.
New scenarios to reduce the risk profile of administrators with elevated rights, including time-based access with fine-grained privileges, and new application publishing capabilities.
The Technical Preview is offered with a “whatever you do, don’t use this in production” caveat.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix lost 218 database servers during AWS reboot and stayed online
https://gigaom.com/2014/10/03/netflix-lost-218-database-servers-during-aws-reboot-and-stayed-online/
While some websites were forced offline as a result of Xen hypervisor updates affecting multiple cloud providers, Netflix once again remained up entirely. The biggest fear last weekend was for the nearly one-tenth of its Cassandra nodes that had to be rebooted.
Downtime, scheduled or not, is one of the unfortunate realities of cloud computing and probably one of the areas where cloud providers will seek to distinguish themselves in the coming years. Thus far, the various open source tools Netflix has released are some of the best methods for failure-proofing AWS instances, but I suspect AWS will have to automate some of this for its users in an attempt to keep up with what Google is offering.
A State of Xen – Chaos Monkey & Cassandra
http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/10/a-state-of-xen-chaos-monkey-cassandra.html
On Sept 25th, 2014 AWS notified users about an EC2 Maintenance where “a timely security and operational update” needed to be performed that required rebooting a large number of instances. (around 10%) On Oct 1st, 2014 AWS sent an updated about the status of the reboot and XSA-108.
While we’d love to claim that we weren’t concerned at all given our resilience strategy, the reality was that we were on high alert given the potential of impact to our services. We discussed different options, weighed the risks and monitored our services closely. We observed that our systems handled the reboots extremely well with the resilience measures we had in place. These types of unforeseen events reinforce regular, controlled chaos and continued to invest in chaos engineering is necessary. In fact, Chaos Monkey was mentioned as a best practice in the latest EC2 Maintenance update.
Monkeying with the Database
Databases have long been the pampered and spoiled princes of the application world. They received the best hardware, copious amounts of personalized attention and no one would ever dream of purposely mucking around with them. In the world of democratized Public Clouds, this is no longer possible. Node failures are not just probable, they are expected. This requires database technology that can withstand failure and continue to perform.
Cassandra, Netflix’s database of choice, straddles the AP (Availability, Partition Tolerance) side of the CAP theorem. By trading away C (Consistency), we’ve made a conscious decision to design our applications with eventual consistency in mind. Our expectation is that Cassandra would live up to its side of the bargain and provide strong availability and partition tolerance. Over the years, it had demonstrated fairly good resilience to failure. However, it required lots of human intervention.
Out of our 2700+ production Cassandra nodes, 218 were rebooted. 22 Cassandra nodes were on hardware that did not reboot successfully. This led to those Cassandra nodes not coming back online. Our automation detected the failed nodes and replaced them all, with minimal human intervention.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Want the EU to work on making cloud snoop-proof? Speak up, my good ‘stakeholder’
That means you
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/06/want_the_eu_to_work_on_making_cloud_snoopproof_nows_your_chance_to_say_so/
The public has less than two weeks to respond to one of the vaguest European Commission consultations ever… but one that will decide where the Commish spends its money.
The deadline for submissions to the public consultation on Cloud Computing and Software has been extended by a week to 17 October. But unlike many consultations, there are no questions or specific guidelines, so anyone (known in Commissionspeak as “stakeholders”) can say whatever they want… within 3,600 characters.
The consultation will “help define future research priorities in the areas of cloud computing and software (including Open Source)”,
According to the Commission, cutting through the “jungle” of technical standards, developing safe and fair contract terms and conditions, and establishing a European Cloud Partnership could result in 2.5 million new jobs as well as an annual EU GDP boost of €160bn by 2020.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Department of Defense May Give Private Cloud Vendors Access To Top Secret Data
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/10/08/0247227/department-of-defense-may-give-private-cloud-vendors-access-to-top-secret-data
An anonymous reader sends news that the U.S. Department of Defense is pondering methods to store its most sensitive data in the cloud. The DoD issued an information request (PDF) to see whether the commercial marketplace can provide remote computing services for Level 5 and Level 6 workloads,
U.S. Department of Defense considers giving private Cloud vendors access to top secret data
http://thestack.com/department-of-defense-considers-private-cloud-vendors-top-secret-data-071014
The U.S. government is reviewing two possible scenarios whereby private cloud suppliers and facilitators would receive access to Level 5 and 6 information workloads – the most sensitive of government data.
A newly published Request For Information document reveals that the U.S. Department of Defense [DoD] is particularly interested in collaborating with the private sector on block storage systems and virtual machine management.
In the first scenario, a Data Centre Leasing Model (DCLM), cloud vendors would lease rack space in data centres run by the DoD, and provide services entirely from within that secure facility.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Originations: Are You Ready to Step onto the Cloud?
http://subscribe.fico.com/Originations-Are-You-Ready-to-Step-onto-the-Cloud?CID=70180000000eN61&utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=content%20syndication&utm_campaign=originations
Cloud-based delivery shifts operational responsibility for everything associated with you using the software—software license, implementation, servers, associated data storage, data center space and utilities, security, and more—to the provider. As a result, the cloud offers strong benefits in several areas:
Fast time-to-value, since software can be available in just a few days, with full configuration in weeks. Client configuration is also available more quickly in the cloud environment, compared to “getting in line” in the long project queues that many IT departments have.
Sign Up and Download
Enter your information to receive your free white paper.
Give us a call: 1-888-342-6336
Optimized performance, with your vendor implementing all application software, operating systems and hardware, plus updates and upgrades. Again, you won’t need to negotiate these projects with your internal IT department.
Seamless scalability, an important capability if your originations business is growing fast, or has demand spikes driven by seasonal factors or promotions. FICO delivers capacity on-demand to handle any increases in traffic, helping to ensure high throughputs and an excellent customer experience.
Regulatory compliance: Am I covered in the cloud?
In short, the answer is yes. Choosing cloud-based solution that meets PCI and/or other regional data security requirements,
Data security: Will my data be protected in the cloud?
Again, the answer is yes—provided your vendor follows industry-standard data security protocols. Some companies, however, feel more confident and secure with storing financial data in-house at their own data centers.
With many organizations struggling to rein in their data center sprawl, cloud-based software and storage are attractive and highly secure.
The bottom line: What’s the difference financially?
Across all industries, many companies are choosing cloud-based software delivery because it can offer greater financial flexibility. Importantly, the cloud delivery model changes the very cost structure of software. Whereas on-premises deployments present a significant, upfront capital expense (CapEx), cloud-based delivery typically entails a (much lower) monthly operating expense (OpEx).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sophos gulps down hot Mojave, will puff out more secure clouds
Safer cloudy stuff for ALL. Except non-Sophos customers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/08/sophos_absorbs_mojave_sticks_head_in_the_clouds/
Sophos has slurped up the security firm Mojave Networks in a bid to develop the world’s strongest and most secure cloud.
You should probably now get excited about data security.
“Mojave Networks is a young innovative company that has built a leading platform right at the intersection of three cutting-edge areas of security: cloud, web security, and mobile,” gushed Kris Hagerman, Sophos CEO.
Here’s a list of benefits Sophos customers can expect to receive when Mojave’s technology is integrated into its cloud, at some point during 2015:
A cloud-based web filtering engine enabling full protection for web interactions without requiring additional on-site technology
Near instantaneous protection from emerging threats by supplying real-time threat intelligence from the cloud
A zero-compromise approach to security across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices, delivering context-awareness, visibility and seamless protection
“We are proud of the work we’ve done at Mojave to pioneer a cloud-based approach to mobile and web security that offers unrivaled protection from malicious threats, security for mobile workers, and uniform policies across platforms,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Want to break Netflix? It’ll pay you to do the job
‘Senior Chaos Engineer’ sought to inflict all sorts of nasty, nasty, pain
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/09/want_to_break_netflix_itll_pay_you_to_do_the_job/
In 2012, Netflix open sourced a tool called Chaos Monkey that it uses to test its networks and systems by trying to break them with attacks based on all sorts of chaotic events.
Now the company wants to hire a “Senior Chaos Engineer” to do the same … only more painfully.
The way Chaos Monkey works is conceptually fairly simple. It runs as a service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), where it seeks out Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) of virtual machine instances. When it finds one, it picks one of its virtual machines at random and terminates it.
At first blush, this may sound like the most maddening piece of software ever, and if a hacker figured out a way to use it maliciously, it could probably cause someone some real headaches.
But Chaos Monkey is a tool, and the reason it runs around your network like a psychopathic ape is because in reality, system failures are one of the most common types of problems the people who manage cloud services must deal with in everyday life.
Like Chaos Monkey, the others – including Latency Monkey, Conformity Monkey, Doctor Monkey, Janitor Monkey, Security Monkey, 10-18 Monkey, and the unnervingly-named Chaos Gorilla – are all designed to root out unseen problems in cloud architectures.
https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy
Tools for keeping your cloud operating in top form. Chaos Monkey is a resiliency tool that helps applications tolerate random instance failures.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud to kill off legacy apps says Rackspace CEO Taylor Rhodes
Trouble on horizon for today’s dev companies and platforms
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/09/cloud_to_kill_off_legacy_apps_says_rackspace_ceo_taylor_rhodes/
Interview Rackspace president and CEO Taylor Rhodes ascended to the latter role just last month, so when our Sydney bureau was offered the chance for a chat we jumped at it. Here’s what Rhodes had to say about Rackspace’s decision to stand alone, what it’s like watching AWS and Google fight giants fight and more.
The Register: How do you find people react to OpenStack? I saw a tweet this week that if there were a computer game called ‘Sysadmin’ the final boss would be OpenStack.
Rhodes: I look at OpenStack as a four and a half year old thing, so it will take time to mature.
We see OpenStack taking on a private cloud flavour. I think there was a period of time when we and others were thinking OpenStack would become a large, multi-tennant cloud play. It is still there, but we see the market seems to be going to OpenStack being a private cloud option.
That’s where we are focusing our development efforts. So we see a Microsoft stack, a VMware stack and an OpenStack. It is important to us but it needs to be treated as one of the players.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google and Snapchat Veteran Magnusson to Lead Oracle Cloud
http://recode.net/2014/10/09/google-and-snapchat-veteran-magnusson-to-lead-oracle-cloud/
Business software giant Oracle is getting serious about cloud computing and has made its first hire demonstrating exactly how serious.
Sources familiar with the move tell Re/code that two weeks ago it hired Peter S. Magnusson, the former VP of Engineering at Snapchat and a former director of engineering at Google, to run its cloud computing efforts.
Magnusson will be working directly with Ellison as well as with Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s EVP for product development. Oracle Cloud is said to be “hiring aggressively” in the Seattle and San Francisco Bay areas, though it’s being considered a global organization within Oracle.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon’s DynamoDB Gets Hugely Expanded Free Tier And Native JSON Support
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/09/amazons-dynamodb-gets-hugely-expanded-free-tier-and-native-json-support/
Amazon today announced a large update to its DynamoDB NoSQL database service that introduces a massively expanded free tier and the ability to store entire JSON-formatted documents as single database items.
Like all of Amazon’s cloud computing services, DynamoDB always offered a limited free tier for developers who wanted to try the service. For DynamoDB, that was a pretty limited offering with only 100MB of storage, 10 read units and 5 write units. Enough to try it, but not enough to do any serious work (which, to be fair, is the point of offering this free tier). Starting today, that limit goes up to a whopping 25 GB of storage and enough capacity to perform over 200 million requests per month.
As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels points out, that’s enough to run a gaming app with 15,000 monthly active users or an ad-tech platform that serves 500,000 impressions per month.
In comparison, Google’s NoSQL database service Cloud Datastore offers users 1GB of free storage space while Microsoft’s new JSON-centric DocumentDB service (which is still in preview) only offers a free tier for open source developers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM’s Watson Going Global
Jeopardy champion branching out
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1324249&
On Wednesday, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty cut the ribbon that officially opened the Watson Global Headquarters in New York City’s “Silicon Alley.” From there the decisions on how to spend IBM’s promised billion-dollar investment in advancing cognitive computing will be made — with Watson leading the way.
The Watson Client Experience Center will allow innovators and entrepreneurs to get expert advice from Watson-savvy research and design teams on how to harness lightning-fast data scanning with learning algorithms in their applications. While waiting for its global headquarters to be built, IBM has amassed a global network of innovators, partners, clients, developers, academics, and venture capitalists to lead the charge into what IBM’s Rometty calls the coming “era of cognitive computing” — the third era in the history of information technology.
The first era was the tabulating era circa 1890, marked by the manual calculator, and the second era started in the 1940s and continues today using the traditional von Neumann architecture based on manual programming. But the third era of cognitive computing will be based on self-learning machines that can ingest unstructured big data, then narrow it down to what people need in particular situations, thereby transforming our professions, our industries, and our day-to-day lives, according to IBM.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EMC Acquiring Cloud-Computing Startup Cloudscaling
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-13/emc-acquiring-cloud-computing-startup-cloudscaling.html
EMC Corp. (EMC) has agreed to acquire cloud-computing startup Cloudscaling Group Inc., pushing to make its storage products work better with a set of free software tools.
EMC plans to use Cloudscaling to “further extend our breadth of cloud platform support,” Dave Farmer, a spokesman at EMC, said in a statement yesterday. He added that EMC plans to hold a cloud event on Oct. 28. By making sure EMC’s storage products work well with OpenStack in cloud-computing environments, companies will have more incentive to pair the company’s hardware with the free software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SAP Cloud Apps Will Now Run on IBM’s SoftLayer
http://recode.net/2014/10/14/sap-cloud-apps-will-now-run-on-ibms-softlayer/
German business software company SAP and computing giant IBM are teaming up in the cloud. SAP says it has tapped IBM’s SoftLayer service to run its suite of cloud-ready business applications.
The plan calls for SAP to let its customers run its HANA Enterprise cloud on IBM’s SoftLayer, something that Amazon’s Web Services cloud unit has been able to do for some time.
One point of the move, said SAP exec Kevin Ichhpurani, is to take advantage of IBM’s global footprint so that customers using SAP applications can do so within the borders of their own countries. “A lot of our customers are concerned about data sovereignty and privacy controls,” he said. “IBM was the obvious choice to help us address that.”
SAP is another one of those old-school software companies that has been struggling to make the transition to selling its stuff in the cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
If Your Cloud Vendor Goes Out of Business, Are You Ready?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/10/15/0321203/if-your-cloud-vendor-goes-out-of-business-are-you-ready
With Amazon Web Services losing an estimated $2 billion a year, it’s not inconceivable that the cloud industry could go the way of storage service providers (remember them?). So any plan for cloud services must include a way to retrieve your data quickly in case your cloud service provider goes belly up without much notice (think Nirvanix).
recovering your data from the cloud quickly is a lot harder than you might think.
One possible solution: a failover agreement with a second cloud provider – and make sure it’s legally binding.
The Day the Cloud Died: Planning for Cloud Failure
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/backup-recovery/the-day-the-cloud-died-planning-for-cloud-failure-1.html
Reports that even Amazon Web Services is bleeding cash should be enough to make cloud users worry. We all know that Amazon is a cash machine, but from the analysis, Steve Brazier of Canalys estimates that “Amazon Web Services lost $2 billion in the last four quarters, and the parent is forecasting losses of between $410m and $810m this quarter.”
So let’s assume that these estimates are true, and let’s also assume that since Google and Microsoft do not break down cloud services that it is also true for them. If a company was making money when everyone else wasn’t, they’d be sure to let us know. This, by the way, is no different than what happened to the storage service provider revolution of the late 1990s, but this time was supposed to be different.
Who own the rights to your data? Who has the decryption keys? Just some food for thought as you start to think about what to do and what not to do.
One obvious answer is to put some requirements into your contract for getting your data out via a network, disk, tape archive or something. This of course doesn’t matter if the company goes out of business or files for protection from creditors, nor does requiring the company to keep networks running for X amount of days so you can get your data out.
For example the time to read a 6 TB disk drive is about 9 hours and 40 minutes (6TB / 172 MB/sec read rate). That is a long time. Do you have on your end enough bandwidth and the capacity to handle all of your data that you have uploaded over the years?
What is the critical data needed to keep your business up and running?
The key here is you need a plan. It would be great if the plan could include at least the following:
1. A prioritization of your data so you can download it to your own systems: What is more important and what is least important, and the reasons why. You are likely going to have to prioritize your data movement so that the highest-priority business-critical data gets moved first.
2. A plan B that you can execute against – having another cloud vendor move your data out of the failing cloud. If your cloud provider fails, who do you go to for secondary access and who do you contract within that organization to move your data? This is well known method in the backup world as organizations can buy services that provide recovery and operational environments.
Cloud vendors do this all of the time with multiple locations, so it is likely that if enough people ask cloud vendor Y to support failover from cloud vendor X, you can buy an insurance policy. Just make sure that that policy is legally binding with penalties and meets your business requirements.
it is highly unlikely that you are going to procure and install hardware and upgrade your network in time to get your data out.
Alternatives
There are two obvious choices: ignore the issue and don’t worry about it, or at the other end of the spectrum, do not use clouds. Neither is a likely a good idea, so what is the alternative?
Having a copy of your business critical data somewhere else where you can get it and use it, and depending on your business this might be something that is done in real time if the data changes often. For some businesses, the data might not change often so this would likely work. What about using multiple providers so that you would not get caught in the failure of a single provider?
Tomi Engdahl says:
German business software giant SAP is annoyed Edward Snowden NSA revelations of the effects of the business – it was expensive.
SAP boss Kyle Garman, the revelations of data centers, as well as the construction of the centers for operating the associated costs have increased “exponentially”.
Garman comments associated with SAP and IBM signed the cooperation agreement , which will start to offer SAP, among other things, the center from memory Hanaa IBM’s data centers.
Sources:
http://www.tivi.fi/kaikki_uutiset/snowden+kavi+meille+kalliiksi+harmittelee+sap/a1020003
http://www.news-sap.com/marriage-made-cloud/
Tomi Engdahl says:
As a service is here to stay
Gentry firmly believes that business process outsourcing as a service model has come to stay. According to him, the limiting factor is, however, currently still often a lack of appropriate technologies. “Cloud Storage was the easy part, cloud computing is not quite so easy, but acted. Business applications, important issues will be a problem, however. The majority of the currently available applications are not designed as a service use as well. This is a challenge for the whole industry, “Gentry says.
Gentry that this is a good place to Xerox to strike. Players in the field is not much yet, but willing to you from the front: “Although we traditionally have not been involved in the business software business, we have a lot of platforms, which we can offer as a service. We also did not have the same burden of the past than some other companies. “Gentry however, can not be without lifting the hat Salesforce.com, which he said made it this far good job.
Source: http://summa.talentum.fi/article/tv/99322
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS takes desktop-as-a-service out of the PC
Support for PCoIP protocol means zero clients can run cloudy desktops
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/16/aws_takes_desktopasaservice_out_of_the_pc/
Amazon Web Services has made a significant enhancement to its Workspaces desktop-as-a-service service, by allowing support for Teradici’s PC-over-IP protocol and “zero clients” that run it.
Workspaces is a US$35 a month service that offers Windows Server 2008 re-skinned with the Windows 7 UI. Until today, consuming the service required player software running on a Mac, PC, iPad, Kindle Fire or Android tablet. But AWS has now announced that Workspaces will run in zero clients, Teradici’s term for devices that pack almost no computing power other than than needed to stream software into a monitor and handle a mouse and keyboard input.
The likes of HP and Dell make zero clients, and it’s also possible to buy a zero client monitor.
Again anecdotally, The Reg’s virtualisation desk hears whispers that Workspaces aren’t setting the world on fire. A quick spot of Googling reveals that zero client monitors can be had for about US$460, rather cheaper than many new business PCs. At the peak Workspaces price of US$75 a month – which buys you twin vCPUs, 7.5GB of memory, 100GB of storage, AV software and Microsoft Office Professional 2010 – you’re looking at US$900 a year for a PC, plus network costs and the cost of the zero client.
If Workspaces are as hands-off as promised, and therefore require less tending by sysadmins, the move to support PCoIP could make for an attractive and well-priced desktop option.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud skills certification can add zeros to your pay cheque
Grab some letters to put after your name
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/16/cloud_skills_certification_can_add_zeros_to_your_pay_cheque/
As IT recruiters collectively bemoan the dearth of cloud professionals, the doom-and-gloom predictions that cloud services would result in the death of the IT department now seem nothing short of laughable.
The most recent research from industry body the Cloud Industry Forum suggests that cloud computing has achieved mainstream deployment in the UK, with 78 per cent of organisations adopting at least one cloud-based service.
Large private enterprises show the highest rates of adoption at just over 80 per cent.
the excitement over the flexibility of cloud services is being tempered by concerns over the security of cloud data storage.
When it comes to recruiting, there is nothing like an inherent fear to drive demand for people with the requisite know-how. The result is a thriving market for certifications
“Cloud computing is becoming very much the norm,”
“Demand for cloud skills over the last couple of years has grown by about 20 per cent as companies look to embrace a cloud computing strategy.”
Rumblings about a massive shortage of cloud professionals are certainly not new.
There is no denying the proliferation of cloud certifications, and the number seems to grow exponentially as the market matures. For IT managers looking to recruit the crème de la crème, understanding the relative benefits of one certification over another can be something of a minefield.
A company looking to spin up test and development servers will have a very different check list to one looking at alternative ways to deploy core critical applications.
Individuals struggling to decide which certification will fill the cloud-shaped hole in their CV may take some solace from an analysis of jobs posted on the Technojobs site.
It shows that the proportion of jobs for which cloud certifications are a prerequisite verges on the insignificant, largely due to supply and demand economics.
“I would expect this to evolve as demand and interest in cloud computing continues to grow and employers look for greater differentiation and skill sets in candidates,”
Employers are aggressively pursuing multi-talented workers with a mix of technology, domain, business, process and people skills.
It can also be a unique combination of pure tech skills: for example, cloud administrators who are adept at automating the configuration and operations in a cloud environment by combining a variety of different skill sets around systems administration, virtualization, storage and network administration. It’s not about just configuring and running a server. Or cloud developers who have mastered new sets of APIs, new frameworks, and non-relational databases like NoSQL to develop elastic and scalable apps in the cloud.
“The focus is on recent qualifications and consistent hands-on experience,”
However, Erdle is not alone in criticising some technical cloud certifications for failing to bridge the gap between business and IT departments.
He also believes vendor-specific certifications on their own are not enough to allow people to work across the range of different cloud environments.
Developed in collaboration with cloud rivals such as Google, Amazon Web Services, IBM and Microsoft, Cloud Essentials sets out to demonstrate that an individual knows what cloud computing means from a business and technical perspective, as well as what is involved in moving to the cloud.
“With cloud computing, users are getting closer to buying the business functionality they need without having to call the CIO,” Erdle adds.
Ultimately, a solid strategic overview of cloud capabilities and in-depth technical knowledge of specific products is a killer combination, with the potential to command huge salaries.
For individuals looking to enhance their CVs with the most sought-after skills, having a clear view of your career objectives is an obvious starting point.
Regardless of the specifics, most experts agree that there are certain boxes that any certification should tick. In particular an element of continuing professional development recognises that technology never stands still.
“If people take lifelong learning seriously, they are definitely the sort of people you want in your organisation,” says Thilthorpe.
“IT professionals need to gain cloud experience in the workplace to enhance their career opportunities,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Huawei and Accenture pucker up for enterprise love-in
It’s all about the cloud, people –cloud, cloud, cloud
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/10/16/huawei_accenture/
Huawei looks to be side-stepping glacier-paced reseller recruitment by getting chummy with consultancy Accenture to work on carrier biz support services and private cloudy enterprise stuff.
The ink is still drying on the pact but will see the pair “develop joint initiatives” in China, southeast Asia, other emerging markets and some select countries in the developed markets.
“In an era where the physical and digital worlds and increasingly converging, no enterprise is able to address all customer needs alone,” said Eric Xu, rotating CEO at the Shenzhen-based Huawei.
He went on to claim the deal with the integrator will “further augment” its enterprise operations, which to date have struggled to grow as significantly outside of China.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Keep a beady eye on your business’s cloud service shopping
Don’t let staff go crazy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/16/cloud_procurement/
If you believe the hype, it is only a question of time before every Tom, Dick and Harriet in your organisation becomes a tech decision maker who can spend your company’s money, with the power to do so a mere click away.
“Shadow IT”, the term emerging to describe the buying of IT and technology services without any central controls or processes, is fast becoming a reality as the scaleability and flexibility of cloud services strikes a chord with businesses of all sizes.
“People can go to a site, sign up to the Ts and Cs and subscribe to services with a credit card, bypassing IT. It is a reality,” says Carl Harris, business technology director at BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.
But embracing cloud services in a way that is going to benefit your business is not just about producing your credit card and hoping for the best. The huge market in services and consultancy to help guide corporates through the minefield of cloud offerings is testament to that.
Although cloud is a game changer, that doesn’t mean all the disciplines that governed IT in the past are redundant, whether that is writing code as efficiently as possible or planning procurement with the next five years in mind.
“Bill shock” is increasingly hitting CIOs as they open the invoice from their cloud service provider at the end of the month, to be confronted by a figure that bears no relation to the deal they thought they had signed up to.
“The flexibility of cloud computing can be a double-edged sword. People aren’t aware how much they are consuming,” warns Owen Rogers, senior analyst, digital economics at analyst 451 Research.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon launched its Trusted Adviser service in 2013. This watches your AWS consumption and shows you how to save by switching off resources you don’t use. To date AWS has sent out 1.7 million notifications, giving customers about $300m in cost reduction.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/16/cloud_procurement/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft to expand business within the meaning of the Azure cloud to its base. For example, the Linux support is far more comprehensive.
Microsoft’s general manager Satya Nadellan of the Azure supports the now five different Linux distribution. Today, about 20 percent of the Azure cloud of virtual machines are Linux-based systems.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1942:microsoft-laajentaa-pilveaan&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Azure? Microsoft and IBM ink deal on business cloud
Enterprise round-up time…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/22/ibm_microsoft_cloud_partnership/
IBM and Microsoft’s Azure cloud are blending after the two firms inked an enterprise partnership.
Big Blue and Microsoft on Wednesday committed to host and integrate their enterprise software on their respective clouds. Also, they’ll work together on deeper developer and VM support.
Staples of enterprise IT spanning servers, software and services, the duo reckoned they’d be facilitating greater access to cloud to different ends.
IBM hopes for greater use of its software and its cloud-hosting services, while Microsoft wants more business customers running on its Azure cloud.
Under the deal, IBM’s flagship Websphere Liberty and MQ middleware and its DB2 database will be punted on Microsoft Azure.
The IBM software will be delivered via Azure Virtual Machines, like containers that run inside the Azure proprietary fabric, for development and production.
Azure Virtual Machines are also used to run Windows Server and Linux on Azure.
Microsoft’s Windows Server and SQL Server database, meanwhile, will be offered on IBM Cloud.
Windows Sever is without doubt a corporate IT operating system standard while SQL Server one of Microsoft’s products growing at an insatiable rate.
IBM has promised make more of its software able to run in and be managed through Microsoft’s hypervisor, Hyper-V.
Also, IBM’s Pure Application Service will be available on Azure.
Pure Application Service is the hosted version of the Pure Application Server cloud-in-a-box and currently running on IBM’s SoftLayer hosted data centres.
Microsoft’s .NET runtimes and “relevant” tooling will be made to run on IBM’s Bluemix platform-as-a-service, which officially launched in July.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Xen says its security policies might be buggier than its software
Users didn’t know if they were allowed to patch bug behind world cloud reboot
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/23/xen_says_its_security_policies_have_more_holes_than_its_software/
The Xen project has asked for help to ensure future bugs aren’t as disruptive as the XSA-108 flaw that saw major cloud operators reboot an awful lot of servers.
XSA-108 emerged in late September and saw the likes of AWS, SoftLayer and Rackspace patch and reboot many servers. Such reboots are just the kind of thing that cloud providers Just Aren’t Supposed To Do, hence Xen’s admission that “During the embargo period of XSA-108, the Xen Project Security Team was faced with some difficult questions of policy interpretation, as well as practical issues related to pre-disclosure list membership applications.”
Presumably because XSA-108 was so disruptive, the organisation has now shouted out to all and sundry with a “community consultation to improve and better define the project’s Security Vulnerability Response Process.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Upstart brags about cheaper-than-Amazon private cold data cloud
Storiant man asks you to check out their racks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/23/storiants_private_cold_data_cloud_cheaper_than_amazon/
Storiant is an object storage startup which claims its customers can use its technology to store petabyte-scale data in a private cloud at a price below public cloud storage. How does it pull this trick off?
A dozen pennies per gig for a year certainly sounds cheap as chips.
The product is a hardware array and ZFS-based software. The hardware features rack enclosures of desktop drives and shingled media drives. The firm claims its “Storiant Power Governor reduces the active drive time to 10 per cent or less, effectively doubling the life of the drive.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft and Dell’s cloud in a box: Instant Azure for the data centre
A less painful way to run Microsoft’s private cloud
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/21/microsoft_and_dells_cloud_in_a_box_instant_azure_for_the_datacentre/
Two words were missing from Microsoft’s cloudy event in San Francisco yesterday, where CEO Satya Nadella and Cloud and Enterprise VP Scott Guthrie presented an update to the company’s Azure and hybrid cloud strategy. Those two words were System Center.
Instead, Nadella and Guthrie talked about another way to build a private cloud, using a cloud-in-a-box offering from Microsoft and Dell called the Cloud Platform System (CPS). This is a private deployment of technology from Microsoft’s public cloud which you install in your own data centre.
The software is based on an existing product, the Azure Pack, while Dell provides the hardware: a rack stuffed with 32 Dell PowerEdge C6220 II servers for Hyper-V hosts, additional PowerEdge servers for managing storage, and 4 PowerVault MD3060e enclosures for HDD and SSD arrays.
You will be able to buy from one to four 42U racks. A full four-rack setup will offer up to 8,000 VMs (each with two virtual CPU cores, 1.75GB RAM and 50GB disk) and 0.7PB of workload storage (there is additional storage used for backup).
Fault-tolerance is built in at every level, including networking. Patch management, monitoring, backup and data recovery are all integrated.
Azure Pack is a subset of the software used to run Azure, configured to run on private infrastructure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Web Developers: Autumnal webinars throw light on the Cloud
Special guests for special webinars
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/23/web_developers_autumnal_webinars_throw_a_light_on_the_clouds/
regular one hour how-to session covering the following demos.
Creating a Microsoft Azure WordPress website
Creating a Microsoft Azure ASP.Net website
Creating a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine
Creating a Microsoft Azure Mobile Services (with Android client)
Creating a Microsoft Azure Cloud Service
How to sign up for a free Microsoft Azure Trial subscription