AWS Re:Invent kicked off in ernest today, 43,000 cloud makers and learners spread across 5 hotels, basically taking over Las Vegas. Its difficult to appreciate the size of the conference as you could be involved in part of the conference and be very separate from another area.
See my preview posts yesterday, AWS re:Invent 2017: The Show Preview as well as re:Invent 2017: The Day 0 Buzz for what I’m concentrating on.
This morning, the 1st proper day of the conference, I started off with a hot topic for all of IT at the moment, security. As I’m currently consulting in the financial sector, this session piqued my interest.
FSV301 – Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid
Kurt Gray from AWS and Jonathan Baulch from Fidelity Investments
This was a really great session with lots of useful tips. I wrote it up separately here:
AWS re:Invent 2017: Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid – FSV301
It’s a shame I had to leave a little early as I needed to head across Vegas because size of conference.
SRV213 – Thirty Serverless Architectures in 30 Minutes
Chris Munns from AWS
Unfortunately I was in the walk up line for this one and despite my dash across Vegas, they only let in 20 people so missed out on the session, a shame, I hope its posted afterwards.
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FSV301 – Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid
Kurt Gray from AWS and Jonathan Baulch from Fidelity Investments
AWS has obviously spent a huge amount of effort building security into the very fabric of its cloud offerings. Enterprises still hesitant to use public cloud as they’re concerned about the security implications of AWS in my opinion are thinking old school. They are often taking the processes and procedures that they currently use on-prem and applying it to AWS rather than looking at all the new possibilities which are often more secure than they can do themselves.
AWS famously has touted the security split of “security OF the cloud” which is AWSs job and “security IN the cloud” which is the customer’s responsibility, however AWS has a huge number of tools to help with the IN part.
Kurt and Jonathan went through some of their learning about best practices and pitfalls. There are a number of governance patterns to avoid even though they may seem logical at first but may limit scale and throttle getting stuff done. This is all bundled under the banner of DevSecOps on a massive scale.
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I flew yesterday from London to Las Vegas and with it being Thanksgiving Weekend, the airport was rather quieter than expected which made for a pleasantly quick immigration experience. The streams of travellers inbound to one of the most important IT conferences of the year has given Vegas some more buzz today.
I wrote a comprehensive Preview Blog Post: AWS re:Invent 2017: The Show Preview with my reasons for why I’m here, what I hope to get out of it and some crystal ball gazing about what I expect we’ll see.
I buffeted up big time for breakfast this morning as I didn’t have much conference stuff on. Marvellous glutonny. 
Registration
I then registered which was painless and had a DJ playing which was nice and lively.
Robocar Rally
This was an interesting “session”. The idea was getting behind a keyboard for a hackathon for getting your hands dirty with deep learning, IoT, AI and autonomous cars, sounds like a fun mix.
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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!
NetApp is one of the grand daddy’s of the storage industry. I first encountered NetApp 16 years ago. I was struck how relatively easy it was to use and set up. Having unified management across all its devices made learning it simpler than many competitors and the knowledge stayed relevant as in time you upgraded to the bigger, better, faster, more option. I loved that NetApp championed the use of NFS for VMware early on even though you often had to purchase an additional NFS license. I worked for a company that was one of the very first VMware on NFS on NetApp at scale customers. LUNs are yuck (still) and NFS provided so many advantages over the clunky block based alternatives of FC and iSCSI. NetApp was at the forefront of virtualisation and I was happy to see it soar.
In the decade since it seems it spent way too many cycles trying to integrate other things and landed up spinning its wheels when others caught up to the ease of use and in many cases surpassed in performance and flexibility. NetApp had SnapShots, SnapMirror and secondary storage before many others and being able to move data around easily was very attractive, however everyone else caught up. Arch competitor EMC combined with Dell and HPE split up and then bought Nimble and SimplVity.
SolidFire
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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!
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!
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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