Red Hat Acquires DevOps Automation Tool - 'Ansible'.

World’s leading provider of open source solutions - 'Red Hat' announced that it has signed a agreement to acquire Ansible. Ansible is powerful infrastructure-provisioning tool. Ansible competes with some popular automation tools named Puppet, Chef and SaltStack. While no actual purchase price are published, it is rumored that it costs around US$100 million for Red Hat to acquire Ansible.

Said Ziouani, cofounder and CEO of Ansible, said, “We’re thrilled that Red Hat, a global leader in open source, has chosen Ansible to tackle the future of IT automation and systems management. This is a strong validation that Ansible’s simplicity, enterprise customer base and robust community is winning in enterprise IT automation, from compute to networking to cloud to containers.”

Joe Fitzgerald, vice president of management at Red Hat, said, “Ansible is a clear leader in IT automation and DevOps, and helps Red Hat take a significant step forward in our goal of creating frictionless IT. Red Hat is transforming IT management, driving innovation that is 100% open source, built on an open management platform, and relentlessly focused on reducing cost and complexity through ease of use and automation. I am thrilled to welcome Ansible to Red Hat to help us expand that commitment.”

Ansible is simple approach to infrastructure-provisioning which does not require any special coding skills. By adding Ansible to its hybrid management portfolio, Red Hat will help customers to :

• Deploy and manage applications across private and public clouds.
• Speed service delivery through DevOps initiatives.
• Streamline OpenStack installations and upgrades.
• Accelerate container adoption by simplifying orchestration and configuration.

Reference : http://devops.com/2015/10/16/red-hat-to-acquire-it-automation-and-devops-leader-ansible/

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AWS re:Invent 2015 : Five Talking Points.

At the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas this week, AWS announced a bunch of new services which are specifically designed to lower the cost and simplify the tasks of analyzing data, streaming data, moving data, migrating databases and switching to different database management systems in the cloud. Have a look on five new services announced by AWS in AWS re:Invent.

 

1. Kinesis Firehose

Amazon already offered Kinesis Streams, a real-time streaming data option, but that service is for specifically  technical users. Making it available immediate, Kinesis Firehose is intended to make it easier to support streaming scenarios such as mobile apps, Web apps or the collection of telemetry or sensor data.
Instead of writing code, "builders" create an Amazon Kinesis Firehose Delivery Stream in the AWS Management Console." These streams can then be targeted at S3 buckets or Amazon Redshift tables. Users can specify refresh intervals, chunk sizes and compression and encryption settings.

 

2. AWS Snowball

AWS Snowball is a shippable appliance designed to move 50 TB at a time. If you have large, dedicated pipes, it takes a long time to move big data. Amazon has an existing Import/Export service that lets you ship data overnight to AWS on one-terabyte disks, but even that's a time-consuming when moving tens of terabytes.
Amazon Snowball, available immediately, is a PC-Tower-sized appliance in a shipping box that stores up to 50 terabytes at a time. The cost per shipment is $200, and Amazon says it's the fastest and most cost-effective option available for bulk data loading to the cloud.

 

3. AWS Database Migration Service

The Amazon Database Migration Service will easily migrate production databases with minimal downtime. It's said ensure continuous replication from target to source for any size database, with tracking and real-time monitoring. The tool takes 10 to 15 minutes to set up and the cost of the service is about $3 per terabyte.

 

4. QuickInsight 

QuickInsight is a data-analysis, visualization and dashboarding suite. It promises ease of use and costs start at $9 per user, per month. Fast to deploy, easy to use, low cost these are the three promises of QuickSight. This service is currently in preview.
According to the Amazon this service is cheaper than traditional Business Intelligence tools and costs one tenth of the traditional Business Intelligence tools.

 

5. AWS Schema Conversion Tool : MariaDB Database Engine

New AWS Database Migration and Schema Conversion services are intended to ease database moves. The Schema Conversion Tool is said to reliably and easily transform the data from one database type to another, swapping like-for-like tables, partitions, store procedures and more. "We think we'll be able to address 80% of changes automatically" said AWS Senior vice-president Andy Jassy. This will radically change the cost structure and speed of moving from the old world to the cloud world.

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'CloudFusion', New File Storage Application for AWS.

Avere Systems introduced new file storage application named CloudFusion for Amazon Web Services (AWS). CloudFusion uses the performance of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). 

It brings same benefits (low latency, high performance, ease of installation and deployment) as a 'Virtual FXT Edge Filter', which was released by Avere in last November. Along with these, it uses access patterns and internal caching algorithms to cache user data on different tiers of Amazon storage. 

CloudFusion also delivers a NAS feature set which includes snapshots, encryption, compression, easy to use web-based GUI and runs these NAS applications on EC2.
CloudFusion is available from today on AWS marketplace. It comes with three week free trial. After that end-user software pricing will start at $0.99/hour for AWS r3.xlarge instances. Other services, EC2, EBS, S3 which are used by CloudFusion will be separately billed at AWS current rates.

Reference : www.storagereview.com/avere_introduces_cloudfusion_for_aws

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Way Towards Digital India : Microsoft Launches Three Cloud Data Centers In India.

Microsoft has opened its local data centers in Pune, Mumbai and Chennai. The core idea behind this is to provide cloud services to governments, businesses and citizens. The datacenters are inaugurated by the chief minister of Maharashtra, Devendra Fadnavis and chief minister of Tamil Nadu, J. Jayalalithaa. CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella has announced that the company would be offering its Azure cloud services from local data centers in India by the end of this year.

“Governments, large businesses, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and citizens can use the massive computing power now available locally to fuel India’s inclusive growth, spur innovation and accelerate digital transformation,” said Microsoft India.
CM of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis said that the government will utilize Microsoft's cloud services to host a variety of digital services improving overall governance and boost productivity.  Entrepreneurs selected by Tamil Nadu government will be allowed to access Microsoft's software development platform free of cost for three months.
As per reports of Microsoft, it has become the first public cloud provider from India. The company hopes that the banking and finance sector, government agencies and state-owned enterprises will be able to take advantage of local data residency. It will also help businesses dealing with large data volumes, by way of reduced network distances and lower latency.

Reference : http://www.digit.in/internet/microsoft-india-launches-three-local-cloud-data-centres-27395.html

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