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:
AWS outage shines a light on hybrid cloud
Paul Sawers, ZDNet, Dec. 8, 2021
“As the dust begins to settle on yet another cloud outage, chatter will once again center on the wisdom of companies putting all their digital eggs in a single cloud provider’s basket. Amazon’s AWS “US-East-1” cloud region went down in North Virginia yesterday, disrupting some of Amazon’s own applications and a slew of third-party services that rely on AWS. The cause? An “impairment of several network devices” led to multiple API errors, which in turn impacted myriad AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Connect, DynamoDB, Athena, Chime, and more. This isn’t the first time AWS and its customers have suffered at the hand of technical glitches — a similar event occurred just last November that impacted the very same AWS region. And while all the major cloud providers including Microsoft and Google have suffered similar fates at various junctures in the past, as the world’s largest public cloud provider, AWS outages often have the farthest-reaching impact.
With more and more business dollars going toward cloud computing infrastructure, incidents such as this serve to highlight why companies need to adopt robust disaster recovery and mitigation plans. While this might include using third-party data backup services, major cloud outages also support those that argue in favor of hybrid or multi-region cloud strategies — particularly for mission-critical services. With hybrid, companies can use their own on-premises infrastructure, leaning on the public cloud only to ensure that their in-house systems don’t crumble under peak traffic.”
4 Options for Building a Hybrid Cloud: Kubernetes, VMware and Beyond
Christopher Tozzi, ITPro Today, Dec. 2, 2021
“Understanding the benefits of hybrid cloud is easy enough. Actually building a hybrid cloud environment can be more challenging. That’s not because there’s a shortage of hybrid cloud tools. On the contrary, there are a variety of platforms and frameworks designed specifically for building and managing hybrid clouds. The challenge lies in figuring out which platform or framework to use. Hybrid cloud solutions vary widely in areas such as:
- Whether they are open source or proprietary.
- Whether they are tied to a particular public cloud platform.
- Which types of cloud services they enable to run on a hybrid architecture.
- Which types of infrastructure you can use to host your hybrid environment.
- Which management, monitoring, logging and security features they provide.
To provide guidance on choosing the right hybrid cloud platform or framework, this article compares four key options: VMware Cloud Foundation, OpenStack, Kubernetes and the frameworks from public cloud vendors (such as Azure Arc and AWS Outposts).”
Cloud computing is the key to business success. But unlocking its benefits is hard work
Mark Samuels, ZDNet, Dec. 1, 2021
“Our reliance on cloud computing is only going to increase. Now firmly in place as the underlying infrastructure of most organisations, cloud is going to play an even bigger role in supporting how enterprises operate and transform during the next few years. Organisations are currently 17 times more likely to increase their cloud spend than to reduce it, says analyst firm Gartner, which reports that spending on the cloud will total $474 billion in 2022, up from $408 billion in 2021. As demands for digital transformation also continue to rise, the tech analyst says that cloud is going to become so important during the next five years that it will become the key enabler of the things that enterprises and their boards want to achieve. ‘There is no business strategy without a cloud strategy, and there is no real cloud strategy without paying close attention to the business outcomes that you’re trying to accomplish,’ says Gartner analyst David Smith.
This close intertwinement of IT and business is also a sign of the maturity of on-demand IT. Gartner suggests that while cloud was once seen as a technology disruptor, it will be more usefully viewed in the future as a platform from which to disrupt business. ‘Cloud is going to create new business models, new opportunities, new revenue streams, and help it move from being more of a cost centre to an enabler of digital business,’ says Smith.’”
