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Tag: data center

Equinix Adds Automated Bare-Metal Server Service

Equinix, a provider of hosted IT services, added an Equinix Metal offering that allows IT teams to automate the deployment of bare-metal servers.

Interest in deploying bare-metal servers is increasing due to the rise of both artificial intelligence (AI) applications that are compute-intensive and Kubernetes clusters that, in many cases, don’t require the overhead created by a virtual machine. However, it is more difficult to automate the provisioning of bare-metal servers compared to provisioning virtual machines.

To address that challenge, Equinix earlier this year acquired Packet, provider of an IT automation framework for bare-metal servers that now drives the Equinix Metal service. As part of that service, the framework has been integrated with Equinix Fabric, formerly known as Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, to gain access to a software-defined interconnection service spanning 237 data centers deployed near major internet exchanges across 46 geographies.

Jacob Smith, vice president of bare-metal strategy and marketing for Equinix, said those servers are available either on-demand or as reserved instances that can be spun up in less than 15 minutes, similar to the way IT organizations provision cloud resources. The servers can be provisioned via application programming interfaces (APIs) common libraries or employ any one of several tools that they already use to manage infrastructure-as-code, he noted.

As applications become more distributed, latency issues that arise because of network physics are becoming more challenging. Many IT teams are now trying to deploy applications closer to where data is created and consumed. Equinix Metal enables IT teams to achieve that goal in an IT environment that also gives them their own private internet managed by Equinix, said Smith.

At the same, Equinix Metal reduces the time it takes IT teams to deploy bare-metal servers in a rival co-location facility to minutes from days, via an automated service, he added. Not many IT organizations are interested in dispatching IT personnel to physically provision servers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The health risks involved in traveling to a co-location facility to configure hardware are deemed too high.

In the meantime, as more application workloads find their way to the edge, the physical locations of servers start to matter a lot more. It may now only be a matter of time before IT teams rediscover the merits of hosting services that can provide as much flexibility as a cloud service provider with far less adverse impact on application performance.

Of course, that also means many existing DevOps processes will need to be extended to include not just a local data center or cloud service, but also a network of data centers that are being managed by someone else on their behalf.

October 7, 2020
The Increased Role of Colocation Providers in Data Centers

You would be hard-pressed to find something more complex than a modern data center. A state-of-the-art building stocked with all the necessary software for a major company might run into billions in costs if you decide to build and operate your own from the ground up.

Even though many pundits had predicted data centers would become a thing of the past due to the ever increasing adoption of SaaS, as we previously predicted, data centers are still popular with companies and evolving for 2020. One phase of that evolution is for businesses to box up all of the gear in their data center and install it with what is called a colocation provider, or “Colo” if you’re looking for a snappy acronym.

“Going Colo” refers to renting space in a building, usually a rather large building, and moving all your physical servers and network hardware there. You’ll have neighbors who are doing the same thing because this is just a fancified way to say you’ll have a landlord.

The Colo market is getting big in a hurry. The global market was $31.5 billion for this type of data center arrangement in 2017, but is expected to expand to at least $62.3 billion by 2022. What a company, large or small, has to ask itself is if this type of arrangement is a good thing for DevOps. Let’s ponder that.

It’s Cheaper When You Don’t Own the Building

If you remove the possibility that you could be thrown out of the space at a moment’s notice (a worst case scenario that a good rental agreement should address), the idea is a no-brainer from a cost savings perspective.

For an enterprise, let someone else take on the risk of construction and infrastructure maintenance. For a small-to-medium-sized business, the cost of building and monitoring a modern data center makes it impossible.

The unfortunate reality is that, when you do own the building, someone has to take care of it. In a perfect world, every company would have a dedicated IT staff; if you’re Microsoft, Apple, Google or Facebook, that certainly is the case.

For much of the tech world, the choice to maintain a data center onsite often results in personnel being frequently dragged out of their role in DevOps and asked them to do something related to the data center, often a task they are not qualified for. This creates holes and inefficiency in the development process. That’s a bad thing.

Good Infrastructure Means Better Uptime

Guess what’s also bad for DevOps? The team’s least favorite scenario—besides an unexpected meteor strike—would be system crashes and downtime related to hardware issues. Downtime can be incredibly expensive for a multitude of reasons besides the obvious—employees sitting around twiddling their thumbs. There is also the scenario of actual lost income. As Amazon found out the hard way, the number can be astronomical.

With no internet connection, business payment systems, no matter how sophisticated, are likely to be non-functional, though some will queue payments and run them through when the system goes back online. This is why it’s a good idea for businesses to find ways to speed up transactions from clients and customers, such as automating invoices and customizable invoicing tools that allow multiple options for straightforward payments.

This is also another area where going Colo can be a huge help to development. Think about it. In return for scratching a monthly rent check, you get diversified and redundant power sources, the most reliable internet on the planet and enough bandwidth to strangle an elephant.

The bottom line is that moving equipment to a Colo space should be accompanied by a significant reduction in downtime. If it’s not, you need a different landlord. Downtime is the enemy of product/service development progress. A modern Colo arrangement means you don’t have to spend time running down to the local Dollar General in search of an extension cord when one flames out. Okay, you really shouldn’t be using extension cords from a dollar store in your data center, but you get the idea.

Secured Data and Premises

The only type of downtime worse than that caused by insufficient infrastructure is when data is breached either through hacker online trickery or physical penetration of the premises. The latter happens more than you might think. Bad guys decide to go old school and break into a Colo center in the middle of the night to physically drag servers out of the rack and spirit them away.

With the intense global focus on thwarting hackers, DevOps is already in the process of evolving into DevSecOps as we speak. The reason is simple. Development teams are realizing that a focus on security from the start reduces the chance that a project gets interrupted mid-development resulting in—you guessed it—downtime.

With a Colo provider, let them worry about security.

In a Word, Scalability

With the everyday lexicon expanding to include cloud storage possibilities, the idea of scalability is at least somewhat familiar to the masses and certainly to businesses.

Google actually started out in a colocation data center before their data collection grew to approximately the size of the Milky Way galaxy. For IT in general and DevOps in particular, scalability is the Holy Grail because no company expects to stay the same size forever.

A smart DevOps team, especially one that works in any of the growing number of SaaS business models, will put the bug in management’s ear about the benefits of Colo long before the need arises.

The worst time for an upwardly mobile small or medium-sized company to start thinking about making the switch is after you’ve already outgrown present resources. For example, when working with inadequate bandwidth, a peak time data spike can slow development as local computers struggle to find enough bandwidth to function.

Another dirty little secret is that Colo providers typically get better internet rates than a single company, so there’s that. With the cost of a spike spread across all tenants, the actual cost to you will be considerably less than trying to manage your own data.

Final Thoughts

The bottom line is that the service provided by a Colo center should reduce the strain on a company’s IT budget and resources. Common services provided to a tenant are support personnel, who monitor and troubleshoot systems and issues before they grow into a big, fat calamity. Money you don’t spend providing basic service to an onsite data center is money you can funnel toward doing your company’s main work.

There’s one more thing a Colo site provides that shouldn’t be undervalued, and that is peace of mind, because you have removed much of the stress, cost and personnel drain that accompanies running your own data center. Farm it out. Let someone run it who hires staff with the particular skills needed and has a vested interest in keeping you happy.

— Gary Stevens

April 8, 2020
Survey Finds More Data Disruption Occurring
A global survey of 1,000 IT decision-makers with more than 250 employees conducted by Dell Technologies finds on average organizations managed 13.53 petabytes (PB) of data in 2019, a nearly 40% increase since 2018.

The same survey also finds that as the amount of data has increased, so, too, has the cost of downtime. Those costs increased by 54% in the same period, resulting in an estimated total cost of $810,018 in 2019.

The survey also notes 82% of respondents suffered a disruptive event in the last 12 months, with the total cost of a data loss now on average exceeding $1 million.

Not surprisingly, the survey finds that a lot of the data that organizations are trying to protect resides in the cloud, thanks mainly to the rise of a variety of application use cases. The top five areas of investment cited by survey respondents include cloud-native applications (58%), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) (53%), software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications (51%), 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (49%), and Internet of Things/endpoints (36%).

Nearly, three-quarters of respondents (71%) noted these emerging technologies create more data protection complexity and 61% said they increase risks. The survey also finds 81% of respondents said their existing data protection solutions will not be able to meet all future business challenges.

Specific areas where existing data protection platforms are expected to fall short include being able to recover data after a cyberattack (69%), recover data from a data loss incident (64%), comply with regional data governance regulations (62%), and meeting backup and recovery service level objectives (62%).

Among organizations that have adopted these emerging technologies the percentage of organizations struggling with adequately protecting data is as follows:
- 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (67%)
- AI and ML platforms (64%)
- Cloud-native applications (60%)
- IoT and endpoint (59%)
- Robotic process automation (56%)
The survey also finds organizations prefer public cloud/SaaS (43%), hybrid cloud (42%) and private cloud (39%) as deployment environments for new applications. In the case of edge computing deployments, 62% cited private clouds as being the platform that will be relied on most to protect data.

Bob Ganley, senior marketing consultant for cloud at Dell EMC, said the biggest challenge for organizations will be finding a way to centrally manage backup and recovery across multiple cloud computing platforms. Those platforms inevitably will span multiple types of public and private clouds accessed as a service and deployed in local data centers. Most organizations are relying on a “mash-up” approach to cloud computing where there is no unified control plane, so as they add each new cloud platform their total cost increases, he said Ganley, noting it’s now only a matter of time before IT organizations start to centralize the management of those multiple clouds to rein in those costs.

It’s not clear to what degree that centralization effort will revolve around IT automation enabled by application programming interfaces (APIs) and best DevOps processes versus traditional data protection tools based on graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, given the amount of data involved, it is more than likely that existing approaches to data protection are not going to scale, so a fundamental change in how backup and recovery is managed is now all but inevitable.

— Mike Vizard
March 16, 2020
vArmour CEO: Cloud Security Needs Simplicity

Cloud computing promised cost savings and simplified IT management, among other things. In many ways, the cloud has lived up to its ideals, and in other ways, such as API security, shadow IT and the securing of clouds across hybrid environments, the cloud has proven challenging.

To get a sense of how enterprises and security vendors are adapting, we reached out to Timothy Eades, CEO at cloud application security provider vArmour. vArmour was founded in 2011 with backing from Highland Capital Partners, Menlo Ventures, Citi Ventures, Work-Bench Ventures, Redline Capital and Telstra. Timothy Eades has been the CEO since 2013; prior to that role, he was the CEO at Silver Tail Systems.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

DevOps: How do you see cloud architectures evolving over the years ahead?

Timothy Eades: There is considerable evolution coming. At vArmour, we have a philosophy about this: Bet on the road maps, not against them.

I think we are seeing a lot of security vendors starting to scratch their heads and wonder: Where do we invent new security technologies that can help us differentiate? The road maps for winners are going to be those that bake security into their products. This way, cloud technology will only get stronger and more secure. If one imagines an x- and y-axis and the x-axis is the strength of security capability and the y-axis is simplicity, the vendor road maps, for those who will be successful, will be about getting that balance right.

Currently, there’s considerable complexity involved when it comes to configuring and securing the public cloud. If you are Tim’s Pizzeria and you are running on AWS, it has to be made simple and more intuitive. I was talking to some friends recently about the Windows operating system and how everything has become so simple. But back in the day when you and I were growing up, we used to say “RTFM” almost daily. Nowadays, there is no manual.

That’s mostly thanks to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs came along and made everything so simple that it shouldn’t require a manual. The worst-case was it might require a YouTube video to understand.

The cloud has to go through that same transition. Everything has to be made simpler, more intuitive. Otherwise, we are just going to get very weak configurations, because people are not going to configure it right. They’re not going to secure them right. They believe that they are inherently secure.

DevOps: What do you think will be the catalyst that will continue to drive cloud vendors getting the simplicity and security balance right?

Eades: I think it’s going to be a competition. I think the market sees the need for the drive to simplify. And it’s going to take the competition to get there. That’s a real battle between AWS, Azure, VMware and others. The good news is that VMware is going to embed a lot of security capabilities, and that will force Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud to respond.

DevOps: Cloud can get complicated quickly; even that small pizza shop may run a dozen cloud services.

Eades: Yes, they are running a bunch of different services. The funny thing is, there is always a lack of security skills at play, too. And we all know that when businesses put things in the cloud, that they think it just became secure. They don’t have the skills to understand that it’s not as secure as they believe. I think the regulators are still scratching their heads a little bit about all of this because Amazon has been preaching its “shared responsibility” model. But, as we now know, it’s not shared liability.

And people haven’t woken up yet to that fact, that shared responsibility is not shared liability.

DevOps: How do you see enterprises consuming the various modalities of cloud in the years ahead, on-premises, public, private cloud and the different mixtures of each?

Eades: It’s just amazing. Consider a company located in Europe. They have to have data on servers everywhere. So they’re using AWS and Azure and others. I think the large enterprises will continue to be hybrid cloud, but they won’t have a private data center. They just won’t.

A friend of mine runs cloud security at a large bank in New York. Their current data center will be their last data center. They’re not going to build another data center. They’re just not.

It’s the lifetime of the applications that they look at, and they wonder: Do I still want a data center? It doesn’t take long for them to get to “no.”

One of the banks we worked with over the last three years, as they were moving many of their applications into the public cloud, they were trying to understand the interaction of their apps. They wanted to know how stable the performance of their apps is in the public cloud. They will tell you now that they don’t see the difference between their Amazon cloud and their private cloud. There’s no difference because they’ve all the bandwidth that they need.

If you can’t tell the difference from a usage and from a financial perspective, more enterprises are going to depart from their data centers.

I think you are going to see a very, very long tail of private data centers among very large enterprises, but the cloud will consume the rest of IT.

— George V. Hulme

February 19, 2020
Predictions 2020: Application Trends, Opportunities and Challenges

Without wheeling out all the usual clichés, 2019 has been another whirlwind of disruptive innovation and opportunity–with plenty of challenges to tackle and circumvent along the way.

The threat landscape mutated with predictable unpredictability, multi-cloud app deployments are becoming mainstream fixtures and DevOps methodologies started exerting a newfound influence on business plans.

The big question is what happens next? What anticipated app-centric trends will change the game and tear up the rule book (again)?

Digital Transformation Takes Shape

In 2020, we will see more organizations shift away from aspirational sloganeering to substantively embrace what can, and should be, a seismic step-change.

Inevitably, business leaders will get more involved in application decisions designed to differentiate or provide unique customer experiences.

Expect a new generation of applications that support the scaling and expansion of business’ digital models to emerge. This will include taking advantage of cloud-native infrastructures and driving automation through software development.

Further down the line, digital transformation efforts will likely be AI-assisted, particularly as they leverage more advanced capabilities in application platforms, telemetry, data analytics and ML/AI technologies.

End-to-end instrumentation will enable application services to emit telemetry and act on insights produced through AI-driven analytics. We anticipate that these distributed application services will improve performance, security, operability and adaptability, without significant development effort.

The Rise of Application Capital

Applications are now firmly established as the main conduit for companies to develop and deliver goods and services. They have become modern enterprises’ important assets.

Even so, most still only have an approximate sense of how many applications they have, where they’re running or whether they’re under threat.

This will soon change.

To manage Application Capital effectively, it is essential to establish a company-wide strategy that sets policy and ensures compliance. This includes addressing how applications are built, acquired, deployed, managed, secured and retired. At a high level, there are six distinct and unavoidable steps that need to take place: build an inventory, assess the cyber risks, define application categories, identify the application services needed for specific activities, define deployment parameters and clarify roles and responsibilities.

The primary aim of an application strategy should always be to enhance and secure all digital capabilities–even as their reach and influence shift and expand.

DevOps’ Culture Club

The technical minutiae DevOps methodologies and associated tools got a lot of publicity this year.

2020 will be all about getting the culture right, marrying theory with best practice and unlocking new levels of productivity without upsetting the operational apple cart.

Culture is not optional. Team structure alone dramatically changes pipeline automation, with traditional single-function teams often falling behind their contemporary, DevOps-driven counterparts.

Consequently, we will see more collaborative team structures and alignment on key metrics that give NetOps additional means to focus on what the business requires: faster and more frequent deployments.

DevOps has a 10-year head start on NetOps in navigating and overcoming obstacles around certain types of integration, tools and skillsets. Collaborative teams can explode the status quo by promoting standardization on tools that span from delivery to deployment (such as Jenkins and GitHub/GitLab).

DevOps should not–and cannot–end with delivery. That means deployment functions–along with a complex pipeline of devices and application services–must be automated. This won’t happen without effective cultural realignment.

The Data Center Is Alive and Kicking

Conflating the adoption of SaaS with IaaS caused speculation that cloud was cannibalizing IT. Pundits warned that data centers would disappear.

The rumors were exaggerated. Data centers are still being built, expanded and run around the globe. The cloud hasn’t managed to–and likely never will–kill the data center.

Early in 2019, an IDC executive told channel partners at the IGEL Disrupt conference that over 80% of companies they surveyed anticipated repatriating public cloud workloads. Security, visibility and performance remain common concerns.

Repatriation-related opportunities include improving availability of multi-cloud operational tools and a push toward application architectures that rely on more portable technologies such as containers.

The data center is not dead. It’s just evolving.

Application Protection Challenges

According to F5 Labs, the server-side language PHP–used for at least 80% of websites since 2013–will continue to supply rich, soft targets for hackers. Situational awareness is critical to mitigate both vulnerabilities and threats.

Businesses are also realizing that applications encompass more than just the code they execute. Attention needs to be paid to everything that makes them tick, including architecture, configurations, other connectable assets and users. The prevalence of access attacks, such as phishing, are an obvious case in point.

F5 Labs analysis of 2019 breach data confirms the need for risk-based security programs instead of perfunctory best practice poses or checklists. Organizations need to tailor controls to reflect the threats they actually face. The first step in any risk assessment is a substantive (and ongoing) inventory process.

As ever, the industry will gradually incorporate emerging risks into business models. For example, cloud computing has gradually shifted from a bleeding-edge risk to a cornerstone of modern infrastructure. The risks associated with the cloud have either been mitigated or displaced to contractual risk in the form of service level agreements and audits.

API and You Know It

The word is out. Application programming interfaces (APIs) can transform business models and directly generate revenue. Cybercriminals know this.

More than ever, organizations need to focus on the API layer, particularly in terms of securing access to the business functions they represent.

One of the biggest issues is overly broad permissions, which means attacks through the API can give bad actors visibility into everything within the application infrastructure. API calls are also prone to the usual web request pitfalls such as injections, credential brute force, parameter tampering and session snooping.

Visibility is another major and pervasive problem. Organizations of every stripe–including IT vendors–have a notoriously poor track record of maintaining situational API awareness.

API security can be implemented directly in an application or, even better, in an API gateway. An API gateway can further protect APIs with capabilities such as rate limiting (to prevent denial of service attacks) and authorization. Authorization narrows access to APIs by allowing access to specific API calls to only specified clients, usually identified by tokens or API keys. An API gateway can also limit the HTTP methods used and log attempts to abuse other methods so you’re aware of attempted attacks.

Appy New Year!

All this is of course the tip of an increasingly interconnected iceberg. Any New Year’s resolution worth its salt should include a commitment to comprehensively master the development, deployment, operation and governance of application portfolio. The best way to do this, and to get visibility into the code-to-customer pathways for all applications, is to leverage a consistent set of multi-cloud application services. Here’s to a safe, innovative and transformational 2020!

Want to learn more about what to expect in 2020? Join us Jan. 23 for our Predict 2020 Virtual Summit featuring discussions from some of the industry’s best and brightest offering up their visions for the future. Sign up today for this free daylong virtual event.

— Vincent Lavergne

December 20, 2019
Growing Pains for Containers, Data Centers Call for Better Management

Containers have taken the tech community by storm with their ability to drive agile and effective innovation. Compared to the rigid nature of virtual machines, it’s no wonder developers and IT teams have flocked to containers and their flexibility. By dropping the strict hardware focus of virtual machines, containers are allowing teams to surface innovation into operating systems and create an elegant solution for moving code.

As we continue to see the adoption of container-driven operations grow, the industry’s excitement for innovation is overshadowing a problem growing at the same scale: over-containerization. Whereas virtual machines traditionally provide a predictable understanding of hardware performance, containers are not in touch with the hardware native to their operating system. As a result, containers are often left to fight for control over one system. In these instances, data centers are inefficiently distributing energy as they experience drastic power pulls that drain energy and dollars.

While this might sound like another bout of industry growing pains, without a proper reaction, this can cost companies millions of dollars lost to inefficiency. Just as teams are investing in the latest orchestration features to manage their virtual environments, it’s time to consider technology’s hardware roots and monitor containers’ effect on data center functionality. Data center management tools provide a simple solution to this problem by monitoring power usage, gauging utilization across data centers and presenting data needed to make a winning strategy.

Monitoring Power

Data center management tools provide granular insight into power consumption, with options to monitor per server, rack, workload and application. Given the hyperfocused, often greedy nature of containers, power monitoring allows data center managers to identify how much energy containers need and how to best allocate it across multiple containers. This gives managers the information they need to create a centralized management policy for server energy consumption and avoid power pulls from hungry containers in the future.

Gauging Utilization

While the industry’s initial concern is containers’ tendency to pull power away from the majority of an environment, there is an opportunity within this dynamic. Data center management tools offer visibility into uptime and cross-platform consumption levels, which presents a chance to identify underutilized servers that could support more containers. Given that containers are far easier to migrate than virtual machines, server migration is likely to occur more often and data center managers will need to provide a recommendation quickly. With enough insight into the long-term, low utilization trends, teams will be able to consolidate and balance workloads across existing devices.

Adjusting the Data Center Strategy

Data center management solutions solve an immediate power problem, but what are they doing to keep up with the ever-evolving enterprise space?

Some data center management tools offer features that visualize power consumption and predictive modeling for efficient planning. With these insights, not only will IT teams be able to give power to containers across their environment, but they also will be able to save resources and lower operational costs for years to come. This presents a win-win situation for developers and managers, in which containers are given the energy to power innovation and data centers are operating at maximum efficiency.

As we look to the future of containers and data center management, it’s in the best interest of enterprise companies to invest in their hardware just as they have invested in containers. As the industry continues to become focused on virtualization, a solid, foundational understanding of data center performance and capacity will be key to long-term success.

— George Clement

May 24, 2019
5 Trends Transforming Digital and IT Operations Management
In 2018, digital transformation ushered in a radical shift in how enterprises harness customer insights, technology capabilities and rapid experimentation to drive revenue growth, profitability and market leadership. Enterprises spent $1.3 trillion in 2018 on digital transformation technologies such as public cloud platforms, microservices and containers, edge computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve customer experiences, business agility and employee engagement.

Heading into 2019, digitalization will accelerate business model innovation and drive the adoption of these emerging technologies for sustainable competitive advantage. Here’s a closer look at five technology trends that will change the way enterprises approach digital operations management in 2019:

Multi-Cloud Adoption Goes Mainstream

In FY18 Q3, the three leading cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) accounted for 65 percent of the market share of public cloud infrastructure and platform services. Enterprises are increasingly relying on multiple cloud providers to avoid lock-in and harness innovative product offerings, global presence and flexible pricing strategies. When it comes to multi-cloud adoption in 2019:
- Lift-and-Shift Will Give Way to Rebuilding. In the initial phase of enterprise cloud adoption, CIOs preferred “lift-and-shift” strategies for migrating complex, legacy applications to public cloud services. In 2019, enterprises will rebuild legacy portfolios to truly take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity, security and utility pricing. Rebuilding is not only the right approach to modernize legacy systems, but also a viable solution for reducing technical debt and unleashing enterprise agility.
- The Rise Of Managed Private Cloud for On-Premises Requirements. While analyst firm Gartner predicts that 28 percent of enterprise spending will shift to public cloud offerings by 2022, the reality is that the vast majority of enterprise workloads still run inside the corporate firewall. Public cloud providers are taking aggressive measures to conquer the final bastion of data center gravity with private cloud offerings. Managed private cloud infrastructure will become essential for enterprise services that will need data sovereignty, latency or compliance, yet still want the flexibility and agility of cloud. Some recent managed private cloud announcements from the big three cloud platforms show how these providers are taking a pragmatic approach to meet customer demand:
  - In 2016, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, declared, “Whether it’s 10 years or 20 years, very few companies will own their own data centers, and those that do will have a smaller footprint than they have now.” During his 2018 re:Invent keynote, Jassy sang a different tune by launching AWS Outposts to bring the power of cloud-native services to enterprise data centers for hybrid interoperability and seamless management.
  - During the 2018 Cloud Next conference, Google introduced its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) On-Premises that delivers an abstraction layer for running container clusters either on the public cloud or in a corporate data center.
  - In 2017, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Stack, which offers the same programmable interface and deployment tooling of Microsoft Azure in a private cloud environment for a consistent hybrid cloud experience.
The Cloud-Native Skills Gap Widens

Software containers have fast emerged as the standard deployment vehicle for agile, reliable, scalable and highly available enterprise services. The transition from virtual machine management to container orchestration and monolithic development patterns to agile microservices will transform the way enterprises build, deploy and optimize cloud-based applications. IT operations teams will need to develop a new set of competencies to manage the health and performance of containerized services. IT practitioners can longer rely on manual scripts to manage large, distributed systems but will need to embrace infrastructure as code to provision, deploy, monitor, alert and auto-scale cloud-native services.

Commodity Monitoring Evolves to Strategic Observability

DevOps teams will use multiple data sources (metrics, logs, and traces) to understand, verify and debug cloud-native systems. Modern observability requires the ability to consolidate and extract relevant insights from observability pipelines using tools such as Prometheus for monitoring, Jaeger for distributed tracing and Fluentd for logging. While IT teams will need new tools to manage autonomous cloud-native services, it is still critical to understand relationships between individual components and the overall system to effectively troubleshoot microservices in production.

AIOps Emerges as the Way to Tame Alert Storms

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is a clear necessity for modern IT infrastructure teams to keep up with the diversity, velocity and volume of IT operational and event data. IT teams can proactively prevent service outages, analyze real-time incidents using contextual knowledge and remediate problems using AIOps tools. Here’s how AIOps will help enterprises run and optimize mission-critical systems:
- Improve Response Time For Digital Interactions. AIOps has the power to boost key metrics for incident management including mean-time-to-detection, mean-time-to-response, mean-time-to-restoration and incident volume handled within a service window. The combination of machine learning and data science techniques in AIOps not only delivers faster incident coordination and response, but also reduces the human time spent per alert with advanced analytics and probabilistic root cause analysis.
- Eliminate Siloed/Redundant Processes. AIOps offers the ability to consolidate event and incident insights from different IT management tools across on-premises and public cloud environments. A shared AIOps platform offers centralized visibility, faster impact analysis and improved collaboration for a diverse set of stakeholders, including application owners, infrastructure teams and business sponsors.
Business-Aware, Service-Centric Delivery Can Optimize Customer Experiences

To help the business remain competitive, IT teams simply must transition from managing hybrid IT infrastructure assets to prioritizing and supporting business-critical services. Service-centric operations management combines business insights, customer knowledge and relevant metrics to improve digital performance, enhance customer interactions and support business goals. IT teams will need to focus on the business value of IT services while offering holistic infrastructure visibility and control at the business process level.

Clear strategy and focused execution will separate the digital winners from losers in 2019. How enterprises embrace and respond to these key trends will be key to unlocking disruptive innovation, operational transformation and business value.

— Deepak Jannu
January 11, 2019
Is NoOps the Future of Cloud Networking?

As enterprises move more of their applications, data and operations to the cloud, competitive success becomes increasingly about speed. If the answer to a request to spin up and connect a new virtual cloud or deploy a new application across your hybrid cloud is “no,” or, “It will take us three months,” that’s a problem.

Organizations operating in the cloud need to deploy in days, hours or even minutes, not months. They first sought greater infrastructure efficiencies and speed through ITOps, then DevOps, then DevSecOps and, most recently, CloudOps. Each of these nuances is a slightly better version of the old model, but all still revolve around humans. And the hard truth is that speed and humans don’t always mix.

The painful implications of the impedance mismatch between humans and automation comes into sharp focus, but with a slight twist, when it comes to cloud networking. Now that networking infrastructure, meaning the actual routing of data, is moving out of the data center and into the cloud, it’s time to consider what a NoOps approach to cloud networking might look like.

Bringing Networking Into the Cloud Era

Way back in 2011, Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Mike Gualtieri famously wrote a blog post titled, “I Don’t Want DevOps. I Want NoOps.” In it, he said: “NoOps means that application developers will never have to speak with an operations professional again.” In this sense, NoOps is another term for automation.

In the world of public cloud technology, the tension Gualtieri was pointing to—i.e., between dev and ops—lived almost exclusively in the realms of compute and storage. It didn’t apply to networking in the cloud, because networking is different. It’s more heterogeneous and distributed than compute or storage. It’s all about moving data, which has gravity and heft. Especially with big data, moving the data securely is an increasingly strategic priority for enterprises.

Until recently, networking technologies used in public cloud environments have been either very limited-feature tools offered by the cloud provider, or virtualized versions of on-premises data center-era technologies. These virtualized technologies, such as vRouters, are complex (often by design) and difficult to master. They have kept CloudOps and DevOps teams dependent upon highly trained and certified networking experts to make and maintain cloud connections.

This traditional networking paradigm slows things down and kills innovation. But it also puts developers and cloud operations people on the same side of the “I want NoOps” equation. That’s because unlike with cloud computing or cloud storage functions—where developers must wait for ITOps and DevOps teams to establish the computing or storage infrastructure their applications require—cloud networking has shifted the “operations” function to the hands of traditional IT networking experts.

What NoOps Looks Like in Cloud Networking

Recent technology advancements in cloud networking point the way toward a NoOps approach to cloud networking, meaning the automation of processes that now depend on direct control by human networking experts.

One advancement is that the as-a-service revolution is finally reaching cloud networking infrastructure. What began with virtualized networking hardware has more recently progressed to software-defined (SD) cloud routing, enabling distributed, heterogeneous networking infrastructure to traverse public cloud, on-premises, hybrid cloud and multicloud environments.

SD cloud routing centralizes and automates networking functions that previously required hands-on, time-consuming attention by highly certified human experts. As a result, SD cloud routing shifts networking infrastructure control directly to CloudOps and DevOps engineers, who are no longer dependent on networking professionals to establish or maintain their cloud networking infrastructure.

Software-defined cloud routing alters the fundamental dynamics of cloud operations. It makes routing in the cloud point-and-click simple for CloudOps and DevOps experts.

In a real sense, SD cloud routing achieves a NoOps approach to cloud networking—not by eliminating DevOps functions and roles, but by automating cloud networking and making it accessible to those who need to establish and maintain cloud connections. SD cloud routing empowers DevOps and CloudOps professionals to manage the networking connections required to move applications and data within, between, and to and from public cloud environments.

— Steve Mullaney

October 2, 2018
Mirantis Modeling Tool Extends SDI Scope and Reach

Mirantis has added a modeling tool to its portfolio that enables users to allocate IT infrastructure that has been distributed across multiple data centers to a common set of workloads.

Company CEO Adrian Ionel said the latest edition of the Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP) for building provide clouds on OpenStack or Kubernetes platforms now includes a Mirantis Infrastructure Model Designer tool that makes it possible to manage IT infrastructure residing in multiple data centers as though they were one logical resource. In effect, slices of distributed data centers can be allocated to run specific classes of application workloads, he said.

The Mirantis tool is based on open source software spanning Cookiecutter, Reclass and Salt projects that Mirantis is employing to enable users to apply management templates across multiple distributed data centers. The goal is to make it possible for IT organizations to employ a software-defined framework that makes it easier to not only manage distributed IT environments, but also change the configuration of those environments as the nature of application workloads change over time, Ionel said.

The Mirantis modeling tool provides a declarative approach to managing software-defined infrastructure that doesn’t require IT operations teams to learn how to program, he added.

Ionel said that as IT organizations invest in IT infrastructure, they need to deploy multiple classes of application workloads on the same systems. Each of those application workloads has distinctly different attributes and requirements. For example, a big data application running on Hadoop today has different infrastructure requirements than an analytics application infused with machine learning data that might be deployed tomorrow. That said, most IT organizations won’t be able to replace IT infrastructure as application workloads evolve, he said, noting the Mirantis tool provides a means to easily reconfigure IT infrastructure from a central location without requiring IT personnel to be present in each local data center.

Virtualization of servers and now storage and networks is a concept that has now permeated data centers for decades. Mirantis is effectively taking that concept to its next logical conclusion by making it possible to maximize utilization of data centers. In fact, Ionel noted, templates can be configured to prioritize the running of different workloads on the same infrastructure.

As software-defined infrastructure (SDI) continues to mature, it’s becoming apparent that data centers soon will be managed at much higher levels of abstractions than they typically are today. Instead of trying to navigate individual compute, storage and networking silos, IT organizations will be able to manage data center resources on demand. The implications of the level of automation go well beyond simply enabling IT organizations to be more agile—the entire organizational structure of IT organizations will need to evolve.

Obviously, organizations that have embraced DevOps are further down than the SDI path than most. But as SDI continues to be able to automate IT infrastructure at levels of unprecedented scale, it’s clear there’s still a long road ahead in terms of how just how extended those DevOps processes can become.

— Mike Vizard

August 28, 2018
Case Study: DevOps Key to AWS Cloud Migration

DevOps practices halved the time it took this SaaS company to migrate to AWS

Australia-based Whispir provides communications applications as a service. One of its goals is to get products into users’ hands as soon as possible, and that requires development, operations and product staff working together, said Jonathan Swift, head of product and operations.

Whispir formerly operated from a co-location data center, a model that continued as it expanded internationally. But the time and effort needed to run the systems was not cost-effective for an organization of its size, so the company switched largely to AWS. Governance issues faced by some clients force the company to still run its own systems in certain geographical locations.

In the process, “[We] learned a lot about our app and how to make it cloud-ready,” said Swift. “Cloud isn’t free, cloud isn’t cheap” and is potentially more expensive than placing servers in co-lo data centers if the software isn’t built correctly.

For example, it makes sense to make the most use of a physical server as it is largely a fixed cost. But in the cloud, the fewer resources you use, the less it costs.

Crises Lead to Spikes

On the other hand, a lot of Whispir’s business is crisis-focused (eg, Caltex uses Whispir at its Kurnell oil refinery in Sydney to send emergency messages), and it takes a certain amount of time to spin up additional instances to deal with spikes in message volumes. “That was a real challenge,” said Swift.

Those crisis-communications clients expect Whispir to have sufficient resources to meet sudden demand. That’s an expensive proposition with co-located hardware, whereas Ccloud resources can be scaled up quickly, though not instantaneously.

Seasonality has to be taken into account. One relatively predictable driver of crisis messaging is Australia’s bushfire season. Unfortunately, this overlaps Christmas, which is a peak time for marketing messages. So Whispir plans to run at around 200 percent of its normal baseline capacity during the fire season. This is easily done with cloud infrastructure, which Swift describes as “a beautiful thing” in this context.

Some organizations are scared by multi-tenant environments. The ability to stand up dedicated instances on AWS is a great feature that Whispir can offer, especially to its clients in the financial sector.

The company’s DevOps practices had been focused on the co-location environment, so even though kanban still “works very well for us” after moving to AWS, some previous choices had to be revisited. In particular, new monitoring tools were needed to cope with the elasticity inherent in the cloud and because the focus expanded from the hardware to the whole stack.

Selected tools included the Zabbix open-source monitoring platform and Sumo Logic for trend analysis.

Earlier this year, Whispir moved all of its Australian customers into a “pure AWS” environment. There are some great tools for migration, Swift said, “but it’s not as straightforward or seamless as you might think.” He recommends doubling any initial estimate of the time required for such projects.

There were some nasty surprises: The first month’s bill from AWS was “huge” and it took a couple of months to determine the cause, even with the aid of AWS’s “really beneficial” premium support service.

Security requirements in various jurisdictions had to be taken into consideration, with updates to various procedures to ensure the new cloud environment was compliant. For instance, the procedures required when a physical system was decommissioned were well-understood, but how could they be translated into a cloud environment? One specific example is that an in-house storage device can be destroyed when it reaches the end of its life, but in the cloud it’s largely a matter of relying on the provider’s controls.

Avoid Lock-In

But Swift warned that “the challenge is to not lock yourself in” to a particular cloud provider. For Whispir, which operates a mixed cloud/on-premises environment (no cloud provider offers the right onshore facilities in New Zealand and the hardware that Whispir has installed in Singapore is too new to be replaced by IaaS), that is a requirement rather than a strategic choice.

Whispir would have avoided AWS-specific features that would make the platform easier to use and more difficult to get out of, despite the fact that using provider-specific toolsets can yield significant cost savings.

Whispir is keeping an eye on Azure—”great tools, great partnerships, great ecosystems,” observed Swift—and may migrate to Microsoft’s cloud in around 18 months.

A particular advantage is that Azure Stack can be run on private hardware, which could be useful if Whispir decided to enter a market where Microsoft Azure wasn’t present.

Either way, the intention is to go 100 percent cloud to the extent that is possible.

‘Infrastructure as Code’ Means More Power for Ops

The move to the cloud has made Whispir’s operations people more powerful, he observed. The infrastructure-as-code concept allows for rapid deployment, enables operations to contribute more to product development, reduces risk and enables the company to be more responsive to the market.

Furthermore, dealing with on-premises hardware still very much a waterfall situation, thanks to the delays and dependencies involved. But moving to IaaS means infrastructure issues sit comfortably within the kanban model.

IaaS also means that various network-related tasks simply disappear, but other issues arise in their place. For example, some external services used by Whispir (eg, SMS gateways) require the use of VPN connections from a known IP address, but with cloud infrastructure the best you may be able to do is specify a range of addresses. Whispir’s short-term fix was to route such connections through a specific server in the co-lo center, and in the longer term it found providers with less-restrictive arrangements.

Moving from co-lo to cloud would have been “incredibly hard” without DevOps, Swift said. It would have taken at least twice as long, he noted, and the company wouldn’t be able to run the mixed environment as well as it does.

“There’s no way we would have been so successful” without DevOps, he said.

— Stephen Withers

November 3, 2017