Interesting, recent Cloud News

Some recent and interesting Cloud Stories

Atlassian extends Jira with roadmaps – fills a great need on Cloudy projects by mapping progress to plans, milestones and visualising the status.

“Among the new features unveiled today is a progress bar that offers a snapshot of a roadmap item’s progress and hierarchy levels that let users drill down into greater detail on a specific project, unfolding items to reveal individual stories and tasks.

Filter options make it easier to find relevant roadmaps, and drag-and-drop dependency mapping can showcase potential blockers when planning projects.”

Most magic DevOps and other software projects use Jira/Confluence (not Teams).

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3516076/atlassian-expands-jira-roadmaps-for-better-project-status-visibility.html

The force is with Salesforce (ignored by the Gartner Group for years….) – acquires Vlocity, industry-domain specific Cloudy CRM application service provider.

Cloud becoming domain-focused. Domain is king in IT.

“The six primary industries targeted by Vlocity are communications, energy and utilities, government, health, insurance, and media and entertainment, with key customers including T-Mobile, Telus, and Sky. The company placed in the top 25 of the most recent Forbes Cloud 100 ranking, as well as just outside the top 50 on the Inc. 5000 Series earlier this month, representing the fastest growing private companies in California.”

https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2020/feb/27/salesforce-acquires-vlocity-133bn-all-cash-deal-amid-executive-shuffle/

To Containerise or not? Not every application is a nail for the Container hammer.

Do you have the talent, the costs (containerisation costs more to dev and ops)? Is it logical for your business process?

“However, they are not the solution for everything. The largest problems I see with containers and container orchestration (Kubernetes), are the misapplications of this technology. Let’s look at three issues:

First, application architecture is key. You can certainly shove code into a container and get it running, but containers work best when the application architecture is created or changed around the notion of containers.

Containers are, in essence, distributed and processing-oriented…”

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3528870/are-containers-a-good-choice-for-your-applications.html

Google (aka Skynet) acquires firm which will help large enterprises migrate off the Mainframe to GCP.

Cobol is dead, long live Cobol.

“…..acquisition of Cornerstone Technology, a mainframe specialist.

The 30-year-old provider, based in the Netherlands, has an overall remit of ‘helping customers protect and improve their investments in essential legacy enterprise applications’, in Cornerstone’s own words. Cornerstone uses automation to break down programs, turn them into services, and then make them cloud-native.

This includes COBOL, which to the potential surprise of many is still used by many enterprises. A recent study from Micro Focus, the language’s arbiter, noted that for more than two thirds of businesses polled, COBOL app modernisation was a preferred strategy to replacement and retirement.”

https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2020/feb/20/google-cloud-acquires-cornerstone-help-customers-migrate-their-mainframes/

Well, stating the obvious but how many firms understand their current estate?

“Long story short, you need to take the time to understand the “as is” state of all workloads that are migration candidates. This means breaking them down to the functional primitive, developing an understanding that may go beyond the application owners’. Once that occurs, the right platform, cloud or not, will be rather easy to define, and your migration success assured.”

Functionality, documentation.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3514671/understand-as-is-before-you-migrate-to-the-cloud.html

Solving that pain in the IaaS – Cloudy Infra on the rise. VMWare on AWS proving quite popular and a strong trend.

“85% of organisations expect to have the majority of their workloads cloud-based by the end of 2020, according to a new study from AllCloud.

The study, which polled more than 150 IT decision makers at organisations where at least 300 employees were using cloud infrastructure, found seven in 10 respondents already ran at least half of their workloads on the cloud.

Perhaps the most illuminating statistic came through AWS’ partnership with VMware. According to the data, almost three quarters (73%) of enterprise private workloads are using VMware. Expect this to continue this year, AllCloud asserts. “The existing partnership is likely to grow stronger and broader, with more accessibility released between the technologies,” the report notes. “This will allow a faster rate of enterprise adoption for organisations that want to leverage the benefits of the cloud.”

https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2020/jan/16/cloud-infrastructure-trends-usage-continues-soar-aws-vmware-workloads-rising-parallel/

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