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Tag: Multi-cloud

  • DH2i Launches DxOdyssey for Zero Trust Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Security

    DH2i’s DxOdyssey Set to Disrupt the Multi-Billion Dollar Cloud VPN Market

    DH2i to Demonstrate New DxOdyssey Software at PASS Summit 2018

    FORT COLLINS, Co. – November 6, 2018 – DH2i®, the leading provider of multi-platform Software Defined Perimeter and Smart Availability™ software for Windows and Linux, today announced the launch of DxOdyssey™, its new network security software that dynamically deploys perimeter security where needed in order to isolate services for fine-grained user access, creating a Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP). The new DH2i SDP offering gives medium and large organizations the perimeter security model needed for Zero Trust network connectivity between on-premises sites and/or multi-cloud environments. In addition, the new offering addresses customer desire for a highly scalable, self-healing networking solution that is easy to configure and manage, with a high ROI. DxOdyssey makes the application infrastructure “always-secure and always-on”.

    Today’s medium and large organization security and network admins are well-aware of the difficulties that surround using traditional approaches such as virtual private networks (VPNs) for perimeter security to connect on-premises sites and/or multi-cloud environments. The issues include:

    –        Complex configuration requiring dedicated routers, ACLs and FW policies increasing risk

    –        Users get a “slice of the network,” creating a lateral network attack surface

    –        Inbound connections create attack surfaces (e.g. DDoS)

    –        No ability to reduce attack surfaces with application-level segmentation

    DxOdyssey cross-platform SDP software overcomes these issues without the use and security risks of conventional networking connectivity approaches. DxOdyssey SDP software delivers:

    –        Micro-Perimeters – Application-level micro-tunnels give network admins the ability to deep segment by application, not by network. Limits remote users to fine-grained access to specific services. No ACLs or FW policies to manage. Eliminates lateral network attacks.

    –        Discreet Invisibility – Randomly generated non-standard UDP ports for dynamic on-demand micro-tunnel communications.Servers are cloaked and secured with no open ports. Virtually eliminates network attack surfaces.

    –        Multi-Cloud Secure – Designed to enable secure communications “from any host, to any host, anywhere” with application-level DTLS encrypted micro tunnels and Public Key Authentication. Scales across environments to build a secure hybrid/multi-cloud distributed application infrastructure. No cloud vendor lock-in.

    –        Smart Availability – Dynamic movement of micro-tunnel gateways and application workloads with self-healing automatic fault detection and failover. The perimeter can be orchestrated to change dynamically so that micro-tunnels and workloads always find their best execution venue (BEV). The entire application infrastructure is “always-secure and always-on.”

    –        Lightweight software – Software-Defined-Perimeter solution. Just install on any host and connect.Integrates into existing network infrastructure. No network reconfiguration. No appliances to deploy, configure or maintain.

    “A ‘zero-trust’ methodology assumes that assets, users and resources are untrusted.  To achieve a zero-trust architecture takes an extremely focused and dedicated effort, but can strengthen most organizations’ risk posture,” said Eric Hanselman, Chief Analyst, 451 Research. “IT professionals seeking to secure today’s more complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments and build highly available, application-aware capabilities should consider offerings such as DH2i’s DxOdyssey to move beyond the complexity and limitations of traditional VPNs.”

    “Traditional perimeter security solutions are obsolete for the new IT reality of hybrid and multi-cloud. They weren’t designed for them. They create too large of an attack surface. One need only open today’s paper to confirm this fact. Customers need a new perimeter security model to support hybrid and multicloud computing,” said Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i.”DH2i’s SDP solution, DxOdyssey, is purpose-built for this new perimeter security reality and is going to disrupt the multi-billion cloud VPN market* because it enables organizations to move away from using a traditional VPN and all of the associated issues for perimeter security. Instead, with DxOdyssey customers can build lightweight dynamic security perimeters to secure application- and workload-centric connections between on-premises and/or multi-cloud environments, with virtually no attack surface.”

    According to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Hosting and Managed Services, Budgets and Outlook, 2017 survey of 644 enterprise IT decision-makers, 58% of organizations are pursuing a hybrid strategy involving integrated on-premises systems and off-premises cloud/hosted resources.**

    DH2i will offer live demonstrations of its new DxOdyssey networking security software, as well as its DxEnterprise multi-platform Smart Availability software for Windows Server and Linux Server databases and stateful Docker containers, at this week’s PASS Summit, Booth # 401 (November 6-9, Seattle, WA).

    Tweet this: .@DH2i Launches DxOdyssey for Zero Trust Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Security — See it live at #PASSSummit 2018 http://dh2i.com/press/ #ZeroTrust #SDN #SoftwareDefined #Cloud #VPN

    *Overall, the global VPN market is valued at $45 billion U.S. dollars in 2014 and forecast for $70 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 (Statista 2018).

    About DH2i

    DH2i Company is the leading provider of multi-platform Software Defined Perimeter and Smart Availability™ software for Windows and Linux. DH2i software products DxOdyssey™ and DxEnterprise® enable customers to create an entire IT infrastructure that is “always-secure and always-on.” To learn more, please visit: www.dh2i.com, call: 800-380-5405 or +44 20 3318 9204, or email: info@dh2i.com.

  • Canonical announces release of Ubuntu 18.10 ‘Cosmic Cuttlefish’

    Ubuntu 18.10: Multi-cloud, new desktop theme and enhanced desktop snap integration

    London, UK, 18th October 2018; Canonical today announced the release of Ubuntu 18.10, focused on multi-cloud deployments, AI software development, a new community desktop theme and richer snap desktop integration.

    “Ubuntu is now the world’s reference platform for AI engineering and analytics” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “We accelerate developer productivity and help enterprises operate at speed and at scale, across multiple clouds and diverse edge appliances.”

    This year, the financial services industry has engaged significantly with Canonical and Ubuntu for infrastructure efficiency on premise and to accelerate their move to the cloud. The push for machine learning analytics and of fintech efforts around blockchain, distributed ledger applications and cryptocurrencies are current drivers of Ubuntu investments and deployments.

    Optimised for multi-cloud computing

    Ubuntu Server 18.10 images are available on all major public clouds, including minimal images popular for container workloads with a small footprint and fast boot time. For private clouds, Ubuntu 18.10 ships with OpenStack Rocky for AI and NFV hardware acceleration and Ceph Mimic to reduce storage overhead. Ubuntu Server 18.10 includes the latest Kubernetes version 1.12 which brings increased security and scalability by automating the provisioning of clusters with transport layer encryption and is more responsive to dynamic workloads through faster scaling.

    Snap momentum strengthens 

    Ubuntu’s secure Linux app store sports 4,100 snaps published by 1,700 developers and supported across 41 Linux distributions. Official desktop snaps from Spotify, Plex and Skype are popular, and major public cloud and server applications are now available including Google Cloud SDK, AWS CLI, and Azure CLI. The new release enables native desktop controls to access files on the host system.

    Improved gaming performance 

    The Linux 4.18 kernel together with updates in Mesa and X.org significantly improve game performance. Graphics support expands to AMD VegaM in the latest Intel Kabylake-G CPUs, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, B+ and Qualcomm Snapdragon 845.

    Ubuntu 18.10 introduces the GNOME 3.30 desktop and Yaru, the new community-developed default theme. Fingerprint unlock functionality is featured for compatible PCs and the latest versions of Firefox, LibreOffice, and Chromium are included.

    About Canonical

    Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, the leading OS for cloud operations. Most public cloud workloads use Ubuntu, as do most new smart gateways, switches, self-driving cars and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise support and services for commercial users of Ubuntu. Established in 2004, Canonical is a privately held company.

  • Cloud Orchestrators: Beneficial in a Multi-Cloud Environment

    Cloud Orchestrators: Beneficial in a Multi-Cloud Environment

    Recent outages of leading cloud providers affecting thousands of business worldwide, such as the Amazon Web Services S3 outage that occurred in late February, have forced many CIOs and CTOs to think hard about their cloud strategies, including whether a multi-cloud environment would be of benefit.

    ROI and Business Impact

    During AWS’ four-hour disruption, S&P 500 companies lost $150 million to $160 million, according to analysis by Cyence, a startup that models the economic impact of cyber risk.

    Web monitoring company Apica, which watches internet performance issues worldwide, discovered that 54 out of the top 100 internet retailers were impacted with a decrease of 20 percent or greater in performance, and three websites went down completely—Express, Lululemon and One Kings Lane—resulting in a high impact in business.

    During this outage, according to Apica spokesperson, Apple and other ecommerce sites were likely spared for an easy reason: They have designed their sites to spread themselves across multiple cloud vendors, so if a problem crops up in one cloud service, it doesn’t hurt them. This is, naturally, the recommended way to use a cloud service.

    Apple, Walmart, Newegg, Best Buy, Costco and, surprisingly, Amazon/Zappos were not affected by the outage.

    Organizations have since started looking for different means to avoid data loss and downtime and to better support different applications, not to mention resilient application support, customer management and data analytics. This is where multi-cloud computing can help solve the challenges and which focuses provisioning, managing and monitoring workload across many clouds.

    Multi-Cloud Computing

    Multi-cloud computing is termed as the use of more than one cloud environment, all of the same type or a mix of types, to satisfy business requirements. An enterprise can choose which workloads can be moved to different clouds, depending upon the service offered by cloud vendors, matching the business need.

    This article discusses the need of multi cloud adoption, its benefits and challenges in managing multiple cloud environments and how multi-cloud orchestrators help solve the challenges.

    Market Trend

    According to research firm IDC, by 2020 more than 85 percent of enterprises will adapt to multi-cloud architectures encompassing a mix of public cloud services, private clouds, community clouds and hosted clouds, driving up the rate and pace of change in IT organizations.

    According to research firm MarketsandMarkets:

    Cloud Model 2016 2021
    The Multicloud management market $939.3 million $3.4 billion (compound annual growth rate of 29.6%,)
    The hybrid cloud market $25.28 billion $84.67 billion

     

    What is Driving Multi-Cloud Adoption?

    All workload and business requirement cannot be the same—this is one of the primary drivers of a multi-cloud reality.

    Unique Needs: You can run each workload where it performs best, for the lowest cost.

    Legacy Apps: You can avoid the pain of migrating legacy apps to a new platform.

    Desire to Diversify: You can avoid vendor lock-in and latency while creating redundancy.

    Benefits of Multi-Cloud Computing

    • Flexibility: Companies can deploy to public, private and hybrid clouds using a range of services.
    • Reduce the expenditure: Competitive prices and services from different cloud providers enable companies to achieve optimum cost expenditure.
    • Enhanced autonomy: Companies avoid keeping all their IT workloads in one cloud provider’s basket.
    • Customization and enhanced IT performance: Customization leverages the best-of-breed capabilities from multiple cloud vendors.
    • Migration: Containers and microservices-based applications can be migrated easily across clouds.
    • Hardware diversity: Relying on multiple locations and multiple providers significantly reduces the chances of impacting QoS.
    • Avoid data loss and downtime: Using more than one cloud services helps an organization avoid data loss and downtime attributed to a breakdown in any single component in hardware, software, storage or network.
    • Multiple Geo Availability: Companies can leverage cloud vendors’ data centers in multiple geographies, enabling to scale the business.

    Challenges of Managing Multi-Cloud Environment

    While there’s a lot of talk about moving things between clouds, the reality is it’s still fairly new. Though clouds have become smart enough to put an end to data lock-in, every vendor deployment comes with its own set of challenges, such as unique portals and processes that companies need to manage and can be put into three different categories.

    Technical challenges

    • API: No single model of integration or infrastructure automation can work, as each cloud provider will provide a different API to access different cloud services.
    • Behaviors: There are many differences in how clouds behave for common actions or under certain circumstances. For example, some clouds automatically provision storage upon launch of a server or instance, while others do not.
    • Resource sizes and types: Each cloud provider will offer different sizes and types of compute, storage and network resources; hence, the IT team must think about provisioning with optimum resource size and type needed for their workloads.
    • Operating system images: Each cloud provider will provide a unique set of operating system images, which makes it difficult to run the workload using the same image in other cloud.
    • Hypervisors: Each cloud provider leverages different, and sometimes proprietary, hypervisor options.
    • Application stacks: Some cloud providers may provide a selection of common, preconfigured application stacks (such as LAMP or Java or .NET).
    • Add-on services and features: Each cloud provider will offer extra add-on services and features above and beyond basic compute, network and storage resources. These may include load balancing, application servers, analysis tools or databases.
    • Security capabilities: The access control capabilities will vary across cloud providers, becoming more complex if different providers demand different password complexities or authentication measures.
    • Network Capabilities: Each cloud offers different ways to define subnets, security groups and network gateways, increasing difficulty in network planning.

    Operational Challenges

    • Testing: Deploying apps to multiple clouds requires platform-specific testing, which needs separate automate tests targeting multiple cloud platforms.
    • Tool diversity: DevOps tools have to keep pace with the rapid changes being made to the platforms.
    • Maintaining security and governance: Companies will need to go through rules and regulations of each service provider to adhere to security compliance.
    • Managing applications and infrastructure configurations across multiple cloud stacks: This can be difficult since the cloud platforms do not share a common API, which exposes different service definitions and billing models.
    • Technical support and expertise: Extra administrative work and research is required to to determine the best provider and whether its services are compatible.
    • Geo-availability: Expand the business into new markets can be a challenge, as not all cloud providers have global footprints and offer data centers only in limited locations.

    Business Challenges

    • Cloud brokers: Managing cloud brokers is an additional cost while using multiple clouds.
    • Billing and Pricing: Each cloud provider offers unique pricing models as well as different billing capabilities, which necessitates the need for governance and cost optimization, providing summary along with detailed cost tracking across clouds.
    • Skill sets and training: A lack of skill set and expertise in different clouds in the organization can lead to outages of workloads and increase cost/effort.
    • Planning and execution: It can be difficult to choose the services that match a company’s business needs, pricing, governance and team’s expertise.

    How a Multi-Cloud Orchestrator Helps

    Regardless of the challenges, multi-cloud environments are growing, thanks in part to multi-cloud orchestration tools, which can prove to be a right fit to address above discussed challenges.

    These orchestration tools have the capability to make multiple cloud providers look like a single provider ensuring configuration of all cloud dependencies within one configuration model. These tools enable companies to automatically deploy and manage multi-cloud environments.

    Some of the big players in this segment are RightScale, OneOps, Cloudify and IBM Cloud orchestrator, which provide a standard set of interfaces and capabilities across a multi-cloud environment.

    We have identified some parameters which current multi-cloud management platforms are well-equipped to handle:

    • Planning and Execution of an application from design to transition to deployment.
    • Installation & configuration of infrastructure packages & services in an automated way.
    • Provisioning of application environment.
    • Deployment plan and execution.
    • Cost Management: Suggestion of cost effective cloud services and single dashboard to track the cost associated with different cloud services.
    • Monitoring of entire application stack.
    • Security & Governance as to who can view, create, execute environment related activities.
    • Blue-print Templates which can be easily reused to create a new environment.
    • Reporting: View a report of instances that are consumed by your organization across multiple clouds.

    Conclusion

    Multi-cloud orchestrator tools help address some of the above  challenges to configure, provision and deploy several cloud environments, as well as integrate service management from a single, self-service interface.

    Though present multi-cloud orchestration tools offer a more time- and cost-effective solution to manage different cloud providers for organizations to focus on larger business objectives, virtually all products in this category are young—bugs and inconsistencies can and will occur. Additionally, security can be a concern for many of the popular orchestration tools. Many APIs offered are not securely encrypted by default and need to have SSL added separately.

    We can say there is still a huge scope of improvement for multi-cloud orchestration tools to build more secure, easy-to-set up standardized workflows across different cloud providers to cover the challenges which multi-cloud computing era offers.

    About the Author / Rashi Sharma

    Rashi Sharma an architect working with Technology Office in HCL Technologies. She has expertise in AWS, DevOps consulting & configuration management methodologies. She is associated with DevOps COE, working on design and Development of DevOps solutions.

  • Quali CloudShell Rises to Multi-Cloud DevOps Challenge

    Quali CloudShell Rises to Multi-Cloud DevOps Challenge

    Multi-cloud computing is now an everyday reality for most IT organizations. Because of that, most DevOps teams are trying to figure out how to apply a repeatable set of processes against multiple clouds; rather than having to manage a unique pipeline for each cloud, DevOps teams want to be able to deploy application workloads on any cloud as necessary.

    With that goal in mind, Quali has extended its CloudShell tools for modeling production environments in a sandbox to include support for both Azure and OpenStack environments. Previously, CloudShell only supported Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware.

    Shashi Kiran, chief marketing officer for Quali, says version 8.0 of CloudShell makes it possible for developer, test, QA and compliance teams to create a truly authentic replicas of a production environments. That replica can then be used to create a blueprint of an application spanning all the physical or virtual infrastructure, data, applications, tools and services in that environment.

    CloudShell 8.0 also includes support for application configuration management using either a custom script or playbook created using the open-source Ansible IT automation framework. In addition, DevOps teams now can edit some app details directly within blueprints.

    Via a CloudShell web portal, shells now can be centrally managed, updated and removed. The new version also offers enhanced single sign-on (SSO) support, enabling more SAML security features and integration with third-party identity management tools. Finally, CloudShell 8.0 includes increased control of blueprint max reservation time, advanced search improvements and access to new table views.

    Kiran says CloudShell is unique in that it gives DevOps teams access to a model that eliminates the surprises that commonly occur when developers attempt to move an application into a production environment. Given the level of scale involved in modern applications, it’s not possible for developers to effectively replicate a production environment on their own machines. The result is a lot of rolling back of applications after they’ve been deployed into production. CloudShell eliminates that problem, says Kiran, by giving developers and IT operations teams access to a sandbox in which to make sure that applications work as expected once they are deployed in production.

    Rolling back applications in a multi-cloud world has become especially problematic. IT organizations now need to deploy applications locally on a private cloud and in a public cloud. But from an IT operations perspective each of those clouds is becoming more complex, which means the opportunity is greater for something to go awry when it comes time to deploy an application into production. Include the number of target platforms in the age of the cloud and the probability  that an application will work seamlessly the first time it’s deployed is virtually nil. Multiply all the application deployments and updates an IT organization is trying to manage, and it quickly becomes apparent how much time and effort is being lost.

    Production environments need to be as pristine as possible. The only way to make sure they remain that way is to make sure that every application that runs on them doesn’t ever get the chance to adversely affect their condition.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Top Reasons to Use Node.js

    Top Reasons to Use Node.js

    When considering the architecture of a new web app, it might be a good idea to include Node.js in the discussion as a key part of that architecture. Node.js could provide you with additional speed, can be used on numerous platforms and has an active community from which to get modules and other assistance.

    What is Node.js?

    Node.js is a server-side platform developed by Ryan Dahl in 2009. It was built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine and designed with a non-blocking, event-driven I/O. It is also cross-platform, able to be run on Windows, Linux and OS X. Its non-blocking I/O is due to its use of asynchronous functionality, which keeps the server from waiting on data to be returned before being able to move on to other tasks.

    Why Use It?

    Given the architecture of Node.js, a number of advantages are provided both to developers and the resulting apps they develop. A few of these advantages include speed, programming language consistency, real-time apps developed easily and a large number of modules/packages for developers to use while creating new apps.

    Speed

    Node.js offers speed advantages in many cases. First, it uses the Google V8 engine, which is optimized for JavaScript speed. Also, its use of non-blocking asynchronous behavior can ease the time it takes for users to see actions as complete, since things can be going on in the background while the user moves on to other tasks.

    One Language

    JavaScript is listed as the most popular programming language. Source: Thenewstack

    Using Node.js, front-end and back-end code can both be in JavaScript, so your developers don’t have to transition between languages as they move through the stack. Some architectures, such as the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, Node.js), are designed around this principle. In this case, the stack uses JavaScript for Express, Angular and Node. MongoDB uses BSON for database queries, which uses the same syntax as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).

    Seeing full-stack developer as the largest occupation and JavaScript as the top language among both back-end and front-end aligns with what we’ve been seeing in overall JavaScript adoption.

    Source: Mikeal Rogers, Node,js Foundation Community Manager 

    For developers, this can help both with moving across the stack during development as well as help communication among developers, as they will be referencing the same language (JavaScript) while discussing programming decisions.

    Real-Time Apps

    Node.js is a great platform for creating real-time apps. With a module such as Sockiet.io, you can create real-time chats, games and more. Along with its non-blocking asynchronous architecture, real-time apps can be developed with plenty of speed and responsiveness.

    Modules

    The Node Package Manager (NPM) makes it easy to install packages that others have developed to perform any number of tasks. This helps to encourage code-sharing among developers and to reduce the amount of custom development that has to be done when one or more packages can take care of that coding for you.

    Notable Examples

    Some notable examples of Node.js use are Paypal and Uber, showing that it can, indeed, be useful for large projects.

    Paypal

    Node.js and an all Javascript development stack helped PayPal bring efficiencies in engineering and helped rethink and reboot product, design and operational thinking.

    Source: Sameera Rao, Paypal Sr. Business Products Engineering Manager 

    Back in 2012, Paypal had a single app running all things, including UI, API and more. This included a lot of duplicated code that was copied and pasted from one app to another to make apps for different locations.

    Using Node.js, the company was able to modularize and clean up its code and processes, which in turn sped the development of apps it needed at any given time.

    According to Paypal’s engineering team, they were able to build the Node.js app with 33 percent fewer lines of code and 40 percent fewer files, and were able to build it twice as fast and with fewer people than before. Certainly, Node.js proved to be advantageous to their development.

    Uber

    Uber used Node.js from the beginning, and its distributed system was a perfect fit, since a lot of network requests are made. The non-blocking asynchronous I/O used by Node.js helped to ensure those requests could be made and handled quickly to provide the best service possible.

    Conclusion

    The benefits of Node.js have been proven. It helps speed development, can be used on numerous platforms and has an active community from which to get modules and other assistance. Include Node.js in your future conversations about website architecture.

    — Brian Wheeler

  • 12 Tips for Managing Your Multi-Cloud Environment

    12 Tips for Managing Your Multi-Cloud Environment

    No single cloud vendor has the perfect solution for your unique business situation. The only way to maximize the benefits of cloud services to your business is by dealing with several cloud providers and monitoring all of them simultaneously. That’s the IT equivalent of singing an aria while standing on your head and scrambling eggs. (Not really, but it can seem that way.)

    Here are 12 things to keep in mind when planning your company’s multi-cloud strategy:

    • Map your entire network, and then identify where the cloud fits in it. Get a clear picture of the cloud’s role in your overall system-management strategy to avoid having to backfill gaps in the data needs of business managers and other customers. Different lines of business will be best served by different cloud providers.
    • Work with vendors that respond quickly and positively to the unexpected. There will always be unforeseen situations when you’re stitching together multiple cloud services. Your partners should report regularly on the state of their services, enhancements, and new features.
    • Automate low-level monitoring and maintenance tasks. Two primary reasons for adopting cloud services are cost savings and more efficient operations. One way to achieve both is by reducing the amount of human oversight required to keep your systems humming.

    The potential complexity of multi-cloud management is shown in this flowchart encompassing the many elements that need to be stitched together precisely. Many of these low-level operations must be automated to optimize your strategy. Source: Carl P. Lehrmann, 451 Research

    • Follow your users. Pay close attention to how the “consumers” of your apps and systems are actually putting the tools to use. They are the best indicators of which processes are the biggest productivity boosters. You can also learn about any new services the users discover that help them get their work done faster, more efficiently and/or less expensively. This lets you get a jump on the kinds of tools the users are most likely to need in the future.
    • Double down on cost controls. You can’t control what you can’t see. Dealing with multiple vendors complicates the process for requisitioning new services. To avoid unnecessary impediments to quick implementation of useful new services, devise a purchasing process that is as flexible as the services themselves. However, not long after the service honeymoon period, evaluate whether each new service is proving to be worth the cost and whether there are better and/or less-expensive alternatives.
    • Application life cycle continues to dictate cloud migration. Data centers may be shrinking, but they are definitely not disappearing. For reasons related to security, compliance, insurance, and any number of other factors, some systems are staying in house for the foreseeable future. You certainly want to avoid attempting to lift and shift an in-house app to a cloud service, particularly one that is only a couple years old and thus hasn’t yet paid for itself. Once an older system is ready for a reinvention, it’s easier to make a business case for going cloud-native.
    • Take advantage of the power of pre-emptable virtual machines. Because they persist for no longer than 24 hours, pre-emptable VMs are a good choice for batch processing and fault-tolerant deployments, according to ComputerWeekly’s Matthew Cooter in a November 2016 article. Pre-emptable VMs are as much as 80 percent less expensive than Google’s regular instances, and their fixed price help companies plan and manage their costs.
    • Adopt an integrated data center management system designed for virtual environments. This is the only way to ensure your server, storage, network, security, operations and applications teams are working as a single unit toward common goals, according to Jay Litkey, president and founder of cloud service provider Embotics, in a November 21, 2016, article in Virtual Strategy magazine. Any organization structured around traditional physical infrastructure boundaries is destined to struggle with the shift to hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
    • Identify the apps in your organization that are best suited to cloud-native implementation. Traditional apps are monolithic, run as VMs, use a scale-up architecture and are generally more difficult to develop, deploy and maintain. By contrast, cloud-native apps are more modular and service-oriented, comprised of collections of containers and services, based on a scale-out architecture, and easy to automate, move, and scale.

    Focus on the apps in your organization that will benefit most from a cloud-native approach, and wait on those that are better served by deployment on a traditional data-center platform. Source: TechTarget

    • Match your apps to the services that play to their strengths. Big-name services such as VMware and AWS have bifurcated to meet the diverse needs of their customers. For example, VMware’s vSphere-based Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is intended for traditional apps, and the company’s Native Hybrid Cloud is designed for modular, microservice-based systems. Similarly, AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud, Elastic Block Store, EFS file system and VPC private networks mimic in-house data centers, while the company also supports higher-level services such as NoSQL databases, BI processing, Hadoop-like clusters, message queues, push notification services, media transcoders and search engines.
    • Automate policy across cloud environments. The only efficient approach to use of multiple cloud services is to have a single standard for policies that are applied automatically to each environment. The policies cover such areas as virtual servers, workloads, data storage, traffic flows, compliance/regulation, reporting and security. It’s also easier to apply updates and changes when you have a single configuration across different infrastructures because the changes propagate seamlessly from environment to environment.
    • Vendor lock-in becomes a thing of the past. When you rely solely on one public cloud service, it can be difficult to migrate virtual machines and other resources to another service. Among the factors to consider are comparable read/write loads, data transfer needs and network latency. By relying instead on your custom combination of cloud services, all of which share policies and configurations, you find yourself managing the change instead of the change managing you.

    — Brian Wheeler

  • Multi-Cloud: The Danger of Data Lock-In

    Multi-Cloud: The Danger of Data Lock-In

    Enterprises rarely think about cloud portability issues before transferring large amounts of data onto a cloud service provider such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. They were likely to ask questions on usage by other players in the industry (“the herd effect”) as well as the reliability of the cloud service and durability of data, among other things. Enterprises are starting to realize that as they store increasing amounts of data onto the cloud, it is easy to import data but difficult to get data out. While it is true that sophisticated users may be able to solve the problem, most run the risk of locking in their databases—the “crown jewels”—with the cloud provider.

    A common solution to the cloud portability issue is to develop an abstraction layer. Having an abstraction layer in place between an application and the cloud data service helps by minimizing the amount of code restructuring that would be required should an enterprise wish to migrate to a new cloud service. One example is the Amazon S3 API: The Google Cloud Framework has developed S3-compliant API to make it easy for enterprises to migrate their applications. The open-source community is also working to make it seamless; for example, the Python Boto library supports both the Amazon S3 service as well as the Google Cloud Storage service under the same abstraction layer.

    However, while an abstraction layer solves the application migration issue, what about the “data” itself? How easy would it be to migrate swathes of data from one cloud service provider to another? Let us do some simple mathematics on this subject. For example, let us assume you would like to migrate 10TB of bucket data from Amazon S3 to Google Cloud Storage. How long do you think it will take? The answer would surprise you—almost a month, by reasonable estimates! The sheer operational cost of managing the data transfer over a month would dwarf the storage and network bandwidth charges accrued in both cloud providers. It might be cheaper to transfer the contents of an Amazon S3 bucket onto a local hard drive, ship the drive to Google and ask the company to upload the drive contents onto a Google Cloud Storage bucket.

    How would someone solve the multi-cloud data lock-in problem? Would you:

    • Run copies of applications on multiple clouds and keep data in sync?
    • Maintain one cloud as the primary and other clouds as passive secondaries?
    • Trust one cloud for Tier 0 applications and other cloud for Tier 2 or Tier 3 applications?

    One of the  key issues is that of the data transfer time. We use intelligent change capture techniques to minimize the amount of data sent over the WAN links that connect multiple cloud providers. For example, take a version of an Apache Cassandra database running in AWS S3, store the version in Google Cloud Storage and restore the version to an Apache Cassandra database running in Microsoft Azure. This is the future of data protection: Not only does it allow you to protect against user errors and logical corruptions, but it also gives you protection across clouds to provide insurance against lock-in onto a single cloud service provider.

    Application Recovery Management: The Rise of Polyglot Persistence

    Enterprises are using a variety of different data stores to capture the needs of a varying set of applications and their access patterns. Relational data stores might be the right choice for multi-faceted normalized data, but data stores today have to cater to a varying degree of access patterns—for example, a relational database cannot keep up with the high volume of a social media stream, and, likewise, a NoSQL data store cannot perform joins efficiently on a normalized data set. This term is referred to as “polyglot” persistence, wherein composite applications are sprayed over multiple data stores for varying types of data and methods of data manipulation. In the earlier days, data architects chose a relational data store such as Oracle and then mapped the application to this data store. Today, the landscape has changed significantly: Data architects first classify the data types and expected manipulation methods and then choose the appropriate data store to fit the needs.

    Let us use the example in which an enterprise needs to identify all the customers in the past year, their purchase characteristics, the customer acquisition method, the social media comments on the post-purchase experience as well as any support interactions. Remember, that in today’s information age, the processing has to be in real time: it would be very imprudent for a business to react to a negative social media reference months after it happened. As one can guess, multiple sources of data with varying degrees of structure need to be collected and analyzed to meet these basic requirements of the enterprise. This type of problem cannot be solved easily or cost-effectively with one type of database technology. Even though some of the basic information is transactional and probably in a relational data store, the other information is non-relational and will require a few different types of persistence engines: document stores for static images and text collateral, spatial for geo-locating mobile customer interactions and graph for deriving relations between the multi-faceted data described above.

    But has data protection kept up? Remember that the data is highly correlated with complex interdependencies between the data stores. A logical error in one data store is likely to propagate to others, so recovery has to span the entire spectrum of polyglot persistence. Today’s data protection is highly siloed with recovery limited to a single type of data store. This is clearly not enough!! What one has to do is to synchronize versioning across multiple data stores according to the needs of the application—this is an application consistent polyglot version. The key advantage of this version is to allow us to recover an entire application rather than sub parts of it.

    Conclusion

    It is time to rethink and reinvent data protection. The world of enterprise IT is experiencing a massive change as cloud is becoming the de-facto infrastructure of choice and multi-faceted big data is becoming the hallmark of the next generation of applications. Data protection must adapt to these changing environments and deliver the next generation of services to the enterprise.

    — Shalabh Goyal

  • Flexiant Offers Cloud Freedom for DevOps

    Flexiant Offers Cloud Freedom for DevOps

    Flexiant Concerto gives DevOps the fastest way to build, deploy and automate applications consistently across multiple clouds

    London, UK – March 25, 2015 – DevOps tasked with driving success in the cloud need a solution to efficiently leverage multiple clouds while avoiding cloud lock-in. Flexiant today announces the commercial availability of Flexiant Concerto. With Flexiant Concerto, DevOps have cloud freedom to automate the build, deployment and operations of applications consistently across multiple clouds. Concerto is available through four disruptive pricing models aimed to deliver multi-cloud at a price point everyone can afford.

    Not limited to just Amazon Web Services, Flexiant Concerto gives DevOps the ability to automate their application on Digital Ocean, GoGrid, Google Compute Engine, IBM Softlayer, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, amongst others through one consistent toolset and interface.

    Marco Meinardi, Vice President Products at Flexiant, said “Other solutions enable people to use multi-cloud platforms once an application is built, or if it’s already present within the cloud providers’ specific library. Flexiant Concerto is unique because it allows DevOps to build, deploy, configure, run, publish, monitor, load balance and auto-scale applications straight in the cloud or multiple clouds of their choice, without relying on the cloud provider’s specifics. Once deployed, that workload can be replicated on other clouds if necessary, with the guarantee of the exact same result helping to reduce uncertainty and risk when developing in the cloud.”

    Flexiant Concerto helps to remove barriers to productivity by automating core and non-core components, consistently across the best cloud for the project/department/business. A great example is how Flexiant Concerto’s UI takes away the complexity to deploy Chef cookbooks, making them easily accessible to everyone. Flexiant Concerto automates the Chef configuration, i.e. set up and configuration of Chef servers and clients with the various dependencies involved, and the management, pull and execution of cookbooks.

    Chef’s Vice President EMEA & Chief Enterprise Architect, Justin Arbuckle, said, “Flexiant Concerto’s hosted Chef solution makes managing the Cloud easy and it uses Chef at the heart of its engine.”

    Flexiant Concerto also offers DevOps the ability to drive continuous innovation. By making Flexiant Concerto part of the CI/CD pipeline, DevOps can enable the automated testing and deployment of every code change in the application, offering a cycle of continuous feedback and release, to maximize the efficiency and productivity.

    George Knox, CEO, Flexiant said, “We help DevOps achieve velocity across multiple clouds with the automation of core and non-core components and Concerto’s configuration management capabilities. Rapidly and frequently adapt applications to the business needs – from the code development to the production deployment – with Concerto.”

    Launched first in 2014, Flexiant Concerto has been refined based on initial user feedback. Flexiant Concerto offers disruptive pricing starting with a free version FREE4LIFE and offers packages that can support businesses as they grow. Find out more about the packages.

     

    Concerto is available through four disruptive pricing models aimed to deliver multi-cloud at a price point everyone can afford.

    About Flexiant

    Flexiant provides solutions aimed solely at helping service providers capture the cloud market opportunity. Its portfolio of solutions includes Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator and Flexiant Concerto. Since 2009 Flexiant has armed service providers with the solutions necessary to launch revenue generating cloud services quickly and easily.

    Flexiant has been named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Management and received the Info-Tech Research Group Trendsetter Award for two consecutive years. Flexiant is a Gold Parallels Partner and a Dell certified technology partner. Customers include Brinkster, Computerlinks, FailProof Technology and ThinkGrid Ceano, part of Colt Telecom. Flexiant is also a key participant in the EU’s Horizon 2020 program. For more information visit www.flexiant.com.