Every time I come back to India, the thing that grabs you is the entrepreneurial spirit of the place. Ive met a whole bunch of startups doing really exciting work, remarked Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as he took the stage with Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and chairperson and co-founder of EkStep Foundation at an event in Bengaluru.

Here are some of the highlights from the session that also included a special guest and announcement at the end.

Referring to Nilekanis work with Aadhaar, Infosys, and other projects, Nadella noted that he personified the need for the country to create more products. Nadella then asked, "If you were starting up again today, what would you do now?"Nilekani joked, "Very excited by what is happening now. Wish I was 30 years younger."

Nilekani went on to saythat there is a lot more power for startups now to disrupt existing industries or create new ones. A key takeaway of his Aadhaar experience was that while building new technologies, startups and enterprises have two choices:

Build something in-depth that has a lot of impact on 50 million people, or do something less in-depth that has an impact on one billion people.

Nilekani noted that there were a lot of interesting developments in the field of AI, with the power and capabilities it has to offer. Talking about Aadhaar, Nilekani said that he and his team were inspired by the widespread adoption of internet and APIs. Both technologies were able to hit a billion people quite quickly.

Extolling Microsoft for its experience in developing a suite of products like Office 365 and others, Nilekani asked, "So what platforms is Nadellaexcited about now?"

Nadella answered, We fundamentally think of ourselves as a platform company.

He said that Microsoft is focusing on multiple areas ranging from artificial intelligence to natural language processing and even augmented reality, with their latest product Hololens. Nadella also considers Cortana, Microsoft's virtual assistant, to be a third run time. He explained that a devices operating system was the first run time, browsers were the second run time, and now agents like Cortana which understand and know your work are third run times. Nadella noted,

"But the ultimate test going forward will be in really understanding natural language.For all the advantages in human computer interface, there is nothing to beat language. That is the ultimate test.

Talking about how new-age learning tools can impact different sectors from education to healthcare, Nadella said,

I'm an electrical engineer who never understood Maxwells equations Ive thought if there were better learning tools

Nilekani interrupted Nadellas train of thought here and quipped,

Then you would nothave ended up at Microsoft!

Nilekani observed that unless one is building technology at scale, it is difficult to see the real benefits. Aadhaar crossed a user base of one billion in about six years and the only other players who can claim such a feat are in Silicon Valley and Seattle.

Nilekani also noted that a well-built system at scale can decrease the cost and time involved in customer acquisition and cited the example of how Reliance Jio went about doing their KYC through Aadhaar. The government benefits too as it can better identify people and also save manpower and time in the long run. He said,

"Data can be a source of individual empowerment. But for that, one needs necessary architecture. If all these technologies can be used for empowerment it will be great. In the West, there is a fear that AI will come out on top. Hence there is some pushback."

Agreeing with Nilekani, Nadella added, Data is the new natural resource that is unevenly spread.

Talking about network effects and its benefits, Nadella said that whatever one is building as a platform should function as a resource for someone else building a platform too. For example, if someone wanted to sign up for Microsofts services like Office 365, providing them an Aadhaar-enabled login would speed up the process.

Just five days ago, Microsoft had also announced that it aims to combine the cloud, AI, research, and its industry expertise to transform healthcare with its Healthcare NExT initiative, in collaboration with UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center).

Nadella and Nilekani agreed that providing reliable cloud infrastructure is important. Any startup that wants to build on the India Stack or for other large projects will have the necessary infrastructure in place.Nadella cited the example of how the government in Andhra Pradesh leveraged machine learning (ML) to detect dropouts and help bring them back to school. Similar strategies are now spreading to Jharkhand and Punjab.

Talking about the enlightened use of infrastructure, Nadella also noted that the election commission of Tamil Nadu leveraged Microsofts public cloud, Azure. In the past, one would build all the servers, but in this case, Tamil Nadu was able to quickly hydrate and dehydrate their servers leveraging cloud computing services.

Talking about issues like public-private partnership and the privacy of data, Nadella asked Nilekani about the different roles at play here. Nilekani noted that the important question here was,

What is government infrastructure and where does it end and where does private innovation start?

Nilekani noted that the Aadhaar Bill is being passed which includes all the necessary frameworks, policies, and also a privacy criterion. Given the financial strength and other factors, Nilekani remarked, The government is best suited to build such infrastructure. They will obviously keep privacy in mind.

There is then the need to create a level playing field so that enterprises small and big can leverage the existing infrastructure.

Nilekani noted that minimalism is an important concept when building platforms for scale. Private companies cant build it in the same way as the government as they need to add an extra layer to earn revenue. Government bodies, though, could build without having those concerns, for the short term. The goal should be to build a solution that can be hard coded and spread quickly.Sharing one example, Nilekani said,

"We had only four data fields in Aadhaar. Somebody else who had 22 fields claimed to be superior and questioned us as to what kind of Mickey Mouse stuff we were building.But to work at scale, minimalism is needed for mass adoption."

Talking about the Indian startup ecosystem, Nadella observed that the Indian market washuge and he wasencouraged by both the small startups and the bigger ones that were innovating and adopting the cloud. He noted,

"Great to come to India and see convoluted neural nets being used to solve problems."

Having interacted with many startups and seeing more than 2,000 of them leverage Microsofts cloud services, he found the entrepreneurial energy remarkable. He said he was also encouraged by how Indian startups wereable to raise funding from local and international funds and also enthused by the startups he met at Microsofts own accelerator.

Nadella then introduced Binny Bansal, Flipkart Group CEO, and said,

"We started with Nandan Nilekani who brought the first wave of the Indian startup wave. Now I want to end our session by introducing another entrepreneur who got the second wave of Indian startups started Binny Bansal from Flipkart."

Binny said that with Flipkart about to complete 10 years of its existence, they are happy to have taken e-commerce to the first 50 million customers in the country. Bansal noted, As we think about the next 10 years, the question is: how do you scale this number to 10x? Delighted to partner with Microsoft. With our combined strength and understanding of the e-commerce market, we can reach higher.

Leveraging AI for a better experience: Going forward, Bansal aims to leverage their in-house capabilities with Microsoft's AI strength to better recommend the right products to their e-commerce customers. He sees a big opportunity for this in the fashion segment for Myntra.

Bansal also noted,

Technology is a great leveller: Today someone sitting in a remote part of India can access a lakh of products. The same variety of products is also available to someone in a big city. This wasn't possible 10 years ago....The opportunities are limitless As Nandan once famously said, The world is flat I believe that technology is the bulldozer.

Talking about AI, Nadella said that he sees the sector bringing down costs and making industries like eye care and education more widespread and affordable.According to him, though, the most exciting thing in the last five years has been the specialised branch of deep neural networks that are fundamentally giving us human perception. He said,

We wont go back to the AI winter as long we don't overhype it and work on real-world applications. But we need to be mindful of the impact of AI on jobs. That is why LinkedIn and LinkedIn learning are working to help people who have to change professions or get mid-skilled jobs.

Nadella and Nilekani agreed that the classical way to fix the job issue was to have more hospitals for more doctors, etc., but the only way to deliver this in a realistic timeline is by leveraging AI as a strategic tool to provide personalised health, education, and financial services, etc. Nilekani noted,

Predicting the skills needed for mid-level jobs in the future won't be easy. To better prepare people, we will need to help them get life-long learning skills.

Originally posted here:
The centre of entrepreneurial energy for us is all around cloud: Satya Nadella - YourStory.com

A statistical analysis of operating system instancesthe creation of objects each time a program runsoffers insights into the economics behind cloud migration. The fine-grained, algorithmic analysis attempts to answer questions such as these: Is it more economical to run workloads on-premise or in the cloud? Should companies invest in refreshing their technology or in cloud migration? Often, businesses rely on spreadsheets and high-level financial models to make these decisions. This statistical method, performed by TSO Logic, uses anonymized data that includes hundreds of millions of data points from more than 10,000 servers, including hypervisors and non-hypervisors. There were 25,000 virtual OS instances from which the authors compiled a sample. Other questions addressed were: What is the cost of running OS instances as currently provisioned? How much is each instance used historically? How well do currently provisioned resources match up to utilization? And which of these workloads would be economically more viable in future environments, including cloud or server refresh? Following are the study findings.

Karen A. Frenkel writes about technology and innovation and lives in New York City.

Link:
How to Cut Costs When Migrating to the Cloud - CIO Insight

In some cases, public cloud services don't offer admins full visibility and control, particularly around variable...

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workload performance and security. Some providers address this challenge by offering bare-metal cloud.

What are bare-metal cloud services?

A bare-metal cloud service is a variation on infrastructure as a service (Iaas) that allows users to rent and configure single-tenant servers, typically without a virtualization layer. Bare-metal cloud promises the flexibility and scalability of public cloud, with the predictability, granularity and security of local servers.

Not all workloads run well on the virtualized cloud instances that make up many IaaS offerings. For example, legacy applications that demand access to physical hardware, or workloads that are extremely stable and require no scalability, might be better fits for bare-metal cloud.

Bare-metal cloud services are similar to other cloud services -- they're accessible like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance or an Azure D-series VM. The primary difference with bare-metal is that the service maps to a physical server rather than a VM. Since the server is rarely virtualized, users get complete access to the entire server directly and all of its compute, storage and network resources. A bare-metal cloud instance is almost indistinguishable from a more traditional server, but typically uses the same on-demand rental model that public cloud providers use.

There are numerous providers in the bare-metal cloud market, including Oracle, IBM, baremetalcloud, Rackspace and Internap.

Major public cloud providers, including Azure and Google, do not have strong bare-metal cloud offerings. AWS comes close with its Dedicated EC2 Hosts service, which commits an entire physical server to the user.

What are the pros and cons of bare-metal cloud services?

The primary difference with bare-metal is that the service maps to a physical server rather than a virtual machine.

The most notable benefit of bare-metal cloud services is direct control of the server and its resources. This is a far cry from typical virtualized cloud instances, which intentionally obscure underlying hardware operations from the users. Additionally, without the virtualization layer, bare-metal cloud reduces the overhead of a hypervisor, which can increase performance.

Because most public IaaS environments are multi-tenant, organizations are concerned with security and compliance. Bare-metal cloud instances address both of these concerns because they provide a single-tenant hardware platform committed exclusively to a single user. However, bare-metal clouds do not guarantee security or compliance; organizations need to understand the legal obligations and industry best practices for proper security and regulatory posture.

Bare-metal cloud instances can also be more cost-effective than public cloud instances because users generally pay only for the underlying hardware rather than usage. However, organizations must consider the costs and compare to in-house hardware acquisition, deployment and operational expenses.

However, compared to virtualized instances, bare-metal cloud services can be limited. For example, when a physical server is virtualized, admins can provision a wide range of standardized VM types from the underlying hardware. But a bare-metal cloud instance is a complete server, so there is a limited number of instance sizes and types available.

What makes bare-metal cloud management unique?

There are few fundamental differences in managing bare-metal cloud instances versus typical virtual machine public cloud instances.

For example, bare-metal cloud providers like Rackspace and Oracle provide management interfaces, including a console and command-line interface. The Rackspace control panel offers a web-based interface to start the cloud server, access and view KPIs, schedule tasks like snapshots and access support functions. Admins can use control panels to perform tasks such as server resets and power cycling -- tasks unthinkable with common VM instances.

However, bare-metal servers generally require a more granular level of management and control than common cloud instances. For example, Oracle organizes bare-metal cloud services into entities called compartments, which provide isolated cloud instances to other business units or projects. This means it is possible to monitor, manage and track billing for resources by activity or group, and assign granular security and data protection characteristics to each individual user. Admins familiar with managing VM-based public cloud instances may see an additional learning to set up and manage a bare-metal cloud environment.

Is bare-metal cloud a better option for higher-level services?

Bare-metal cloud services can be a good option when a workload's computing demands are relatively constant due to lack of scalability. Workloads that fit this model include those involved with big data analytics, backup and recovery cycles, media encoding tasks, machine learning, visual rendering projects and other I/O-intensive applications.

For example, a big data workload needs to ingest a large amount of data, transform and process that data and then pass results back to storage. Once completed, the server may remain unused for weeks or even months. This makes bare-metal cloud a viable option, rather than buying and owning servers permanently.

Find out if bare-metal cloud services are right for you

Evaluate the architectural, cost benefits of bare-metal

Do containers run better on bare-metal servers?

Link:
Discover the pros, cons of bare-metal cloud services - TechTarget

Image: Jack Wallen

Nextcloud is one of the most flexible and easy to use cloud servers. Not only is Nextcloud an incredibly simple cloud server to get up and running, but you can expand its capabilities through a user-friendly app store.

An especially useful feature that can be included in the Nextcloud server is the cloud-based Bookmarks app. With this feature, users can add and tag bookmarks to be saved in their personal Nextcloud account. This makes it easy for users to reach their work-based bookmarks from any browser that can access the Nextcloud server.

I'll walk you through the process of adding the Bookmarks app and then illustrate how easy it is to work with. I assume your Nextcloud server is set up and running, and that you have an administrative account on the server.

SEE: Video: The 5 trends that form the future of cloud computing (TechRepublic)

Nexcloud will download and install the app. Once it's installed, the app is ready to gothere are no settings for the app.

Click the Apps drop-down and select Bookmarks from the list. In the new window, you will see a warning that you have no bookmarks. Nextcloud makes it easy to add bookmarksit includes a bookmarklet that you can drag to your browser's toolbar (Figure A).

Figure A

The Nextcloud bookmarklet is ready to be added to your browser.

Once you drag the bookmarklet to your browser, you can add bookmarks to Nextcloud by pointing your browser to the site you want to bookmark and then clicking the bookmarklet. In the window that appears, you can edit the bookmark's name, tag, and description (Figure B).

Figure B

Adding a TechRepublic Cloud bookmark to Nextcloud.

After the bookmark is added, you can return to your Nextcloud server, click the Apps drop-down, click Bookmarks, and view/edit your current listing of bookmarks. If there's a URL you want to visit, click the name (Figure C) and a new tab will open to that link.

Figure C

Bookmarks are easily accessed, edited, and tagged.

You can also add new bookmarks from within the Nextcloud Bookmark app by typing in the URL in the Address textarea and clicking the + button. Nextcloud will call out to the URL to get the name of the site and automatically add it to the bookmark.

The Bookmarks app can import and export bookmarks, which means you can export a browser's bookmarks and then import them into Nexcloud or vice versa. To get to this feature, click the Bookmarks app from the Apps drop-down, click the small gear icon in the bottom right of the window, and click either Export or Import (Figure D). The only downfall of the Import feature is that your bookmarks won't be tagged, so you'll have to do that manually.

Figure D

Importing and exporting bookmarks.

The Bookmarks app helps make your life a tiny bit easier. This feature may not change the way you work, improve your ROI, or secure your network, but it can extend your Nextcloud server offerings and help users get the most out of your company's hosted cloud. And with the help of the Nextcloud bookmarklet, adding bookmarks to a Nextcloud account is incredibly simple.

Read the rest here:
How to add cloud-based bookmarks to your Nextcloud server - TechRepublic

"Friends don't let friends build data centers," said Charles Phillips, chief executive officer of Infor, a business software maker, about two years ago.

His remarkwhich launched a flood of T-shirts came at an Amazon Web Services conference in April 2014, when he announced that Infor would move all of its IT operations into AWS data centersand out of its own.

That was a bold statement at the time, and it presaged a change in how big software companies are building and distributing their products.

Since then, a slew of these software companiesincluding Box ( box ) , Salesforce , NetSuite , Tableau ( data ) , Workday, and SAP ( sap ) have all announced plans to use a public cloud (like AWS) as a deployment option for their own software.

A public cloudreferred to within the industry as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)consists of massive quantities of servers, storage, and networking owned-and-operated by one company, and then rented out to others.

Box and Workday , for example, are turning to AWS and IBM ( ibm ) SoftLayer to run specific types of software. Salesforce has signed on to AWS for its Internet of Things Cloud Suite and other new products. NetSuite named Microsoft Azure as its " preferred cloud partner ." (Although now that NetSuite has been bought by Oracle ( orcl ) , which has its own public cloud ambitions, that could change.) JDA Software, which offers supply chain management software, is using Google Cloud Platform.

None of these companies are going as far as Inforat least not yet. But unless these announcements are 100% marketing hype, they indicate that much more software power will be concentrated in fewer, albeit bigger, data centers owned and operated by just a handful of cloud computing giants.

The arguments seem sound: Let the big cloud providers pull together hundreds of thousands of servers, petabyte upon petabyte of data storage, and networking at their data centers around the worldand software companies can just piggyback on that. That allows the software maker to concentrate on features and functions for customers, not racks of servers and power supplies in the data center running either in a dedicated corporate data center or in facilities owned by third-parties like Equinix ( eqix ) , Digital Realty Trust, or Dupont Fabros. But build or no build, that's a major expense.

And, if a U.S. software company throws in with a cloud provider with data centers around the world, it won't have to eat the expense of operating a data center in a country with strict data sovereignty laws requiring that local data stay in country. That is no small benefit.

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But isn't there concern about relying so heavily on a small handful of huge playersnamely Microsoft, Amazon, and Google? Some software executives admit there is. Privately, they worry that their cloud provider might end up being as competitor as well.

Microsoft ( msft ) , for example, offers its own cloud-based applications, which compete with offerings from many other companies. Amazon ( amzn ) keeps adding higher level software to its infrastructure as well. Who knows where that will end?

Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce( crm ) , downplays the concern, noting that there is no shortage of competition in cloud. Aside from Amazon, Google , IBM, and Microsoft, Benioff cites the various telcoslike Deutsche Telekom, BT , and NTTthat also offer cloud services.

And, Salesforce is not leaving its own data centers behind. "Our infrastructure remains our primary focus as public cloud is still too expensive for many of the primary markets we are in," Benioff tells Fortune via email.

So while Salesforce is working with AWS in Canada and Australia, it will keep using its own data centers as well.

"This is not a one-size fits all solution for infrastructure," says Benioff.

David Clarke, senior vice president of technology development at Workday ( wday ) , which specializes in financial and human resources software for big companies, agreed that expanding geographic reach is a big reason to consider public cloud. Amazon, Microsoft Azure, and IBM SoftLayer maintain data centers all over the world.

"Our first production workload will go on AWS in Canada this year," Clarke tells Fortune . "Whether or not you like running data centers, it's expensive and being able to offer geographic diversity without having to build data centers everywhere is a benefit." Workday itself has three primary data centers in Ashburn, Va.; Portland, Ore.; and Dublin, Ireland.

For more on Dropbox's infrastructure move, watch:

Another factor is that big businesses have grown more comfortable with the use of massive public clouds, and may push other software suppliers to put services in the customer's cloud of choice.

SAP offers versions of many of its productslike SuccessFactors human resources and Concur travel and expense accounting softwarefrom various cloud partners. Right now, however, SAP's new public cloud-based SAP S/4Hana manufacturing and financial management software runs only on SAP's own public cloud infrastructure. However, the company will consider "the usual suspects" among the giant public cloud playersif demand warrants it, Darren Roos, president of the company's S/4Hana business unit tells Fortune .

As many SAP customers already run some software in AWS or Azure, they may want to "co-locate" the new SAP software there as well, Roos suggests.

But there are some in the tech industry who say that there are many companies of sufficient size with specialized needs that would be better off running their own data centers, but in a cloud-like manner. In this "private cloud" model, all of the computing gear is devoted to one company, but still offers internal users flexibility in adding or deleting resources as needed. And each department or user can be charged for what capabilities they use.

"There are plenty of companies big enough to operate their own data centers," Bryan Cantrill, chief technology officer of Joyent said recently. And that is likely one huge reason Samsung Electronics bought Joyent for its cloud expertise last year.

And then there is Dropbox, the popular file storage and file sharing company that ran almost entirely on AWS until it quietly moved 90% of that workload into its own data centers over the course of a few years. Companies like Dropbox say they know their own needs better than a public cloud provider, and that they're big enough to make the economics work. Their argument is that once a company's workload gets big enough and stable enough not to need all that public cloud flexibility, it is cheaper to run your own data center gear.

Still, it seems that if the public cloud is a viable option, more corporate workloads will flow in that direction. Oracle co-chief executive Mark Hurd has said he expects 80% of corporate data centers to disappear by 2025. Even if he's a little bit off, that's a considerable estimate.

This shift could be generational. A company like Boxfounded in 2005, a year before AWS launched its first cloud servicedidn't have much of a choice but to provision its own data centers. If the content management company were starting out now, Box chief executive Aaron Levie says that would likely not be the case.

When asked if it was hard to rely on a huge cloud provider that might end up competing with Box, Levie replies, "You know what's harder? Building data centers!"

Originally posted here:
Welcome to the Era of Great Data Center Consolidation - Fortune