virtualisation &
cloud computing
A tale of two clouds
As cloud develops and continues to mature, the industry is split into two camps. Some continue to focus on
IaaS and the larger megalithic products. On the other side there is the more API-driven, DevOps approach
to cloud, with vendors on either side quick to pronounce the decline of the other. Lawrence Jones MBE,
CEO at UKFast, discusses why he thinks there is a place for both.
T
he demand for always-
on applications that
simply can’t fail is driving
developments on both sides
of the cloud market. On the
infrastructure side this is delivered
through features like metro storage
clustering – a VMware technology
for guaranteeing uptime. On the
DevOps side it’s coming from
increased utilisation of availability
zones and making sure your load
balancing is multi-site, meaning
that a site can go down and the
user experiences no impact on
their solution.
A lot of the most exciting
developments we see in our work
in the industry are extensions of
the DevOps way of operating. The
more cloud-native applications,
which are designed to be elastically
scalable and sit on outsourced
hardware, are becoming a lot more
responsive and granular. These
applications are spun up, destroyed
and moved around as needed.
Because of this development,
we are seeing a shift towards
containers, where people are
spinning up instances for mere
seconds for transactions and then
destroying them, rather than
having a database server that sits
there forever, not being utilised. So
the situation is a lot more stateless
and rapid in development.
DevOps is also becoming more
granular and focused on as-a-
service offering, like database aaS,
Apache aaS and load balancing
aaS. Some developers just want to
piece together applications from
these services.
The other side of the coin
On the other side we’re seeing
a big growth in the private
cloud market. Many industry
doomsayers – including the
hyperscalers – claim that private
cloud is dead and encourage firms
to move to public cloud. Well, they
would wouldn’t they?
The true picture in the industry
is a shift back to private cloud for
many enterprise users and SMEs,
following the peak of public cloud’s
hype cycle. People fully understand
now what its drawbacks are and
what its benefits are.
There are some great examples
of large enterprises – Netflix and
Dropbox for example – who make
public cloud work for them to
incredible effect. They build their
architectures from scratch and
July 2017 | 23