#severless computing

[parkar-consulting-labs-blog]

Cloud computing is a crucial pillar of the digital transformation technology ecosystem. It lays the foundation for digital transformation projects to achieve digital consumerism. Whether you are from the manufacturing or the healthcare industries, bringing the flavor of modern digital consumerism helps you enhance the customer experience.

The cloud steers the scale and speed businesses need to focus on transformation, with an apparent effect on the IT department role. According to 451 research, 90% of companies are already on the cloud. Also, a Logic Monitor survey reveals that the businesses looking for digital transformation are adopting public cloud and around 83% workload will be on the cloud by 2020.

A Forbes study says that businesses offering services are the leading adopter of cloud to pursue digital transformation and the healthcare sector being on the top of the list with 92% just after the financial sector. Digital transformation is vital for a faster time to market and enhance the customer experience.

When businesses adopt cloud, the organizations significantly reduce costs and improve scalability also. Moreover, the cloud ensures your business continuity during any crisis by safely storing the data in a protected location. Cloud has many types and various service delivery models along with separate sets of benefits. Hybrid cloud is a recent phenomenon that offers a combination of private and public clouds suiting to your requirements.

Read this blog to know how phenomenal a cloud can be for your business.

[aws-certification]

Cloud News Round-up: February 2020

Welcome to our monthly round-up of the latest Cloud News. Every month we’ll take a look at some of the most recent stories in IT, updates to AWS Cloud and cloud computing in general.

Below is a list of the topics we will cover in this blog post. Click on any of these links and you’ll be taken to the corresponding section:

AWS Cloud Updates

Cloud and IT News

Useful Cloud Resources

AWS Cloud Updates

As always, we’ll get started by taking a look at recent updates to AWS Cloud.

Registration for AWS Summit 2020 Now Open

That’s right, it’s almost that time of year again! AWS Summit is returning to the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Sydney. Summit will run from April 1 to April 2.

Get ready for two days of educational and inspirational keynotes, breakout sessions, and customer stories. This is the perfect opportunity to discover how cloud technology can help your business lower costs, improve efficiency, and innovate. Click here to register for Summit 2020.

New Desktop Client for AWS Client VPN

This functionality enables users to use Open VPN-based clients to securely access AWS and on-premises networks from anywhere.

This month AWS has launched this functionality as a desktop client, one for windows and one for MacOS. This makes it even easier for users to connect Windows and MacOS clients to AWS.

These client applications can be installed on your desktop or laptop. Both support mutual authentication, username/password via Active Directory, and Multi-Factor Authentication.

AWS Compute Optimiser Now Available in Singapore and Sydney

AWS Compute Optimiser is now available in 11 additional regions including Sydney and Singapore. As of this announcement, the service is available in a total of 16 AWS Regions.

AWS Compute Optimiser recommends optimal AWS Compute resources for your workloads by using machine learning to analyse past workloads. This reduces costs and improves performance.

  Cloud and IT News

Alright, lets jump into the latest news stories in AWS, cloud computing and the IT industry as a whole.

How AI is Helping to Battle the Coronavirus Outbreak

A Canadian firm called BlueDot was able to use AI to warn its customers about coronavirus. The warning came in late December of 2019, days before both the CDC and WHO sent out their official notices.

The company’s early-warning system uses artificial intelligence to track over 100 infectious diseases. It does this by analysing roughly 100,000 articles in 65 languages every day. BlueDot uses this data to notify clients about the potential presence and spread of an infectious disease.

Australia Leads the Way in Cloud Adoption

According to the newly released Enterprise Cloud Index there is a growing optimism around emerging and developing technologies in Australia. The Research, commissioned by cloud OS provider Nutanix, studied 2,650 IT decision makers in 24 countries. This included Australia.

The study shows 87% of Australian respondents feel AI and ML are having positive impacts on their organisations. It also revealed 86% of Australian organisations have brought, or plan to bring, public cloud applications back into their organisation. This is well ahead of the global average of 73% percent.

In particular hybrid cloud is very popular, with 91% of Australian organisations favouring this mode. This is compared to 85% of organisations globally.

  Useful Cloud Resources

We’ve collected recent reports, articles and white papers containing helpful insights about AWS Cloud, cloud computing and IT in general.

Course Spotlight: AWS Technical and Business Essentials

AWS Technical Essentials and AWS Business Essentials are the first step for those beginning their cloud journey. This Course Spotlight article will help you get acquainted with one (or in this case two) of the AWS training courses we offer. You’ll get a better idea of what the featured courses cover, the skills you’ll learn and the job roles that benefit from taking it.

AWS Launches New Online Course: Architecting Serveless Solutions

Architecting Serverless Solutions is the latest free online training module from AWS. Discover how to combine AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway to power serverless applications. You will also learn how to create event-driven, proof-of-concept serverless architecture that uses managed services.

This is an intermediate level course and takes roughly 3 hours to complete. This digital training is a great compliment to our Architecting on AWS in-person classroom training.

The State of Severless Report

While we’re on the topic of severless, Data Dog has released The State of Serverless report. The report, which examines the serverless usage of thousands of companies, provides insight into how serverless is being used.

Serverless provides the same pay-as-you-go model as public cloud, but it provides specific functions rather than infrastructure. Data Dog’s report focuses on AWS Lambda. As of the start of 2020 Lambda is the most mature and widely adopted serverless platform.

7 Steps to Accelerating your Cloud-First Transformation

Want to accelerate your adoption of cloud and increase your ROI?

Discover the secrets Netflix and Time Inc used to transition from data centre to the cloud.

In our FREE webinar you’ll learn the proven method organisations of all sizes can use to fast-track the benefits of cloud.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

What a Cloud-First transformation involves

Getting C-level executives on board with your Cloud-First vision

Keeping momentum up during the transition

Establishing a Centre of Cloud Excellence

Operating a hybrid cloud/datacenter model

The webinar will run on:

Wednesday, 26th February, 2020

2:00pm – 3:00pm AEDT

Register now.

  Want the latest in AWS Cloud, Cloud Computing and IT news delivered straight to your inbox each month? Enter your email in the footer below to sign up for the Bespoke Training newsletter.

from Bespoke Training https://ift.tt/2woXVHV

[reseau-actu]

D'après une étude Forrester, IBM et Oracle vont se spécialiser sur le marché des entreprises, tandis que Google, AWS, et Alibaba continuent de poser leurs pions

Le cabinet Forrester établit ses prévisions pour le cloud computing en 2020. Cinq grandes tendances semblent se dessiner suite aux évolutions marquantes de 2019. Toutes au profit des géants numériques semble-t-il.

2020, une année charnière

Les entreprises utilisaient le cloud essentiellement pour « créer de nouvelles applications et réhéberger leur infrastructure. En 2020, les leaders mondiaux du cloud public à grande échelle formeront de nouvelles alliances et se recentreront sur leurs capacités de base, conduisant les fournisseurs d’applications professionnelles à abandonner leurs infrastructures propriétaires ».

Dans la même catégorie

Intel dévoile une puce capable de contrôler les ordinateurs quantiques.

Les entreprises utilisent le cloud computing pour transformer radicalement la manière dont sont créés les logiciels. Les technologies sont également davantage utilisées pour satisfaire davantage le client, notamment pour améliorer la personnalisation du client.

Le marché du cloud public n’a de cesse de se déployer, et devrait atteindre les 411 milliards de dollars d’ici 2022. En 2020, l’étude prévoit une croissance de 30% de celui-ci. Si les entreprises utilisaient jusqu’ici les applications et les infrastructures d’hébergement, les choses risquent d’évoluer de manière radicale en 2020, véritable année charnière selon Forrester.

La bataille des géants

Cette année 2019 a permis d’assister à plusieurs transactions de taille, laissant entrevoir les directions appréhendées par les grands groupes pour tenter de se positionner de manière rentable sur le marché du cloud.

Parmi les transactions récentes, Forrester ne manque pas de rappeler le dernier achat d’IBM. Pour la « modique » somme de 34 milliards de dollars la firme a en effet récupéré cette année Red Hat, considéré comme « le numéro un de l’open source ». Ginni Rometty, PDG de l’entreprise, avait alors expliqué que ce rachat était un réel « tournant » faisant d’IBM « le premier fournisseur mondial du cloud hybride ».

Aussi IBM, et Oracle, qui est entré en partenariat avec Microsoft en 2019 pour créer une passerelle entre leurs services cloud, ont choisi de concentrer leurs efforts sur le service cloud entreprise. Reconnaissant ainsi que Google, Alibaba et bien sûr Amazon Web Services dominent désormais le marché du cloud public.

IBM compte aider les entreprises à utiliser OpenShift en tant que service complet permettant de gérer l’infrastructure des sociétés clientes. Oracle pour sa part, compte développer les services SaaS (Software as a Service) offrant ainsi un domaine d’exploitation pour différents logiciels utilisés par les entreprises et hébergés dans le cloud. Dans le cadre de son partenariat avec Microsoft, il recommandera Azure pour les services de développement en intelligence artificielle (IA), en apprentissage automatique (machine learning/ML), et pour les services IoT (objets connectés).

Quant aux fournisseurs d’applications professionnelles, il semblerait qu’ils finissent par abandonner leurs infrastructures propriétaires, ne pouvant lutter face aux alliances citées plus haut. Ils devront se concentrer sur leurs compétences de base, autrement dit la fonctionnalité des applications.

Les tendances des ventes sur le marché Hyperscale

En matière de ressources utilisées dans les data centers, les géants du Web continueront de se partager le gâteau, avec quelques évolutions toutefois, selon Forrester. Sur les 75% du marché détenu par les géants numériques, le cabinet prévoit une hausse des ventes d’Alibaba (à hauteur de 4,5 milliards de dollars), dépassant ainsi son concurrent Google à l’échelle mondiale. La firme de Mountain View devrait néanmoins garder sa troisième place sur le marché américain, Alibaba étant peu présent en Amérique du Nord.

Le HPC monte en flèche

Le service cloud nécessite de plus en plus de pouvoir traiter les données en temps réel, notamment pour tester de nouveaux produits ou analyser les tendances des marchés financiers. À cet égard, de plus en plus d’entreprises font appel au calcul de haute performance (High Performance Computing/HPC). La solution HPC permet en effet de traiter plusieurs quadrillons de calculs par seconde, contre 3 milliards de calculs par seconde pour un ordinateur avec un processeur normal.

Compte tenu de son utilisation en hausse depuis 2016, et du déploiement des services cloud, le cabinet Forrester parie tout naturellement sur une hausse des investissements en HPC de la part d’AWS, Azure, et Google notamment.

Des leaders sur le marché de la virtualisation de système d’exploitation

Depuis plusieurs années, l’orchestration de containers en open source est nécessaire aux entreprises. Ce type de service leur permettant de se focaliser sur le fonctionnement des applications, et d’automatiser certaines mises à échelle.

Si la plateforme Kubernetes, créée par Google en 2016, semble avoir littéralement inondé le marché, Forrester nomme l’émergence de nouveaux acteurs, parmi lesquels Consul Connect, Gloo, Kuma, Linkerd 2, Maesh, et SOFAMesh.

Néanmoins, le cabinet indique qu’Istio tire son épingle du jeu dans le domaine du « Service Mesh », pour garantir et monitorer la communication entre services. Or ce service nait d’une collaboration entre IBM et Google… Même chose pour Knative dans le « severless », lancé par Google et conçu pour utiliser Kubernetes, ça tombe bien. Google semble donc bien parti pour garder la main mise sur le secteur.

Un renforcement de la sécurité

C’est sans surprise que l’étude conclut à un renforcement des offres pour sécuriser le cloud, et ainsi éviter la fuite des données, sur le cloud privé, comme le public.

[faizrashis1995]

AWS resilience capabilities explained (Podcast)

AWS resilience capabilities explained (Comment)

If you have ever considered setting up your own resilient database system you'll know just how complicated that process is.

 Moving data reliability from your primary to mirror database is vital. And when it comes to switching to the mirror database when the primary fails, how can you do that painlessly?

 The effort in planning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance is significant. Many man hours are involved in building your own resilient system.

 Compare that then to the systems that AWS make available at the flick (almost) of a switch. RDS is where those that require resilient systems should look.

 Have a listen to the podcast if resilience is important for your business. And of course, now that we've met... we're here to help: 01786 430076.

 AWS resilience capabilities explained (Transcript)

Alex: Hello and welcome to another edition of the Objective Associates podcast with myself Alex Ogilvie. And joining me as always is Fraser Ingram, the CTO at Objective Associates.

 Fraser: Hi there.

 Alex: Today we thought we'd cover some of the main services that AWS offers and in particular look at the aspects of them that give you, or give you the opportunity, to build a resilient system. In particular a resilient database. So Fraser but what are the main things that make up AWS? Let's just quickly recap on those.

 Fraser: the core services if you like are things like EC2 which is your compute power, S3 which is your storage. Lambda which is your serverless compute power and RDS which is effectively a managed, or a set of managed database technologies. Different database types for different types of solutions, so you know, you've got things like the Aurora for large MySQL type solutions, or you've got Microsoft SQL server available in there, within RDS as well, or you've got Redshift for something like Data warehouse.

 Alex: Yeah, I mean it's interesting that in amongst that short list you included Lambda. Because Lambda's obviously, well not obviously, but it's severless computing, and that strikes me as the ultimate in resilience, because you don't have to worry about any of the server technology behind that. Amazon does that for you.

 Fraser: Yeah, you don't worry about the servers or where it's running. You give it a bit of code and you've got 5 minutes to run it. Or up to five minutes to run it. on And yeah you pay for the time the code was executed.

 Alex: And Amazon's gonna look after where that's gonna run and how it's going to execute. So from a resilience point of view that's probably almost as good as it's gonna get.

 Fraser: Yeah, I mean you tell it which region to run on. But yeah.

 Alex: You tell it the region? We'll probably cover regions later when we talk about RDS in a wee bit more detail. So okay so you've got those areas of AWS that lend themselves to making you resilient, but I guess before you start you want to at least have some idea of what the costs are going to be on this kind of stuff. So how does Amazon help you there? How can you figure out that you're not biting off more than you can afford?

 Fraser: Well all this, the costs on these are all available. You can either sit and read many webpages from Amazon telling you about which instance size and which, what the power is on these things or Amazon have helpfully given you a simple cost calculato.r And if you Google AWS simple cost calculator you'll drop onto a page that lets you set up the, what do you want, what do you want to configure on AWS. Do you want to configure EC2 instances, or do you want to configure some S3 storage, or do you want to configure RDS. And there you choose, you know, on these options, you choose things like for some EC2 instance, you would choose what type of server it is, what license that you want to run in that server. Is it a Linux sever is it a Windows Server. Same with RDS, when your running up RDS on the cost calculator, what you'll do is you'll say okay, I want it to be a SQL server and the size effectively of the instance type that database is going to run on.

 Alex: So that simple calculator is that what they call the Cost Explorer or is that different.

 Fraser: Cost Explorer is a bit different. Cost Explorer is within your AWS console and that in effect is telling you what you are spending at that point.

 Alex: Right, okay, so that's more for management rather than for project planning.

 Fraser: Yeah, yes, so Cost Explorer will give you daily breakdowns and forward-looking projections on what you have spent, and what you are spending and will also give you some recommendations. So give your recommendations on things like, okay, based on the last seven days it looks like you should go away and buy these reserved instances in order to bring your costs down a little bit.

 Alex: But I guess there's more to running a resilient database than simply the cost of the server, so is there any way that you can figure out the cost of ownership? How do you do that?

 Fraser: Well, I mean, Amazon have another calculator as well. They've got a total cost of ownership calculator and that genuinely does things like compare what it would cost to have a on-premise solution or a data center co-located type solution, versus what it would cost you to put this in AWS. So effectively genuinely calculating the total cost of owbership on these things. Down to kind of of power and engineering and all the rest of the things that you need to do, to be putting together an onpremise or colocated system. Versus what that costs on AWS. As you can imagine AWS comes out pretty favorably in that.

 Alex: well I was going to say it sounds like a wonderful marketing tool that Amazon's built for itself. To show you that no doubt their solution is cheaper and more efficient than anything else you can buy.

 Fraser: Well, yeah I mean absolutely, I mean it's about economies of scale at that point. You know, you're buying into the economies of scale that Amazon provide and that you can't get on your own.

 Alex: Alright so you've got a couple of things here. You've got Cost Explorer for when you're up and running to help you manage your costs and adjust it to save money. You've got this simple cost calculator that let's you just configure things and comes up with a bottom line. And then you've got this kindof total cost of ownership calculator. So they're really, going to quite some lengths to actually show you that they genuinely want to show you what the cost of these things are.

 Fraser: Yeah, absolutely and let you control them. Because part of being using AWS is giving you this flexibility and elasticity on, you know, being able to add compute power, but also take compute power away when you don't need it. Which is completely different from, you know, if you're working on an onpremise or a colocated type solution. Where you're pretty much fixed on what you're buying. Whereas within AWS you can start scaling back, scaling up and scaling back when you need to. And your costs flex at the same rate.

 Alex: We've mentioned RDS a lot here, I'm suspecting that that's one of the core things that's available to you if you want to build a resilient database system. So talk us through RDS, whats it doing for us that makes it so resilient, so helpful.

 Fraser: So RDS, if you think of a SQL server RDS type solution, Microsoft SQL Server, effectively you've got, your live database and then you've got a mirror of your database. And there's a fast switch over between those two, so effectively those two databases, if you think of them as the live and the mirror, if you think of them as sitting in different datacenters. Because they'll be in what AWS call availability zones, so effectively what you can think of is different data centers. And then if one datacentre goes down you've got the mirror sitting ready to run on the second datacenter.

 Alex: Alright, so RDS is doing all that mirroring for you.

 Fraser: It's all managed for you, they set it up, they manage it, they make sure that's happening. And then they switch over happens exactly as it needs to happen.

 Alex: And happens automatically?

 Fraser: Happens automatically, yeah.

 Alex: Because all that stuff is pretty complicated. Even setting up a reliable mirroring system is pretty complicated stuff.

 Fraser: Yeah, yeah, and Amazon are taking that pain away from you. And that's just on SQL server you know you can do the same on mySQL, you can do the same on Aurora. Actually on Aurora you can have up to six databases some already live.

 Alex: And you mentioned zones here right, so okay, I get the idea that a zone is equivalent to a datacenter. So where are these zones located is one in the States and one in London? I mean how's this work?

 Fraser: Yeah, they are all over the world, so close by us we've got one in Ireland, we've got one in Frankfurt, we've got one in London, so they're the regions within AWS, and each region has got at least two availability zones. And those availability zones are like the data centers.

 Alex: Okay, so Ireland is a region, and within some place in Ireland they've got at least two zones. So if you were setting up a resilient RDS system one of your databases is in zone 1 and one is in zone 2 within Ireland.

 Fraser: Yes

 Alex: Do they share that information? I mean is that public information or do they keep that a secret?

 Fraser: No, that's all public, they've got their zones are all named, so you can choose, if you're spinning up an EC2 instance you can choose which zone you want it to be in. So you can choose you know some to be in one zone, some to be in another zone for resilience.

 Alex: Because you may well want to build your own resilient system you have to know that information. And I guess then given that potentially you could be using a London zone and Ireland zones as well, then from a global perspective you've actually got capability through all that to build a pretty robust system.

 Fraser: Yeah, I mean if you want to build a globally robust system what you're looking at is, use a couple of regions, so use regions that are close to your customers. So use the East Coast of the States, use Ireland, or use something that's in Asia Pacific.

 Alex: And does the price change from region to region, do we know?

 Fraser: Yeah, it does, yeah, you know the price of compute power in one region will be different to the price of compute power in another region. I guess thats to do with connectivity and power costs and all the rest of it.

 Alex: I guess that makes sense. And again that could influence the way in which you pull together your particular system. It could potentially alter the price significantly I guess.

 Fraser: Yeah, I mean, a few cents here and there. But a few cents here per hour if you're using a lot of power, it all adds up.

 Alex: Well that sounds like a failrly good explanation of some of the features within AWS that can allow it to be very resilient even on a global basis. All right folks we'll you've heard it here. The main components EC2, S3, Lambda and RDS. We suggest you do a bit of Googling but if you need any help feel free to give us a call or drop by the website at www.objectiveassociates.co.uk So from me and Fraser have a good day.[Source]-https://www.objectiveassociates.co.uk/aws-resilience-capabilities

AWS Training for Beginners Courses in Mumbai. 30 hours practical training program on all avenues of Amazon Web Services. Learn under AWS Expert.

[computersystemsdesign]

The Actuator – March 15th

The Ides of March are upon us. And with the Ides comes one of my least favorite things: Daylight Saving Time. I'm one of those "UTC forever" fanboys, because I've suffered having to work with systems that fail to consider how to track, or properly convert, datetimes. On the other hand, I do recognize the trouble by trying to convert everyone to UTC. The link at the end is a nice thought experiment for anyone that has to work with datetimes.

 As always, here's a handful of links from the intertubz I thought you might find interesting. Enjoy!

 Spammergate: The Fall of an Empire

One dozen people, 1.4 billion emails a day. Nice summary of how a handful of groups came together to take this spam empire offline.

 The WikiLeaks CIA hacking documents include spy tools literally from sci-fi

Most of the articles about the CIA spy hacks last week were like this one - clickbait. The details in the Wikileaks appear to be quite dated, resulting in Apple, Google, and Microsoft to all declare that the vulnerabilities have been patched long ago.

 Artificial intelligence: Cooperation vs. aggression

A nice reminder that computers will do what we tell them to do. If we tell them to shoot people, we shouldn't be surprised when they shoot people.

 DevOps has reached critical mass, CIOs need to get on board

I dislike the marketing term 'DevOps', but I *love* how it helps describe a modern software development lifecycle. It's hard to believe that there is any CIO out there that isn't subscribing to such methods.

 Serverless is the new Multitenancy

A quick summary of the future of SaaS. 'Serverless' architecture is going to allow cloud providers the ability to scale further than they do now. I suspect that for the end user we won't have to worry about creating such functions, we will just click buttons and the plumbing will be handled for us.

 30 Questions to Ask a Severless Fanboy (or Fangirl)

Because if serverless gets brought into a discussion you are having you should be prepared to ask a few basic questions.

 So You Want Continuous Time Zones

Someone had a bit of time on their hands, pun intended. This thought experiment was worth the time, and has a wonderful conclusion: "The sad, ultimate truth of modern timekeeping is this: it's not perfect, but it doesn't honestly get a whole lot better."

 With the Perfstack™ launch this week I am reminded how much I love working here at SolarWinds, and this image best describes why:

The post The Actuator – March 15th appeared first on Computer Systems Design.

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