Can orchestration be considered a better alternative to provisioning and configuration management, especially in the case of cloud-native applications? We can look at this from a variety of angles; comparing against data centre-oriented solutions; differentiating orchestration of infrastructure (in the cloud and out of the cloud) versus containers (focusing mostly on cloud), as well as looking at best practices under different scenarios.

It’s worth noting here that this topic can span not only a...

A couple of interesting pieces of news from Rackspace; the company has launched a ‘Kubernetes as a service’ offering, as well as announcing the acquisition of digital agency RelationEdge.

The service, which will become available on Rackspace Private Cloud later this month, with planned support for public clouds later this year, is more affirmation of the rise of the container orchestration tool. At the

With KubeCon and CloudNativeCon taking place in Copenhagen this week, it is not surprising that a series of Kubernetes-based announcements has hit the wires over the past 24 hours – with Cisco, Red Hat and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) taking top honours.

The CNCF, which maintains Kubernetes alongside other open source technologies, has announced the launch of a certified Kubernetes application developer (CKAD) examination, alongside a Kubernetes for...

Resellers and channel partners can do more to guide organisations into a cloudy future by leveraging IaaS and PaaS solutions, according to a new report from Ingram Micro.

The study, which surveyed 250 UK-based cloud end users as well as 50 resellers, found Azure was the most popular IaaS solution sold by resellers, followed by Amazon S3 and Google Compute Engine – while Azure is significantly ahead on the PaaS side.

The paper’s hypothesis is simple. As organsiations’ cloud desires are often...

Updated 1700 BST: Netflix has always been considered the poster child of Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployment – but the streaming and entertainment giant is utilising Google Cloud for certain workloads.

According to a report from The Information (paywall), citing sources close to the company, Netflix is using Google’s cloud for several functions, from disaster recovery to artificial intelligence.

The report...

CloudHealth Technologies, Boston-based cloud management and cost optimisation provider, is expanding further into Europe by making ‘significant investments’ in the region.

The company is forming a development team in London, as well as the typical expansion bases of expanding its employee, partner and customer base. CloudHealth adds it has grown its London employee base by 300%, as well as hitting 83% revenue growth in EMEA. London is not the company’s only European office, with operations...

Commodity trading companies are rapidly switching from on-premise commodity trading and risk management solutions (CTRM) to cloud-based systems.  Research from Commodity Technology Advisory LLP shows that cloud-delivered CTRM solutions now outsell on-premise solutions and will significantly outpace spend on traditional deployments over the next five years.

Small commodity companies lead the way

One reason for this shift is a change in the commodity industry. Early adopters of cloud-hosted CTRM solutions...

“Software is eating the world”, claimed Marc Andreessen back in 2011; though it may have seemed like an exaggeration when his essay was published, so far he has been proved correct. Now that software exists across every industry, organisations that rely on information need to reimagine themselves as software companies to avoid falling behind competitors.

In today’s society, childhood favourite Blockbuster couldn’t stand...

Oracle has announced the availability of enhanced UK cloud services promising customers ‘unprecedented levels of performance and availability’.

The company will expand its UK cloud region, which comprises three physically separate, high bandwidth and low latency sites, and will offer a range of Oracle PaaS and IaaS services, as well as the highly publicised autonomous database service.

To that end, the company rolled out a couple of satisfied customers; the National Grid, who said using...

Hosting provider GoDaddy is going all-in on Amazon Web Services (AWS) moving the ‘vast majority of its infrastructure’ over to Amazon as well as maintaining an active interest in containerised apps.

The move, announced by AWS, will see GoDaddy utilise various services, including Amazon EKS, its elastic container service for Kubernetes launched at the company’s re:Invent event at the end of November. Other services being used include P2, AWS’ general purpose GPU instances ‘to...