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Tag: private cloud

The Cloud Reset: DevOps Brings Workloads Back to Private Clouds

Many DevOps teams are hitting the reset button and rebalancing their use of public versus private clouds after a decade of “public cloud-first” strategies.

Recent research reveals that 69% of enterprises are considering moving workloads from public cloud back to private environments. DevOps teams’ desire for greater control, security and cost predictability is largely driving this shift. Indeed, 92% of IT leaders say they trust private cloud more for security and compliance needs than public cloud

The shift to private cloud is very DevOps-driven. This is because all stakeholders can benefit. DevOps teams benefit from the private cloud’s stability and how existing or future investments in on-premises infrastructure are complemented and maintained. With the benefits cloud computing offers (automation, scalability and self-service), DevOps teams are better able to manage security and meet compliance needs, especially when data sovereignty is concerned. Additional benefits for the business DevOps stakeholders include how private cloud can help reduce rapidly rising public cloud costs.

Learning from a Decade of Public Cloud

The lessons learned in the public cloud space over the past few years are key. Public cloud platforms are agile and scalable, but they often present unpredictable costs and data governance issues. Most companies admit that at least some of their public cloud budget is wasted, and almost half believe that at least a quarter of their cloud spending is lost to inefficiencies.

Cost unpredictability has surfaced as a major concern. Most companies acknowledge that at least some of their public cloud budget is wasted, and nearly half believe that at least a quarter of their cloud spending is lost to inefficiencies. What began as a promise of “pay only for what you use” often led to surprise bills from unforeseen usage spikes, data transfer costs and complex pricing models that made budgeting nearly impossible.

Equally significant are concerns over security and data control. While public cloud providers offer robust security features, many organizations struggle to navigate the shared responsibility model and the complexities of managing security across multiple cloud environments. More leaders believe that private or hybrid cloud environments better meet stringent security requirements and provide them with direct oversight of critical data. For industries with strict compliance mandates, having complete control over data location and access has become non-negotiable.

The Evolution, Not Abandonment, of Cloud Strategy

This shift doesn’t signify a failure of cloud computing or a return to traditional on-premises infrastructure. Instead, it illustrates a maturation of cloud strategy. Organizations seek the same cloud benefits, such as automation, self-service provisioning and scalability, but within a more predictable and accountable operational model.

Private clouds have advanced considerably since the early days of virtualization. Modern private cloud platforms now provide the same cloud-native capabilities that made public clouds appealing: containerization, microservices architecture, DevOps tooling and infrastructure as code. The distinction lies in where these capabilities are deployed and who oversees them.

Strategic Workload Placement

The trend toward repatriation is fundamentally about strategic workload placement. Organizations are realizing that not all workloads are equal, and the “lift and shift everything to public cloud” strategy often fails to yield the expected benefits.

Workloads with predictable resource requirements, sensitive data, or stable performance needs are increasingly being transitioned back to private cloud environments, where they can be managed and controlled more effectively. Meanwhile, workloads that benefit from elastic scaling, global distribution, or specialized cloud services continue to reside in public clouds.

This hybrid approach enables organizations to optimize for different priorities, keeping mission-critical applications in private clouds for security and control, while utilizing public clouds for innovation and experimentation. It’s about selecting the right tool for each task rather than forcing all workloads into a single model.

Cost Governance and Predictability

In private cloud environments, IT departments can allocate resources per workload and precisely determine the cost of delivering those resources. This predictability encompasses not only infrastructure costs but also operational expenses, compliance costs and the total cost of ownership.

When a department’s application suddenly requires additional compute power in a private cloud, it prompts a conversation about capacity planning and budget allocation, but not an unexpected bill at the end of the month. This level of control enables organizations to more effectively align IT spending with business objectives and mitigate the “shadow IT” issue that often plagues public cloud deployments.

The Path Forward

In this era of cloud reset, DevOps teams are not abandoning the benefits of the cloud, but rather refining their approach. Our analysis at ReveCom shows the next phase in cloud computing for DevOps teams involves selecting the right environment for each workload while ensuring performance, interoperability and accountability are in alignment with DevOps.

For many organizations, this means developing sophisticated hybrid cloud strategies that leverage the best of both worlds. Private clouds offer the control, security and predictability required for core business applications, while public clouds provide the flexibility and innovation platform for new initiatives.

As DevOps teams continue to move to private and hybrid clouds, it’s a strategic shift in how they think about their infrastructure. It’s acknowledging that the cloud isn’t just a destination, but an operational approach that can be applied where it makes the most sense for business. As DevOps teams continue to refine their cloud strategies, the focus is shifting from “cloud-first” to “cloud-smart,” with private clouds increasingly playing a crucial role in delivering the promise of cloud computing while maintaining the governance and control that enterprises need.

October 21, 2025
GitLab Unfurls Dedicated SaaS Edition in the Cloud

GitLab today made available to a limited number of customers a single-tenant version of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

David DeSanto, vice president of product at GitLab, said the GitLab Dedicated option provides all the benefits of a cloud platform without running afoul of any potential compliance issues.

Designed to be deployed on a cloud platform selected by the customer, DeSanto said the single-tenant edition of the platform makes sure that all the data stored in the cloud is isolated. In addition, the access to GitLab Dedicated is provided via a private network connection, he added.

Initially, GitLab Dedicated is being made available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud with support for other cloud platforms planned for 2023 once it becomes generally available.

GitLab is, in effect, trying to strike a balance between a lower-cost multitenant edition of the platform or, alternatively, requiring organizations to deploy an on-premises edition of the platform themselves, DeSanto said.

In general, GitLab expects this latest version of the platform to appeal most to organizations that operate in highly regulated industries. However, the number of organizations looking to isolate their data in a private cloud to better protect their software supply chains is expanding, he noted.

In the wake of a series of high-profile breaches and vulnerability disclosures, the number of organizations that are reviewing their software supply chains has increased. Less clear is the degree to which organizations will look to lock down their existing CI/CD platform versus replacing it with a more secure modern alternative that can be more easily accessed via the cloud.

The challenge, of course, is replacing a CI/CD environment is not trivial, so organizations will need to consider the time and effort made over the years to customize their CI/CD environment. In some instances, that customization provides a meaningful competitive advantage. In other cases, however, the weight of maintaining all those customizations has become more troublesome than it’s worth.

Each individual organization will need to decide to what degree they will want to manage the DevOps platforms used to construct applications. More organizations are deciding they prefer to devote as much of their resources as possible to writing code instead of managing the underlying CI/CD platform used to create their applications, said DeSanto.

Regardless of approach, the number of organizations adopting DevOps best practices to build and deploy applications faster continues to increase. A CI/CD platform accessed via the cloud lowers the barrier to entry for smaller organizations that typically don’t have the skills and resources required to manage DevOps platforms.

In the meantime, SaaS-based approaches should significantly increase the number of applications being constructed using DevOps workflows. The level of DevOps adoption will naturally vary by organization. However, the total number of custom applications being used to drive, for example, digital business transformation initiatives should considerably expand in the months and years ahead as more applications are built and deployed at incredible speed.

November 30, 2022
The Past, Present and Future of OpenStack

OpenStack, described as the world’s most widely deployed open source cloud software, will mark its 12-year anniversary milestone later in 2022. In September 2012, the OpenStack Foundation launched as an independent organization to manage and promote the technology—a watershed moment for a project announced just two years earlier.

Today, with contributions from more than 34,000 people at 550 companies, OpenStack is one of the three most active open source projects, alongside the Linux kernel and the Chromium web browser, according to the group now known as the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF). More than 25 million OpenStack cores are running in production worldwide.

It’s easy to forget that only a few years ago many predicted OpenStack’s demise. Initially, OpenStack was positioned as a general-purpose private cloud platform that offered an open source alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS), but it never stood much of a chance in that matchup.

Then, after OpenStack regained momentum and pivoted to become a platform for telco network function virtualization infrastructure (NFVI), it was rumored that it would be overtaken by the new ‘next big thing’—Kubernetes, the open source orchestration and coordination system for containerized applications.

The Kubernetes-as-OpenStack-killer talk was silly, in retrospect, because the technologies are complementary, not competitive. In fact, more than 70% of OpenStack users reported running Kubernetes on top of OpenStack for container coordination, according to the OIF.

And OpenStack adoption should continue to flourish in 2022. Gartner forecasted that global spending on cloud services will exceed $480 billion this year, up from $313 billion in 2020, as more organizations invest in hybrid cloud: A mix of pay-as-you-go public clouds and private clouds that can offer lower, more predictable operating costs and greater customization. As the hybrid cloud market expands and open source continues to become more firmly entrenched in development and IT organizations, OpenStack is more relevant than ever.

If you’re not familiar with OpenStack, here are 10 things you should know about its past, present and its future.

1. OpenStack began in early 2010 as a collaboration between Rackspace and engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Rackspace wanted to rewrite the infrastructure code running its cloud servers and the NASA team wanted to standardize the space agency’s websites. Their original mission was “to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.”

2. The first OpenStack design summit was held in Austin, Texas in July 2010, and the project was officially launched at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) later that month.

3. A whopping 80% of OpenStack clouds are used in production, while 13% are under development and 8% are in the proof-of-concept stage, according to the OIF. With that level of adoption, no wonder OpenStack is considered the most widely deployed open source cloud software.

4. An OIF survey showed that nearly half of the organizations using OpenStack have deployed at least 1,000 cores. The breakdown: 29% of organizations have 1,000-9,999 cores, 13% have 10,000-99,999 cores, 6% have 100,000-999,999 cores and 1% have one million or more cores.

5. An enormous corporate ecosystem supports OpenStack, including IBM, Red Hat, HP Enterprise, Intel, Huawei, NEC, Cisco, VMware, AT&T and Canonical, whose Ubuntu Linux distribution is the most popular operating system for OpenStack deployment (used by about 40% of OpenStack clouds globally).

6. OpenStack has a great resource guide available on openstack.org with all kinds of helpful information for developers, including for those new to the platform.

7. One of the main qualities people love about OpenStack is that it’s a modular architecture with interconnected components including, for example, services that expose API endpoints and handle basic cloud functions, a dashboard, SQL databases that store records created by OpenStack services and message queues for facilitating inter-process communication.

8. OpenStack jargon includes several special terms. A tenant, for example, is a user or group of users with isolated cloud resources. (OpenStack is multitenant.) An image is a template containing an OS for instance provisioning. A flavor is a template defining cloud resources for instance provisioning. An instance is a virtual machine (VM) provisioned from the image and flavor. And so on.

9. The platform has expanded through the years to include a panoply of core services, such as the Keystone identity service that manages domains, projects, roles, groups and user accounts, the Glance service that manages the catalog of cloud images, Nova for instance provisioning, scheduling and termination, the Neutron network service and the Cinder block storage service.

10. Beyond these core services, several newer services are seeing increased adoption. For example, according to the OIF, use of Ironic, a project that provisions bare metal, nearly tripled between 2016 and 2021. Others with growing traction include Octavia, which provides load balancing capabilities, Manila for file system sharing between instances and OpenStack Charms which provide rich life cycle management capabilities for services.

As these 10 points show, far from being on its deathbed, OpenStack has survived, sometimes against the odds, and thrived as a unique force in open source and cloud computing. Given its journey over the last 10 years, it will be interesting to see what lies ahead in the next decade.

February 18, 2022
Ten Years Later — What Is Cloud Native?
Ever since the term cloud native made its debut in 2010, its usage has grown in popularity. Today cloud native is used as a qualifier for innovative, leading edge applications, platforms and systems or cloud-savvy organizations and processes.

However, what is cloud native exactly? There are some definitions, there are many opinions, but first and foremost there is a lot of confusion: Is my system already cloud native if I follow a microservice-based architecture? Is my system already cloud native if I run containers? Do I have to change development and operations?

In this post, we cut through any uncertainty and ambiguity and provide an accurate and concise definition of cloud native systems.

However, first, we have to discuss a set of prerequisite concepts.

Application + Platform = System

Frequently, in our day to day conversations, we use the terms application, platform and system interchangeably. Yet in this blog post, we draw a strict distinction:
- Application: An application is the set of components that are designed and implemented for a specific use case.
- Platform: A platform is the set of components that are designed and implemented independently of a specific use case.
- System: A system is the combination of an application and a platform. Generally, we refer to an application as being hosted on a platform.
End users do not interact with applications or with platforms only; end users interact with systems. Consequently, we will focus our discussion on system-level properties, not application—or platform-level properties.

Application + Cloud Platform = Cloud System

A cloud platform is a service provider that enables a service consumer to request and release resources on demand via an Application Programming Interface (API).

According to this definition, a cloud platform is any service provider that enables a service consumer to request and release resources on demand:
- Public Cloud Platform: A public cloud platform is a service provider that offers resources outside of its own organization.
- Private Cloud Platform: A private cloud platform is a service provider that offers resources within its own organization.
Consequently, a cloud system is any application that is hosted on a cloud platform. However, what is a cloud native system?

Responsiveness, Scalability and Reliability

The distinction of cloud native systems versus non-cloud native systems is drawn along the lines of responsiveness, scalability and reliability.

In a nutshell, responsiveness is a system’s ability to meet the users’ expectations. In order to quantify responsiveness, we rely on a set of four related concepts:
- Service Level Indicator: A service level indicator is a quantitative observation about the behavior of a system.
- Service Level Objective: A service level objective is a predicate (a function that yields true or false) on a service level indicator that determines whether the behavior of a system meets an objective.
- Error Rate: The error rate is the ratio of the number of observations that do not meet their objectives to the number of observations in total for a fixed time interval.
- Error Budget: The error budget is an upper limit on the error rate.
Based on the above, we can now define responsiveness of a system as the ability of the system to keep its error rate below its error budget.

These concepts are best explained with a tangible example: Consider a web application processing HTTP transactions, that is, accepting HTTP requests and returning HTTP responses.

Service Level Indicators

Here, we define two SLIs.
- SLI Latency: determines the latency of a transaction, that is, the time when the request enters the system to the time the response leaves the system.
- SLI Result: determines the result of a transaction, that is, the status code of the response.
SLIs are recorded at the edge of a system, here the Ingress component, to exclude any variation that is outside our control and focus on the performance of the system that is within our control. For example, we do not want to include any variation in observed latency or observed results originating in the users’ network connections. However, we do want to focus on the performance of the system once Ingress accepts the request until Ingress returns the response.

Next, we define two SLOs.
- SLO Latency: For this example, we define the SLO Latency to be met if a transaction’s SLI Latency is less than 250 milliseconds.
- SLO Result: For this example, we define the SLO Result to be met if a transaction’s SLI Result is not in the HTTP 500 range.
Finally, we set the value of the error rate’s time interval to a 30-day sliding window and the value of the error budget’s to 1%.

By definition, this system is responsive if the ratio of the number transactions over the last 30 days that do not meet their SLOs to the number of transactions over the last 30 days in total does not exceed 1%.

Scalability and Reliability

At this point we have the necessary tools to define scalability and reliability:
- Scalability is responsiveness in the presence of load.
- Reliability is responsiveness in the presence of failure.
So Finally, What Is Cloud Native?

With the definition of cloud systems and the definition of responsiveness in place, we can now define cloud native systems: A cloud native system is a cloud system that is scalable and reliable by construction.

The operator “by construction” is in stark contrast to “by requirement”: The design and implementation of a cloud native application guarantees scalability and reliability within the limits set by the service level objectives and error budgets.

According to this definition a cloud native application must be able to:
- Autonomously detect and mitigate the presence of load.
- Autonomously detect and mitigate the presence of failure.
Discussion

This post defined the term “cloud native” as a property of a system, not as a property of organizations or processes.

The defining criteria of a cloud native system are scalability and reliability by construction. Here, the employment of microservices (an architectural choice) or containers (a technological choice) is not a defining criteria of cloud native systems. If you want to know more, head over to—or better yet, get involved with—the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a Linux Foundation project founded in 2015 with the mission to build a sustainable ecosystem for cloud native systems.

— Dominik Tornow
February 25, 2020
Out of Date: Cloud Anti-Trends of 2019
Let’s talk about 2019 cloud tech anti-trends. A lot of those anti-trends are nothing but cloud myths, which are still widely spread and talked about.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some anti-trends and try to understand where’s the myth part in them.

Private Cloud Is Not Popular Anymore

According to the IDC research organization, by 2021, companies from around the world will spend more than half a billion dollars on cloud tech. This is two times more than in 2016. At the same time, there is a clear tendency: The public cloud workloads are growing, while the situation is exactly opposite for the private cloud. Cisco said, after three years 73% of the company’s applications will move to the public cloud, while just a year ago this figure was around 50%.

Such a shift is partly caused by cloud providers, who offer users of public clouds more and more features that simplify the development of services. For example, tools that allow creating machine learning models, manage software deployment processes and analyze logs.

That’s why many felt the active development of a public cloud meant the final decline of the private cloud niche. During his speech at a conference last year, Anthony Lai, senior vice president of the cloud-based division of NetApp said private clouds would “die out.”

I wouldn’t expect the private cloud to disappear completely. The statement that it will cease to exist is only partly true. The private cloud may disappear as an independent unit, but it will remain part of the hybrid IT infrastructure.

As noted in Gartner, 72% of companies in the world use a hybrid strategy. And it is expected this figure will grow. According to analysts from Market Research, the market for cloud object storage systems will reach six billion dollars by 2023. This will definitely spur further development of the hybrid IT infrastructure.

One reason to use private clouds is predictable business processes.

Yes, the public cloud offers flexible scaling. The company does not have to urgently buy new hardware if the load on the services has increased dramatically (for example, the application became a success and tons of new users came in). In this case, you can simply rent additional computing power. But if the load can be predicted (say, it is static) a private cloud is often enough.

Also, a private cloud is often used to create object storage. Sure, object storage services are also available in the public cloud and a number of companies use them. Just a couple of years ago, Netflix migrated its entire infrastructure to the public cloud.

However, not all companies need to build a distributed infrastructure as Netflix did. There are cases when companies have object storage in a private cloud because it already has an appropriate low-cost automated infrastructure. CERN is one of them. All the data generated by the Large Hadron Collider is stored in a private cloud.

The IT-Infrastructure Market Is Oversaturated with Specialists

Today, companies are actively abandoning their own infrastructure in favor of cloud solutions. That is why the need for in-house specialists engaged in its maintenance, gradually disappears. The IaaS provider takes on many issues related to the management and administration of the infrastructure, and the specialists need only ensure that everything is set up correctly.

That is also why companies often abandon their own IT departments. At first glance, it seems this will gradually lead to instability in the labor market. Experts in the field of IT infrastructure, system administrators and data center operators will have to compete fiercely for the remaining jobs. But will they really have to?

This does not mean such specialists have become completely unnecessary. In reality, in-house specialists simply change the focus of their activities. Most of the IT infrastructure administration tasks are now on IaaS and IaaS providers are now the ones who need and are actively fighting for such specialists.

Even when you do use third-party solution, that is what happens sometimes:

When customers start using intermix.io for the first time, they can see the set-up and configuration of their Amazon Redshift cluster in the context of their queries and workflows.

At that point, customers experience one common reaction: Knowing what we know now, how would we set up our Redshift cluster had we do it all over again?

The answer is not that straightforward.

However, sometimes it happens that migration to the cloud stimulates the company to strengthen and develop the IT department more, attracting new cloud employees. These people study the cloud ecosystem, analyze the trends and evaluate how the transfer of an application to the cloud will affect the company’s work. If the company is already working with the cloud, then cloud specialists are also exploring new features of the current platform and exploring services that will benefit a business in the future.

Clouds Don’t Hold New Technologies

Four years ago, IBM listed seven cloud technologies to help businesses. The list includes IaaS/PaaS, private/hybrid cloud, test and application development environments, big data processing and disaster recovery solutions, along with data storage and backup systems.

These technologies served as a standard technology stack for a long time. It was all developed with the efforts of IaaS providers. Therefore, there was an opinion that the cloud ecosystem was finally formed and no other use cases will be foreseen in the near future.

New Directions Still Appear: The blockchain technology was born in 2008, gained worldwide popularity 8 years later and came to the cloud about a year ago. Based on the virtual infrastructure, a new direction has started to develop: Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS). In this case, the client receives a virtual environment prepared for working with blockchain technology. Users can create their own applications on the blockchain (for example, for processing financial transactions) and run them in a secure virtual environment.

Quantum Computers: the most recent, fresh cloud trend. The quantum machine uses qubits instead of bits we are used to. Unlike bits, qubits can take the value of zero and one at the same time. Thus, a quantum machine can be in several states at once. The more qubits a quantum computer has, the faster it performs the tasks assigned to it. Imagine how much faster it can brute-force passwords or simulate chemical reactions.

Quantum computers already have practical applications. IBM has recently opened access to its 20-qubit developments via the IBM Q cloud platform. And this year, Alibaba partnered with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to deploy an 11-qubit quantum device in the cloud. Quantum Computing as-a-service (QCaaS) opened the way for experiments on the infrastructure of providers and proved the cloud industry can adapt to the emergence of new technologies.

Another Trend Is Fogging or Fog Computing: IT-industry experts are trying to solve the problem of delay in transferring data to the cloud. In the case of fogging, server components are not located in the centralized data center, but on the periphery, close to the end-user devices.

In such an architecture, a main, large cloud still remains but has additional networking and computing layers: cloud, fog, edge. The Cloud (cloud layer, primary) solves expensive tasks for periphery machines (edge layer, end-user): data analysis, system logging, etc. The fog layer does local calculations in real-time to generate reports and send them to the central hub. This architecture improves the performance of the entire infrastructure by significantly (up to 10 times) reducing the delay in data exchange.

To Sum It Up on Cloud Myth-Busting

So, as with everything, rushing into extremes doesn’t help. That’s what we figured out:
1. Even though public cloud seems to be a mainstream option, private cloud infrastructure still makes sense for certain use cases.
2. Most of the IT infrastructure administration tasks are now on IaaS and IaaS providers are now the ones who need and are actively fighting for Engineers i.e. market is more than far away from being oversaturated with specialists.
3. Clouds don’t hold new technologies. Did anyone really believe this one anyway?
— Dmitrii Borodin
August 26, 2019
Mirantis Adds Modeling Tool to Configure Private Cloud

At the Open Infrastructure Summit conference, Mirantis today unfurled a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application through which IT administrators can employ modeling tools to configure private clouds based on either OpenStack or Kubernetes.

Boris Renski, chief marketing officer for Mirantis, said rather than having to manually configure a private cloud for an on-premises IT environment using YAML files, the Model Designer for Mirantis Private Cloud enables IT administrators to configure a private cloud using modeling tools they access via a graphical interface (GUI). The Model Designer is scheduled for general availabilility in May.

That approach then makes it feasible for IT administrators with little to no programming expertise to quickly spin up private clouds within the context of a DevOps environment using a set of declarative tools, added Renksi.

Those tools also enable IT administrators to specify the degree of configurability they require. A basic configurability level automatically populates most of the cluster settings to a default set of pretested values. The most advanced “ultraviolence” configurability setting enables IT administrators to adjust virtually every aspect of their on-premises cloud. The resulting configuration models are then fed into DriveTrain, which is the automation framework that Mirantis provides within Mirantis Private Cloud.

Renski said requiring IT administrators to master all the nuances associated with managing YAML files to stand up a private cloud is one of things holding back adoption of both on-premises private clouds and the best DevOps practices that should be relied to mange them. Most organizations that want to make the transition to DevOps clearly want to be able to manage infrastructure as code in much the same way public cloud service providers do today. The challenge is, the learning curve associated with achieving that goal is simply too high for the average IT administrator, he said, adding a modeling tool made available as SaaS application will make it possible for even mere IT mortals to easily spin up a private cloud within an on-premises IT environment.

Both OpenStack and Kubernetes suffer to varying degrees from often being too complex for the average IT organization to set up. Because of those complexity issues, adoption of both platforms often is limited to IT organizations that have advanced IT skills. But as the deployment processes surrounding both platforms become more automated, it’s probable the number of organizations adopting either platform will increase. At the same, IT organizations that do embrace either platform more likely will spin up more instances once they no longer have to rely on a cumbersome manual set of processes.

Of course, setting up a private cloud based on either OpenStack or Kubernetes is only the beginning of the IT challenge. Once all those private clouds are deployed, IT organizations need to acquire the tools and expertise required to manage them on an ongoing basis. In fact, one of the things IT organizations should consider in the age of the private cloud is the level of integration of the tools from vendors they intend to rely on to set up and then manage a private cloud.

— Mike Vizard

April 29, 2019
‘Software is Eating the World,’ and DevOps Needs a New Infrastructure to Keep Up

Every Fortune 1000 company should expect to face Uber-like competition in the next decade. These digital disruptors are software companies; they are basing their business models on software platforms, and development of these software platforms is much more agile than in the past. To compete effectively, every company must essentially become a software company, and it must adopt agile software development practices to keep up with the demand for new applications and services.

Software Development: The Engine of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation will be the mantra for IT initiatives in 2018, and the underlying technology will be agile software development. IT organizations are at a crossroads: They can either work to become more agile and innovative, or business unit managers will decide to expand their use of public cloud providers, reducing the role and value of internal IT organizations.

Applications are defining and continuously redefining products, services, customer experience, business processes and competitive advantage. About the only thing not being redefined by applications is the IT infrastructure. As applications and organizations become more dynamic, IT largely operates at the pace it always has. High-velocity DevOps life cycles collide with an IT infrastructure that is optimized for stability and is too complex to keep up. The pace of the organization is slowed down by its applications, while the pace of applications is slowed down by their infrastructure.

How DevOps’ Role is Changing

For decades, DevOps organizations have been at the mercy of IT departments, having to request resources for development efforts. DevOps groups have endured long provisioning cycles, waiting days or weeks for IT to provision servers, databases, development tools and other resources. Even the tools for requesting resources are antiquated—most IT departments rely on manual ticketing systems that require requests to be passed from one silo to another before a request is completed.

But with software development as a corporate priority, companies are now looking for much more streamlined development processes. DevOps now wants to drive the provisioning process. This has given rise to a lot of ad hoc use of public cloud resources by DevOps teams. No longer content to wait for the IT department to provision resources, DevOps organizations are taking control away from the IT department and are provisioning resources themselves with public cloud services such as AWS, Azure or Google. These platforms have enabled agile software development, and the spread of agile software development is integrating development and deployment into a unified continuous integration/continuous development/continuous deployment (CI/CD/CD) process. In the meantime, the IT department wants to maintain control over the infrastructure and software tools in use, as well as the monthly spend on public cloud resources.

Unfortunately, what began as a fast, ad hoc way of acquiring compute resources from the public cloud has become a significant drain on enterprise resources. Monthly cloud costs are spiraling, and the IT department has little control over these expenditures. In many ways, DevOps has usurped IT’s role in resource provisioning. Also, it’s easy to create a sprawling, undisciplined IT environment where the company is not sure which workloads its developers have on AWS or other public clouds. Finally, the company may be developing applications that use intellectual property or confidential client information—or require high security or government compliance—so using public clouds for DevOps may not be an option.

What Developers Want

Clearly, today’s DevOps teams want to be able to select and provision resources as needed. They want to be free to build their own workspaces without waiting for provisioning by the IT department. If cloud platforms accelerate the application life cycle by applying new technology to operations and integrating and aligning applications and infrastructure, the challenge for IT is to regain control over the process. The answer is to deploy a private cloud platform that is as easy to operate and consume as a public cloud. With a self-provisioning private cloud platform, DevOps teams can continue to set up their own workspaces and access the tools they need to complete their development cycle, and IT’s private cloud—rather than a public cloud provider—makes those resources available.

Compared to public cloud, private cloud delivers improved security and governance, higher performance and lower costs. It also unifies the separate compute, storage and networking silos to deliver a cost-optimized IT infrastructure. With a private cloud, DevOps can have the agility it needs while IT retains the control it needs. It’s a win-win for both groups.

— Ajay Gulati

February 28, 2018
ZeroStack Advances Self-Service Provisioning on Private Cloud

Many IT organizations have aspired to build a private cloud only to find that they don’t have the granular control over IT infrastructure to deliver on that promise. To solve that problem, ZeroStack unveiled DevOps Workbench, a framework internal IT organizations can employ to present developers with a set of options that can self-select to automate the deployment of an application in an on-premises environment.

DevOps Workbench is designed to layer on top of the ZeroStack Intelligent Cloud Platform, which combines 40 developer tools and templates on top of a layer of abstraction based on a Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) to unify the management of underlying IT infrastructure via a cloud management service. Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing for ZeroStack, says DevOps Workbench adds a self-service framework on top of that private cloud to present developers with an experience similar to the way they provision resources on a public cloud. The company also announced it has added DeployHub, continuous deployment software from OpenMake, to the portfolio of DevOps tools it makes available.

Garrison says developers have been doing an end run around internal IT organizations for years now because it takes too long for internal IT teams to make infrastructure resources available. ZeroStack aims to solve that problem by first applying an abstraction layer to create the private cloud, which is then managed via a suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that ZeroStack exposes in the cloud.

Rather than trying to force collaboration between developers and internal IT teams, Garrison says DevOps Workbench allows both groups to accomplish what they need without getting in each other’s way. Developers can access a user interface to provision IT infrastructure within a set of use cases predefined by the internal IT team.

Because of performance issues and compliance concerns, there are whole hosts of applications that will not be deployed in a public cloud. But the IT teams who manage those applications are still under pressure to provide developers with a cloud-like experience. In fact, Garrison notes that in 2017 research by Gartner found that 76 percent of respondents indicated that they are using DevOps in regulated situations, an increase from 47 percent in 2015.

ZeroStack rivals also are advocating transitions to software-defined data centers (SDDC). But most of those efforts involve expensive upgrades to both software running on virtual machines and the underlying infrastructure. Garrision says a private cloud approach that relies on cloud management services provides a faster, less costly, means to achieving the same goal, especially in midmarket IT organizations that don’t have access to much internal expertise to begin with. He adds that ZeroStack is committed to providing support for additional hypervisors soon.

Most IT organizations are still a long way from being able to build, deploy and manage a true private cloud at scale. Most of them have what might be more aptly described as large virtual machine farms. The operating costs associated with managing virtual machine farms will eventually push most IT organizations to some form of an SDDC platform. It’s just not clear yet what the preferred path for making that journey will be.

— Mike Vizard

December 18, 2017
IBM Brings Cloud-native Environment to Private Clouds
New IBM Cloud Private software – based on containers, microservices and APIs –bridges Public Cloud and traditional IT environments

ARMONK, N.Y. – 01 Nov 2017: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new IBM Cloud Private software platform to help companies unlock billions of dollars in technology investment in core data and applications and extend cloud-native tools across public and private clouds.

IBM Cloud Private software is designed to enable companies to create on-premises cloud capabilities similar to public clouds to accelerate app development. The new platform is built on the open source Kubernetes-based container architecture and supports both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry. This facilitates integration and portability of workloads as they evolve to any cloud environment, including the public IBM Cloud.IBM also announced new container-optimized versions of core enterprise software, such as IBM WebSphere Liberty, Db2 and MQ – widely used to run and help secure the world’s most business-critical applications and data. This makes it easier to share data and evolve applications as needed across IBM Cloud private and public clouds and other cloud environments with a consistent experience.
An airline, for example, could use IBM Cloud Private to bring a core application that tracks frequent flyer miles into a private cloud environment and connect it to a new mobile app in the public cloud. A financial services firm could use it to keep customer data in-house as it works to meet its security and regulatory requirements while taking advantage of new analytic tools and machine learning in the public cloud to quickly identify investment trends and opportunities.

Enterprises to Spend More Than $50 Billion a Year on Private Clouds

While public cloud adoption continues to grow at a rapid pace, organizations, especially in regulated industries such as finance and health care, are continuing to leverage private clouds as part of their journey to public cloud environments to quickly launch and update applications. IBM estimates companies will spend more than $50 billion globally starting in 2017 to create and evolve private clouds with growth rates of 15 to 20 percent a year through 2020, according to IBM market projections.

“Innovation and adoption of public cloud services has been constrained by the challenge of transitioning complex enterprise systems and applications into a true cloud-native environment,” said Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President for IBM Hybrid Cloud and Director of IBM Research. “IBM Cloud Private brings rapid application development and modernization to existing IT infrastructure and positions it to be combined with the services and experience of a public cloud platform.”

Hertz, Ilmarinen Transforming IT with Private Cloud

The Hertz Corporation, one of the top car rental companies in the world, believes both public and private cloud is critical to achieving its technology objectives.

“Private cloud is a must for many enterprises such as ours working to reduce or eliminate their dependence on internal data centers,” said Tyler Best, Hertz Chief Information Officer. “A strategy consisting of public, private and hybrid cloud are essential for large enterprises to effectively make the transition from legacy systems to cloud. Hertz is an early adopter of both public and private IBM cloud and we could not accomplish our technology goals without private cloud as part of our overall cloud portfolio.”

Ilmarinen, a Finland firm responsible for the pensions covering approximately 900,000 Finns, has started a pilot project with IBM Cloud Private and plans to be in production in early 2018. “Ilmarinen is excited about the capabilities in IBM Cloud Private as a flexible, compliant cloud-native platform that it can deploy and manage behind our firewall for creating new applications and modernizing traditional workloads,” said Jani Itkonen, Production Manager, Ilmarinen.

IBM Cloud Private Provides Flexible Platform with Support for Enterprise Developers

Innovations used in IBM Cloud Private are designed to simplify cloud management, accelerate app develop and maintain security across cloud environments. Key features include:

Cloud Management Automation – Streamlined management across cloud environments to help launch, monitor and manage services and help ensure consistent security protocols.

Security & Data Encryption – Security Vulnerability Advisor to scan containers across the cloud to surface potentially serious issues and weaknesses; Ability to encrypt all data in flight and provide for strict access control by users within a cluster.

Core Cloud Platform – Includes a container engine, Kubernetes orchestration, Cloud Foundry and essential management tools surrounding developer runtimes, which are fully integrated and automated.

Infrastructure Choice – Compatible with systems from leading manufacturers including Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Lenovo and NetApp, as well as IBM Systems, including IBM Power Systems, IBM Z and IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix software.

Data and Analytics – Integrations with database services, such as IBM Db2, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, to leverage data and gain business insights.

Application Support & DevOps Tools – Containerized versions of software and development frameworks, including IBM WebSphere Liberty, Open Liberty, MQ and Microservice Builder, as part of software bundles; Optimized management and DevOps tools, including APM, Netcool and UrbanCode, which can be added for a separate fee.

IBM also offers cloud deployment, management, brokerage and storage services to help clients manage multiple clouds and can help clients with migration of applications to IBM Cloud Private. More details on Cloud Private can be found in the product overview.

IBM Cloud Private Reinforces IBM Commitment to Open Source

IBM Cloud Private is another significant step in IBM’s support for organizations to create, deploy and manage apps in the cloud environment of their choice. IBM and Google recently announced an effort to create and open source the Grafeas project to help developers with security of containers. Last month, IBM released Open Liberty, a new lightweight, open-source version of its WebSphere Liberty Java application server, to make it easier for developers to get apps up and running in any cloud environment.

IBM also is a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which hosts Kubernetes and Cloud Private is in compliance with its interoperability conformance tests. To get started with IBM Developer Journeys as they relate to Kubernetes, please visit: https://developer.ibm.com/code/journey/

For more about IBM Cloud Private, visit here.

For more about IBM Cloud, visit here.
Contact(s) information

Joe Guy Collier
IBM Media Relations
1 (248) 990-4707
jgcollie@us.ibm.com
November 10, 2017
IBM Adds Cloud Foundry PaaS to Cloud Private

As IT organizations are being asked to provision and support an ever-growing number of platforms, they increasingly require an approach that abstracts away as much of that complexity as possible. With that goal in mind, IBM created IBM Cloud Private, an on-premises platform that automates the deployment of a private cloud based on Kubernetes container orchestration software. This week, IBM announced it is extending the reach of IBM Cloud Private to include support for the open-source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment.

IBM Cloud Private is designed to be deployed on top of virtual or physical servers, including instances of hyperconverged infrastructure based on software from Nutanix. Michael Elder, an IBM distinguished engineer for IBM Cloud Private, says IBM has developed tools for automating the provisioning of not only underlying infrastructure, but also containerized and legacy versions of IBM middleware such as IBM DB2 databases, the Open Liberty Edition of WebSphere application server and IBM Microservice Builder. In addition, Elder says IBM Cloud Private can be employed to deploy a variety of open-source databases, including MongoDB and PostgreSQL.

Also available for an additional fee with IBM Cloud Private are a plethora of DevOps tools including APM, Netcool, UrbanCode, Cloud Brokerage, Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana and ElasticSearch. Regardless of the platform employed, IT organizations should be able to apply a consistent set of DevOps processes to manage either Kubernetes or Cloud Foundry, Elder says.

IBM is also addressing security issues by including Security Vulnerability Advisor to scan containers and an ability to encrypt all data in flight.

Elder says many IT organizations will deploy 12-factor applications on a PaaS environment alongside containerized applications running on Kubernetes. IBM Cloud Private is designed to provide a common management framework for managing both environments. However, IBM is not extending that management framework to the IBM public cloud. Elder says the company determined that attempting to create a common management framework for both would result in too much complexity, especially for administrators of public cloud services that require a much more streamlined user interface experience.

Most IT organizations could, of course, craft their own private cloud. IBM Cloud Private simplifies that process by providing all the pieces required under a common management framework. Rather than spending months putting those elements together, IBM is making a case for an integrated platform that enables IT organizations to concentrate more of their efforts on deploying applications instead of managing infrastructure.

The debate occurring across the IT industry now is to what degree will container-as-a-service (CaaS) environments based on Kubernetes supplant traditional PaaS environments. IBM, as a major supporter of both Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, is clearly betting there will be room for both. The Cloud Foundry Foundation recently furthered that goal by adding support for a Kubernetes runtime.

Thus far, however, the complexity of standing up a PaaS environment has limited the adoption of Cloud Foundry to Fortune 1000-class IT organizations or cloud service providers. Meanwhile, CaaS environments based on Kubernetes increasingly are being stood up by developers and then handed over to IT operations to manage. Given that disparity in deployment models, it may not be too long before the number of CaaS environments simply overwhelm the number of instances of traditional PaaS environments.

— Mike Vizard

November 3, 2017