IaaS Archives - ICT News https://www.ict-news.org Information & Communication technology world news Fri, 14 Apr 2017 07:53:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.9.3 https://www.ict-news.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/ICT-icon-3.png IaaS Archives - ICT News https://www.ict-news.org 32 32 13 tips to foil cloud lock-in https://www.ict-news.org/13-tips-foil-cloud-lock/ https://www.ict-news.org/13-tips-foil-cloud-lock/#respond Fri, 14 Apr 2017 07:53:58 +0000 https://www.ict-news.org/?p=7714 13 tips to foil cloud lock-in Public cloud vendors want your workloads forever. Here’s how to create a viable exit strategy Last month I noted that the big AWS outage proved one cloud isn’t enough. This week, I’d like to go a bit further into the topic and talk about some of the things you can do concretely to embrace […]

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Public cloud vendors want your workloads forever. Here’s how to create a viable exit strategy

Last month I noted that the big AWS outage proved one cloud isn’t enough. This week, I’d like to go a bit further into the topic and talk about some of the things you can do concretely to embrace the cloud without betting the farm.

It’s not just about outages. Any vendor who has you by the data will eventually extract the maximum value from the relationship. Sometimes the most important question in a business relationship is: “What’s your exit strategy?” Here are my best answers, arranged by cloud type.

For IaaS

  1. Use Docker or a similar solution. You should have relocatable containers that you can rebuild and deploy at a whim. This is a critical if you want to protect yourself against lock-in.
  2. Avoid direct database integration. OK, your app needs a store, but no two apps should talk to the same operational store. Those sorts of connections and protocols tend to build a house of cards. You can’t move anything until you move the database — but everything goes down once you do, or you end up with a split brain situation.

For IaaS/PaaS

  1. Implement API/REST integration. Rest easy that you are connecting over HTTPS and making standard, easily relocatable web calls.
  2. Externalize configuration. Don’t hard-code the scheme, server, or domain into your URLs. Anything else that’s environmental should be externalized.
  3. Use common APIs. If you’re using NodeJS and Express or other, similar, well-known APIs, then you’re pretty safe from vendor lock-in. If you start using platform-provided services, you’ve got a bigger problem.

For SaaS

  1. Ensure there’s a standard method for data export. By that I really mean a way that you could feasibly import your data into another system.
  2. Test the method of data export. That they theoretically let you grab a dump of data isn’t really that promising. I’ve seen vendors that offered it, but then the dump feature didn’t actually work on any kind of reasonable timeline and the data was trash by the time it did.
  3. Favor solutions with well-known, stable REST APIs. Realistically, you’re not likely to dump, import, and move all in one shot. You may need some custom glue code where you grab and transport.

For everything cloud

  1. Favor open source technologies. If the core technology, APIs, and functionality are provided by a healthy open source project, you have a lot better chance of leaving if you need to. This means architectural choices (for example, using Kafka instead of Kinesis).
  2. Avoid dependence on unique cloud vendor technology. Sometimes your architectural ties are more process than code. These tend to leak into API calls or other operational management procedures. For instance, maybe you don’t use AWS’ Elastic Map Reduce, because it’s frankly not the greatest financial deal and it’s somewhat flakey. Maybe you just shouldn’t use it because it’s different from what you’d use on any other cloud platform.
  3. Use fixed IPs and DNS names tied to your company, not the provider.Using an IP and a DNS name is sort of internet 101. Having virtual instances that go down and come up with a new IP isn’t very resilient not to mention relocatable.
  4. Use messaging where possible. If you can do something on more of a message basis, where a service that’s down can be tolerated, do that. It means while you are moving you can forward things somewhere else.
  5. Two clouds. As I said before, it is easier to move if you start with at least two different vendors. That’s harder to do with SaaS, but pretty operable with IaaS/PaaS.

The bottom line is that you should favor open source, open standards, and open APIs over vendor-specific solutions. Use microservices architecture or at least the principles thereof. Always maintain your cloud provider exit strategy, and you’ll have a very advantageous relationship with your cloud provider. Always assume your cloud vendor follows the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.

 

By  , source by InfoWorld

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]]> https://www.ict-news.org/13-tips-foil-cloud-lock/feed/ 0 Oracle promises IaaS growth as cloud business rises https://www.ict-news.org/oracle-promises-iaas-growth-cloud-business-rises/ https://www.ict-news.org/oracle-promises-iaas-growth-cloud-business-rises/#respond Fri, 17 Mar 2017 09:30:06 +0000 https://www.ict-news.org/?p=7650 SaaS and PaaS are still the stars, though, and its cloud is still dwarfed by AWS’ revenue Oracle’s third quarter financial results continue to show that the company’s future is in the cloud. On Wednesday, the company reported massive growth in its software- and platform-as-a-service businesses, promising further gains as its customers do away with their data centers. The company’s […]

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SaaS and PaaS are still the stars, though, and its cloud is still dwarfed by AWS’ revenue

Oracle’s third quarter financial results continue to show that the company’s future is in the cloud. On Wednesday, the company reported massive growth in its software- and platform-as-a-service businesses, promising further gains as its customers do away with their data centers.

The company’s SaaS and PaaS revenue from December 2016 through February 2017 was a little over $1 billion, up from $583 million during the same period a year prior. Its infrastructure-as-a-service business brought in $178 million during the same period, bringing the company’s total cloud revenue for the quarter to almost $1.2 billion.

IaaS lets customers rent raw compute power for the applications they’re building. PaaS offerings are tailored for particular tasks and include products like Oracle’s Exadata Database Cloud Service, IT Analytics Cloud, Business Intelligence Cloud and Internet of Things Cloud.

All together, the cloud offerings added up to 13 percent of Oracle’s $9.2 billion in total quarterly revenue, up from $9 billion during the same period a year ago. Oracle’s total profit for the quarter was roughly $2.2 billion, up from about $2.1 billion.

oracle cloud revenue chartBlair Hanley-Frank

One of the major stories coming out of the enterprise tech titan’s financial report on Wednesday is its high expectations for its cloud infrastructure services. Oracle CEO Safra Catz told financial analysts on a conference call that the company’s IaaS business is expected to grow 25 percent to 29 percent year over year, not accounting for an expected negative impact from foreign exchange rates.

That expected growth is driven by interest in IaaS products from Oracle PaaS customers, Catz said. If the company comes through on that promise, it would be a massive spike in growth for a business that has seen steady but unimpressive sales gains over the past year.

Customers may be more interested now than before in part because of the company’s Bare Metal Cloud infrastructure offering, introduced at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco last year. It’s designed to provide customers with the ability to purchase high-performance compute resources from Oracle data centers.

That service is a key part of Oracle’s plan to compete against the bigger players in the cloud industry like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and Google Cloud Platform. Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison called out AWS specifically in the company’s earnings press release on Wednesday.

“Our new Gen2 IaaS is both faster and lower-cost than Amazon Web Services. And now our biggest customers can run their largest and most demanding Oracle database workloads in the Oracle Cloud — something that is absolutely impossible to do in the Amazon Cloud,” he said.

Drawing direct price comparisons between Oracle Bare Metal Cloud and AWS is difficult, since the companies don’t offer comparable virtual or physical machine shapes.

But Oracle has to deal with reality: Amazon’s latest earnings report showed AWS’s quarterly revenue was more than $3.5 billion, up 47 percent year over year. It’s not a perfect comparison, given the strength of Oracle’s cloud SaaS business and Amazon’s lack of competing products in the ERP, HCM and CRM sector.

But it does highlight one of the major issues with Oracle’s offering: The company’s marquee IaaS offering is late to the game. Even its first-generation Oracle Compute Cloud has only been on the market since 2015. Compare that to AWS’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which launched in 2006.

One of the key issues with the Bare Metal Cloud offering is geographic reach. Right now, it’s only available from a single region, the U.S. southwest. Oracle has promised additional (and increasingly rapid) expansion of its physical footprint.

Meanwhile, AWS has 16 cloud regions, Azure has 34, and Google has 6. All of those providers have plans to launch several more over the course of this year. (It’s not a perfect comparison, since Oracle’s first-generation IaaS offering is available in other regions and competitors like Azure don’t strictly follow Oracle’s model of three availability domains per region.)

Broad geographic availability is important for reducing application latency for customers outside the U.S., in addition to satisfying data residency compliance requirements for customers in other countries.

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison said that he expects increased cloud growth over the next five years as the company’s database customers continue to move away from on-premises technology deployments.

By , source by ComputerWorld

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