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Scaling Up and Out

re:Invent has turned into a vast conference, dwarfing many other IT get togethers, 50,000 people expected with an unmanageable schedule spread across 5 hotels. Even if you can walk quickly, its at least 30-45 minutes walk between quite a few of the venues.

This is the first time I’m attending re:Invent so the rush of excitement of a new event is invigorating for me.

I’d love to meet up with anyone who is here so please get in touch via @julian wood

AWS seems an unstoppable machine and that’s not in any way to say it should be stopped. Its rare a single company rises so spectacularly to create a major new part of an already established industry. 10 years ago this new thing called EC2 was a curiosity, now its old hat as services like Lambda become the new compute engine.

Why I’m here

I’m coming to AWS self funded so don’t have a company/vendor agenda I need to follow, I can truly see what interests me! My plan is to first of all see what’s new. This isn’t just about announcements although those are important but more how AWS develops into a service provider specifically for enterprises. Cloud is a new way of doings things yet enterprises have been doing things in a particular way for a long time, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes it is plain old toxic heritage IT!

I’m also investigating how enterprises change themselves to do cloud properly, taking advantage of the flexibility and scalability of public cloud and also how AWS updates itself to service enterprises better. This is a complicated dance which needs a lot of back and forth fancy foot work from both sides. I’m expecting more enterprise features, plenty of compliance, governance and security as a service. The recently announcement of PrivateLink as a new way to connect your VPCs to AWS services with more control is a nod to enterprises that’s don’t want all their stuff near the internet by default. AWS is working hard to ensure enterprises can take advantage of all the clever cloud stuff they have to offer.

Secondly I’m watching the serverless space very keenly and expecting a huge focus on Lambda. I’m not being hyperbolic by stating the serverless/FaaS pattern is the future of compute. A new cloud operating model where all infrastructure is abstracted, business processes as pure code without restrictions on scale, billed per invocation giving you financial super-powers.

What could be coming?

AWS releases new features and major updates to existing ones in an unprecedented manor. Just last week, more than 30 announcements were made and that’s before re:Invent and the big picture announcements likely reserved for the show. Make sure you subscribe to the excellent Last Week in AWS mailing list by Corey Quinn

At this stage its a guessing game as to what they might be, but certainly more IoT, ML, AI and buckets of enticing delicious serverless. I’m expecting some Blockchain as a Service and likely Kubernetes as well.

Amazon is also a remarkable company in the way it is able to erm. reinvent itself. This isn’t just an AWS thing but AWS certainly helps all of the rest of Amazon be incredible agile, be able to continually experiment, use its own platform as a sensing engine, rely on real data to make decisions and cannibalise itself. Lambda has been built to cannibalise EC2.

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I was happy to be asked to present at the National UK VMUG about Serverless. I had done the closing keynote last year so pretty relieved that I was at least invited back!

The presentation was similar to the London VMUG presentation I had done in July although updated as the Serverless ecosystem is moving at breakneck speed.

Changes of note since July are the addition of the new and momentum gathering OpenFaas framework, Azure Functions now available in the wild with Azure Stack, AWS adding more Lambda functionality particularly with its announcement that traffic shifting is coming soon for canary releases and blue/green routing. Iron.io bought by Oracle and VMware shutting down Photon Platform and shifting direction to Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC).

AWS Re:Invent is in less that 2 week’s time so I’m sure there will be plenty more to talk about!

Here are the slides:

Presentation Summary:

I went though some of the public cloud examples like Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions. There are also Kubernetes based options you can deploy yourself like Fission, Kubeless and Funktion as well as cross container platforms such as Apache OpenWhisk, IronFunctions and the new and exciting OpenFaaS. I spent time going through what events are, why they are so critical to understanding serverless and gave some examples. How much it costs was covered, the differences between PaaS and containers. Listed the benefits and currently many disadvantages as its very new.

I also talked about how Ops is changing and doesn’t mean Ops goes away, just evolves. As it was a VMware user group I went through two connections to VMware, the kinds of things you could use serverless for to manage a VMware environment as well as the VMware cloud native story and using Pivotal Container Service the new Kubernetes based container runtime from VMware as your private serverless hosting platform.

Functional billing was highlighted as probably the most important future benefit for serverless, being able to track the cost of every single function call you make which can very easily highlight the inefficiencies you have and the benefit of being now able to have business costings matching up to IT costings.

Looking into the future there’s lots that needs to evolve but perhaps this is the time to decide whether you skip PaaS and containers for some things that have event triggers and go straight to serverless?

I was thrilled to be asked recently to join the CloudInsiders podcast to talk about Serverless. I was joined by Chan Ekanayake and we had a wide ranging discussion on what Serverless is, use cases, pros and cons and much more. It’s worth a listen if you’re trying to get your head around what its all about.

Thanks for having me.

Listen to the episode here: Serverless: Viva la revolución

The whole CloudInsiders podcast series is certainly worth subscribing to via iTunes or Stitcher.

Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Nimble Storage is a storage company with lofty goals of “giving users the fastest, most reliable access to data – on-premise and in the cloud”. The premise is their wording, certainly not mine, really should be premises, Nimble!

Nimble has an interesting Tech Field Day history as it announced its original product, the CS200 hybrid array at Tech Field Day 3 in Seattle in 2010. Fast forward to March 2017 when Nimble was purchased by HPE for just over $1 Billion.

HPE Land

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Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Gigamon is an established vendor which provides network traffic visibility. In its simplest form it is a large network tap. You chose what traffic you want to inspect more closely and run it through Gigamon’s devices. Gigamon then can hand off to other vendor products to then analyse the data. It could be security scanning with an intrusion detection system or watching traffic for data loss prevention or seeing if you have a bot net running internally.

In terms of virtualisation inspection, Gigamon already has its GigaVUE solutions which provide visibility into virtual workloads running in VMware networking with ESXi and NSX as well as OpenStack KVM powered clouds. Its Cloud Field Day so of course Gigamon is heading to the clouds and has recently announced the Gigamon Visibility Platform for AWS.

Enterprises love the simplicity of cloud networking, create a VPC with pretty much all the address space you need. Connect via an API and easily connect servers and clouds together. Nothing can communicate unless you specifically say it can so some of your firewalling is already taken care of and all the config can be more easily managed as code. Amazon looks after all the underlying compute, network and storage so you don’t have to, sounds great. It can be easy to think you then don’t have to worry about more security at the network level. Well, you may have permissioned a web server to be able to talk to an app server but how do you know what is actually running across port 443. What if the web server is in AWS but your app server is on-prem?

Visibility Platform for AWS

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Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

ServiceNow has a SaaS suite of products and is trying to take traditional enterprise IT Service Management to the next level. It has had a number of leadership changes recently so seems to be shaking itself up for new things.

ITSM products have been often maligned and I have been fairly vocal over the years in my scorn for some ITSM/ITIL products. They often insert an inordinate amount of unnecessary bureaucracy between getting things done and protecting your IT estate. This causes all sorts of problems. IT teams try as hard as they can to navigate around the horrible tools they are forced to use, hence some shadow IT. ITSM bureaucrats continually add more and more process to trap more and more potential issues, more process = more hassle. Processes get so complicated and change is avoided at any cost. It can take weeks to shepherd a change through the system and finally get approved. People dump as much as they can in a change to avoid having to repeat the process. Business users have to log IT issues in a system that makes them feel IT doesn’t care. IT SLAs are tracked through the ITSM tools so solving tickets becomes wack-a-mole for IT staff.

ITSM Dispair

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Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

What a journey Rubrik has had so far, a 2 year old company that has ambitious plans to redefine that stodge of datacenter technologies, backup. Rubrik recently received a further $180 million in a Series D round at a $1.3 billion valuation. Yes, that’s a more than billion dollar valuation for a company that does backup, wow! Rubrik says it has hardly dipped into its $61 million Series C round but is going for hyper growth. It currently has several hundred enterprises as customers. Interestingly in the Series D funding announcement Rubrik mentioned investing heavily in R&D with this money. They’ve already had 8 product releases with the latest including a number of cloud features so I would think sales and marketing is where the money will need to be spent to increase customers. Hyper growth phase is normally less about R&D and more about knocking on the doors of prospective customers so will be interesting to hear the latest company plans.

All the Data

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Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Scality has been a previous Tech Field Day presenter.

Scality is one of the new storage companies leveraging the AWS S3 storage API standard to create new enterprise storage options beyond your typical block and file store. S3 is object storage which is all about scale, built to store billions of objects or massive petabyte sized files or stores.

Scality already provides an open source implementation of the AWS S3 API called Scality S3 Server. Interestingly it is packaged as a Docker container so can leverage the benefits of Docker such as the same deployment mechanism from a developers laptop to being deployed in production and further scaled out via Docker Swarm.

Scality RING is the enterprise friendly version of S3 Server for more critical workloads with the usual enterprise feature requirements of security, support, availability, etc.

AWS S3 is all great but some enterprises aren’t willing to store everything in a public cloud. There may be (often unfounded) security concerns or more valid concerns about bandwidth usage, data gravity and cost. If you have PBs of on-prem storage for your media files, x-rays, satellite images etc. you would love the ease of use of the S3 API but accessed locally. Scality can provide this S3 API on-prem as well as the replicated, highly available storage infrastructure running on standard x86 underneath. Having S3 locally also allows your developers to test functionality locally for things that may eventually access AWS S3.

Zenko

Scality has now announced Zenko which is an open source multi-cloud controller and this is what I expect we’ll hear more about at Cloud Field Day.

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Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Platform9 is a regular Tech Field Day presenter and I am lucky to be able to heard from them directly when I attended Virtualisation Field Day 4 in 2015 when it was just starting

The company was founded in 2013 by some clever VMware people who wanted to create a company to provide managed cloud infrastructure with two important distinctions. They wanted their offerings to be SaaS managed and wanted it to use open source software.

It’s first product was a cloud managed OpenStack. OpenStack was (is?) hellishly complicated to set up and manage yourself so Platform9 stepped in and offered a cloud managed OpenStack which would run on-premises. Platform9 would take all the hassle away of deploying and upgrading OpenStack and you could spend your time using your OpenStack private cloud rather than managing it.

As the cloud landscape evolved and containers became the next big thing, Platform9 added a managed Kubernetes option. Kubernetes is also difficult to set up so Platform9 came to the rescue. Clouds don’t stand still and Platform9 now has an alpha version of its own Serverless offering called Fission (plenty to say about this).

Platform9 is a cloud infrastructure management company following the current cloud trajectory in what seems like an ideal evolving portfolio: Managed servers, then managed containers then managed Serverless.

The company has had a recent fund injection of $22m with a mix of existing a new investors to bring the total capital raised to date to £36.5m, a helpful war chest. It currently manages 200 enterprise clouds worldwide.

Hybrid Cloud

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Cloud Field Day 2, part of the Tech Field Day family of events is happening in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 26-28 July and I’m super excited to be invited as a delegate.

We are hearing from a number of companies about how they cloud!

Accelerite is a company I surprisingly haven’t heard of before and it is also new to Tech Field Day.

Founded in 2012 it is a wholly owned business of Persistent Systems and is a software house that aims to “Simplify and Secure the Enterprise Infrastructure”. Accelerite says there is a proliferation of devices and clouds that enterprises need to manage and secure.

CloudPlatform

I hadn’t realised that it was Accelerite that bought CloudPlatform from Citrix in March 2016. CloudPlatform was Citrix’s Apache CloudStack based platform, an open source cloud management platform and was at a time a possible alternative to OpenStack. It didn’t seem to get much traction in terms of numbers although tere are some massive deployments and it was seen as more enterprise ready. OpenStack seemed to get the buzz and won the marketing battle but has itself struggled with adoption due to complexity & feature bloat. Cries of OpenStack is dead are overblown, it is used in very large telcos and service providers, is being simplified and streamlined and will possible then creep back into enterprises who want an open source private linux of the cloud. AWS and Azure have of course been courting the same enterprises with their public cloud offerings. It remains to be seen how much time and effort enterprises are going to expend to what end to create what at least Wikibon is terming the True Private Cloud when public cloud is very tantalising and growing in features way above IaaS.

Accelerite’s CloudPlatform has multi-hypervisor support with its own hypervisor or you can choose from VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, KVM, or Hyper-V. There is bare metal provisioning as well with a particular use case highlighted of high performance computing applications. It can use traditional storage or hyper-converged.

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