CloudEXPO 2019

When the Clouds Part: How to Better Manage Your Cloud Infrastructure

On-premise or off, you have powerful tools available to maximize the value of your infrastructure and you demand more visibility and operational control. Fortunately, data center management tools keep a vigil on memory contestation, power, thermal consumption, server health, and utilization, allowing better control no matter your cloud’s shape. In this session, learn how Intel software tools enable real-time monitoring and precise management to lower operational costs and optimize infrastructure for today even as you’re forecasting for tomorrow.

Cloud Outages: From HTTP to DNS to BGP

Cloud, SaaS and Internet outages are becoming increasingly common and severe in today’s Internet-centric enterprise landscape, impacting employee productivity on one end and brand reputation on the other. Join this session to get a visual walkthrough of several recent outages as seen in the ThousandEyes platform and take away some valuable lessons about how to manage a multitude of risks in your cloud strategy.

The Great Migration: Retreat from the Cloud Sacrificing Security?

Signs of a shift in the usage of public clouds are everywhere:

• Previously, as organizations outgrew old IT methods, the natural answer was to try the public cloud approach; however, the public platform alone is not a complete solution.

The move to hybrid, custom, and multi-cloud will become more and more prevalent:

• At the heart of this technology trend exists a custom solution to meet the needs and concerns of these organizations, including compliance, security, and cost issues.
• Blending Service and Deployment Models.
• The “new normal” of enterprise clients includes a hybrid cloud solutions.

Hybrid Cloud the new normal:

• Benefits require a planned approach and expertise.
• Organizations' risks get amplified as the boundaries grow.
• Risks unique to Hybrid Cloud require a Hybrid solutions not just addition of tech.

What’s old is new again:

• Due diligence and planning before deployment is critical to not only success but is a requirement for compliance.
• Access management is key and enforcement is more than policy.
• Data protection become as hybrid as the environment.
         - Data lakes make for poor clouds.
• Monitoring as a defense of shared infrastructure mean security tools need hybrid ability and technology needs to flex to on-prem through the cloud.

Cloud Security solutions:

• Don’t get burned on the re-entry complications returning from the cloud.
• Matching your hybrid cloud to the hybrid security includes compliance that spans your environment.

Transforming Computing and the Way People Work: Technology Should Enable Innovation, Not Hinder It

Today’s workforce is trading their cubicles and corporate desktops in favor of an any-location, any-device work style. And as digital natives make up more and more of the modern workforce, the appetite for user-friendly, cloud-based services grows. The center of work is shifting to the user and to the cloud. But managing a proliferation of SaaS, web, and mobile apps running on any number of clouds and devices is unwieldy and increases security risks. Steve Wilson, Citrix Vice President of Cloud, discusses improving personal productivity with an evolved approach supporting modern workstyles and simplifying IT complexities to deliver the right experience to the right user at the right time, on any device.

TBA

Risk Management When Migrating into a Public Cloud Provider

As more and more companies embrace the Cloud, many are restricted by pre-cloud policies and requirements; especially when dealing with sensitive data such as PCI, PHI, SPI/PII etc. This makes it hard or not cost effective to enable the migration to the Cloud. With the challenges of a dynamic competition, many are forced to adapt to the Cloud and end up spending excessive operational dollars or compromising on critical components and limiting their effectiveness in leveraging native Cloud services. In this talk we will walk through some of the patterns to consider when moving to the Cloud specifically from a compliance and regulatory requirements perspective. The agenda will cover topics such as:

• Building a Business Case
• Classifying the requirements (Business, Customer, Industry, Data Sovereignty)
• Lift and Ship vs building for the Cloud
• Baking in a Time Factor for setting expectations
• Managing Security, Usability and Cost
• Building re-usable Architecture patterns
• Lessons learnt from the constantly evolving landscape of AWS
• Thoughts on meeting Compliance requirements and passing an Audit

Improve SD-WAN Application Performance in Three Simple Steps

Yesterday, applications resided in the data center, while users resided in an office and enterprises relied on carriers for their WAN transport architecture. With this legacy approach, applications resided in centralized data centers with MPLS networks. Today, IT is moving to the cloud and users are mobile with the public internet being an increasingly critical component of the enterprise WAN and application performance. However, as applications move to the cloud, enterprises are struggling with increased application performance issues.

Enter the cloud-ready WAN architecture to better leverage SD-WAN. This shift in architecture from the enterprise premises-based data center to communications hubs help hybrid enterprises span the legacy and cloud environments with SD-WAN.

Because SD-WAN is just a technology, it cannot deliver the application performance users need. So to deliver the best application performance, SD-WAN needs to be combined with optimized network routes, communications/applications hubs (racks of switching equipment and or application services deployed in carrier-neutral data centers) and internet peering. But where do you start? Mark Casey, Founder and CEO of Apcela will discuss three simple steps to enable enterprises to get the most out of their SD-WAN technology.

Not Your Mother’s Cloud: Best Practices for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

To enable their developers, ensure SLAs and increase IT efficiency, Enterprise IT is moving towards a unified, centralized approach for managing their hybrid infrastructure. As if the journey to the cloud - private and public - was not difficult enough, the need to support modern technologies such as Containers and Serverless applications further complicates matters. This talk covers key patterns and lessons learned from large organizations for architecting your hybrid cloud in a way that:

Supports self-service, “public cloud” experience for your developers that’s consistent across any infrastructure.

Gives Ops peace of mind with automated management of DR, scaling, provisioning, deployments, etc.

Goes beyond VMs, to future-proof your solution to support Containers, Serverless, and what’s coming next

Improves CAPEX and OPEX across the board, and gets you to a deployable, scalable solution without having to spend years re-architecturing or developing complex integrations.

Why the Cloud is Perfect for Data Protection

While more companies are now leveraging the cloud to increase their level of data protection and management, there are still many wondering “why?”

The answer: the cloud actually brings substantial advancements to the data protection and management table that simply aren’t possible without it. The easiest advantage to envision? Unlimited scalability. If a data protection tool is properly designed, the capacity should automatically expand to meet any customer’s needs. The second advantage: the cloud is the simplest way to centralize the storage of all secondary data sources while also providing unlimited compute that can be used to gain additional insight and business value from that data. Finally, the ability to do automated Disaster Recovery (DR) without maintaining a DR facility is unquestionably a major value of the cloud, and simply isn’t possible otherwise. Join W. Curtis Preston, AKA Mr. Backup, as he explains the benefits of cloud-based data protection and management, how to decide if a cloud-based solution is right for you, and best practices when evaluating data management vendors.

Establish a Successful and Sustainable IaaS Business

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market, which Gartner has forecasted to hit an estimated $57.8B in 2019. The speed at which IaaS is growing presents a unique opportunity for channel resellers through Ingram Micro Cloud. Learn what’s required for building a successful IaaS practice, such as identifying solutions and platforms, structuring talent, choosing value-added tools and resources, creating a services strategy, and more.

The Edge Needs a New Data Architecture

Bold predictions are being made about the disruptive new applications that edge computing will unleash on enterprises and consumers. However, edge computing unlike cloud computing. is a distributed data problem. Creating enterprise grade systems that can deliver geo distributed database capabilities with useful consistency guarantees is extremely challenging and conventional approaches fail at doing these at global scales.For edge computing to become a reality, we need geo-distributed databases that can scale across hundreds of locations worldwide yet act in concert to provide a single coherent multi master database. This in turn requires us to design a system that works on the internet with its unpredictable network topology, use some form of time keeping that is not lossy, and avoid centralized forms of consensus yet still arrive at some shared version of truth in real time.

In this presentation I discuss the needs and design of such a serverless edge platform for stateful, data intensive, realtime applications and web services that need to run in a distributed manner, at the edge, closer to humans (end users), their things (devices) than the cloud can.

The Role of Fast Data in Continuous Hybrid Cloud

In Hybrid Cloud scenarios you are combining services from multiple clouds, or from a cloud with on-premise or colocated services.

The conversation about hybrid-cloud is often related to applications, virtual machines, micro-services and how these things are scaled or moved between clouds or on-premise and cloud. However, a bigger consideration is the data.Almost all hybrid-cloud use-cases require movement of data in addition to movement and scalability of services. Spinning up additional service instances in a cloud, to rapidly and elastically scale, is useless if these services can’t access the data they need.

In this presentation we will consider, through real-world use-cases and examples, how to implement cloud migrations, cloud bursting, and cloud analytics, and how continuous fast data feeds are required to achieve them.

Bringing the Software Defined Data Center into Focus for SME Customers

The VMware NSX platform represents a paradigm shift for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). By leveraging multi-tenant cloud environments that leans on the NSX platform, SMEs can gain the network virtualization and security benefits of a software-defined data center (SDDC), that were previously out of reach, except for large corporate organizations.

Attend This Educational Session to Hear Such Topics As:

• Defining the software-defined data center (SDDC) approach and what it should mean to SMEs.
• Examining time and resource improvements gained by SDDC virtualization and security.
• Realizing security at a virtual machine (VM) level through “micro-segmentation” process. 
• Simplifying backup and disaster recovery services.
• Learning how managed services can help remove any hesitation of an SSDC approach.

The Hard, and Not So Obvious, Challenges with Building, Maintaining and Operating a Global Edge Computing Network

Creating a network of edges is a much harder problem than it appears. It is more complicated than merely standing one or two servers in a few (hundred) far-flung data centers and installing an open source stack in each node.

That’s a start but there is far more to it than that. This session will cover just some of the hard and not-so-obvious things you'll need to do to build out a scalable application delivery platform at the edge, including:

How do you securely deploy an application image, (e.g. a container) to every edge in your network and run them as needed?

How do you do this several times a day if the application developer needs to apply fixes, add enhancements, etc.?

How do you ensure that your application is running in a location close to your end users, without amassing a massive infrastructure bill?

How do you remotely manage a large number of compute clusters, assuming each edge is some container-specific environment?

How do you implement network and resource isolation so no one workload impacts another?
How do you make sure everything works in concert, on a global basis?

Multi-Cloud Migration Provisioning-as-a-Service

Public clouds are being widely adopted by organizations of varying sizes. However, lately the public cloud space has gotten increasingly crowded with large number of players. Among them, few public cloud providers stand out and have a dominant market share like AWS, Azure and GCP.
These service providers offer a large variety of services which keeps growing over the period. And as a result, if an organization uses bunch of services from these providers, managing them could become a cumbersome task after they achieve scale. To get rid of vendor locking and utilize the best services out of available from cloud service provides multi-cloud is getting top option to migration on cloud for enterprises.

An enterprise running with large legacy systems would like to move towards latest technologies and modernization with vendor agnostic, provision of using best services, faster time-to-market, cost optimization and above all easy to operate in cost efficient manner.

What can also become tedious is the provisioning of multi-cloud resources. Data lake, Analytics, AI, Machine learning, serverless / micro-services architecture wherein various interfaces for modern web, mobile applications, voice interfaces etc. As a result, once the application architecture is ready, provisioning can take a lot of time and can be error prone. Also, once the resources are being provisioned, integrating them with business applications for seamless continuous integration and deployment, is another challenge.

In order to alleviate some of the challenges listed above, Multi-Cloud Migration Provisioning-as-a-Service is an offering that focuses on simplifying the Enterprises migration to cloud.

Public Cloud Performance: Which Is the Right Cloud Provider for Your Business?

Given the proliferation of the public cloud within the enterprise architecture and the dominance of the Big 3 – AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GPC), and Microsoft Azure – this session will present an agnostic, first-of-its-kind comparison of the performance of the three major public cloud vendors.

Ultimately, it is important for IT leaders to understand that cloud architectures are complex and not to be taken lightly. Enterprises heavily relying on the public cloud, spanning multiple AZs, regions, and providers should arm themselves with the right data to understand performance and changes over time.
Overall, the collected performance data indicates comparable and robust network performance across all three cloud providers, yet geographical exceptions persist. Cloud connectivity architectures vary between the three providers, with corresponding differences in the level of Internet exposure when connecting to the cloud.

Given the globally distributed nature of customers, their client base, and infrastructure, plus the inherently variable nature of the Internet, monitoring global performance of cloud providers is imperative for determining how their application or service performs on a global scale.

Relying on the cloud means relying on the Internet – that black box shrouded in a cloak of invisibility that no enterprise owns or controls – yet businesses rely on it for outcomes. And as multi-cloud increasingly becomes the norm, visibility issues are significantly compounded. Whether an enterprise is deploying G Suite and wants to monitor performance across branch offices, or if it wants to deploy its own applications hosted on GCP and ensure it has the most control possible over the end-user experience, visibility into how these applications are traversing the Internet across multiple service providers is critical for ensuring exceptional digital experiences

FinOps: A Culture Transformation to Bring DevOps, Finance and the Business Together

New research finds enterprises uneducated and unprepared to manage multi-million dollar cloud budgets. FinOps is the operating model for the cloud.

Navigating Security & Compliance with VMware Cloud, Threat Analytics and Intelligence

Risk-based analysis and examples of threat intelligence, analytics and real-time metrics that drive prudent Cloud architecture and investment decision making. We’ll explore using real customer examples, field tested and proven to be effective. Practical advice and discussions will allow the audience to interact with the speakers.

1. What drives IT security and cloud spending?
2. How can IT leadership choose where to place scarce financial resources?
3. Options for cloud solutions, including VMware Cloud, threat intelligence tools and analytics
4. How to evaluate risk and leverage a decision matrix to arrive at repeatable and sound decision-making

Chasing Your Startup Dream? Let's Talk About How We Can Make It Happen!

I know we're all here to talk tech and learn new cool stuff, but I'm sure many of you here have at least five ideas running through their heads, and they wish they can one day make it happen and start their startup.

Now I know what's running in your head now. You have a fat paycheck every month, health insurance, family commitments, monthly bills, fear of opportunity loss, etc. And I bet you always talk to some of your friends about your excellent idea that will rock the world as soon as you launch it BUT do you always say "I want to have all my ducks in a row before I quit my lucrative job and start my company."?
Guess what, your ducks will not be in a row, your plan will never be crystal clear, you have to take some risks and go through some rough conditions and many unknowns.

In this session let's talk about some of the lessons learned to start up a business. How to calculate your risks? And is it worth it?

Feel free to email me questions in advance to omar.mehilba@magalix.com, and I will cover in my talk.

Integrating IBM Power Systems into a Multi-Cloud Architecture

Based on the same POWER9 processor used in the world's fastest supercomputers, the latest generation of IBM Power servers was designed from the ground up as mission-critical cloud infrastructure, with unrivaled performance, scalability, resilience and uptime. This session provides a broad overview of how Power systems fit within a multi-cloud world, including seamless hybrid cloud integration, cloud-native development, hyperconverged infrastructure and multi-cloud management capabilities.

The Growth of Cloud Usage in the ERP World

GCP, Azure and AWS are dominating the "cloud" world, well now they are attacking the Enterprise with partnerships with SAP. Learn how and why these cloud firms see the enterprise ripe for the attack.

Designing a Highly Secured, Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Infrastructure for an Enterprise -- a Case Study

For many large enterprises and government agencies, establishing a cloud infrastructure consisting of multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) is a necessity to provide alternative services, avoid vendor lock-in, benefit from competing prices, and mitigate potential risks. These large enterprise and government agencies also require hybrid cloud infrastructure to meet controls when their data centers connect to the public clouds for identity federation, security monitoring, cloud management, and on-prem to cloud system communication. Implementing comprehensive security controls for moderate to high security categorization, therefore, obtaining Authorization to Operate (ATO) for moderate to high security impact systems, is another necessity for the enterprises and agencies to deploy their mission critical systems to the cloud.How do you put all these requirements together, and design a highly secured, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure for an enterprise with satisfactory security, usability, stability, manageability and performance quality attributes? In this presentation, we will work through a case study to build an enterprise-level multi-cloud infrastructure in AWS and Azure. Specifically, we will present:

•Multi-cloud adoption strategy
•Enterprise cloud account management
•High level hybrid multi-cloud architecture
•Multi VPC (AWS) or vNet (Azure) network design
•On-premises to Cloud network design
•High availability, backup and recovery
•Security-in-depth architecture

Identity federation, multi-factor authentication to cloud portal and VM console
Centralized perimeter and zone security design
Centralized logging, auditing design
Centralized SIEM design
Anti-virus, intrusion detection, vulnerability management

•Cloud operation: patching and upgrading strategy
•Single-pane-of-glass multi-cloud management
•End-to-end infrastructure as code to automate the entire cloud and on-premises service provisioning

At the end, we will also present a technology decision tree used to facilitate the process for selecting appropriate on-premises and cloud technologies based on security, viability, total cost of ownership (TCO), and efficiency. We will also discuss and demonstrate a cloud center of excellence (CoE) framework and initiative to improve the maturity of cloud adoption processes.

Dynamic Auto Scalable Software Applications

Dynamic auto scalable software applications having multiple custom schedulers running as part of a Multi-Cluster often have the need to execute code in exactly one Application Instance. This pattern can be used to implement processing which must only be performed once within the entire application. This is achieved via a leader election and even job distribution. Microservices utilize this software pattern to ensure all future schedulers that will wake up in the future will stream the events for marketing campaigns. It is so important that we should not reach a customer with several duplicate messages through multiple channels like email, Direct Mail etc. When a custom configured, persisted scheduler wakes only one Application Instance will start processing the customer information to determine the eligibility to reach a customer and stream those events through the specific channels. Ensuring exactly one Node/Scheduler election to run a custom scheduled job ensures events are not duplicated resulting in duplication of work and wasted computer resources from technology and duplicate campaigns from business perspective.

Also, a Scheduler is non-preemptive. Thus, if an Application Instance is running the Scheduler and another Application Instance is eligible to run the Scheduler, the eligible Application Instance must not preempt the Scheduler already running; running Scheduler is allowed to complete.
Apart from that having multiple custom configured scheduled jobs, this algorithm should be responsible to evenly and randomly choosing a node for load distribution of the job election leaders.
The leader election algorithm is aware of the Application Instance version. If a Multi- Cluster contains Application Instances with different versions the Scheduler must only run in the newer version Application Instances.