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TECHNOLOGY

Cloud bursting can help businesses manage spikes in demand

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Perry Krug, director of shared services at Couchbase, explains how cloud bursting is essential for those businesses that need to suddenly handle large spikes in demand.

Businesses in all sectors are continuing to migrate to the cloud as they look to capture and analyse large volumes of data, improve collaboration between staff, and streamline their overall digital transformations. Worldwide, 95% of enterprises say increased movement of infrastructure to the cloud is “inevitable”, including 99% of UK enterprises. 

One particularly useful cloud strategy for running business applications is “cloud bursting”. This means that once a business app’s demand for computing capacity reaches a certain predetermined threshold, the app “bursts” from that business’ private cloud into a public cloud, and is run there. By using private and public cloud resources in this way, cloud bursting might sound sophisticated. And, as a way of helping businesses streamline their cloud migrations, it certainly is. But what practical benefits does it offer?  

The business advantages of cloud bursting

One of the main advantages of cloud bursting is its ability to help businesses manage spikes in demand. When an app is used heavily and suddenly, as it might be at Christmas in industries like retail, or in July for industries like hospitality, private cloud capacity is often maxed out. Businesses need a way to ensure extra cloud capacity on demand. Cloud bursting offers this by ‘bursting’ the app onto a public cloud to be run there temporarily. When demand drops off, the app returns to being run on a private cloud. 

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A second advantage of cloud bursting is that it helps minimise cloud infrastructure costs. Cloud infrastructure expenditure can be kept to a minimum if there’s the option of bursting apps on the public cloud. Cloud bursting also ensures extra compute resources are only paid for when needed.A business’ cloud spending can be neatly aligned with real-time peaks and troughs in demand. 

Cloud bursting also aids business continuity. If a popular business app can burst onto a public cloud and back again, any customer using that app can enjoy a seamless experience with round-the-clock availability. The app is less likely to malfunction under the weight of its own popularity. It’s worth noting, though, that this seamlessness is dependent on bursting being thoroughly tested beforehand.

Cloud bursting is additionally attractive to many businesses whose database infrastructure supports it. Because NoSQL databases offer higher performance and lower latency for many applications, the applications NoSQL tends to support are well-suited to cloud bursting. Businesses that employ NoSQL databases, such as many retailers and hospitality firms, can benefit from cloud bursting, provided their apps don’t handle extremely large volumes of data.

It’s clear that cloud bursting is a useful tactic for businesses as they manage activity spikes in an efficient way. But cloud bursting will not suit all use cases, and enterprises must do their due diligence before committing to using it.

Issues businesses should consider

Firstly, there’s the issue of security. For some applications that can only use private clouds for security reasons, cloud bursting will not be appropriate. By bursting apps onto a public cloud, businesses place the security of those apps’ data into the hands of a public cloud provider.In itself, this isn’t a problem, but it does mean apps temporarily cede control of proprietary data. Cloud bursting can therefore be unsuitable for apps that handle highly sensitive data, such as banking or healthcare apps. 

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There’s also the unavoidable fact that, in a public cloud provider’s ideal world, cloud bursting wouldn’t exist. It’s only natural that public cloud providers aren’t enamoured with cloud bursting because it means the public clouds they run are only used temporarily, or during peak demand. Because of this, public cloud providers may charge businesses more on an hour-by-hour basis to use a public cloud for bursting than they’d charge to use it full-time.  

The amount of data used by certain apps is another consideration; cloud bursting may not be realistic for apps that handle large volumes of data. This is because apps that come with large volumes may not be able to burst from private to public and cloud without major delays in data transferral, making cloud bursting a non-starter.

Finally, businesses should remember that cloud bursting isn’t a quick fix.IT departments must budget, plan when and where bursting will take place, and ensure that when it does, apps run smoothly and meet demand. As well as this groundwork being costly and time-consuming, it also requires that the private and public cloud architectures being used for cloud bursting are compatible with each other. As such, further IT infrastructural work may be needed before bursting is feasible. 

Cloud bursting: a down-to-earth approach 

For some businesses, such as those handling very large volumes of sensitive data, cloud bursting is off the table, at least in the short term. But for businesses that have practised bursting before implementation, using apps that don’t need high latency and have predictable spikes in demand, it can be highly beneficial. For those businesses, cloud bursting is no head-in-the-clouds pipe dream, but a sensible, down-to-earth approach that keeps costs low, and users happy.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and LondonExplore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: cloud bursting, demand

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

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As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.  

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

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Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

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Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

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Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

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With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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