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What does it mean for multi-cloud complexity?

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Cloud Computing News

A new concept for cloud networking aims to bring clarity to multi-cloud and bring the true aspirational path we were all promised. Except it’s not that new.

Say hello to the supercloud. This time last year, Lori MacVittie, distinguished engineer at F5, wrote for Network Computing around the results of the multi-cloud security and app delivery provider’s annual State of Application Strategy report. MacVittie, who has previously written for CloudTech, concluded that 99% of organisations were invested in multi-cloud; and of that number, 100% were having challenges with it, from consistent security, to migration, to app visibility.

The answer comes from a team of Cornell University researchers from as far back as 2016. It is a cloud architecture that ‘enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers… provid[ing] interfaces to allocate, migrate, and terminate resources… and presents a homogeneous network to tie these resources together.’

In theory, per the academic definition, supercloud users are free to locate virtual machines to data centres across the world, including edge locations, regardless of owner and without complex reconfiguration. MacVittie clarifies this as seamless migration, consistent security, and optimal performance.

So what does this mean in business strategic terms? “Supercloud is the chance to be proactive and play the long game to ensure your business is set up to stay competitive for the future,” William Collins, principal architect at Alkira, tells CloudTech. “For the network, this creates a unique opportunity to simplify design and operations by employing a single fabric, or abstraction, that connects you to the cloud, across clouds, and to on-premises sites.”

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Collins sees three key tenets for superclouds to adopt all the current benefits of public cloud. Firstly, per Cornell, it must run as a service across cloud providers. Secondly, it should leverage the cloud-native constructs of each public cloud provider. Finally – with a nod to optimal performance – it must provide a consistent experience for practitioners by abstracting the underlying components of each cloud platform.

Is it a case of organisations waving the white flag with the complexity of multi-cloud? Collins stops short of putting it in those terms, but creating on-ramps, connecting apps and users and configurations remain a major headache-maker. “The advantages of multi-cloud have not been outweighed by the challenges of managing these deployments,” says Collins in direct response to this question. “But that complexity has made it so it’s much more difficult and takes a lot more time to fully realise those benefits.”

Collins notes that while the term might be new, the need for an ‘automated global cloud network’ is known among organisations. Alkira believes it is well-positioned to handle these challenges, being claimed as the only platform built in the cloud and offered as a service. The key: the Alkira network is managed using the same controls, policies and security network familiar to admins, meaning no new hardware, software, or architecture to learn. The company secured AWS Networking Competency status in network connectivity earlier this month, with relationships already established with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

“Ultimately, customers want an easy way to solve the long-lingering obstacles and bottlenecks in their clouds,” says Collins. “That means breaking down silos, minimising shadow IT, implementing enhanced end-to-end security, and achieving a new level of speed and agility in scaling the network to meet any application need.”

For CIOs and CTOs looking to get a handle on the concept, Collins suggests ‘contextualising what they already know.’ “Network performance is a must – if the network is slow, everything is slow,” he explains. “Capacity can make or break user experience. Adequately scaling on demand and tapering things down as demand subsides is critical. Networking must be present in the proximity of your products and customers in a secure and controlled fashion.”

Ultimately however, wherever you are on your digital transformation journey, performance counts for plenty – particularly as it is a key metric across the board, from security to workload distribution. As MacVittie noted in a blog post last April, the F5 research found that performance ‘as usual is a significant obstacle to realising the benefits of multi-cloud strategies and definitively driving businesses to extend to the edge.’

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“Multi-cloud challenges put enterprises in a slog when it comes to architecting, deploying and figuring out how to manage new clouds and sites,” says Collins. “The entire process today can take several months or longer, and that’s for a major enterprise with technical resources and partners at their disposal.

“By leveraging the right supercloud platform, though, this can all be done in a few days.”

Picture credit: “Everybody Needs a Superhero”, by Eddie Wong, used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Image modified from original

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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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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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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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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