cloud computing
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How startups can leverage elastic services for cost optimization
Joey Lei is director of service management at Synoptek, a global systems integrator and managed services provider. Prior to joining Synoptek, he was a lead product manager for Dell EMC’s Data Protection Division and was a founding product manager for Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager, Dell EMC’s newest generation data protection and data management solution.
Due to COVID-19, business continuity has been put to the test for many companies in the manufacturing, agriculture, transport, hospitality, energy and retail sectors. Cost reduction is the primary focus of companies in these sectors due to massive losses in revenue caused by this pandemic. The other side of the crisis is, however, significantly different.
Companies in industries such as medical, government and financial services, as well as cloud-native tech startups that are providing essential services, have experienced a considerable increase in their operational demands — leading to rising operational costs. Irrespective of the industry your company belongs to, and whether your company is experiencing reduced or increased operations, cost optimization is a reality for all companies to ensure a sustained existence.
One of the most reliable measures for cost optimization at this stage is to leverage elastic services designed to grow or shrink according to demand, such as cloud and managed services. A modern product with a cloud-native architecture can auto-scale cloud consumption to mitigate lost operational demand. What may not have been obvious to startup leaders is a strategy often employed by incumbent, mature enterprises — achieving cost optimization by leveraging managed services providers (MSPs). MSPs enable organizations to repurpose full-time staff members from impacted operations to more strategic product lines or initiatives.
Why companies need cost optimization in the long run
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Docker expands relationship with Microsoft to ease developer experience across platforms
When Docker sold off its enterprise division to Mirantis last fall, that didn’t mark the end of the company. In fact, Docker still exists and has refocused as a cloud-native developer tools vendor. Today it announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft around simplifying running Docker containers in Azure.
As its new mission suggests, it involves tighter integration between Docker and a couple of Azure developer tools including Visual Studio Code and Azure Container Instances (ACI). According to Docker, it can take developers hours or even days to set up their containerized environment across the two sets of tools.
The idea of the integration is to make it easier, faster and more efficient to include Docker containers when developing applications with the Microsoft tool set. Docker CEO Scott Johnston says it’s a matter of giving developers a better experience.
“Extending our strategic relationship with Microsoft will further reduce the complexity of building, sharing and running cloud-native, microservices-based applications for developers. Docker and VS Code are two of the most beloved developer tools and we are proud to bring them together to deliver a better experience for developers building container-based apps for Azure Container Instances,” Johnston said in a statement.
Among the features they are announcing is the ability to log into Azure directly from the Docker command line interface, a big simplification that reduces going back and forth between the two sets of tools. What’s more, developers can set up a Microsoft ACI environment complete with a set of configuration defaults. Developers will also be able to switch easily between their local desktop instance and the cloud to run applications.
These and other integrations are designed to make it easier for Azure and Docker common users to work in in the Microsoft cloud service without having to jump through a lot of extra hoops to do it.
It’s worth noting that these integrations are starting in Beta, but the company promises they should be released some time in the second half of this year.
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BetterCloud scores $75M Series F as SaaS management needs grow
BetterCloud gives IT visibility into its SaaS tools providing the means to discover, manage and secure those tools. In the middle of a crisis that has forced most companies to move workers home, being able to manage SaaS usage in this way is growing increasingly significant.
Today the company announced a $75 million Series F. Warburg Pincus led the way with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Accel, Greycroft Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, New Amsterdam Growth Capital and e.ventures. Today’s round brings the total raised to $187 million, according to the company.
While CEO David Politis acknowledges the gravity of the current situation, he also recognizes that giving companies a way to manage their SaaS usage is more pertinent than ever. “What has happened in the last two months has been terrible for the world, but in some crazy way it has just made what we do a lot more relevant,” Politis told TechCrunch .
He says the pandemic has really accelerated the market opportunity because of the reliance on cloud services and the services his company provides.
Those services began as an operational layer on top of G Suite. Later it added support for Office 365 and in 2016 it moved to more general SaaS management. It now offers direct integrations into multiple SaaS apps including Box, Dropbox, Salesforce, Zendesk and more. The set of tools in Bettercloud gives IT control over security, configuration, spend optimization and auditability across SaaS applications.
In normal times after a large Series F round, we might be talking about this being the last round before an IPO, but Politis isn’t ready to commit to that just yet, especially in this economy. He does say, however, that he’s in it for the long haul and sees an opportunity to build a long-term, sustainable company.
“The last couple of months I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and when you take a $75 million round at the stage you’re not doing that because you want to sell the business. You’re doing that because you want to build something and build something really special,” he said.
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Microsoft launches industry-specific cloud solutions, starting with healthcare
Microsoft today announced the launch of the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, an industry-specific cloud solution for healthcare providers. This is the first in what is likely going to be a set of cloud offerings that target specific verticals and extends a trend we’ve seen among large cloud providers (especially Google) that tailor specific offerings to the needs of individual industries.
“More than ever, being connected is critical to create an individualized patient experience,” writes Tom McGuinness, corporate vice president, Worldwide Health at Microsoft, and Dr. Greg Moore, corporate vice president, Microsoft Health, in today’s announcement. “The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare helps healthcare organizations to engage in more proactive ways with their patients, allows caregivers to improve the efficiency of their workflows and streamline interactions with Classified as Microsoft Confidential patients with more actionable results.”
Like similar Microsoft-branded offerings from the company, Cloud for Healthcare is about bringing together a set of capabilities that already exist inside of Microsoft. In this case, that includes Microsoft 365, Dynamics, Power Platform and Azure, including Azure IoT for monitoring patients. The solution sits on top of a common data model that makes it easier to share data between applications and analyze the data they gather.
“By providing the right information at the right time, the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will help hospitals and care providers better manage the needs of patients and staff and make resource deployments more efficient,” Microsoft says in its press materials. “This solution also improves end-to-end security compliance and accessibility of data, driving better operational outcomes.”
Since Microsoft never passes up a chance to talk up Teams, the company also notes that its communications service will allow healthcare workers to more efficiently communicate with each other, but it also notes that Teams now includes a Bookings app to help its users — including healthcare providers — schedule, manage and conduct virtual visits in Teams. Some of the healthcare systems that are already using Teams include St. Luke’s University Health Network, Stony Brook Medicine, Confluent Health and Calderdale & Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust in the U.K.
In addition to Microsoft’s own tools, the company is also working with its large partner ecosystem to provide healthcare providers with specialized services. These include the likes of Epic, Allscripts, GE Healthcare, Adaptive Biotechnologies and Nuance.
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Microsoft launches Azure Synapse Link to help enterprises get faster insights from their data
At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced Azure Synapse Link, a new enterprise service that allows businesses to analyze their data faster and more efficiently, using an approach that’s generally called “hybrid transaction/analytical processing” (HTAP). That’s a mouthful; it essentially enables enterprises to use the same database system for analytical and transactional workloads on a single system. Traditionally, enterprises had to make some trade-offs between either building a single system for both that was often highly over-provisioned or maintain separate systems for transactional and analytics workloads.
Last year, at its Ignite conference, Microsoft announced Azure Synapse Analytics, an analytics service that combines analytics and data warehousing to create what the company calls “the next evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse.” Synapse Analytics brings together data from Microsoft’s services and those from its partners and makes it easier to analyze.
“One of the key things, as we work with our customers on their digital transformation journey, there is an aspect of being data-driven, of being insights-driven as a culture, and a key part of that really is that once you decide there is some amount of information or insights that you need, how quickly are you able to get to that? For us, time to insight and a secondary element, which is the cost it takes, the effort it takes to build these pipelines and maintain them with an end-to-end analytics solution, was a key metric we have been observing for multiple years from our largest enterprise customers,” said Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure Data.
Synapse Link takes the work Microsoft did on Synaps Analytics a step further by removing the barriers between Azure’s operational databases and Synapse Analytics, so enterprises can immediately get value from the data in those databases without going through a data warehouse first.
“What we are announcing with Synapse Link is the next major step in the same vision that we had around reducing the time to insight,” explained Kumar. “And in this particular case, a long-standing barrier that exists today between operational databases and analytics systems is these complex ETL (extract, transform, load) pipelines that need to be set up just so you can do basic operational reporting or where, in a very transactionally consistent way, you need to move data from your operational system to the analytics system, because you don’t want to impact the performance of the operational system in any way because that’s typically dealing with, depending on the system, millions of transactions per second.”
ETL pipelines, Kumar argued, are typically expensive and hard to build and maintain, yet enterprises are now building new apps — and maybe even line of business mobile apps — where any action that consumers take and that is registered in the operational database is immediately available for predictive analytics, for example.
From the user perspective, enabling this only takes a single click to link the two, while it removes the need for managing additional data pipelines or database resources. That, Kumar said, was always the main goal for Synapse Link. “With a single click, you should be able to enable real-time analytics on your operational data in ways that don’t have any impact on your operational systems, so you’re not using the compute part of your operational system to do the query, you actually have to transform the data into a columnar format, which is more adaptable for analytics, and that’s really what we achieved with Synapse Link.”
Because traditional HTAP systems on-premises typically share their compute resources with the operational database, those systems never quite took off, Kumar argued. In the cloud, with Synapse Link, though, that impact doesn’t exist because you’re dealing with two separate systems. Now, once a transaction gets committed to the operational database, the Synapse Link system transforms the data into a columnar format that is more optimized for the analytics system — and it does so in real time.
For now, Synapse Link is only available in conjunction with Microsoft’s Cosmos DB database. As Kumar told me, that’s because that’s where the company saw the highest demand for this kind of service, but you can expect the company to add support for available in Azure SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL in the future.
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Why we’re doubling down on cloud investments right now
Mary D’Onofrio is a software investor at Bessemer Venture Partners who joined to start the firm’s growth practice; she’s also an architect of ^EMCLOUD and authored the 10 Laws of Cloud and the State of the Cloud 2020.
Hansae Catlett is an investor for Bessemer Venture Partners where he primarily focuses on investments in cloud (enterprise and SMB), machine learning and consumer technologies; he’s an author behind the State of the Cloud 2020.
Elliott Robinson is a partner for Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the authors behind the State of the Cloud 2020, and focuses primarily on growth investments in SaaS and cloud companies.
Years from now, people will look back on the COVID-19 pandemic as a watershed moment for society and the global economy.
Wearing a mask might be as common as owning a phone; telework, telemedicine and online education will be more of a norm than a backup plan; and for the global economy, the cloud will have transformed the underlying infrastructure of businesses and entire industries.
COVID-19 is a turning point for the cloud and cloud company founders. For its computing power and as a delivery model of software, the cloud has been embraced as a solution to many challenges that businesses face during today’s economic downturn and recovery. Not only is the cloud industry more resilient than other industries, but the cloud model offers businesses a promising future in the age of social distancing and beyond.
We believe that once founders find shelter in the cloud, they’ll never go back.
Cloud’s resiliency amid historic volatility
Over the past decade, there’s been a massive market shift from on-premises to cloud, as 94% of enterprises use at least one cloud service today. 2020 was already a milestone year for the cloud industry, as aggregate SaaS and IaaS run-rate revenue each crossed $100 billion, and the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index (^EMCLOUD) market cap crossed $1 trillion in early February. Yet in a matter of days, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, fear tore through financial markets.
In early March, public markets experienced the steepest crash in history with volatility we haven’t seen since the Great Recession. The cloud index market cap dropped to ~$750 million and cloud multiples returned close to their historical averages of ~7x while the VIX volatility index spiked to the mid-80s. Both at global highs in February 2020, the ^EMCLOUD and the S&P 500 traded off by roughly 35% by mid-March. Over the next two months, though, the ^EMCLOUD recouped those losses, charging to a new all-time high on May 7.
The cloud index has continued its rise since then, and as of the close on May 11 has a market cap above $1.2 trillion and has returned to the lofty 12x forward run rate revenue multiples from 2019. Similar to Adobe in 2012, we expect many enterprises to transition over to the cloud model, and the index will continue to expand. As we predicted in this year’s State of the Cloud 2020, by 2025 we expect the cloud to penetrate 50% of enterprise software.
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VMware to acquire Kubernetes security startup Octarine and fold it into Carbon Black
VMware announced today that it intends to buy early-stage Kubernetes security startup Octarine and fold it into Carbon Black, a security company it bought last year for $2.1 billion. The company did not reveal the price of today’s acquisition.
According to a blog post announcing the deal, from Patrick Morley, general manager and senior vice president at VMware’s Security Business Unit, Octarine should fit in with what Carbon Black calls its “intrinsic security strategy” — that is, protecting content and applications wherever they live. In the case of Octarine, that is cloud native containers in Kubernetes environments.
“Acquiring Octarine enables us to advance intrinsic security for containers (and Kubernetes environments), by embedding the Octarine technology into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud, and via deep hooks and integrations with the VMware Tanzu platform,” Morley wrote in a blog post.
This also fits in with VMware’s Kubernetes strategy, having purchased Heptio, an early Kubernetes company started by Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, two folks who helped develop Kubernetes while at Google before starting their own company,
We covered Octarine last year when it released a couple of open-source tools to help companies define the Kubernetes security parameters. As we quoted head of product Julien Sobrier at the time:
Kubernetes gives a lot of flexibility and a lot of power to developers. There are over 30 security settings, and understanding how they interact with each other, which settings make security worse, which make it better, and the impact of each selection is not something that’s easy to measure or explain.
As for the startup, it now gets folded into VMware’s security business. While the CEO tried to put a happy face on the acquisition in a blog post, it seems its days as an independent entity are over. “VMware’s commitment to cloud native computing and intrinsic security, which have been demonstrated by its product announcements and by recent acquisitions, makes it an ideal home for Octarine,” the company CEO Shemer Schwarz wrote in the post.
Octarine was founded in 2017 and has raised $9 million, according to PitchBook data.
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Orca Security raises $20M Series A for its multi-cloud security platform
Orca Security, an Israeli cloud security firm that focuses on giving enterprises better visibility into their multi-cloud deployments on AWS, Azure and GCP, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round led by GGV Capital. YL Ventures and Silicon Valley CISO Investments also participated in this round. Together with its seed investment led by YL Ventures, this brings Orca’s total funding to $27 million.
One feature that makes Orca stand out is its ability to quickly provide workload-level visibility without the need for an agent or network scanner. Instead, Orca uses low-level APIs that allow it to gain visibility into what exactly is running in your cloud.
The founders of Orca all have a background as architects and CTOs at other companies, including the likes of Check Point Technologies, as well as the Israeli army’s Unit 8200. As Orca CPO and co-founder Gil Geron told me in a meeting in Tel Aviv earlier this year, the founders were looking for a big enough problem to solve and it quickly became clear that at the core of most security breaches were misconfigurations or the lack of security tools in the right places. “What we deduced is that in too many cases, we have the security tools that can protect us, but we don’t have them in the right place at the right time,” Geron, who previously led a security team at Check Point, said. “And this is because there is this friction between the business’ need to grow and the need to have it secure.”
Orca delivers its solution as a SaaS platform and on top of providing work level visibility into these public clouds, it also offers security tools that can scan for vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, password issues, secret keys in personally identifiable information.
“In a software-driven world that is moving faster than ever before, it’s extremely difficult for security teams to properly discover and protect every cloud asset,” said GGV managing partner Glenn Solomon . “Orca Security’s novel approach provides unparalleled visibility into these assets and brings this power back to the CISO without slowing down engineering.”
Orca Security is barely a year and a half old, but it also counts companies like Flexport, Fiverr, Sisene and Qubole among its customers.
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IBM and Red Hat expand their telco, edge and AI enterprise offerings
At its Think Digital conference, IBM and Red Hat today announced a number of new services that all center around 5G edge and AI. The fact that the company is focusing on these two areas doesn’t come as a surprise, given that both edge and AI are two of the fastest-growing businesses in enterprise computing. Virtually every telecom company is now looking at how to best capitalize on the upcoming 5G rollouts, and most forward-looking enterprises are trying to figure out how to best plan around this for their own needs.
As IBM’s recently minted president Jim Whitehurst told me ahead of today’s announcement, he believes that IBM (in combination with Red Hat) is able to offer enterprises a very differentiated service because, unlike the large hyper clouds, IBM isn’t interested in locking these companies into a homogeneous cloud.
“Where IBM is competitively differentiated, is around how we think about helping clients on a journey to what we call hybrid cloud,” said Whitehurst, who hasn’t done a lot of media interviews since he took the new role, which still includes managing Red Hat. “Honestly, everybody has hybrid clouds. I wish we had a more differentiated term. One of the things that’s different is how we’re talking about how you think about an application portfolio that, by necessity, you’re going to have in multiple ways. If you’re a large enterprise, you probably have a mainframe running a set of transactional workloads that probably are going to stay there for a long time because there’s not a great alternative. And there’s going to be a set of applications you’re going to want to run in a distributed environment that need to access that data — all the way out to you running a factory floor and you want to make sure that the paint sprayer doesn’t have any defects while it’s painting a door.”
BARCELONA, CATALONIA, SPAIN – 2019/02/25: The IBM logo is seen during MWC 2019. (Photo by Paco Freire/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
He argues that IBM, at its core, is all about helping enterprises think about how to best run their workloads software, hardware and services perspective. “Public clouds are phenomenal, but they are exposing a set of services in a homogeneous way to enterprises,” he noted, while he argues that IBM is trying to weave all of these different pieces together.
Later in our discussion, he argued that the large public clouds essentially force enterprises to fit their workloads to those clouds’ service. “The public clouds do extraordinary things and they’re great partners of ours, but their primary business is creating these homogeneous services, at massive volumes, and saying ‘if your workloads fit into this, we can run it better, faster, cheaper etc.’ And they have obviously expanded out. They’ve added services. They are not saying we can put a box on-premise, but you’re still fitting into their model.”
On the news side, IBM is launching new services to automate business planning, budgeting and forecasting, for example, as well as new AI-driven tools for building and running automation apps that can handle routine tasks either autonomously or with the help of a human counterpart. The company is also launching new tools for call-center automation.
The most important AI announcement is surely Watson AIOps, though, which is meant to help enterprises detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in order to reduce the effects of incidents and outages for a company.
On the telco side, IBM is launching new tools like the Edge Application Manager, for example, to make it easier to enable AI, analytics and IoT workloads on the edge, powered by IBM’s open-source Open Horizon edge computing project. The company is also launching a new Telco Network Cloud manager built on top of Red Hat OpenShift and the ability to also leverage the Red Hat OpenStack Platform (which remains to be an important platform for telcos and represents a growing business for IBM/Red Hat). In addition, IBM is launching a new dedicated IBM Services team for edge computing and telco cloud to help these customers build out their 5G and edge-enabled solutions.
Telcos are also betting big on a lot of different open-source technologies that often form the core of their 5G and edge deployments. Red Hat was already a major player in this space, but the acquisition has only accelerated this, Whitehurst argued. “Since the acquisition […] telcos have a lot more confidence in IBM’s capabilities to serve them long term and be able to serve them in mission-critical context. But importantly, IBM also has the capability to actually make it real now.”
A lot of the new telco edge and hybrid cloud deployments, he also noted, are built on Red Hat technologies but built by IBM, and neither IBM nor Red Hat could have really brought these to fruition in the same way. Red Hat never had the size, breadth and skills to pull off some of these projects, Whitehurst argued.
Whitehurst also argued that part of the Red Hat DNA that he’s bringing to the table now is helping IBM to think more in terms of ecosystems. “The DNA that I think matters a lot that Red Hat brings to the table with IBM — and I think IBM is adopting and we’re running with it — is the importance of ecosystems,” he said. “All of Red Hat’s software is open source. And so really, what you’re bringing to the table is ecosystems.”
It’s maybe no surprise then that the telco initiatives are backed by partners like Cisco, Dell Technologies, Juniper, Intel, Nvidia, Samsung, Packet, Equinix, Hazelcast, Sysdig, Turbonomics, Portworx, Humio, Indra Minsait, EuroTech, Arrow, ADLINK, Acromove, Geniatech, SmartCone, CloudHedge, Altiostar, Metaswitch, F5 Networks and ADVA.
In many ways, Red Hat pioneered the open-source business model and Whitehurst argued that having Red Hat as part of the IBM family means it’s now easier for the company to make the decision to invest even more in open source. “As we accelerate into this hybrid cloud world, we’re going to do our best to leverage open-source technologies to make them real,” he added.
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AWS launches Amazon AppFlow, its new SaaS integration service
AWS today launched Amazon AppFlow, a new integration service that makes it easier for developers to transfer data between AWS and SaaS applications like Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake and Zendesk. Like similar services, including Microsoft Azure’s Power Automate, for example, developers can trigger these flows based on specific events, at pre-set times or on-demand.
Unlike some of its competitors, though, AWS is positioning this service more as a data transfer service than a way to automate workflows, and, while the data flow can be bi-directional, AWS’s announcement focuses mostly on moving data from SaaS applications to other AWS services for further analysis. For this, AppFlow also includes a number of tools for transforming the data as it moves through the service.
“Developers spend huge amounts of time writing custom integrations so they can pass data between SaaS applications and AWS services so that it can be analysed; these can be expensive and can often take months to complete,” said AWS principal advocate Martin Beeby in today’s announcement. “If data requirements change, then costly and complicated modifications have to be made to the integrations. Companies that don’t have the luxury of engineering resources might find themselves manually importing and exporting data from applications, which is time-consuming, risks data leakage, and has the potential to introduce human error.”
Every flow (which AWS defines as a call to a source application to transfer data to a destination) costs $0.001 per run, though, in typical AWS fashion, there’s also cost associated with data processing (starting at 0.02 per GB).
“Our customers tell us that they love having the ability to store, process, and analyze their data in AWS. They also use a variety of third-party SaaS applications, and they tell us that it can be difficult to manage the flow of data between AWS and these applications,” said Kurt Kufeld, vice president, AWS. “Amazon AppFlow provides an intuitive and easy way for customers to combine data from AWS and SaaS applications without moving it across the public internet. With Amazon AppFlow, our customers bring together and manage petabytes, even exabytes, of data spread across all of their applications — all without having to develop custom connectors or manage underlying API and network connectivity.”
At this point, the number of supported services remains comparatively low, with only 14 possible sources and four destinations (Amazon Redshift and S3, as well as Salesforce and Snowflake). Sometimes, depending on the source you select, the only possible destination is Amazon’s S3 storage service.
Over time, the number of integrations will surely increase, but for now, it feels like there’s still quite a bit more work to do for the AppFlow team to expand the list of supported services.
AWS has long left this market to competitors, even though it has tools like AWS Step Functions for building serverless workflows across AWS services and EventBridge for connections applications. Interestingly, EventBridge currently supports a far wider range of third-party sources, but as the name implies, its focus is more on triggering events in AWS than moving data between applications.
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