First conceived more than 25 years ago, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is not a new concept. At its heart, it is designed to enable the modeling of infrastructure with code, empowering developers to design, implement, and deploy application infrastructure with known software best practices. The ability to treat infrastructure like code and use the same tools as any other software project ostensibly allows developers to rapidly deploy applications.

An emerging vendor in IaC is HashiCorp’s Terraform, which was introduced in 2015 and has rapidly grown a base of ardent users. Terraform’s co-founder and CTO recently called one of their releases “a milestone…designed to deliver stability, scalability, and interoperability.” He then asserted that “Terraform has emerged as the ‘lingua franca’ for infrastructure.”

While an interesting and thought-provoking statement, data collected as part of our recent CloudBolt Industry Insights report, The Truth About DevOps in the Hybrid Cloud Journey, uncovered a different story regarding Terraform in the context of hybrid cloud infrastructure management.

Leveraging Pulse Research’s proprietary platform and audience between May 7 and June 10, 2021, CloudBolt secured 200+ responses from senior titles (74% VP+) at large companies (>1,000 employees) around the world who had specific knowledge of IaC, Terraform and CI/CD within their organizations.

How the Enterprise Feels About Terraform and IaC Adoption

Here are some of the key takeaways on the IaC/Terraform portion of the report:

  • Fully 88% of respondents indicate that they are either using or considering using Terraform.
  • Only 5% of users in our survey are truly satisfied with Terraform. 75% are only “Somewhat Satisfied.”
  • 62% of respondents indicate that deployment of on-premises infrastructure via Terraform is challenging.
  • 90% state Terraform requires more custom-coded integrations to other critical tools and systems to work properly.
  • Skillsets are another challenge, with 39% pointing out they lack the specific and necessary Terraform expertise.
  • 74% state that they need a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) operating in conjunction with Terraform. 58% use DevOps tools like CI/CD or Kubernetes. 56% require configuration management tools like Ansible or Chef. And 51% said scripts.

Learn more in the full report here.

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

An effective cloud strategy is a frame of mind, not a one-time transition 

Jen A. Miller, CIO Dive, Sept. 7, 2021

“The rush to the cloud during the start of the pandemic motivated companies sitting on the sidelines of digital transformation to get into the game. But moving to the cloud is a continuous process, not just a one-time, necessary, cost-saving action.

Two-thirds (65%) of enterprises saw up to a 10% cost savings due to moving to cloud, according to an Accenture survey of nearly 4,000 C-suite executives. However, six in ten executives do not actively manage and optimize it continuously, and 80% do not actively prioritize the use of cloud-native architectures, applications and data.”

Cloud adoption remains a top enterprise priority for 2021

Ian Barker, Beta News, Sept. 8, 2021

“According to a new report, in mid-sized to large enterprises 50 percent of the software applications being developed are cloud based and another 30 percent are expected to migrate to the cloud within the next two years. 83 percent of respondents state that cloud-based development and deployment is a top IT priority in 2021 for applications their company develops and deploys. The top three business drivers for moving applications to the cloud are: enabling a remote workforce, bringing technology to market faster, and increasing agility, with cost was ranked only a distant fourth.

But the study from Security Compass also highlights that organizations are struggling to develop cloud applications that meet security requirements and that integrate with existing on-premise technologies with 54 percent naming these as the top challenges. There’s also an increased case for automation, with 92 percent of enterprises that are developing over three quarters of their software applications in the cloud reporting an interest in solutions that automate proactive security and compliance processes.”

CISA releases the cloud security technical reference architecture and zero trust maturity model for public comment

Editorial Staff, Security Magazine, Sept. 8, 2021

“The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released the Cloud Security Technical Reference Architecture (TRA) and Zero Trust Maturity Model for public comment. As the federal government continues to expand past the traditional network perimeter, it is paramount that agencies implement data protection measures around cloud security and zero trust.

The TRA is designed to guide agencies’ secure migration to the cloud by explaining considerations for shared services, cloud migration, and cloud security posture management. CISA’s Zero Trust Maturity Model assists agencies in developing their zero trust strategies and implementation plans and presents ways in which various CISA services can support zero trust solutions across agencies.”

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

Cloud migration initiatives are complex, expensive undertakings. Many things can go wrong, which is why organizations perform meticulous planning before migrating important systems. To reduce risk, most organizations start with a POC, migrating non-critical applications first, and use migration assessment tools to identify problems in advance.

While many articles have been written about what can go wrong with a migration and how to prepare, few have focused on migrations that go right. In this article, I collected three stories about organizations that moved business critical systems to the cloud, experienced a smooth migration, and met and exceeded their goals. These stories can serve as inspiration, and also teach us a few lessons about how to do things right when moving to the cloud.

Spotify: Bare Metal to Cloud

Spotify provides media services through an audio-streaming platform that enables users to search, share, and listen to music and podcasts.

The Challenge

Spotify had massive local data centers that were difficult to maintain and provision. The company decided to free up time for their engineers so they could prioritize innovation rather than maintenance. In 2015, they started planning their migration to Google Cloud. They defined two key objectives—minimizing disruption to software development and reducing the costs and complexity of a hybrid operation. 

The Result

Spotify spent two whole years on the pre-migration preparation phase. They assigned a dedicated Spotify-Google cloud migration team, which oversaw the effort. The migration effort was split into two main parts, one dedicated to services and the other to data. They invested two years in total—one year to complete each part of the strategy. 

Spotify’s engineering team worked in sprints. During two weeks, they paused all product development work and focused primarily on migrating services to Google Cloud. When working on data migration, teams were either responsible for “forklifting” or rewriting. The result of this effort was a significant increase in scalability and development time.

90 Seconds

90 Seconds is a video creation platform, which helps brands to plan, shoot, and edit video content from any location in the world. They manage a marketplace of 12,000 video professionals located in more than 160 countries across 70 categories, and their 3,000-plus clients include many global enterprise brands.

The Challenge

90 Seconds started using new technologies to scale the business after receiving millions of dollars in venture capital several years ago. The company received additional funds later on, and continued to scale the business. 

They started operations in a colocated data center in the U.S. and as the business began to rapidly expand, they ran into scalability and cost issues, particularly around storage and content delivery. To solve these issues, they moved to another cloud service—Google Cloud.

The Result

90 Seconds leveraged Google Cloud services to support their growing marketplace and they are now adding machine learning (ML) capabilities through cloud AutoML, so they could provide deeper and more relevant analysis for brands. This type of service can help the company to easily train ML models for video analysis. Google Cloud provides the Video AI service that enables automated analysis of video content and extraction of metadata at shot or frame level. 

The company now uses ML models to extract content from videos, such as footage of people, and analyze how footage contributes to performance in terms of attracting viewers and driving engagement. They plan to use Google-powered ML, and possibly other video APIs, to power a chatbot that provides customers with answers to frequently asked questions. 

DocuSign

DocuSign helps organizations automate their agreements. Customers can automate the preparation, signing, and management of their agreements. DocuSign’s cloud-based platform includes eSignature features that let partners electronically sign agreements on any device. 

The Challenge

DocuSign developed their own business intelligence (BI) infrastructure and analytic solutions. The company relies on this technology to make data-driven decisions. However, as the company continued to grow, its legacy infrastructure could not meet the increasing scalability and performance demands. Eventually, their infrastructure became too expensive to maintain on premises.

The Solution

DocuSign created a data modernization strategy. The first step was to select a cloud data warehouse (CDW), and they needed a solution that could help them:

After evaluating several solutions, DocuSign chose Snowflake as its CDW vendor and Matillion ETL for Snowflake. Matillion was deployed from within the AWS Marketplace, launched directly into DocuSign’s EC2 instance, and was then integrated with Snowflake. The solution helped aggregate multiple data sources. Matillion was also responsible for creating dimensional models, which were needed to achieve downstream consumption. 

The Result

Snowflake and Matillion helped DocuSign improve scalability, performance, improve security, and reduce costs on AWS via resource optimization. Using this strategy, DocuSign was successful in reducing the time needed for long-running jobs from approx. 22 hours to only 6 hours.

Conclusion

In this article I reviewed three successful cloud migration stories:

The common denominator of these three stories is that the three companies took a phased approach, worked closely with their cloud provider, and were not afraid to go all out—moving an entire production system to the cloud and rebuilding it to take full advantage of the new platform. Like many things in life, avoiding shortcuts and building their operation from the ground up was the key to long term success. 

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

Majority of Organizations Now Adopt Multi-Cloud

Bill Doerrfeld, DevOps, Aug. 31, 2021

“As IT’s digital footprint grows, its cloud footprint is rising both in size and complexity. As a result, most organizations have matured into multi-cloud operators. A multi-cloud approach empowers different divisions with the autonomy to select the right computing environment for their needs. It also enables a lift-and-shift ability to port workloads across cloud service providers (CSPs) when needed. Adopting a multi-cloud model could bring performance benefits, cost savings or better scalability, all while encouraging a more vendor-neutral stance.

We’re in a multi-cloud world. A recent HashiCorp study found three out of every four organizations are already multi-cloud. This is a staggering increase from just a few years ago when mono-cloud was more accepted, and operators had zombie-like allegiance to AWS. The uptick in multi-cloud signals the maturity of offerings at other CSPs, like Azure and GCP. It also signals differentiation among clouds as each hones in their unique value propositions.”

Tackling intelligent data management in the cloud

Greg Hanson, TechRadar, Aug. 30, 2021

“It is predicted that by 2025 there will have been 175 zettabytes of data generated, with machines already creating upwards of 40% of the world’s data annually. This exponential data growth is being driven by innovation, with many organizations widening their IoT networks and enhancing their cloud computing capabilities. The imminent arrival of 5G is set to be a major catalyst in this forecast, aided by an increasingly connected global population.

With this growth of data has come proliferation and fragmentation, which can significantly limit the value of the data insights extracted and used by companies. To truly achieve digital transformation and reap the rewards of effective data analytics, organizations require cloud solutions that enable them to seamlessly manage their ever-increasing volumes of information. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that while there is only one cloud, there are multiple cloud providers. Organizations commonly choose to work with multiple cloud partners to ensure cloud sourcing resilience, but this also creates complexity in a world where data must flow freely and be readily available, yet it becomes fragmented across multiple cloud locations.”

How to Choose a Cloud Provider for Your Hybrid Cloud Solution

Christopher Tozzi, ITPro Today, Aug. 25, 2021

“Choosing a cloud provider is complicated enough when you plan to run all of your workloads within a single public cloud: You have to compare the various features and pricing schedules that different cloud providers offer to determine the best fit for your workloads. But if you’ve adopted a hybrid cloud solution, selecting a public cloud platform to help power your strategy is even more challenging. It requires comparing not only the core features of public clouds themselves, but also the services they offer related to hybrid cloud. Here’s some advice on how to choose a cloud provider when you’re building a hybrid cloud solution strategy.

If you want to build a hybrid cloud solution, then, one of the first steps is to decide which public cloud platform to use to deliver the public cloud services and/or infrastructure that will help power your hybrid cloud. As we’ve noted, this is a complex decision, given the many considerations at play in areas like features and pricing. You also need to think about not just how a cloud provider’s services work within its cloud, but also how they integrate with private infrastructure as part of a hybrid strategy.”

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

If you haven’t heard, CloudBolt has released its second CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII) report, this one focusing on the results of a survey of over 200 global IT leaders on the topics of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and infrastructure-as-code (IaC).

This survey, powered by Pulse Research’s platform, highlighted the connectivity between DevOps, hybrid cloud, and digital transformation. We at CloudBolt believe this shows how important these processes are to the formation and development of a new way of thinking when it comes to cloud. We’ve coined a term to describe it: the New Cloud Order.

A Reminder on the New Cloud Order

As a refresher, this is 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. Think about all the change in the world since the beginning of 2020.

There has been a reordering of strategic priorities that 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.

To face the New Cloud Order, organizations must provide simple and effortless self-service capabilities, optimize cloud costs intelligently, automatically informing and remediating gaps in real-time, and make clear investment in automation tools to integrate systems in a scalable way free of custom code.

What the New CII Report Tells Us About the New Cloud Order

The truth about the state of DevOps is still evolving as developers and ITOps struggle to find reliable common ground and contribute more fully in the New Cloud Order. Gaps in reliability, interoperability, testing, governance, ease of use, integration, and visibility combine to stymie efforts to advance CI/CD and leverage IaC for competitive advantage.

While progress is being made for DevOps, CII data proves much improvement is still necessary before reality matches exuberance and hype lives up to promise.

When it comes to CI/CD, reliable infrastructure for DevOps pipeline is important beyond just the act of development. Organizations need those pipelines to work for innovation to grow, digital business to proliferate, and for competition to be squashed.

Consider this: while 97% of our respondents agree that testing CI/CD infrastructure is important and 85% claim to regularly test that infrastructure, only 11% of companies believe their CI/CD infrastructure is very reliable. 69% characterize it as only somewhat reliable, and fully 21% say theirs is somewhat unreliable or not reliable at all.

As for IaC and Terraform, there’s a lot of desire to make it work, but so far the proof isn’t really in the pudding. Fully 88% of respondents indicate that they are either using or considering using Terraform. However only 5% are very satisfied with the platform. 58% cite a lack of cost visibility into infrastructure deployed by Terraform as a key shortcoming. 53% call out the lack of visibility of who is using Terraform, while 42% of respondents say that they have a fear of ungoverned Terraform plans being executed by other teams.

In the end, these areas must improve and work together for the New Cloud Order to fully take shape.

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

Top 3 Ways to Save Money on Cloud Computing

CIO Review, Aug. 23, 2021

“The process of minimizing the overall cloud spend by identifying mismanaged resources, eliminating waste, reserving capacity for higher discounts, and right-sizing computing services to scale is known as cloud cost optimization.

Addressing idle resources is one step in lowering cloud computing expenses. A CPU utilization rating of one to five percent might be found in an idle computing instance. It is a significant waste when an organization receives a bill for 100 percent of a computing instance. Identifying such instances and consolidating computing jobs onto fewer instances would be a crucial cloud cold optimization method. Heat maps are helpful tools for lowering cloud costs. A heat map is a visual representation of computing demand peaks and dips. This data can be useful for determining the cost-cutting start and stop times. Heat maps, for example, can show if development servers can be safely shut down on weekends. “

5 Vexing Cloud Security Issues

Christopher Tozzi, ITProToday, Aug. 23, 2021

“Cloud environments are complex. So is the task of keeping them secure. With so many different types of cloud architectures, services and deployment models, it can be hard to know which cloud security best practices apply to your environment. That’s why it may be simpler to approach cloud security by focusing on what not to do, rather than what you have to do. In this article, we explore five common cloud security issues that can leave organizations with cloud environments ripe for attack.

Among the many cloud security issues that companies struggle with, identity and access management (IAM) can be especially challenging. IAM systems provide the foundation for securing access to sensitive resources. IAM policies define who can and can’t access applications and data.”

‘Why cloud computing?’ is always a good question

David Linthicum, InfoWorld, Aug. 20, 2021

“Based on my research and the research of others, about 25% to 30% of existing on-premises workloads will not provide an ROI in the cloud. They don’t have platform analogs or it’s just not economically viable in other ways. Yes, they can be forced into the cloud, but that path will result in a net negative for the business.

Even if we get to more modern applications that do have platform analogs in public clouds and workloads that seem economically viable, they may not have a compelling business case to move to the cloud at this particular time. Often, issues unrelated to technology, such as the business being sold or a low tolerance for risk or company culture factors, contraindicate a move to the cloud in that instance, at that time, for that application and its attached data.”

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

Earlier this year, we at CloudBolt Software launched Cloud Industry Insights (CII) to provide a regular window into the multi-dimensional thinking of the IT leader in 2021. With hybrid cloud and digital transformation strategies changing so rapidly, it made more sense to check in with global IT leaders more frequently than annually.  

In our first report earlier this year, we took a general overview of how the hybrid cloud and digital transformation landscapes are transforming into a New Cloud Order. It that eschews myopic, monolithic processes and updates them to meet the extensible, holistic, and flexible needs of today.  

In our newest CII report, we take a more granular view of some very specific issues on the minds of enterprise IT leaders in the constantly evolving area of DevOps. We got the opinions of over 200 global IT leaders on topics related to continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes and strategies for infrastructure-as-code (IaC), specifically related to HashiCorp’s Terraform. 

The results indicate continued unsettledness around both areas, despite decades of usage and development for CI/CD pipelines and IaC. There’s difficulty for developers and ITOps to find common ground as gaps in critical areas around reliability, interoperability, visibility, testing, governance and more still exist.  

A Quick Glance at the Numbers for CI/CD and Terraform Realities 

We secured over 200 responses from leaders with senior titles (74% VP+) at companies with over 1,000 employees around the world, utilizing Pulse Research’s proprietary platform. Our full findings are in the full report, but here’s a quick summary of what we discovered:  

On the subject of CI/CD:  

When it comes to IaC and Terraform: 

Why It Matters and What Comes Next 

When we speak to IT leaders about hybrid cloud, conversations tend to focus on ITOps. But increasingly, DevOps is growing in importance when it comes to how we talk about hybrid cloud. There are realities and potentially misconceptions on both sides that we wanted to provide a clear picture on as part of this report.  

We invite you to read the full report for free here. Like with all CII materials, you don’t have to fill out a form to access our research, just click the link and you’re there. Over the next few weeks, we’ll dive more deeply here on the specific numbers and what they mean for your journey to realizing the New Cloud Order.   

Plus, we’ve got some more exciting CII research coming your way very soon.  

Learn more about CloudBolt today. Request a demo!

An Azure Network Security Group (NSG) is a core component of Microsoft Azure’s security fabric. Leveraging an NSG, you can filter traffic to and from Azure resources that you have commissioned on an Azure Virtual Network (VNet).

At its core, an NSG provides access control rules you assign to an Azure resource. It inspects inbound and outbound traffic and uses these rules, grouped into inbound and outbound, to determine whether it should grant or deny access to a particular network packet.

Azure NSGs control access and manage communication between individual workloads, connectivity between on-premises environments and Azure, and connections to and from the Internet. A standard Azure subscription can have up to 5,000 NSGs, and each NSG can have a maximum of 1,000 rules.

Although Azure NSGs offer adequate security, they do have some limitations. Microsoft offers Azure Firewall, a highly available, managed service providing additional security features relevant to some use cases.

To learn more about how this works, and the impact to your cloud costs, check out the Microsoft Azure NSG article in our Guide to Azure Cost Optimization.

Get your Azure costs under control. Learn how CloudBolt solutions can help.

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:

When does hybrid cloud trump private or public cloud?

Dashveenjit Kaur, Tech HQ, Aug. 13, 2021

“Nearly 94% of businesses surveyed in NTT’s 2021 Hybrid Cloud Report said that the hybrid cloud was a core enabler for their business strategy and critical to meeting their immediate business needs. Additionally, one of the key findings of the NTT report was that while business continuity, resilience, and agility were the top objectives for hybrid cloud adoption, the biggest driver was cost efficiency.

A study by IDC showed that over a five-year period, a bursting workload on hybrid cloud cost 44% less than its native public cloud equivalent, even after taking into account all the costs associated with computing and storage infrastructure management, application installation and software licensing fees, as well as refactoring and migration costs. Another study by IDC found strong cost efficiencies in migrating workloads to a hybrid solution compared to another public cloud – organizations incurred up to 57% lower migration costs, translating into savings of over US$200,000 per 100 virtual machines.”

Cloud Computing vs. On Premises: The Diminishing Differences

Christopher Tozzi, IT Pro Today, Aug. 12, 2021

“For years, one of the biggest questions IT teams had to ask themselves when planning a new deployment was, ‘Should we use cloud or on-prem?’ Today, the cloud computing vs. on premises decision is becoming less and less important. The differences between cloud and on-premises environments have grown increasingly irrelevant from the perspective of application developers and IT engineers.

Take pricing models, for one. It’s no longer the case that the cloud is the only place to find pay-as-you-go pricing. Center vendors offer the same pricing structure for on-prem resources that customers deploy in their own data centers. Indeed, you could make a good case today that the cloud tends to be more secure than on prem. Cloud providers’ IAM frameworks enable more granular access control than most on-prem environments can support. Cloud providers also tend to be better at keeping their environments patched, and at following security best practices, than teams that manage on-prem infrastructure.”

UK government advises firms to use cloud to reduce carbon emissions

Fin Strathern, Cloud Tech News, August 17, 2021

“UK businesses are being told to accelerate cloud adoption in an upscaled effort to tackle climate change, the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has advised. This in turn is part of a wider push by the government to encourage businesses to get behind its climate change-tackling net-zero emissions campaign, in which firms across the country are being challenged to halve their carbon footprints by 2030.

‘Large cloud providers are generally more energy efficient than traditional enterprise data centres,’ said the advisory note. ‘That’s thanks to IT operational and equipment efficiency, data center infrastructure efficiency and a higher utilisation of renewable energy. So consider moving from on-premise servers to the cloud.”

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