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.

With at least 80% market share as a virtualization platform, VMware is easily the market king. Therefore, it’s not surprising that when people wished to extend private and public cloud usage and needed a cloud management platform, many chose VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) to manage and automate their hybrid cloud IT infrastructure.

But that led to the single biggest question mark emerging out of our newest CloudBolt Industry Insights report: Will existing vRA customers, currently on version 7.6 or earlier, make the migration to vRA 8.0+ prior to the sunsetting of support for vRA 7.x (currently scheduled for September 2022 – which already got pushed back once from April 2022)? And for those who will choose not to, why?

In May-July 2021, CloudBolt commissioned a global survey leveraging Pulse Research’s proprietary platform and vast IT audience. The survey was opened to companies of all sizes and 200+ responses were collected from vRA customers globally. The distribution of titles for respondents ended up being Director (56%), VP (27%), and CXO (17%). Here’s what we gleaned: Gone are the days of one public cloud and all workloads being on VMware. Organizations want to offer true self-service across multiple clouds and virtualization platforms. They want Terraform, they want CI/CD/CIT, they want DevOps. These are challenging requirements – even for a market leader.

The Trouble with vRA 7

While other problems were identified, the following were cited as the Top 3 challenges with vRA 7:

  • Requires enormous amount of custom code (64%)
  • Movements to major releases require re-writes of all custom-built integrations (59%)
  • Lack visibility around what moves in and out of integrations (53%)

92% of respondents have custom coded at least one quarter of their integrations in vRA; 59% have at least half. Automation does NOT happen without integrations. Considering the time, expertise, continual care and feeding required to create and maintain vRA integrations, it’s no surprise customers have delayed a move to the latest edition.

Another huge contributing factor to delayed vRA 8 deployments is most custom integrations for vRA 7 will have to be re-written for vRA 8. The time and effort alone are forcing organizations to re-evaluate the Return on Investment (ROI) with vRA and potentially consider alternatives. 59% of respondents view this as a significant issue. Many have scars from the vRA 6 to 7 migration upheaval. Similar motion is required for vRA 8, and customers are much more hesitant this time around.

Tracking and visibility seems to generally be an issue for hybrid cloud deployments. And given the amount of custom coded integrations vRA customers have, tracking and seeing the flow of data between those integrations becomes exponentially more challenging (for example, the ability to visualize, audit, or troubleshoot from the component level integrations such as IP/DNS assignment, networking, security, and configuration/directory/service management). 53% of respondents recognize that vRA simply does not provide this information – and neither does any custom coded integration.

Learn more about these issues and some of the hesitancy surrounding migration to vRA 8 by accessing our new report.

Even the venerable first-generation leader in cloud management must contend with in meeting evolving cloud requirements.

VMware, and its vRealize Automation (vRA) product specifically, may be struggling with the New Cloud Order. Gone are the days of one public cloud and all workloads being on VMware. Organizations want to offer true self-service across multiple clouds and virtualization platforms.

They want Terraform, they want CI/CD/CIT, they want DevOps. These are challenging requirements – even for a market leader. We discovered this as part of our survey of over 200 IT practitioners and leaders for their opinions about vRA, the shift from vRA 7 to 8, and the visibility into the integrations needed for modern CMPs. We gathered this information in our latest CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII) report, The Truth About First-Generation Cloud Management Platforms: A Focus on VMware vRealize Automation.

The New Cloud Order Refresher

Here’s how we view the New Cloud Order at CloudBolt: old, siloed, myopic ways of doing business no longer cut it. Not when technology, tools, processes, and ideas change as rapidly as they do now.

Reordering of strategic priorities require comprehensive solutions and improvement in three key areas: automation, optimization, and integration. That’s where the New Cloud Order comes into play. It demands simplification of complexities using intelligent, agile, and interdependent approaches to vexing hybrid cloud problems. Self-service, cost and security optimization and simplifying integrations all play a factor here.

Where Users Need More from vRA

The two top reasons companies cite for wanting to leave vRA are:

  • Pain of migrating to vRA (custom coded integrations and workflows must be rewritten)
  • Pressure to buy “Enterprise” edition to maintain current capabilities (Enterprise is nearly double the cost of other editions)

As the end of support date for vRA 7 approaches in Sept. 2022, it is likely more customers will seek alternatives for similar reasons.

Tracking and visibility seems to generally be an issue for hybrid cloud deployments. And given the amount of custom coded integrations vRA customers have, tracking and seeing the flow of data between those integrations becomes exponentially more challenging (for example, the ability to visualize, audit, or troubleshoot from the component level integrations such as IP/DNS assignment, networking, security, and configuration/directory/service management). 53% of respondents recognize that vRA simply does not provide this information – and neither does any custom coded integration.

In the end, despite the delays in making the jump from vRA 7 to vRA 8, companies will migrate. But as the New Cloud Order continues to become increasingly more complicated, customers will need more than just vRA to be effective. The goal is to use vRA as a framework and make it better by integrating other tools and capabilities.

We will discuss more of the specific issues raised by our survey in subsequent blog posts.

In the meantime, please check out the full CII report on vRA, which you can access for free below.