Many customers tell us that they want to start with the digital transformation of their assets, for example production lines, as well as their business processes. However, many times they just don’t know where to start or what exactly Industrie 4.0 is all about. Check out this post on what’s new in IoT on Azure.
https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/azure-iot-suite-connected-factory-now-available/
Wow! What an interesting business decision for HP’s public cloud platform business. When I saw this, I just had to dig deeper to get the full scoop. I had already seen a previous article on this new relationship between HP and Microsoft. At first I was stunned. Why would HP drop its own public cloud platform to offer a competitors? Then I remembered all the years of partnership between the two companies in the past. So what do we think will come out of this particular venture? Most analysts are saying that this move will open doors for providers to operate more in the hybrid cloud space. It’s strange to me that hybrid cloud has been labeled as weak in the cloud space. I remember going to vendor sponsored seminars on cloud computing four years back where public, private and hybrid cloud we featured. Has hybrid cloud really not been taking off? Could HP dropping its public cloud platform really change the face of cloud services completion? What do you think about this new relationship? Let me hear from you.
Its public cloud soon gone, HP aligns with Microsoft Azure
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has partnered with Microsoft to offer its Azure cloud services to customers, filling a gap when HPE closes its own public cloud early next year. Microsoft will be a “preferred” public cloud partner to HPE, and HPE will become a “preferred provider” of Microsoft Azure services, CEO Meg Whitman said on HP’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday.
Looking to get a better handle on cloud platforms? Check out this Slideshare post to get a run down on differences between Azure and AWS. You’ll learn some specifics about the products and services each has to offer. The presentation explains the four main offerings: Compute, Database, Storage & Content Delivery, and Networking. It is a very informative piece of content on Azure Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. There are 18 slides in this presentation. You’ll learn about the similarities and differences of each product at a high level. Additionally, be exposed to the difficulty associated with deploying each. There are also links to other Slideshare presentations that could offer more information. Check it out and leave a comment.
Cloud Foundry has been updated with support for Spring Cloud Services, Microsoft Azure and even Docker. Check out this on ADT blog post for more information on this new product development.
Cloud Foundry Adds Support for Spring Cloud Services, Azure, .NET and Docker — ADTmag
Pivotal Software Inc. has released a new version of its Cloud Foundry (PCF) platform with expanded support for Spring Cloud Services, .NET applications, Docker images, Microsoft Azure and several ALM toolchain products. With version 1.6 of its cloud-native platform, Pivotal is making a number of enhancements previewed earlier this year at O’Reilly’s annual Open Source Convention, generally available.
Microsoft and Red Hat have entered into an agreement in the cloud space. Red Hat will now be an option for Linux customers in the Azure platform. It looks like the war is on hold for now.
Microsoft just buried the hatchet with another huge and bitter rival, Red Hat
Microsoft and Red Hat struck up a major new partnership on Wednesday. They’re giving Red Hat’s Linux operating system a starring role on Microsoft’s cloud computing service, Azure. Linux is a free and open source competitor to Windows offered by a number of players, with Red Hat being the biggest.
Cloud based services are available in various forms and at different levels. Just about anyone from a home consumer all the way up to a multinational corporation can purchase, or consume for free, cloud services. But just like anything else, why should anyone use cloud services? Is all the hype really substantive? I would like to propose that cloud based services provide a benefit that is sometimes difficult to recognize. I want to share with you exactly how businesses can benefit from cloud services adoption.
There are particular aspects of operating a business that that are vital to the revenue cycle. One of the them is uptime. Uptime is measured by the amount of time a businesses systems are accessible to customers. If your customers can’t access your systems to purchase goods or services, your business can’t make money. Cloud services can help to eliminate the negative impact downtime can have to your sales by increasing the number of available zones your business systems can operate in. Most cloud service vendors have zones across the world. This helps to provide constant availability. Which in turn, increases uptime. How much would you be willing to pay for constant availability? More importantly, how much would it cost you to ensure that kind of availability for your business?
Another aspect of business operations that is a direct benefit of cloud services adoption is disaster recovery (DR). A cloud service implementation could be used as part of an overall DR plan. This plan could couple with a Continuity of Operations (COOP) plan. Think of how have deploying some, or all of your IT infrastructure with a cloud service provider could solidify one or both of these plans. Based on your business needs and decisions made concerning either your COOP or DR plan, a cloud based service could be a definite base camp. Additionally, think of how these types of business requirements would be met by implementing a comprehensive cloud strategy for you IT infrastructure. How would you plan for a disaster or an outage that affects you continuity if your services already running in different parts of the world? How much is having a COOP and DR plan that could literally be bullet proof worth to you?
I don’t want to forget the about the issue of security since it’s such a hot topic. However, I think I’ll save it for a later post. The fact is, many companies have there data and services with cloud service providers. Based on my use of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, security starts with the way you configure your accessible assets. A complete understanding of your providers security model is the first goal to accomplish. Then you can go from there.
Take some time to muddle over these ideas on cloud services adoption and let me know what you think.
Manage Hadoop clusters in HDInsight using the Azure portalI was following up on a Microsoft Azure blog post revealing a new customer preview – Spark for Azure HDInsight. This was very interesting to me and I wanted to check it out. As a Microsoft Partner, I have access to Azure as on of the many benefits. After completing the cluster installation, I found the below article by Jonathan Gao at GitHub very helpful with the initial configuration. He made configuring the Hadoop clusters, easy to complete. I was also able to learn something new about managing my account as well.
For additional information, try reviewing these other resources.