Ravello Systems: The MVNO of Cloud

Ravello Systems LogoThe cloud market is young, despite AWS’ growth and current worth of a few billion dollars. Most of the enterprise’s IT resources are still hosted on the organizational premise of using VMware hypervisor. The enterprise hybrid cloud challenge is hidden in the cloud utility model’s basic notion of hardware as software, whereas legacy application performance and usages are still based on physical resources capabilities. This difference is the greatest factor when it comes to discussing the evolution pace of the `enterprise grade cloud`. The CIO today is required to show cloud adoption and IT operations’ efficiency. This is consequentially triggering new startups to evolve in efforts to facilitate IT resources to close this existing gap. What follows is a story of such a startup that, in my opinion, has a real chance at becoming a leader in this intermediary cloud adoption phase and the hybrid cloud ultimate enabler, Ravello Systems.

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Enterprise Grade Cloud Enabled by the Ecosystem

While investing in building new data centers all over the world and creating the management overlay in order to be able to sell their hardware, IaaS operators are also relying on their ecosystem to support the evolving enterprises that go to the cloud (e.g. the “Enterprise Grade Cloud”).

API First – The move to the cloud pushes the data center to re-invent itself within the new environment. It is a fact that, although the cloud is a pure revolution (at least in MHO), terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI are still valid in this new IT era. Thanks to industry leaders such as Salesforce.com that realize the notion of “API first”, vendors such Amazon cloud present new capabilities first through their APIs. In this way, the cloud operator platform enables development of its ecosystem.

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5 Key Essentials of Cloud Workloads Migration

imageThe benefits of migrating workloads between different cloud providers or between private and public clouds can only truly be redeemed with an understanding of the cloud business model and cloud workload management. It seems that cloud adoption has reached the phase where advanced cloud users are creating their own hybrid solutions or migrating between clouds while striving to achieve interoperability values within their systems. This article aims to answer some of the questions that arise when managing cloud workloads.

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IGT: Story of a Leading Cloud Computing Institute

imageNext week, on Oct 23rd in Tel Aviv we welcome the annual conference of IGT – The Israeli Association of Cloud Computing. Started in 2008, this is the 5th year that this international conference takes place in the vibrant city of Tel Aviv located alongside the Jaffa coastline. This year the conference will no longer discuss what is the cloud and how it disrupting the IT world. This year the conference holds two themes: Big Data and SaaS business.

In a discussion I had with Mr. Avner Algom, Founder and CEO of IGT, he noted:

““Every year we strive to bring the international industry leaders and, as our community grows, it just becomes more appealing and it’s easier to get them to come. Without a doubt, the question “What is Cloud?” is behind us. This year’s conference focus is on Big Data and SaaS. These are important issues for cloud companies and cloud business as these are strongly tied together in the cloud”” said Avner Algom, IGT CEO.
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Consumption, Utilization and Elasticity: Cloud Basics

newvem cloud utilization heatmap
Cloud Utilization Heatmap by Newvem

Lets start with a basic scenario where there is a sudden peak in the demand for an application service as the amount of clients’ requests increase. This event leads to a direct and immediate impact on the load placed on the web servers that host the service. In the traditional world, the number of servers is fixed, therefore an overload adversely affects the application performance and the service may slow down or even be terminated. The IT team would want to restore the environment functionality and bring the service up as soon as possible. The immediate impact  of such an event on the business can be devastating. Starting with this simple understanding, we can move into the world of cloud computing use including resources consumption, while relating to the key differences between the traditional data center and today’s cloud technologies.
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Developers are from Mars

The three layers of cloud computing IaaS, PaaS and SaaS occupy the headlines with significant capabilities undergo continuous improvement to host services in the cloud. This growing market is slowly changing so that offered services will become generic. The current evolving struggle is the deployment and management of SaaS applications in the cloud, Gartner calls this cloud market portion SEAP (Software Enabled Application Platforms). We will dare to say that developers are from Mars and cloud providers from Venus, let us explain in detail why.

SaaS application developer builds the application architecture structure including the database system, the business logic and the user Interface. The software developer (or the SaaS vendor for that matter) invests on building these main three infrastructure cornerstones in order to bring life to the business idea and launch a new on-line service.
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