Category: Cloud

Organizations are beginning to look more closely at their cloud spend.

Jordan Novet writes at CNBC

“The ongoing macroeconomic uncertainties have seen an uptick in AWS customers focused on controlling cost, and we are proactively working to help customers cost optimized, just as we have done throughout our history especially in periods of economic uncertainty,” Olsavsky said. “The breadth and depth of our service offerings enable us to help them do things like move storage to lower-priced tiered options and shift workloads to our Graviton chips.”

Has your team been working on reducing your IT cloud spend? Are you bringing more apps on-prem?

Automated firmware updates bring us closer to a software defined data centre. The intelligence built into this feature removes some heavy lifting IT admins have to deal with. 

Glenn Sizemore writes on the VMware Cloud Blog

The automated firmware update process has been enabled to expedite firmware updates within existing SDDC deployments. The process will add a new non-billable host to augment the cluster’s capacity.  Once this new host is online and healthy, the service will initiate the firmware update process by first placing the host into maintenance mode, all workloads will be vMotioned to other hosts in the cluster, and then the host will be rebooted. Once the host is back online and confirmed healthy to run workloads, the non-billable host is removed. This activity will be logged in the SDDC activity log under ” Firmware update.”

To help convince the team to use this, consider sharing savings you can expect to gain and share it with management. After a few cycles of firmware updates, prove the saving out with concrete numbers. 

Cloud teams need to work closely with their finance teams to provide visibility into what your organization’s cloud usage is costing and find ways to optimize the spend.

David Linthicum writes at InforWorld

Without cloud spending visibility and insights, you’re basically driving a car without a dashboard. You don’t how fast you’re going or when you’re about to run out of gas. A guessing game turns into a big surprise when cloud spending is way above what everyone initially thought. That sucking sound you hear is the value that you thought cloud computing would bring now leaving the business.

I agree with David and as part of any cloud program there needs to be visibility into what is being used, how much and by whom as well as where to optimize. As David also points out:

The overall objective is to have more business value from fewer cloud computing dollars.

What are you currently using for cloud observability? Do you know your cloud spend? Let me know on Twitter.

As more of us are using multiple clouds to avoid vendor lock-in, it’s nice to see the interoperability between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Steve Rosenbush writing at The Wall Street Journal

The new service connects Oracle’s database service directly to the Azure cloud, eliminating custom work that previously would have been required.

In practice, that means an Oracle database user can move data easily to the Microsoft Azure cloud and have access to Microsoft tools such as Azure Synapse, which analyzes the data, the companies said.

The Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure streamlines the service and should make it less difficult to get started and operate.