Tech Drop Every Minute

The latest iteration of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, which took place in Barcelona last week, felt like something of a milestone – and not one shoehorned in for marketing purposes, either. It is true however that Kubernetes came into being five years ago this June, so for those at Google Cloud, it was a time of reflection. From the acorn which was Eric Brewer’s presentation at Dockercon 2014, a veritable forest has grown. “We’re delighted to see Kubernetes become core to the creation and operation of modern software, and thereby a key part of the global economy,” wrote Brian Grant and Jaice Singer DuMars of Google Cloud in a blog post . “Like any important technology, Kubernetes has become about more than just itself; it has positively affected the environment in which it arose, changing how software is deployed at scale, how work is done, and how corporations engage with big open source projects,” Grant and DuMars added. 2019’s KubeCon saw a smattering of news which represented a s...

Amazon may still have an iron grip on cloud infrastructure across all geographies – but in Asia Pacific (APAC) at least, Chinese cloud providers are closing the gap. That’s according to a new study from Synergy Research, which argues the top three players in China are now in the top six across APAC as a whole. Alibaba is ranked at #2, while Tencent is at #4 and Sinnet at #6, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google filling the odd numbers in that order. Across China, where local business reigns supreme, it may not be a surprise to note that the top six players are all local. Baidu sits just outside the medals, with China Telecom and China Unicom rounding off the six. For the rest of APAC, however, positions four to six are held by Asian vendors, but only one of them Chinese; Alibaba (#4) is followed by Japanese firms Fujitsu and NTT. The analysis makes for an interesting exploration of market drivers across the Asia Pacific region. As far as budgets go, Synergy notes that China is ‘by far...

Cloud computing has utterly transformed the IT industry, requiring organisations to make fundamental changes to how they design, deploy, manage and optimise their security strategy. Many organisations, however, are simply using the same security model they have relied on for over a decade in their traditional networks to the cloud. But true cloud security requires more than deploying isolated cloud-enabled network security tools to protect cloud-based resources. The future is multi-cloud According to research published by the IBM Institute for Business Value, 85% of enterprises already operate in multi-cloud environments, and by 2021, 98% of companies plan to use multiple clouds. And according to Rightscale’s  2018 State of the Cloud Report , organisations are typically running applications in 3.1 clouds, and are testing 1.7 more, with an average of 2.7 of those being public cloud environments. And given the nature of digital business, those clouds don’t operate in isolation....

Over the next two years, cloud service providers will be systematically sabotaged by attackers aiming to disrupt critical national infrastructure (CNI) or cripple supply chains. Organisations dependent on cloud services will find their operations and supply chains undermined when key cloud services go down for extended periods of time. Nation states that engage in a digital cold war will aim to disrupt economies and take down CNI by sabotaging cloud infrastructure through traditional physical attacks or by exploiting vulnerabilities across homogeneous technologies. Attacks on cloud providers will become more regular, resulting in significant damage to businesses which share those platforms. Organisations with a just-in-time supply chain model will be particularly vulnerable to service outages and will struggle to know when services will be restored, as cloud providers scramble to prioritise customer recovery. Further consolidation of the cloud services market will create a small nu...

Bottom line:  Enterprises are attaining double-digit improvements in forecast error rates, demand planning productivity, cost reductions and on-time shipments using machine learning today, revolutionising supply chain management in the process. Machine learning algorithms and the models they’re based on excel at finding anomalies, patterns and predictive insights in large data sets. Many supply chain challenges are time, cost and resource constraint-based, making machine learning an ideal technology to solve them. From  Amazon’s Kiva robotics relying on machine learning to improve accuracy, speed and scale  to  DHL relying on AI and machine learning to power their Predictive Network Management system  that analyses 58 different parameters of internal data to identify the top factors influencing shipment delays, machine learning is defining the next generation of supply chain management.  Gartner  predicts that by 2020,  95% of Supply Chain Plan...

HSBC has been moving towards a cloud-first world - and the bank's latest endeavour has shed light on how it is pushing ahead in the DevOps sphere. The company is investing $10 million (£7.8m) in capital investment to CloudBees, the continuous delivery software provider and arbiter of open source automation server Jenkins.  This is by no means an entirely altruistic act, with HSBC using CloudBees significantly since 2015 in order to bolster its software delivery system. The companies had previously gone public about their relationship; HSBC was at a CloudBees event in April, as reported by Computerworld UK. Regular readers of this publication will be aware of the bank's cloudy aspirations, in particular its relationship with Google Cloud. In 2017 Darryl West, HSBC CIO, took to the stage at Google Next in San Francisco to discuss the companies' collaboration. West noted that the total amount of data the company held at the time was more than 100 petabytes, and that, havi...

“Cloud-native” is an approach for building applications which often incorporates microservices, containers, and cloud services on dynamically orchestrated platforms. There can be a steep learning curve, but these techniques and technologies fully exploit the advantages of the cloud computing model. Managing application operations through agile DevOps processes and continuous delivery pipelines empowers organisations to more easily build and run new applications in modern environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds.  This dramatic shift in how applications are architected and deployed has huge potential for IT, leading to lower operational costs, boosted performance, greater efficiency, and increased business agility. At a broad level, this translates into acclerated speed to market, the ability to support rapid expansion, and more margin as departments pay for additional resources only as needed. “Disruption-forward” companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Uber are grab...

If the weather isn't quite up to scratch it is hard to resist the lure of an all-inclusive family holiday. The azure blue sea, pristine white sand, and masses of food and drink - interspersed with a spot of swimming to burn off some of the excesses.  But fast-forward to check out and you get a nasty surprise: a larger than expected bill. Those extras excluded from your “all-inclusive” deal were too tempting for your teenagers: how did they consume so many snacks between the all-you-can-eat buffets?  The post-holiday blues kick in as you realise you should have given your kids clearer guidelines on the first day. A nasty surprise on the invoicing front can also occur if you do not prepare carefully enough when you move to the cloud. I highlighted the importance of tackling ghost spending and costly, complex contracts before moving to the cloud in this article . A natural next step is cloud cost optimisation, whether you are starting to deploy cloud or already have pro...

VMware has announced its intent to acquire Bitnami, a provider of application packaging and delivery, to help accelerate app delivery for multi-cloud use cases. Bitnami, based out of San Francisco, offers organisations the capability to deploy a multitude of applications through its libraries either natively or across a plethora of cloud providers. The company was a graduate of Y Combinator and was noted for a reticence on funding, only accepting a seed round in May 2013. This need for greater enterprise presence and the funding required to do it ultimately precipitated the move, the company said. “This was actually an easy decision and has to do with our shared vision for the future,” wrote co-founders Daniel Lopez and Erica Brescia in a blog post . “Our mission at Bitnami is to make awesome software available to everyone, everywhere… to make that software accessible to the largest number of users and developers possible. “Over the past years, we expanded our focus to help enterp...

Cloud security best practices are improving - but there is still a long way to go, according to a new report from SANS Institute. The study, which polled several hundred respondents across the IT spectrum, came about, as author Dave Shackleford put it, as the result of concerning news stories around the security space. IDC found back in April that worldwide IT security spending would hit $103.1 billion by the end of this year - but stories continue to persist, particularly around open Amazon S3 buckets . Misinformation around shared responsibility, as this publication has regularly perused, continues to persist. The survey respondents were most likely to have two or three public cloud providers on spec, with almost half using cloud network access services (43%) and more than a third (35%) using cloud access security brokers (CASBs). Approximately half of those polled said they have BI data (48.2%) and intellectual property data (47.7%). The study explored organisations' bigges...

Google Cloud has announced the official launch of its Osaka cloud data centre region, making it the second facility in Japan and the 20th overall. The Osaka region, as with all Google Cloud facilities aside from Iowa, has three availability zones and comes with the standard product set, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. The move ensures the company is going ahead at a steady clip following the opening of the Zurich data centre region in March. According to Google Cloud’s map, Seoul, Jakarta, and Salt Lake City are next on the list, pencilled in provisionally for the first half of 2020. Writing in a blog post confirming the launch, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted the strategic importance of Japan – and that with two cloud regions in the country, customers will benefit from greater business continuity, infrastructure, and more partners. “We’ve invested more than $47 billion in our global infrastructure ...

Leading hyperscale cloud service providers continue to disrupt the traditional IT infrastructure vendor landscape, as more enterprise CIOs and CTOs expand their adoption of multi-cloud strategies that marginalise the remaining applications for on-premises data centres. Legacy IT vendors that were reluctant to evolve their business model will now seek niche cloud market segments where they can differentiate their offerings. There's no viable growth path that's based upon hardware or software market status-quo assumptions. However, distinctive professional services are still a source of new opportunities. Cloud computing market development The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.5 percent in 2019 to total $214.3 billion -- that's up from $182.4 billion in 2018, according to the latest global market study by Gartner. The fastest-growing market segment will be cloud system infrastructure services, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is f...

The last six years have seen a rapid acceleration in the use of cloud computing. Enterprises of all sizes and across industries are now turning to cloud infrastructure and pursuing cloud-first strategies. As IT departments increasingly shift workloads into public clouds while they simultaneously convert existing on-premises virtualised environments to support cloud-like capabilities, optimising cloud spending has become an intense focus for many organisations. In the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera , cloud users who were surveyed on their adoption of cloud identified two top priorities that, not surprisingly, correlate: moving more workloads to public cloud and optimising cloud costs. As the use of public cloud has grown, so has the amount of spend. Public cloud spending is quickly becoming a significant new line item in IT budgets, especially among larger companies that typically run more workloads in cloud. More than 50 percent of enterprises are spending ...

Most traditional forms of dealing with network and data latency, as well as packet loss, fall short of their promise. This includes WAN optimisation. SD-WANs are great, but their performance can also be improved by adding a WAN data acceleration layer. With the growth of the Internet of Things, therefore, organisations are looking for new ways to reduce the impact of latency and packet loss. David Linthicum, chief cloud strategist at Deloitte, explains edge computing’s benefits. “By eliminating the distance and time it takes to send data to centralised sources, we can improve the speed and performance of data transport, as well as devices and applications on the edge.” This sounds great, but why are people talking about edge computing, which while in many respects has many other names isn’t quite so new? With technologies such as autonomous vehicles, the answer appears to lie in edge computing because it permits much of the data analysis to be conducted close to the data, while mini...