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Weekly CloudNews: Cloud Operations Gain Momentum as Hyperscalers Dominate

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

Cloud Operations Gain Momentum as Hyperscalers Dominate

Nathan Eddy, ITPro, November 7, 2022

While cloud-native technologies are opening a path to greater productivity, organizations must overcome technical management and operational challenges to realize that potential. Meanwhile, cloud leaders should be focused on refining their strategies and picking up the pace of adoption. These were among the findings of Forrester Research’s recent ‘Top 10 Trends in Cloud’ report. The study also pointed to the continued dominance of hyperscalers — aka the cloud mega-vendors AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — and predicted cloud technology’s potential to redefine the data center. Nick Durkin, field CTO for Harness, explained that the cloud is redefining the enterprise data center by minimizing the data center’s value, or in many cases making data centers entirely obsolete.

“The group on the front lines of cloud-native adoption is the people who will be using these tools daily: developers and engineers. While cloud customers have appreciated the rapid rate of innovation and proliferation of services, they now want the hyperscalers to provide more automation and finished or semi-finished platforms that are easier to adopt. In addition, the distinction between cloud and data center is breaking down as Kubernetes-based multicloud and hybrid solutions provide a common abstraction layer, as do various ‘cloud at customer’ solutions from cloud providers. Durkin said any cost a company incurs in this economic climate should not just be managed but governed. In addition, cost information should be exposed, tracked, and optimized from the very beginning of the SDLC. Engineers should have the same access to costing information, budgets, and savings potentials that finance teams have, he said.” READ MORE

Cloud architects are afraid of automation

David Linthicum, InfoWorld, November 8, 2022

“Automation is not new, but its use in cloud computing is recent. The idea is to automate tasks that have been traditionally carried out by humans; for example, self-healing a saturated computer server by automatically restarting it on a cloud provider. Or restricting the overuse of some expensive cloud service by finops automation.The truth is I’ve preached the role of automation in cloud computing for many years now, but I’ve noticed a reluctance to set up and leverage automation within cloud deployments. This seems to be a systemic problem that could lead to suboptimized cloud deployments, missing an opportunity to have more reliable, more secure, and more trackable cloud operations.

“Take our self-driving car: Those things have hundreds of sensors that take a 360-degree view of the environment, including speed, direction, engine status, tire inflation, etc. As the automated driving occurs, the systems have almost a perfect understanding of what’s around the car. The car is never tired, never drunk, and it doesn’t drive road-rage angry. While we have experienced driving cars and can look out the front window, we don’t have a perfect understanding of current data, past data, and what this data likely means in the operation and driving of the vehicle. Properly configured automation systems do. At the end of the day, automation is a leap of faith that the automated systems will perform better than humans. If you are not looking for ways to actively automate things in the cloud, you’re missing the point of using cloud-based systems in the first place. We need to expand our capabilities, even if that feels unnatural.” READ MORE

Cloud computing is booming, but these are the challenges that lie ahead

Owen Hughes ZDNet, November 7, 2022

“Cloud adoption is not slowing down, but that doesn’t mean 2023 is going to be an easy year for users of on-demand computing services. According to a recent report by Gartner, worldwide consumer spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.7% to $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022. That’s compared to the 18.8% growth forecast for 2022. Meanwhile, consultant KPMG’s 2022 Global Tech Report found that nine in 10 businesses consider their adoption of cloud systems to be ‘advanced’, and almost three-quarters (73%) are in the process of migrating strategic workloads to the cloud. Cloud computing is now seen as a fundamental pillar of tech for many businesses.

“Companies may find it difficult to upskill existing enterprise application teams, says Lisa Heneghan, at KPMG International. Instead, they may need to find what she calls ‘entirely new’ groups of hard-to-hire talent. That’s perhaps no surprise: according to KPMG’s Global Tech Report, talent shortages remain the number one barrier to organizations adopting digital tech. The lack of cybersecurity staff has become particularly acute over the past year. This is because IT and business leaders appear to finally be waking up to the fact that cybersecurity needs to be built into every business decision, particularly now that much of their day-to-day work is being conducted off-premises by distributed teams. Malware and ransomware continue to evolve, and as new techniques and attack vectors are identified by hackers, companies will see every inch of their IT defenses poked and probed by malicious actors. Managing risks properly will require an empowered IT leadership that is given a say in strategic decision-making processes – something you might assume is a given, but continues to be a complaint among tech leaders.” READ MORE

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