COVID-19 leads to shocking cloud computing bills

It’s pretty significant when the Wall Street Journal talks about cloud issues, and this story (behind a paywall) is no different. The gist is that as enterprises support a mostly remote workforce with cloud computing, they are, of course, seeing rapid growth in the monthly public cloud bills.  Although a 20 percent expansion in dollars burned…

Introducing Microsoft’s Dataflex low-code data platform

Microsoft’s family of low-code and no-code application tools is one of its fastest growing developer platforms. Building on top of technologies from the Dynamics line-of-business applications and from Office, the Power Platform is perhaps best thought of as the spiritual successor to familiar tools such as Visual Basic for Applications: a quick way of building…

Migrating to cloud native requires seeing shades of gray

A common approach to application migration to the public clouds is to alter the applications to take advantage of cloud-native features. This means that the applications can speak with the native management systems, native security systems, and other native services. The alternative is lift-and-shift: doing as few modifications to the applications as you can get…

What is CaaS? Simpler container management

As modern, containerized applications continue to prove popular with organizations, it was only a matter of time before the major vendors started to offer container infrastructure and management “as-a-service.” Use of containers is firmly on the rise with enterprises globally, with 65 percent of organizations stating they use Docker containers, and 58 percent using the…

6 ways Alibaba Cloud challenges AWS, Azure, and GCP

Most folks will by now have heard of Alibaba, the giant Chinese conglomerate, with business interests that include retail, financial services, logistics, media, and digital branding and marketing. The technology backbone underpinning these business units, Alibaba Cloud, is the third largest cloud provider globally, behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. And while Alibaba Cloud…

What comes after Kubernetes?

“Boring.” That’s one of the best compliments you can pay an infrastructure technology. No one wants to run their mission-critical applications on “spicy!” But boring? Boring is good. Boring means that a technology has reached a certain level of ubiquity and trust, that it’s well-understood and easily managed. Kubernetes, in production at 78 percent of…

Next.js builder Vercel spruces up edge network

Vercel has enhanced its edge platform for content delivery with better performance, improved ease of use, and automatic global failover. The improvements are designed to optimize the experience for both front-end developers and web users. The company’s edge platform, called the Vercel Edge Network, has been rearchitected for faster routing, improved caching, and backward compatibility.…

Multicloud is not really about clouds anymore

Most think of multicloud just how it sounds: an architecture that leverages plural public and/or private clouds at the same time, in support of best-of-breed cloud services. In other words, we use multicloud as a path to access the cloud services that are the best fit. As multicloud becomes the norm, I’ve observed that the…

Getting started with Azure Arc and Kubernetes

Microsoft announced Azure Arc, an application-centric tool for deploying and managing applications running on virtual infrastructures, towards the end of 2019. Since then it’s rolled out two waves of product previews: the first targeted at virtual machines running on-premises and in the cloud; the second, a more recent release, at applications running on Kubernetes clusters. To…

When to use a fog computing node

Think of a fog computing node as a physical server that resides between the edge devices (thermostats, robots, in-vehicle computers) and the back-end systems, typically hosted on public clouds. The fog nodes respond to an architectural problem: too much latency to pass requests all the way back to the public cloud-based services and not enough…