devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: DevOps in the Cloud

  • VMware Drops Managed Cloud Onto Dell EMC Appliances

    VMware Drops Managed Cloud Onto Dell EMC Appliances

    At the Dell Technologies World conference, VMware today announced it will make available an instance of its managed cloud platform on appliances from Dell EMC in the second half of this year.

    VMware Cloud for Dell EMC is a turnkey platform that combines VMware compute, storage and networking software in a single offering managed and updated by VMware on behalf of its customers. It is similar to VMware Cloud for AWS, a managed service that VMware provides for Amazon Web Services, said Wei Wang, director of product marketing for VMware.

    VMware Cloud for Dell EMC represents the first commercial instance of Project Dimension, an initiative launched last year that promised to make available a software-defined data center (SDDC) as a managed service for on-premises IT environments in an effort to “ruthlessly automate IT.” In addition to supporting VxRail appliances from Dell EMC, VMware plans to make available instances of Project Dimension on other platforms, Wang said.

    Pricing for the managed service initially will be based on a flat monthly subscription, but Wang said VMware plans to provide a metered option that will enable customers to pay for VMware Cloud for Dell EMC on a pure consumption basis.

    In the meantime, VMware Cloud for Dell EMC, coupled with VMware Cloud for AWS, will provide IT organizations with a consistent control plane across a hybrid cloud computing environment based on vSphere, vSAN and NSX software that virtualizes compute, storage and networking, noted Wang. VMware is already managing infrastructure running more than 25 million workloads on AWS, a number that is expected to increase substantially as it rolls out instances on Project Dimension on additional public clouds including Microsoft Azure and on-premises IT environments.

    By opting to rely on VMware to manage IT infrastructure, organizations should be able to shift more of their own internal IT resources toward developing and deploying more applications. The VMware approach also potentially reduces the scope of the operational challenge many organizations now face when trying to manage virtual compute, storage and networking software in tandem.

    The challenge those organizations will face is implementing a set of best DevOps practices that match the cadence of the updates being made to the IT environment by VMware. It’s not clear to what degree organizations will want to relinquish operational control over IT infrastructure to VMware. Historically, roughly a quarter of all IT is consumed as a managed service usually provided by an IT services firm, but as vendors such as VMware begin to offer those managed services, the number of organizations that might switch to the model may increase.

    Many organizations already rely on cloud service providers such as AWS to manage infrastructure on their behalf. This latest offering essentially extends that same concept to on-premises IT environments.

    The degree to which organizations will save money by relying on a managed service is going to be difficult to quantify. In some cases, relying on a managed service might prove more expensive, while in other cases the savings on IT administrators alone might pay for the service. Whatever the path chosen, the number of workloads that will running on IT infrastructure managed by vendors such as VMware will increase sharply in the months and years ahead.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Mirantis Adds Modeling Tool to Configure Private Cloud

    Mirantis Adds Modeling Tool to Configure Private Cloud

    At the Open Infrastructure Summit conference, Mirantis today unfurled a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application through which IT administrators can employ modeling tools to configure private clouds based on either OpenStack or Kubernetes.

    Boris Renski, chief marketing officer for Mirantis, said rather than having to manually configure a private cloud for an on-premises IT environment using YAML files, the Model Designer for Mirantis Private Cloud enables IT administrators to configure a private cloud using modeling tools they access via a graphical interface (GUI). The Model Designer is scheduled for general availabilility in May.

    That approach then makes it feasible for IT administrators with little to no programming expertise to quickly spin up private clouds within the context of a DevOps environment using a set of declarative tools, added Renksi.

    Those tools also enable IT administrators to specify the degree of configurability they require. A basic configurability level automatically populates most of the cluster settings to a default set of pretested values. The most advanced “ultraviolence” configurability setting enables IT administrators to adjust virtually every aspect of their on-premises cloud. The resulting configuration models are then fed into DriveTrain, which is the automation framework that Mirantis provides within Mirantis Private Cloud.

    Renski said requiring IT administrators to master all the nuances associated with managing YAML files to stand up a private cloud is one of things holding back adoption of both on-premises private clouds and the best DevOps practices that should be relied to mange them. Most organizations that want to make the transition to DevOps clearly want to be able to manage infrastructure as code in much the same way public cloud service providers do today. The challenge is, the learning curve associated with achieving that goal is simply too high for the average IT administrator, he said, adding a modeling tool made available as SaaS application will make it possible for even mere IT mortals to easily spin up a private cloud within an on-premises IT environment.

    Both OpenStack and Kubernetes suffer to varying degrees from often being too complex for the average IT organization to set up. Because of those complexity issues, adoption of both platforms often is limited to IT organizations that have advanced IT skills. But as the deployment processes surrounding both platforms become more automated, it’s probable the number of organizations adopting either platform will increase. At the same, IT organizations that do embrace either platform more likely will spin up more instances once they no longer have to rely on a cumbersome manual set of processes.

    Of course, setting up a private cloud based on either OpenStack or Kubernetes is only the beginning of the IT challenge. Once all those private clouds are deployed, IT organizations need to acquire the tools and expertise required to manage them on an ongoing basis. In fact, one of the things IT organizations should consider in the age of the private cloud is the level of integration of the tools from vendors they intend to rely on to set up and then manage a private cloud.

    — Mike Vizard

  • The Biggest News from Google Cloud Next ’19? Better Capabilities for Big Data

    The Biggest News from Google Cloud Next ’19? Better Capabilities for Big Data

    Data analytics is about to become a whole lot easier. Google’s annual Google Cloud Next conference brought plenty of new announcements and innovations. But the search giant’s focus on data has stolen the show. Partners of the tech titan such as Fivetran, DataStax and Hammerspace are bringing unprecedented data capabilities to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

    Accelerated Data Analytics = Automated Data Infrastructure

    When Google BigQuery came onto the scene, it changed data analytics forever. Acting as a serverless and scalable data warehouse, the service unlocked unparalleled price-performance and productivity for enterprises around the world.

    Now, Google aims to simplify things even more with BigQuery Data Transfer Service, a new offering that lets organizations automate data movement from SaaS applications to Google BigQuery on a scheduled basis. Basically, you can build a robust and dynamic data warehouse without having to write any code.

    Fivetran, a startup that lets you automate data infrastructure into your warehouse for advanced analytics, is one of Google DTS’ launch partners. The company has built a solid reputation around its prebuilt, maintenance-free data connectors; you can deploy them in five minutes and completely replicate applications, databases and more.

    Without leaving the Google Cloud environment, users can automate setup and product integration between Google Cloud and Fivetran. This allows them to drastically reduce overhead maintenance when centralizing disparate data sources. In turn, this accelerates analytics and reduces time to insight.

    Currently, Fivetran and Google Cloud offer connectors for more than 100 sources, including NetSuite, Salesforce, Marketo and more. Fivetran is currently developing new data connectors, so you can expect this list to expand soon.

    A New Database-as-a-Service Offering

    DataStax is a company and GCP partner that delivers “Active Everywhere,” distributed cloud databases to support always-on, web-scale applications. It has roughly 400 customers across 50 countries.

    The company’s CEO, Billy Bosworth, realized that its clients needed more flexibility in moving data among public and private clouds. So, for the first time ever, it’s now providing a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offering.

    Bosworth explains the demand: “Recently, enterprise customers have said they want those database attributes available to them in a variety of on-premises and cloud options—or in other words, for their hybrid cloud and multi-cloud realities.”

    The new agreement with Google Cloud to offer DataStax Enterprise as a DBaaS will do just that—and more. Not only is the new service the first major step in making this wish a reality, it also will provide users with optimal flexibility in how and when data gets moved to public and private clouds.

    Hammerspace DaaS Arrives on GCP

    Fivetran and DataStax aren’t the only ones bringing new data management capabilities to GCP. Hammerspace, a Los Altos, California-based company, recently announced its new Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform has arrived on the GCP Marketplace.

    Hammerspace is dedicated to simplifying data consumption for hybrid cloud and container users. The company provides a global data workspace for organizations that is free from the usual lock-in that comes with storage silos.

    Since its cloud data control plane is both storage and protocol-agnostic, Hammerspace can abstract data from the infrastructure to provide self-service hybrid cloud data management. When combined with metadata management and machine learning, it allows the company to deliver its DaaS in which enterprises can make file data cloud-native. In turn, this allows them to automate only once and deploy anywhere.

    Hammerspace DaaS will let users protect and manage their data across hybrid cloud environments with global enterprise file data services. And with support for both GCP storage classes and on-premises storage, it will be easier than ever before for analytics teams, application owners and data operations to leverage their new service.

    What Will You Do With Your Data?

    With new data offerings from Fivetran, DataStax and Hammerspace, GCP is becoming the place to be for all data endeavors. But this is just the beginning; you can expect more announcements soon as Google continues to double down on more data tools to offer.

    For now, the only question left is this: What will your company do with these new data capabilities?

    — Ben Bloch

  • The Key to Multi-Cloud Success

    The Key to Multi-Cloud Success

    In the era of cloud-based architectures, companies have implemented multiple cloud platforms but have yet to reap the full benefits. Whether it’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure—or some combination thereof—a recent Forrester study found that nearly 86% of enterprises have incorporated a multi-cloud strategy. Not only does this strategy take companies out of the business of hosting their own applications, it also leads to benefits including avoiding vendor lock-in, reduced costs and optimized performance.

    While it’s clear that a multi-cloud strategy offers many benefits and flexibility for an organization, there are more moving parts to track (with the added challenge of hybrid, multi-generational infrastructure), making it all the more critical that businesses have a solid monitoring strategy in place. Luckily, the collection of monitoring data is essentially a solved problem; instead, businesses today are faced with an endless cycle of day-two operational challenges such as avoiding downtime and maintaining visibility.

    As Andreessen Horowitz so aptly put it, software is eating the world; every company is becoming (or has become) a software company. Software is not only ubiquitous, it’s powerful, enabling us to solve a wide range of problems. This emphasis on software within companies has led to the emergence of multiple cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which all recognized the trend and seized the opportunity by building cloud computing platforms.

    Because companies no longer have to build their own data centers, they can focus on their core business of delivering value to their customers. With the public cloud, they’re able to achieve far greater time-to-value than they would if left to build their own data centers and cloud platforms.

    Today, companies can build a portable software stack that is DevOps-driven, free from vendor lock-in and capable of delivering a superior set of capabilities than can be gained from a single provider. Although we’re now consuming infrastructure from cloud providers (which has its own inherent risks), we have better tooling to enable multi-cloud strategies, minimizing the risk of being reliant on any one provider for cloud services.

    The Missing Piece: Multi-Cloud Monitoring

    In this software-dependent world, availability is critical, and downtime is not only expensive but also damaging to business reputation. As a result, monitoring systems and applications has become a core competency, crucial to business operations. To fully reap the rewards of a multi-cloud strategy and thrive in this cloud-based world, implementing a unified monitoring solution is critical for success. In addition to the existing benefits multi-cloud offers, a unified solution gives operators constant and complete visibility into their infrastructure, applications and operations.

    Surviving as a Modern Enterprise

    Improved operational visibility through monitoring is often cited as a top priority among chief information officers (CIOs) and senior operations leadership, and good monitoring is a staple of high-performing teams. Yet, too often it’s implemented as an afterthought in reaction to changes in the mission-critical systems that power businesses. When this happens, organizations can struggle to reap the benefits of multi-cloud because they lack sufficient visibility to detect and avoid problems or recover from expensive downtime.

    Further complicating this underlying challenge is the fact that ephemeral infrastructure platforms such as Kubernetes are the new normal, while digital transformation, cloud migration, DevOps, containerization and other initiatives are compelling movements in the modern enterprise. Although they vary in scope and overlap or intersect in practice, they are unified in purpose: To deliver increased organizational velocity, empowering organizations to ship more changes faster.

    While they are a boon to business initiatives and developer productivity, these practices can increase exponentially the number and duration of day-two operational challenges. Delaying adoption of the solution to these challenges only increases risk exposure and cost.

    Be Prepared for the Cloud Gold Rush

    According to Gartner, the number of cloud-managed service providers is expected to triple by 2020. While this gold rush is good news for analysts, investors and operators alike—everyone (except Amazon?) benefits from a competitive market—it suggests that the multi-cloud trend will only become more diverse moving forward. Given the already complex landscape and this forecast, it’s impractical to expect turnkey monitoring solutions to provide enough coverage—a different approach is needed.

    The good news is that the solution is surprisingly simple: Treat monitoring and observability like we do the rest of our DevOps toolchain—as a pipeline. When containerization gained in popularity and we incorporated Docker and Kubernetes into our multi-cloud strategy, we didn’t have to replace our CI pipelines; we simply shipped containers instead of RPMs, essentially making our CI tools future-proof.

    For monitoring and observability, that future-proof solution is the monitoring event pipeline. At the end of the day, there are only so many mechanisms for observing systems (APM and observability client libraries, Prometheus-style /metrics or /healthz endpoints, logs and good old-fashioned service health checks are a few great examples). Once we start to think about these as workflows that can be automated via monitoring pipelines, we’re empowered to continuously adapt and thrive (maintaining visibility and avoiding downtime) in the ever-evolving and increasingly multitudinous cloud world of IT infrastructure.

    — Caleb Hailey

  • The Challenge of Securing a Dynamic, Cloud-Based DevOps Environment

    The Challenge of Securing a Dynamic, Cloud-Based DevOps Environment

    The tech landscape has fundamentally changed over the last decade. The steady migration from local data centers to cloud computing combined with the advent of DevOps and the rise of containers have taken what was a more or less contained and relatively stable environment and transformed it into a dynamic, constantly shifting ecosystem. At the same time, the volume of exploits and threats has risen exponentially. The challenge today is how to effectively secure and protect servers, applications and data when your network is a moving target.

    It Starts and Ends With Visibility

    It’s difficult enough to protect something. Imagine that I give you a bag filled with money and tell you to keep it safe. There are risks involved and there will be criminals that want to steal the bag of money, but you have a fair idea of the threats you face. You know about the bag. It is in your possession. You can put it in a closet with only one entrance, make sure the door is locked and deadbolted, and monitor access with cameras. Now, consider how you would protect bags of money if hundreds of them could materialize at any point in time, anywhere in the house.

    If you don’t even know how many bags of money there are or where they’re located, how can you effectively protect them? The answer is simple: you can’t. That is essentially the situation IT teams face with dynamic, cloud-based DevOps environments.

    On a traditional, legacy network, it was relatively simple to keep track of how many servers were running in the data center and the applications running on them. One of the primary benefits of cloud computing, however, introduces one of the primary challenges of security in the cloud: The ability to scale capacity on demand adds elements of chaos and complexity that make it more difficult to know what exactly is on the network in real-time.

    As with the bags of money illustration above, though, comprehensive visibility is crucial for effective security. You can’t protect what you can’t see—or what you aren’t aware exists at all.

    Achieving Visibility in a Dynamic Environment

    Of course, getting comprehensive visibility is easier said than done. Many organizations have a hybrid and/or multi-cloud environment, with assets and data in local data centers and spread across different public and private cloud systems. You can install agents on some resources that will provide accurate information about the current state in real-time, but there are also many devices and services that can’t run an agent—requiring more diverse and creative approaches to gain visibility.

    The reality is that no single telemetry source will suffice. It takes a combination of active scanning, passive scanning, cloud-based accounts, agents running on devices and container-aware security to ensure that all of the various networks—and the servers, applications and services running on them—can be monitored and inventoried in real-time.

    Comprehensive Visibility Equals Consolidated Visibility

    Having broad visibility is not the same as having comprehensive visibility. Putting the tools and technologies in place to achieve and maintain comprehensive visibility is essential, but you also need to have the means to consolidate that information and manage it from a single console or pane of glass.

    You need all of the various sources of visibility data to be integrated into a single, comprehensive view so the entire ecosystem can be analyzed, monitored and maintained from one central view. Effective cybersecurity depends on visibility, and comprehensive, real-time visibility in a dynamic cloud environment requires a security platform with both the agility and scalability to keep pace and provide you with the information necessary to prioritize and address issues as they arise.

    — Tony Bradley

  • Insight IGNITE: DevOps, Cloud and Cyber From Iceland With Love

    Insight IGNITE: DevOps, Cloud and Cyber From Iceland With Love

    I had the pleasure recently of attending my first Insight IGNITE event, which was held at the ION Adventure Hotel in enchanting Iceland. It was also my first trip to Iceland. These two new experiences combined to deliver an excellent learning and networking experience, resulting in me realizing more than several new insights (pun intended) around DevOps, cloud and cybersecurity, as well as mindfulness and contentment.

    The agenda for this particular IGNITE event featured some great examples and discussion around DevOps, cloud migration and infrastructure and cybersecurity, among several others. All three of these were right in my wheelhouse, so I really enjoyed the presentations and discussions. I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with all of the insights I was soaking in. Of course, I was also trying to contribute to the conversations, which are held in a very open, communal manner under Chatham House Rules.

    You may not be familiar with the Insight IGNITE Innovation Roundtable Series. They are the brainchild of Insight Partners’ Emmet B. Keeffe III. Emmet is beyond passionate about digital transformation (among several other passions including Formula One racing, world peace and now mindfulness/contentment). Utilizing his vast network (and it is vast), Emmet founded Insight IGNITE, an innovation program that delivers Innovation Briefings, the Innovation Roundtable Series and Growth Advisory Board opportunities to global IT leaders. I know that sounds like marketing speak, but let me explain.

    Basically, Emmet holds about one of these events a month at some of the most fascinating venues on earth. Each one has ~50 people. There is a mix of C-level executives from some of the 200+ Insight Partners portfolio companies, along with executives past and present from large global enterprises, sprinkled in with a mixture of technology experts and subject matter experts (I guess that is what got my ticket punched). The agenda is an exhilarating mixture of roundtable discussions and presentations on subjects touching on Digital Transformation, along with exciting activities that allow attendees to experience the local venue.

    The events are open to Global 2000 executives and other business and technology experts who think they could both benefit from this type of experience as well as have something to offer.  You can reach out to Emmet’s team if you are interested in attending one of these events.  Most attendees have to cover their own airfare/hotel. While not cheap, it is well worth the money, and the IGNITE team, who are extraordinary, do an amazing job of keeping it fresh, fun and challenging.

    The real special sauce of the IGNITE Roundtable Series, though, is the passion, caring and love that they receive from Emmet’s team. It is infectious and spreads to the attendees as well. I have attended hundreds of conferences over the years and don’t remember one where I made as many connections, had as many great side conversations and really felt part of a group. I am sure many of the people I met at this event I will be in touch with and doing business with in the months and years ahead.

    I met Emmet about three or four years ago in London (where he lives with his family now) and was invited to a previous event or two but was unable to make it. Since then, it seems Insight Partners is investing in so many of the companies that we work with here at MediaOps in DevOps, containers and cybersecurity—including Tricentis, JFrog, Aqua Security, Firemon and others. If you can’t beat ’em join ’em, as they say, so I decided to take Emmet up on his kind invite and check it out.

    The IGNITE event in Iceland had several great presentations about disrupting your own company product by spinning up the disruptor internally. We heard from “a queen of transformation” who has led transformations at several large multinational and government agencies. Another presentation focused on how an energy company keeps transforming as it stays ahead in today’s ever-shifting market and sets the bar for what the energy company of tomorrow looks like. In addition, there were some great panel discussions on the current state of DevOps and Agile, another on the state of cloud migrations, hybrid cloud and next-generation infrastructure. Also on the agenda was a great discussion regarding what is happening in cybersecurity and how critical it has become as part of any transformation. All of these were great, but what made them better was the great discussions they sparked among the attendees.

    That was not the full roundtable agenda, though. We also had a private briefing with the first lady of Iceland, discussions on some new fintech companies and technologies, AI/ML and more.

    But perhaps some of my favorite presentation and discussions were on a new passion of Emmet’s called the Contentment Foundation. This is a breakthrough effort to bring a new take on making education better for the world of today and tomorrow. Led by Dr. Daniel Cordaro, it recognizes that children are truly our future. How can we make them more content and mindful, better equipped to handle the world of tomorrow and the challenges they will face? The Contentment Foundation has developed a curriculum that is available to just about any school in the world. If you know a school that you think could benefit from this, I encourage you to reach out to them.

    All work and no play would make for a boring event, though. My trip to Iceland at the Insight IGNITE Roundtable was far from boring. We visited the famous Perlan Planetarium (which, unfortunately, was as close as I got to seeing the Northern Lights on this trip); ate in a Viking-themed restaurant; and rode ATF vehicles through the rugged, lava rock-strewn, stream-filled Icelandic countryside. We explored a lava tube cave and more. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate, so we had to cancel snowmobiling, whale watching and dinner on an island off the Iceland coast. I stopped off before heading to the airport to explore a bit in the capital of Reykjavík, which is a great little city with great cafés, shopping and sights.

    Even the social activities provided some great bonding and networking opportunities. It is rare for me that I not only make business acquaintances, but also form friendships at events like this. To me, this was yet another unique feature of the IGNITE Roundtable: People were there genuinely to share their experiences and discuss the burning topics at hand.

    All in all, one of the best events I have attended in a long time. I highly recommend attending at least one of these IGNITE Roundtables, if this sounds like something you may be interested in. As for me, I am already looking at what is the next one I will be able to attend. Once I have had a chance to digest and percolate on some of the insights I experienced, I will share a follow-up article to share them with you.

    Thanks, Emmet and IGNITE team, for a great experience.

    — Alan Shimel

  • CloudBees Allies with Atos to Accelerate DevOps Adoption

    CloudBees Allies with Atos to Accelerate DevOps Adoption

    In a move that should accelerate adoption of best DevOps practices in the enterprise, CloudBees and Atos announced this week that the two are collaborating to advance adoption of continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platforms on the Google public cloud.

    Announced at the Google Cloud Next 2019 conference, the alliance will result in the IT services giant delivering a managed instance of a CloudBees CI/CD platform running on the Google cloud, in addition to providing traditional consulting services.

    Francois Dechery, chief strategy officer for CloudBees, said the alliance with Atos will accelerate adoption of DevOps processes in traditional enterprise IT organizations as Atos consultants engage customers looking to modernize their application development and deployment processes. In fact, many of the principles first pioneered by proponents of agile development methodologies are now being applied to business process management, he noted.

    Atos plans to add a DevOps practice as a complement to its existing processes. Michael Kollar, senior vice president for cloud engineering, said the company expects that, for the foreseeable future, most of their clients will be trying to meld some degree of DevOps and existing ITIL-based approaches to IT services management (ITSM). The alliance with Google will go a long way to accelerating that transition because it will allow Atos to deliver access to a CI/CD platform based on a consumption model that reflects the way public cloud infrastructure is consumed, he said.

    Kollar noted enterprise IT organizations are under more pressure than ever to deliver applications faster as more organizations recognize they are a software company that happens to make something. Most organizations today need to create a superior customer experience through software to differentiate themselves from their competition, he said.

    Many of those companies will need help setting up the processes that will enable them to function as a software company, he added. The biggest challenge, however, is finding a way to meld new ways of building and deploying applications with investments in legacy systems on which the business still depends, he said.

    Naturally, Atos won’t be the only IT services firm to launch a managed DevOps process. But as more IT services firms invest in developing managed services, there will be need for a balance between the managed services provided by IT services providers and cloud service providers such as Google and the IT services that will continue to be managed and delivered by internal IT organizations. The degree to which organizations will rely on external IT services firms for DevOps will be dictated by how mature they are today. But it does not follow that an organization which sees a need to rely on external expertise today will be that position tomorrow. As more organizations develop internal expertise, a managed service provider will need to earn its seat at the table every time its contract comes up for renewal.

    — Mike Vizard

  • 6 Considerations for Secure Cloud Migration

    6 Considerations for Secure Cloud Migration

    Planning a secure cloud migration? Here are some tips to help make the process smooth.

    Three out of every four organizations on the planet have some sort of cloud presence. According to a 2018 IDG survey, 77% of enterprises now have at least one application or some portion of their enterprise computing infrastructure in the cloud. In addition, enterprises plan to invest an average of $3.5 million on cloud apps, platforms and services, the report found.

    Looking forward, executive management at technology-dependent industries—including manufacturing, high-tech and telecom—are increasingly driving toward becoming 100% cloud-enabled. Which also means that, except for those new startups starting with a full cloud-based infrastructure, most organizations are currently either actively migrating their infrastructure and/or applications to the cloud; trying to bridge their business processes, applications and workflows between a local physical network and one or more networks residing in the public cloud; or are planning to do so.

    One of the challenges these organizations face is creating a consistent security posture across their local and cloud-based resources. The reality is, not all security policies can be successfully and seamlessly implemented across a multi-cloud environment, especially when using a variety of tools. That’s because most vendor solutions either do not support all of the major cloud platforms. And for those that do, many do not support native cloud integration leveraging cloud resource description. This can create challenges in enforcement consistency and policy definition as workflows and applications move between different cloud environments, resulting in security gaps and blind spots that can be exploited.

    Successfully Migrating Security to the Cloud

    Migrating infrastructures, applications or services to the cloud without expanding the attack surface or increasing security overhead requires careful preparation. This starts by understanding that any cloud-based deployment, whether building out a new infrastructure or building a new application, requires clear communication between lines of business, IT and security teams. Without clear communications about business needs and objectives and a candid discussion of related threats, organizations open themselves to a whole array of new risks, including denial-of-service attacks targeting cloud resources, cloud malware injection, web application exploitation, cloud-API attacks and account or service hijacking.

    Successful cloud migration also requires successfully migrating security to the cloud, enabling organizations to deploy and manage a single, consistent security framework that spans the entire multi-cloud infrastructure.

    Here are six steps every organization should consider when planning a cloud adoption or cloud migration strategy:

    Baseline Your Security Before Cloud Migration

    Far too many organizations own security architecture built around isolated security devices, decentralized management and an inconsistent application of security policies.

    If this is the case for your organization, you will need to start by getting control of your security sprawl and imposing a central security strategy. Once that is in place, you then need to ask the following questions:

    • Do you know your current security posture and its implications for your future business goals?
    • Do you have the proper policies and procedures in place for your current and future environments?
    • Have you performed a gap analysis for how cloud will change your security paradigm?
    • What are the impacts of a distributed, cloud-based network on risk management?

    Plan for Bandwidth Requirements

    You will need to model and understand data flows and bandwidth requirements to ensure that your security solutions can meet performance requirements, especially for latency-sensitive services that will need to go over VPN tunnels.

    Understand Compliance Issues

    What requirements do you have to meet for data processed and stored on the cloud, as well as for data that moves between different cloud and physical network environments? It is crucial that your legal team be consulted before you begin to build or adopt any sort of cloud program.

    Provide for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

    The biggest fear for most organizations looking at a cloud solution, after addressing security concerns, is the availability of cloud-based resources. You also need to recognize whether dynamic scaling is required and whether your security solution can meet new performance requirements. Finally, you need to consider things such as flow symmetry and load balancing, especially for legacy applications, to maintain availability, performance and protection even when utilizing dynamic cloud-based services.

    Apply the Right Security at the Right Place

    Cloud security requires much more than simply placing a firewall at the perimeter of the cloud infrastructure. A wide range of security solutions will need to be applied depending on the applications running and services being used. A next-generation firewall (NGFW) solution is the most common security tool to be applied, but other solutions are often also required, including web application firewall (WAF), intrusion protection or detection service (IPS/IDS) and a cloud access security broker (CASB).

    Establish a Lifecycle Management Framework

    Ensuring consistency between security solutions and policy enforcement, especially when they span multiple environments, is crucial. Security tools need to be chosen not only for their ability to operate natively in a specific cloud platform, but also for their ability to interoperate seamlessly through the entire security policy life cycle with sister solutions deployed in other environments. This includes consistent security change policy, dynamic provisioning and scaling, single point of management—including integration with a central ITSM solution and central log collection—and correlation.

    Don’t Let the Ease of the Cloud Trick You into Shortcutting Security

    Adopting a cloud service can be as simple as clicking a link. And adding a new cloud-based infrastructure, while much more complex, is far easier than building its physical counterpart. But that can be deceptively simplistic. Far too many organizations have had to pay the price for rushing into a new cloud solution without carefully considering challenges related to security. These have ranged from opening new attack vectors into their network, to being unprepared for new cloud-based threats or being blindsided by fines and penalties for failing to adequately prepare for new compliance considerations.

    Careful preparation before you begin to build out your new cloud infrastructures, platforms or services can save you time, money, reputation and enable you to compete effectively in today’s new digital marketplace.

    — Lior Cohen

  • Google Revamps Hybrid Cloud Strategy

    Google Revamps Hybrid Cloud Strategy

    At the Google Cloud Next 2019 conference, Google announced it will make available cloud services based on Kubernetes under the brand name Anthos on its own cloud and on-premises platforms, as well as on third-party cloud services. such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Google also announced a tool dubbed Anthos Migrate that enables any virtual machine to be encapsulated in a container that then can be migrated on to Anthos Migrate. More than 30 vendor partners, including Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo, Dell EMC, VMware and Intel, announced their support for the latest expansion of the Google hybrid cloud strategy.

    Google also is now making available in beta a runtime for the Apigee API management platform that can be used anywhere. Dubbed Apigee hybrid, Google acquired the API management platform in 2016.

    In addition, Google is making available a managed set of database services in collaboration with Confluent, MongoDB, Elastic, Neo4j, Redis Labs, InfluxData and DataStax.

    The company also announced Cloud Run, a managed serverless computing offering based on the Knative middleware Google developed to make it possible for applications running on Kubernetes clusters to dynamically invoke a serverless computing framework. Google also announced it is updating its App Engine serverless computing framework to add support for Node.js 10, Go 1.11 and PHP 7.2 runtime in general availability and Ruby 2.5 and Java 11 runtimes in alpha.

    Finally, Google updated both its functions programming framework and virtual private connection (VPC) software used to create virtual private networks, while also revealing it has added regions in Salt Lake City and Seoul, South Korea. In all, there are now 22 GCP regions.

    Like other cloud service providers, Google continues to invest heavily in managed services through which it essentially functions as the IT operations team for application developers. In the case of the databases Google is making available as a managed service, those offerings are distinguished by the fact that they are being delivered in collaboration with the companies that oversee the open source projects that maintain and update those databases.

    DevOps teams will, of course, need to determine to what degree they want to deploy and manage open source databases in the cloud versus relying on Google and its partners. Mavinder Singh, head of infrastructure partnerships for Google Cloud, predicted the long-term trend will be to rely more on databases delivered as a service to allow organizations to focus more resources on developing applications.

    The challenge DevOps teams increasingly face is that next phase of cloud computing is considerably more complex than the previous phase. In the first phase of cloud computing most organizations replaced an on-premises IT environment based on virtual machines from VMware with virtual machines made available of cloud infrastructure. The second phase is more complex in that monolithic applications are now being eclipsed by so-called cloud-native applications based on instances of Kubernetes clusters running on top of virtual machines that are augmented by serverless computing frameworks. Most IT organizations don’t yet have the skills required to deploy, manage and secure those cloud services on their own. In time, however, as it becomes easier to automate the provisioning of the platforms required to run cloud-native applications, many IT organizations may prefer to rely on their own internal DevOps team versus contracting for a managed service, especially if those managed services don’t conform easily to the DevOps processes those organizations have adopted.

    It may take a while for organizations to determine which path forward ultimately suits them best. But the one thing that is clear is that cloud service providers are investing heavily in providing managed services direct to developers to add value on top of what have rapidly become commodity IT infrastructure services.

    — Mike Vizard

  • TypeFox Ties Cloud-Based IDE to GitHub

    TypeFox Ties Cloud-Based IDE to GitHub

    TypeFox has launched a GitPod.io service that melds the integrated development environment (IDE) based in the cloud from TypeFox with the open source GitHub repository.

    Sven Efftinge, co-founder of TypeFox, said this level of integration will make it easier for developers to navigate multiple projects from which they pull code from GitHub into an Eclipse-based IDE.

    In addition, when developers open a Gitpod.io workspace, they will find that any build involving an update to an artifact housed in GitHub will have been automatically completed, said Efftinge. That will reduce substantially the amount of time developers spend waiting for build to finish, he noted.

    TypeFox collaborated with Google, Ericsson, Arm and Red Hat to develop the open source Eclipse Theia project, which provides a foundation for building IDEs in the cloud using TypeScript, CSS and HTML for a desktop-like user experience. At the highest level, Theia consists of a front end running in a browser or in the local desktop application and a back end running on any host or locally within the desktop application. Both the front end and back end communicate through JSON RPC over WebSockets. TypeFox then leveraged that project to build its own cloud-based IDE.

    Gitpod.io further advances the collaboration capabilities that are inherent of cloud-based IDE by adding the ability to capture and share snapshots of the development environment.

    Efftinge said following initial support for GitLab, the next effort will be focused on integrating Gitpod.io with the GitLab repository, which is used widely in traditional enterprise IT organizations.

    Regardless of the repository employed, more attention needs to be paid to reducing the daily friction developers encounter when developing applications. While best DevOps practices go a long way to accelerating application development and deployment, there a lot of wasted steps during the development process that, if eliminated, would increase developer productivity substantially. Of course, the more productive developers become, the more applications there are moving through the continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline.

    It’s still a bit unclear to what degree application development will move to the cloud. It’s certainly easier to streamline development process in the cloud. But many developers remain attached to individual workstations because they may not always be in a location that has reliable access to the internet. However, as application development—especially in the age of microservices—becomes more of a team sport, it’s clear that more application development is being pushed into the cloud. Pushing application development into the cloud also provides the benefit of reducing the number of high-end PCs and workstations an organization may need to acquire for its developers.

    Whatever the path chosen, it’s clear repositories such as GitHub and GitLab are now at the center of application development. Very few developers these days are writing raw code. Most of them are combining artifacts stored in repository to build their applications. The challenge organizations now face is bringing some consistency to what otherwise could easily become a chaotic process.

    — Mike Vizard