Need some help with your cloud strategy? You’ve come to the right place. Our blog combines insights from experts across the cloud industry with a focus on telcos and service providers to help you grow your business. If you missed some of our blogs this year, check out our top 15 cloud blog posts of 2015.
1. How to Use Spark Across Any Cloud with Flexiant Concerto
The emergence of large scale Big Data projects continue to grow. This has fueled the need to process Big Data faster and is accelerating the adoption of new approaches and technologies. One such technology exploding in 2015 is Apache Spark.
2. Learn How to Use Chef on Any Cloud Today
Chef offers the benefit of automating how you build, deploy and manage your infrastructure. Most people want to dig into it straight away, however they need to first set it up and configure the Chef servers and clients including all the various dependencies involved. Then manage, pull and execute Chef cookbooks. This is in many cases a repetitive task.
3. 2015 Cloud Predictions for the Service Provider
What changes will 2015 bring? We asked our team here at Flexiant, what they believe will be the key trends of 2015. While many in the industry make predictions on cloud, few are focused 100% on the cloud service provider. Today, we offer 10 cloud predictions for 2015 for the service provider.
4. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Telcos in the Cloud
There is bad and ugly news for telcos – just shy of half of SMBs surveyed recently receive no help from their telecoms operators whatsoever and many are contemplating switching telco operators.
But there is good news – 40% of UK and US SMBs are openly willing to purchase software and tools from operators to help them grow their business according to recent research. Another 31% of SMBs currently have a cloud migration strategy in place – the segment remains largely untapped.
5. New from Flexiant: Kubernetes Orchestration as a Service – Cloud Management Software and Cloud Orchestration Software
Kubernetes is a powerful and increasingly popular system for managing the lifecycle of distributed microservices over clusters of containers, letting you harness the potential of technologies such as Docker at scale. Heavily influenced by Google’s celebrated Borg system, it provides true immutability for your infrastructure, where containers that fail for whatever reason can be replaced nearly instantaneously, with the availability of the service that resides on that cluster continuing unaffected. As the analogy goes, it allow you to treat containers as cattle rather than pets.
6. Network Scalability: Layer 2 Issues
To overcome cloud networking scalability challenges as outlined in a previous blog post, cloud service providers look to solutions like Layer 2, VLANs and Layer 3. Discussed below are the issues service providers face with Layer 2.
7. DevOps & Cloud: A Match Made in Heaven
Gartner said in 2010 that “the DevOps philosophy was born primarily from the activities of cloud service providers as they worked to address scale-out problems due to increasing online service adoption.”
Fast-forward to today and Gartner defines DevOps as “a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices…”
8. Containers vs Hypervisors and Other Considerations
A hypervisor is one of two main ways to segment a physical machine into multiple virtual machines; the other significant method is to use containers. A hypervisor segments the hardware by allowing multiple guest operating systems to run on top of it. In a container system, the host operating is itself divided into multiple containers, each running a virtual machine. Each virtual machine thus not only shares a single type of operating system, but also a single instance of an operating system (or at least a single instance of a kernel).
9. A Telecom Operator’s Checklist to the Cloud
Declining revenues, economic challenges, technology transformation and price competition are all contributors to the rapidly changing telecom industry alongside the evolving requirements of customers. As telecom operators look to transform to overcome these challenges, the cloud has become ever more important. The cloud enables telecoms to support businesses and consumers in our anywhere, anytime culture. It also enables them to reinvent their business and their role in this technology transformation. Support for digital services, the Internet of Things (IoT), next generation services and even Over The Top (OTT) cloud services are major opportunities for telecoms.
10. It’s all about that (Hybrid) Cloud
You might be asking yourself what’s new with cloud adoption in 2015. This year cloud adoption might actually hit an all time high.
Those cloud providers with a dog in the fight believe Microsoft ending its support for Windows Server 2003 this July will greatly bolster cloud adoption among SMBs. They are eager to portray cloud as the most affordable way for companies with limited resources to refresh their IT infrastructure.
11. Why Traffic Management is Critical to the Bottom Line
The days when users were prepared to wait a few seconds for websites to respond are long gone. Consider that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Or consider that a one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. We have become so used to near-instant responses that unless businesses are able to deliver this kind of performance on their web applications, they are potentially putting their revenue, brand awareness and productivity in jeopardy.
12. Hypervisor Comparison | KVM, Xen, VMware, Hyper-V
There are many considerations when such as the performance, how mature the technology is, how it integrates with existing systems, the commercial implications and guest and functionality support. In our latest selecting a hypervisor white paper, we put together a guide that sets out to help you select the most appropriate hypervisor.
13. The Importance of Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure for Service Providers
We recently highlighted five trends from Gartner that we think service providers need to consider for their 2015 business plan. This post focuses on the fourth trend we listed, “Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure”, covering the opportunities that this trend is creating for service providers.
14. 5 Cloud Billing Pitfalls
When it comes to billing for cloud services, it’s a tricky business. Sometimes complexity can take over causing services to not be billed for correctly. And as we all know, if you are not billing properly, you are most likely losing money or customers.
15. 5 More Examples of Service Providers Excelling at Cloud
Think you’re too late to the cloud market? Think again. By 2018, IDC forecasts that public cloud spending will more than double to $127.5 billion. This forecast is broken down as $82.7 billion in SaaS spending, $24.6 billion for IaaS and $20.3 billion in PaaS expenditures.
