Not sure if there is a market opportunity for you in the cloud? This year, businesses in the United States alone will spend more than $13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services. By 2017 the public cloud services market is predicted to exceed $244B. In the next five years, a 44% annual growth in workloads for the public cloud versus an 8.9% growth for “on-premise” computing workloads is expected. The market opportunity exists which is why service providers need to position themselves for growth.
To capitalize on the cloud market opportunity, differentiate products and services and open new lines of revenue, orchestration software can help. It’s been said that a cloud without orchestration is like a racecar without a steering wheel: All that performance just goes to waste unless you have a way to control it. Cloud orchestration lets you quickly configure both standardized and bespoke service offers, as required by your customers. It also provides the ability to react rapidly to changing customer demands or to specific opportunities as they emerge.
Arthur Cole says in his article “Not Just a Cloud, But an Automated Cloud” (or an orchestrated cloud as he later defines) that:
The cloud will change the way data interacts with other data—hopefully toward a more efficient and productive work environment. Automation [or orchestration], however, changes the way in which humans interact with underlying infrastructure, particularly those who are responsible for the care and maintenance of that infrastructure.
As we wind up the first half of 2014, we’ve noticed a sharp rise in demand for IaaS cloud orchestration showing that service providers are more prepared and ready for adoption this year than last.
Cloud orchestration serves as the principle foundation layer for service providers to launch cloud services on their own infrastructure. Clearly, one cannot launch their own cloud on their own infrastructure without this primary building block before ultimately arriving at the attractive shiny SaaS and PaaS solutions. Telcos, service providers and hosting companies require this core ability to orchestrate, from one UI, all the compute and networking power necessary to launch a local cloud. With this ability, these telcos, service providers and hosters now can offer customers an alternative to the norm or defacto– Amazon Web Services (AWS), the undisputed King of Cloud.
Today we have announced our work with Russian service provider RadiusGroup to launch new cloud services. Key for RadiusGroup working with Flexiant, is Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator’s extensibility, Russian language localization and mixed billing model capabilities and available deployment options.
Recognizing the need to differentiate and open new revenue streams through cloud services, RadiusGroup investigated various build versus buy solutions for managing its new services. After investigating the Flexiant-buy strategy versus alternative build options, RadiusGroup is partnering with Flexiant because of the breadth and depth of Flexiant’s flagship product Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator Multi-Cluster Edition, combined with the rapid speed to market available through this choice. Using Flexiant, RadiusGroup will be able to offer various cloud models.
Together, RadiusGroup and Flexiant will bring a cloud solution to the market that will compete in the cloud battleground by using Flexiant. We also offer the leading cloud management solution with access to our ecosystem of technology partners.
This year’s GigaOm Structure 2014 event focused on three main themes. The first, the relationship between the enterprise and the cloud; the second the effect the Internet of Things will have on infrastructure; and the third OpenStack.
The conference took place in San Francisco and managed once again to gather industry leaders and visionaries in the computing infrastructure space. While I’m not going to give you a summary of all what has been discussed (you can find the complete coverage on GigaOm), there are some important takeaways to share.
Despite Amazon Web Services CTO, Werner Vogels’ claims that enterprises are already on AWS – he specifically named some of them such as Netflix, Dropbox and Newscorp – we all understood how far those examples are from traditional enterprises with legacy workload. In fact, HP remarked how its daily talks with CIOs revealed how the percentage of enterprise applications running in the cloud is still on a single digit.
We have recently announced the full integration of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator with Parallels Cloud Server virtualization. This is really exciting news. Today I want to answer some questions about container technology, but first call out two things it allows us to do:
On to a few questions.
What is a container?
Before I discuss why I think containers offer such an advantage to the service provider, I want to define in my opinion, what is a container.
