Innovation In The Era Of The Transformation Cloud

Looking back on the past year, I see challenges—but also reinvention. Reinvention in how children are educated. Reinvention in how medical professionals provide care. Reinvention in how customers purchase products. This reinvention was made possible by all of the IT leaders around the world who had a vision about what could be possible with technology.

Technology has allowed people to work and complete critical activities safely outside of their standard locations. But, it has also enabled transformation in ways we have not seen before: in how people collaborate, in how businesses operate, and most important to me, in how organizations innovate.

Rethinking what it means to transform

The leading indicator for organizations that are accelerating their innovation during this time is how they are thinking about transformation. Instead of asking infrastructure questions about where their apps and services should run, they are asking transformation questions about how to build an environment that enables every person, process, and technology to adapt in order to bring the highest level of innovation to the business.

Innovative companies have moved beyond migrating their data centers to the cloud, changing not only where their business is done but, more importantly, how it is done. For example, Papa John’s recently announced they are building a digital platform that looks at real-time data across the business to improve its loyalty programs, website, and customer and partner experiences. Albertsons Companies is transforming itself by reinventing grocery shopping, both the digital and physical aisle, through shoppable maps, AI-powered conversational commerce, and predictive grocery list building. Airbus is reimagining their work environment to embrace the hybrid work reality. And Siemens is partnering with Google Cloud to reinvent industrial manufacturing with AI to empower employees, automate mundane tasks, and improve product quality.

#google cloud platform #inside google cloud #cloud

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Multi-cloud Spending: 8 Tips To Lower Cost

A multi-cloud approach is nothing but leveraging two or more cloud platforms for meeting the various business requirements of an enterprise. The multi-cloud IT environment incorporates different clouds from multiple vendors and negates the dependence on a single public cloud service provider. Thus enterprises can choose specific services from multiple public clouds and reap the benefits of each.

Given its affordability and agility, most enterprises opt for a multi-cloud approach in cloud computing now. A 2018 survey on the public cloud services market points out that 81% of the respondents use services from two or more providers. Subsequently, the cloud computing services market has reported incredible growth in recent times. The worldwide public cloud services market is all set to reach $500 billion in the next four years, according to IDC.

By choosing multi-cloud solutions strategically, enterprises can optimize the benefits of cloud computing and aim for some key competitive advantages. They can avoid the lengthy and cumbersome processes involved in buying, installing and testing high-priced systems. The IaaS and PaaS solutions have become a windfall for the enterprise’s budget as it does not incur huge up-front capital expenditure.

However, cost optimization is still a challenge while facilitating a multi-cloud environment and a large number of enterprises end up overpaying with or without realizing it. The below-mentioned tips would help you ensure the money is spent wisely on cloud computing services.

• Deactivate underused or unattached resources

Most organizations tend to get wrong with simple things which turn out to be the root cause for needless spending and resource wastage. The first step to cost optimization in your cloud strategy is to identify underutilized resources that you have been paying for.

Enterprises often continue to pay for resources that have been purchased earlier but are no longer useful. Identifying such unused and unattached resources and deactivating it on a regular basis brings you one step closer to cost optimization. If needed, you can deploy automated cloud management tools that are largely helpful in providing the analytics needed to optimize the cloud spending and cut costs on an ongoing basis.

• Figure out idle instances

Another key cost optimization strategy is to identify the idle computing instances and consolidate them into fewer instances. An idle computing instance may require a CPU utilization level of 1-5%, but you may be billed by the service provider for 100% for the same instance.

Every enterprise will have such non-production instances that constitute unnecessary storage space and lead to overpaying. Re-evaluating your resource allocations regularly and removing unnecessary storage may help you save money significantly. Resource allocation is not only a matter of CPU and memory but also it is linked to the storage, network, and various other factors.

• Deploy monitoring mechanisms

The key to efficient cost reduction in cloud computing technology lies in proactive monitoring. A comprehensive view of the cloud usage helps enterprises to monitor and minimize unnecessary spending. You can make use of various mechanisms for monitoring computing demand.

For instance, you can use a heatmap to understand the highs and lows in computing visually. This heat map indicates the start and stop times which in turn lead to reduced costs. You can also deploy automated tools that help organizations to schedule instances to start and stop. By following a heatmap, you can understand whether it is safe to shut down servers on holidays or weekends.

#cloud computing services #all #hybrid cloud #cloud #multi-cloud strategy #cloud spend #multi-cloud spending #multi cloud adoption #why multi cloud #multi cloud trends #multi cloud companies #multi cloud research #multi cloud market

What are the benefits of cloud migration? Reasons you should migrate

The moving of applications, databases and other business elements from the local server to the cloud server called cloud migration. This article will deal with migration techniques, requirement and the benefits of cloud migration.

In simple terms, moving from local to the public cloud server is called cloud migration. Gartner says 17.5% revenue growth as promised in cloud migration and also has a forecast for 2022 as shown in the following image.

#cloud computing services #cloud migration #all #cloud #cloud migration strategy #enterprise cloud migration strategy #business benefits of cloud migration #key benefits of cloud migration #benefits of cloud migration #types of cloud migration

How Cloud-Native Architecture Drives Innovation In Product Development

As users are becoming more and more sophisticated today, companies big and small should adjust their processes and practices to meet the demand. On-prem development proves cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive, while cloud-native architecture allows for better transparency, rapid innovation and quick changes. The article explores key benefits of cloud-native architecture for software product development.

Cloud-native architecture takes full advantage of the distributed, scalable and flexible nature of the public cloud to maximize your focus on quality coding, creating business value, and meeting customer needs.

Moving to the cloud means abstracting away many layers of infrastructure such as networks, servers, operating systems, etc., and deploying as much infrastructure as you need just in a matter of seconds by running a quick script.

As a software developer, all you need to worry about is how to organize the entire infrastructure via code. The more you focus on your code quality, the better.

And this is the essence of cloud technology.

How cloud-native architecture helps unleash business ideas

Let’s say that based on your user feedback, you need to build a bill- splitting feature for your mobile banking app.

In the old world, you might first think about how you would deploy it, what networks you would need, what you are going to write it in, and so on. And what really matters (CODE! CLIENT!) slowly slides into the background as niche technical issues cloud the horizon.

In our brave new world, a decent cloud-native setup removes the need for servers, operating systems, orchestration layers, networking, etc., and puts your code at the center of everything you do.

You (or your team) can try everything at once: test hypotheses, experiment, use machine learning tools, and many more.

Questions like “what if we did this …?” can be challenged almost instantly in practice, which will provide you with a data-driven and informed response.

“When you are constrained by infrastructure, your ideas are blocked. When you want to test something, you are instantly hit by a brick wall which is hardware!” says Philippe Peron, Chief Delivery Officer of a Leicester-based software house Evolve. “And whichever solution you come up with, there will always be a trade-off based on the constraints of what you have in your data center. But compromises don’t always benefit customers!

When the cloud removes these limitations, you can focus less on technology and more on the customer experience. Think about your product, not pipelines. Fix bugs right in your application, not in database replication.”

All this means that you can move from idea to application as fast as you can/wish.

In the cloud world, your ideas collect feedback, not dust!

But cloud-native architecture offers many benefits beyond “it lets you focus on your code” concept. And this is what we are going to address now.

So how does cloud-native architecture unlock ideas?

Take a look at the image below. The User is at the top of a software development circle, while the development team is at the bottom.

#cloud #cloud-native-application #cloud-native #cloud-architecture #innovation

Google Cloud: Caching Cloud Storage content with Cloud CDN

In this Lab, we will configure Cloud Content Delivery Network (Cloud CDN) for a Cloud Storage bucket and verify caching of an image. Cloud CDN uses Google’s globally distributed edge points of presence to cache HTTP(S) load-balanced content close to our users. Caching content at the edges of Google’s network provides faster delivery of content to our users while reducing serving costs.

For an up-to-date list of Google’s Cloud CDN cache sites, see https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/locations.

Task 1. Create and populate a Cloud Storage bucket

Cloud CDN content can originate from different types of backends:

• Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instance groups
• Zonal network endpoint groups (NEGs)
• Internet network endpoint groups (NEGs), for endpoints that are outside of Google Cloud (also known as custom origins)
• Google Cloud Storage buckets

In this lab, we will configure a Cloud Storage bucket as the backend.

#google-cloud #google-cloud-platform #cloud #cloud storage #cloud cdn

An Approach to Cloud Transformation and Cloud Migration

This article provides a methodology for cloud assessment, strategy, and migration including info on 7R methodology, assessment, and target cloud architecture.

Overview

The ongoing COVID 19 pandemic is creating new challenges to almost all industries. It is causing a significant impact on business and operating models. Organizations are rethinking, “how to make business resilient for such large disruptions,” " how to innovate faster and enable new business services to customers," “how to reduce TCO,” and “how to enable better connectivity and collaborations.” Such challenges existed before the pandemic era as well, but have become more relevant and important now.

Businesses that have already embarked on their cloud journey have shown greater resiliency and responsiveness to this pandemic. In the near future, it’s expected that cloud adoption will significantly increase across industries with a combination of different cloud service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) along with hybrid and multi-cloud topologies. Cloud hosting will become a new essential IT service for businesses.

#cloud migration #cloud transformation #cloud