The evolution of the wheel has changed human society forever. As a result, we now need less time to travel. With the reduction of manual effort, we can focus on other essential activities. As innovation continued and more machines were invented, the need for management increased over time. 

Machines have been given tasks that were unsafe, repetitive and non-strategic while humans focused on strategic tasks. The need for data and analytics increased to better manage the machines. We invented servers, storage systems, and other hardware to increase the speed, reduce manual errors as we continued our analysis. 

However, with these advancements, the need for more manual management increased too. Manual processes in the data center were laborious, time-consuming and also error-prone. People used to manually fill up forms and take the approval of their managers, walk to every admin to show the list of resources they needed and then they were told that they will have to wait for days/weeks before they can get anything. This has continued for decades. Speed to market was affected and things got chaotic as the organizations grew rapidly. Plus, it was not self-sustaining as the IT admins could not get to the more important initiatives. 

Public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform can alleviate a lot of the pain in this regard. However, hardware management problems still remain especially for the sensitive data in your data centers even though they are reduced. Enter Infrastructure as a Code (IaC)! Before we understand its benefits and challenges, let’s define what IaC means. 

What is Infrastructure as Code?

IaC is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. This is a Wikipedia-based definition

In simple words, IaC is the process of replacing manual effort required for IT resource management and provisioning by simple lines of code. 

Now, there are two types of IaC methods: declarative and imperative. In the declarative approach, you declare what the desired end state should be and the system ensures that you get the desired outcome. The imperative approach entails you defining each and every step in the process explicitly to reach the desired end state. 

What are the Benefits of IaC?

Let’s take a closer look at what IaC gets your organization:

  1. Faster speed and consistency: The goal of IaC is to make things faster by eliminating manual processes and eliminating the slack in the process. A code-based approach makes it easier to get more done in less time. No need to wait on the IT Admin to manually complete the task at hand before he can get to the next one. This also means that you can iterate quickly and more often. Consistency is another vital benefit of IaC. You do not need to worry about tasks not being completed because it is a weekend or because your admin is focused on something else. Also, you can implement changes globally while keeping the same version of the software, etc. 
  2. Efficient software development lifecycle: IaC shifts the power into the developer’s hands. As the infrastructure provisioning becomes more reliable and consistent, developers can start focusing on application development more. Also, they can script once and use that code multiple times, thus, saving time and effort while keeping complete control.
  3. Reduced management overhead: In a data center world there was a need to have admins to govern and manage storage, networking, compute and other layers of hardware and middleware. IaC eliminates a need for these multiple roles. Those admins can now focus on identifying the next exciting technology they want to implement.

What are the key challenges for IaC?

Every coin has two sides. While IaC adds a lot of value to the IT environment, there are some challenges that cannot be overlooked. Remember to account for your unique IT situations that might make the following more or less relevant (like organization size, state, and your technology adoption lifecycle). 

  1. Coding language dependency: As I said earlier the power shifts to developers more. Similarly, since IaC is more code dependent you need to be an expert at coding. The learning curve for this can be steeper if you do not have a developer bench ready. Some of the languages used for IaC are JSON, HashiCorp Configuration Languages (HCL), YAML, Ruby, etc. The shortage of these skill sets can hamper your IaC usage potential. Also, is your strategy to move away from development and make things serverless? Think of the strategic direction in which you are heading before you jump into IaC. Maybe, IaC is a pit stop that you can avoid taking if your end goal is different.
  2. Security assessment processes: Your legacy security tools and processes might not be enough in the new world of IaC. You might have to manually check if the provisioned resources are operational and being used by the right applications. Although manual checking is a confidence-building step, it might take a lot of iterations to get your legacy security tools tuned to IaC. Also, consider that IaC is more dynamic than your existing provisioning and management processes. It can be used optimally or abused even faster. Therefore, you might need to take extra steps to ensure you’re establishing guardrails for complete governance.
  3. IaC monitoring can be challenging: In continuation of the point above, you might need additional tools to track who is provisioning what, where, how often and what is the cost of that. You might find it challenging to track the usage/capacity by your old monitoring tools such as worksheets. Moreover, if you are a global company you might need to think of better monitoring tools.

CloudBolt can help with your IaC needs. We can help you maintain the desired agility that IaC provides while keeping complete control and visibility.

Schedule a demo now to see CloudBolt’s IaC support in action.

Recently, mergers and acquisitions have been very common in the hybrid cloud space. On Jan. 9, Insight Partners announced its agreement to acquire Veeam Software for a whopping $5 billion.

This is a big deal in the cloud backup and data protection solutions space. Veeam, based out of Baar, Switzerland, is one of the backup and data management leaders along with leaders such as DellEMC, Veritas and IBM. 

What is Veeam? What is this acquisition about?

Veeam has been leading the cloud data management providers space in the Europe, Middle East and Africa markets. They have also been capturing the US market at a steady click and is currently valued at a $1 billion run rate. They have thousands of customers including more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies and have presence in more than 30 countries. 

The cloud data management industry has seen some consolidations recently. Establishing leadership in new regions and adding larger customers seems to be the idea behind the acquisition. In fact, Veeam’s new CEO William H. Largent said this acquisition will help Veeam to scale at an unparalleled pace (in the US and globally).

How is Veeam used by customers?

Organizations want to move to public clouds to gain the agility and flexibility at a pay-as-you-consume model that public clouds offer. However, migrating workloads and data to the cloud poses some unique challenges around data migration, data management and its protection in public clouds. 

Customers need to ensure the data quality, identify the right applications and account for data replication and disaster recovery. They need to finally analyze whether refactoring old applications for cloud makes sense or whether they should use cloud for greenfield applications only. 

Veeam has been instrumental in helping customers migrate and protect data across both private and public clouds. Its partnerships with a wide variety of hardware manufacturers, such as NetApp, HPE and public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure has helped its customers immensely. With backup and disaster recovery solutions across the entire hybrid cloud, Veeam has provided a framework for data management.

However, to manage any hybrid cloud properly customers also need to have granular visibility of their environment. Cost management is another factor to keep in mind as hybrid cloud usage scales. Also, defining guardrails to establish boundaries without hampering agility is key to govern a hybrid cloud platform. We have seen customers struggle with these challenges as hybrid cloud is adopted rapidly by different teams and manual processes start to breakdown. To ensure that you stay ahead of these challenges you need a proven cloud management platform. 

How can CloudBolt help your Veeam integration and management?

CloudBolt is a trusted platform for customers who want to transform their IT environments. It integrates with solutions including Veeam to let users focus on more strategic activities by automating a lot of mundane tasks around orchestration through templates, establishing guardrails for consumption, etc. 

CloudBolt helps customers using Veeam with use cases including provisioning their Veeam tagged resources, running Veeam backup and replication policies on existing servers, automating recurring jobs, etc. All of this is done through simple UI extension in CloudBolt.

Hundreds of customers have made their cloud environments more efficient through unparalleled self-service, cost visibility and orchestration capabilities from CloudBolt. It can be deployed in minutes, is simple to use and easy to extend through API integrations; making it the most powerful tool in your infrastructure management arsenal.

Learn more about this integration and how CloudBolt can help you maximize your cloud environment.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Earlier this week on our blog, we explored Cloud Solutions in the Multi-Cloud Era. We also officially announced the launch of CloudBolt 9.0—Cumulus.

With that, onto this week’s news:

Recent AWS Billing Error Points to Need for Partner-Led Cloud Management

Kelly Teal, Channel Futures, Oct. 15, 2019

“Telecom expense management has been a familiar part of the indirect channel landscape for at least a dozen years. But the need for its more evolved counterpart, cloud management, provisioned through partners, is becoming more apparent.

In late September, word quickly spread that Amazon Web Services had overbilled a number of customers throughout the world. It was an accident, and one that AWS caught and corrected right away. Nonetheless, the incident made clear that channel partners can, and should, play a larger role in their enterprise clients’ cloud management efforts.

And therein lies the real opportunity for channel partners. While there is legitimate reason to track and monitor cloud expenses for organizations, there is even more call to ensure they use what they buy, and control consumption.”

Nutanix Outlines Cloud Footprint Expansion As Talk Of Acquisition Rears Head

Antony Savvas, Data Economy, Oct. 11, 2019

“Nutanix is planning to increase its data centre footprint further to support the increased number of data storage, disaster recovery and cloud orchestration and management services it is planning in the near- to medium-term.

The company now generates the majority of its sales from software and services, which is a far cry from when it gained quick traction for its hyperconverged infrastucture (HCI) appliances a few years ago.

At the firm’s annual .NEXT EMEA customer and partner event in Copenhagen this week, Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey (pictured) told Data Economy: “We will expand our cloud reach as the compute has to come to the customer data now being generated in the cloud and at the edge.”

He said this would involve widening the company’s partnerships with data centre operators and public cloud providers to increase the number of the firm’s cloud regions, to make sure services more easily comply with data laws such as GDPR and data sovereignty demands from both enterprises and governments.”

CenturyLink Adds Google to Cloud Destinations

Edward Gately, Channel Partners Online, Oct 15, 2019

CenturyLink has expanded its Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections service to Google Cloud Platform.

The move provides a new option for connecting business premises and public data centers to cloud environments. It allows self-serve, real-time, dedicated network connectivity across thousands of endpoints in North America, Asia Pacific and Europe through CenturyLink’s global fiber network.

Chris McReynolds, CenturyLink‘s vice president of core network services, tells Channel Partners the top three public cloud providers are Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and adding Google to his company’s cloud destinations for Dynamic Connections is “key to supporting the customers’ need to move and stand up workloads when they want and where they want.”

Dale Carnegie taught our grandparents 80 years ago that a “person’s name is to that person the sweetest sound in any language.” For IT organizations the sweetest sound is often…a hostname.

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