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Tag: Cloud Computing

GitLab Allies With Google to Improve Developer Productivity

GitLab Inc., in collaboration with Google, today launched an open source Cloud Seed tool that makes it simpler for DevOps teams to consume Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources.

The Cloud Seed tool, announced at the virtual Google Cloud Next ’22 conference, is integrated within the GitLab web UI to make it simpler for developers to consume Google cloud resources—such as Cloud Run for building and deploying containerized applications—and the managed Cloud SQL database service.

Nima Badiey, global vice president of alliances for GitLab, said the goal is to reduce friction that would otherwise be created by requiring developers to write code to consume these services using a set of lower-level application programming interfaces (APIs).

That self-service approach not only improves productivity but provides the added benefit of reducing the odds those services might be misconfigured in a way that creates a cybersecurity vulnerability, he added.

As it seeks to gain ground on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, Google has a vested interest in working with providers of DevOps platforms to make it simpler for developers to consume cloud resources. The challenge is that developers often make mistakes when they programmatically invoke cloud services. Those resulting misconfigurations are all too often not discovered and remediated until after there has been some type of cybersecurity incident.

In the wake of a series of high-profile breaches of software supply chains, there is a lot more focus on security. The challenge, of course, is finding a way to ensure application development platforms are as secure as possible without slowing down the rate at which software is developed and deployed. Achieving that goal requires the right mix of policies, training and systems, said Badiey.

Most organizations are trying to strike a balance between the need for greater security and their need to attract and retain developer talent. In theory, the rise of DevSecOps best practices is pushing more responsibility for security further left toward developers. However, most developers have little to no cybersecurity expertise, so it’s clear more guardrails need to be built into DevOps tools and platforms to prevent cybersecurity mistakes from being made.

It’s not clear how much improved developer productivity and greater security will drive organizations toward one cloud platform versus another, but in an age where many more organizations now routinely employ two or more cloud platforms, it could make a significant difference. Developers don’t especially enjoy remediating applications after they are deployed in a production environment because they have generally already moved on to other projects. IT operations and cybersecurity professionals are also likely to nudge developers toward platforms that create the least amount of operational overhead for them.

Regardless, one thing that is certain is compliance requirements are about to become stricter for all concerned as scrutiny of software supply chains intensifies in the months ahead. The issue now is how to proactively address those requirements before they become a much larger issue.

October 11, 2022
What’s Next for Cloud Computing? Distributed Cloud
The public cloud has greatly advanced IT by allowing teams to interact with their data and write new applications in a cloud-native way. The cloud simplifies the application development process, provides services on demand and allows you to pay as you go. There has been phenomenal growth in public cloud use and all estimates show that it is likely to keep growing in the near future.

Nevertheless, most IT computing still takes place outside of the public cloud, simply because there has been no effective way to consume cloud-native services outside of data centers (or “regions”) operated by the hyperscale cloud providers. This location constraint negatively affects cloud computing in three main ways: Performance (latency, throughput), data sovereignty (residency, regulations) and commercial considerations (legacy architecture, pricing).

As a result, to realize the cloud’s fullest potential, many enterprises are turning to a recent innovation in cloud computing: Distributed clouds that are untethered to specific locations or regions.

How does this work? Through APIs, the distributed cloud connects to any IT stack in any location and provides cloud functionality as if running on a hyperscale cloud. However, instead of running in a dedicated location, it runs on existing infrastructure on top of any IaaS, virtualized environment or bare-metal machines. It is agnostic to the stack’s underlying physics and doesn’t require any installation or capex. It runs workloads in any environment: Commercial data center, on-premises facility, edge microcenter or even in a multi-facility hybrid environment.

How the Cloud is Transforming Enterprise and SMBs

Modern application development lives and breathes cloud computing. It’s been the enabler for much of the recent progress with modern applications—such as those dedicated to IoT, smart cities and personal health, for example—and will continue to be the infrastructure on which enterprises and small businesses develop new innovations. But as more and more businesses employ a cloud-first approach using cloud-native architectures and technologies, “IT budget” has become synonymous with “cloud budget.” And this is often a very expensive proposition.

Therefore, the next step for many businesses is to manage cloud computing costs while supporting legacy and cloud-native applications as well as cloud migration. Their computing strategy may be simultaneously on-premises, bare metal and hybrid across multiple continents. And so they need a cloud with architectural latitude to match their needs as well as their budget.

This flexibility is provided by the customizable distributed cloud. By facilitating interoperability with existing infrastructure, it enables enterprises to deploy and infinitely scale applications anywhere they need. The more openness they have in terms of where they run applications, the more freedom they have to optimize their budget.

Who is Driving Cloud Computing Innovation?

Amazon, Microsoft and Google have gone from being the innovators in cloud computing to being the incumbents. Innovation in the cloud is coming from startups as well as legacy IT companies. Here are a few examples:
- Kyndryl has emerged as one of the system integrators of choice when the Fortune 500 look to innovate and modernize their IT and application infrastructures. Kyndryl has been engaged by large companies to solve many of the challenges that cloud computing has created. One of the innovations they have championed is the distributed cloud.
- NetApp has spent over $2 billion on more than a dozen acquisitions to build their cloud portfolio. Their focus has been on creating a portfolio that gives enterprises the ability to bridge their various compute and storage infrastructures to the cloud. As opposed to assuming that their customers will have greenfield implementations on cloud infrastructure, NetApp has built a portfolio that allows them to meet their clients where they currently are in terms of architecture and to shift from there into more cloud-native capabilities.
- Zenlayer has built cloud infrastructure in diverse geographies, giving them global reach that even the hyperscalers can’t rival. Zenlayer claims to provide cloud infrastructure that is so globally distributed that they are within 25 milliseconds of latency from 85% of the world’s internet population. This focus on physical infrastructure locations that enable global performance is an important innovation for many modern applications.
Emerging Cloud Computing Innovations

The distributed cloud, which integrates programmatically into any existing local infrastructure, is an innovation that drives businesses forward by providing them with a cloud that can be customized for specific locality requirements. Without requiring any installation, its cloud-native building blocks leverage existing servers to run application workloads in any environment—private, public, on-premises and hybrid.

As a result, application owners are able to build an optimized cloud computing strategy, taking advantage of existing and available infrastructure in the location—or multiple locations—of their choosing.
October 6, 2022
Cosmonic Previews Deployment Platform for Distributed Wasm Apps

Cosmonic has made available a preview of a platform for deploying applications built using the portable WebAssembly (Wasm) binary format that enables applications to be deployed on any platform.

Cosmonic CEO Liam Randall said the company is providing early access to the Cosmonic Platform Developer Preview platform to enable developers to experiment with a new type of software artifact that will be used to build a new class of cloud-native applications.

The Cosmonic Platform Developer Preview platform is based on wasmCloud, an open source application runtime that hosts components written as Wasm modules that can then be loosely connected to build applications. Originally developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium for building browser applications, Wasm is a portable binary instruction format for building software that describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment.

That approach replaces the current predominant method for building software that relies on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct boundaries. It’s that lack of distinct boundaries that enables malware to flow so easily from one software module to another. The wasmCloud runtime, originally developed by Cosmonic, provides a platform for deploying distributed Wasm applications and is now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Prior to Wasm, Randall noted, every format for building applications led to the creation of ‘walled gardens’ that resulted in developers being locked into a platform. Wasm is the first software artifact that enables applications to run on an platform, including Linux and Windows, without any modification required, said Randall.

It may be some time before Wasm becomes the preferred artifact for building applications, but it’s clear the walls that have separated one IT platform from another are about to crumble. Once applications become much more portable, the longstanding goal of writing an application once and then deploying it anywhere may finally be achieved. Just as importantly, those applications will run in a memory-safe sandbox that is more secure than what can be enabled in legacy IT platforms. In fact, as more organizations review the security of their software supply chains, they may decide to accelerate their embrace of Wasm to build more secure applications.

Naturally, the transition to Wasm will have major implications for DevOps teams, as it represents an opportunity to streamline deployment processes across multiple platforms. In effect, the total cost of application development and deployment would decline as processes spanning multiple platforms become more automated using platforms such as wasmCloud. Ultimately, much of the infrastructure complexity that developers need to navigate today would be eliminated, noted Randall.

It’s not clear just yet to what degree Wasm will drive a transition to another era of computing, but the potential to change almost every aspect of IT is on the horizon. Ultimately, the issue will be decided by how quickly developers are willing to embrace yet another software artifact for building and deploying applications. What is clear is that the number of platforms that will make it possible to experiment with Wasm are starting to multiply.

October 3, 2022
Alleviating Developer Workflow Headaches by Moving to the Cloud

Leaders in tech make one common mistake when it comes to serverless and cloud computing: They want to migrate their current environment exactly as it is to the cloud. That’s about as limiting as planning a flight path along the road network and deciding the route based on street-level traffic. You can do it, but everyone’s going to look at you like you’re crazy.

Keeping that ‘lift and shift’ mindset prevents developers from seeing the real ROI of cloud computing and serverless technology. Instead, we have to challenge our traditional ways of thinking.

Redefining How we Think About Software Development

The traditional definition of software is anything that makes the hardware do what we want it to. We use operating systems to control internal functions as well as peripherals. We use application software to direct our computers to execute commands. So we tend to think of software as programmatic, needing specialized programming languages to develop. But the most popular functional programming language isn’t Erlang or Haskell or Lisp. It’s Microsoft Excel, if you can believe it, with over 750 million users.

Every Excel spreadsheet represents someone’s software; it makes their hardware process data in a way that’s valuable to them. In a similar way, the “systems” we build on the information technology side are just more software. And cloud computing gives us a new range of powerful tools so we can build bigger systems faster than before.

What are Cloud Computing and Serverless Computing?

Cloud computing largely references data centers and data storage. Serverless computing is one piece of cloud computing. It lets developers create software without managing infrastructure. In the end, it increases productivity, speeds up product delivery, optimizes resources and keeps developers focused on the end product rather than infrastructure maintenance.

Once deployed, serverless apps respond to demand, scaling up or down as needed. So when a serverless function sits idle, it costs nothing.

Key Benefits of Cloud Computing and Serverless Computing

There are many benefits of cloud computing and serverless frameworks. By far, the one leaders are most excited about is cost control and increased ROI. It’s also one that leaders most often miss.

Increase ROI With Cloud Computing and Serverless

The number-one way to increase ROI with serverless frameworks and cloud computing is to avoid building anything from scratch. Invest in open-minded research. Sometimes you need to build something yourself, but often there’s a way to shift some of the burden away from your team.

An easy example is functions. The first thing most developers think of when they hear “serverless” is functions. But the functions running code are just a tiny piece of the puzzle. Serverless technology allows development teams to hand off as much work as they can to cloud platforms like Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Just like someone wouldn’t buy a field, till it, plant wheat, water it, thresh the wheat into flour, bake bread and toast it to make a piece of toast, developers shouldn’t write their own code when the building blocks already exist in their cloud platform. Take, for example, Azure’s Durable Functions feature. This feature manages stateful workflows so teams don’t need to explicitly create, store and retrieve the progress through your data’s workflow in some other place. This process is so common to the systems that teams build that the cloud providers made it available without needing us to write lines of code. It’s like instant toast delivered to your door!

The more a team can leverage already-made code, the more time they get back on their schedules and the more money goes back into the team’s budget, something we can all appreciate!

September 26, 2022
DevOps and Hybrid Cloud: Life in the Fast Lane, Part Two

In the early years of cloud computing, cost savings were the major driver of adoption. These days, however, organizations are increasingly faced with spiraling expenditures, waste and a lack of control. As cloud usage bills and inefficiencies start to balloon, these challenges are beginning to undermine the benefits of migrating in the first place.

The truth is that optimizing costs in the cloud is more taxing than many organizations first expect. Identifying cost savings that can be made isn’t generally the hard part; effectively implementing those savings is where the real challenge lies.

A lack of control over infrastructure means that many organizations are failing to make the changes needed to truly realize these gains. So common are these challenges that there is even a word for the process to deal with them: FinOps. FinOps, at its core, is the culture and practice of creating visibility and accountability to manage cloud penetration throughout an organization, and it’s an area that is growing rapidly.

This is the second article in my series that looks at what needs to change so that organizations can really start embracing the opportunities provided by hybrid cloud and DevOps. In this installment, I’m going to take a look at the areas of FinOps, cloud waste and automation. In doing so, I hope to show that there is indeed life in the hybrid cloud and DevOps fast lane if handled the right way.

Get Ready for FinOps

If you think hybrid cloud and the topics of FinOps and, more specifically, cloud waste, haven’t come up during discussions, you’ve probably been living under a rock.

It naturally follows that the more agile an organization becomes the harder it needs to work to keep track of waste. Exponential growth is great, but without the right controls a cloud budget will disappear before there has been a chance to see any returns; there are even examples of companies migrating and then deciding to roll back—such are the concerns around lack of control and rising costs.

Based on survey responses from over 750 cloud decision-makers, Flexera found earlier this year in its 2022 State of the Cloud Report that organizations continue to waste significant amounts of money in the cloud. A full 66% of respondents said that cloud usage is “higher than initially planned this year”, and they estimated that they are wasting 32% of their overall cloud spend. A good five years into full cloud migration and most organizations still haven’t got a handle on costs.

The tricky part is that waste can rear its head at many stages over the course of a project, which is why it’s so important to maintain control from day one.

Establishing a baseline of an environment that is deemed to be the known state means that what is versioned can become a source of trust and the desired state of an organization’s cloud infrastructure. How is this possible? Simple: By creating a culture and practice of visibility and accountability throughout an organization.

How do you do that? Yes, you guessed it: FinOps.

Tackling Cloud Waste Head-On

The ideal time and place to start establishing robust FinOps policies and reducing waste come when the move has been made to start embracing a dual DevOps/hybrid cloud approach. The good news is that the principles of FinOps are easy to follow and can be applied at various stages of an application management life cycle and DevOps and hybrid cloud journey.

First, teams need to estimate financial and environmental costs ahead of deployment, something which can be particularly challenging when infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible or Puppet are being used, but which is essential to successful FinOps. Once a team has decided which cloud provider they will be using, how much they plan to spend and, more generally, what criteria will be governing these decisions, effective tag management comes in.

Tagging is the basis for achieving a structured cloud infrastructure, especially in multi-cloud environments that feature different resources being used for different purposes. Tagging means that users can add descriptive metadata (tags) to cloud infrastructure to identify key resources or values such as staging, development or production.

In a rapidly growing cloud environment, consistent and comprehensive tag management helps to keep track of what is happening in terms of cost, usage, availability, performance and security across a constantly transforming cloud infrastructure. Once a project has been deployed, these tags need to be managed and maintained across all cloud providers, something which is critical for the management of waste, but is often a huge and messy task.

Good tags help drive good decision-making and the more options there are for categorizing data, the better. To truly get a handle on tag management, finding a platform that can enable users to visualize and study multi-cloud costs in a central place makes it possible to establish that all-important baseline and start to reverse engineer invoices, optimize monthly costs and tackle waste head-on.

One Cloud, One Strategy

There was a time a few years ago that we used to hear people say this a lot: “I’ll migrate all my assets to a single cloud provider.” Cloud providers were pushing migration to a one-cloud strategy; considered completely normal at the time, but which has since been shown to be flawed, especially in the world of enterprise.

Segregation of responsibility is perhaps the best example of why—there are simply too many responsibilities that keep a modern business afloat to risk putting all your eggs in one (cloud) basket. Consider on-premises legacy apps, sensitive data, critical workloads, the production life cycle, ongoing applications without too many peaks and even backend apps. Then consider the cloud providers, new cloud-first applications, public data, non-critical workloads, the development life cycle and frontend applications dealing with high traffic.

Now imagine all of that suddenly disappears.

Hybrid cloud means eggs in multiple baskets. Yes, it adds a layer of complexity, but when so much is at stake, it’s worth it. And when you have defined where you want to host everything for each application, it becomes much easier to gain clarity. The challenge is that all cloud providers have their own ecosystem, which will either be private or public.

These ecosystems make it possible for everything to be integrated, but what is often not immediately obvious is that even though they are integrated, they are not always aligned. It’s in the interests of the cloud provider to provide the best tools to use their platform but not necessarily the best user or developer experience which is something that requires specialist expertise. That usually leads to a certain degree of lock-in as you generally cannot use their tools for managing other applications that aren’t part of the infrastructure.

This lack of transparency and visibility into other cloud providers can get in the way and impact the ability to get the most out of a dual DevOps and hybrid cloud strategy. However, by adopting a hybrid cloud approach, teams can choose the best cloud provider for each application, putting the team in the best position possible to provide the best services possible.

And finally, Always Consider the DevX Factor

For DevOps to thrive, it is important for companies to stay independent both for their own sovereignty and for creating the best developer experience, or DevX (a topic I have explored in a previous article for devopsy.kinsta.cloud).

It’s easy to fall into the trap of using all the automation capabilities available from each cloud provider, but that locks an organization into a situation where it needs deep expertise across a wide variety of technologies. Adopting a one-cloud, one-automation strategy means that it would never be possible to migrate automation or reuse it in different application deployment processes across various clouds.

This is where automation of configuration management, IaC, CI/CD pipelines and the DevOps and hybrid cloud platform has a significant role to play. Automation on an organization’s own terms is arguably the most critical element in the race to reduce time to market and improve quality where concepts such as shift left are adding complexity and increasing the responsibilities piled on top of developers.

Using automation technologies to maintain autonomy and favor cross-subject expertise and team mobility gives organizations the freedom and flexibility to save time, money and roll out better DevX. Ultimately, it also helps to create the best possible environment for organizations to truly start enjoying a DevOps and hybrid cloud life in the fast lane.

September 19, 2022
The Future of FinTech and the Cloud

The integration of FinTech continues to revolutionize the way businesses interact with their consumers. What started as a viable solution to eliminating the need to carry physical currency has now become a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Basically, FinTech is a catch-all term used to describe software, mobile applications and other integrated technologies that improve and automate traditional forms of finance for businesses and their consumers. The financial infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) focuses on enabling FinTech companies to quickly facilitate highly secure transactions among an internal network while improving user experience. The complex (yet efficient) solution helps streamline fiscal transactions while simultaneously eliminating unnecessary steps throughout the transaction process. Ultimately, making financial transactions more affordable and accessible.

The integration of FinTech continues to bolster unprecedented growth within the business sector. The industry’s rapid growth can be attributed to a shift in consumers’ lifestyles towards more accessible and affordable solutions. As a result, FinTech has been able to solidify a prominent role within business operations, however, needs to remain vigilant in adapting infrastructures to satisfy ever-changing consumer and industry demands.

With this goal in mind, FinTech companies have begun to innovate new solutions which include embracing the cloud within its infrastructures. With new integration, companies will have to determine whether using fintech-cloud computing entities will ultimately be an asset in achieving longevity and lucrative business growth or not.

FinTech Meets Cloud

FinTech companies are rapidly turning to the cloud to provide businesses and consumers with effective solutions. According to a research study, 87% of enterprises plan to accelerate their cloud migration by 2025. So, why is cloud computing becoming imperative for FinTech companies to integrate?

1. Agility: For businesses to compete, they must stay ahead of the competitive curve by reacting quickly to market changes. Cloud services satisfy this need by enabling companies to accelerate its scaling process. Businesses can scale their capacity up or down quickly to meet customer demand in real-time. As a result, providing a more cost-efficient solution.

2. Competitive Advantage: Within the financial industry’s competitive landscape, it can be quite difficult for smaller companies to gain significant market share. Likewise, larger corporations struggle to retain customers as internal legacy IT practices hinder reaction rate times to changing customer demands. The cloud provides both entities with a better way to compete by offering a quicker alternative to meeting customers’ demands.

3. Enhanced Customer Experience: Millennials and Gen Z have transformed the banking industry by starting to view finances through the lens of technology. Cloud computing offers FinTech companies the opportunity to promote enhanced customer experience with consumer-centric web applications and improved efficiency metrics. Ultimately, providing the next generation of consumers with an accessible, agile and much more manageable solution that adheres to their technology-savvy lifestyle.

4. Cost-Effective: Businesses can incur significant infrastructure costs while developing and deploying FinTech products for a large customer base. Cloud adoption can help cut down costs by limiting usage, promoting elasticity of its products and adhering to an all-inclusive price.

5. Amplified Security Measures: With the ecosystem of hackers and cybercriminals continuing to evolve, companies must remain proactive in mitigating the potential risk of data breaches and cyberattacks. FinTech applications with weak security measures can compromise customer data and other private information. Consequently, leaving the door open to exploitation by malicious operators. Hybrid cloud architecture provides a more secure framework by allowing companies to build their own solutions in the cloud infrastructure they own, rather than in a shared environment within a shared network. As a result, they can be proactive and help eliminate potential data security risks.

Limitations of FinTech: Enhancing Cloud Integration

Cloud computing integration continues to provide FinTech companies the opportunity to accelerate business growth. While there are a number of FinTech companies that have managed to achieve great success while using these infrastructures, other companies have failed.

Any company that invests in FinTech (or any other public cloud service) is susceptible to potential disadvantages. It’s important that companies begin to identify these potential challenges and actively try to avoid them.

Here are potential limitations to consider:

1. Refusing to Use Existing Tools: Change is difficult to manage. Nevertheless, it’s important that companies continue to embrace new technology as they emerge. If FinTech companies refuse to build platforms using current technology, they run the risk of an influx of user discrepancies. On the contrary, if they decide to scale up, they run the risk of hindering the agility of the entire company. By using existing and open source technology, companies can proactively fix their problems and promote continuity in their infrastructures by eliminating outdated data, obscure patches and massive inefficiencies.

2. Ignoring Scope and Capacity: Using FinTech engineering requires an abundance of capacity planning to ensure an effective solution is created. Without planning, companies run the risk of creating infrastructures that cannot accommodate the volume of metrics used. This can result in killing dashboard performance and making troubleshooting issues impossible. It’s important to plan at every stage regardless of what providers are used.

3. The Desire to Implement More than Required: Amid a fast-paced and competitive industry, FinTech engineers are constantly implementing new innovations to solidify their competitive advantage. It’s important companies continue to innovate and improve their products; however, operations should not stray too far from their original scope of work. Businesses should work to eliminate unnecessary additions within their projects that could result in wasting a considerable amount of time and resources. Keep simple tasks simple.

4. Plan and Evaluate: Businesses need flexibility, independence and a cost structure to thrive. To achieve these marks, it’s necessary for companies to take the time to plan and evaluate each offering to determine which solution accommodates their business needs. Although switching providers might seem doable, doing so can result in a more complicated and expensive solution. Setting long-term objectives before deciding on a provider could make that eventual move simpler for your team.

The integration of FinTech and cloud computing services continues to impact the technology, finance and business sectors. The question of whether a FinTech-cloud computing structure is a more viable solution in businesses remains. By planning and evaluating each financial solution, businesses can determine which FinTech service is the most feasible for optimizing business objectives.

FinTech companies will always continue to provide safe and seamless solutions for their customers, however, it’s the companies who can capitalize on efficiency that will rise to the top. As FinTech and cloud integration continues to revolutionize customer-brand solutions, we will become closer to unveiling the future of FinTech and the lasting impacts it has on society.

September 9, 2022
Four Steps to Avoiding a Cloud Cost Incident

The recent Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report found that organizations waste 32% of their cloud spend, up from 3o% last year. This can be due to cloud cost incidents triggered by unused resources, malicious activity or overambitious projects and which have a massive financial impact if not found and corrected promptly.

As an organization’s cloud infrastructure footprint matures, mapping cloud resource use and costs accurately to product lines, teams and business units becomes progressively more complicated and problematic. However, accurate cloud cost attribution is vital to understanding team resource use and determining accurate cost of goods sold (COGS) margins and is imperative to budgeting and forecasting. Organizations need reliable, granular views of the cloud environment to attribute costs back to departments and optimize a meaningful budget.

Cloud cost spikes can blow up an organization’s budget fast and can be hard to track down, but enterprises can help protect themselves from a cloud cost incident with just a few simple steps.

Have a Strong Tagging Strategy That Attributes Cost Granularly

The cloud operations team needs to identify what is important to business reporting, which will help define and create a strategy for tagging. For instance, when an organization has two teams managing a particular service, the teams should safeguard the services tagged with a team identifier. Also, the teams should add another tag for the environment in which they’re running so they can allocate cloud costs across teams and environments.

When an application uses numerous resources, like a database and storage, teams should consider adding a specific application tag and break down costs by each application. It should be noted that there is no one-size-fits-all tagging solution, so enterprises will need to determine what works and try out different strategies by adding and removing tags later.

Understand Cloud Cost Ownership to Avoid Chaos

Ask yourself how well your organization has attributed cloud costs to teams, applications or COGS. If the answer is “Not well,” then you are missing vital information about how your cloud costs relate to your business.

The lack of this context or visibility into resource allocation makes it unmanageable and impossible for cloud operations owners and senior leaders to agree on who is responsible for varied expenses and resources. Manual cost attribution doesn’t scale accurately or account for shared cluster resource use across teams and applications. This creates confusion that can escalate when users arbitrarily slice data and claim ownership without accountability or clear visibility.

What happens is that costs can sometimes be double-counted with two owners—or even missed completely with no owner whatsoever. The resulting data emerges as an inferior quality that is untrustworthy and not actionable. The inability to visualize resource use in context can dilute, hinder and even defeat cost improvement initiatives and optimization.

Cloud costs should have an owner who can ensure that cloud spending is tied to business value. Understanding who owns which pieces will help pinpoint the cause.

Establish and Monitor Cloud Budgets

Historical data on cloud spending is gold—it can help forecast and budget for what should be happening with the cloud’s cost footprint. If that’s not happening, then it should be flagged and investigated.

Once you get cost data under control, organizations can get an accurate picture of where cloud spending is taking place. However, does this match the expectations of spending? By establishing and monitoring budgets at every stage of a project, organizations can have guardrails to cloud spending and prevent costs from soaring out of control when engineers overallocate on performance “just in case.” Once budgets are in place, organizations can monitor spending and right-size resources to balance actual usage, rather than estimated usage at the start of execution.

Over time, right-sizing resources will allow for optimal spend, as well as identify unused resources that can be shut down. Organizations should identify development and test instances left running when no longer needed and shut them off.

Implement Cost Anomaly Detection

Organizations can shield themselves from cost anomalies by continually monitoring and optimizing cloud costs. Cost anomaly detection can help act as a barrier to early recognition before they become problematic. This is especially effective when prompt, actionable alerts can be delivered directly to resource owners via Slack or email when their forecast exceeds the set budget. The best option would be adopting a cloud cost monitoring and optimization (CCMO) tool that gives alerts in real-time when a cost anomaly occurs. These tools must be able to detect anomalies and analyze their root cause, while also allowing visibility into what went wrong to avert similar future errors.

Executing continuous cost monitoring and anomaly detection tools for dynamic cloud environments is essential in identifying any activity that doesn’t align with expected expenditure or diverges from an established pattern. With proper monitoring, organizations can take corrective measures before the fact.

Unwanted and unexpected cost incidents can clean out an enterprise’s budget quickly, especially as its cloud infrastructure grows. Organizations need to practice these steps to gain a full picture view of their cloud environment.

June 22, 2022
Could Buying VMware Bring Broadcom Hybrid Cloud Bona Fides?

Rumors are swirling that Broadcom wants to buy its way into the growing hybrid cloud market by acquiring VMware. The deal won’t come cheap—after news of the potential deal surfaced, VMware’s market cap soared to around $50 billion. Yes, billion with a ‘B’.

As interest rates increase and investors reevaluate many of the lofty software company valuations, I expect to hear many more acquisition rumors. During this time of uncertainty, cash-flush vendors are going to be on the hunt for software vendors that can provide a technology platform, have large partner ecosystems and that also produce reliable revenue.

Why the Acquisition Makes Sense for Broadcom

Broadcom has a nice, solid business producing semiconductors for smartphone makers as well as storage and networking devices used in large data centers. However, like many hardware companies, the business has been desperately trying to break into the software industry. Why? There’s a semiconductor shortage and the company is in the right market at the right time. However, the company’s leadership knows that market conditions change. Software margins are significantly higher than hardware deals, and R&D and manufacturing costs for semiconductors are notoriously high.

VMware has grown to become a large cloud technology platform, not just a virtualization offering. If Broadcom is able to successfully close on this deal, it will instantly own one of the largest cloud software platforms in the industry. In addition to acquiring large enterprise customers, the VMware partner ecosystem is important. For example, I believe that the NVIDIA partnership will be a profitable one for VMware. The two companies have been working together to create a platform to support AI-based applications for the data center, cloud and at the edge.

In a time when some cloud businesses are experiencing wild fluctuations because of their lack of profitability, the VMware business model is solid. However, these fundamentals are also why the company is ripe for acquisition. In its fiscal year 2022, the company reported $12.85 billion in revenue and $6.33 billion in subscription and SaaS licensing revenue. Free cash flow for fiscal year 2022 was nearly $4 billion.

Let’s quickly contrast VMware to the cloud data warehouse Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW). Snowflake’s market capitalization is around $40 billion and within the last year was well over $120 billion. Meanwhile, the company’s revenue is around $1.2 billion and it is struggling to find a path to profitability. If you were hunting to acquire a software business during a time when financial indicators are flashing red, which business model would you prefer?

Broadcom’s Strategy: Become a Software Company

I mentioned that Broadcom is desperate to gain relevance in the software industry. Why do I say this? The company’s recent acquisitions showed a clear pattern emerging—Broadcom has been trying to acquire its way into software.

In 2018 the company acquired CA Technologies for nearly $19 billion. The following year, Broadcom acquired Symantec’s enterprise cybersecurity business for $10.7 billion. In addition, there were rumors that Broadcom was planning to acquire SAS Institute, the privately held analytics vendor, for somewhere around $15 billion to $20 billion. Those talks fell through when the SAS Institute’s aging co-founders and majority stakeholders announced a plan to go public in 2024.

This M&A strategy might seem strange to many, but Broadcom originally tried growing through the acquisition of companies similar to itself. In 2018, the company made an offer of $117 billion to acquire chip producer Qualcomm. Broadcom later withdrew the bid when it became clear that the Trump administration pushed hard to prevent the deal, citing national security concerns.

Although this latest deal would face governmental review and the Biden administration previously voiced concerns over tech mega-mergers and monopolies, we have not seen the administration prevent similar deals.

The Path Won’t be Easy: Three Strategies for Success

The market is full of cautionary tales of software vendors that were acquired only to be slowly destroyed. A successful acquisition would require Broadcom to tread lightly and maintain the elements that have made VMware the company that it is today. Below are three priorities that Broadcom should focus on if the deal is completed.

Keep VMware independent: It is critical that VMware does not show favoritism toward one chip maker. VMware’s largest customers use chips from Intel as well as other manufacturers. If Broadcom tries to steer VMware toward its own chips exclusively, the backlash could quickly undercut the value of the acquisition. In addition, it’s my belief that the hybrid and multi-cloud models are here to stay (rather than a single cloud approach). Customers expect vendors to work with each other and are reluctant to accept single stack proprietary approaches.

Find innovative DNA and facilitate business unit collaboration opportunities: Hock Tan, Broadcom’s CEO, is very well respected in the industry; however, the company is not known for software innovation. Although I expect VMware to remain a standalone business unit (similar to CA’s current position within Broadcom’s ecosystem), it will be important to foster innovation. Broadcom should accelerate VMware investments, like Project Monterey and the NVIDIA partnership, while looking for new investment opportunities. Perhaps Broadcom could provide VMware with custom chips to help accelerate Project Monterey, but this sort of line-of-business collaborative innovation hasn’t been the model for Broadcom’s other software acquisitions. It should be.

Nurture the partnership network: The next phase for the VMware partner ecosystem will require partners to understand the company’s vision for the future. What will the acquisition mean for partners? Will they have access to more solution selling that combines VMware and Broadcom technologies? How can existing Broadcom partners join the VMware partnership ecosystem? That will be another big question.

It will be extremely interesting to see how this plays out. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this potential merger of two heavyweights!

May 24, 2022
How DevOps is Revolutionizing Embedded Development

There’s something curious happening on the desktops of embedded developers around the world. From home offices to cubes to labs, in lamp-lit rooms late at night and sun-lit rooms early in the morning, developers are doing something different. They’re beginning to implement DevOps practices in their embedded development.

Something quite serendipitous has occurred to make this possible: The parallel rise of cloud-native computing and the explosion of internet of things (IoT) devices and edge technologies. A world with billions of embedded devices connected to the internet all the time, every minute of every day, requires a new way of designing, testing, deploying and maintaining these devices. At the same time, cloud-native computing has introduced continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI), among other methods, to enable automated software builds that are reproducible. This is creating a revolution in the embedded world.

Until now, embedded software was written and deployed and then remained static in perpetuity because it was isolated. Not anymore.

The Slog, Security Demand New Thinking

Embedded software developers have traditionally faced a monumental slog to build projects. Typically, embedded developers have had to build an entire platform to build new software, including the kernel, the distribution and more. And all of that software would need to get (re)built anew every single time something changed. Everything had to be checked in. Everything had to be rolled out. There was a version control infrastructure team, a CI team, a QA team—and they all had to work together and be aligned to meet the production schedule.

This approach to developing was incredibly slow, costly and clumsy and in no way architected for today’s world of connected devices, IoT and the edge. Consumer product makers (home appliances, for example) simply don’t have the resources to provide frequent updates. Additionally, consumers are not used to frequent updates on consumer devices that are not their phones or laptops. With the rise of modern applications, it is just no longer acceptable to build static software that is never changed or updated.

With billions of devices connected to an always-on network, large-scale security vulnerabilities have never been a bigger concern or consideration among companies that have millions of nodes on a network. Today, companies need to be continuously connected to all of their nodes and devices to properly maintain and secure them.

Enter DevOps and Embedded Innovation

DevOps has already transformed the way cloud-native applications are developed. Software gets built often, but it also gets deployed often. That’s why web apps are constantly being upgraded. Now, embedded is poised to take advantage of this software version control system that automates software builds and that is reproducible. Bringing DevOps to the embedded software ecosystem is about providing a set of tools or a platform that does the version control, CI and CD all in a single package—a platform to simplify the workflows for companies that typically have to build all of this themselves now can deliver opportunities for tremendous efficiencies and innovation.

Consider the airline industry as it was 60+ years ago. At that time, the airlines built their own planes from start to finish. Today, Boeing and Airbus build all airlines’ planes. Of course, each airline can customize their fleet from the overall flying experience to the interior branding, but everybody is leveraging the same core technology because airframes are really hard to build and the differentiation happens on top of that foundation.

Similarly, embedded software developers can focus on the customization of their product, not the time-consuming build that provides no differentiation. This is the concept behind the cultural shift we see in embedded software: Buy the airframe and customize it rather than build it yourself. Also inherent in the DevOps model is a distributed development practice, where different team members in different roles can be anywhere in the world and still work together seamlessly.

The pandemic certainly created more demand for this model, but distributed teams aren’t going away and are more prevalent than ever in technology development. Many embedded software developers are still working in the same way they were in the 1980s and 1990s. With DevOps practices and platforms in place today, embedded software developers can focus on the value-add of their application. By taking all the complexity out of building it yourself, companies today can simply leverage easily consumable and reusable tools to achieve what cloud developers have been doing for years.

March 24, 2022
Top Nine Skills for SREs to Master

It’s easy to talk at a high level about what site reliability engineers do: They ensure that IT systems achieve availability and performance requirements.

But which skills, exactly, do SREs need to do to perform their jobs? That’s a more complicated question.

To answer, let’s look at the top nine site reliability engineer skills that modern SREs (or aspiring SREs) should master. Although SRE skills may vary from one team to the next depending on the types of systems managed and the main types of reliability challenges faced, virtually all SREs need a core set of standard skills that allow them to understand and manage the type of complex, distributed systems they will have to support at the typical organization today.

Here’s a breakdown of top SRE skills.

Networking Expertise for SREs

The network plays a pivotal role in connecting modern, distributed environments. As such, it’s often the culprit when something goes wrong—a lesson that Facebook, for example, learned when a networking problem brought down its entire global infrastructure.

Situations like this are why SREs should master networking concepts. Even if their organization also employs networking engineers, site reliability engineers need a deep understanding of networking themselves to know when the network is the root cause of an incident and how to resolve network-caused issues effectively.

Linux and Unix

If you come from a Windows background but you want to be an SRE, there’s no getting around it: You’ll need to learn how to work with Linux and other Unix-like systems in addition to Windows.

That’s because, even at organizations that don’t rely heavily on Linux servers, you’re likely to find that Linux and Unix concepts are deeply embedded within other systems that you have to work with. Most public cloud management tools follow the conventions of Linux CLI tools, for example. So do systems like Docker and Kubernetes, even if you run them in a Windows environment.

Cloud Computing

Like Linux and networking, cloud computing is another category of skill that modern SREs can’t live without.

The reason why is almost self-explanatory: Around 90% of businesses use the cloud, and you can’t manage reliability for cloud environments very well if you don’t understand cloud architectures, cloud networking, cloud data storage, cloud observability and so on.

CI/CD Pipelines

SREs don’t typically help to develop software, but they nonetheless need a deep understanding of how software is written and deployed—which, at most organizations, today, is a process that happens via a CI/CD pipeline.

It’s hard to engineer reliability if you don’t know how to address reliability problems that emerge from application source code or deployment processes. Understanding how CI/CD processes work and which tools drive them is key for virtually every SRE today.

Quality Assurance and Software Testing Automation

SREs also don’t usually help to test software pre-deployment. That task falls to developers or quality assurance engineers.

Nonetheless, understanding how software is tested—and how to use test automation to speed tests and expand test coverage—is a vital SRE skill. After all, the more thoroughly and efficiently your team can test software, the greater your chances of catching reliability problems pre-deployment, when they are easier to fix and pose a much lower risk to the business.

Security Engineering and Response

Securing is another domain that SREs don’t “own,” but where they nonetheless require significant skills.

Indeed, good reliability engineering makes security a priority, and vice versa. SREs who don’t understand security fundamentals are at risk of implementing reliability solutions that are effective from a reliability standpoint, but not necessarily secure.

DevOps

Although SREs are not DevOps engineers, SRE and DevOps are closely related domains. SREs at most organizations today will be expected to understand DevOps concepts and, in many cases, work alongside DevOps teams.

So, plan to master DevOps skills as part of your site reliability engineer skills acquisition strategy.

Incident Management

Perhaps the single most important type of skill for SREs to learn is incident management. Although many roles may participate in incident response, SREs usually take the lead in organizing the incident response team, communicating with stakeholders and devising the best strategy for resolving each incident as quickly as possible.

This means SREs should know how incident response roles are structured and understand incident response concepts. They should also be familiar with incident response platforms that automate the complex processes required to ensure rapid, effective incident resolution.

Managing Postmortems

In addition to overseeing incident response, SREs may be tasked with managing post mortems. Knowing how to run a postmortem—as well as when a postmortem is necessary, and when it makes sense to use a “blameless” postmortem approach—is an essential SRE skill.

The list of SRE skills could certainly go on. Above are only the most fundamental types of skills SREs will need for most modern environments. But if you’re just starting out on your journey to becoming an SRE, the nine skill domains described above are a good place to begin acquiring the knowledge you’ll need to excel in an SRE career.

February 24, 2022