Tricentis, the cloud’s #1 Continuous Testing Platform, announced today they will be presenting their Cloud Load Testing solution at the AWS booth at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW on Wednesday, May 8, 5:30 PM. This strategic new offering is now available on the AWS Solution Space.
“Modern SAP applications, powered by S/4HANA and Fiori 2.0, involve many highly-distributed components—and a performance issue in any of them could have a ripple effect across the entire application,” explained Kevin Dunne, SVP of Strategic Initiatives at Tricentis. “Tricentis allows anyone involved in the quality process to start load and performance testing from their desktop. The same business-readable test case definitions used for functional testing can be used for load and performance testing.”
Cloud-based Fiori load testing is just one part of Tricentis’ industry-leading SAP Testing for AWS offering. Tricentis Tosca, recognized as the #1 Continuous Testing Platform for SAP, helps leading enterprises modernize testing for SAP Digital Transformation initiatives. With the most advanced SAP business process test automation technology on the market, Tricentis Tosca helps enterprises effortlessly expose change impacts to their core end-to-end business transactions—across and beyond SAP (APIs, web UIs, Java, mobile interfaces, mainframes, data warehouses, and more).
The solution features include: Automated End-To-End Testing for SAP: Automatically test your SAP implementation and beyond. Test business processes across all connected applications + APIs
Validate SAP Workloads on AWS: Prevent business disruption by revalidating SAP business processes – measure performance impacts across each critical path
Load Testing for SAP Fiori: Easily construct and run load tests specifically tuned to support SAP Fiori
AI-Enabled Testing for the Business User: Tricentis Tosca’s model-based test automation approach enables business users to rapidly create resilient, reusable test assets.
Learn more about Tricentis SAP Testing and Cloud Load Testing for AWS
With the industry’s #1 Continuous Testing platform, Tricentis is recognized for reinventing software testing for DevOps. Through agile test management and advanced test automation optimized to support 150+ technologies, we provide automated insight into the business risks of your software releases—transforming testing from a roadblock to a catalyst for innovation. The result is accelerated software delivery speed, improved cost efficiency, and reduced business risk.
Tricentis is the only vendor to achieve unanimous “leader” status. This honor is based on our technical leadership, innovation, and a Global 2000 customer base of 1600+ companies, including global enterprises such as Allianz, ANZ Bank, Cisco, Dolby, Experian, First Data, HSBC, Merck, Office Depot, Samsung, Swiss Re, Starbucks, Telstra, UBS, Vodafone, Whole Foods, and WorldPay. Customers rely on Tricentis to achieve and sustain test automation rates of over 90 percent—increasing risk coverage while accelerating testing to keep pace with Agile and DevOps.
Tricentis has a global presence in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, India, Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland, Poland, United States and the UK. To learn more, visit https://www.tricentis.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
AWS Users Can Seamlessly Install and Purchase Automatic Application Monitoring and Tracing
SAN FRANCISCO AND SOLINGEN, GERMANY – APRIL 19, 2019
Instana, the leading provider of Automatic Application Monitoring (APM) solutions for cloud-native applications, today announced that its automatic APM solution is available for purchase in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. AWS subscribers can now acquire Instana to manage their AWS applications and infrastructure seamlessly through their AWS account.
“No matter how big or small an IT organization is, cloud-based infrastructure and applications have become a critical part of the deployment strategy,” said Pete Abrams, Instana co-founder and COO. “Allowing these organizations to research, purchase and deploy a performance monitoring solution for their cloud systems makes their monitoring startup processes more efficient.”
With just a few clicks, AWS users can access Instana’s automatic APM and application infrastructure monitoring solution, add the licenses to their AWS account and start monitoring performance.
Unlike conventional monitoring solutions, Instana’s automatic APM solution discovers application infrastructure and service components, deploys monitoring sensors for the application’s technology stack and traces all application requests – without requiring any human configuration or even application restarts. The solution detects changes in the application environment in real-time, adjusting its own models and visualizing the changes and impacts to performance in seconds.
The new Instana AWS marketplace entry includes an option to try the fully-featured product for free, giving users the opportunity to see how all their AWS applications and infrastructure are performing. Instana’s automatic deployment, discovery and monitoring configuration capabilities deliver visualizations of application dependency maps and service level monitoring in minutes.
Instana’s automatic APM includes monitoring and tracing for over 100 different languages, microservices and popular Amazon platforms including EC2, DynamoDB and AWS RDS databases, AWS SQS Messaging, ELB Load Balancing, and AWS Kinesis streaming. Learn more by visiting http://www.instana.com.
Anything that gets rolled out quickly in the technological world is a major step forward—as long as it doesn’t compromise security.
DevSecOps is able to provide compliance processes far more effectively than before, and without jeopardizing security while also freeing up developer resources.
How do you direct your IT team to keep your applications and customers safe without completely draining your resources in the process?
The answer: automation.
Why is Security Vital to DevSecOps?
To take full advantage of the agility and responsiveness of DevOps, you must bring forward an IT security team through the entire life cycle of your apps.
In the past, when software could take months or years to complete, it was perfectly acceptable to bring in the security team in the final stage of development. But in the days of DevOps, a security team must get consulted from day one due to rapid and frequent development cycles.
An effective DevSecOps system can be completed in days, so the outdated approach to handling security during the development phases also must change.
How Did Security Radically Change DevOps?
It is important to remind developers that security is a shared responsibility that must be integrated from end to end to guarantee a smooth and functional application. The mindset is so important that many have changed from using the term DevOps to DevSecOps to stress the importance of the need to build a very sound security foundation.
If you are already making the transition to the cloud with AWS, chances are you have already implemented DevOps strategies into your interface so you can test new virtual machines (VMs) and deploy applications quickly without waiting for infrastructure to get manually configured.
For those who prefer the old-school method of developing applications, neglecting security until the end leaves their applications exposed. One of the most common security issues with most SMEs is misuse of security during beta tests, which is basically akin to leaving your front door wide open when you go to sleep at night. It’s just a terrible idea.
Making the transition from DevOps is not a luxury but a necessity for developers who want a secure environment, even during the dev/test period.
Designing Compliance Processes for IT
Even if you add “security” to the term DevOps, it means little without properly adding the processes you use into the building of the applications.
Security must be built into the processes by design, or you are not correctly taking advantage of what DevSecOps means—and your developer resources will get neglected, too.
Like the name implies, security must be in the center of development and operations. To maintain compliance, you must enforce a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer:
AWS is responsible for security of the cloud, including the hypervisor and hardware.
Customers are responsible for security in the cloud. They do this by securing your applications and network with services through a third-party vendor.
The best examples of DevSecOps in the cloud take this philosophy to heart.
Automation is Critical to Compliance Processes
A “security first” mentality is good , but are you really taking action with your compliance processes to free up developer resources?
The answer for many developers is, “Not quite.” Automation is essential to DevSecOps, yet so many systems lack the right tools. This is especially unfortunate for organizations that have the necessary skills and procedures in-house to implement built-in security processes directly into the application by design.
For other organizations, automation is only achievable by leveraging their services from a security integrator, who can then provide services to help define processes and roles, unveil security tools and set up automation procedures.
Steps to Establish Automation on DevSecOps
Now that you know automation is crucial to the success of any system, here are a few basic steps you can take from day one to start building the security processes into your design:
Consider a “shift-left” mentality when adding new processes, ones that incorporate design thinking from customers’ security needs and remain consistent. Steps such as threat-modeling storyboards build cyber resilience into the application before the first code is even written.
Consider a cloud-based vulnerability scanning solution. It will help you define standards for the AMI as well as validate adherence to those standards.
Implement an audit, logging and monitoring solution to track changes to the in-use AMIs. It helps combine account activity and AWS resources from the cloud with data related to security incidents. The in-use AMI changes can do everything from providing ongoing insights to allowing other security controls and having influence over network security.
View the AWS Marketplace catalog. Along with what an internal staff or a systems integrator can help automate, there are a number of other terrific resources out there for automation. The software listings are all from independent software vendors that make it straightforward to locate, test, buy and deploy software that runs effectively on your AWS environment. Like other AWS services, the providers are billed based on consumption, so you pay only for what you need.
By asking yourself the important question, “What am I trying to accomplish with my security controls?” you can get a variety of answers regarding what measures you need to take for compliance processes.
Final Thoughts
Speed, speed, speed. Developers today simply have no time to waste when it is time to launch new applications and get them out the door.
You have little time to burn on extra features, but you also can’t afford leaving your systems exposed and vulnerable to attacks. That’s why DevSecOps uses superior security processes to free up developer resources by utilizing as much automation as possible.
When SoulCycle wanted to improve application development and deployment, including improving services for customers across its 80-plus indoor cycling centers in the United States and Canada, the company turned to Mark Sost, a veteran developer and engineer who worked at several media companies, including Hearst.
Over the last two-plus years, Sost, who now holds the title of senior director of engineering at SoulCycle, has built-up the company’s engineering and DevOps teams, increasing the headcount from eight or nine developers to about 40 employees now.
The first major project was revamping a legacy, LAMP-based stack used to support applications to focus more on a modern platform that could take advantage of DevOps methodologies, as well as continuous integration and continuous delivery practices (CI/CD).
Sost and his team dubbed this new platform Podium. However, Podium is more than a development platform, Sost explained.
“Podium became the ethos and the methodology, as well as the architecture and application stack for re-platforming Soul’s technology stack in total,” Sost said in a telephone interview. “We moved from that monolithic to more of a service-oriented architecture. As such, we started to break out functionality on multiple applications.”
The re-engineering also meant investing in new infrastructure, as well as other cloud-based technologies. This includes a multi-cloud approach.
While most of the legacy applications have now been moved to Amazon Web Services, SoulCycle also uses Google Cloud Platform for Podium and all new developments. Sost also takes advantage of Kubernetes and Docker for container orchestrations, as well as investments in other managed services.
Other tools in the DevOps arsenal include Jenkins to run unit tests; DataDog and StackDriver for monitoring and analytics for workflows; combing Travis CI, Cloud Builder and GCR for CI; and technology from startup Harness, which provides CD-as-a-service. Sost called Harness the “last-mile” tool needed for application deployment.
“For Harness, that’s CD for us,” Sost said. “That’s continuous delivery to our various Podium environments. We’re leveraging it for delivery to all our Podium environments. Everywhere from UAC (user account control) during the code review cycle to QA after merge, to production, load test and everywhere in-between.”
This revamped approach to application development now means that the SoulCycle engineering team has created approximately 30 different apps over the last 24 months, this includes internal apps used within the company environment, and ultimately to customers using the facilities and equipment.
Additionally, Podium helps create a more unified architecture to help ensure that the entire team—whether it’s DevOps, QA or the production team—can paint a 360-degree view of the problem that needs to be solved and what the implications are for the business once the solution is put into place.
This is what Sost and his team call “Podium principles.”
“When we say that we’re building things with Podium principles in mind, we’re talking about the fact that everything is version-controlled,” Sost said. “We have full test coverage. We have everything in terms of Kubernetes manifests to infrastructure automation written down and version control checks it as part of source code. That applications are conforming to more of that 12-factor methodology and that we’re really focused really heavily on developer empowerment.
“I think for us, that really is a shift that Podium has introduced; a move from writing the code as an application developer and then throwing it over a wall to an operations person—a QA person—to test it and deliver it somewhere,” Sost added. “Instead, we provide a developer the tools and the patterns of principles to go about controlling more of their application development life cycle all the way through to delivery.”
The results have helped improve the overall SoulCycle experience for customers, which includes:
Reducing deployment time by approximately 80 percent.
Instead of one hour, deployments now take one developer 10 to 15 minutes.
QA verification has been reduced by approximately 80 percent.
It now takes three QA engineers one hour to verify, compared to three to six hours previously.
At the same time, Sost believes that the Podium approach gives developers more control over their projects and lets them focus on writing good code that creates apps people want to use.
“It’s more, ‘Now, I know what’s involved with getting my application to people,’” Sost said. “Because at the end of the day, engineers are just concerned with writing things that people want to use. … This is how we’re going to give you more control of the code and applications that you’re writing, so that you can see meaningful results quicker, without having to wait for someone.”
What’s next for Sost and his team at SoulCycle? The answer: Machine learning and a bit of automation to the DevOps process.
Here, SoulCycle is using Harness tools to log more data and infrastructure monitoring into the platform, which allows the algorithm to learn more about the various development projects. This can make the code better and eliminate errors that come with constant development and deployment.
“We’re letting it get smarter over time around how it can detect anomalies and understand whether our code was successful because there are going to be times where things slip through unit testing or slip through integration tests and there are even going to be times where they slip through load tests, where things like 99 percent are just not going to cut it,” Sost said.
Businesses made the right choice using spot instances for Black Friday
Black Friday is the unofficial kickoff to the holiday shopping season, when retailers announce exciting deals to attract as many customers as they can into their stores. With online shopping surging in recent years, e-commerce and AdTech businesses are also participating in Black Friday to increase their online presence and revenues. Today, millions of customers have the choice of shopping online or in brick-and-mortar stores. While these stores have their challenges managing massive amounts of shoppers, e-commerce and AdTech businesses are dealing with their own set of challenges when it comes to handling shopper traffic.
Source: Business Insider
During peak shopping days such as Black Friday, businesses use significantly more capacity to process online shopper requests while constantly trying to provide them optimal performance. In theory, as more companies utilize resources from a cloud provider, they may experience a capacity shortage when trying to scale. When a busy online shopping day finally approaches, this theory can become a reality as online retailers scale to meet their shoppers’ demands and cloud providers struggle to accommodate capacity. However, what many cloud users may not know is that about 50 percent of the major cloud vendors’ infrastructure is mostly idle.
To be clear, this is not because AWS, Microsoft or Google are struggling to sell their capacity; it’s because they have to be ready for rapid increases in usage—just like the one businesses experience during Black Friday.
The fear of insufficient capacity also has made users apprehensive to use cloud providers’ excess capacity such as spot instances to run their workloads, since many customers are using more cloud resources and are eating all of the cloud inventory. Businesses simply do not want to take a chance trying to compete for excess capacity and opt for something more predictable, such as on-demand instances. The fact that cloud providers are capable of handling the most aggressive computing demands has created a situation in which businesses that chose to make intelligent use of excess capacity during Black Friday saw great returns on their investments.
Events such as Black Friday, national elections and the Super Bowl are pretty extreme stress tests for any consumer-facing business. We thought it would interesting to go through the data and see how the AWS spot market behaved during Black Friday, and see what we can learn from it. In this blog post, I will go over the spot market statistics and lessons learned from 2018’s Black Friday.
Spot Markets and Statistics
Spot markets are defined as the supply and demand for a specific instance type at a specific spot price in an availability zone. Spotinst Elastigroup ranks spot markets for availability and costs from current and historical data in a process called Spot Market Scoring. Spot Market Scoring enables us to predict an instance interruption in a market approximately 15 minutes before it happens (sometimes even more than an hour). This advance notification on upcoming interruptions is what triggers the spot instance replacement and ensures the continuous availability of compute workloads. Let’s see how the spot markets behaved before and after Black Friday.
Now that you have a better understanding of the spot market, let’s delve into the statistics from Black Friday. In the image below, we can see the number of spot interruptions for each Friday three months prior to Black Friday in the us-west-1 and us-east-1 region. The us-east-1 region had significantly more spot interruptions during this period.
The graph below shows the number of spot interruptions that occurred a week before and after Black Friday in us-east-1 and us-west-1 across all instance types. We can see that us-west-1 was more reliable for spot instances than us-east-1. Also, us-east-1 continued to experience more outages the week after Black Friday.
We then took a look at popular instance types and sizes used before, on and after Black Friday to see how many interruptions there were. In the image below, we can see that c4.4xlarge had the highest number of interruptions and incrementally improved after.
The section below shows metrics for Back Friday in comparison across different availability zones in us-east-1 and us-west-2:
Total Spot Interruptions this Black Friday in the US: 462
Breaking down the Interruptions by Availability Zones, some had more Spot interruptions than others
Availability Zone
us-east-1
us-west-2
AZ 1
29
1
AZ 2
3
7
AZ 3
24
3
Average Spot Uptime: 2675 Minutes (1.8 days)
What Spot Interruptions and Autoscaling Events Look like
Let’s examine what a spot market interruption looks like and how Elastigroup handles the situation. In the data below, you can see an actual event log from one of our customers.We can see that early on Black Friday, the day started with Elastigroup automatically replacing terminated or soon-to-be-terminated instances. A little later, as shoppers began scavenging the internet for deals, we see that the instances were automatically scaled up to meet demand. Elastigroup scaled down the instances the following day because demand was not as high as on Black Friday. With this type of autoscaling automation in Elastigroup, administrators can spend more time worrying about application development and other tasks.
Takeaways
DevOps Automation is Key – Elastigroup uses predictive algorithms to identify and drain instances that are about to be terminated. Prior to termination, Elastigroup will launch a new instance and replace it seamlessly. Elastigroup will also make sure to distribute your instances across different types to optimize costs and longevity.
Spot Instance Availability – Having a stable uptime is crucial for peak days such as Black Friday. With millions of shoppers visiting e-commerce sites, an outage can result in revenue loss. On Black Friday, the small number of spot instances that experienced interruptions had an average uptime of 1.8 days. With that uptime, organizations can rely on spot instances managed by Elastigroup to reduce costs while not sacrificing service availability during peak times.
Spot Market – Spots allow businesses to make better decisions without sacrificing costs and availability. Elastigroup reliably leverages the spot market to optimize your underlying infrastructure for cost, without compromising availability. Per the statistics above, we can see that some availability zones had more spot terminations than others. AZ 1 in us-east-1 had the highest number of spot interruptions.
The 2019 State of the Union Address, delivered Feb. 5, was light on anything tech-related. But just a week later, Feb. 11, technology was the focus of an executive order that launched The American Artificial Intelligence (AI) Initiative. Why do we need a national AI initiative, and what does it have to do with DevOps? (Hint: You may need hardware and a hybrid cloud strategy for your AI initiative.)
Investments in AI technology are exploding worldwide. Most analysts believe that while the total number of startups and equity deals to date still favors the United States, China is spawning startups rapidly, thanks to their recent AI initiative. According to just-released data from CB Insights:
“While China accounted for only 10% of global AI deals in 2017, Chinese AI startups took 48% of all AI funding dollars that year, surpassing the US in AI funding for the first time.”
The long tail doesn’t lie. A big global competition here is a good thing, though, and the scoreboard has spurred movement. The American AI Initiative lays out five principles, paraphrased in brief:
We need to drive technological breakthroughs in AI.
We need technical standards for development and testing.
We need workforce training in skills and applications.
We need to be able to trust AI solutions for privacy.
We need both open markets and protection for “critical” technologies.
Go, Team America! What, you expected more than motherhood and apple pie out of the White House? I’m not going there. I don’t think any administration could prepare the level of technical insight needed for something of this magnitude. It can, however, lay a course and task agencies for technology plans and funding proposals—and about two-thirds of this executive order is devoted to timelines for those.
Let’s assume this AI initiative comes together with real dollars, and everyone including your competition is at work on AI. You may be thinking, “This is easy. I’m looking at a prominent cloud vendor’s machine learning webpage right now and it says, ‘No machine learning skills required.’ Its solution is based on its libraries of algorithms plus cloud-based workload acceleration hardware.”
If that approach solves your specific problem, that’s great. Many use cases will fit those offerings. However, I’m thinking that a lot of you out there won’t turn over your data and your privacy control to a single vendor. Based on what I’ve seen, while the public cloud may be fast enough for some use cases, it’s woefully non-deterministic for others. You may be able to afford all kinds of time and elastic cloud resources for training, where time may be measured in weeks or months on bigger machine learning data sets.
Real-time inference is a different game. There. Will. Be. Slowness. One missed result can be very costly—ask any autonomous vehicle developer, then look at all the hardware sitting in the trunk. Public cloud solutions are woefully non-deterministic, especially as everyone and their dog starts using them. The CEO of another big cloud vendor just said in an event keynote that most AI solutions will split 40/60 private/public cloud. She went on to say if you’re regulated, it’ll be more like 60/40.
Most current startup investment is headed for AI chips. Machine learning is the ultimate workload optimization problem. By adding compute nodes with clusters of GPUs, FPGAs or dedicated system-on-chip (SoC) designs, inference speed-up is achievable. Whatever approach you chose, you’re probably going to want workload optimization safely in your private cloud instance within a hybrid cloud AI solution.
You’re also going to want control over differentiation of your solution. Open source AI software solutions are great because they handle a fundamental base of value. However, AI-enabled applications are very likely to run into problems at scale. Open source will get you to prototyping quickly. Your innovation will be tested as real-world, real-time issues develop. If you can get a truly differentiated hybrid cloud AI solution that proves to be fast, reliable and secure, you’ll have a huge competitive advantage.
Again, this looks like a perfect job for a DevOps team. Here’s where to start on your AI initiative, in increasing order of difficulty:
Have someone get familiar with machine learning and AI public cloud solution offerings—those vendors are easily found.
Also get familiar with open source frameworks such as TensorFlow, Caffe, Cognitive Toolkit, PyTorch, MXnet, DeepLearning4J and others.
Look at your preferred distributed computing framework for recent innovations in AI workload optimization; for instance, a lot of work is happening around Hadoop and Spark.
Inventory the problems you think AI might solve in your organization and see how they line up with those potential solutions.
Experiment and discover where the bottleneck in your preferred algorithms might be; those will be candidates for a hybrid cloud workflow optimized solution.
If there’s a profound bottleneck, you’ll need to evaluate the best hardware solution, meaning someone on your team (or a consultant) should understand GPU code or FPGA design.
For the most severe AI challenges, more companies will be considering either off-the-shelf AI chips or custom SoC designs—even companies that have never designed chips.
My point here wasn’t to provide a primer on AI technology; that’s a huge topic. The American AI Initiative is a call that teams need to move on AI now or risk being left behind in the competitive prop wash. You also shouldn’t wait for someone to generate the exact solution you need out in the marketplace. With the feds driving a sea change in AI, investments and technology will be shifting even more rapidly, and it’s best to get in front of it.
If you’ve started already, how’s your AI initiative going? Are there other areas in AI or machine learning you’re curious about that would be a good topic for future posts? Reach out if you’d like to discuss this.
Moving to the cloud is becoming a must for many companies if they want to grow beyond their current footprint and be more innovative. But for many companies—especially those in the SMB space—their transition to the cloud is hindered by a lack of knowledge and experience, which often results in difficult migrations that sometimes just aren’t successful.
Since its inception, nClouds has helped organizations of all sizes move to the cloud successfully. Its experience as an AWS Premier consulting partner and its well-architected approach to cloud migration helps companies get the most from their infrastructure by engaging with the cloud, whether they’re adopting a hybrid environment or going all in on cloud.
In this DevOps Chat, JT Giri, nClouds founder and CEO, and I speak about the triggers that push companies to adopt cloud, some issues companies face in their decision-making and infrastructure’s role in an increasingly cloud-based IT world.
As usual, the video is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.
Transcript
Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat, or in this case, perhaps, watching a DevOps video. Happy to be joined here by my friend J.T. Giri, who is the CEO and founder of nClouds. J.T., welcome.
J.T. Giri: Hey—good morning, Alan. Thanks for having me.
Shimel: My pleasure, nice to have you here. J.T., let’s first of all say Merry Christmas, happy new year.
Giri: Thank you, and you.
Shimel: Yeah, it’s been an exciting—we were talking off camera, off mic—it’s been an exciting quarter for you. You’re a new time dad and moving homes and at the same time, nClouds’ business seems to be just booming along with everything else associated with Amazon Web Services and the cloud. So, congratulations.
Giri: Thank you. Exciting times.
Shimel: Yeah, it is. So, J.T., I wanted to talk a little bit about—you know, there’s people listening to this or watching this who are saying, “You know, I wanna be like Google,” or, “I wanna be Facebook” or, “I wanna be one of these unicorns in that I wanna harness the cloud. You know, we have our servers in a closet here or a data center or a third-party data center, but we’re not really cloud. And everything seems to be in the cloud. We wanna move to the cloud, but you know, we’re only maybe 250, 500 employees. How do we do that, right? Do we need a helper, like an nClouds. Do we need to update everything? Do we throw out the baby with the bath water and start new?”
I want you to tell us a little bit, sort of, what’s the typical sort of customer journeys that you see when you guys engage?
Giri: Yeah, absolutely. So, Alan, you know, we’ve talked in the past. I’ve been migrating companies to AWS ever since EC2 was in beta. And, as I would migrate these companies, people would realize that they need someone to manage it, right? So, that’s how, sort of, nClouds came to be. And as you mentioned, this has been an incredible year for us. We doubled the size and revenue and the number of people.
What we were seeing in an SMB type of market, when companies migrate or when they try to migrate to AWS, they still need to follow—obviously, they need to follow best practices because cloud or AWS is constantly changing, and the skill set is just not there. So, that’s where we come in play. We can make sure that your infrastructure is well-architected. We take an approach of migrating in a way where you’re really taking advantage of the cloud—so, for example, using containers, things that are really gonna help you to harness the power of cloud. And then, for most of our customers, you know, we’re providing 24/7 support. And when we see people try to do this themselves, they get a bad taste of cloud. They’re like, “Oh, this is not for us. We’re not really innovating fast.”
So, that’s why, Alan, we’ve been very successful, because there is a huge gap in SMB type of companies. There is a skill gap and just experience. We bring that to the table, and it’s been incredible. We’re able to add a lot of value.
Shimel: Sure. So, J.T., early on there, you said something about when an organization needs someone to help them manage their cloud migration—when does an organization recognize that they need someone to help them? What’s sort of a trigger point? You know, as, again, we spoke off camera a little bit—is it when someone dives in the pool and says, “Oh, my God, I can’t swim, it’s too deep?” Or is it, before you dive in the pool, a prudent person hires a swim coach, you know what I mean?
What are sort of the trigger things that people should see as a red flag or as a trigger event that says, “Hey, man, I should be getting some help, here”?
Giri: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, basically, it depends when the companies come to that realization that we need some outside help, right? Sometimes, it is that they will try to do the project themselves, or in other cases, they realize that they really want to just focus on delivering value to their customer, right? They really wanna just innovate fast.
So—and they see how they can just stay focused on that, and that’s something we do incredibly well. We have a build—we build systems and processes together where our key focus is to make sure the customer can deliver value to their customers fast and we want to make sure the infrastructure is not getting in their way.
So, you know, it’s just, this is becoming more and more popular, like, DevOps as a service, where companies are reaching out to partners like nClouds to help them with DevOps related tasks, like, with the migration, setting up CI/CD pipeline, becoming an extension to their team, so they can focus on their core business, right? And, you know, it really depends when they—sometimes, they come to that realization pretty fast, or sometimes they try to do things themselves, and when things don’t work out, they try to use someone like nClouds.
Shimel: So, J.T., generally, one of the hardest things in life is learning when to ask for help.
Giri: Right.
Shimel: And that includes cloud migrations and everything else. At the SMB level, mid-enterprise level, you don’t have an elaborate or as big a structure as, let’s say, you do with a large enterprise where you have layers and layers of management and hierarchy—a lot of the organizations you deal with are rather flat in their management structure.
So, who is it in the organization who finally kinda raises his hand and says, “Wait a second, I think we should engage in some professional help, right? I think we should being in some experts to help us.” Is it the CEO, CIO, someone lower than that? What’s your experience?
Shimel: Yes, normally, CTO, VP of Engineering type of person. And also, you know, as you know, we became a premier partner with AWS last year. So, AWS is—Amazon, it’s no secret that they’re very customer obsessed. So, they will—Amazon, when they’re speaking to a customer and if they see the customer is struggling, they will introduce someone like nClouds to help them out with the migration or just modernize their infrastructure. And sometimes, you know—actually, many times, they can come in with funding where they will offset some of the costs.
So, for a customer, it’s just like a no-brainer to see if we can have some external experts come in and fix up the infrastructure or streamline the infrastructure. So, you know, the conversation, normally, we do get a lot of business directly from people reaching out, like, “Hey, we need DevOps help,” but we also get a lot of business directly from AWS where they identify this customer needs help, and we get involved that way.
Shimel: So, I’m just gonna bring up two questions. The first one is on track with what we’re talking about. So, now the CTO or CIO or an executive says, “Yeah, we’re gonna bring in nClouds,” whether AWS referred it or is partially subsidizing it or what have you, but, “We’re gonna bring in nClouds or some other type of help”—is there any sort of pushback or resistance normally with, you know, when you’re dealing with people? The—not first responders, but the individual contributors who feel like, “Hey, man, I don’t wanna be replaced. I don’t wanna be outsourced. I don’t want to give up my cheese to some outside company who’s helping us” or, if so, how do you overcome that? How do you work with an organization like that?
Giri: Yeah, so, normally, there’s not a pushback, Alan. So, I was actually re-reading “The Venus Project” yesterday, and I was just reading the story of Brent, right?
Shimel: Mm-hmm.
Giri: So, when you’re talking to these customers, some of these guys are on their honeymoon with their pager with them, right? And then, when you’re coming in and you’re saying, “Hey, we’re gonna help you out with 24/7 support so you can get your life back” or, you know, “We’re gonna help you to streamline this DevOps work which you never really got the opportunity or time to work on, we’re gonna help you out with that,” right? And it’s incredible.
Sometimes, maybe the initial impression might be the same as you describe, like, “Hey, are you gonna take my job?” But as they understand the value, they normally are super happy. And another thing we do, Alan, in most of our engagements, we do this assessment called architected assessment where we’re coming in and we’re just reviewing your infrastructure to see how well you’re architected, and after that assessment, we give you, like, a roadmap, like, what are some things you should focus on the first month, and what are some things you should focus on short term and long term? And the assessment goes over cost, security, reliability, performance, and operation excellence.
So, you know, we can get, in the short-term road map, we can show some quick wins where the customer sees the value and they also get confident in our ability, so that’s sort of the path that works really well for us right now.
Shimel: Got it. J.T., another thing you mentioned is that nClouds is a premier Amazon partner. And, you know, in today’s world, we throw out platinum and gold and these sort of levels all the time—but really, within the Amazon hierarchy, a premier partner has sort of, they don’t hand that out like candy. Talk to us a little bit about what’s entailed in being an Amazon premier partner.
Giri: Yes. It’s a top tier status with AWS and in order to get there, like you said, there is only 25 premier partners in North America, and you have to show case studies, you have to show the training path of your employees, and you also have to have multiple competencies, like, we have DevOps competency, we have migration competency, and we’re also the well-architected partner.
And it’s just very subjective. You know, if you work closely with Amazon, even if you hit all the check boxes, they want to make sure that quality is there for premier partners. So, they look how you work well with your customer, what does your customer experience looks like, because that’s what Amazon cares about that as well.
So, you know, it’s just very hard to get to this status, and we’re honored to be at this level right now. This is great.
Shimel: Yep. So, J.T., let me go next kind of where I want to take this, and that’s—you know, two or three years ago, migrating a company onto an AWS, or it doesn’t have to be AWS, migrating a company onto the cloud, you know, you set up some virtual instances, maybe they had some separate storage, stuff like that, EC2 kinda stuff. But, you know, I just got back from Seattle a couple weeks ago from KubeCon and CloudNativeCon—Reinvent was the week before that. And certainly, Kubernetes and containers are kind of really quickly, quickly, quickly changing the landscape, here.
You know, are you seeing that as well? And what does that mean for—typically, SMB businesses are not leading edge or bleeding edge, right in [Cross talk] option?
Giri: Yeah.
Shimel: What are you guys seeing?
Giri: Yeah. You know, it’s very interesting. Who would’ve thought that the infrastructure we built a couple years ago would be considered a legacy infrastructure, you know? People using EC2 instances and an auto scaling group in Amazon’s world will kinda be called outdated right now.
So, we’re seeing incredible push and a lot of sort of initiatives on our customer side where they wanna go containers, pretty much like 90 percent of our engagements are around containers. Because it’s a no brainer, right? It makes the CI/CD pipeline much easier. You know, most of the time, containers are automatically integrated with scaling, so you can really binpack your resources, it has impact on your cost. So, you know, this is just—it just makes the infrastructure far more streamlined and far more easier to manage.
And as I mentioned, Alan, I’ve been migrating companies to Amazon and EC2 from the last 10 years, and I’ve been managing infrastructure as long as I’ve been migrating. So, it’s just, when I’m building infrastructure right now, it’s a no-brainer to build something using Kubernetes or on AWS we use EKS or—you know, depending on what the customer wants to do, and we had a customer the other day where they were saying, “I just wanna focus on delivering product to our customers, so what is the easiest way?” We use Fargate for them. Depending on the customer requirement, we’ll go Kubernetes, but long story short, it just makes a lot of sense these days to build infrastructure on containers, because they really streamline how you manage it in the long run. It just makes life easier.
Shimel: And that’s even at the SMB level?
Giri: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, because the needs are the same. You need CI/CD pipeline, you need a way for you to scale infrastructure, you need a way for you to run batch or cron job type of jobs. And when you go with something like containers, you get there—like, you know, you don’t have to build home grown tools to facilitate these things. You know, containers or EKS or Kubernetes, they allow versioning when you’re deployed or auto scaling is sort of built in, you know, you can schedule batch jobs.
Just, it’s a no-brainer, you know? If you’re building out infrastructure, you should definitely explore containers each time, and that’s what we try to do every time. And it’s just incredible, the amount of success we’ve had before and after.
Shimel: Sure. So, as we sit here at the dawn of a new year, if I would’ve asked you in early 2018, do you think Kubernetes and containers would be one of the major stories of the year, I don’t know if you would’ve said yes or no. But as we sit here in the dawn of 2019 and we project ahead—let’s say I interview you and everything’s all well and at the end of next year, the end of this coming year, 2019, we sit down and talk about, “Well, what’s 2019 really show?”—what do you think are the big stories this year, J.T.? What do you think, coming down the pike, especially—I’m not talking about the world view. For nClouds and for your customer base, what do you think is really big for you in the coming year?
Giri: Yeah, so, I think in general, the application modernization will continue. We continue to see that trend, and this is also going to be big in SMB. So, we will continue to double down on AWS. It’s been an amazing partner. Our core values, our partnership is based on shared goals, so we’ll continue to kinda double down on that relationship.
And we’ll continue to utilize this well-architected framework. It helps us to assess the customers when we’re onboarding and it helps us to manage the customer, like, every time the customers were managing, we continued to run a well-architected assessment to make sure they’re well-architected, and they continue to stay well-architected.
And, yeah, I mean, just continue to focus on SMB, AWS, continue to align with well-architected framework. We also just spun off another company, it’s called nOps, and basically, it just helps to make sure the customers are well aligned with well architected framework, and it’s available on AWS Marketplace. So, we’ll continue to invest in that, because that solution has been incredible, nOps. A lot of our customers are seeing value in that, so, we are actually working with Amazon to give that solution to other partners like nClouds who can use it to manage their infrastructure to make sure the infrastructure is well architected, and we are also offering it to end customers who can use that tool to assess their infrastructure and continuously stay in compliance with well-architected framework.
Shimel: Excellent. You know, nOps, that’s something we’ll have to discuss on our next chat, J.T.
Giri: Yeah, absolutely.
Shimel: Well, you know what? We’ve been on almost a half hour here, so, unfortunately we’re about out of time for this one. J.T. Giri, CEO and founder of nClouds, thanks for being our guest on DevOps Chat.
Giri: Thank you so much for having me.
Shimel: My pleasure. Best of luck to nClouds this year, best of luck to you personally with your family and everything else, you know, it’s gonna be a busy year for you, my friend.
Giri: Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you.
Shimel: Alright. Hey, J.T. Giri, nClouds—you’re here with Alan Shimel on DevOps Chat. You’ve just listened to another chat. Bye bye, everyone.
More than four years ago, we launched InfluxDB, an open source time series platform. In the years since, time series technology has become increasingly popular; according to DB-Engines, over the last 24 months time series has been the fastest growing database category. This popularity is fueled by the “sensorification” of the physical world (i.e., IoT) and the rapidly increasing instrumentation requirements of the next generation of software. InfluxDB has millions of downloads, an expanding list of enterprise customers and a growing community that is always finding new ways to deploy and build on our platform and we believe we are just scratching the surface.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently entered the market with Timestream, a hosted time series database. We have been evangelizing the importance of high compression, super fast engines and a purpose-built stack for time series data and Amazon seems to have followed this model pretty closely. We are excited to have more competition in the market, as it affirms the broader market opportunity and further validates the need for robust, purpose-built solutions such as InfluxData. Amazon makes smart and strategic moves and we know that when it enters a new space, it’s not done so haphazardly—there is a lot of thought and research that goes into identifying the commercial potential, so its play in the time series database space is further evidence of what we already knew: that building a time series platform on existing multipurpose SQL or NoSQL databases is a nonstarter for a modern enterprise. AWS is a bedrock of the modern cloud-based internet and we are excited to see how Timestream evolves.
Public details about Timestream’s technical capabilities are limited, but based on the AWS model, there are likely several significant differences between our offerings—enough to appeal to distinct developers and use cases. Among them:
Open source — We are first and foremost an open source company. We are committed to sharing ideas and information openly, collaborating on solutions and providing full transparency to drive innovation. InfluxData’s products are continuously improved by an energized group of developers that help to make them more reliable, secure and awesome. The power of the open source community to drive innovation is unsurpassed by any proprietary software solutions.
Hybrid cloud and on-premises support — Distributing assets on any or across multiple cloud-hosting environments is often the best choice for companies. Key among the advantages is avoiding vendor lock-in, which can limit the ability to customize systems and negotiate better rates, ultimately making it very difficult—and expensive—to change cloud providers to meet ever-evolving business and technical needs. Every business has specific functionalities and a hybrid cloud system offers the flexibility to choose services that best fit their needs, whether it’s to support GDPR regulatory requirements or teams that are spread across multiple providers. And from an operations perspective, a multi-cloud system increases efficiencies and provides another layer of security to ensure there is no downtime.
Inevitably, as recognition of the power of time series data becomes more prominent, we’ll see even more competitors enter the space. And this is great from our perspective: Not only does competition fuel innovation, it grows the market as a whole. More importantly, it keeps us vigilant and focused on delivering value for the developers and those in the DevOps space who solve real-world problems with our platform.
Our priorities remain the same and we will proceed on the track we’re laying for the future. We will continue to push the edge with this technology—leveraging the advantages of a purpose-built system, developing new languages, supporting new platforms and new workloads and pursuing exciting opportunities as they come. We are committed to having a project with velocity, investing in the platform to make it successful and in the community of creative and talented developers who are discovering new ways to deploy our time series platform every day.
InfluxDB is available now and we encourage developers, both existing users and those who are just learning about the power of time series databases, to download and get up and running in minutes.
AWS’ Well-Architected Framework provides a wealth of incredibly valuable best practices and guidelines structured around five distinct pillars that more cloud-native organizations would do well to heed. The first of these pillars, Operational Excellence, recommends a number of particularly valuable techniques. However, successfully adopting the design principles and practices within Pillar No. 1 requires a strong foundation: a company culture that is willing to continuously work to improve.
In practice, this can mean holding high-profile “Game Days” focused on advancing internal procedures, nurturing an environment where engineers and product leaders really collaborate to promote business value while pursuing rapid iterative release cycles, championing operational automation and related approaches. Fortunately, adopting the tenants of AWS’ Operational Excellence Pillar can naturally assist in implementing cultural changes where they are needed.
Design Principles for Operational Excellence
To achieve operational excellence within AWS, incorporate these six design principles:
Perform Operations as Code
The cloud makes it possible to apply the same rigorous practices used to reduce risks in software development (such as version control and automated testing) across your full application environment. Cloud infrastructure allows all aspects of operations to be defined, managed and implemented in software code, spurring a revolution in their automation and consistency.
Annotated Documentation
Without effective automation, maintaining documentation is tedious to keep in sync with reality—ultimately making it challenging to troubleshoot issues when they inevitably arise.
Fortunately, the cloud makes it possible to create documentation automatically as an artifact of the build process. This documentation is detailed and annotated, always up-to-date and can be read by us humans (as well as systems). With automated documentation, engineers can react to issues more rapidly and accurately, and enlist automated systems to do the same.
Make Frequent, Small and Reversible Changes
While agile, iterative development methods have become commonplace in many areas, product-driven organizations tend to stick to large releases. However, operational excellence calls for a systems design that incorporates tightly focused, failure-resistant components in an environment designed for constant change and improvement. Implementing this flexibility allows for more rapid deployment of new iterations—but easy rollback if issues pop up.
Refine Operations Procedures Frequently
Operational excellence requires holding regular meetings to reflect, suggest and implement improvements to operations procedures, the same as those held when practicing any agile methodology. Game Days, where procedures are tested and iterated on, will help build and strengthen excellence as well.
Anticipate Failure
Rather than waiting for failures to strike and then studying the causes in a post-mortem, practicing routine “pre-mortem” exercises that recognize failure points before any harm is done. Game Days can then be used to investigate these scenarios and ultimately bolster resilience. For example, premier cloud-native organization Netflix demonstrates this design principle with its Chaos Monkey project, which is purpose-built to strengthen application resiliency against random instance failures.
Learn From All Operational Failures
Operationally excellent cultures have the openness to share post-mortem findings across the organization without pointing fingers. This broadly shared knowledge can then inform improvements in all areas of the business, not just in engineering and product departments but marketing, finance, and others as well.
Critical Components of Operational Excellence
Embracing the six design principles above paves the way for you to practice operational excellence in three key areas defined by the Well-Architected Framework: Preparation, Operation and Evolution.
Preparation
Operational excellence requires operations teams to possess a clear and complete understanding of the goals for each workload within the complete system, and how those goals will be achieved.
Operational Priorities
This clarity must include knowledge of the workloads the operations team is responsible for, the shared business goals and their role in achieving them and any relevant regulatory or compliance requirements. This information allows teams to correctly prioritize those workloads with greater importance or complexity.
AWS offers these helpful resources for setting operational priorities:
AWS Support. This including the AWS Knowledge Center, AWS Discussion Forums, and AWS Support Center.
AWS Documentation, now available on GitHub as an open source project.
AWS Trusted Advisor, which includes core checks for environmental improvements.
Businesses can also enlist AWS Certified Partners—experts selected by AWS to provide consulting, and professional and managed services as an extension of a company’s own operations team—to make sure priorities are set wisely.
Design for Operations
A well-architected workload is designed for operations from the beginning, with consideration for deployment, updates and similar needs. AWS provides the ability to model entire workloads as code, from applications to infrastructure, policy, governance and operations. It also offers a robust set of tools and services for operation design, such as CloudFormation and the AWS Developer Tools. Businesses can also create systems featuring the observability and insights needed to operate workloads by using AWS Cloudtrail, AWS VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudWatch and more.
Operational Readiness
Beyond the technology used, operational excellence is also a function of elegant, consistent processes and procedures for deploying and operating workloads. This means maintaining accurate documentation, building a well-trained and resourced team of experts and having governance that makes sure everything is done the right way.
It’s also smart to utilize automation when evaluating environments. CloudWatch events can be automatically addressed by scripting procedures created with AWS Systems Manager’s Run Command and Lambda. Configurations can be automated and benchmarked against best practices using AWS Config rules.
Operation
The first step to operational success is clearly defining it with key metrics based on shared business goals, so that events can be addressed with those goals in mind and success can be recognized when (or when not) achieved.
Understanding Operational Health
Because no two businesses are the same, the definition of operational health and success will vary. For example, one company might have workloads that demand low-latency and high-throughput performance to be prioritized over cost. Another might require a focus on cost-effectiveness and high availability. Operations teams must first understand those priorities and how they serve business goals to deliver what is actually needed.
AWS offers tools and services for analyzing workloads to serve specific goals. CloudWatch Logs and Dashboards can provide system and business level views of key metrics. Amazon ElasticSearch and Kibana can offer further visualization of operational health metrics, as can outside tools and services like Logstash and Grafana.
Responding to Events
When events occur, operational excellence means having prepared and even anticipated failures and putting metrics, processes and procedures into action for a quick and effective response. At the same time, teams must have metrics to understand the business impact of workload components to resolve the highest priority issues first. AWS enables teams to script automatic event responses, such as automated rollbacks triggered by failures. Amazon CloudWatch offers a powerful service for these automated responses.
Evolution
Curiosity and a desire to learn and improve are essential traits for operations teams pursuing operational excellence. Every experience should be viewed as an opportunity to learn and to share that new knowledge base. The best teams enjoy learning from failure and by asking for the perspective of other business units.
AWS offers an incredible platform for the analysis and experimentation needed to evolve practices. Amazon CloudWatch and CloudTrail can be combined with Amazon ElasticSearch with Kibana. Data exported to Amazon S3 can enable analysis with Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. AWS also helps share best practices with CloudFormation templates, Chef Cookbooks, Ansible Playbooks, Lambda functions and more.
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.
We can see that early on Black Friday, the day started with Elastigroup automatically replacing terminated or soon-to-be-terminated instances. A little later, as shoppers began scavenging the internet for deals, we see that the instances were automatically scaled up to meet demand. Elastigroup scaled down the instances the following day because demand was not as high as on Black Friday. With this type of autoscaling automation in Elastigroup, administrators can spend more time worrying about application development and other tasks.
