While Amazon Web Services (AWS), the market-leading public cloud from
The common theme: cloud has matured. It’s on every enterprise IT roadmap. The challenges now are more tactical: how cloud can support devops and big data initiatives. How to manage and secure cloud environments, especially hybrid ones. How to migrate enterprise workloads to the cloud.
Here are the highlights from the floor.
Chef Software is now offering its software via the AWS Marketplace. AWS for their part mentioned Chef frequently throughout the summit, no doubt for their ability to migrate workloads into AWS without losing the code for automating lower level services.
Software AG is “all in” with AWS, putting together cloud versions of many of its core products, including ARIS business process tools and Alfabet enterprise architecture management, as well as the webMethods Integration Cloud – Software AG’s integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS). One highlight is webMethods AgileApps Cloud (formerly AgileApps Live), a PaaS offering for building and deploying process-driven application solutions.
Management and Monitoring
AppDynamics now offers the same performance monitoring, management, automated processes, and analytics for applications running on AWS that are available for applications running on-premises. Out of the gate, AppDynamics supports Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon DynamoDB.
ScienceLogic’s CloudMapper discovers and visually maps relationships across IT infrastructure while applying monitoring policies, enabling admins to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of issues in minutes. Its multitenant architecture is well-suited for managed service providers as well as large enterprises.
SignalFx enables customers to create custom analytics pipelines that immediately aggregate data across many different types of metrics, collected from as many as thousands of sources. These pipelines enable customers to build their own anomaly detection algorithms specific to their particular situation.
Big Data
Avere Systems delivers a hardware-based abstraction of on-premise network-attached storage that reduces the overprovisioning of storage capacity. They also provide a cloud-only virtual appliance that allows enterprises to leverage public and private cloud storage resources without having to rewrite existing applications or compromise on performance or availability.
Qubole simplifies the provisioning, management and scaling of big data analytics workloads that leverage data stored on AWS or other public clouds. Once IT sets policies, data analysts and others can “click to query” Hive, Spark, Presto and other data processing engines, empowering a wide range of people, not just data experts, to leverage big data analytics.
SnapLogic integrates Amazon database services with any other data source in the cloud, on-premises or both – in particular, integration with Amazon Redshift cloud data warehouse. SnapLogic’s Snaps (connectors) can move petabytes of data into and out of Redshift in real-time.
Security
Aviatrix NetConnect is a cloud gateway that makes cloud workloads appear like local corporate resources in hybrid cloud environments, abstracting out the security considerations that can bog down hybrid initiatives. NetConnect’s architecture leverages Layer 2 and Layer 3 technologies to enable running workloads over an encrypted infrastructure without any reconfiguration of the edge router in the enterprise, allowing users to create virtual private clouds on demand.
FortyCloud’s cloud security SaaS solution enables organizations to build their own secure, scalable, virtual private cloud network over any number of data centers and geographic locations, especially over hybrid cloud infrastructure deployments. FortyCloud uses an overlay technology approach to enable cloud security and policy enforcement, creating a layer of end-to-end security with VPN, firewall, servers, and networking.
Professional Services
2nd Watch is a managed cloud service provider and AWS premier consulting partner. The company removes the hidden complexities of the public cloud with tested software enabled services for migrating single or multiple workloads to AWS, even for complex enterprise workloads that can be especially difficult to migrate to the cloud.
Conclusion
The contrast between the AWS Summit and last June’s Cloud Expo was dramatic. The attendees at Cloud Expo were clearly tiring of cloud conferences, and organizer Sys-Con is transitioning their show to other hot topics, including microservices and containers, among others.
Attendees at the AWS conference, in contrast, remain excited about the cloud. Amazon’s plethora of hands-on sessions clearly made a difference. And while there was some overlap among the exhibitors at the two conferences, Cloud Expo suffered from the lack of a coherent theme (as it was collocated with devops and internet of things conferences), while AWS itself provided a unifying force for last week’s summit.
The level of interest at the AWS Summit was especially remarkable because it was a one-day, regional show. As long as AWS remains such a dominant player in the cloud space, I expect to see such excitement continue. If – or when –
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, 2nd Watch, AppDynamics, Chef Software, SnapLogic, and Software AG are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Ilkerender.
