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Tag: Microsoft Azure

  • Bitnami Offers Popular Application with Managed Database Configuration in Azure Marketplace

    Multi-tier Packages of WordPress and Drupal with Azure Database Services Remove Complexity of Deploying Enterprise Configurations

    SAN FRANCISCO, CA – January 15, 2018 —Bitnami, the leading provider of application packaging, is excited to announce the availability of WordPress and Drupal pre-configured with support for Azure Database for MariaDB in the Azure Marketplace. Bitnami has collaborated with the Azure Database Services team to deliver packages that make it much easier for companies to deploy enterprise configurations of these popular and widely used applications to Microsoft Azure.

    Deploying one of these new ‘Bitnami Certified’ application packages enables companies to realize the benefits of stability, security, and simplicity, while harnessing the power of a fully managed Azure database. The result is the ability to scale quickly and reach global distribution without worrying about costly downtime.

    “The new Bitnami packages significantly improves enterprise productivity by reducing the effort involved in packaging and deploying complex multi-tier architectures, while offering guaranteed high-availability, security, and dynamic scale with Azure OSS Database services” said Sudhakar Sannakkayala, General Manager, Azure Data engineering. “Our customers can now simply scroll through the Azure Marketplace, select an offering, and click ‘launch’ to deploy one of these applications.”

    “Bitnami has worked with the Azure Database team to create packages that deliver the reliability, security and ease of use of Bitnami Certified applications and the flexibility and power of Azure,” said Bitnami Vice President of Business Development and Sales Pete Catalanello. “Because Bitnami optimizes packaging for Azure, it is easy to utilize platform services such as databases, auto-scaling, and load-balancing. The combination of Bitnami and Azure delivers what customers say they care about most.”

    A long-term Microsoft partner, Bitnami provides a wide range of pre-packaged, easy to deploy open-source applications and development stacks to the Azure Marketplace. It supports Microsoft enterprise customers in multi-tier environments in numerous ways, and actively works with the Azure Database team to provide enterprise solutions and promote best practices. Other multi-tier Bitnami solutions for Azure include:

    • Stacksmith, which enables enterprises to package their own multi-tier applications for Azure and AKS. Users can define best practices once and enforce them when packaging and updating. This includes configuration requirements for the use of Azure Databases for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.
    • Kubeapps, an open-source web-based interface for discovering and provisioning applications on a Kubernetes cluster. Microsoft has partnered with Bitnami to integrate Kubeapps with Open Service Broker for Azure. With Kubeapps, users can create and present Helm charts that leverage Azure-native PaaS services as part of the architecture.

    With this combination, a user could deploy an application tier on AKS and an Azure Database backend to achieve a highly-scalable application with a highly available database. They could then use Stacksmith to maintain and update these applications with their PaaS service integrations going forward.

    Bitnami continues to expand the scope and number of enterprise solutions to make it ever easier for users to set up and deploy complex environments that leverage first party Azure services. For a closer look at these multi-tier enterprise solutions, register for the Create an Application-Centric DevOps Experience with Stacksmith and Azure OSS Database Services webinar. To access the new WordPress or Drupal packages, visit the Azure Marketplace.

    About Bitnami

    Bitnami provides packaged applications for any platform. The Bitnami application automation platform delivers and maintains a catalog of 130+ ready-to-run server applications and development environments in partnership with the world’s leading cloud providers including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle, driving over 1.3 million deployments per month. Bitnami is helping to shape the future of software deployment via its leadership role in the evolution of the Kubernetes ecosystem, including being the authors and maintainers of Kubeless and Kubeapps projects and major contributors to helm. Based in San Francisco and with offices around the world, Bitnami is a privately held, rapidly growing company. For more information, visit https://www.bitnami.com, or follow us on Twitter (@Bitnami) and Facebook.

    Kris Kraves

    Cogenta Communications, Inc.

    Let us amplify your message

    www.cogentacom.com

    @kriskraves

  • Evaluating a Multi-Cloud Strategy: The Pros and Cons

    Evaluating a Multi-Cloud Strategy: The Pros and Cons

    First off, let’s define multi-cloud. Clearly, we’re talking about using one or more clouds, but clouds come in different flavors. For example, multi-cloud incorporates the idea of hybrid cloud—a mix of public and private clouds. But multi-cloud can also mean two or more public clouds or two or more private clouds.

    So, why is this important? Over the past year or so, I’ve seen a major increase in the amount of companies who use multiple public clouds. In fact, more than 20 percent of ParkMyCloud’s customers use multiple public clouds. With this trend in mind, I think it is time to take a look at the positives of a multi-cloud strategy. But I also want to mention the negatives—because, of course, there’s no “easy button.”

    According to the “RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report,” more than 80% percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy:

    What are the Advantages of Multi-Cloud?

    So, why are businesses heading in this direction with their infrastructure? Simple reasons include the following:

    • Risk mitigation—create resilient architectures.
    • Managing vendor lock-in—get price protection.
    • Optimization—place your workloads to optimize for cost and performance.
    • Cloud providers’ unique capabilities—take advantage of offerings in AI, IOT, machine learning and more.

    When I asked our CTO what he sees as the advantages of a multi-cloud strategy, he highlighted risk management. Our own platform was born in the cloud, so we run on AWS. We also have a multi-region architecture with redundancy (let’s call this “multi-cloud light”) and if we went multi-cloud, we would leverage another public cloud for risk mitigation.

    Specifically, he mentioned risk management from the perspective of one vendor having an infrastructure meltdown or attack. AWS had an issue about 15 months ago year when S3 was offline in US-East-1 region for more than five hours, affecting many companies large and small. Software from web apps to smartphones apps were affected (including ours). Certain AWS regions also have been the target of DDoS attacks that have affected service availability.

    Having a backup to another cloud service provider (CSP) or private cloud in these cases could have ensured 100 percent uptime. In the case of Alibaba and other cloud vendors, they may have a much stronger presence in certain geographic regions due to a long-term presence. When any vendor gets a toe-hold in a region, its environment has minimal redundancy and safeguards in place that provide the desired high availability; in this case, another provider in the same region may be safer from an availability perspective.

    What are the Disadvantages of Multi-Cloud?

    Now let’s say you want to go multi-cloud: What does this mean to you? From our own experience integrating with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, we’ve seen that each cloud has its own set of interfaces and own challenges. It is not a “write once, run everywhere” situation between the vendors, and any cloud or network management utility system must do the work to provide deep integration with each CSP.

    Further, the nuances of configuring and managing each CSP require both broad and deep knowledge, and it is rare to find employees with the essential expertise for multiple clouds, so more staff is needed to manage multi-cloud with confidence that it is being done in a way that is both secure and highly available. With everyone trying to play catch-up with AWS—and with AWS itself evolving at a breakneck pace—it is very difficult for an individual or organization to best utilize one CSP, let alone multiple clouds.

    A common container environment, for example, can help mitigate these issues somewhat by isolating engineers from the nuances of virtual machine management; however, the issues of network, infrastructure, cost optimization, security and availability remain very CSP-specific.

    On paper, there are advantages of having a multi-cloud strategy. In practice—like many things—it’s not as easy as it may seem.

    — Jay Chapel

  • Case Study: DevOps Key to AWS Cloud Migration

    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

  • With a Multicloud Infrastructure, Control is Key

    With a Multicloud Infrastructure, Control is Key

    Ask any developer or DevOps manager about their first experiences with the public cloud and it’s likely they’ll happily share some memories of quickly provisioning some compute instances for a small project or new app. For (seemingly) a few pennies, you could take full advantage of the full suite of public cloud services—as well as the scalability, elasticity, security and pay-as-you-go pricing model. All of this made it easy for teams to get started with the cloud, saving on both the IT budgets and infrastructure setup time. Public cloud providers AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Rackspace and others made it easy to innovate.

    Fast forward several years and the early promise of the cloud is still relevant: Services have expanded, costs have (in some cases) been reduced and DevOps teams have adapted to the needs of their team by spinning up compute instances whenever they’re needed. But for many companies, the realities of their hybrid-IT infrastructure necessitates support for more than one public cloud provider. To make this work, IT Ops needs a control layer that sits on top of their infrastructure, and can deliver applications to customers over any architecture, including multicloud. This is true, no matter what the reason teams need to support multi-cloud environments.

    Prepare for the Worst

    As any IT Ops manager, or anyone who has lost access to their web app knows, outages and cloud service degradation happen. Modern Ops teams need a plan in place for when they do. Many companies choose to utilize multiple public cloud providers to ensure their application is always available to worldwide customers, even during an outage. The process of manually re-routing traffic to a second public cloud in the event of an outage is cumbersome, to say the least. Adding an app delivery control plan on top of your infrastructure allows companies to seamlessly and automatically deliver applications over multiple clouds, factoring in real-time availability and performance.

    Support Cloud-driven Innovation

    Ops teams often support many different agile development teams, often in multiple countries or from new acquisitions. When this is the case, it’s likely that the various teams are using many architectures on more than one public cloud. Asking some dev teams to switch cloud vendors is not very DevOps-y. A better option is to control app delivery automation with a cloud-agnostic control plane that sits on top of any cloud, data center or CDN architectures. This allows dev teams to work in their preferred cloud environment, without worrying about delivery.

    Avoid Cloud Vendor Lock-in

    Public cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure aren’t just infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendors, they sell (or resell) products and services that could very well compete with your company’s offering. In the beginning, using a few cloud instances didn’t seem like such a big deal. But now that you’re in full production and depend on one of these cloud providers for your mission-critical app, this no longer feels like a great strategy. Adding a second public cloud to your infrastructure lessens your dependence on a single cloud vendor who you may be in “coopetition” with.

    Multiple-vendor sourcing is a proven business strategy in many other areas of IT, giving you more options during price and SLA negotiations. The same is true for IaaS. Cloud services change often, as new services are added or removed, and price structures change. Taking control over these changes in public cloud service offerings, pricing models and SLAs is another powerful motivator for Ops teams to move to a multi-cloud architecture. An application delivery automation platform that can ingest and act on cloud service pricing data is essential.

    Apps (and How They’re Delivered) Have Changed

    Monolithic apps are out. Modern, distributed apps that are powered by microservices are in. Similarly, older application delivery controllers (ADCs) were built for a static infrastructure world, before the cloud (and SaaS) were commonly used by businesses. Using an ADC for application delivery requires a significant upfront capital expense, limits your ability to rapidly scale and hinders the flexibility to support dynamic (i.e. cloud) infrastructure. Using ADCs for multiple cloud environments compounds these issues exponentially. A software-defined application delivery control layer eliminates the need for older ADC technology and scales directly with your business and infrastructure.

    Regain Control

    Full support for multicloud in product may sound daunting. After all, Ops teams already have plenty to worry about daily. Adding a second cloud vendor requires a significant ramp-up period to get ready for production-level delivery, and the new protocols, alerts, competencies and other things you need to think about. You can’t be knee-deep in the details of each cloud and still manage infrastructure. Adding in the complexity of application delivery over multiple clouds can be a challenge, but much less so if you use a SaaS-based application delivery platform. With multicloud infrastructure, control is key.

    About the Author / Andrew Marshall

    Andrew Marshall is the Director of Product Marketing for Cedexis, and has driven product marketing efforts at New Relic, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

     

  • Microsoft Lifts Investment in Cloud Foundry

    Microsoft Lifts Investment in Cloud Foundry

    At the Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley 2017 conference this week Microsoft formally pledged its support for the open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment by becoming a gold member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF).

    Beyond influencing the future direction of the Cloud Foundry PaaS, Microsoft also revealed this week it will tighten the integration between the Cloud Foundry PaaS running on Microsoft Azure and backend database services. There also now command line tools for Cloud Foundry available within Azure Cloud Shell, a browser-based tool for managing Azure resources.

    Corey Sanders, partner director for Microsoft Azure, told conference attendees that Microsoft is fully committed to Cloud Foundry as any member of the foundation. In fact, there have been instances of Cloud Foundry running on Azure for years, including the version of Cloud Foundry that SAP makes available as part of a multi-cloud computing strategy it has crafted. Microsoft claims usage of Cloud Foundry on Azure has increased 300 percent over the last year.

    CFF CTO Chip Childers says that endorsement of Microsoft is significant because, along with Google, it means two of the three largest public cloud providers are now investing in Cloud Foundry. There are instances of Cloud Foundry running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but the largest public cloud service provider has not seen fit to join the CFF.

    The mission of CFF is to promote the adoption of multi-cloud computing via technologies that can be deployed across both public clouds and an on-premises IT environment, Childers says. He expects Cloud Foundry and the Kubernetes container orchestration engine to play similar roles in that regard. The actual operating system deployed in those environments, he says, is now much less relevant. The choice regarding when to deploy one or another will come down to the nature of the application workload and the relative cloud-native maturity of the organization deploying those workloads.

    Microsoft has already made it clear it it is committed to offering multiple classes of services with Azure. In addition to Cloud Foundry, Microsoft already offers a PaaS environment built on its own proprietary stack of Windows software. There’s also both a container-as-a-service offering based on Kubernetes and implementations of the container stack developed by Docker Inc., in the wake of a strategic alliance between those two companies.

    Obviously, the range of deployment options now being made available on platform such as Microsoft Azure creates some significant DevOps challenges. Rather than trying to limit the number of services developers might invoke, IT operations teams will need to focus more on making sure the right type of application workload invokes the class of cloud service that is best optimized for that workload. Naturally, that approach will require IT organizations to address both technology and cultural issues within their organizations. But given the limited effectiveness most IT operations teams historically have had in terms limiting deployment options, there’s no better time than the present to get started.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Azure vs. AWS for the Enterprise

    Azure vs. AWS for the Enterprise

    In a previous post we discussed Azure & OpenStack, the less-explored hybrid cloud, and we thought we’d segue on the hybrid cloud theme, and follow up with an additional post focusing on a question we’re often asked …

    Azure or AWS?

    It’s one of the most common questions enterprise customers today face as they look to go to the cloud. According to this year’s Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report, the two cloud powerhouses are the clear market leaders, and as they each add new services to their arsenal and expand their service offerings, customers must decide which one is best-suited for their business needs. This, of course, is in the context of public cloud, whereas the question of OpenStack vs. VMware usually arises in the context of private cloud. And with reports popping up all the time that demonstrate growing numbers around every hybrid cloud mix-and-match scenario, many enterprises are debating on what to bet their cloud strategy.

    To begin this comparison, it’s important to understand how each has evolved. Azure was built as a holistic platform and has been geared toward the enterprise from the beginning. It began as a platform as a service (PaaS), making it easier for developers to build applications without worrying about the servers on which they’re running. In addition, part of the Azure approach always has been to think about how to integrate each service to the platform as a whole and support enterprises’ IT flexibility with keeping specific workloads on-premises while complementing their IT requirements with services running on the cloud.

    AWS, on the other hand, started scaling from the infrastructure from the beginning. Its approach has been to continually be ahead of the innovation curve and offer services that IT operations can easily comprehend and use to support their compute and storage requirements on demand.

    Market Share Comparison: The Path to Growth

    It’s not hard to see why both AWS and Azure have grown into their roles as the market leaders. Today more than 70 Amazon services can be utilized, including the basic compute, storage and network building blocks, as well as “up the stack” services such as database as a service and even frameworks to easily scale mobile applications, databases and more. AWS has a massive public cloud with the largest data centers in the world, and excels at allowing their customers to choose the building blocks they need to create a variety of service offerings.

    That said, Azure is growing as well, and quickly gaining ground on AWS. Microsoft has moved aggressively to match AWS by enhancing and building up its array of offerings. The company has been selling to the enterprise market for decades and, as a result, has garnered strong relationships with many large global organizations. These efforts and relationships seem to be paying off, as a recent survey of 100 CIOs by Morgan Stanley predicted that Azure would be the largest infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendor by 2019.

    Enterprise-Grade Product Capabilities

    AWS and Azure both provide comprehensive enterprise cloud services, and they both do it well. The core features of AWS include a large suite of infrastructure and application services that enable running nearly everything in the cloud, from traditional enterprise applications to large web-scale workloads. AWS is the clear winner these days in terms of the number of services it offers; the services are well-connected and provide full cloud capabilities for most enterprise needs.

    Azure is also fast closing the gaps with the enterprise cloud market, including with large-size virtual machines, StorSimple Virtual Array, itsNAS offering and the SQL Data Warehouse. In addition, with its recent announcement of Azure Stack, and via solutions such as Cloudify, Microsoft strengthens hybrid architecture and workload mobility between on-premises and public cloud workloads.

    Other factors that are driving enterprises to adopt Azure include the Azure Security Center (ASC), which provides a centralized view of security policies and configurations from multiple Azure subscriptions; the ability for customers to save time and effort through unified operations tools such as SQL Manager, Visual Studio and other such services; and seamless VM migration to migrate servers between disparate environments.

    Growth Strategies

    Microsoft also plans to invest heavily in cloud growth going forward, with a big push and investment in new features and infrastructure. Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud unit continues to be the focal point of the company’s growth strategy, as the company claims that nearly 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies use at least three of Microsoft’s cloud offerings.

    Both AWS and Azure, in fact, are investing heavy capital expenditures on worldwide data centers and servers. AWS, for example, has just announced a new Asia Pacific region in Mumbai, India, with two availability zones. And with the introduction of new regions in the U.K., Microsoft has announced 34 Azure regions around the world, with 28 generally available today—more than any other major cloud provider. With certifications such as MCSE and many more, Microsoft has more certifications than any other cloud provider in the industry.

    Both AWS and Azure are poised to continue growing, and both companies have big futures in the cloud market. It’s clear, however, that in the cloud game today, Azure is narrowing the functional gap. Azure gives enterprises the ability to use existing Microsoft software licenses under the Enterprise Agreement (EA), giving enterprises better terms and packages. Microsoft enterprise users are potentially ‘power users,’ and prefer a DIY approach versus pre-packaged and opinionated options. This leaves the market open to more collaboration, such as through the use of Docker Swarm. With this type of approach, users have control over the way they run their apps on various platforms, with open-source orchestration to allow consistent management and control of their applications and services.

    — Sharone Zitzman