Grazed from Acquia

Acquia, the digital experience company, today announced the launch of Acquia Cloud CD, a continuous delivery service that enables developers and DevOps teams to automate processes for code building and testing on production-like environments. With the addition of Acquia Cloud CD, development is faster, more efficient and better integrated than when using standalone continuous integration tools. It provides continuous integration and a delivery automation service within Acquia Cloud to accelerate production.

"Acquia Cloud CD turbocharges DevOps capabilities for our Acquia Cloud customers," said Christopher Stone, Acquia chief products officer. "The automation benefits of ready-repeatable building and testing orchestration and self-service environments, all tightly integrated with Acquia Cloud, greatly reduce code and versioning inconsistencies for Drupal DevOps teams."

The Basics of Cloud Computing

There is a high probability that you have been using cloud computing for a while without even knowing it. The cloud powers things like webmail for Yahoo and Google, social media sites, blogs, Google Docs, online gaming, and online storage.

Grazed from DarkReading. Author: Kaushik Narayan.

If you think you’ve finally gotten control of unsanctioned user apps, think again. The next wave of rogue apps is on its way from your data center to the cloud. Over the years, the consumerization of IT has spurred a free-for-all in the adoption of cloud services. As employees found unsanctioned applications to help them do their jobs, overwhelmed security teams took a head-in-the-sand approach, giving rise to a serious problem dubbed "Shadow IT."

But how big of a problem is Shadow IT, really? That depends who you ask. Based on my personal conversations, CIOs estimate the number of unsanctioned cloud apps to be around 100. But in a tally based on an analysis of network logs, Shadow IT totals are much larger –averaging roughly 1,000 cloud services in use since early 2015…

Read more from the source @ http://www.darkreading.com/cloud/the-new-shadow-it-custom-data-center-applications/a/d-id/1328590

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Mary Jo Foley.

Microsoft has refreshed the third (and said to be final) Azure Stack technical preview with lots of new features and fixes. Don’t call it Azure Stack Technical Preview (TP) 4. But given the many features and fixes in the April 6 update, you might be excused if you do. Today’s update includes previews of the Azure App Service (web apps, API apps, and mobile apps), Azure Functions server-less computing, and updated version of of SQL/MySQL database services.

In addition, according to Microsoft’s blog post on the update, "Based on feedback and several ongoing improvements/bug fixes, we’ve also updated the Azure Stack TP3 software for a better deployment and operational experience." In order to try out the new Azure Platform-as-a-Service services introduced today, users must first move to the updated TP3 software, which includes refreshed features for both administrators and tenants…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-refreshes-azure-stack-preview-adds-new-cloud-services/

Tintri, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise cloud platforms, today announced it is working with Plan B Technologies, Inc. (PBT), a Tintri partner and IT solutions provider in Annapolis, MD, to help customers improve management and performance of their virtualized environments and enterprise cloud.  

As a Tintri partner, PBT delivers a complete lifecycle of professional services, including project management, consultation, assessment, design, deployment, support and staff augmentation delivered by consultants and integrators cross-trained with more than 300 technical certifications. PBT selected Tintri as the standard for customers operating highly virtualized environments and building enterprise cloud. They needed a solution that would integrate with other infrastructures as a building block and greatly reduce customers’ management efforts.  

"We consider ourselves first and foremost an engineering firm, not just a reseller," said Zach Breckin, Plan B Technologies account manager. "Before we became a Tintri partner, we went through a very strenuous technical approval process involving multiple engineers. We poked and prodded around the Tintri platform before we even thought about recommending the solution to any of our customers. Tintri was able to step up to the challenge-we confidently recommend their platform to our customers." 

Call Centers – Nothing New

Call centers themselves are nothing new. These have been used for decades in order to provide customers and clients with support when needed and assistance when needed. The ability to talk to a live operator is attractive for many people.

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Editorial Staff.

Snowflake Computing, a cloud data warehouse vendor, has closed a $100 million funding round as it aims to expand internationally. The company, built on Amazon Web Services, was founded in 2012 and has raised $205 million so far. The funding round was led by ICONIQ Capital and Madrona Venture Group and included its initial venture partners. Snowflake said it will build out its engineering team as it aims to take more on-premise data warehouse workloads. CEO Bob Muglia, a former Microsoft exec, said the funding will help Snowflake scale. I caught up with Muglia to talk shop. Among the key themes:

Building on Amazon Web Services. Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse service is built on AWS, which also competes via Redshift and other offerings. "AWS has treated us well. We compete with them obviously, but they are great partners," said Muglia. Translation: Netflix is built on AWS and competes with Amazon. Snowflake is a data warehouse spin on that theme…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/article/snowflake-computing-raises-100-million-to-expand-cloud-data-warehouse-footprint/

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Aaron Shelley.

The past decade has brought much change to the IT infrastructure industry as enterprise IT companies scale up their data consumption to unprecedented levels. Today’s enterprise IT giants require far more speed, power and bandwidth to successfully run their businesses and this is only possible via enhancements to the underlying infrastructure.

Infrastructure develops so quickly that industry practices in 2020 will likely be unrecognisable from what they were 10 years ago. Infrastructure has become more powerful, faster and more secure – and we have still only just scratched the surface of what’s possible. This article will examine some of the current trends within the industry as it stands, as well a look at what the future holds for IaaS in 2017…

Read more from the source @ https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2017/apr/05/key-trends-cloud-infrastructure-hybrid-smart-storage-security-and-more/

Over the last two years, there have been articles in the press suggesting OpenStack is in trouble. These reports typically cite vendors who are exiting the market or laying off OpenStack employees. Clickbait headlines aside, the facts are clear: OpenStack deployments are growing. It is becoming a standard cloud platform in corporations of all sizes, and corporations are consistently growing their usage of OpenStack.

Rackspace is seeing a dramatic growth in customers’ usage of OpenStack as a de-facto platform for the private cloud market for many reasons including:

RightScale Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise cloud management, today announced RightScale Optima, a new standalone collaborative cloud cost management and optimization solution, which leverages RightScale’s decade of experience in multi-cloud management and automation. RightScale Optima streamlines collaboration across the enterprise by delivering cost-saving recommendations to the appropriate resource owners, enabling those resource owners to take automated actions, and tracking optimization progress across the entire organization.

"Because cloud use in the enterprise is decentralized, the biggest challenge in reducing cloud costs is the need for tight collaboration between cloud governance teams and the teams that own the cloud resources," said Torsten Volk, managing research director at analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "EMA research shows that organizations are aware of this requirement, with organizations identifying "Collaboration" as the most significant area for cost savings."