devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Mike Vizard

  • AWS Finally Embraces On-Premises IT

    AWS Finally Embraces On-Premises IT

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced this week it will make available instances of its IT infrastructure available in on-premises IT environments, which it will then manage on behalf of customers. The announcement was made at its AWS re:Invent 2018 conference.

    AWS CEO Andy Jassy said AWS Outposts platforms, scheduled to be available in 2019, will come in two flavors: one will run the same stack of software AWS uses to manage its public cloud, while the other will be based on the software stack VMware currently makes available on the AWS cloud.

    VMware announced it will make available a managed service of its own for AWS Outposts based on its entire platform stack, in addition to making its management and networking software in the form of VMware Cloud Foundation available on instance of AWS EC2. That move represents a significant expansion of the VMware approach to hybrid cloud computing because AWS EC2 is based on the open source Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) rather than the VMware hypervisor.

    Regardless of path chosen, each Outposts platform will function as an extension of the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service, with connectivity being provided via the closest AWS Region located to that on-premises platform. Both Amazon VPC and AWS Outposts will be tied into the AWS Control Tower service to create a common management plane.

    After years of making the case for moving all workloads into the public cloud, Jassy admitted this week that there are instances when performance and compliance concerns will result in some workloads never moving to the public cloud. In response to demand from customers who want to be able to deploy and manage the same infrastructure on-premises as they have in the cloud, Jassy said AWS is now committing to making racks of systems available via an AWS managed service.

    The challenge DevOps teams will now face is determining the degree to which they will want to integrate their DevOps processes with managed services provided by AWS, VMware or any number of third-party service providers. In some cases, DevOps teams may simply decide that additional layer of management adds to much complexity. In other cases, the decision might lean more toward allocating more resources to application development, as IT operations spanning hybrid clouds become more of an automated service provided by an external vendor.

    Heading into 2019, it appears the specious debate over public clouds versus on-premises IT environments is coming to an end. Not only will there be workloads running in both environments for the foreseeable future, but a recent study conducted by International Data Corp. (IDC) notes that 80 percent of IT organizations surveyed have repatriated workloads back into on-premises IT environments from public clouds. To make matters even more complex, a whole new generation of so-called cloud-native applications based on microservices enabled by containers running on Kubernetes clusters is adding even more complexity to IT environments.

    The goal, of course, is to make modern businesses more agile. The irony is that achieving that goal appears to requires paradoxically making IT environments more complex than ever.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware Wavefront Adds AI, Distributed Tracing

    VMware Wavefront Adds AI, Distributed Tracing

    VMware has updated its Wavefront monitoring service to include support for distributed tracing along with anomaly detection capabilities enabled by machine learning algorithms.

    Stela Udovicic, senior director for product marketing for Wavefront by VMware, said the addition of the distributed tracing support, now available as part of a public beta, means that a single monitoring service now can provide metrics, histograms and the tracing function required to provide a holistic view of the IT environment. Those capabilities eliminate the need to employ multiple services to achieve the same goal, she noted.

    In contrast, Wavefront makes it easier to search for traces containing a specific service or application programming interface (API) to determine which ones have errors or long response time. Additionally, DevOps teams can filter the trace search to show traces containing spans from a given cluster or shard.

    At the same time, VMware is adding an AI Genie capability that promises to make it easier to troubleshoot existing needs and identify future application and IT infrastructure requirements, said Udovicic. That data is collected in real time and presented in a way that allows even the most novice users to visualize using analytics tools built into the Wavefront services, added Udovicic.

    Wavefront is based on an agentless architecture that in part makes it possible for the service to process millions of metrics, histograms and traces per second. That capability is especially critical in IT environments that have embraced microservices based on containers that tend to expand across an enterprise IT environment, said Udovicic. Wavefront already supports Kubernetes clusters.

    In general, Udovicic noted that developers tend to embrace a variety of open source approaches to monitoring applications as they build their applications. But a SaaS application such as Wavefront makes it easier for enterprise IT organizations to apply monitoring across a broad range of applications. To facilitate that transition, Wavefront provides an OpenTracing/OpenCensus compliant solution that includes a drop-in replacement for the Zipkin and Jaeger distributed tracing software, which is at the core of many open source monitoring tools.

    VMware is clearly betting that increased reliance on AI will push organizations toward relying more on cloud services. Machine learning algorithms require access to massive amounts of data before they can construct AI models capable of accurately predicting events. The cost of collecting and storing all that data, plus the expertise required to train the AI models, are beyond the capabilities of most DevOps teams.

    Most enterprise IT organizations have applied monitoring tools to only their most critical applications, mainly because of cost concerns. But as applications based on microservices proliferate across the enterprise, it’s becoming apparent that all the dependencies that will exist between various application services will need to be continuously monitored. The only issue now is determining how best to achieve that goal as part of an integrated set of DevOps processes.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Red Hat Injects DevOps Flexibility into RHEL 8

    Red Hat Injects DevOps Flexibility into RHEL 8

    With the beta release of the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat is setting the stage for making it easier for DevOps teams to consume emerging operating system services without having to upgrade their entire operating system.

    The beta release of RHEL 8 adds an Application Streams capability designed to make it possible to leverage userspace more flexibly, as modules running in userspace now can be updated more quickly than the core operating system.

    Matt Micene, the technical product marketing manager for RHEL 8, said it’s also now possible for multiple versions of the same package—for example, an interpreted language or a database—to be made available via an application stream. That means different DevOps teams will be able to more easily work with different versions of various classes of technologies without having to wait for the next upgrade of the operating system, he said.

    As part of that focus on flexibility, Red Hat is also moving to make it easier for organizations that have embraced microservices based on containers to build applications. Open source tools such as Buildah for container building, Podman for running containers and Skopeo for sharing and finding containers are now fully supported in the operating system. Red Hat is also extending support for container networking using IPVLAN, which enables containers nested in virtual machines (VMs) to access networking hosts. There’s also a new TCP/IP stack with Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) congestion control. As organizations increasingly adopt containers, many of them are starting to make operating systems decisions based on which platform has the most containerized optimized services built in.

    Other capabilities being added include support for OpenSSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 along with Systemwide Cryptographic Policies; a Stratis file management system for dealing with lots of volumes; a Composer tool for building custom images that can deployed on hybrid clouds; support for the Yum 4 packager; and a new web console for managing the RHEL environment that presents administrators the same user interface experience regardless of their experience.

    Micene said Red Hat is trying to strike a balance between stability and IT agility. There are plenty of organizations that still prefer to upgrade their operating systems at very well-defined intervals. But there are also an increasing number of organizations that want to be able to take advantage of the latest IT innovations without having to wait for an operating system upgrade. Many of those organizations increasingly view IT as being core to their ability to compete, he said.

    Over time most organizations will develop a more schizophrenic approach to IT. There will be some application workloads where stability trumps all other requirements. At the other end of the scale, innovation will be the most prized attribute. To one degree or another, every workload is going to fall along a spectrum between those two extremes. The challenge is defining the right mix of DevOps processes to serve the needs of every and any workloads regardless of its attributes.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Cisco Looks to Build DevOps Community

    Cisco Looks to Build DevOps Community

    Cisco Systems is making a concerted effort to create an era of détente between networking professionals and the rest of the IT operations teams that have embraced DevOps practices.

    Susie Wee, senior vice president for the DevNet community at Cisco, said the goal is to provide network operations (NetOps) teams the skills required to programmatically expose a range of self-service capabilities to developers.

    At the same time, Cisco is encouraging developers to deploy applications directly on routers and switches that now incorporate general-purpose processors. Those processors would run applications in a way that significantly reduces network latency, while the custom ASICs that Cisco develops would continue to handle all the networking functions.

    Wee said that dichotomy is now driving Cisco to classify two classes of developers within its DevNet community. The first is aimed at traditional application developers and the second community is more focused on managing infrastructure as code.

    Cisco is now extending that latter initiative into the realm of software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs). The company has added integrated firewall, intrusion prevention and URL-filtering technologies to its SD-WAN platform. In addition, there are code samples, videos, learning labs and sandboxes available on Cisco DevNet that are intended to make easier to learn how to programmatically manage Cisco SD-WANs using open application programming interfaces (APIs).

    Cisco claims to now have 530,000 developers participating in DevNet. One the one hand, the company is trying to entice NetOps teams that have been reluctant to give up legacy command line interfaces to modernize their networking environments. On the other hand, Cisco is trying to attract more application developers who increasingly find themselves encountering latency issues as they move to deploy applications in highly distributed computing environments, such as an Internet of Things (IoT) application.

    Over time, Cisco and other providers of network operating systems also will be moving away from monolithic architecture to embrace microservices, which would make it possible to programmatically invoke networking services on a more granular level.

    Of course, there may be some developers who would prefer to programmatically take control over networking along with the rest of the IT infrastructure. But Cisco is clearly betting most organizations will want to make it easier for their NetOps and DevOps teams to work more closely together. Today, most enterprise IT organizations can spin up a virtual machine in a matter of minutes; provisioning the network connections to that virtual machine, however, is still measured in days and weeks.

    Other networking infrastructure companies besides Cisco have realized the need to make networking more programmable. But in terms of the resources the company is making available to solve that problem, it would appear to ready to make a significantly larger commitment.

    — Mike Vizard

  • IBM Allies with ServiceNow to Bridge DevOps Divide with ITIL

    IBM Allies with ServiceNow to Bridge DevOps Divide with ITIL

    IBM and ServiceNow today announced an alliance under which IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) will collaborate with ServiceNow to make DevOps processes and events managed via the IBM Cloud Migration Factory visible to a cloud-based IT service management platform from ServiceNow based on the ITIL framework.

    Jim Comfort, general manager for cloud services at IBM GTS, said that from a governance and compliance perspective it has become clear IT organizations need more visibility in to DevOps processes. In general, enterprise IT organizations are increasingly adopting DevOps processes to accelerate application development and deployment, while still relying on ITIL to manage governance and compliance, he said.

    IBM GTS, via the alliance with ServiceNow, will be able to bridge that divide by integrating ServiceNow with a set of tools and services IBM provides across hybrid cloud computing environments that are based on DevOps process.

    The IBM Cloud Migration Factory is based on a methodology IBM developed to move applications to cloud. IBM Services claims it has completed more than 100,000 migrations. In addition to allying with ServiceNow, a new toolset is being added to IBM Cloud Migration Factory that employs algorithms based on the migrations IBM has completed that improve planning accuracy and uncover application dependencies. Included in that portfolio is cloud brokering software that IBM gained via the acquisition of Gravitant in 2015.

    Comfort said the alliance with ServiceNow will make it possible to have DevOps processes and events register automatically in the change management database (CMDB) provided by ServiceNow. That’s critical because it should allow IT organizations to maintain governance and compliance without having to impose an overhead that otherwise would slow down application development and deployment using DevOps processes, he said, adding there’s no need to impose an artificial construct on top of a DevOps process.

    As hybrid cloud computing continues to evolve, Comfort said IBM GTS expects IT organizations will be relying on a mix of ITIL and DevOps processes for the foreseeable future. In fact, he noted that while managing one to ten DevOps processes is relatively simple, keeping track of hundreds of DevOps processes requires a more static set of processes to maintain governance and compliance. The IBM approach is to create a unified approach to integrating DevOps and ITIL processes that doesn’t require organizations to integrate a variety of point products on their own.

    Proponents of DevOps processes have been making a case against ITIL processes that they tend to view as being too rigid to support agile application development. Comfort said the next iteration of the ITIL framework will incorporate many of the concepts advocated by DevOps proponents. But the two frameworks will remain distinct.

    The alliance between IBM and ServiceNow represents a clear signal that DevOps is going mainstream in enterprise IT environments. The challenge now is finding a way for organizations that have spent more than a decade adopting ITIL processes to embrace DevOps processes with a minimal amount of friction possible.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Virtual Instruments Extends Scope of AIOps Platform

    Virtual Instruments Extends Scope of AIOps Platform

    Virtual Instruments has extended the reach of its AIOps platform to add application service assurance, predictive capacity management, workload infrastructure balancing and problem resolution and avoidance capabilities.

    Based on a combination of machine learning, statistical analysis, heuristics and expert systems technologies, VirtualWisdom is designed to enable DevOps teams to be able to apply analytics to resolve issues in near real time versus having to convene a “war room.”

    Len Rosenthal, chief marketing officer for Virtual Instruments, said the whole war room concept has become antiquated in the age of DevOps. Instead of wasting time having individual departments within an IT organization coming together to defend their innocents every time an issue arises, VirtualWisdom identifies the likely source of the problem instantly.

    The latest release of VirtualWisdom adds to that a predictive capability that identify workload balancing opportunities intended to prevent problems from arising in the first place, he added.

    As part of an ongoing effort to infuse AIOps into DevOps processes, the latest release of VirtualWisdom also adds integration with application performance management (APM) tools from Dynatrace, in addition to enhancements to existing support for APM tools from AppDynamics, a unit of Cisco.

    VirtualWisdom is also now able to collect Linux and Windows operating systems along with metric generated on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. There also a now iSCSI wire data monitoring support in the NAS Performance Probe, which complements existing NFS and SMB monitoring capabilities.

    Rosenthal said the rate at which applications are being developed and deployed soon will force the AIops issue in most organizations. As those applications become more distributed across hybrid cloud computing environments, it’s become impossible for any single IT team to manually keep track of all the dependencies that could adversely impact all their applications, he noted.

    While increased reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) is all but inevitable at this point, it’s less clear to what degree IT organizations themselves will be reorganized as a result. Most organizations have embraced DevOps to bridge the divide between their IT operations and application development teams. But many of the silos within their IT operations teams soon may be automated out of existence as the need for dedicated compute, storage and networking specialists declines. In some instances, developers are already taking advantage of application programming interfaces (APIs) to assume control over IT infrastructure end to end. That scenario may become even more common as AI continues to automate more of the rote IT operations tasks.

    None of that means there won’t be a need for someone to architect the IT operational workflows required to support applications at scale. But it does mean many lower-level administrator tasks soon might be sharply reduced or eliminated altogether. The challenge IT organizations soon will face is retraining those administrators to handle tasks beyond what’s possible to automate using AI.

    In the meantime, organizations will continue to experiment with AI. Not every organization is comfortable enough with AI to turn over control to what many still view as a “black box” that doesn’t provide any visibility into those processes being automated. But as more of that visibility is provided, it’s now only a matter of time before AI platforms take move control of the IT environment.

    — Mike Vizard

  • CA Technologies Report Highlights App Modernization Paradox

    CA Technologies Report Highlights App Modernization Paradox

    The rush to modernize IT environments using microservices, application programming interfaces (APIs) and containers may very well turn out to represent something of a double-edged sword.

    A survey of 1,087 IT and business professionals conducted by Frost & Sullivan on behalf of CA Technologies, a unit of Brocade, finds that organizations that have modernized their application environment are eight times more likely to achieve key performance indicators (KPIs) for the business. Four out of five respondents also said agile practices are helping them build what customers really need to improve overall customer satisfaction.

    On the downside, however, the study also finds more than half of respondents (56 percent) claimed that software issues can negatively affect the achievement of KPIs. A full 69 percent of all respondents say the pressure to release new applications or updates negatively affects quality and security, and 67 percent admit that their organization sometimes trades off security for application development and deployment speed.

    Nine out of 10 respondents who claimed to widely utilize modern application architectures also concede it’s challenging to manage and monitor APIs, microservices and containers, and that APIs and microservices add new risks for their organizations. A total of 80 percent of respondents also say they view continuous application security testing and DevSecOps as critical components of their strategy to help resolve those issues.

    Ashok Reddy, general manager for DevOps at CA Technologies, said that while organizations are clearly seeing a business benefit after embracing DevOps to modernize their application environments, the process hasn’t always been easy. The challenge they now face is that the rate at which digital business transformation projects are being launched has substantially increased. Most organizations are not going to achieve those goals in a timely fashion unless they modernize their application development and deployment processes, said Reddy, noting that only then can IT become flexible enough to meet the needs of the business versus continuing to try and force the business to bend to the way their applications work.

    The paradox many organizations find themselves wresting with is that making the business more agile requires a more complex approach to IT. In theory, each microservice deployed is easier to manage than a monolithic application. But as thousands of microservices get deployed, the number of dependencies between services becomes more than the average IT organization can track. In fact, all those dependencies is one reason more organizations are starting to investigate applying machine and deep learning algorithms within the context of an artificial intelligence (AI) model to automate IT management at scale. Clearly, most IT organizations are now on a journey that starts with a simple set of microservices and ends up fundamentally transforming enterprise IT, regardless of whether anyone likes it.

    It may take a while longer before the future of IT becomes a completely settled question. But for now, it’s apparent microservices in some regards are too much of good thing. The challenge is that from a digital business perspective, those microservices have become something most organizations can’t do without.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Survey: Rapid Automation of IT Ops Looms Ahead

    Survey: Rapid Automation of IT Ops Looms Ahead

    The rate at which IT operations will become automated is about to accelerate significantly over the next two years. A global survey of 1,500 senior IT leaders conducted by Cisco Systems finds that 64 percent of respondents today would describe their approach to IT operations as either reactive (26 percent) or proactive (38 percent), but within two years more than two-thirds expect their approach to be either become predictive (33 percent) or preemptive (33 percent). Only 14 percent of respondents describe their IT environments as being preemptive today.

    In general, the survey finds 88 percent of IT leaders said their investment in IT operations over the past 12 months had improved external customer satisfaction, while 89 percent said there have been improvements in innovation. But only 26 percent collect data on an ongoing basis and even fewer (17 percent) employ any kind of real-time automated analysis, the survey finds.

    Nevertheless, 42 percent of respondents said they expect artificial intelligence (AI) to have the biggest impact on their ability to automate. More than half (51 percent) said they already rely on AI to some extent today to automate IT operations.

    A full 82 percent also already collect operational and performance data about their security infrastructure.

    Joseph Bradley, global vice president for IoT, Blockchain, AI and Incubation Business at Cisco, said much of the investment in automating IT operations is being driven by the realization that IT has become a profit center rather than cost center. As organizations increasingly realize they are a software company that happens to make something, they are looking to maximize the return on their investments in IT wherever possible, said Bradley, adding as a result, line of business (LOB) executives are exercising more influence over what applications get built and deployed within the context of an overall digital business transformation strategy.

    Naturally, all that increased appreciation for the value of IT is putting more pressure on IT organizations to modernize their processes. As the number of applications that need to be built, deployed and maintained continue to increase, the need to embrace DevOps processes becomes a greater imperative. To facilitate that shift across enterprise IT environments that now routinely span multiple clouds, Cisco has been making a two-fold case for centralizing the management of highly distributed IT environments and upgrading to next-generation software-defined infrastructure that makes use of machine learning algorithms to automate IT management.

    Cisco is not the only IT vendor pursuing a similar strategy. The success of those strategies, however, depends as much on the ability of the IT organization to implement the processes required to modernize their IT environments as much as it does the technology platforms. That creates something of a chicken-and-egg relationship between processes and platforms. It is difficult, but not impossible, to implement some level of DevOps without having a lot of automation. But applying DevOps at any meaningful scale within an enterprise undoubtedly will require a lot more automation than currently exists within most IT environments.

    — Mike Vizard

  • CircleCI Automates Configurations Across CI/CD Platform

    CircleCI Automates Configurations Across CI/CD Platform

    CircleCI has unveiled what it describes as the first package manager designed specifically to address configuration tasks involving software delivery automation.

    Matt Wyman, vice president of product for CircleCI, said the Orbs package manager condenses commands, executors and jobs into single, reusable lines of code that automate tasks on the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform the company provides as a cloud service. The initial set of Orbs being made available by CircleCI are focused on automating more than 25 different cloud deployment scenarios to enable organizations to employ DevOps processes at scale, he said, noting those Orbs can then be validated and shared via an Orbs registry that CircleCI is making available.

    CircleCI is also launching a technology alliance program through which Jfrog, Twistlock, Anchore, Aqua Security, Cypress, Postman, Coveralls, datree, Rollbar and Codacy have committed to building Orbs.

    Wyman said shareable Orbs that require only a few lines of code to develop makes it possible to share configurations across multiple CI/CD workflows. Those Orbs then can be integrated with any number of third-party tools.

    CircleCI is making a case for a CI/CD platform delivered as a managed cloud service that eliminates the need for DevOps teams to set up and manage on their own. Open source CI/CD platforms can be too complex for the average IT organization to set up. Alternatively, CircleCI makes available a version of its CI/CD platform that organizations can deploy behind their own firewall. The CircleCI approach is designed to enable DevOps teams to flexibly create workflows that can be executed sequentially or in parallel.

    There are 12 million builds a month being generated by more than 300,000 developers taking advantage of the CircleCI cloud service to build applications, Wyman said. One of the primary drivers of that success is a cloud service that allows organizations to apply more of their limited resources to developing applications versus managing CI/CD infrastructure, he noted.

    Most IT organizations have yet to standardize on a specific CI/CD platform. Competition between providers of CI/CD platforms has never been more fierce as more enterprise IT organizations embrace DevOps. As DevOps processes continue to mature, it’s also clear that DevOps processes will need to be extended across multiple clouds in addition to on-premises IT environments.

    In general, CI/CD platforms are initially set up by developers who have embraced DevOps processes to accelerate development and deployment of applications without sacrificing quality. The most widely used CI/CD platform is the open source instance of Jenkins. Developers often can adopt Jenkins on their own without requiring anyone to sign off on a purchase order. But as organizations move to scale up their DevOps processes, CircleCI is betting interest in a commercial service that can be easily accessed across an entire enterprise will increase as organizations move to standardize their CI/CD environments.

    In the meantime, pressure to increase the rate at which applications are built and deployed is only going to increase as organizations become more aggressive about digital business process transformation. The issue now isn’t so much whether they will have a CI/CD platform, but rather to what extent—and, in some cases, how many.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware Extends Scope of Alliance with IBM

    VMware Extends Scope of Alliance with IBM

    On the heels of IBM announcing its intent to acquire Red Hat, VMware announced at the VMworld Europe 2018 conference this week an extension of its longstanding cloud alliance with IBM.

    Red Hat competes directly with VMware; yet, there are also more than 1,600 customers running VMware on the IBM cloud. Ajay Patel, senior vice president of product development for cloud services, said VMware remains committed to the IBM cloud alliance even while its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to expand.

    VMware and IBM jointly announced this week they have opened Joint Innovation Lab and that IBM Cloud Private Hosted can now be installed on VMware vCenter Server on IBM Cloud. In addition, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions are now integrated with the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. IBM is also adding support for VMware NSX-T Data Center to provide VMware customers with access to a network virtualization (NV) overlay on IBM Cloud.

    In addition, VMware vRealize Operations automation software is now available on IBM Power Systems, and VMware will use the IBM Watson cognitive computing platform within VMware customer support portals.

    Despite the obvious tension between VMware and Red Hat and IBM and AWS, Patel noted that VMware has more customers running on the IBM cloud service than any other cloud environment. In addition, IBM, VMware and Red Hat all are committed to advancing Kubernetes. Point of fact: VMware, separately at the conference, announced its plans to acquire Heptio, a provider of management tools for Kubernetes and added support for Kubernetes running on top of VMware virtual machines in version 3.5 of VMware Cloud Foundation.

    VMware, via its alliance with IBM, is making a case for enabling customers to run stateless components of an application on Kubernetes, while maintaining stateful components such as databases on virtual machines, which provide better support for persistent storage.

    IBM said it intends to treat Red Hat as an independent subsidiary capable of making independent alliances, in much the same way VMware operates as an independent unit of Dell Technologies. It may take a while for IT organizations to get used to navigating strange-bedfellow relationships in the era of the cloud; for example, Red Hat has an extensive relationship with Microsoft that spans both Microsoft Azure and on-premises IT environments.

    What remains to be seen is the degree to which DevOps teams will navigate conflicting vendor alliances in isolation from one another instead of trying to unify the management of all those clouds under a common framework. A recent IDC report finds that while most customers (64 percent) are employing multiple clouds, the degree to which those clouds are interoperate varies widely. IDC finds that only 24 percent of IT organizations have a high degree of interoperability between their cloud environments. Another 40 percent say they have achieved low interoperability between their clouds. Only 7 percent say they have a true hybrid cloud in place.

    As the number of organizations with hybrid cloud capabilities starts to increase, the next battle in the cloud won’t be focused on what platforms are employed as much as what management plane might be employed to unify them all.

    — Mike Vizard