Why Companies are Taking the Hybrid Cloud Approach

Hybrid cloud approaches have seen a steady rise in popularity among organizations. A hybrid cloud approach refers to incorporating the benefits of company-owned private clouds, public cloud services, and the more traditional dedicated hosting services. Each of these has its pros and cons, and companies are starting to take advantage of what each has to offer while also minimizing the potential risks that come attached.

It was the concern over the security of public clouds that have led many to turn to hybrid models, in the first place. For instance, businesses will make use of the privacy and security that private clouds have to offer, while still benefiting from the flexibility and easy scalability of public clouds. Below are some of the main reasons why organizations are steadily moving towards hybrid cloud methods.

More Flexibility

One of the most immediate benefits of such a hybrid system is that it allows companies to manage their applications and databases more effectively. On the one hand, they can host their important data on private clouds and/or dedicated servers, where they will have absolute control. On the other hand, they will use the available public cloud space for faster and easier scalability. They'll be able to test out new applications on the public cloud, determining their feasibility, among other such benefits.

So, as you steadily reach your limit, you can easily and seamlessly migrate entire services and applications to the public cloud. If you do need to scale down, you'll be able to take the same action in reverse. This enhanced flexibility and the ability to mix these functionalities based on your own needs is what draws so many companies to hybrid clouds.

Enhanced Security

When you are using a third-party, public cloud system to store all of your sensitive data, you are leaving yourself exposed to all sorts of possible risks. You will need to take into account all security problems, compliance issues, and performance requirements, which indicates that private clouds are also a good alternative. When using a hybrid cloud, you can choose which services will be on the public cloud and which will remain on the private one. In addition, when you're also using a public cloud, you're not overcrowding your private and secure space.

Lower Costs 

An organization that uses a hybrid cloud approach will almost always experience lower costs than a company that is exclusive with either one or the other. Hybrid clouds allow you to pay-as-you-need, meaning that you will have complete control over your IT expenses. You'll still have your backups in the cloud, which further reduce the costs. And with public cloud services, such as Azure or AWS, you can accurately determine your exact requirements without having to overpay for something you won't use.

Innovation Opportunities

With the ability to test and develop new applications on the public cloud, you can focus more of your efforts of this process without having to worry about ever exceeding your limits. This will reduce your potential costs of failure and give you access to an immense potential for scalability. In such an environment, the probabilities of innovation are greatly enhanced without having to sacrifice privacy or security in doing so. You'll not have to rearrange your infrastructure to test out a new service when using a hybrid cloud.

Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 Reach GA

windows server 2016 - managed solution

Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016

By Kurt Mackie as written on redmondmag.com
Microsoft today announced that Windows Server 2016 and the System Center 2016 management suite of products have reached "general availability" (GA) status.
GA means that the products can be purchased and used in production environments. Both are now licensed on a per-core basis, instead of the earlier per-processor approach. In addition, today's GA milestone means that that Microsoft's service provider partners can now begin testing Windows Server 2016 in their datacenters.
In late September, both products were at the earlier "release-to-manufacturing" stage. They got a small bit of stage time during Microsoft's Ignite keynote product "launch" back then.
Microsoft seems to have reserved Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 product details for its Ignite session attendees. Many of those sessions are currently available on demand via the Ignite 2016 Channel 9 portal. The agenda for Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 sessions at Ignite can be found at this page.
Also, Microsoft announced this week that it will broadcast a Windows Server 2016 Webcast on Oct. 13, starting at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time. The Webcast will feature talks by Microsoft luminaries such as Jeffrey Snover, Jeff Woolsey and Erin Chapple.

Windows Server 2016 Highlights

Microsoft is marketing Windows Server 2016 as another advance in its "hybrid cloud" approach. The "hybrid" part means that the traditional customer-maintained server model can work with the services delivered from Microsoft's datacenters, such as Microsoft Azure services and Office 365 services.
Windows Server 2016 was "forged in our own Azure datacenters," Microsoft stressed in its announcement. The new server also has software-defined capabilities that come from Microsoft's experience in running Azure datacenters. Microsoft also had previously announced that the Docker Engine was added to Windows Server 2016 at "no additional cost" to customers. It facilitates running applications without conflict by using either Windows Server Containers or Hyper-V Containers, which both tap Docker Engine technology.
Microsoft lists its application server product support on Windows Server 2016 in this TechNet publication. The main Microsoft application server products that aren't yet supported on the new Windows Server 2016 product include Skype for Business Server 2015, BizTalk Server 2016, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 15 and Host Integration Server 2016. They will get supported eventually, though, a Microsoft spokesperson indicated.
IT pros looking for hardware recommendations for Windows Server 2016 might take a look at this listcompiled by Thomas Maurer, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. He's also compiled other useful links on "deployment, upgrading and certification" in this blog post.
Microsoft is touting access to its new server technology via a relatively new licensing portability option. It's for current Windows Server users that have Software Assurance coverage. Under this "Azure Hybrid Use Benefit" option, if an organization has Windows Server products installed on premises that are covered by the Software Assurance annuity program, then it's possible to move that licensing from an organization's infrastructure and use Windows Server virtual machines on Microsoft Azure datacenter infrastructure.
Windows Server 2016 currently can be downloaded. It's available via the MSDN subscriber portal and the TechNet Evaluation Center (a free 180-day trial copy).

System Center 2016 Highlights

The GA announcement of Microsoft's System Center 2016 suite of products means that all of its components are now available, including Virtual Machine Manager, Operations Manager, Orchestrator and Service Management Automation, Service Manager, Data Protection Manager and Configuration Manager. A 180-day trial edition is available for download at Microsoft's evaluation portal here.
Instead of listing the exhaustive feature details, Microsoft broadly listed the following highlights of the System Center 2016 suite:
There's also a Microsoft white paper listing the System Center 2016 highlights (PDF).
Microsoft is also touting an option to license System Center 2016 components via its Operations Management Suite (OMS) subscriptions. OMS is Microsoft's solution for managing public cloud workloads. There are four service options available to OMS subscribers, namely Insights & Analytics, Automation & Control, Security & Compliance, and Protection & Recovery. They are priced per node.
Various System Center 2016 components come with each of those OMS service options. For instance, Configuration Manager use rights come with an Automation & Control OMS subscription. It's also possible to "attach OMS services to your existing System Center license," which Microsoft calls the "OMS Add-on for System Center." It requires having Software Assurance coverage on System Center to use this add-on option. More details about these System Center-OMS licensing options can be found in Microsoft's OMS "Pricing and Licensing Datasheet" (PDF).

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_cta_button2 h2="Find Your Best Path To A Truly Consistent Hybrid Cloud" title="COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS" size="lg" position="bottom" link="url:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.managedsolution.com%2Faws-azure-compare%2F||" accent_color="#f4c61f"]

Achieve IT infrastructure cost savings of at least 50%

Call Southern California’s most trusted name in cloud at 800-208-3617 for real time pricing and a cost benefit analysis for Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS.

[/vc_cta_button2][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Cloud Migration Made Easy with New Tools for Azure

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

move to azure cloud - managed solution

Microsoft launches new tools to help enterprises move to its Azure cloud

By Frederic Lardinois as written on techcrunch.com
Since the dawn of Azure, Microsoft has talked about how enterprises can benefit from a hybrid cloud approach — that is, using the public cloud while still running some of their applications in their own data centers. Even today, Microsoft says that 80 percent of the companies it talks to still want to use a hybrid cloud approach and to help them move to its cloud services, the company is launching a number of new tools and resources today.
The most important of these is the new Cloud Migration Assessment service. With this, companies can scan their existing IT infrastructure and get an estimate for what it would cost to move these services to Azure (and how much they could save in the process).
Azure users can now also get a discount for moving their Windows Server licenses (with Software Assurance) to Azure. This new Azure Hybrid Use Benefit can save them up to 40 percent and is obviously meant to make it more attractive for existing Windows Server users to move their workloads to the cloud.
For those who want to make that move, the Azure Site Recovery (ASR) tool is also getting a minor update. This service is mostly meant to help enterprises orchestrate their disaster recovery plans, however, it can also be used to migrate existing virtual machines to Azure. It’s currently in use by the likes of Marquette University and United Airlines (no word on whether United dragged its servers over to Azure or whether it was a voluntary re-accommodation). Today’s update adds support for both the new Azure Hybrid Use Benefit and in the coming weeks, it’ll add some new features that will make tagging virtual machines in the Azure portal easier.
Update: even though Microsoft’s own marketing materials names United as an ASR customer, the company has now informed me it is not. I’m sure the company will soon re-accommodate United’s logo. Until then, it’s worth mentioning that Rackspace, Generali and Pantaenius (a yacht insurance company) are ASR customers.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row font_color="#ffffff" css=".vc_custom_1471641930410{background-color: #6994bf !important;}"][vc_column][vc_column_text css_animation="appear"]

Learn more about professional services provided by Managed Solution

Network Assessment & Technology Roadmap


[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Public vs private? Hybrid gives the biggest gains

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Public vs private? Hybrid gives the biggest gains

By James Staten as written on azure.microsoft.com
OpenStack_HybridWant to hear about the best examples of enterprise computing today? At Open Stack Silicon Valley, August 9-10 you will hear about some of the most innovative implementations in the market and what you will find is that the majority are not purely in the public cloud, nor are they solely in the data center. Enterprises today are getting the most benefit when they take advantage of both, and use the hybrid model of cloud computing.
Why? Because using this “blended” model lets you stop worrying about where your apps are, and focus more on how to leverage the right resources for the right value that helps you deliver innovation and create new value streams for your business. According to IDC, eighty-two percent of you already have a hybrid cloud strategy -- but are you utilizing the mix of resources for maximum gains?
Despite what other cloud market leaders might tell you, hybrid is not a temporary state but the new normal and the normal for decades to come. That’s because compute and data are everywhere and being generated everywhere. And if you want to deliver greater business value you need to embrace and leverage this breadth. In my session at Open Stack Silicon Valley, on August 10 at 10:00 am PDT, I’ll take you through why leading organizations are thinking hybrid now and for the future. The catalyst for this thinking isn’t infrastructure ownership, control or security. It’s what’s right for the apps.
Want global reach, massive elastic scale, and a wealth of innovative compute and data services? Use the public cloud: that’s what it was designed for!
Perhaps you have a factory automation solution, point-of-sale system, or a legacy application that you’d just as soon keep in your data center for now. If there’s a good reason not to move to the cloud, you shouldn’t – but think about connecting those apps to cloud-based, agile and highly scalable business workflows, mobile customer experiences, IoT initiatives and other innovations that help drive your business values forward.
For example, Microsoft and GE recently announced a partnership where GE’s vast base of industrial computing capabilities will connect to its Predix analytics service running in Azure. “Connecting industrial machines to the internet through the cloud is a huge step toward simplifying business processes and reimagining how work gets done,” said Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE. You can’t move the industrial machines to the cloud, obviously, but offloading all the analytics from the data center to the cloud makes great technical and economic sense.
Want to connect on-premises and cloud apps securely so that you have one consistently managed “virtual” data center?
With Azure virtual networking, or Express Route, our dedicated-line solution, you can connect securely and get the bandwidth you need. With Microsoft’s Operations Management Suite, you can have a “single pane of glass” for managing workloads across OpenStack, public Azure, AWS and other deployments.
Here’s what Michael Alatortsev, chief executive officer at iTrend, a provider of data discovery services, said about their hybrid application: “A Microsoft hybrid cloud solution with … Azure enabled us to make more flexible design decisions.” He added, “We can adapt our solution to address different market verticals and situations, and creating a new type of report is very easy.”
Today, using Infrastructure-as-a-Service, you can easily migrate VM’s from your data center to the cloud. With SQL Server, you can keep your database local, shift to a blended deployment using SQL Server 2016, or trivially move it to Azure – as mobile application provider App Dynamic did: “The transition of [the on-premises] database to … Azure SQL Database only took a few hours,” said Pratik Kumar, CEO and founder of App Dynamic.
Microsoft offers the most comprehensive suite of offerings for the hybrid cloud, from networking and directory services to application services like SQL Server and big data, backup and recovery, and our Office and Dynamics offerings, all of which can run either on-premises or in the cloud, and can easily connect to other applications running in either location. No other vendor provides such a rich hybrid portfolio, and why? Because we’ve been providing enterprise-grade technologies to our customers for years and we understand your needs.
At the end of the day, it’s not about where your computing assets are, it’s how they provide value to your business! Think of the cloud as a new opportunity – not an obligation – for you to drive breakthrough levels of value from your computing assets, and design your hybrid cloud for the maximum business value.
Have questions about this premise? Want to hear more about how to implement this strategy at your organization? Join me at Open Stack Silicon Valley on August 10. Already executing on a successful hybrid app strategy? Tell us about it in the comments section below. Let’s get you on stage at next year’s show.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Microsoft brings together IT management and security for the hybrid cloud

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][vc_single_image image="10922" img_size="900x550" alignment="center"][vc_column_text]

Microsoft brings together IT management and security for the hybrid cloud

As written on blogs.technet.microsoft.com
As organizations adopt hybrid cloud models for IT, the challenges for operations management continue to increase. Among those challenges is the difficulty of securing these complex environments, which include resources on-premises as well as in hosted clouds, Azure or AWS. At the same time, the cost of breaches continues to rise – the average cost of a data breach to a single company is $3.5M. To help meet these challenges, today we are announcing the general availability of new and improved security features for Microsoft Operations Management Suite, a set of cloud-based services designed to help customers protect, detect and respond to security issues across hybrid cloud environments.
Operations Management Suite (OMS) is management for the cloud, from the cloud. Delivering analytics, automation, configuration, security, backup, and site recovery, OMS gives you the ability to increase visibility and control from the on-premises datacenter to the cloud. The advantages of cloud-based management include the ability to innovate faster, scale to meet expanding requirements, and get up and running without long deployment cycles. Using cloud-based security tools also ensures that you are always working from the latest information on threats. Security and management go hand in hand, because the same data that indicates a potential performance or health issue, might also indicate a security breach. By bringing security and management together in a single cloud-based offering, OMS provides the tools you need to address threats and remediate issues without the added complexity of point solutions.
Last week we announced the general availability of Azure Security Center, a set of tools to help customers gain visibility into the security state of their Azure resources, take control of cloud security policies, and both detect and respond to active attacks. With OMS Security we bring the security analytics that are built into Azure Security Center to hybrid cloud environments, giving you the capabilities you need to handle today’s evolving security threats. OMS Security leverages the same intelligence and detection that we use in Azure and is based on the security knowledge that we gain from running a hyper-scale cloud.
With OMS Security, you can quickly assess the security posture of your hybrid cloud environment and detect active security threats. OMS Security will continuously monitor the environment for security vulnerabilities such as missing critical security updates, antimalware, and recommended security configuration baselines. To detect active security threats and attacks, the service leverages powerful event analysis paired with threat intelligence derived from Microsoft’s own cloud experience. You can centralize management for protecting systems, as well as creating alerts, implementing automatic security updates across systems, and applying security policies. A simple approach to search and queries across all data sources lets you streamline the security audit process with easy access to comprehensive and actionable security log data. With these new capabilities, IT administrators can avoid being blindsided by a breach and alert the security team if they see indicators of compromise. Security response teams can then use the same simple search capabilities to rapidly get a view across operations and security data to help stop the threat.
The new Security service includes a broad range of tools to help you get deeper visibility across multiple aspects of the security landscape. Highlights include advanced threat detection and the Threat Intelligence dashboard, which lets you visualize attacks using the same data we use in Azure. For customers using Advanced Threat Analytics in Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), you can now view that information in OMS, giving you a single view of security for IT operations. The new Security Configuration Baseline Assessment identifies vulnerable OS configurations that could be exploited by an attacker. To see OMS Security in action, and get a deeper view on how these features can work for you, take a look at Operations Management Suite Security in this episode of Microsoft Mechanics.
To make it easier to get access to these solutions, we announced earlier this month that you can purchase OMS via a new subscription model. Existing System Center customers can get OMS as an add-on, extending the value of existing on-premises investments.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

The Mythical, Magical Cloud: By Kate Frasure, Customer Development Manager

magic clouds
The Mythical, Magical Cloud By Kate Frasure, Customer Development Manager

I was standing in Verizon Wireless the other day to upgrade my phone. The salesman I was working with was describing to me the process of transferring the data from my current phone to the new one via the cloud back-up.
When I started to speak, I noticed my hand made a gesture as if I was talking about a physical ‘cloud’ in the sky. It’s amazing how the branding of essentially data that is just located in a big data center, offsite, has been made to appear more like a mythical, magical world where our data lives.
As one of our engineers pointed out to me, ‘the cloud’ has been around longer than you may think. If you ever setup a Hotmail or Yahoo email account, or even if you have a Gmail account today, you are utilizing the cloud for your mail because the email data is housed on a server in a datacenter somewhere in the United States.
Of course today, it is not just email anymore. You can now setup your entire business network infrastructure in the cloud and not only that, there are various services you can choose from. So who should you choose?
Unfortunately, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Each service offers you a variety of options and it is up to you to determine which mix of services best fits your business needs.
Lucky for you, we have put together a quick side-by-side comparison to help you get started. While there may be a variety of options out there, we decided to look at three of the most well-known, Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Amazon Web Service (AWS) Microsoft Azure Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Year entered market
 2006
 2010
2014
Hours of downtime in 2014
2.69 hours
 50.74 hours
Under 5 hours
 Linux OS Support
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora
  • Ubuntu
  • CentOS Linux
  • SUSE Linux (SLES and openSUSE) Enterprise
  • Canonical Ubuntu
  • CentOS by OpenLogic
  • CoreOS
  • Oracle Linux
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise
  • openSUSE
 Not currently available
Pricing & Models*
  • Per hour – rounded up
  • On demand, reserved, spot
  • Per minute – rounded up commitments (pre-paid or monthly)
  • On demand – short term commitments (pre-paid or monthly)
  • Per minute – rounded up (10 minute minimum)
  • On demand – sustained use
 Compliance
 GovCloud – meets ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), HIPAA, SOC 1-3, ISO 27001, FIPS 140-2 compliant endpoints, etc.
 Azure Government – still very new
Pros
  • Scalability
  • Auto-scaling offered at additional cost through CloudWatch
  • Large partner ecosystem, having been in the market the longest
  • Larger offering of third-party applications
  • Archiving capability through Glacier
  • Seamless integration for heavily invested Microsoft users
  • More modern, familiar and easy to use interface for those familiar with Windows
  • Vast hybrid capabilities
  • Primarily targets PaaS**
  • Single sign-on (SSO) option for many applications
  • Better networking, with each instance living on its own network
  • Instant auto-scaling for no additional cost
  • Data storage and analytic tool capabilities
Cons
  • Requires cloud architecture knowledge
  • Has experienced significantly more downtime than AWS and GCP in the last year
  • Not as much support for Linux, especially Red Hat
  • Not as geographically widespread
  • Not as many offerings
*Pricing Models: on demand – customers pay for what they use without any upfront cost; reserved – customers reserve instances for 1 or 3 years with an upfront cost that is based on the utilization; spot – customers bid for the extra capacity available
**PaaS (Platform as a service): Vendor provides the infrastructure and an application development platform that generally includes the operating system, database and web server. Customers managed only their applications.
About the author:
Kate Frasure is a Texas-born, Colorado-raised project manager. In her role as Customer Development Manager at Managed Solution, she oversees the process of bringing new clients on board and various other IT projects. Her diverse communications background and attention-to-detail contribute to her passion to improve processes to see businesses succeed. She is continuously looking to find the organization and flow that accompanies a streamlined business.

How I explained dynamic cloud to my kids by Stewart Hyman

Explain-cloud-to-kids Managed Solution

How I explained dynamic cloud to my kids by Stewart Hyman, Certified IT Architect and an IBM Master Inventor

"Daddy, what do you do?”
Ugh, there’s that dreaded question again.
Honestly, there are days I wish I’d gone into medicine, teaching or even astrophysics, if only so I could more easily explain what I do. My saving grace is that kids today understand more about computers than I do; my seven and eight year olds can easily pick up concepts that even I sometimes struggle with.
Dynamic cloudIt was simple for them to pick up the concepts of outsourcing, managed services, process choreography and even cloud computing. We use cloud storage services to share pictures with family and friends around the world, so the concepts were in no way foreign. But when I started explaining how I design cloud solutions for large companies and started delving into the concept of composable services and dynamic cloud, it made me pause and try to think in terms they could understand.
It quickly dawned on me that this struggle to understand dynamic cloud is one that only really plagues adults, that it was my struggle (yet again) and not theirs. Adults tend to live with more rigid rules, consuming pre-built services from pre-built systems, and generally have very few options to choose from. But kids are urged to use their imagination and instead build fit for purpose solutions out of numerous different building blocks. For example, LEGO has 2200 different types of pieces, so if you compare the scope of options that kids deal with compared to adults it becomes easy to frame dynamic cloud in terms kids will understand.

Here’s how I explained it:

Dynamic cloud services are like LEGO blocks, each with their own features and costs. Some blocks are bigger and simpler while other blocks are smaller and more complex, but each block serves a specific purpose. At IBM we have been creating managed services “blocks” to provide different capabilities on top of servers, like backup and restore, storage tiering, patching or anti-virus scanning. We can sell these blocks separately and they can be integrated into existing or newly-built capabilities in our company. Luckily IBM has been doing services management for years, so we have a lot of existing capabilities we are wrapping into blocks. We also have a lot of smart people who are working on building newer and better blocks that are more automated or have lower cost.
You only pay for the blocks you use while you use them, and when you are done you throw the block back into the bin and stop paying for it. This part is extremely important because it provides a mechanism for customers to save a lot of money on things they aren’t using. In existing managed services you usually sign two to ten year contracts that overestimate how much you have to spend or how much you need to use. Dynamic cloud gets rid of this problem by allowing you to only pay for the services you use. In order to do this, the system has to be capable of automatically turning on and off services you want. This is no small order because many of these services existed before cloud, so updating them to be automated and to fit into this dynamic new world requires heavy thought and redesign.
You can save money by using cheaper blocks or leaving blocks out entirely. This was never an option in a traditional outsourcing contract; we would use fixed teams, tools and services for all servers at all times. These services cost what they cost and you were paying a standard high price service fee whether you needed those services on each server or not. In dynamic cloud, this is no longer the case. You could dynamically tailor the services per server, allowing a whole new paradigm of flexibility and cost reduction options. Perhaps you might use disaster recovery services on production servers but leave them off development servers. Maybe you’d use file level backups on production servers and full system image backups on test servers, but no backups at all on development servers. Any given service might cost the same or more than it actually did before dynamic cloud (backup and restore likely will not be cheaper now than it used to be), but the combined costs and features can be tailored greatly to suit your specific need per server, and therefore you can be confident that costs always align with your use case.
Some people use Krazy Glue to lock blocks together in a pattern, so they act like a single compound block. Sometimes blocks work better together when combined in a specific way and can offer features or costs savings that only apply when combined in that way, so we create a pattern to remind us of that special combination. Until now patterns have really only focused on infrastructure configurations (servers, storage, networks, operating systems and more) or application configurations (application nodes, platform per node, applications and so on), but dynamic cloud can introduce the concept of service patterns to this as well (groups of services that should be combined together for best practice, or to achieve new compound service levels or cost reduction).

Dynamic cloud with service composition patterns

Anyone must be able to contribute new building blocks and patterns. If you make the mistake of centralizing the development of building blocks in a “closed” development model, then you run the risk of creating bottlenecks and limiting community contribution or adoption of the model. There are a lot of people out there with skills, time and money to contribute, and you have to enable them rather than stifle them or try to control them. Linux is a great example of an open approach to community contribution fostering more rapid growth and adoption. It allows the entire enterprise to start contributing and allows for distributed projects to prioritize and fund their own additions. It even allows other vendors or customers to contribute as well.
But they have to comply with certain standards. Even LEGO blocks have standard connectors with standard measurements, so any new block must comply with these standards in order to be useable and helpful and snap on easily. The same is true for dynamic cloud; a framework is required to make sure everyone is developing assets in a common, reusable, best practice-oriented way, with good documentation and so on. Examples are easy to find. Each service needs to be billed, be presented from a single “store front” for purchase, define standard service level agreements (SLAs), present owner and contact details and so on. You don’t want to bill customers 100 different ways if they use 100 different services. You don’t want the customers to look in 100 places to find the services. They need to know who to contact if a service breaks. You need to centralize and standardize certain features and define clear guidelines for contribution, but once you do this you effectively allow a community of experts, each in their own area, to begin adding capabilities to the mix and grow together.
After listening intently to all this, my boys seemed excited, so I was sure I’d gotten through until almost in unison they said: “Daddy, now I understand what you do! Can you buy me some new LEGO?“
Sigh.
You can’t win them all.
Source: http://archive.thoughtsoncloud.com/2014/05/explained-dynamic-cloud-kids/

Hybrid Cloud without the Hassle

Availability-on-Demand_thumb

Hybrid Cloud without the Hassle, Simply Connect to Azure with Availability on Demand

Availability is not merely Disaster Recovery in the cloud, it’s the empowering connection between a datacenter and the cloud for protection and value creation. With today’s announcement, Microsoft provides comprehensive Availability on Demand in Azure for hybrid and heterogeneous environments, allowing organizations to harness a near unlimited amount of compute and storage in the cloud for dev/test, cloud bursting, migration, reporting/analytics, recovery, backup and long-term data retention.
Microsoft offers an unrivaled integration of on-premises assets with Azure in one unified solution, eliminating the hassle of managing multiple point solutions, and a mix of cloud providers. Whether an environment has Hyper-V, Physical (in preview) or VMware (in preview) assets, with Availability on Demand, the power of Azure is just a few clicks away. Merely connect your datacenter to Azure with Availability on Demand, and your data and applications will be available in Azure when needed.
Availability on Demand provides a seamless connection between your on-premises production systems and Azure or a secondary site, leveraging the replication capabilities of Azure Site Recovery and the data protection of Azure Backup. With the ability to provide both on-premises support and connect to Azure and replicate Hyper-V and now Physical and VMware workloads (in preview), organizations can implement a true hybrid model, and take advantage of compelling cloud economics and elasticity.
Source:
http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/03/26/hybrid-cloud-without-the-hassle-simply-connect-to-azure-with-availability-on-demand/