Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

Report: Cloud adoption grew 25% in the past year

Editorial Staff, VentureBeat, Jan. 24, 2022

“A new report from Palo Alto Networks found that the COVID-19 pandemic affected cloud adoption strategies for nearly every organization over the past year. Data from the report showed that businesses moved quickly to respond to increased cloud demands: nearly 70% of organizations are now hosting more than half of their workloads in the cloud, and overall cloud adoption has grown by 25% in the past year. That said, the struggle to automate security was palpable, and no matter the reason an organization moves workloads to the cloud, security remains consistently challenging. Respondents noted that the top three challenges in moving to the cloud were maintaining comprehensive security, managing technical complexity, and meeting compliance requirements.

Case in point: 80% of organizations with strong cloud security posture reported increased workforce productivity, and 85% of those with low ‘friction’ between security and development (DevOps) teams report the same. More specifically, organizations that tightly integrate DevSecOps principles are over seven times more likely to have a very strong security posture. This is independent of industry, budget, country, or other demographic categories.”

How to Plan a Pain-Free Cloud Migration

John Edwards, Information Week, Jan. 25, 2022

“When it comes to IT project challenges, few are more intimidating than a full-fledged cloud migration. Fortunately, with the help of some careful planning, a cloud transition can be successfully accomplished with minimal effort and disruption. The way organizations approach mass migrations to the cloud are rapidly changing. ‘Methodical and strategic modernizations have replaced the expedited ‘lift and shift’ approach,’ says Alicia Johnson, consulting principal, technology transformation, at professional services firm EY. The ability to compete at today’s locally and globally required speeds continues to be a driving force for companies heading into the cloud. For enterprises looking to the cloud for agility gains, an operating model transformation is more often than not required to optimize cloud benefits, Johnson observes. ‘Organizations that implement product operating model optimization, and change the way they work and operate, often reap the most benefits,’ she adds.

Before planning begins, it’s important to resolve several key questions, says Lee Voigt, a principal with audit, tax, and consulting services provider RSM US. ‘Why are you migrating to the cloud? What is your ultimate cloud play? What are your core expectations for the cloud? How have you solved the cloud technical competency gap? What is the plan for your business applications? How will you manage your cloud assets once they are in place?’ Finding the answers to these questions, and other issues that may arise during the planning process, will help ensure a pain-free cloud migration, he notes.”

CLOUD COST MANAGEMENT: PURPOSE, ADVANTAGES, AND BEST PRACTICES

Sukesh Mudrakola, TechGenix, Jan. 24, 2022 

“Traditional on-premises setup allows companies to know what they’re spending on infrastructure and resources. The more flexible cloud computing paradigm allows access to a wide range of services and resources, but it can sometimes be difficult to understand in terms of pricing. The pay-per-usage cloud model often makes it difficult to estimate overall cloud costs and to break down the charges for individual items as they are consumed. With more than 70% (Gartner) of all major enterprises and small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) having migrated at least some portion of their workloads to the cloud, there is an upsurge in the usage of associated cloud services. This trend creates numerous challenges in controlling cloud costs at an enterprise scale. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is further surging cloud adoption. Many industry experts believe that this will continue being an upward trend in the coming years.

Establishing visibility on cloud costs is crucial for any business. Companies can rely on their experienced IT staff, outsource to external consultants, or rely on cloud usage monitoring services to find the usage patterns. These cloud services and applications usage patterns can be then analyzed to calculate and perform consolidated cost analysis. These projections can be used to predict future cloud costs based on scalability, increased usage, and additional cloud services. The data generated can also be used by the companies in establishing performance, operational, and usage metrics.  The main reasons for cloud cost management is to save money, control the spending on cloud resources, and maximize usage. Cloud cost optimization can help businesses focus on other essential aspects of business without having to worry about the cost overheads.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

If you’re a modern enterprise, chances are you’ve implemented some form of DevOps processes. Before DevOps, developers and ITOps often operated in siloes, reducing productivity while increasing bottlenecks and headaches. DevOps came into being so these functions could work together from a planning standpoint, shorten the delivery timeframe for new software, improve innovation and optimize the recovery process if things go wrong.

But simply establishing DevOps wasn’t enough, so Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, or CI/CD was introduced. Continuous Integration is the practice of integrating code into a shared repository (e.g. Github) and building and testing each change automatically, as early as possible—ultimately several times a day. Continuous Delivery adds that the software can be manually released to production at any time, often by automatically pushing changes to a staging system. An additional process, Continuous Deployment, goes further and pushes changes to production automatically.

Continuous Integration: CI is the practice of integrating code into a shared repository (e.g. Github) and building/ testing each change automatically, as early as possible – usually several times a day.

Continuous Delivery: Continuous Delivery enables software to be released to production at any time, often by automatically pushing changes to a staging system.

Continuous Deployment: Continuous Deployment goes further and pushes changes to production automatically.

CI/CD Can Still Fall Short

There is no doubt that while CI/CD has helped shore up many areas around digital innovation and development, it still has many pitfalls that organizations can easily run into without the right tools and infrastructure in place.

Research from 2021 indicates CI/CD hasn’t quite reached its full utility. CloudBolt Industry Insights surveyed over 200 global IT leaders and found that over 3/4ths identified themselves as only “intermediate” CI/CD users. Almost 70% of respondents said they need days or weeks to deploy their CI/CD pipeline.

What’s causing these issues? In many respects, the challenges are with the infrastructure around CI/CD. Just 11% find their CI/CD infrastructure reliable, meaning they see failures often, resulting in drawn-out and painful CI/CD processes. Manual processes for CI/CD were cited as the top pain for respondents, while detecting failures proactively was also cited. Missing automated processes and a lack of visibility after deployment is costly in terms of time and money.

See how CloudBolt can help. Request a demo.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

This week we added two new resources to our Resource Center, eBooks to help customers solve their vexing CI/CD challenges, and navigate the upcoming migration from VMware vRealize Automation 7 to 8 before end-of-support for vRA 7 later this year.

With that, onto this week’s news:

Cloud computing spend grows again after slight dip

Liam Tung, ZDNet, Jan. 18, 2022

“Global spending on cloud infrastructure returned to growth in Q3 2021 after the first quarterly decline since the pandemic triggered a massive increase in spending.  According to researcher IDC, spending on cloud infrastructure across dedicated and shared environments increased 6.6% year on year to $18.6 billion in Q3 2021. The growth put spending back on track with the seven consecutive quarters of growth since Q3 2019, with the exception of the 1.9% decline in Q2 2021. The main boost in cloud spending happened in Q2 2020, which saw 38.4% year-on-year growth.

Cloud, whether dedicated or shared, is expected to continue to eat into traditional hardware spending in the future. The 2020 split on spending between ‘non-cloud & dedicated’, ‘cloud & shared’, and ‘cloud & dedicated’ infrastructure was 46.4%, 37.5%, and 16.2%. IDC expects this order to be reversed by 2025: by then it expects spending on compute and storage cloud infrastructure to reach $118.8 billion and account for 67% of all compute and storage spend. Of that amount spent on cloud, shared infrastructure will dominate cloud spending with a 70.9% of that investment. Cloud infrastructure spending in 2021 is likely to have grown 8.3% compared to 2020 to $71.8 billion, according to IDC projections. Meanwhile, spending on non-cloud IT infrastructure is expected to have grown just 1.9% in 2021 to $58.4 billion, which is actually a positive result after two years of decline.”

What to do in ’22: six cloud trends for the year ahead

Paul Delory, SiliconANGLE, Jan. 16, 2022

“Cloud services let smart business leaders respond quickly to opportunities — or threats. So don’t get in the way. You cannot let debates over technical minutiae derail the quick transition to cloud services — even if that means making uncomfortable compromises in initial implementation quality. However, you cannot abdicate your responsibility to keep business functions safe and highly available. Rather, you must implement flexible governance frameworks that can handle different risk profiles. Optimize cost and risk based on the business needs. You should:

Red Hat Integrates IT Automation for Hybrid Cloud With Microsoft Azure

Chris Ehlrich, Datamation, Jan. 18, 2021

“The open-source software maker Red Hat is integrating its IT automation software for Microsoft Azure. The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure builds on Red Hat’s standard for hybrid cloud automation and brings it more deeply into the application development lifecycle, according to Red Hat last month. The collaboration between Red Hat and Microsoft is intended to provide customers flexibility in how they adopt automation and scale in hybrid clouds and at the edge to “deliver any application anywhere,” without additional overhead or complexity.

Users can work on scenarios such as automated OS configuration, application provisioning, network automation, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), and cybersecurity orchestration.

The integration with Azure services, including Azure compute, network, and storage, can allow customers to scale their IT operations. Virtually all organizations (97%) see major barriers to their ability to effectively employ automation across their enterprise, according to IDC. Through 2023, many IT automation efforts will be delayed or fail outright due to under-investment in creating IT/Sec/DevOps teams with the right tools and skills. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure is designed to remove the infrastructure maintenance and operational burden from IT teams, enabling them to focus on delivering automation strategies for a more efficient business.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

VMware’s High Availability feature, also known as VMware HA, is a subset of vSphere Availability and part of the broader vSphere suite of technologies. It helps minimize virtual machine downtime in the event of a hypervisor (ESXi) host failure. With HA, vSphere can detect host failures and restart virtual machines on other hosts.

VMware HA includes multiple configurable features. The right choice of configuration options varies depending on your specific use case (host failure, admission control, etc.). However, the default settings are a great starting point for many vSphere deployments.

Popular HA features include:

Review VMware HA concepts, best practices, common misconceptions, and a configuration walkthrough in this article that’s part of our Complete Guide to VMware Administration.

Discover how we can help you make the most of your VMware environment. Talk to us today.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

Cloud Watching, New Barometers To Weather The Observability

Adrian Bridgewater, Forbes, Dec. 15, 2021

“The problem with cloud, is cloud. Or to put it another way, the central challenge associated with migrating and wrangling our way to cloud-native computing is the inherent scale we are now operating at and the granular detail that lies beneath. While we can be happy about the fact that cloud computing promises seemingly limitless flexibility and capacity, this scope and breadth creates a deluge of operational data related to system performance, service availability and wider system health.

That’s no easy task says Eric Horsman, global director of strategic alliances at Dynatrace. Horsman points out that most enterprise organizations making use of cloud computing are building multi-cloud environments (i.e. combining cloud services from more than one Cloud Services Provider), spanning services from a variety of playbooks with a variety of specialisms and optimizations. ‘As a result, DevOps (developer & operations) teams first need to deal with the data deluge from the multiple monitoring solutions they use to manage cloud applications and infrastructure,’ said Horsman. ‘This is happening against a backdrop of enterprise IT teams working to deliver application modernization initiatives where software services are being refactored to be cloud-native, using microservices and containers.’”

Forrester Predictions 2022: Cloud Computing Reloaded

Lee Sustar and Lauren Nelson, CDO Trends, Dec. 13, 2021

“As my Forrester colleagues anticipated in last year’s predictions, the pandemic put a lot more revenue in leading cloud providers’ pockets while accelerating the transformation of traditional enterprise IT. The results will be seen in 2022: We’ll see a shift to modern application development and industry-specific clouds even as geopolitical tensions reshape the cloud service provider (CSP) marketplace worldwide.

The coming year will see big organizations move decisively away from lift-and-shift approaches to the cloud, embracing cloud-native technologies instead. Having watched the hyperscalers upend entire industries — perhaps including their own — enterprises will accelerate their move into cloud-scale applications to meet their competitive challenges.”

How to get cloud storage costs under control

Chris Preimesberger, ZDNet, Dec. 8, 2021

“A decade ago, when enterprises seriously started migrating their data and file storage to a single cloud service from servers sitting in data centers, it was a fairly simple process to keep track of offsite storage costs. Most companies had one cloud provider with billing based on total capacity along with network egress fees. One bill, a couple of line items, one payment, and that was it. Not so much anymore.

While a single cloud provider model still may be the case for many businesses, now it’s generally a lot more complicated than that here in 2021. The trend now is for IT to use a multiple-cloud or hybrid-cloud (combination of data center and cloud) setup for optimizing various workloads. In fact, multi-cloud and hybrid systems are what cloud-service providers in all areas – not only storage – are gearing up for as we enter 2022. This is the most significant storage trend IT has seen in the last decade.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

We often get questions from advanced DevOps engineers and technical IT managers about how to best optimize Microsoft Azure cloud spending. As Azure administration experts, their questions aren’t about the service functionalities but for the ever-expanding pricing models and the industry best practices to safely reduce their monthly bill without compromising service performance.

The basic Azure virtual machine has gradually evolved to support multiple instance families, types, and versions, translating into hundreds of thousands of configuration permutations and purchasing plans. The resulting complexity confuses even the most experienced cloud administrators.

We’ve now created a new CloudBolt Industry Insights eGuide: The DevOps Guide to Azure Costs, so you can access all the information you need on Azure costs in one place.

In this guide, we clarify the pricing options, summarize the concepts into tables and diagrams, and share industry best practices for safely reducing your spending. We have created this guide to publicly share our responses to the most common questions involving popular Azure concepts such as migration, storage, spot, reservations, and SQL pricing.

Read the new CII eGuide: The DevOps Guide to Azure Costs now.

VMware NSX, also known as NSX-T, is a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution. SDNs allow IT administrators to create networking components in software rather than hardware. This results in significantly cheaper and faster deployment of network solutions.

Transitioning to a software-defined datacenter skips the time-consuming procurement and physical implementation steps, which enables teams to react faster to new challenges and projects required by the business. Let’s take a look at NSX and the role it plays in the transition to software-defined infrastructure.

Components of VMware NSX

NSX is an enterprise-ready network solution, and as you’d expect from such a product, has many features and components.

Depending on your license, NSX features include:

To learn more about how this works, and the impact to your VMware environment, read the full article on VMware NSX in our Ultimate Guide to VMware Administration.

Discover how we can help you make the most of your VMware environment. Talk to us today.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

With that, onto this week’s news:

Efficient Management of a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Swapnil Miahra, Enterprise Talk, Nov. 9, 2021 

“Hybrid cloud solutions not only allow organizations to hold their applications in multiple locations but also give businesses greater flexibility. In an era where ‘data is the new oil,’ protecting your business data is an important aspect of your storage strategy. Once implemented, it is important to manage hybrid cloud infrastructure properly as it has costs and safety effects.

Hybrid cloud is the new buzzword and is becoming overtly popular among tech companies. A hybrid cloud has gained popularity as it provides enterprises with additional flexibility and data deployment options. To put it broadly, it is a computing environment coordinating between a third-party public cloud and a local private cloud. A hybrid cloud makes it possible for enterprises to transfer workloads between resources according to the needs of the costs and businesses. According to a recent report, the global end-user expenditure on public cloud services is expected to exceed $480 Billion by next year. New trends in cloud computing are continuing to expand the breadth of cloud offerings and capabilities, accelerating growth across all segments in the cloud services market.”

How Banks Can Use Automation to Power Digital Transformation

Natalie Gross, BizTech Magazine, Nov. 9, 2021

“Prior to 2020, banks were adopting automated ways of completing processes that had traditionally been done by hand and on paper. However, the global coronavirus pandemic brought unprecedented changes to human interactions with financial institutions — as well as to in-house operations. The need for digital transformation became more apparent than ever, and the pace of change dramatically increased. 

Further digital transformation in the industry could include increasing the use of artificial intelligence to develop personalized financial plans, enhance customer relationships and automate debt collection. Institutions are also making the move to cloud services for storing data. In the IDC white paper, Silva points to a 2020 IDC survey showing that 89 percent of banks are operating with public and private hybrid cloud solutions or are planning to. He also notes that financial institutions that had already bought into digital transformation have been able to weather the pandemic and recover more quickly than their peers.”

Report: Cloud adoption by orgs increases to 90%

Editorial Staff, VentureBeat, Nov. 8, 2021

“According to a recent survey from O’Reilly, cloud adoption is steadily rising across industries, with 90% of organizations using cloud computing. This is an increase from last year’s survey, which reported that 88% of respondents used the cloud, proving that cloud adoption is proceeding rapidly. Even during a global pandemic, cloud adoption did not slow, as cloud computing was an obvious solution when it became difficult or impossible to staff on-premises infrastructure. This year’s survey found that in every industry, at least 75% of the respondents worked for organizations using the cloud, with the most proactive industries being retail and ecommerce, finance and banking, and software.

Not only is cloud adoption growing, but respondents are approaching cloud migration aggressively. The survey found that almost half (48%) of respondents plan to migrate 50% or more of their applications to the cloud in the coming year, while 20% plan to migrate all of their applications.”

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.

In recent years, new technical content has primarily focused on the latest technologies such as Kubernetes, Terraform, serverless, and the latest public cloud services. Yet millions of VMware installations are here to stay, supporting the hybrid cloud strategy adopted by large enterprises.

Verified Market Research forecasts that the global hybrid cloud market will grow 22.8% annually to reach $283B by 2027. Many have chosen a hybrid cloud strategy due to security and compliance reasons, while some are migrating infrastructure back to data centers to save money.

Meanwhile, every month hundreds of thousands of searches are typed in Google by VMware administrators seeking answers to configuration challenges ranging from network settings and upgrades to automation, load balancing, and high availability.

Meeting the Needs of the VMware Community

With that in mind, we created The Complete Guide to VMware Administration. We have devoted this VMware administration guide to the most commonly asked questions and commissioned senior practitioners to share their practical knowledge gained over the years to help new administrators solve everyday configuration challenges.

So far we have published guides to VMware NSX, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, VMware High Availability, and VMware Storage. We have a guide coming very soon about VMware Load Balancing, and much more to come. We look forward to sharing more of our knowledge with you.

If there are other areas you’d like to see us cover around VMware, feel free to reach out to us at sales@cloudbolt.io.

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.