devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: cloud service

  • AWS Adds GUI to Snow Edge Computing Family

    AWS Adds GUI to Snow Edge Computing Family

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced it has added a graphical user interface (GUI) tool dubbed AWS OpsHub for Snow Family to provide an alternative to the command-line interface (CLI) tool it makes available to manage its family of Snow appliances deployed in on-premises environments.

    At the same time, AWS announced it is making available additional Snowball storage appliances that are 25% faster than previous generations thanks to additional memory, support for more virtual CPUs and 100GB networking.

    Finally, AWS is also making it possible to control access to Snow appliance via AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and the ability to automate tasks using AWS Systems Manager.

    Bill Vass, vice president of technology for AWS, said organizations can now build storage clusters that are now as large as 1.4PB using Snow appliances.

    AWS originally rolled out Snow appliances to provide an easier way to upload massive amounts of the data to a public cloud. Once an organization loads data on to an appliance, it is physically shipped to AWS. Once there, AWS personnel transfer that data on to the AWS cloud.

    However, with the rise of edge computing, AWS is now also employing Snowball appliances to drive hybrid applications in internet of things (IoT) and other environments. AWS now makes available a Greengrass framework for building hybrid cloud applications. The Snow appliance family provides a more efficient and secure alternative to the rival edge computing platform from Dell Technologies, said Vass.

    The GUI from AWS is intended to make it easier for the average IT administrator to provision Snow appliances, which previously would have been accessible only to IT professionals who had mastered the Snow CLI. AWS is even going so far as to include cartoons that demonstrate how to provision its appliances.

    While AWS clearly dominates the public cloud, it is not clear to what degree it will be able to extend that dominance to edge computing. AWS is counting on the fact that large numbers of edge computing applications will need to be tightly integrated with application workloads running on its public cloud. Providers of traditional data center platforms are also vying to become the providers of those same platforms, all of which now can be centrally managed via the cloud.

    Edge computing platforms will, of course, vary widely in size depending on the use case. However, there may come a day soon when the total number of workloads deployed at the edge exceeds the number of workloads in the cloud. The amount of compute and storage horsepower at the edge will be crucial as organizations look to deliver next-generation applications that process and analyze data real-time, especially as 5G wireless computing networks simultaneously make more network bandwidth available.

    AWS may not be the first IT vendor that comes to mind when it comes to edge computing platforms, but it is signaling its intention to be a lot more than just a provider of cloud computing services.

  • VMware Makes vRealize Automation Framework Available via the Cloud

    VMware Makes vRealize Automation Framework Available via the Cloud

    VMware this week announced it has made a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of its vRealize automation platform generally available.

    Taruna Gandhi, senior director for product and technical marketing at VMware, said VMware vRealize Operation Cloud will make IT automation more accessible to a broader swath of organizations that might not be able to implement IT automation on their own.

    The vRealize Operations Cloud service provides all the same capabilities as the on-premises edition of vRealize with the added benefit of being integrated with other VMware Cloud services, including VMware Cloud on AWS.

    In general, Gandhi said VMware is seeing increased adoption of IT automation frameworks occurring in three phases. In the first phase, IT teams are automating internal processes primarily for their own benefit. In the second phase, IT operations teams set up self-service portals for developers. In the third phase, organizations embrace DevOps processes to provide developers with the equivalent of a cloud computing experience spanning both on-premises and public cloud computing resources.

    Most existing VMware customers are still in the first or second phases, but over time Gandhi said VMware expects organizations to adopt DevOps practices as part of a more aggressive effort to reduce costs during the current economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic while accelerating the rate at which applications are deployed and updated.

    The VMware vRealize Operations Cloud will play a significant role in accelerating that transition because it makes IT automation available as a service rather than a platform that needs to be deployed and maintained by an internal IT department. The beta test for vRealize Operations Cloud spanned dozens of customers that put more than 130,000 virtual machines under management across 120-plus vCenters and more than 10 VMware Cloud on AWS deployments, Gandhi said, noting the next phase will to see IT organizations begin to centralize the management of multiple cloud silos that have sprung up over the last several years within most organizations.

    There are, of course, no shortage of options these days when it comes to IT automation frameworks. VMware is making a case for vRealize as a natural extension of the VMware management tools that many organizations employ to manage VMware virtual machines that are widely used across most enterprise IT environments. VMware is now extending the reach of those tools to enable IT teams to also manage containers and even rival virtual machine platforms, noted Gandhi.

    Most of those IT organizations are now struggling to manage IT environments that have become more complex at a time when the pressure to employ higher levels of automation to rein in costs is rising sharply. It remains to be seen how IT organizations will respond to that imperative as pressure to either cap or reduce IT headcount continues to mount. Of course, not every sector of the economy is experiencing the same pressure. There are high-growth segments involving, for example, educational or entertainment services. Regardless of industry, however, it’s clear IT teams are being asked to do a lot more sooner with either the same or fewer resources.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Scalyr Alters Log Analytics Economics

    Scalyr Alters Log Analytics Economics

    Scalyr today announced that its log analytics cloud service is now capable of ingesting over 200TBs of data per customer per day in real-time.

    Company CEO Christine Heckart said the goal is to make as much log data available at a price point that will continue to be less than $5 per GB at scale.

    Heckart said Scalyr expects to be able to continue to expand the amount of data it makes available to customers because its namesake platform is built on top of a columnar data store rather than an index engine. The goal of a project dubbed Sonic Boom is to eventually make a petabyte of data available to customers of the cloud service, she said.

    One of the paradoxes of log analytics is that while IT organizations are encouraged to use this data to proactively identify issues before they become a major problem, the cost of storing that data often results in IT organizations limiting the amount of log data they analyze. As a result, they often miss outlier events that could have major implications for the IT environment.

    As a cloud service that is compatible with the S3 storage interface defined by Amazon Web Service (AWS), the columnar store engine employed by Scalyr makes it easier to pass the economics of cloud storage back to the end customer, she said. IT costs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic are, of course, going to be a much bigger issue going forward. Almost every aspect of IT, including log analytics, is likely to be subject to a cost review in the week and months ahead as organizations adjust to an economy that has changed for the worse overnight.

    Heckart said the issue many organizations will face when it comes to logs is that data is the lifeblood of any digital process. Organizations may not need to store that data, forever, but analyzing log data to identify anomalies indicative of, for example, a cybersecurity breach is now almost a daily routine. As such, how much log data to make available where at what cost becomes a subject of debate.

    Of course, it may be less costly to store log data locally. However, someone on the IT staff will need to manage those logs. Scalyr and other providers of SaaS-based platforms for log analytics contend it’s more cost-effective to rely on a cloud service to manage log data that also is more accessible via shared analytics tools.

    Regardless of the amount of IT resources made available, the one thing that is certain is neither the amount of data nor the rate at which it needs to be analyzed will be slowing down anytime soon. In fact, many organizations are likely to accelerate their transition to digital processes that are ultimately both more flexible and cost-efficient than existing processes. It will be up to DevOps leaders to figure out how best to keep pace with that rate of change with whatever resources are at hand.

    — Mike Vizard

  • 2nd Watch Allies With GitLab for Managed DevOps Service

    2nd Watch Allies With GitLab for Managed DevOps Service

    2nd Watch today launched a managed DevOps service based on the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform from GitLab that it will operate on behalf of customers in addition to coaching them on how to adopt best DevOps practices.

    Stefana Muller, a senior product manager, said the 2nd Watch Managed DevOps service combines the managed and professional services capabilities of 2nd Watch into a single offering. That approach is required because when it comes to DevOps most organizations need as much help transitioning their culture as they will operating their CI/CD environment, she said.

    One of the major challenges organizations face when trying to embrace DevOps is they typically spend a lot of money upfront only to see those efforts flounder when changing the internal culture of the organization becomes too difficult, Muller said. As part of an effort to smooth that transition, 2nd Watch DevOps experts will assess an organization’s readiness to adopt DevOps tools and processes and then train internal teams on DevOps fundamentals such as managing infrastructure as code and Git principles. The assessment is based on a Culture, Automation, Lean Practices, Measurement and Sharing (CALMS) methodology.

    The 2nd Watch service is built around an on-premises edition of the GitLab CI/CD platform that it will host and upgrade on behalf of a customer on either an Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft public cloud platform. The DevOps service will focus on enabling organizations to build both monolithic and microservices-based applications faster because no organization today has fully transitioned to microservices. The company already provides a managed Kubernetes service for building and deploying applications based on a microservices architecture.

    2nd Watch chose to partner with GitLab because of the completeness of that CI/CD platform, which among other things includes integrated security modules that can be employed to advance DevSecOps practices as well, Muller said, noting that longer-term, 2nd Watch is planning to layer a more robust set of managed DevSecOps services on top of the GitLab platform.

    Managed DevOps offerings are starting to proliferate as the number of services providers that have attained certifications from multiple IT vendors has increased. It’s not clear to what degree organizations will prefer to rely on these services just yet. However, it’s is apparent many organizations are trying to shift as much of their limited resources to building application code versus managing IT infrastructure. It’s also possible that as the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic becomes more widespread many organizations will need to rely on external service providers to manage their DevOps environments.

    Regardless of the motivation, organizations that are at the beginning of their DevOps journey clearly will need more help than those that are further along the DevOps maturity curve. The decision most organizations will need to make is to what degree will they rely on a managed DevOps service to accelerate their transition versus opting to rely permanently on an external IT service provider to manage one of their most critical IT environments.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Microsoft Revamps Approach to DevOps on Azure

    Microsoft Revamps Approach to DevOps on Azure

    Microsoft this week unfurled a broad range of DevOps services for the Azure cloud that are intended to make it easier for organizations to embrace modern application development and deployment processes.

    Jaimie Cool, director of product management for Azure DevOps, said it’s fundamentally simpler for organizations to embrace DevOps processes using tooling hosted in the cloud because they don’t have to spend time setting up the underlying infrastructure themselves. Once they master those processes in the cloud, organizations can take the tooling provided by Microsoft and extend it out to either instances of Azure running in a local data center or Windows Server platforms.

    The Azure DevOps portfolio spans Azure Pipelines, a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform that supports any language; Azure Repos, a private repository based on Git; and Azure Test Plans, a wide range of testing tools. Azure DevOps also includes Azure Artifacts, which provides Maven, npm and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources, and Azure Boards, a suite of collaboration dashboards and reporting tools.

    Microsoft is positioning Azure DevOps as an evolution of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). VSTS users will be upgraded into Azure DevOps projects automatically. Organizations that are using the on-premises Team Foundation Server (TFS) component of VSTS will continue to receive updates based on features made available in Azure DevOps. TFS will be rebranded Azure DevOps Server starting with next release.

    As part of this launch Microsoft is also making Azure Pipelines available for free with unlimited minutes for 10 parallel jobs for every open source project. Major open source projects already using Azure Pipelines for CI/CD include Atom, CPython, Pipenv, Tox, Visual Studio Code and TypeScript.

    Cool said that when it comes to application development, too many organizations overlook the critical role of DevOps processes in making a project a success. There’s a tendency to focus too much on features rather than the tools that enable an organization to deliver those features consistently. DevOps processes are crucial when it comes to improving the quality of software and the velocity at which upgrades are delivered, he said.

    But the ultimate DevOps goal is to not to increase the number of releases put into production over a specific amount of time such as a week, month or quarter, he added. Rather, organizations should be able to updates to applications whenever they are ready or required.

    Cool noted there’s a high correlation between adoption of Docker containers and an appreciation of the value of DevOps. As organizations embrace microservices-based architectures based on containers, the complexity of the IT environment overall increases. That issue soon may be coming to a head for more organizations, as Microsoft is now seeing containers all over the place, he said.

    Longer term, Microsoft expects to see machine learning incorporated into DevOps processes as well, Coole said, noting that it’s still early days as far as machine learning and DevOps are concerned.

    Clearly, Microsoft is trying to provide a more sophisticated DevOps experience as part of an ongoing battle with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other cloud service providers to attract developers to its platform. As those efforts continue to expand, the number of organizations Microsoft schools on the DevOps processes should increase correspondingly.

    — Mike Vizard