Cloud Enable examines the options available to IT departments considering adopting or managing cloud-based architectures in their business environment.
Microsoft has released Azure DevOps, a rebranding of VSTS, but also tools serving as its APLM contribution.
Modern application development architectures (microservices) and requirements (CICD) are driving the need for APLM.
Striving for a digital environment, enterprises are challenged to exploit the full benefits of cloud-enabled innovations, assembling solutions that combine and orchestrate both the business software and the infrastructure on which that software runs. While technology providers of switches, servers, cloud services, et al. have certainly set the stage for unified management, automation, and optimization, no single vendor is yet capable of managing the entire lifecycle of this amalgamation. Continue reading “Microsoft Azure DevOps Touches on the Larger APLM Trend”→
Just as multi-cloud usage is recognized as a necessity, IT suppliers are keen to help enterprises reduce its inherent complexity.
IT, hosting, and network service providers have rolled out specific offers over the last year to address the demand.
As multi-cloud consumption becomes the reality for transforming enterprises, solutions are now appearing from service providers as well as platform vendors (beyond their initial solutions for hybrid cloud). Each player has its own take – with varying levels of focus placed on self-service tools, automated operations, and good old-fashioned managed services. Continue reading “Multi-Cloud Services: Service Provider and Vendor Approaches Keep Coming”→
Charlotte Dunlap – Principal Analyst, Application Platforms
Summary Bullets:
• Having laid out its private cloud management and strategy, VMware needs to set its sights on easing microservices and multi-cloud deployment complexities next.
• Articulating its DevOps roadmap, including microservices, service mesh, and serverless computing, would go a long way instilling confidence among customers.
A year after rolling out new cloud services including visibility, cost monitoring, analytics, and security, VMware released during VMworld SaaS-based automation tools, but this is only the tip of the iceberg in helping address customers’ app modernization plans.
Enterprises are now seeking private/hybrid cloud solutions addressing APLM (application and platforms lifecycle management) issues around new development architectures such as microservices and eventually serverless computing. VMware is well positioned through its vSphere enterprise and SP customer base to provide services to enterprises moving to provision containers with security, storage, and networking. While VMware is focused on providing private and hybrid cloud management around early containerization projects involving monolithic applications, it must now turn its attention towards supporting IT operations teams through important product integrations of key technologies such as Istio service mesh and Knative.
During this week’s VMworld, within VMware’s Cloud Services division there was little context in the way of DevOps strategy, including updates on its containerization strategy which centers around Pivotal Container Service (PKS), VMware Kubernetes Engine (VKE), VMware Integrated Container (VIC), and Photon (microservices) portfolio. VMware needs to ratchet up efforts in coming months to move further up the cloud stack and address enterprise IT operations teams’ APLM issues. This blog post provides five crucial moves VMware needs to make to remain competitive with rival application platforms and hybrid cloud rivals. Continue reading “VMworld 2018: Five Things VMware Needs to Do to Support an Enterprise DevOps Model”→
Microservices will get a boost from growing vendor adoption of Istio (service mesh), Envoy (distributed proxy), and MicroProfile (microservices portability).
Serverless computing is receiving more attention stemming from vendors’ OSS projects, including Knative and CloudEvents.
This summer has seen a raft of activities in OSS projects aimed at easing configuration complexity and furthering adoption around emerging DevOps architectures including microservices and serverless computing. The most notable OSS technologies shoring modern application development/deployment methods are Istio (service mesh) and Knative (serverless), projects spearheaded by Google and others. Yet, rival projects are emerging, promising to throw a wrench into the mix, such as Oracle’s efforts around CloudEvents, now backed by CNCF. Another competitive threat lies in the potential for disruption brewing among little-known startups offering their own pure-play versions of service mesh and serverless technology to developers and software engineers in the form of easy-to-use SaaS offerings. Continue reading “Vendors’ Private Cloud Offerings Hinge on Microservices and Serverless Success”→
Google announced the general availability of Cloud Functions, but are enterprises ready for serverless computing?
• The Google Cloud Build app development environment supports the increased demand for CICD among enterprises.
Google announced general availability of its serverless platform, Cloud Functions, during last week’s Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco. The growing phenomenon of serverless computing pits Google most squarely against cloud rivals AWS Lambda and Microsoft Azure Functions. Google’s serverless solution, founded on App Engine, runs alongside its Cloud Services Platform and offers new runtimes, additional languages, and enhanced performance, networking, and security features. Continue reading “Google Cloud Next: Google Finally Joins the Serverless Ranks, but Enterprises Aren’t Interested Yet”→
The U.S. Supreme Court is taking on the Apple v. Pepper antitrust case to determine whether the Apple iOS App Store represents an anti-competitive monopoly and, as such, whether users can sue Apple.
A ruling for Apple by the court will impact software developers’ ongoing role in providing the innovation behind mobile apps.
Just as multi-cloud usage is recognized as a necessity, IT suppliers are keen to help enterprises reduce its inherent complexity.
Fujitsu is strengthening its multi-cloud integration and operations services by partnering with key platform vendors and training thousands of service professionals to achieve relevant certifications.
Starting in the second half of last year, the focus on hybrid cloud implementations shifted towards the need to accommodate concurrent management of workloads running on multiple cloud platforms, and this has emerged as one of the biggest themes in cloud computing. Whether it is the case of central IT looking for some level of control over enterprise-wide consumption or the equally common justification for the same organization using, say, Amazon EC2 for one set of workloads while using Azure and/or VMware for others, ‘hybrid’ management solutions now need to support this multi-cloud usage. Continue reading “Multi-Cloud Services: Fujitsu’s Take”→
Charlotte Dunlap – Principal Analyst, Application Platforms
Summary Bullets:
Traditional platform services including integration embedded into blockchain solutions will prevail in the competitive landscape.
Application platforms providers are beginning to offer BaaS, looking for ways to support repeatable operations by integrating the technology into core DevOps technologies.
Blockchain is just one form of distributed ledger technology (DLT), but considering the amount of investment being made in blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) offerings by vendors such as IBM and Oracle, it’s likely to become the main technology global companies will use to revolutionize global commerce.
• HPE’s new EdgeLine portfolio enhancements will enable customers to run storage-intensive applications and additional core data center functions within remote edge locations.
• HPE’s new GreenLake Hybrid Cloud offering will appeal to hybrid cloud customers that struggle with things like cost and management complexity but won’t disrupt the wider market.
At its Discover event in Las Vegas a last week, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) unveiled several new solution updates and strategic initiatives which, it believes, will transform the way businesses consume, deploy and operate data center technologies. First, HPE announced plans to invest US$4 billion over the next four years to develop technologies that support enterprise edge computing. Edge computing promises to transform the way data centers are deployed and managed and the type of workloads they support. It enables the operation and allocation of enterprise IT resources – including compute, storage, networking, data management, and analytics – at locations that are closer to the points of data generation, and to the end users of digital content and applications.
HPE already has a number of products that support enterprise edge computing initiatives. These include its EdgeLine hyperconverged infrastructure systems, which are specifically designed for deployment in remote locations, often far from central data centers. In Vegas, HPE revealed that it was increasing the storage allocation available on its EL1000 and EL4000 models, from 4TB to 48TB, thanks to a new hardware add-on. The additional storage will allow EdgeLine to support more storage-intensive use cases at the edge of enterprise networks, including databases, artificial intelligence, and video applications. In addition, HPE announced that it had validated several enterprise software stacks for use with the EL1000 and EL4000 systems, including VMware, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA and Citrix XenDesktop. By validating entire software stacks, rather than lighter, tailored versions, HPE aims to help customers run virtualization and compute functions at the network edge with the same tools they use in their primary data centers. Continue reading “HPE Sets Out to Master the Edge While Extending Managed, Metered IT Consumption to Hybrid Cloud”→
