Best Practices for cloud migration

 

In an age of choice and flexibility, multi-cloud is the norm today rather than the exception. Most enterprises today want to avoid vendor lock in, and want to choose different cloud platforms for different workloads. A study conducted by IDC of 300 enterprise IT leaders revealed that 93.2% of respondents were using ‘multiple infrastructure clouds’ for their business operations.

While having greater choice is a clear necessity, it also throws up multiple challenges for organizations. Any organization that underestimates the complexity of multi-cloud migration will fail to realize the full potential of a multi-cloud strategy. Being aware of the potential hurdles can help enterprises to tap into the numerous business benefits of a multi-cloud environment. Hence, before planning any cloud migration, it is critical to clearly define the pre-migration and post-migration stage, and document the existing IT ecosystem consisting of apps, databases, networks and interdependencies.

We recommend some of the following best practices for ensuring seamless multi-cloud migration

Define what to migrate

 

Before you decide to migrate applications or data to a cloud platform from on-premise or from another cloud, it is critical to first identify a list of applications that must be migrated. This can be done on the basis of performance gain, economics of maintaining the application or security, after migration to the new cloud environment. Enterprises hence must invest enough time to maintain an inventory of applications so that there is minimum risk of any missing dependency during a migration process.

Decide the type of migration

Once the inventory of applications is prepared, enterprises must decide the type of cloud environment they want to migrate – will be it be an all public cloud environment, will be it a private cloud or will be it a hybrid cloud environment? Depending on the benefits, you could decide to migrate to the cloud environment that your organization need. The migration must be planned in such a way that it is less disruptive with very less downtime.

Prepare and test

The new cloud environment where your applications and data will migrate needs to be ready to receive data in a format that is required by the cloud provider. You could start small, and move migrating applications gradually, as you gain greater confidence in the new cloud environment. It is also equally important to test if your on-premise applications with their data and dependencies will work properly in the new environment. Factors such as latency, performance and additional bandwidth also need to be considered as migration to the cloud can affect end users.

Monitor and measure 

Post migration, organizations must implement tools that can help them get complete visibility into the performance of every application. This can be done by correlating the performance of every application by mapping the user journeys across different platforms such as web or mobile. Post migration, organizations must check if all the application interdependencies and linkages are working perfectly, and also check if performance levels have improved or reduced, due to migration. You could also use cloud-native monitoring tools that provide application-level insights and monitoring on the cloud environment.

Enforce security

Most of the breaches that have occurred on public cloud platforms are due to user mis-configurations. Other issues include unencrypted databases, weak network controls and poor governance. Hence, post migration, enterprises must ensure that all applications must ideally have the same level of security across on-premise apps or apps in the cloud environment.

Lastly, if your organization lacks the capability or has less bandwidth to carry out cloud migration activities, you could consider outsourcing this activity to a specialist and certified cloud service provider. For ensuring that you get the best out of your cloud migration, you must consider service providers that can not only guide your organization in choosing the best possible cloud platform, but also help your organization ensure effortless provisioning, monitoring and management via a single dashboard.

Critical Importance of DRaaS for your Business for Now and the Future

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It is a pattern which repeats itself year after year. From monsoons to floods to earthquakes, disasters are common to India. A 2018 UN report estimated that India has been among the top five countries with disaster-related economic losses of more than $79.5 billion in the last twenty years. India is also the 14th most vulnerable country in the world, according to the 2019 Global Climate Risk Index report.

Given this context, a robust disaster recovery process is absolutely vital, as the survival of the organization depends on it. In the current times, this is even more critical, as the Covid 19 crisis has enforced many more limitations with respect to physical access. Hence, irrespective of the size, every organization today needs a digital component. The cost of downtime in a digital age can be disastrous as it can shut down the ability of the business to deliver services to its end customers.

Traditional DR involves a huge number of steps, and is not only expensive, but also complex to execute. Firstly, setting up an alternate DR site requires enterprises to invest in acquiring the required space and the associated infrastructure (power, cooling, IT equipment) and manpower. Configuring the required infrastructure is also a complex process, as every component of the infrastructure has to be ready for deployment. This requires testing networks, software, hardware and applications. Data backup is also a tedious process. For example, if the backup medium is tape, then the tapes have to be delivered to the secondary DR site in the event of a disaster. Further, applications have to be patched with the latest updates and the network has to be configured to match the required specifications (firewall rules, authentication, DNS settings). Even if there is a small failure in one of the steps, then it stalls the entire recovery process. In the goal towards achieving DR compliance, organizations choose the DR strategy depending on the business risk. For example, the faster the recovery time needed, the more expensive is the solution. If the recovery time is slower, the cheaper is the solution. Hence, there is always a trade off between the benefit and the cost

How DRaaS can help?

Thanks to the cloud, DRaaS has emerged as a powerful option. DRaaS can help enterprises
overcome all the issues that are present with traditional DR.
Here is how

1. Faster recovery time: 

IT infrastructure components such as the operating system, application data and related patches can be quickly copied to the offsite DR site and be made live in a shorter period of time.

2. Efficient recovery: 

As every process is automated, replication is extremely efficient when compared to manual processes, which can have the probability of errors. Further, due to lower costs, organizations can test the reliability of their DR process more often, than they could have done using a traditional process. As the frequency of testing increases, it increases the accuracy, as organizations understand the gaps in their process, and can also determine the time taken for gauging how quickly critical workloads can be recovered in case of a disaster.

3. Lower TCO:

A pay-per-use model allows enterprises to pay only for actual usage. Enterprises only have to pay when data transfer takes place between the primary and

secondary site.

4. Lower upfront investment:

The cloud has levelled the playing field for even smaller organizations, as there is zero capital investment, and an enterprise has to only pay when the cloud option is used

5. Anywhere access:

The ability to access information from any part of the globe gives DRaaS a massive advantage. As the information is stored in the cloud, a DR process can be fired from anywhere in the world by just using a smartphone or a laptop. This is of huge advantage in the current situation, where organizations have been forced to cut down their manpower visiting their data centers. Today, DRaaS gives organizations the capability to shift the operations to a remote DR site quickly.

In an environment that demands an always-on infrastructure, DRaaS is a must have option today, as it gives enterprises the confidence and the ability to bounce back quickly in case of any disaster.

The value of SAP Analytics cloud

Given the pace at which data is being consumed and generated, it is imperative for businesses to make sense of their data – structured and unstructured. While there are a plethora of analytics-related tools available in the market today, there are few tools that can have the impact that SAP Cloud Analytics can have. The SAP Analytics Cloud solution integrates business intelligence, augmented and predictive analytics, and planning capabilities into one cloud environment.

Given the huge volumes of data being produced, it is extremely challenging for enterprises to analyze every bit of data being produced by different functions, and look at the larger picture. Due to its ability to integrate, process, and analyze information on a real-time basis, the SAP Analytics Cloud is extremely valuable in providing insights. A single platform for analytics gives business users the ability to take decisions effectively due to self-service analytics.

An interesting feature called ‘SAP Digital Boardroom’ enables business leaders to understand business insights in a better way, as it presents information graphically and intuitively. This helps business leaders to understand the impact of past decisions, monitor the current trends with respect to changing business dynamics, and use ‘what-if’ scenarios to simulate the future.

Democratizing analytics

The biggest advantage with SAP Analytics Cloud is that users across all functions can learn about the power of intelligent insights. This is made possible by the augmented analytics capabilities. This helps any employee, even untrained ones, to start exploring the power of analytics. Support for conversational analytics, helps users ask questions in a natural way and get instant answers. This frees up the precious time of data scientists for other high-value activities.

Some additional useful features help enterprises to fully capitalize on their data. A ‘Search to Insight’ enables employees to chat with their data using conversational AI and natural language processing. With natural language query (NLQ), employees can search and analyze their data by asking questions. This is an extremely beneficial feature for non-technical people, as it does not require any knowledge of query languages such as SQL or Python. Similarly, the ‘Smart Insights’ feature lets employees dig deeper into their data visualizations without manual effort. For example, with just a click of a button, users can reveal the top contributors behind values and understand the factors contributing to important metrics such as profits or revenues.

Users can also take advantage of the ‘Smart Discovery’ feature, which enables them to use automated machine learning models to reveal relationships and hidden patterns in specific datasets. This feature helps users generate key trends and experiment using ‘What-if’ simulations. Users can also take advantage of the intelligent predictive analytics feature to predict or forecast future scenarios or outcomes. All these initiatives can be undertaken without the help of any data scientist.

 

By linking and creating planning, financial and operational plans in one solution, you can drive better decisions. A centralized view of data across all lines of business, helps organizations ensure that their strategy and actions are linked closely. Enterprises can also do rapid prototyping by using existing data models to customize or integrate or create new models.

In summary, using SAP Analytics Cloud, you can democratize the usage of analytics by giving the power to analyze for every business user. Most enterprises are data-rich, but insights poor. SAP Analytics Cloud allows enterprises to correct this anomaly and use the power of data to your advantage.

Why it is essential for organizations to adopt an application modernization strategy

Given the scale of digital transformation, it has become imperative for enterprises to find a way to modernize their applications. Legacy applications are built on outdated architectures and typically are characterized by high maintenance costs, inflexibility, and redundant features. If the applications are not modernized, they lose their relevance to the business. Legacy apps also are seldom understood by the current generation of developers as they have been maintained for many decades with or without adequate documentation. The other big challenge is that of unsupported platforms or skills shortage. If the application has been created in an old language, then it becomes extremely challenging to find developers that can support these applications. Organizations that have legacy applications are hence, extremely vulnerable to a fast-changing business environment, and hence need to quickly have a strategy for modernizing their applications.

Options to modernize

There are several ways to modernize an application. Enterprises can choose to encapsulate a legacy application and make it available via an API to other modern apps. They can even choose to rehost the application to another infrastructure (such as the cloud) without making any change to the code. If organizations want to quickly take advantage of the cloud without making any modifications to their applications, then the rehosting option is the preferred option. If enterprises want to take advantage of the scalability of the cloud, then a re-architecting option is recommended. The other option is replacing or completely rewriting or rebuilding the application from scratch.

Why the cloud is the best option

The cloud is the best option from an infrastructure point of view, as it can help enterprises take advantage of several tools available in the cloud ecosystem to modernize an application. For example, a microservices strategy is one of the most common methods for refactoring and breaking down an application into small components called microservices. Another option is containerization, which plays a critical role in the modernization of an app. As containers provide a complete ecosystem for an application with all associated dependencies, they are ideal for running an application in an isolated environment. This makes them well suited to run on any cloud platform.

Cloud service providers such as AWS also provide the underlying database foundation (such as Amazon DynamoDB for quick lookups for user searches or Amazon ElastiCache for in-memory storing and rendering) for delivering cloud-ready applications. Serverless computing capabilities are also possible which allows enterprises to run application code without provisioning. Enterprises can also make use of proven migration tools from providers such as AWS to ensure a successful migration.

Modernizing an application without understanding the base infrastructure on which it is hosted, is not sufficient and can lead to performance issues. Hosting an application on the cloud can help enterprises ensure that their applications scale up to handle millions of users and manage the increasing volumes of data without any problem of infrastructure breakdowns.

By modernizing an application in the cloud, some of the top benefits include:

• Ability to scale infrastructure up or scale down as per user requirements
• Reduced cost and support issues for applications
• Greater functionality at reduced costs
• Ability to incorporate better security features
• Ability to attract quality talent for supporting your application due to cloud

In summary, the question of modernizing an application today is not ‘why’, but ‘when’ as no company wants to miss out on taking advantage of the digital technologies that modern platforms like cloud provide them.

Notifications announced for New Amazon GuardDuty Finding Types and Feature Launches

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service which constantly detects for harmful or uncertified action to aid you guard your AWS accounts and workloads of the these data sources : VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail event logs, and DNS logs. It scans for actions like abnormal API calls or potentially unapproved deployments which show a feasible account settlement. Amazon GuardDuty too identifies potentially compromised instances or inspection by attackers.
 
Earlier, you required to manually examine if a new finding type or feature was declared by referring at documentation or in the GuardDuty console. But now, you can subscribe to the new SNS topic and be informed automatically. Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service which harmonizes and controls the delivery or sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients. The SNS subscription can be configured to give update information through an email, SMS message, or activate an automated action with AWS Lambda. Now Amazon GuardDuty provides an Amazon SNS notification subject so you can be informed automatically when new Amazon GuardDuty finding types or features are launched.

Amazon GuardDuty produces findings when it notice unforeseen and potentially harmful actions in your AWS domains. You can perceive and control your GuardDuty findings on the Findings page in the GuardDuty console or with the help of GuardDuty CLI or API operations. You can also check your GuardDuty findings through Amazon CloudWatch events.

Amazon GuardDuty can instantly start examining billions of events over your AWS accounts for signs of risk and its possible with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. You do not need to deploy and maintain software or security infrastructure, that means it can be allowed rapidly with no risk of negatively affecting current application workloads.

You can start your 30-day free trial of Amazon GuardDuty within just one click in the AWS Management console, see Amazon GuardDuty Free Trial. And to get more about, click Amazon GuardDuty Findings
 
About Cloud.in:

Cloud.in is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that delivers AWS managed services that cater every business need and aims in simplifying the AWS Cloud Journey. Our Team is the driving force behind Cloud.in with the experience, knowledge, and the skills that they behold in making cloud computing and AWS Cloud a pleasant experience.

Amazon Polly now adds support for the Hindi Language

Amazon Web Service has announced that they have added support for Hindi and Indian English Language to its Text-to-Speech Amazon Polly service in addition to the English language which will be the first bilingual voice. Amazon Polly brings life to the text by adding Lifelike speech via machine learning service. You can create application or products that can talk or is speech-enabled. It uses advanced deep learning technologies to produce speech that sounds like a human. 

Amazon Polly offers dozens of lifelike voices in different languages and you can choose your desired voice or language to build speech-enabled application or products across the world. 

Amazon has taken this step because of the mass number of Hindi speaking people residing worldwide. With this support, Amazon Polly Hindi Language Support can reach 500 million Hindi speaking people globally. 

Amazon Polly uses Advanced deep learning technologies that can deliver human-like voice to the customers with a variety of language and voice to choose from. Customers can enable their application to talk with a natural sounding female and male voice. Adding speech-enabled features to their applications and products will provide the users a better way to connect with the customers. Adding voice to the text will make the user interface with the application and product more advanced.

Navdeep Manaktala, Head of Business Development at Amazon Internet Services Private Limited said that there is a huge demand for the content to be available in Indian English and Hindi language globally. Customers want their training videos, corporate narrations, E-learning, voice bots and more to be available in the Hindi language as well. With Amazon Polly, the users can easily switch between the voices and languages. He added that the customer requested for a high-quality speech in Hindi and India English language especially when the two languages are mixed and spoken together. Customers can also use local dialects including the Romanized Hindi, Devanagiri Hindi and supports the text input in Devanagari Script with Amazon Polly.

Aditi and Raveen are the two Indian English voices that are available in Amazon Polly with several other languages and voices supported that enables text-to-speech.

You can use Amazon Polly to add voice in the content especially in the use cases of blogs, white papers, articles and etc. Customers can also use it for E-learning medium by pronouncing certain words or paragraphs so that the learners can grasp information much better. Amazon Polly is extremely helpful for the contact centers when it comes to engagement and interaction with the customers. 

ClearSky launched a new service that enables VMware Data Cloud on AWS Customers to back up and archive data

ClearSky Data a Boston based startup company launched a new service that enables the VMware Cloud on AWS Customers to store and protect data in Amazon S3. The customers can now store the existing backup applications and use the Amazon S3 as the back-end storage repository. 

Laz Vekiarides, CTO,  and Co-founder of ClearSky Data said that this newly launched service can change the block and file-based data from the certified backup application to the object format. This will allow the users to enable the data protection and data archiving in Amazon Simple Storage Service.

VMware Cloud on AWS operates VMware software data center stack on the AWS Cloud which allows the users to use a variety of VMware tools with the power of the AWS Cloud. VMware Cloud on AWS can be used for end number of use cases such as migrating on-premise workloads on AWS Cloud, building environment for testing and deployment, disaster recovery tools and consolidation and migration of the data centers.

This new service will allow the customers to use the VMware tools and at the same time can store data in the inexpensive data storage Amazon S3. Customers don’t want to leave their backup vendor and also they don’t want to change the common back up application but at the same time, they are also on a lookout for lowest cost storage for long-term backups. So with the introduction of VMware Cloud on AWS, it will allow the users to use their existing vendor tools and store their data on AWS Cloud. 

Customers can extend their on-premises server virtualization environments to the AWS Cloud with the new VMware Cloud on AWS on-demand service. The VMware Cloud integrates with vSpher server virtualization, NSX software-defined networking and security, vSAN software-defined storage and vCenter management software. When the customer creates Virtual Private Cloud on vSpher VMs in Amazon EC2 a cloud infrastructure, the VMware’s vSAN creates a local storage on SSDs in the Host server cluster. But if any server in the Amazon EC2 cloud gets shut down then all the data in EC2 will be erased so to recover from such disaster you will need a place to back up all the data when you will be not using the VMware cluster. 

How does ClearSky troubleshoot the storage data problem?

ClearSky data use different data storage services for different type of scenarios such as Amazon S3 for long-term retention, data protection, and data archiving. Customers can run their VMware virtual servers and third party back up applications and store the data in Amazon S3 by duplicating and compressing the data and converting to object format. The duplication and compression of the data are done to remove the stress on the primary data storage by reducing the data size. The data reduction for primary data storage can help in accessing the data quickly and store data easily. This way the customers can run VMware Cloud to use a wide variety of tools and ClearSky store the data to S3 to help the users to save on cost. 

About Cloud.in:

Cloud.in is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that delivers AWS managed services that cater every business need and aims in simplifying the AWS Cloud Journey. Our Team is the driving force behind Cloud.in with the experience, knowledge, and the skills that they behold in making cloud computing and AWS Cloud a pleasant experience. 

Photobox Group ahead of its schedule of migrating 10PB of image data to AWS Cloud

Photobox Group is an online image printing company that have up to 5.7 million images that are uploaded by the customers that use their service to order physical copies of the digital photographs. Now with the rise of AWS Cloud Services, enterprises have known that cloud is the only way that can now give them more efficiency and scalability. So now the Image Printing Company has now migrated 10 PB of image data to the AWS Cloud 5 months ahead of its schedule by using the AWS Snowball appliances. 

Earlier the images were stored in two different collocation data centers in Europe. Photobox wanted to deliver a much faster website for its customers and it also becomes easy to manage the huge chunk of data so it migrated the date from the data center to the AWS Public Cloud. 

Richard Orme, CTO of Photobox Group said that the company’s on-premise was using more attention and efforts to manage instead of spending time and money on the future growth of the company. He explained that they were they spending too much time on building infrastructure so to keep up with the flow of photos that they were ingesting and finding compression technology to reduce the size of the images without losing the data. They realized that they were just spending a lot of time and efforts in just keeping the company’s continuity but not in the company’s growth. So they knew it was the time to make a switch to much better technology that can help them manage the core part of the business.

At the initial, they thought that it will 12 months to migrate the data from the datacenters into the AWS S3 cloud storage by using the AWS Snowball appliance but astonishingly the migration process just finished in 5 months. 

Snowball was introduced in 2015 by Amazon Web Services that eliminates the high data migration cost the company normally incur when moving the data into AWS Cloud. AWS Snowball appliance is first delivered to the customer then the customers upload all the data into the appliance and send it to the Amazon data center. AWS uploads all your data into the AWS Cloud directly from the Snowball appliance by saving your time, efforts and money. Orme said that each Snowball has 100 TB of capacity and they used 90 of snowball appliances because of the amount of data that they hold because of the being Europe’s largest consumer photo database. 

When the migration project started in January 2018 they came across some problems by finding out that the Snowball appliance was quickly filling up and it was taking more time than expected to migrate the data. But Amazon enabled a feature that will compress thousand of images into a single file transfer. This kick-started their project to finish much faster and also save a significant amount of cost. 

As the migration of the data got completed, Photobox is now using Artificial Intelligence to assist the customers in making the most of their platform. It will help the team in the knowing the content of the photo that helps in knowing the context of the photo. This way the company and the customers are getting creative in designing process. Artificial Intelligence provides historical data for inspiration or suggestion for the customers that can use it for the designing and it helps them tell the story. 

PhotoBox Group leveraging AWS Cloud services such as data storage and Artificial Intelligence proves that Cloud does help the company set milestones. Enterprises not only save cost and time but also bring efficiency and scalability in their services and operations.

About Cloud.in:

Cloud.in is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that delivers AWS managed services that cater every business need and aims in simplifying the AWS Cloud Journey. Our Team is the driving force behind Cloud.in with the experience, knowledge, and the skills that they behold in making cloud computing and AWS Cloud a pleasant experience. 

Dell Boomi has announced its migration to the AWS Cloud

Dell Boomi a Cloud Integration platform provider is now moving to AWS Cloud by shifting its management platform to Amazon Web Services. Chris McNabb, Chief Executive said that they will be wrapping up the migration to the AWS Cloud in the next month or so.

McNabb was joined by the Boomi Asia-Pacific and Japan managing director Michael Evans and Chief Product Officer Steve wood in Melbourne. The Executives mentioned that the shift to the AWS Cloud was on track. McNabb while speaking to CRN made it clear that the shift to the AWS Cloud was only operational, testing and programming platform so it will not influence the level of integration to be offered.

He further explained that there are two parts to their product by saying that there is a place where the products are tested to see whether they work or no and there is another place where the actual integrations happen. The data are been stored in many places including Azure and Amazon and also in Personal Data Center and Private Clouds and so on. He said that they are moving their platform from the previous provider to AWS and it is going to take 9 months to get the project completed. He added that they will be done with the migrations in the next month or so. McNabb didn’t disclose as to who the previous provider was.

A spokesperson from Dell Boomi said that this strategic plan was developed by moving the Boomi platform to the AWS Cloud so to provide their customers an enhanced level of customer support and improve the Service Level Agreement for their customers. The spokesperson also added that AWS has excellent services that enhance the elasticity, provisioning and storage performance.  

McNabb explained on the topic of the Partner Business that the partners in Australia had to deliver IT modernization to the customers where many businesses still holding back when it came to cloud or mobile project by legacy systems and infrastructure. He said that there is a big growth for Boomi globally and the region by stating that they had started in this region two years again and it now growing continuously at a faster rate and they are trying to change and go for a global expansion. The Chief Executive said that they have observed a faster growth with their technology and loved the opportunity that they were getting to serve major customers.

Dell Boomi is reaching out for a global expansion of their company and they have come to realize that to deliver services globally they also need to be the best in the market. With the latest update about their migration and partnerships with different vendors and services has proved that they are improving and upgrading their services to the next level. Shifting their management platform to the AWS Cloud is one of the many steps that they are making to achieve Excellency into their business. Running their management platform on the AWS Cloud will not only improve their service but also bring efficiency into their management and operations.

Amazon Web Services is rising powerfully in the Cloud Market which has ultimately given a rise in cloud adoptions among the Large Enterprises and Small Enterprises. AWS Cloud can be utilized by any size or type of the business operating with the need for efficiency in their business. Amazon Cloud Services are driving companies into excellence by boosting their speed and agility.

Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute now in a portable data storage AWS Snowball Edge

Amazon Web Services announced that the customers can now run Amazon EC2 instances on AWS Snowball Edge which is portable data storage for bulk data storage in the cloud. Snowball Edge is data storage and data transport solution that transfer bulk amount of data to the AWS Cloud. Snowball is highly secure and you can also save cost and the transfer times. You can migrate image repositories, video libraries, genomics data, analytics data, backups, and archive the data center shutdowns, application migration projects or tape replacement. The difference between the Snowball and Snowball Edge depends on the functionality.

With the ability to run Amazon EC2, the Snowball Edge can also run full scaled virtual machines. You can also form a local cluster by connecting multiple Snowball Edge devices that will be centrally managed by the AWS Console.

Snowball Edge can become a hyper endpoint infrastructure appliance. The compute will be available through AWS Lambda or Amazon EC2 where the storage layer will be exposed via an S3 compatible API. Snowball Edge supports 10GBase-T network connection, 40Gb QSFP + copper and 10/25Gb SFP28 and an optical networking for lightning-fast data transfer. The device comes at 100 TB storage size in a strong container. It has local compute power that is equal to EC2 m4.4x large instance with support for AWS Lambda functions.

This machine delivers a strong data storage and compute power that can run enterprise workloads. Generally, it is been treated as an IoT device the Snowball Edge also comes with AWS Greengrass.

AWS Snowball Edge can be transferred from one place to another via Aircraft, ships and trucks to run Edge workloads that can be run in an offline mode. The device doesn’t require to be connected to the internet and it has its own essential software to function. This means that the processing and the data collection can be taken place anywhere within the isolated operating environments. Deploying Elastic Cloud Compute instance on Snowball Edge devices can be a similar process of creating an Amazon Machine Image and deploying it to the device. Amazon has now created a new EC2 family instance called SBE1 designed for typically for Snowball devices. SBE1 instance has 1.8 GHz Intel Xeon D processors and 32 GB of memory and 16 vCPUs which is designed to support the Edge applications such as image compression, machine learning, and IoT Sensor data collection. The instances work normally in the snowball devices as to how it works in the cloud where the instances that are deployed locally can be stopped.

The pricing of the AWS Snowball Edge pricing is different from the other AWS service where the customers have to pay for the consumption of the EC2 instances, data transfer and the additional charge per day when the usage period exceeds 10 days. Snowball Edge devices can be used as the temporary solution but it is not economical when used as permanent IoT gateway or a local edge device.

But Snowball Edge also has its own limitation where the EC2 instance cannot be run with the existing Elastic Block Storage volumes. Data stored within the EC2 instance can be associated with only one volume at a time. Each snowball edge instances can be only associated with only one volume at a time. Kinesis Endpoint cannot be exposed for storing high-velocity data streams.

With the rise of Machine Learning and IoT, now the adoption of Edge computing demand is been increased. Customers don’t want to store all the data in the public cloud so they analyze, pre-process and aggregate the data streams locally with the help of AWS Snowball Edge before sending into AWS cloud. This helps the customer in reducing the storage cost and bandwidth. Snowball Edge is a device that bridges the gap between the on-premises and the public cloud and with the EC2 support it is now making an on-premise migration to the cloud easier. 

About Cloud.in:

Cloud.in is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that delivers AWS managed services that cater every business need and aims in simplifying the AWS Cloud Journey. Our Team is the driving force behind Cloud.in with the experience, knowledge, and the skills that they behold in making cloud computing and AWS Cloud a pleasant experience. 

Formula 1 choose AWS Cloud to provide greater insight into the game

Amazon Web Services is being adopted by many companies that enhance the IT part of the company sector. Well, now Formula 1 has chosen Amazon Web Services Cloud to upgrade their overall computing power. They are going use the AWS Machine Learning expertise to provide deeper insight into the game for broadcaster and fans.

AWS will be the first company in the Cloud computing market that will provision Machine Learning Service to the Formula 1 and the company’s logo will appear on screen TV graphics. This means that AWS is growing stronger as ever by providing service to the international companies globally.

Formula 1 will be moving majority of its data from the on-premises data centers to the AWS Cloud. They will be also opting for many other several AWS data analytics tool so to provide insight on the sport which can change in milliseconds.

The partnership with the cloud leader depicts that how Formula 1 is changing the way the sport relates to the fan based by providing detailed real-time data insights and increasing fan engagement with in-depth insights. AWS Cloud Platform will use the data from every race and gives fans the prediction about the strategies and decisions that are been adopted by the drivers and the teams.

Formulas 1 data scientist can predict the right time to pit for the fresher tires and they can also identify if the driver is performing at the level of the car’s performance. This info helps greatly for the people who are keen to know in-depth knowledge about the current game's performance.

Pete Samara, Director of Innovation and Digital Technology at Formula 1 said that AWS performs better than the other Cloud providers in the Cloud computing market when it comes to speed, reliability, scalability, partner community, global reach and a wide variety of cloud service available.

He said that they can provide better insights and real-time predictions to fans with the help of AWS Machine learning services and Amazon SageMaker. Formula 1 Technology team are excited to know that the Formula 1 motorsports division will run compute workloads in a scalable environment on AWS Cloud. This will help the team to create and develop new car design rules for Formula 1.

AWS and Formula 1 strategic partnership will help both the company in acquiring such a deal and it will also help Formula 1 to offer robust game insights to its fans and broadcasters. 

AWS has now teamed up with Autodesk to promote generative design by giving out free cloud credits

Amazon Web Services and Autodesk have teamed to promote a new design technology called generative design. Generative Designer assists the designer to explore all types of designs for a product.

Generative design provisions different options for product designs that are based on the set of features such as manufacturing methods to be utilized, materials and the product’s weight. Using Machine Learning and Cloud for designing products can offer tons of different designs options.

Autodesk had launched generative design in April into its product development tool which is called Autodesk Fusion 360 Ultimate. Now Autodesk has made a strategic plan for encouraging the adoption of its technology by teaming up with AWS and giving away free cloud credits to 1000 new subscribers to Fusion 360 ultimate.

Autodesk customers with their Fusion 360 Ultimate subscription already get 1000 cloud credits so that it can be used to run generative design studies in the AWS Cloud. The new customers will get an additional 500 credits because of the promotion which soon kicks off from July 1.

The Autodesk company in its blog post said that “Generative design isn’t just transformative for the product development process but it is a scalable technology with a possibility to shake the manufacturing industry for the better.” Autodesk Generative design offers engineer and designers different options with a view in providing full design exploration solution. 

Amazon Alexa and AWS reach space to help NASA get their work done quickly and efficiently

Astonishing as how it can sound, Alexa has now reached the stars by helping the USA space agency in keeping their daily task organized while processing their underlying data sets.

Tom Soderstrom, CTO and Innovation Officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that voice as a platform is the next big future once they learn to talk to the chatbots and digital assistants as how we do normally with fellow beings or colleagues.

Soderstrom at the AWS Public Sector Summit said that if anyone has an Alexa controlled Amazon Echo smart speaker at home and commands it to enable the ‘NASA Mars application. Alexa will give all the right answers if asked about the Red Planet.

On the inaugural of the “Earth and Space Day,” Soderstrom said that the serverless computing comes in the picture where we no longer need to build it for scaling but for real-life work cases and get the result in cost-effective means without compromising the quality. He also added that voice as a platform offers 10 times faster result than compared to the written dialogue.

With Serverless Computing there is no need for scaling, managing and provisioning any servers and yet build and run applications efficiently. AWS is the cloud computing market leader that offers a collection of fully managed service to the client in the public sector that allows the clients and customers to focus more on the innovation of their products.

Alexa assists JPL employees to scan through 4 Lacs sub-contracts and provide the requested copy of the contract from the data set in seconds. Alexa is a virtual helpdesk that delivers information when it’s commanded without knowing where the data is stored or what passwords are to be accessed to get the data. But the only challenge that arises is to find out ways to better communicate with the Chatbots and Digital Assistants so that to aim in making voice as the powerful medium.

Pasadena is a California based Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a research and development center which is managed by the California Institute of Technology for NASA that performs key robotic Earth and Space Science missions. It has nearly 6000 employees.

Soderstrom said that there are six technology waves that will initially force the developer to build a better solution before they affect the common people. The above said technological  waves are as follows;

“New Habits”- Gaming, Always connected Workplace

“Implement Artificial Intelligence” - Machine Learning, Automation, Analytics and chatbots

“Ever present Computing” – Augmented Reality, Smart devices, Mobile, IoT

"Cyber Security challenges” – BlockChain

"Software-Defined Everything" – DevOps, APIs, Networks and Open Source, etc.

"Accelerated Computing" – Serverless Edge Computing

Tom Soderstrom said that it is essential to make the right combination with the technologies stated above and move forward with the development. Cloud Computing has become the foundation for these technologies to function. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is integrated with Alexa and IoT sensors that have helped to solve queries quickly. He also said that Artificial Intelligence will not steal any job but instead, it will help the employees to carry out work more efficiently.

He added that Artificial Intelligence will alter the industries norms ranging from Retail to health care and auto and transformation and E-commerce. Industries that will not adopt the Artificial Intelligence will fall behind. Machines are 80 percent effective and even Humans are 80 percent effective and when you combine this then there will be 95 percent effectiveness.

Soderstrom warns that there will be a next technological tsunami in the form of built-in intelligence and every industry and sector has to be ready to handle that kind of wave. 

AWS Cloud service makes a big impact on India's Cloud Growth

Amazon was the first who predicted the future of cloud computing way ahead than other tech giants who are in the cloud computing business so hence this has given Amazon the added advantage in the cloud service space. AWS is dominating the cloud market because of the quarter earnings jumped expediently from 46 % in 4th Quarter 2017 compared to the final quarter of 2016. This exceeded their revenues from their other four closest competitors which is Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Alibaba.

At the AWS Summit in Mumbai 2018, Chandrashekhar Sanholkar, General Manager of Amazon Internet Services which is the India subsidiary of the Amazon Group explains how Amazon Web Service is driving India’s cloud growth story.

Sanholkar said that when they had launched AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region in June 2016 they had observed a drastic growth in the number of customers adopting AWS Cloud services. He said that AWS offers the opportunity for the Indian customers by helping their business deliver faster service and also enable them to keep the data locally so that it can fulfill any data authorization requirements. He said that they pride over the rapid growth of innovation that has taken over few years in Indian region and they are looking forward to further innovate on behalf of the customers. He also added that they have prominent local partners including HDFC Life Insurance, NDTV, Tata motors, Druva, Shaadi.com and many more.

Many Startups and large enterprises are adopting AWS cloud services where at least 90 percent out of the 100 Indian startups use AWS. Sanholkar gave example as to how far the customers are using AWS services effectively whereas Practo connects 60 million patients to 200,000 doctors from 10000 hospitals and how Shaadi.com uses Machine Learning and AL from Amazon Web Service to scrutinize 67 billion event records to make 4 million matches.

He also said that there are large enterprises that are also equally taking the opportunity of AWS cloud service to keep up with the fellow competitors that’s why there are many enterprises from different sectors building their infrastructure on AWS. HDFC Standard Life has built a digital platform from AWS which is called Atom where all the digital workloads are being put on the Amazon Web Service. There are also other customers like Bajaj Capital and Bajaj Finance. Aditya Birla Capital a non-banking finance also putting their entire workloads on AWS. There is also Tata Motors and Titan Industries that have migrated their digital properties and business on AWS by doing some interesting stuff with IoT and Telemetry. He added that the list is endless and it will grow continuously.

Amazon Web Service is the first global cloud service that has been enlisted for delivering Public Cloud Service to the government customer in India. Cloud Service has become general in the Indian IT department where many sectors and enterprises are comfortable adopting AWS Cloud service with the aim of going through a digital transformation. Security threats are increasingly overwhelming thus it has made companies and organization vigilant over their next IT step which has made them choose AWS because of its superior security.

Amazon Web Service has a strong partner network with thousands of partner all around the world. Recently AWS has added over 10000 new partners to the APN where at least 60 percent of the APN partners are headquartered outside the United States. India’s has 5 PoPs in a different region and four AWS Direct Connect locations. This shows that India is growing stronger with the rising customer and partner base.

No doubt Amazon Web Service is making their mark in India with expedient Cloud Service offerings. AWS is looking forward to continuously invest in the India market because they are convinced of India’s strong growth potential.