Cloud Economics: Enabling Efficient & Secure Cloud Infrastructure

The role of the architect has changed dramatically in the past few years and is headed for even more change as the landscape of possible technology options is only going to
increase. Faced with a list of options that is increasing almost daily across a highly
competitive landscape, many architectural decisions have become an exercise in avoiding error rather than exploring possibility.

Whilst an acceptance of failure is becoming the norm in smaller development faced activities, architects must make big decisions that can affect the entire operation of an organisation. This webinar explores some ideas for architectural best practice and mechanisms for reducing risk whilst empowering architects to unleash some of the exciting new options available to them.

Digital Transformation is an over-used phrase and one that is often used to describe what is
essentially business transformation that is underpinned by technology. Does this mean that
these transformations are deeply vertical and need deep industry experience to be
successful? In this webinar we examine how organisations can learn from other industry
sectors and also from breaking the standard rules within their own industry.
In this webinar, listeners will be able to learn:
- How do we look across industries and learn from success in others?
- How do we escape from the ‘me too’ transformational activity and break away from trying to keep up and get in front?

The majority of organisations today are running their IT estate across multiple platforms including private clouds, on-premise data centres, software as a service, and public clouds. Whilst this flexibility can drive significant business benefit, there are a number of key areas of operations and governance that require a different approach. Many organisations have suffered from cost management challenges despite the claims of many cloud providers that their platform will create savings and so we will examine options for effective cost management that actually work – and the pitfalls to avoid!

Cloud itself has a well-established security pedigree but managing security and risk across multiple clouds adds a layer of complexity that can lead to issues and so we will explore some of the key risks in such an environment and suggest how these can also be mitigated.

The cloud strategy of today's enterprise spans across multiple clouds and hundreds of applications. Point security solutions no longer work, so enterprises are turning toward a more orchestrated approach to achieving security and compliance in the cloud.

Join cloud and security leaders in an interactive discussion to learn about:
- Key security and compliance challenges associated with a multi-cloud strategy
- Recommendations for managing and automating security across multiple clouds and applications
- The future of cloud
- Improving enterprise security in an ever-changing threat landscape

Panellists tbc

Moderated by Alex Hilton, Chief Executive, Cloud Industry Forum

Kubernetes (k8s) is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes promises simplified management of cloud workloads at scale, whether on-premises, hybrid, or in a public cloud infrastructure, allowing effortless movement of workloads from cloud to cloud. By some reckonings, it is being deployed at a rate several times faster than virtualization.

In this presentation, we’ll introduce Kubernetes and present use cases that make clear where and why you would want to use it in your IT environment. We’ll also focus on the enterprise requirements of orchestration and containerization, and specifically on the storage aspects and best practices.

•What is Kubernetes? Why would you want to use it?
•How does Kubernetes help in a multi-cloud/private cloud environment?
•How does Kubernetes orchestrate & manage storage? Can Kubernetes use Docker?
•How do we provide persistence and data protection?
•Example use cases

Traditionally, much of the IT infrastructure that we’ve built over the years can be divided fairly simply into storage (the place we save our persistent data), network (how we get access to the storage and get at our data) and compute (memory and CPU that crunches on the data). In fact, so successful has this model been that a trip to any cloud services provider allows you to order (and be billed for) exactly these three components.

We build effective systems in a cost-optimal way by using appropriate quantities of expensive and fast memory (DRAM for instance) to cache our cheaper and slower storage. But currently fast memory has no persistence at all; it’s only storage that provides the application the guarantee that storing, modifying or deleting data does exactly that.

Memory and storage differ in other ways. For example, we load from memory to registers on the CPU, perform operations there, and then store the results back to memory by using byte addresses. This load/store technology is different from storage, where we tend to move data back and fore between memory and storage in large blocks, by using an API (application programming interface).

New memory technologies are challenging these assumptions. They look like storage in that they’re persistent, if a lot faster than traditional disks or even Flash based SSDs, but we address them in bytes, as we do memory like DRAM, if more slowly. These PMs (persistent memories) lie between storage and memory in latency, bandwidth and cost, while providing memory semantics and storage persistence. In this webcast, SNIA experts will discuss:

•Traditional uses of storage and memory as a cache
•How can we build and use systems based on PM?
•What would a system with storage, persistent memory and DRAM look like?
•Do we need a new programming model to take advantage of PM?
•Interesting use cases for systems equipped with PM
•How we might take better advantage of this new technology

Has hybrid cloud reached a tipping point? According to research from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), IT organizations today are struggling to strike the right balance between public cloud and their on-premises infrastructure. In this SNIA webcast, ESG senior analyst, Scott Sinclair, will share research on current cloud trends, covering:

•Key drivers behind IT complexity
•IT spending priorities
•Multi-cloud & hybrid cloud adoption drivers
•When businesses are moving workloads from the cloud back on-premises
•Top security and cost challenges
•Future cloud projections

The research will be followed by a panel discussion with Scott Sinclair and SNIA cloud experts Alex McDonald, Michelle Tidwell, Mike Jochimsen and Eric Lakin.

When it comes to continuous deployment on open source software, there are numerous benefits for application developers. Now that we're living in the era of multi-cloud and building apps that are cloud-native, it's more important than ever to have a multi-cloud platform CI/CD model.

Tune into this live panel discussion with experts in the field as they discuss:

- How to build CI/CD models for public, private and hybrid cloud
- The different benefits that Kubernetes provides for building infrastructure as code
- How service mesh and microservices fit into your CI/CD model
- How to get the most out of your cloud deployments

Moderator: Robert Starmer, Cloud Advisor & Founding Partner, Kumulus Technologies
Panelists: Tarak Modi, CTO, TekNirvana

Kubernetes, microservices, AI and machine learning have forever changed the traditional enterprise tech stack. As DevOps practices become increasingly more adopted and widely used, automation is imperative for your tech teams and cloud infrastructure to remain scalable and turnkey. Join this live panel discussion with experts in the Cloud, IT Infrastructure and DevOps communities as they discuss these and other major trends, and what to look out for in the coming years.

Topics include:
- How to accelerate software delivery in the era of automation and composable infrastructure
- Infrastructure as code and changing organizational design
- How to properly set up your DevOps automation and see big cloud cost savings
- The future of DevOps in the cloud and real life use cases for applications and machine learning

Moderator: Robert Starmer, Cloud Advisor & Founding Partner, Kumulus Technologies
Panelists: Tarak Modi, CTO, TekNirvana, Bala Kalavala, Founder & CIO, Adiya Inc., Syed Rasheed, Director of Portolio Solution, Red Hat

We’re all accustomed to transferring money from one bank account to another; a credit to the payer becomes a debit to the payee. But that model uses a specific set of sophisticated techniques to accomplish what appears to be a simple transaction. We’re also aware of how today we can order goods online, or reserve an airline seat over the Internet. Or even simpler, we can update a photograph on Facebook. Can these applications use the same models, or are new techniques required?

One of the more important concepts in storage is the notion of transactions, which are used in databases, financials, and other mission critical workloads. However, in the age of cloud and distributed systems, we need to update our thinking about what constitutes a transaction. We need to understand how new theories and techniques allow us to undertake transactional work in the face of unreliable and physically dispersed systems. It’s a topic full of interesting concepts (and lots of acronyms!). In this webcast, we’ll provide a brief tour of traditional transactional systems and their use of storage, we’ll explain new application techniques and transaction models, and we’ll discuss what storage systems need to look like to support these new advances.

And yes, we’ll explain all the acronyms and nomenclature too.

You will learn:

• A brief history of transactional systems from banking to Facebook
• How the Internet and distributed systems have changed and how we view transactions
• An explanation of the terminology, from ACID to CAP and beyond
• How applications, networks & particularly storage have changed to meet these demands