By Shiji Sujai, IOD Expert My first tryst with cloud can be traced back to 2007, when the term public cloud was synonymous with AWS. At the time, our team had…
Koby Holzer has 17 years of experience working with large infrastructure environments, with the last 4.5 of these at LivePerson as the director of cloud engineering, specifically focussing on Openstack. His past experience includes working with prominent Israeli telecom companies in the area of technological infrastructure. I have personally known Koby for the past few years, through discussing, lecturing and enjoying the great cloud and DevOps community in Israel.
If we look at market growth rates and the concentration of power within a handful of providers, using the terminology coined by Geoffrey Moore, it could easily be argued that the public IaaS cloud market is in the tornado and approaching Main Street. Despite a lack of publicly available market share data, for many in the industry, it seems like a two or three-player race, with one clear “gorilla”: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In this article I will attempt to briefly characterize the competitive positioning of the key players in the public IaaS market, and highlight some of the alternative strategies used by other providers to carve their own niches. The question that needs to be kept in mind is, can anyone else survive in the face of the steep competition presented by the two or three American mega-clouds?
(more…)
Last week, I was invited by Leaseweb to take part in a panel discussion about the evolution of the hybrid cloud. Alongside me sat Robert van der Meulen (Cloud Manager, LeaseWeb), Avi Shalisman (CEO, MoovingON), and Anatoly Atamanov (Director IT Operations, MyThings). As a result of this panel discussion, I’d like to share some of the challenges that IT faces in this seemingly inevitable transition to a hybrid cloud model. Although many things have already been said about the topic, I still feel the need to define what it means (yes…again), as well as what it is not.
I see the hybrid cloud as a sub-section of multi-cloud deployment, meaning IT users use both internal (private cloud) and external (public cloud) environments. While this sounds pretty straightforward, I’ve come to understand that there is no real alignment in terms of the definition of the hybrid cloud. As mentioned above, this article will identify certain challenges that are faced when building a hybrid cloud. While these challenges may (still) keep IT teams from even wanting to begin building a hybrid cloud, the business side of many companies is increasingly moving towards using the public cloud.
There are several incentives of building a hybrid cloud. Some see the public cloud as an extension of their on-premises environment; some simply want to use the public cloud for everything outside of mission critical applications and data that is kept on their trustful on-premises environment for increased security. Regardless of what your incentive is, it’s important to be aware of possible challenges lurking ahead.
(more…)
Outages are inevitable. As we’ve seen over the past few years, every major cloud vendor’s experienced at least one, and we can expect that they will again at some point in the future. As cloud consumers, we need to be able to use the cloud’s building blocks and unlimited resources (at least, in theory), and create service robustness and high availability. Yet, important issues, like SLAs, remain unclear when it comes to consuming resources and services from IaaS vendors.Today, more than ever, online software service vendors, have a lot to lose when their services suffer from performance degradation. They could lose significant amounts of revenue as a result of actual outages as well as diminished user loyalty. In this article, I will share baseline perceptions and methods of cloud-based DR.
This article is cross-posted on TechTarget as part of my contribution during the AWS re:Invent show in Vegas this month. It is important to note, however, that this version is slightly different. In this article I will cover the evolution of the AWS ecosystem over the last 3 years, which, in my opinion, has been one of the most important indicators of the cloud industry’s growth.
Cloud vendors need an ecosystem. It is a vital part of their product’s and service’s maturity. In order to enable products to support more use cases, customers and revenues, you need a community of vendors that can link up to your API and extend your platform. By first developing your API and then creating a UI, you set the stage for companies that thrive off of your API and product. SalesForce, for example, holds data with their flexible platform that has quite possibly developed into the largest ecosystem in the cloud over the past few years. When external companies develop around your API, cloud vendor get 2 things: very rich services, above and beyond their core services, and a scalable business with revenues that are generated directly by ecosystem, itself.
(more…)
2013 has been incredibly eventful for the cloud industry, mostly for making itself an eminent presence in the mainstream IT market. Businesses of all sizes have made their ways to the cloud, confirming my 2013 predictions. Government agencies worldwide take the cloud seriously, as demonstrated by the CIA’s contract switch over to Amazon from IBM. AWS has proven its rapid pace of innovation and has introduced great leaders who have completely replaced the concept of sluggish IT servers with instances. While the market is still small, I believe it will take over the IT market sooner than some of us think. I am not alone in my forecast… another analyst predicted that AWS will become a $50B business in 2015, which means it will multiply 12 times its size from last year. So, have a look at my 2013 predictions and read on to see what 2014 has in store for the world of cloud computing. (more…)
In this post series, I will raise some basic questions and will delve deeply into this topic to debate the common resistance to what I call “pure cloud deployment”.
Let’s begin with a leading question: Can’t the hybrid economy model live within the public cloud? From the enormous number of conversations with top cloud thought leaders, CIOs, startups, and the like, it seems that the answer is YES.
(more…)
The 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.
I recently joined forces with Patrick Pushor of CloudChronicle.com to discuss timely news in Cloud Computing.
In this episode we discuss VMWare. Based on recent article in GigaOm, “VMware Hotseat Getting Hotter by the Minute”. We end up
For more information about IOD, our services, or opportunities to write for us, drop us a line below.
