The Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF), the open source home of the increasingly popular Kubernetes container orchestration service and related projects, is hosting its annual developer conference today and the group used the event to announce that it has accepted projects from Docker (containerd) and CoreOS (rkt) into its fold.

Dockers containerdis the companys container runtime and a core part of Dockers portfolio of container management and orchestration services that was born out of Dockers need to move many of the standard container life-cycle management features out of the Docker Engine (think container execution and supervision, local storage, etc.). Through Docker, containerd is already being widely used by a large number of companies today. As Dockers Patrick Chanezon noted during his CloudNativeCon keynote in Berlin today, the company decided to donate the project to the CNCF because it was looking for a neutral organization that could provide the right kind of stewardship for it.

CoreOS rkt(pronounced rocket), on the other hand, is that companys container engine for Linux clusters. Unlike containerd, its not a daemon but a single executable that is meant to integrate with other container projects, including Kubernetes itself. While CoreOS originally launched rktas a competitor to the Docker Engine, and with a focus on its own container format, it has now become a standards-compliant container engine.

Kubernetes and other container orchestrators benefit from reliable, community-driven container runtimes, like rkt, said CNCF director Dan Kohn today. Having a container runtime engine such as rkt, along with container cluster managing system Kubernetes under a single foundation umbrella will bring huge benefits for providing solid end-user solutions to the industry.

In addition, the organization also announced a number of new members (like all Linux Foundation-managed projects, its those members that provide the financial support for the CNCFs activities).Dell is making a pretty major commitment by joining up as a Platinum member (a $370,000/year commitment ), where it joins the likes of Cisco, CoreOS, Docker, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and others. SUSE is a new Gold-level member ($120,000/year), while HarmonyCloud, QAware, Solinea and TenxCloud arejoining as Silver members (which pay between $7,000 and $50,000, depending on the number of employees).

Open source is the key to agility in todays environment, where environments must be able to handle rapid change and evolution driven by software, said Josh Bernstein, VP of Technology for Dell EMC, in todays announcement. By joining CNCF, we are furthering our commitment to enabling transformation, while making software open, accessible and consumable as the heart of enterprise IT strategy.

As a final piece of news, the CNCFis also making the curriculum for its Kubernetes Certified Administrator Exam freely available under an open source license. While this is a not necessarily a new trend, weve seen the number of open source certification programs increase over the last few years. Other large open source projects like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry (which announced its program today) face the same talent crunch as the CNCF. They, too, are looking at these certification programs to not just certify that a potential employee knows these projects inside-out, but also to help develop a new talent pool by offering a clear curriculum for getting started with them.

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Managed cloud hosting provider Hyve has enjoyed significant growth over the last few years, but what has been the secret to its success?

Hyve isnt your average cloud hosting provider. Based in Brighton, the sixteen-year old company started life as the part-time venture of Jon Lucas and Jake Madders, playing second fiddle before the two founderswent full time in 2010.

Madders early work on the company was carried out from the beaches of South America and, with a company jet ski and plans to buy a water-powered jet pack,Lucas and Madders could never be accused of conforming to what you might think of as thetraditional infrastructure IT image.

Indeed, the birth of the company itself was unique at the time. Hyve proudly calls itselfthe UKs first enterprise VMware cloud hosting provider and actually started before VMware even had a hosting model in place.

They didnt realise that they were going to make a load of money from hosting companies, so it was before they even provided a hosting reseller model, Madders explained to Silicon at Cloud Expo Europe. We bought a load of perpetual licenses and then virtualised everything that we had and in doing that our costs just disappeared.

We went from maybe 20,000-30,000 a month in costs down to 2,000 or 3,000 a month costs, but pretty much the same income. So thats when we thought we were on to something.

But growth didnt happen straight away. According to Madders, it was around 2012 that the company started to see real traction: People with dedicated servers, they just realised that cloud infrastructure works.

We had a period where we had to really persuade people to move to the cloud but they werent keen to trust it, then about 5 years ago everyone was suddenly moving and we had a great platform that we could scale so we didnt have any problems saying no. We could service pretty much anyone who called up.

In recent years, Hyve has gone from strength to strengthand now boasts the likes of Carluccios restaurant, T. M. Lewin and the RSPCA as customers. Arguably the most high-profile client is Southampton Football Club, which came on board in January as the club looked to revamp its digital platform.

So, with an influx ofcompetitors entering the market as more and more businesses turn to hosting providers to manage their cloud estates, what has been the secret to Hyves success and its 50 percent year-on-year growth?

Maddersputs a lot of it down to the personal touch that him and Lucas have been keen to retain throughout Hyves development: Customerscan phone us directly and because its a small team they can talk to our engineers without going through a big help desk which doesnt know who they are.

You can get in touch with a person, you know who they are and they know who you are and youre not going through to some help desk. Thats our man niche factor thats kept us in business and given us growth.

All of the competitors in our sector who offer close to as good a platform as us, are so big that youre going to have a help desk of a thousand. Theres no-one whos really our size who offers the same level of product as us.

Lucas agreed, saying that although retaining that personal touch has been a challenge, theyve come up with a solution: Every customer has got its own dedicated team, so we keep that team associated with one customer.

We always give the customer our phone number as well and say theres the mobile number if you need us for emergencies, give us a ring and weve now done that with account managers as well. That always closed the deal.

With an impressive roster of customers and a strong reputation to fall back on, the future is looking bright for Hyve.

Not only is the industry itself on the crest of a wave thats showing no signs of slowing, but there is also an interesting new group ofpotential customers in the market. Football teams are the biggest thing for us at the moment, said Madders.

All the Premier League clubs were stuck on one platform and theyve just been told that they can now do their own thing in IT, so theres this huge market rush right now to get them on board. Theyre not concernedabout budget, they just want it to be amazing and thats like the ultimate dream customer.

Hyve already has interest from two other Premier League teams (I pressed Madders and Lucas for names, but they wouldnt bite) and getting three of the UKs top football teams on board would represent a big win for the Brighton-based firm.

They also recently opened a new data centre in San Jose, California, to add to existing facilities in London, Somerset, Hong Kong and Shanghai, making Hyve a truly global company as it tries to compete with the industrys giants.

And, if it manages to retain that personal tough, theres no reason why Hyve wont continue to be an option for businesses on their cloud journeys.

Think you know cloud? Try our quiz!

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Hyve Brings A Personal Touch To Managed Cloud Hosting - Silicon UK

If youre running any sort of business that relies on data structures or web management, theres no denying the asset that cloud computing can provide, says Jack Mizzi, chief marketing and business development officer at BMIT.

Cloud computing really is an easy concept to grasp, but lets go with the analogy route to make it even easier. In the old days, farms and factories needed to generate their own power either through windmills or water wheels. This all changed thanks to power grids, as businesses could just tap into the grid and pay for the power they use, avoiding all costs related to building the power-generating infrastructure.

A good cloud computing provider is essentially that power grid its a one-stop means of getting all sorts of hosted services online. That means that if you require a range of services such as web hosting, data storage and backup, creating your own virtual machines, collaborative tools and business intelligence solution features, and more, you can get them all through a cloud computing services provider.

As they say, the best things come in threes, and cloud computing is no exception to this maxim. Cloud computing can follow a private model, a public one, or a hybrid of the two. As you can imagine, each type comes with its own distinct advantages and is best suited for different scenarios. Well go into the specific differences between all three models.

Public cloud services are generally offered through the internet, by way of companies selling infrastructure, applications or storage options that you can pay for on a pay-per-use model, for example per hour or in bundles of bandwidth consumption.

The big advantage here is that public clouds are generally more cost-effective, making them an excellent choice for small and medium-sized businesses. The caveat, though, is that users do not get to oversee the management of the underlying infrastructure that is storing their data, so the element of trust needs to be considerably higher as theres less direct assurance that your data is being managed the way it should be.

Of course, when youre dealing with very reputable companies that offer public cloud services, there shouldnt be any reason for distrust.

Something else which you should expect with regard to public clouds is that theyre often much less customisable overall youre generally dealing with one-size-fits-all packages, and you can select which services from that package appeal to you the most. Whether this is a positive or negative factor depends entirely on what your operation is and what your outlook on the whole issue is.

Some people actually enjoy the fact that public clouds are less fussy in that regard and it makes it much easier for companies to get moving with tried and tested services, as opposed to having to undergo processes to test how well-optimised a service is for their individual business.

Cloud computing can follow a private model, a public one, or a hybrid of the two

Private clouds are defined by their added security and personalisation. Usually designed with specific businesses in mind, private clouds are the ultimate for tailor-made solutions.

Are private clouds, then, a step up from public clouds? Again, it really depends on what your needs are as a company. If youre running a larger business, it might be easy to feel weighed down by the limits of public clouds. Private clouds give you very similar features, such as self-service and scalability, but with even more independence.

Lets put it another way. With public clouds, its like using a bus. You dont have much say in how it looks or how it drives, but it gets you from point A to point B. With private clouds, youre renting a car, and you get to decide whether you need a hatchback or an SUV. Youre in total control except for the fact that you didnt fork out the money upfront to buy the car.

Plus, some of the features available with private clouds are just not an option with public clouds. Take BMITs load balancing service, for example, which was designed to counteract the pitfalls of high volumes of traffic, particularly when running multiple private cloud servers. Its an effective way of distributing this traffic and thus ensuring that no single device gets overloaded. As a result, devices run smoother and performances is improved all round with your devices as well as your business.

The hybrid cloud approach is the best of both worlds but why would a company need to take this route.

Think about it this way: if you adopt a hybrid model, you can use the private cloud features for particularly sensitive or classified data, or run your most mission-critical workloads through it, and use the public clouds for less pressing jobs or jobs were added scalability is required.

In addition, hybrid clouds are excellent when disaster recovery or cloud-bursting is needed. In other words, situations in which a company will need to very quickly transfer data or operation to another server, but cant afford to make use of multiple private cloud servers.

If youre running any sort of business that relies on data structures or web management of any kind, theres really no denying the asset that cloud computing can provide to your operation. For flexibility, customisability, and ease-of-use, theres nothing as flexible and scalable that will help you reach the standards expected today.

The fact that there are so many different faces to cloud computing might initially seem overwhelming, but really should be seen as an excellent way of ensuring that your company gets exactly what it needs to oversee the smooth running of its operation. Theres no better or worse here theres only whats right for you, so the idea shouldnt be to go for the most expensive option just for the sake of it.

Contact BMIT, Maltas largest multi-site data centre services provider, to find out how your business stands to benefit from the various cloud computing options available.

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What cloud computing can offer you - Times of Malta

In order to ensure that patient outcomes are constantly being improved upon it is important that the speed of change within the biotechnology sector occurs at an exponential rate. However, this continued drive for innovation puts immense pressure on IT departments to develop new technologies at speed, while also making sure that they do this cost effectively.

Add to this the fact that, more so than other industries, biotech firms are extremely tightly regulated. As a result, IT groups within this industry are often reluctant to introduce more complexity into what is already a very complex environment. To them, expanding a data centre can often feel a whole lot easier than navigating the regulations of the cloud. Despite this, growth in the demand for cloud computing in life sciences research and development is escalating due to the benefits it brings to the industry benefits like exceeding regulatory requirements, for example.

At iland, we have worked with many companies in the healthcare, life sciences and biotech industries. Therefore, we know from experience that the implementation of cloud computing in biotechnology empowers organisations with the control and flexibility needed to lead the way in both the research world as well as the businesses world. For example, we recently worked with a US based biotechnology organisation on their backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategy, and were able to drive global data centre consolidation with host-based replication to the iland cloud. As a result, their DR testing and auditing processes were greatly simplified and streamlined which drove significant cost savings as well as compliance assurance.

If you still need convincing here are three key benefits that we believe cloud brings to biotech organisations:

When the Human Genome Project began it was one of the most extensive research projects in the field to date costing billions of pounds and lasting over a decade. These days, thanks largely to cloud technology, it can bedone in just 26 hours. Things such as drug R&D, clinical research as well as a whole host of other areas have benefited just as much from the rapid growth of computational power. The better your technology is at crunching huge sets of data, the quicker you can innovate.

Cloud computing within the biotech sector can take big data analysis to the next level by means of performance, connectivity, on-demand infrastructure and flexible provisioning. Labs can also benefit from immense computing power without the cost and complexity of running big onsite server rooms. They can also scale up at will in order to make use of new research and ideas almost instantly.

Concerns have been voiced that so called scientific computing in the cloud may make results less reproducible. One concern is that cloud computing will be a computing 'black box' that obscures details needed to accurately interpret the results of computational analyses. In actual fact, by leveraging the application program interfaces (APIs) in the iland cloud, biotech customers are able to integrate cloud data back into on-premises IT systems to ensure that data analyses done in the cloud can be easily shared and consumed by other applications. Essentially, cloud computing services bring more players to the table to solve the giant puzzle. Its a win-win situation from an economic and patient standpoint, and several big name companies are jumping on the biotech cloud bandwagon.

Biotech companies need to maintain strong access and authentication controls, while also being able to collaborate easily.For this reason audit trails and other measures are often required to verify that information has not been improperly altered, and that good experimental and manufacturing procedures have been followed. At the same time biotechnologists need to be able to access and share data across multiple departments or even multiple companies.

Cloud computing in biotechnology makes this all possible. Theiland cloud, for instance, centralises data, ensuring security and data sovereignty while facilitating collaboration. It supports extensive user and role based access control, two-factor authentication and integrity monitoring to prevent improper access and changes. In addition to data encryption, vulnerability scanning and intrusion detection, these measures facilitate security and compliance, without disrupting the internal workflow.

Complex regulatory requirements and logistics combined with niche markets make efficiency paramount within biotechnology. Even minor mistakes as a result of sloppy process management can easily result in major issues. Real-time operational reporting dramatically improves efficiency, quality control and decision making, allowing organisations to react instantly to challenges and opportunities, both internal and external.

As well as enhanced billing visibility and resource management functions, the release of our latest Secure Cloud Services means that the iland cloud now includes on-demand security and compliance reports. This advanced cloud management functionality is designed to foster strategic, self-sufficient control of a cloud environment, optimising overall cloud usage and costs to drive business initiatives and growth.

Without a shadow of a doubt, cloud technology can help biotechnology companies build the future.From research and development to marketing, computing affects everything your organisation does. With rich experience in the biotech, healthcare and life sciences sector, you should talk to iland today to find out how our cloud hosting services can give you the power to develop at the speed of thought, not the speed of compliance or processing.

Read more: Why the cloud could hold the cure to diseases

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Assessing biotechnology in the age of cloud computing - Cloud Tech