CloudProfs Issue 11: Bumper secret knowledge and VMworld!

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Welcome! This is the eleventh edition of CloudProfs, sent to subscribers on October 8. See the email in-browser here.

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What’s Been Said and Done in Cloud This Week

VMware has looked to app modernization, multi-cloud and edge at VMworld this week. On the former, Tanzu Application Platform has been launched to help build and deploy apps and APIs on any Kubernetes. For edge, VMware has launched a specific product portfolio, including an integrated VM and container-based stack (Edge Compute Stack) in standard, advanced and enterprise editions – as well as a lightweight version. Raghu Raghuram, VMware CEO, said that for forward-thinking organisations it was ‘no longer about a cloud first approach – it’s about being cloud smart.’ (Read more at The Key News From VMworld This Week below).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud have rolled out new training initiatives for those looking at entry-level qualifications. Google Cloud announced a new goal this week of equipping more than 40 million people with skills on its platform through Google Cloud Skills Boost. The learning portal offers more than 700 hands-on labs, role-based courses, skill badges, and certification resources. AWS, meanwhile, has launched AWS re/Start, its free 12 week program where no previous tech experience is required, in India. The initiative will host cohorts in six cities: Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, and Thiruvananthapuram.

OpenStack’s latest release this week (Oct 6) has promised a reduction in technical debt and greater integration with cloud-native applications. The release is named Xena – being the 24th iteration – and includes almost 15,000 changes authored by more than 680 contributors. The release also shared some notable data and milestones. The number of total cores managed by OpenStack has grown 66% over the past year, while more than 100 new OpenStack clouds have been built in the past 18 months.

The 2021 Open Source Jobs report from the Linux Foundation has found that cloud and container technologies are the most in-demand skill sets for developers to have. 46% of those polled cited it, ahead of 35% for Linux development and administration, and 26% for networking technologies. 38% of hiring managers polled said they had to increase open source hiring due to the Covid-19 pandemic, as a ‘likely’ result of organisations accelerating digital transformation initiatives including cloud migrations, according to the paper. Read here (direct to PDF link).

The Key News from VMworld This Week

CEO Keynote, Product Updates and Strategic Vision

CEO Raghu Raghuram used his keynote speech to expand on the meaning of multi-cloud and how VMware was ‘uniquely positioned’ to deliver on ‘the power of and.’

What does this mean for CloudProfs readers like yourself; developers, architects and engineers alike? “At this stage it’s clear multi-cloud is going to be the model we’re going to use for the next 20 years,” said Raghuram. So this is the route if you want to head where the puck is going.

VMware said its research found that the typical enterprise utilizes more than 450 apps, on average. Two in five organizations are using three – or more – public clouds. Multi-cloud aims to answer your customers’ questions around innovating using the ‘best of the best’ services from different clouds, as well as avoiding lock-in. There are challenges to this, however.

“Your enterprise architecture is way more distributed,” noted Raghuram. “Your workloads are way more diverse; cloud-native, core enterprise, SaaS, and now apps at the edge. Each has its own siloed tools and systems. If you’re a developer, you tend to have a preferred cloud that you’re most comfortable with using. But getting your code into production is painful and slow, even in one cloud.

“Whether you realise it, you’re facing the same set of operational challenges that companies like Netflix do, but with a fraction of resources,” added Raghuram. “Put it all together, it is a multi-cloud environment that’s more diverse than anything we have managed in the past. And it’s only getting more complex all the time.

“Today, multi-cloud forces you to make some tough choices and trade-offs. Do you optimize for developer autonomy and choice, or do you prioritize DevSecOps, who want to deploy code with consistency? If you’re an IT Ops, do you prioritize flexibility on running the enterprise applications in different clouds, or do you focus on retaining full control of your environment and your spend?” added Raghuram.

VMware’s answer to this problem, and its attempt in having the best of both worlds, was the biggest strategic announcement at VMworld: VMware Cross-Cloud services. The below diagram outlines how the VMware product suite integrates across the stack, from infrastructure and hyperscalers, to management tools, to security and networking:
Elsewhere, key product launches and enhancements related to these areas include:

  • Enhancements to vRealize Cloud Management include cloud-agnostic provisioning, proactive monitoring, capacity and cost optimization, app-aware troubleshooting, and end-to-end network visibility across all cloud environments
  • VMware Cloud with Tanzu services, a new portfolio of managed Kubernetes services. Platform operators and SREs will be able to manage Kubernetes clusters consistently across clouds using Tanzu services as a multi-cloud Kubernetes management plane
  • VMware Edge, offering Compute Stack, SASE, and Telco Cloud Platform. The offering ‘brings together products from across VMware… purposefully designed for edge-native apps and their unique performance and latency requirements.’

Demos and Cool Tools You May Have Missed

Hidden Gems and Secret Knowledge Bumper Edition!

A cool selection of recent (or recently updated) cloud repositories and tools across vendors and languages. Got a tip or are you working on a project you want the world to know about? Email the editor today!

NEW Awesome-PaaS: A curated list of PaaS, developer platforms tools to emulate PaaS on cloud, Cloud IDEs and ADNs

NEW AzureAD Attack/Defense Playbook. This publication is a collection of various common attack scenarios on Azure Active Directory and how they can be mitigated or detected

NEW CloudGraph: An instant GraphQL API to query your cloud infrastructure and configuration so you can solve various complex security, compliance and governance challenges faster. Primary language: TypeScript (97.2%)

NEW Versatile-Data-Kit: A data engineering framework used by VMware that enables data engineers to develop, troubleshoot, deploy, run and manage data processing workloads. Primary language: Python (50.9%), Java (46.9%)

NEW Windows-10-Sandbox-to-Elastic. Rapidly building a Windows 10 system to use for dynamic malware analysis (sandbox), sending data to Elastic Cloud. Language: PowerShell

POPULAR THIS WEEK Automated Cloud Advisor (Disney Streaming). Automated Cloud Advisor is a extensible tool that aims at facilitating cost optimization in AWS, by collecting data for resources that are under utilized. In addition, this is a great learning tool for new DevOps/Cloud engineers that want to start automating things in AWS. Latest version: v1.1.14 (Sep 2020). Primary language: JavaScript (98.5%)

Burst: Lets you run your software remotely in the cloud, on powerful GPUs or multi-CPU hardware instances that are booted up and stopped automatically, so you only pay for the time you use. Remote computing on AWS supported, GCP support in beta. Primary language: Jupyter Notebook (83.5%)

Gitoops: A tool to help attackers and defenders identity lateral movement and privilege escalation paths in GitHub organizations by abusing CI/CD pipelines and GitHub access controls. Latest release: v0.0.0 (Sep 22). Primary language: Go (84.8%)

Infracost: Cloud cost estimates for Terraform in pull requests. It helps DevOps, SRE and developers to quickly see a cost breakdown and compare different options upfront. Latest version: v0.9.9 (Sep 5). Primary language: Go (96.2%)

Jina: Cloud-native neural search framework for any kind of data. Latest release: patch v2.1.5 (Sep 30). Primary language: Python (97%)

Opta: Infrastructure as code where you work with high-level constructs instead of getting lost in low-level cloud configuration. Latest version: v0.14.7 (Sep 22). Primary language: Python 75.7% / HCL 22%

Self-taught-guide-to-cloud-computing: Learn the fundamentals of cloud computing in six months. Linux and networking, programming, cloud platform and DevOps fundamentals

Yor: Extensible auto-tagger for your IaC files. The ultimate way to link entities in the cloud back to the codified resource which created it. Latest version: 0.1.111 (Sep 5). Primary language: Go (93.8%)

Good Long Reads

Why good cloud architects are generalists not specialists – David Linthicum

“I often run into cloud architects who don’t look up from their screens to find better and more optimized solutions. They only focus on options from a single cloud provider, because that’s all they really know.”

Cracking CKAD, CKA and CKS exams – Neeraj Sharma

“Once you clear any one Kubernetes certification, you K8S knowledge base will become very good and now you will be in a position to clear other two certifications with much lesser efforts (but please don’t take it too easy, otherwise be prepared for some nasty surprises). It should not take a maximum of 3–4 weeks for clearing the remaining two certifications each — once you clear your first one.”

Why does culture matter in DevOps? – Ivan Porta

“DevOps is supposed to be the secret sauce that fixes everything. The big tech four, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, are all crazy about it and it’s no surprise that DevOps engineers are one of the most sought for positions at tech companies. But is introducing Scrum, continuous integration, and continuous deployment the be all end all to your procedural woes? As it turns out, no.”

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