Author: Rene Buest

Machine Learning Cloud Provider Overview

Chatbot Cloud Provider Overview

In this interview with Cloud Era Institute, I discuss the growing trend of companies opting into the public cloud to leverage scalable infrastructure and global outreach. I also share how vendor lock-in contributes to innovation. I provide an important distinction between data privacy and data security, and explain why the public cloud is a shared responsibility.

What trends are you seeing in the public cloud right now?

The first trend is that the public cloud is growing because enterprises need innovation and global scalability. Previously enterprises talked about building private cloud environments, but soon realized the financial impact of building a massive, scalable infrastructure. Last year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) released over seven hundred new services and functionalities, something that would not be possible for a private cloud or a web hosting company. Amazon and Microsoft Azure are investing heavily in innovations at the infrastructure level, in data center operating, and new services.

Another big trend we are seeing are containers like Docker, which has gained momentum because of the importance of portability. With Docker, you can move workloads to different cloud providers. You can capitulate your application and its dependencies in a container, then move everything from one system to another.

A third trend is microservices such as Azure machine learning or AWS Short Notification Service. You can use the microservice approach to create your own powerful application.

Netflix is an on-demand video streaming platform with massive scalability and a highly available application on top of AWS, created based on microservice architecture. Their application is always running because when one microservice has a problem, the others remain unaffected. It is a single application running on top of AWS and connected via a public API.

CIOs and developers typically don’t like vendor lock-in, but I believe it helps with innovation. If you are using an iPhone, then you are totally locked in the Apple environment, and you love it. Apple is able to innovate because they have a closed ecosystem. It’s the same with AWS and Azure, since they also have service lock-in. This is how companies are able to innovate.

What has been the biggest challenge for businesses in the public cloud?

For Germany, Europe, and the U.S., it is data privacy and security. It is important to separate data privacy and data security. Data privacy is about legality issues and ensuring that you are fulfilling the law. Data security means that data is stored securely so nobody can access it without authorization.

Germany thinks its data centers are more secure than the U.S., which is not true. Data centers in Germany, the U.S., or Australia have the same physical security. When it comes to data security, it is no big deal to store data in the U.S.

Another big issue is a lack of cloud knowledge. The cloud has been around more than ten years, yet there is still a global lag. Many people do not understand how to create cloud applications that can be used on cloud platforms; from the design, to the architecture, microservices, and containers.

Public clouds are shared-security environments. There is a lack of knowledge about this as well. A public cloud provider is only responsible for the physical infrastructure and ensuring that the virtual infrastructure can be deployed.

Everything on top of the virtual infrastructure belongs to the customer. In the public cloud, the customer has to create their own virtual infrastructure, for example on top of AWS, and then has to run systems and applications on top of it. To fire up a virtual machine is not cloud. The application and virtual infrastructure must also be scalable.

What have observed about marketing as it relates to the cloud?

It is not only a cloud issue; it is that many companies do not focus on content marketing. It is better to market your products with good content, not just advertisements. Unique content is just as important as having an expert voice contributing to it. It is better to let the people write who are experts, not the marketing people.

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The interview with Cloud Era Institute has been published under “Global technology expert, Rene Buest, on innovation and scalability in the public cloud“.

Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are near the top of the agenda for IT decision-makers. They understand that a modern, cloud-based IT world shouldn’t just be drawn in black and white. Diversity is needed to purchase services and innovations from a larger number of cloud providers. Private clouds quickly meet their limits here and don’t offer the benefits of a public cloud.

What is the optimal strategy for using public cloud services in enterprise IT? Find the answers in an interview with T-Systems in “Public cloud services: in search of the white knight”.

Mr. Buest, public, private, hybrid: when does which cloud offering become relevant for a company?
There’s no catch-all answer here. We are now seeing an increasing number of companies that are intensely engaging with the public cloud, following an “all in” approach. This means, they do not manage a local IT infrastructure or internal data centers anymore, instead they are migrating everything to public cloud infrastructures or platforms, or purchasing what they need under a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model. However, these companies are still a minority.

…and that means?
At the moment, most companies prefer to use private cloud environments. It’s a logical consequence of the legacy solutions that companies still maintain in their IT. However, we believe that in the future, a majority of German companies will move to hybrid or multi-cloud architectures, enabling them to cover all the facets they need for their digital transformation.

And how can companies coordinate these different solutions in combination?
By using cloud management solutions that have interfaces to the most commonplace public cloud offers, as well as to private cloud solutions. They provide powerful tools for managing workloads in different environments and shifting virtual machines, data and applications around. Another option for seamless management is iPaaS: integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) provides cloud-based integration solutions. In the pre-cloud era, such solutions were also called “middleware”. They provide support for the interaction between different cloud services.

What do companies have to watch out for principally when using these cloud services?
They should not underestimate the lack of understanding of the public cloud, nor the challenges associated with setting up and operating multi-cloud environments. The benefits gained from using multi-cloud infrastructures, platforms and services often come at a heavy price: namely, the costs that result from the complexity, integration, management and necessary operations. Multi-cloud management and a general lack of cloud experience are currently the key challenges many companies are facing.

What is the solution?
Managed public cloud providers (MPCPs) are positioning themselves as “white knights” or “friends in need”. They develop and operate the systems, applications and virtual environments for their customers – in both the public cloud infrastructures and multi-cloud environments – in a managed cloud service model.

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The interview with T-Systems has been published under “Public cloud services: What really matters“.