What is a Service?

A service in the context of software architecture is a discrete unit of functionality that is designed to fulfill a specific task, operation, or business logic. It is typically part of a larger system and is often used to provide a particular set of capabilities over a network (e.g., HTTP, TCP). Services can be independent entities or part of a larger distributed system or microservices architecture, which allows them to interact with each other to provide more complex functionality.

In modern software systems, services are often designed to be modular, reusable, and interoperable. They abstract the internal details of how functionality is implemented, allowing other components to interact with them through a well-defined interface (e.g., API). The primary purpose of services is to provide reusable and independent units of work that can be called, consumed, and managed independently.

Types of Services:

• Web Services: Services accessible over the web using standard protocols such as HTTP, and usually employ REST or SOAP for communication.
• Microservices: Smaller, independently deployable services that are part of a larger application, designed to scale and evolve independently.
• Backend Services: Services that run in the backend to perform heavy-lifting tasks such as database queries, business logic processing, and user authentication.
• Cloud Services: Services that provide scalable and accessible functionality hosted in the cloud, often integrated with infrastructure services (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).

Services are central to modern architectures such as Microservices Architecture, SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), and serverless computing.

What are the Major Use Cases of Services?

The use of services is prevalent in almost every modern software application, especially in distributed and scalable systems. Below are some major use cases for services in software systems:

1. Web and Mobile Application Backend

In web and mobile applications, services typically act as the backend, providing essential functionality such as user authentication, data management, payment processing, and content delivery.

Example:

• Authentication Service: A separate authentication service could handle login, user registration, session management, and security checks for multiple applications or systems.
• Payment Service: A payment service could manage all interactions with third-party payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, or credit card systems.

2. Microservices Architecture

In Microservices Architecture, an application is broken down into a series of small, self-contained services, each responsible for a specific business function or domain. These services can communicate over a network, and each microservice can be independently developed, deployed, and scaled.

Example:

• E-commerce System: A system for an e-commerce platform may include microservices for inventory management, order processing, payments, customer reviews, and shipping.

3. Integration and Interoperability

Services are commonly used to integrate different systems or applications that need to exchange data. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) often serve as the intermediary that allows services to communicate with each other, even when they are built with different technologies.

Example:

• API Gateway: An API gateway can be used as a single entry point for all services in a system, routing requests to appropriate backend services and transforming data as necessary.

4. Distributed Systems and Cloud Applications

Services form the backbone of distributed systems, particularly in cloud computing environments. They provide a modular way to scale applications by dividing them into smaller, independently scalable components. Cloud services such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions are designed to allow developers to run specific pieces of logic in a serverless environment, making them more flexible and scalable.

Example:

• File Storage Service: In a cloud-based application, a dedicated file storage service may handle the uploading, storing, and retrieving of user files, scaling as needed to accommodate the number of users.

5. Enterprise Applications

Large-scale enterprise applications often rely on services to decouple complex business processes and enable better scalability, maintenance, and integration with other systems. In enterprise architectures like SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), services represent core business logic that can be accessed by different parts of the organization.

Example:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System: A CRM system may consist of services for contact management, lead tracking, email marketing, reporting, and customer support.

6. Data Processing and Analytics

Services can also be used for data processing tasks, including analytics, machine learning model inference, and data transformations. Services provide the ability to process large datasets in a distributed manner, often integrating with big data platforms.

Example:

• Data Aggregation Service: A data service may collect and aggregate data from different sources, perform some transformations, and provide the processed data to other services or users.

How Services Work Along with Architecture?

Services play a central role in modern software architecture, especially in distributed systems and cloud computing. Here’s a look at how services integrate into software architecture:

1. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

In SOA, software components (services) are designed to communicate with each other via standard communication protocols such as HTTP, SOAP, or REST. Each service is independent, with its own data storage and logic, but they can communicate to perform tasks as part of a larger system. SOA focuses on reusability and interoperability between services.

Key Features of SOA:

• Loose Coupling: Services are decoupled, meaning changes in one service do not directly affect others.
• Interoperability: Services can communicate regardless of the technologies they are built with.
• Service Discovery: Services can be discovered dynamically in a networked environment, allowing them to interact without prior knowledge of each other.

2. Microservices Architecture

Microservices is an architectural style where an application is decomposed into smaller, independently deployable services. Each service has its own responsibilities and can be developed, deployed, and scaled separately. Microservices communicate through APIs, often over HTTP, and can be written in different languages or technologies.

Key Features of Microservices:

• Independent Deployment: Each microservice can be deployed independently, allowing for faster releases and scaling.
• Isolation: Microservices are isolated from each other, which makes them fault-tolerant.
• Single Responsibility: Each microservice typically handles one responsibility, such as payment processing, user authentication, or inventory management.

3. Service Communication

Services often communicate through network-based protocols like HTTP, REST, or gRPC. In larger systems, services may interact with message brokers (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka) to decouple services and provide asynchronous communication.

4. Service Layer

In an application, the service layer is a set of services that encapsulate business logic. This layer often interacts with the data layer (databases, file systems) and provides API endpoints for external systems or user interfaces.

Basic Workflow of a Service

The basic workflow of a service typically involves several key steps to provide functionality, manage data, and interact with users or other systems. Here’s a general workflow:

1. Receive a Request
   • A service begins by receiving a request, typically via a network protocol such as HTTP, gRPC, or SOAP.
2. Process the Request
   • The service processes the incoming request, which may involve executing business logic, interacting with a database, or calling other services.
3. Interact with the Database (if necessary)
   • Many services interact with databases or data storage systems to retrieve, store, or manipulate data as part of their operations.
4. Return the Response
   • After processing, the service sends a response back to the requester, which could be a user interface or another system, typically in the form of JSON, XML, or other standard data formats.
5. Logging and Monitoring
   • Services typically include logging and monitoring to track performance, errors, and usage patterns. This allows operators to diagnose issues and improve the service’s performance over time.
6. Scaling
   • Services are often deployed in environments that allow automatic scaling to meet demand. For example, in a cloud environment, services can be scaled horizontally by running more instances when traffic increases.

Step-by-Step Getting Started Guide for Services

To get started with creating a service, follow these steps:

Step 1: Define the Service’s Purpose

Start by defining the core purpose and functionality of your service. What problem will it solve? What data or functionality will it provide?

Example:

• A payment service could handle payment processing for a web application.

Step 2: Choose the Architecture

Decide whether your service will be part of a monolithic application, a microservice architecture, or part of a larger distributed system. For most modern applications, microservices or cloud-native architectures are preferred due to their scalability and flexibility.

Step 3: Set Up the Development Environment

Set up your development environment based on the technology stack you plan to use. For example, if you’re building a RESTful API, you might choose Node.js, Spring Boot, or Django.

Step 4: Implement the Service

Implement the core functionality of your service. This involves writing code to handle requests, interact with databases, and implement business logic.

Step 5: Expose an API (if needed)

If your service needs to communicate with other applications or clients, define an API (usually RESTful or gRPC) to expose the service’s functionality. Use tools like Swagger to document your API endpoints.

Step 6: Test the Service

Test the service to ensure it handles requests correctly. Write unit tests, integration tests, and possibly end-to-end tests to ensure that the service performs as expected.

Step 7: Deploy the Service

Deploy your service to an environment where it can handle real traffic. Use containers (e.g., Docker), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) to automate deployment and scaling.

By following these steps, you can design and implement a service that meets your business needs, integrates seamlessly with other parts of the system, and scales to meet growing demand. Services are crucial components of modern software systems, providing the flexibility, modularity, and efficiency needed to build scalable and maintainable applications.

Cox Communications has launched Cox Edge, a full stack edge-cloud computing service to deliver ultra-low latency compute solutions, helping customers to improve application performance and to reduce cloud transport and on-premise infrastructure costs.

The shape of the internet is evolving. Increasingly immersive digital experiences require faster application performance and response times to delight consumers. Technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence drive the need for real-time processing and decision making. These and other innovations can benefit from bringing compute power closer to the action – to where users are engaging and to where sensor data is being created.

Cox Edge, with last mile edge locations and a global network, brings compute resources closer to users and businesses. This can help reduce cloud transport costs, improve application resiliency and continuity, reduce latency to deliver near real-time application performance, and provider better overall security.

Cox Edge is a full stack edge-cloud infrastructure service deployed from last-mile edge data centers, with offerings that will include Virtual Compute, Storage, Bare Metal, Edge CDN, Distributed Database services, Serverless computing, Distributed Containers, and Enterprise Kubernetes. The services are offered through an integrated user experience, so that developers can easily augment their cloud or on-premise deployments with edge capabilities.

It’s important to remember, however, that there is much more to cloud computing than simply storage, including software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service, and more. This provides investors with a multitude of ways to profit from the accelerating move to the cloud.

With a large and growing list of cloud-native products and services, investors are looking for the best ways to capitalize on this opportunity and ride the increasing wave of cloud adoption. These three companies offer investors clear and ongoing opportunities to profit from the trend.

1. HubSpot: Rapidly expanding its suite of services
While it began life as an inbound marketing specialist, HubSpot (NYSE:HUBS) has quickly evolved and expanded its aspirations to become a one-stop-shop for customer relationship management (CRM).

The company has copied liberally from the successful template employed by salesforce.com, increasing its functionality with a series of successful, snap-on acquisitions. In fact, HubSpot has made five multi-billion-dollar acquisitions — as well as a multitude of smaller ones — over the past five years alone.

As a result of this platform expansion, HubSpot now provides marketing, sales, and service support, as well as content management and operations products. Each new offering has resulted in a growing market opportunity, with some estimates placing HubSpot’s total addressable market at about $20 billion. The company currently has roughly 114,000 customers, which pales in comparison to its total addressable market of more than 3 million small- and medium-sized businesses with a website.

The proof is in the pudding. During the first quarter, HubSpot delivered revenue that grew 41% year over year. Subscription revenue also climbed 41%, while professional services revenue jumped 43%. Additionally, the company’s total customer count grew by 45% and spending per customer was on par with the prior-year quarter.

These results aren’t a one-time thing, either. Since late 2014, HubSpot’s revenue has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 41%, while its international revenue has grown at 58%. At the same time, its margins have continued to expand and its free cash flow has rocketed higher.

2. NVIDIA: Providing the processing power that unpins cloud computing
While investors might not immediately think of NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) when considering cloud computing investments, its cutting-edge processors have become the industry standard for powering cloud computing and data center operations.

The same graphics processing units (GPUs) that render lifelike images in video games also underpin the unique challenges presented by cloud computing. The secret is the parallel processing, or the ability to conduct a multitude of complicated mathematical calculations simultaneously, thereby reducing the amount of time necessary to complete complex tasks and speeding up the most complex algorithms.

Each of the world’s largest cloud providers depends on NVIDIA state-of-the-art processors to power their systems. Its customer list reads like a Who’s-Who of cloud providers. They include Amazon’s AWS, Alphabet’s Google Cloud, International Business Machines’ IBM Cloud, Microsoft’s Azure, and Alibaba Cloud, just to name a few.

Yet NVIDIA has just begun to tap this massive opportunity, as evidenced by its most recent results. In the first quarter, data center revenue — which includes cloud computing, data center, and artificial intelligence applications — grew 79% year over year, accounting for 36% of NVIDIA’s total sales. At the same time, its gaming segment, which represents the lion’s share of its revenue, grew 106%. Total revenue grew 84%, a remarkable feat for a company with a market cap of $436 billion — and this could be just the beginning.

NVIDIA generated revenue of $16.68 billion in 2020, which pales in comparison to the company’s total addressable market, which management estimates will reach $250 billion over the next few years.

3. DocuSign: Digital signatures are just the beginning
Many investors are familiar with DocuSign (NASDAQ:DOCU), which provides cloud-based tools to sign documents. The company is the undisputed leader in the electronic signature space, with a whopping 70% share of a market that continues to grow. What investors may not know is that e-signatures are just the beginning of a large and growing opportunity for DocuSign, a fact that CEO Dan Springer is quick to point out.

“Typically, e-signature is the first step that many customers take on their broader digital transformation journey with us,” said CEO Dan Springer on a recent earnings call. “So from a financial point of view, we believe this surge in e-signature adoption bodes well for future Agreement Cloud expansion.”

The Agreement Cloud is the next step in DocuSign’s evolution, providing a dozen software applications and more than 350 integrations designed to manage the entire lifecycle of contracts and agreements. For example, once a contract is signed, the system can trigger the creation of a bill. An agreement up for renewal? A reminder is generated. There are hundreds of similar use cases including employee on-boarding, non-disclosure agreements, change orders, new customer forms, vendor/supplier agreements, and much more.

The strategy is not only working, but the business is on fire. For DocuSign’s fiscal 2022 first quarter (ended April 30, 2021), revenue grew 58% year over year, accelerating from 39% growth in the prior-year quarter. Perhaps more importantly, subscription revenue grew at an even faster pace, up 61%. At the same time, billings — a sales growth metric that factors in changes in deferred subscription revenue — climbed 54%. Adjusted earnings per share (EPS) more than tripled.

DocuSign generated total revenue of $1.5 billion last year, but its remaining opportunity is vast. With the addition of the Agreement Cloud, DocuSign management estimates that its total addressable market has doubled to more than $50 billion, leaving a long runway for growth.

You get what you pay for
Each of these stocks has vastly outperformed the market over the past year, with no signs of slowing. Bears will be quick to point out that these stocks are by no means cheap when measured using traditional valuation metrics. HubSpot, NVIDIA, and DocuSign are currently selling for 23, 19, and 18 times sales, respectively — when a good price-to-sales ratio for a stock is generally between one and two.

That said, each of these cloud-native companies has a strong position within its industry and is riding the secular tailwind of cloud adoption to new heights. As a result, investors have thus far been willing to pay up for the impressive topline growth and the promise of explosive profits that each represents.

Should you invest $1,000 in NVIDIA Corporation right now?
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Our award-winning analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now… and NVIDIA Corporation wasn’t one of them.

Recently google Announcement New serverless Database Migration Service (DMS) In preview. This service supports migrating self-hosted MySQL databases on-premises or in the cloud, as well as managed databases from other clouds to Cloud SQL for MySQL.

New serverless services for database migration are aimed at enterprises migrating to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) managed database services Cloud SQL Or Google computing engine Seamlessly. In addition, according to a post on the announcement blog, customers using this service will benefit from:

Migration using DMS keeps data replication from the source database to the destination without any manual steps, minimizing downtime.
DMS uses the database’s native replication capabilities to maximize fidelity and reliability for a reliable and complete migration.
It’s serverless and secure because you don’t have to provision or manage migration-specific resources or monitor them to keep everything running smoothly.

In addition to Google, Microsoft Azure and AWS also offer database migration services. Azure for customers Azure managed SQL instance service. This allows customers to move their on-premises applications to the cloud with minimal application and database changes. AWS DMS It enables migration from Oracle to Oracle and heterogeneous migration between different database platforms such as Oracle to Amazon RDS for Oracle, MySQL to Amazon Aurora, MySQL to Amazon RDS for MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon RDS for SQL Server.

Funded by the Ministry of Transport, Communication and Information Technology, DataMount Company, and International Emerging Technology Company (ETCO) have signed a cooperation agreement with the Chinese Alibaba Group on cloud computing services.
The signing of the agreement, which was held at COMEX 2021, stipulates that the Data Mount and ETCO will manage, operate and market Alibaba center and services for cloud computing in the region, which will enhance the Sultanate’s position as a regional gateway for cloud computing services and technologies.

The agreement will also stipulate that the three parties provide data processing and cloud hosting services and train national cadres to use Alibaba’s cloud programs.

The aim is to enhance the cloud computing market in the Sultanate and in the region in general.

Under the agreement; Alibaba will invest about $10 million during the first stages of providing central devices and modern technologies, while DataMount will invest nearly $4 million in preparing the infrastructure for the information center; The project is expected to provide the technology sector in the Sultanate with a number of job opportunities (direct and indirect);

Datamount has started training and employing a number of graduates, and it is expected that the number of employees during the first phase will reach 12 employees to work on managing and marketing the project.

Alibaba’s cloud is the leading international provider and the third-largest infrastructure provider in the Asia Pacific region, according to Gartner; Through this partnership, the company aims to provide secure and reliable cloud services and technologies to enterprises in the Sultanate of Oman as a whole and the region in general.

Sumo Logic this week announced it is making a security information event management (SIEM) platform available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Jabari Norton, vice president of partners and alliances for Sumo Logic, said the Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Powered by AWS extends the reach of the Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Platform for analyzing data into the realm of cybersecurity.

The Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Platform is already hosted on AWS. The challenge the company faced was extending the reach of that platform to create a SIEM that can collect data from multiple third-party data sources spanning everything from on-premises IT environments to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, said Norton. Those capabilities make it possible to now analyze security data using machine learning algorithms to detect threats and correlate security intelligence, noted Norton.

The Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM is also tightly integrated with AWS security services such as Amazon GuardDuty and AWS CloudTrail in addition to all the cloud services that AWS continuously updates, added Norton. While the relationship with AWS is not exclusive, Norton said Sumo Logic has no plans to host of a version of its SIEM on any other public cloud at this time.

In effect, Sumo Logic is now applying the same observability capabilities it provides to IT operations and DevOps teams to analyzing security data. In theory, that approach should make it easier for all those teams to collaborate around a platform that aggregates data from across the extended enterprise. That’s critical because while security teams are mainly tasked with discovering vulnerabilities they typically need to rely on DevOps and IT operations teams to remediate them.

In the meantime, the rate at which security platforms are shifting to the cloud continues to accelerate in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Security teams that now need to work from anywhere are finding it simpler and more cost effective to employ cloud platforms to analyze security data. In many cases, the rise of cybersecurity AI will soon force the cloud migration issue. Few organizations have the infrastructure resources required to aggregate the volume of data that is required to train an AI model. The need for those AI models is becoming increasingly pressing because the rate at which cybersecurity attacks are being launched is increasing beyond the abilities of any cybersecurity team, on their own, to analyze.

Of course, there is no shortage of SIEM platforms available in the cloud. Sumo Logic is betting many organizations will simply extend their existing subscriptions to now include a SIEM service.

It may still be some time before the bulk of security platforms employed by any organization reside in the cloud. However, at this juncture, it’s now more a question of time. The less time understaffed cybersecurity teams spend managing infrastructure themselves, the more time they should have available to uncover threats. The issue, of course, is finding the time and resources to make transition in the middle of what is now often a daily cybersecurity firefight.

The Israeli Government has penned a $1 billion+ deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google for public sector and military cloud services.

The tech giants are thought to have beaten Microsoft, Oracle and IBM to a tender in April 2021 for the four phase project, dubbed Nimbus.

It will not be a centralised system due to there being two providers and, although not all data will be stored on it, Israeli finance ministers expect to start moving data to the cloud this summer.

The different phases of the undertaking include acquisition and construction of cloud infrastructure, formulating government policy for migrating to the cloud, integration and migration, and control and optimisation of cloud activity.

Somekh Chaikin-KPMG has already been selected to provide services for phase two. A tender for local suppliers has been issued for phase three, while the tender for the fourth phase is yet to be issued.

Israel’s Government Procurement Administration director, Gal Amir, said: “This project is the product of a vision, high professional capabilities, commitment and investment, and with an emphasis on cross-government cooperation led by the Nimbus team – an integrative inter-ministerial team that has brought the vision to fruition.

“We are now embarking on a long process of partnership with the winning suppliers.”

As part of the deal, AWS and Google are committed to spending at least 20% of the value of the contract on Israeli products and services.

The late great W. Edwards Deming, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and consultant said, “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” The point is, if you want people to trust your information, then you need to present measured data. This is true for countless circumstances. As a DevOps consultant, I am often asked by my clients what data should be used to show the value of their DevOps capabilities, in a way that is acceptable to the stakeholders of those DevOps capabilities. A lot of excellent research results, published by DORA and others, describes metrics that demonstrate the value that DevOps provides to application development. More and more enterprises are embracing the idea of providing DevOps capabilities, such as pipelines, tools, hardened containers and tech stacks, as a centralized service to support their many application teams. The question then becomes, “What metrics should be used to show the value of DevOps-as-a-Service (DaaS)?”

Before measuring the value of anything, you need to know two things: “What is it?” and “Why is it important?”

What is DevOps-as-a-Service?
In high-level terms, DaaS is DevOps capabilities made available to the users of those capabilities through portals and APIs. There is no standard set of services; DevOps capabilities offered vary from organization to organization. In my SlideShare, DevOps-as-a-Service (DaaS) Values, I illustrate a generic blueprint for DaaS.

The DaaS blueprint has four layers, as follows:

• Stakeholders – There are three types of stakeholders: business, app-dev users and DaaS teams.
• Service access layer – This layer consists of user portals, APIs, and access security.
• Service layer – The service layer consists of user services and management services. User services include things such as repositories, CI/CD pipelines, sandboxes, test data, configuration data, guides and training. Management services include service catalogs, issues and change requests, SLOs, SLIs, governance policies, experience monitoring and automated tasks.
• Resources layer – This layer includes application stacks, infrastructure resources, tools, infrastructure code and topology data.

Why is DaaS Important?
The value of DaaS, as perceived by different stakeholders, can be summarized as follows:

• Business – DaaS makes the business competitive.
• App-dev Users – DaaS improves application development.
• DaaS team(s) – DaaS improves management of DevOps capabilities.

What Service Level Objectives (SLOs) Demonstrate the Value of DaaS?
The SLOs need to be chosen to best fit the requirements of each application. The following are examples.

Business value can be demonstrated by:
ROI based on tracking cost savings relative to a benchmark comparing prior non-DaaS, trend cost per developer and per release.
SLO agility of services – Lead time for changes, and frequency of releases.
SLO reliability of services – change failure rate, time to restore services.
SLO governance, compliance and security scores.

App-dev user value can be demonstrated by:
SLO availability of DaaS, service level indicators (SLIs) depend on service components and architecture.
SLO service response time.
SLO experience scores.
SLO change request response time.

DaaS team value can be demonstrated by:
SLO scope of applications – number of apps supported, number of users per month.
SLO number of requests served per month.
SLO critical events per month.

How Does an Organization Develop DaaS Metrics?
Start by picking an application that is supported by DaaS. Do not try to boil the ocean and measure all applications at once. Then, appoint a DaaS SLO/SLI team to work on metrics development for the application. The team should include stakeholders from business, app-dev and DaaS support teams associated with the application.

DaaS SLO/SLI team members determine the SLOs of DaaS that each class of stakeholder values the most, and then decomposes the services to identify sources of data that will form the most important service level indicators (SLIs).

With the SLIs in hand, instrumentation, telemetry and analysis requirements can be determined and used to design monitoring agents, communication, analyzers, alerts and dashboards.

Then, roles, policies, playbooks and responsibilities will complete the solution. Test the solution for the chosen application. As you gain confidence in the solution, adapt and expand the solution for use with other applications.

Continue to monitor the progress and performance of the SLO metrics, and continuously improve them with experience and as newer technologies become available.

What This Means

DevOps-as-a-Service provides many valuable capabilities to business, app-dev users and DaaS teams. Metrics that demonstrate value to each class of stakeholder should be determined for each application that consumes the capabilities offered by each unique DaaS. A DaaS SLO/SLI team can determine the best metrics and system design for the implementation for an example application. The SLOs can be adapted and evolved for other applications in the organization, and used as a basis for continuous improvement.

Computer network technologies have seen gigantic enhancements and changes in the recent 20 years. After the introduction of the Internet, the networking of computers has prompted a few novel progressions in computing technologies like Distributed Cloud Computing

Distributed computing in cloud computing is utilized to interconnect information and applications which are served from different geological locations. By all accounts, the public clouds available previously fit a distributed cloud definition. Most leading cloud service providers, including Microsoft Azure, Oracle Gen2 Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), have a worldwide footprint with geographically scattered data centers and points of essence (PoPs). They all have edge devices accessible or call their PoPs edge locations. Since these significant cloud suppliers are running their services basically in centralized data centers rather than on network edge.

Some organizations have deployed a new cloud concept that will shape their business infrastructure in the years to come and that is edge computing. Edge computing is guaranteeing the proximal location point of computing services is as close as conceivable to where your customers are. If you are a public or worldwide organization, this can propose a challenge.

Enter the distributed cloud, a type of cloud service infrastructure that utilizes smaller individual clouds, each with its own processing abilities, to offer an assortment of services for clients across a single network.

Why Distributed Computing Services Are Important?
Cloud services from public cloud suppliers become “distributed” out to explicit and different physical locations. Operations being genuinely nearer to the individuals who need the capacities to empower low-latency compute. This likewise guarantees a reliable control plane to manage the cloud infrastructure from public to private cloud and expand reliably across the two environments. Taken together, these things can provide significant upgrades in performance because of the end of latency issues, as well as reduce the risk of worldwide network-related outages or control plane shortcomings.

Distributed cloud computing makes strategically positioned substations of cloud compute, networking and storage that can go about as shared cloud pseudo-availability zones. Gartner utilizes the expression “substations” to summon the picture of subsidiary stations, for example, branch post offices, where individuals come to utilize services.

Low latency applications and regulatory compliance are possible issues for conventional centralized infrastructure. Distributed systems in cloud computing mitigate those downsides by properly distributing the workload to pre-relegated – which are generally the server actually closest to clients. Soon, data network utilization will incorporate augmented reality, virtual reality and the Internet of Things (IoT). They are generally low-latency applications and will essentially profit from the CDN/caching function of the distributed cloud.

By keeping certain computational, data delivery, and storage local, distributed cloud computing speeds up latency to users who need it, and lessens resource requirements to every other person and the central infrastructure overall. It makes the whole solution more proficient for all users.

With cloud computing distributed systems, distributed cloud benefits include being open for purchase: users can ask that specific information stays inside explicit regions, or that a specific performance target for latency or throughput is met. These are communicated in Service Level Agreements (SLA) between the client and the cloud supplier.

It is the work of the cloud supplier to conceal the intricacies of how such SLAs are met. This may consist of working out extra cloud infrastructure for explicit areas or partnering with cloud suppliers effectively who are already present in those regions. Moreover, high-speed data interconnections should be set up between these geologically scattered data centers.

Significant cloud service providers have their own technology to incorporate into these scattered cloud data centers to guarantee the intelligent placement of data, storage, and computing to meet the SLAs, all clear to the cloud users.

One such application of the distributed cloud is autonomously driven trucks moving in echelon can locally process the data from street sensors to keep a consistent speed and partition between one another and different vehicles, all while sending traffic and engine information back to a central cloud. Their way to the destination is observed by a fleet management application in a provincial cloud, which breaks down information from numerous vehicles to decide ideal routes and distinguish vehicles for maintenance.

Future applications are additionally moving towards mobile use, IoT, and AR/VR. All would require distributed computing services for a great customer experience. Customer experience is one of the crucial variables in the coming years with regards to estimating the success of an IT solution.

If you are as of now utilizing a cloud computing solution, future-proofing your infrastructure to address the issues of forthcoming technologies will help your company to grow. If any cutting-edge technology in the AI, VR/AR, IoT, and other related fields go to the market, being one of the first to use the advantages of a distributed cloud computing puts you a couple of strides ahead of competitors.

Publication of a new analytical documentation including clear synopsis of ongoing market developments governing Global MEA Cloud Infrastructure Services Market t has been accomplished, enabling rapid diversification of report repository. The report is mindfully designed to present a holistic overview of the market across historical and current timeframes, for the enablement of futuristic predictions and forecasts. The export includes a 360-degree outline of the market that consistently allows market participants to imbibe growth probabilities.

This information profilesis elementary in rendering crucial business decisions through the forecast span, 2020-25. Talking at length about various drivers and opportunities prevailing in the space, the report also underpins new trend assessment, primarily highlighting novel technological leaps and improvements that further push the market towards systematic growth in global MEA Cloud Infrastructure Services market.

The study encompasses profiles of major companies operating in the MEA Cloud Infrastructure Services Market. Key players profiled in the report include:
AWS
Microsoft Corporation
Google
IBM
Key Points Covered in the Report: Overview of manufacturing landscape
 Outline on Consumption and Production Patterns
 Details on Capacity Building, production initiatives, revenue chains and market valuation in terms of volume have been highly specified in this investigative research report featuring MEA Cloud Infrastructure Services market.
 Following further, the report houses critical evaluation of export and import ratios, trend assessment, as well as futuristic probabilities that effectively ensure sustainable returns.
 As the report progresses further, the report also decodes specific information on sourcing strategies, value chain touchpoints and recurrent information on trader initiatives, growth strategies and distribution highlights.

Segment-wise Assessment

By the product type, the market is primarily split into
Public Cloud
Private Cloud
Hybrid Cloud

By the end-users/application, this report covers the following segments
SME
Large Organization

The key regions covered in the MEA Cloud Infrastructure Services market report are:
North America (U.S., Canada, Mexico)
South America (Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, and many others.)
Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Italy, Russia, Spain, etc.)
Asia (China, India, Russia, and many other Asian nations.)
Pacific region (Indonesia, Japan, and many other Pacific nations.)
Middle East & Africa (Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and many others.)

Segment Assessment:
 This critically compiled market development synopsis reveals that the global MEA Cloud Infrastructure Services market is widely segmented across vivid segmentation comprising product and service type, followed by applications and end-use dimensions. Additional details on geographical developments have also been pinned in the report to encourage skilled deductions and eventual business deliverable.
 This versatile research report is poised to offer a highly granular version of the MEA Cloud Infrastructure Services market evaluating market performance across product segments and multi-functional applications. Such scalable information offered in the report is apt in inculcating growth proficient business discretion based on the profitability quotient of the segments.
 This section of the report entails crucial information on various product types and service variants available on the market and the scope of their futuristic developments and associated revenue generation mettle. This report section clearly focuses on the usability of various products and services available on the market and multifarious developments aligning with user preferences.

The referential data compilation evaluating regional developments and geographical guide to ascertain multiple developments across countries, localities and other global areas. This referential document assessing the market has been compiled to understand diverse market developments across specific regional pockets such as Europe, North and Latin American countries, APAC nations, as well as several countries across MEA and RoW.

With unfailing market gauging skills, has been excelling in curating tailored business intelligence data across industry verticals. Constantly thriving to expand our skill development, our strength lies in dedicated intellectuals with dynamic problem solving intent, ever willing to mold boundaries to scale heights in market interpretation.

In one of the latest announcements of re:Invent 2020, AWS introduced the preview of Amazon Location, a new mapping service for developers to add location-based features like geofencing and built-in tracking to web-based and mobile applications.

The new product offers currently four different types of resources – maps, place indexes, trackers and geofence collections – and an API for routing is expected to be added during the preview. While the place indexes API allow searching for addresses, businesses, and points of interest using free-form text, trackers can be linked to geofence collections to implement monitoring of devices as they move in and out of geofences. The service supports maps and map styles provided by Esri and by HERE Technologies, two of the largest location data providers, and it is possible to use existing map libraries such as Mapbox GL and Tangram. As for the documentation, the API is consistent across LBS data providers, making it possible to switch across different providers for different use cases or geographies.

The service will help in use cases such as displaying maps, tracking the movement of packages and devices, geomarketing, geocoding (turn an address into a location) and delivery management. Even if not all geolocation functionalities are yet available, the cloud provider is going to cover an area where it was not offering a managed solution, competing now in the location data market with Google Maps Platform and Azure Maps.

Sander Heije, product owner IoT at PostNL, commented on how the parcel and e-commerce corporation took advantage of an early access to the service to manage and track their Unit Load Devices (ULD), like pallets and containers:

Daniel, author of “Be A Better Dev”, explains how the tracker feature can benefit location based applications:

Anton Babenko, AWS Community Hero and HashiCorp ambassador, jokes about the simplicity of setting up a fence and trigger actions when tracked items leave a geofenced area:

The new service is available as preview in a subset of AWS regions and free until the end of the preview. Different pricing plans will then be available, including a request-based usage paid tier.

The report titled Service Level Management Market has been recently added by Research N Reports which provide readers with a stronger and effective business outlook. The data also presents penetrative insights into several industry attributes such as trends, policies, and clients operating in widespread industrial regions. The qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques have also been used by analysts to provide an accurate overview of global business owners and industry trends.

Technical expansions of the Service Level Management market have also been scrutinized by focusing on distinctive technical platforms, tools, and methodologies of the market. Among other salient features of the report, the study also incorporates client’s demands as well as insinuates future progress of the market across global regions.

This market research reports on analyzes the growth prospects for the key vendors operating in this market space including:

ServiceNow, Micro Focus, SysAid, Interlink Software, Alemba, Ivanti, Marval, PhaseWare, NetHelpDesk, SMART Service Desk, Autotask, bpm’online

Global Service Level Management Market research survey represents a comprehensive presumption of the market and encloses imperative future estimations, industry-authenticated figures, and facts of market. The report portrays the keys factors affecting the market along with detailed analysis of the data collected including prominent players, dealers, and the sellers of the market.

The report also studies the widespread global expanse of regions such as North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and India on the basis of the manufacturing base, productivity, and profit margin. Moreover, the market is evaluated from the point of view of different practical oriented case studies from various industry experts and policymakers. For the analysis, the report also uses numerous graphical presentation techniques such as tables, charts, graphs, pictures and flowchart, thus ensuring easy and better understanding to the readers.

Highlights of the Global Service Level Management Market:

What will the market size and the growth rate be in 2027?
What are the key factors driving the Global Service Level Management Market?
What are the key market trends impacting the growth of the market?
What are the challenges to market growth?
Who are the key vendors in the Global Service Level Management Market?
What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in this market?
This report provides an effective business outlook, different case studies from various top-level industry experts, business owners, and policymakers have been included to get a clear vision about business methodologies to the readers. SWOT and Porter’s five models have been used for analyzing the Global Service Level Management Market on the basis of strengths, challenges and global opportunities in front of the businesses.

About Us:

Research N Reports is a new age market research firm where we focus on providing information that can be effectively applied. Today being a consumer-driven market, companies require information to deal with the complex and dynamic world of choices, where relying on a soundboard firm for your decisions becomes crucial. Research N Reports specializes in industry analysis, market forecasts and as a result getting quality reports covering all verticals, whether be it gaining perspective on current market conditions or being ahead in the cutthroat global competition. Since we excel at business research to help businesses grow, we also offer to consult as an extended arm to our services which only helps us gain more insight into current trends and problems. Consequently, we keep evolving as an all-rounder provider of viable information under one roof.

PORTLAND, Ore., Nov. 12, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Puppet, the industry standard for infrastructure automation, today released the findings of the 2020 State of DevOps Report. This year, over 2,400 IT, development, and information security professionals took the survey, revealing approaches that can help organizations scale DevOps principles and practices through providing more self-service capabilities and modernizing change management practices. Puppet’s State of DevOps report remains the longest-standing and most widely-referenced DevOps research in the industry after nearly a decade and 35,000 global survey respondents.

Taking DevOps from isolated teams to scaling across an enterprise is a significant challenge for any business. According to the report, establishing a platform approach to software delivery helps organizations standardize and scale DevOps practices across more application development teams. While the platform model is a fairly new approach for enabling application teams, it can help achieve overarching DevOps goals: faster and easier delivery of better-quality, more secure software.

Even more revealing in the report was that self-service capabilities were seen at higher levels of DevOps evolution, when companies’ DevOps practices are more mature. More evolved organizations are almost twice as likely as mid-level organizations to have high usage of internal platforms with self-service capabilities. Linked to findings in Puppet’s 2018 State of DevOps report, the DevOps evolution model consists of five stages of DevOps adoption which show critical practices at each stage and the “how” to get from one stage to the next.

“The underlying structural changes that have occurred to get to the highest level of DevOps evolution have reduced complexity in the technology stack, automated away a lot of toil, and reduced handoffs between teams — all while building a high degree of trust. These are all the necessary components for building an internal platform that can deliver higher value for the organization,” said Alanna Brown, Senior Director of Developer Relations and author of the State of DevOps report. “For organizations that are not ready to make the leap to a self-service platform approach, addressing change management processes within your company can also help eliminate toil and speed up software delivery.”

The report also revealed four common approaches to change management based on approval processes, degree of automation and risk mitigation techniques. The four approaches — operationally mature, engineering-driven, governance focused and ad hoc — result in different levels of effectiveness and different performance outcomes. Orthodox approvals make the change management process less efficient. Firms with high orthodox approvals are nine times more likely to have high levels of inefficiency than firms with low orthodox approvals. Teams that automate and practice advanced risk mitigation believe that their change management process reduces risk and downtime while facilitating the rate of change the business needs.

“This year we were able to gather data in-depth on how change management practices correlate with organizational success. The highlights for me were clear evidence that by using CI and automation as the primary change management mechanism outcomes are better, and effectiveness is higher,” said Michael Stahnke, Vice President, Platform, CircleCI. “Surprisingly, teams that have good outcomes are likely to not be satisfied with their change management process. Likely because they strive for continuous improvement — particularly when compared to organizations practicing a more traditional change management approach.”

Additional key findings of the survey, include:

63 percent of the respondents state their company has at least one self-service internal platform, and 60 percent have between two and four platforms.
Highly evolved DevOps firms are six times as likely to report high use of internal platforms as firms with a low-level of DevOps maturation.
Top challenges in creating an internal platform include: lack of time; lack of standardization; and lack of technical skills within the team.
Firms whose employees believe their change management is effective are three times more likely to automate testing and deployment than firms where confidence in change management performance is low.
Among respondents with full security integration, 45 percent can remediate critical vulnerabilities within a day. Just 25 percent of those with low security integration can remediate within a day.
For every person who completed the 2020 State of DevOps survey, $1 was donated to the World Health Organization COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. An additional $45,000, provided by our generous sponsors, was donated to several nonprofits helping our most vulnerable communities cope with the effects of COVID-19, including WHO COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, No Kid Hungry and Doctors Without Borders.

*Report Methodology
The survey collected data from technical professionals with a working knowledge of their IT operations and software delivery process. A third-party research firm, ONR, hosted the survey and conducted the data analysis. The resulting report was written by Puppet and CircleCI.

Supporting Quotes
“When it comes to change governance, larger organizations tend to be the ones to experience difficulties in succeeding with DevOps at scale. The findings of this year’s report highlights this pain point,” said RJ Jainendra, VP and GM, ITBM and DevOps at ServiceNow. “Part of the problem is that older change processes, which many larger organizations still use, have reinforced silos, leading to change evasion. By leveraging adaptive change, teams can eliminate toil, increase success, and in turn become high-performing. This can be achieved using a policy-based approach to automate the change process while ensuring the highest levels of governance and on-demand deployment.”

“Secure DevOps is a hot topic and it is exciting to see organizations are taking action,” said Omer Azaria, VP of Engineering at Sysdig. “From this year’s State of DevOps Report, we’ve discovered that highly productive DevOps teams automate security and compliance as part of their change management process. These are the teams that are able to both reduce security risk and accelerate application releases.”

About Puppet
Puppet makes infrastructure actionable, scalable and intelligent. From the data center to the cloud, Puppet helps enterprises modernize and manage their infrastructure to deliver innovation and efficiency through continuous automation. More than 40,000 organizations — including more than 80 percent of the Global 5000 — have benefited from Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to ensure business continuity, optimize costs, boost compliance and ensure security – all while accelerating the adoption of DevOps practices and delivery of self-service. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Puppet is a privately held company with offices in London, Belfast, Singapore and Sydney

Desktop as a service adoption lags behind on-premise VDI, but the popularity of cloud-hosted desktops is growing. Here’s a look at the top DaaS providers and their services.

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) hosted in the cloud and paid for as a subscription service, usually charged for by the seat. DaaS solutions use a multi-tenancy architecture where a single application instance is delivered to multiple users, or “tenants”. The third-party service provider assumes the responsibility for managing the desktop infrastructure. 

Features and benefits of DaaS

As with other cloud services, DaaS is an attractive solution for companies moving away from managing their own hardware either in an on-premise data center or cololocation. DaaS benefits can include easier patch management and software updates, faster migrations, quicker new user provisioning, better disaster planning and recovery, and improved application and data security. The costs of deploying and maintaining the hardware required to run each virtual desktop shifts from a capital expense (capex) to operational expense (opex). Users can also benefit from DaaS by being able to access corporate data and applications through a desktop experience on a wide range of either company-provided or BYOD devices using a network or internet connection.

SEE:  <strong>A desktop virtualization primer</strong> (TechReupblic)

Despite its benefits, a 2018 Gartner survey found that DaaS adoption was still significantly lower than VDI adoption, especially among large enterprises. According to Gartner’s 2018 DaaS survey, 75% of vendors “had a customer with more than 1,000 users, with an average largest customer of 5,000 users.” In the same report however, Gartner also stated that their assumption from a 2016 DaaS report, that “By 2019, 50% of new VDI users will be deployed on DaaS platforms,” may yet prove correct as the deployment of DaaS solutions “cannibalize on-premises VDI at refresh.”

The DaaS market has definitely picked up additional momentum in 2019 with Microsoft expected to make their own DaaS solution, Windows Virtual Desktop, generally available as soon as September, Citrix Managed Desktops reaching general availability in August, and industry heavyweights like Dell and Microsoft announcing cloud and virtualization partnerships focused around VMware.

Top DaaS providers

Here’s a look at many of the major players in the desktop as a service market and the services they offer. The service providers are listed in alphabetical order by company name. The name of each DaaS provider’s virtual desktop service name is listed after the company name. A full breakdown of each DaaS provider’s virtual desktop service is located below the list.

• Amazon Web Services – WorkSpaces
  
• Citrix – Managed Desktops
  
• Cloudalize – Desktop-as-a-Service
  
• dinCloud – dinWorkspace
  
• Evolve IP
  
• Microsoft – Windows Virtual Desktop
  
• MTM Technologies – AnywhereApp
  
• VMware – Horizon Cloud
  

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AND DOWNLOADS

• Cloud computing policy (TechRepublic Premium)
• Cloud providers 2019: A buyer’s guide (free TechRepublic PDF)
• Everything as a Service: Why companies are making the switch to SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and more (TechRepublic Premium)
  
• Vendor comparison: Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud (TechRepublic Premium)
• VDI vs. DaaS: What is the difference, and which is best for your business’ virtualization needs? (TechRepublic)
  
• Virtualization policy (TechRepublic Premium)
• What is cloud computing? (Free TechRepublic PDF)
• BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) Policy (TechRepublic Premium)
• Home usage of company-owned equipment policy (TechRepublic Premium)
• Cloud migration decision tool (TechRepublic Premium)
• Remote access policy (TechRepublic Premium)
• How to build a successful career as a cloud engineer (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Amazon Web Services – WorkSpaces

PUblic cloud compatibility: Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Minimum term: <1 month
Minimum seats: 1
Pricing: Monthly or hourly; dependent on geographic region

Amazon launched Workspaces, their proprietary cloud desktop service, in 2013 and in 2016 they announced hourly billing for WorkSpaces desktops. Customers can provision either Linux or Windows desktops on a wide variety of virtual hardware and storage configurations. If deploying Windows desktops, companies can use their own Windows 7 and Windows 10 Desktop licenses or pay for them as part of the subscription.

Amazon offers a default set of applications with each WorkSpace depending on the operating system. Linux desktops include applications such as LibreOffice, Firefox, and Evolution mail. Windows 7 and 10 desktops include applications such as Internet Explorer 11, Firefox, and 7-Zip. Customers can also add various versions of Microsoft Office Professional for an additional cost or build their own custom images.

WorkSpaces supports customer’s on-premise Microsoft Active Directory (AD) for Group Policy management and end-user credentialing. Applications can be deployed to the virtual desktops via existing tools, and WorkSpaces allows customers to use their existing RADIUS server for multi-factor authentication (MFA). Users can access their WorkSpaces via a client application on a Windows or Mac computer, Google Chromebook, Apple iPad, Amazon Fire tablet, and Android tablet, or through either the Chrome or Firefox browsers. WorkSpaces supports encryption root volume and user volume encryption and does not store user data on the local device. Amazon WorkSpaces also provides multiple compliance options including, but not limited to HIPAA, PCI DSS and GDPR.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AND DOWNLOADS

• Amazon resource library on TechRepublic
• Amazon Web Services: A cheat sheet (TechRepublic)
• 5 best desktop cloud sync apps (TechRepublic)
• Cloud v. data center decision special report (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
• AWS re:Invent 2018: A guide for tech and business pros (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Citrix – Managed Desktops

www.citrix.com/products/citrix-managed-desktops/

Public cloud compatibility: Azure
Minimum term: 1 month
Minimum seats: 25
Pricing: Monthly or Term (1 to 5 years)

Longtime remote desktop, thin-client, and virtualization provider Citrix released its desktop as a service solution, Citrix Managed Desktops (CMD), to general availability in August 2019. The company already offered a from of DaaS through Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD), but this solution required companies to deal with multiple vendors. Citrix Managed Desktops is designed to be a simplified version of CVAD and a “turnkey service” where all costs are billed directly to Citrix.

CMD uses Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop to deliver virtual desktops hosted on Microsoft Azure IaaS (compute, storage, and networking) and managed by Citrix. Customers can provision a variety of Windows machines, including: Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows 10 EVD (Enterprise Virtual Desktops) Multi-Session, and Windows Server 2016 (with RDSH). The operating system and application licenses can be paid for through the Citrix subscription or customers can use their existing licenses through a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) program. CMD will offer a variety of AD authentication options and support domain-joined and non-domain-joined desktops.

Citrix offers monthly and term (1 to 5 years) pricing options for CMD. Customers can expect to pay about $30 per user per month for CMD for a minimum of 25 users. In a CMD presentation at their Synergy event in May 2019, Citrix broke down that ~$30 monthly price for Managed Desktops as follows:

• $16 (per user per month) for Citrix Managed Desktops
• $6.25 (per month) for Microsoft Licenses (not charged under BYOL)
• $5 (per user per month) minimum for Consumption Commitment (workload management)

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AND DOWNLOADS

• Citrix resource library on TechRepublic
• Citrix looks to cloud, security, analytics to power ‘future of work’ at Synergy (TechRepublic)
• Why remote work has grown by 159% since 2005 (TechRepublic)
• Why employees are sick of cities and want to work remotely (TechRepublic)

Cloudalize – Desktop-as-a-Service

Public cloud compatibility: N/A
Minimum term: 1 month
Minimum seats: 1
Pricing: Hourly or monthly

Belgium-based Cloudalize provides a DaaS solution for office and knowledge workers only in EMEA and one for power users (engineers, architects, etc.) globally. Subscriptions include the cost of operating system licenses, but customers will need their own application licenses. According to a 2018 Gartner report, the company “hosts its own data centers using both Citrix and proprietary infrastructures” and “all workspaces must run a Windows 10 experience on a Windows 2016 Server.” As of August 2019, prices for Cloudalize DaaS start $79 per month per desktop.

dinCloud – dinWorkspace

Public cloud compatibility: N/A
Minimum term: 1 month
Minimum seats: 5
Pricing: Monthl

dinCloud’s dinWorkspace DaaS solution allows customers to provision virtual desktops that are hosted on hardware in dinCloud’s US-based data centers. According to dinCloud, it’s data centers “maintain SOC 1 Type II, and SOC 2 Type II compliance, ISO 27001, NIST 800-53/FISMA, and PCI Compliance.” Customers can provision a variety of Windows and/or Linux desktops managed through Citrix-based, Microsoft-based, or proprietary tools

Public cloud compatibility: N/A
Minimum term: 12 months
Minimum seats: 25
Pricing:  Monthly

Cloud services company Evolve IP delivers its DaaS solution using VMware View and PC-over-IP (PCoIP). Evolve IP’s virtual Windows desktops can be accessed from a variety of end points, including Windows and Mac computers, thin clients, IOS, Android, ChromeOS devices or web browsers that support HTML5. Evolve IP supports both VMware and Citrix stacks and virtual machines are hosted in the company’s US-based data centers. As an Authorized Qualified Multitenant Hosting (QMTH) Partner with Microsoft, Evolve IP can support full versions of Office 365 and Exchange access. Evolve IP offers a range of compliance and security certifications, including SOC2, HIPAA, HITRUST CSF, and PCI DSS.

Microsoft – Windows Virtual Desktop

azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-desktop/

Cloud compatibility: Microsoft Azure
Minimum term: N/A
Minimum seats: N/A
Pricing: N/A

Officially unveiled at Microsoft Ignite 2018, Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) (formerly known as “Windows 10 Enterprise for Remote Sessions” and “Windows 10 Enterprise for Virtual Desktops”) allows companies to run Windows desktops hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. In August 2019, Microsoft indicated that WVD was “feature complete,” but had not announced a date for general availability (GA). A public preview of WVD has been available since March 2019. According to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, “this could happen before the end of September 2019.”

Using WVD, Customers can provision Windows 7 or 10 virtual machines running Office 365 ProPlus and third-party applications. After official support for Windows 7 ends in January 2020, companies will still be able to host Windows 7 VMs for three years without paying for Extended Security Updates. Companies using Remote Desktop Services (RDS) will also be able to migrate their existing Windows Server remote desktops and apps to Azure.

Companies with eligible Windows or Microsoft 365 licenses, get access to WVD machines by paying for the Azure compute, storage, and networking resources used to host each virtual machine. As of August 2019, Microsoft had released WVD preview pricing for different workload scenarios, but not specific per user per month prices.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AND DOWNLOADS

• Microsoft resource library on TechRepublic
• Windows Virtual Desktop service on Azure (TechRepublic)
• Microsoft Azure: A cheat sheet (TechRepublic)
• Putting Azure to work: Tips for IT pros (TechRepublic Premium)

MTM Technologies – AnywhereApp

anywhereapp.com

Cloud compatibility: AWS, Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink, Oracle
Minimum term: 12 months (36 months for best pricing)
Minimum seats:  50
Pricing:  Monthly

MTM Technologies is an IT services company that provides both technical consulting and infrastructure management in areas, such as cloud, virtualization, and data center design/management. In 2017, MTM launched AnywhereApp, a “workspace-as-a-service” solution that lets customers deploy Windows 7 or Windows 10 virtual desktops with support for a variety of mission-critical enterprise applications such as those from Jack Henry & Associates and OpenText, productivity software like Office 365 and Google G Suite, and cloud-based solutions from providers like Salesforce and Adobe. Hosting can be provided through a private cloud, on-premise data center, colocation facility, AWS, Azure, or CenturyLink. MTM can support a full range of virtualization stacks from Citrix VMware, and Microsoft. MTM can provide the software licenses for Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware products on a month-to-month basis, or clients can provide their own licensing if they use a stand alone environment. Users can access AnywhereApp virtual workspaces via a variety of end points, including Windows and Mac computers, iOS and Android devices, and thin clients from companies like IGEL and Dell. MTM has accreditation for both HIPAA and SOC2 Part 1 compliance.

VMware – Horizon Cloud

www.vmware.com/products/horizon-cloud-virtual-desktops

Cloud compatibility: IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure
Minimum term: 1 month
Minimum seats:  1
Pricing:  Monthly

VMware’s Horizon Cloud DaaS solution allows companies to provision Windows virtual desktops using either their existing Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure or a VMware-managed IBM Cloud infrastructure. VMware offers two types of Horizon Cloud subscriptions…”per named user” (for users who need dedicated virtual desktops) or “per concurrent connection” (for virtual desktops that will be shared by multiple users). Horizon Cloud with IBM Cloud customers purchase both the Horizon Cloud user license and capacity on IBM Cloud from VMware. Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure customers purchase the Horizon Cloud user license from VMware and buy the Microsoft Azure capacity from Microsoft.

Like Citrix, VMware is planning to support Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop. Unliked Citrix however, VMware has said it has no current plans to become a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and will therefore not resell Microsoft licensing or Microsoft Azure capacity. Customers will need to buy their own Microsoft software licenses and Azure capacity.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AND DOWNLOADS

• VMware resource library on TechRepublic
• VMware vSphere: Cheat sheet (TechRepublic)
• VMware NSX: Cheat sheet (TechRepublic)
• VMware’s Pivotal purchase looks toward a containerized, not virtualized, future (TechRepublic)
• How to regenerate certificates on VMware host servers (TechRepublic)

Pivotal Application Service for Kubernetes: Dropping the VMware Requirement

Pivotal’s alpha release of the Pivotal Application Service (PAS) for Kubernetes shipped with a dependency on VMware infrastructure—a deliberate shortcut to accelerate time-to-market. According to Ian Andrews, Pivotal’s senior vice president of products, that dependency will not survive into the generally available release.

“The only reason the alpha was tied to a number of components was to bring it to market quickly,” Andrews told The Register during the Cloud Foundry Summit in The Hague, Netherlands.

PAS is one of several certified distributions of the open-source Cloud Foundry platform. At the time of the interview (September 2019), no general availability date had been announced for PAS on Kubernetes. Andrews indicated that Pivotal planned at least two more preview releases before year-end: one at the SpringOne Platform conference in October and another toward the end of 2019.

Investor Pressure vs. Real-World Kubernetes Adoption

Pivotal faced significant investor pressure to accelerate its Kubernetes strategy, with critics arguing the company was falling behind the broader ecosystem. Andrews pushed back on the urgency, drawing a distinction between market narrative and actual production adoption.

“The urgency was more around understanding the long-term vision than an immediate need,” he said. “We’re still very early. Everybody is talking about K8s all the time, but if you look at who is actually using it in production, the list is much shorter. Our technology stack works incredibly well—we have customers with over 100,000 containers running on the current platform. If we forecast out three to five years, though, it seems clear that Kubernetes is going to be a de facto component in the architecture.”

Kubernetes as a Universal Infrastructure API

Andrews articulated a longer-term architectural view: Kubernetes will eventually recede into the infrastructure layer itself, replacing the distinct conceptual separation between VMs, storage, networking, and an orchestration tier sitting above them.

“In the future, Kubernetes will exist as an infrastructure API almost universally,” he said. “VMware has introduced Project Pacific. Now you have a consistent way to provision resources and infrastructure, do health management, updates, and scheduling. The operational complexity of the landscape goes way down.”

Project Pacific, announced at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, integrates Kubernetes directly into vSphere. Andrews framed it as an early signal of a broader trend: “Today we think about VM hosts, storage, networking, and then Kubernetes as a thing that deploys on top of that. Potentially that becomes the only API that you see.”

The VMware Acquisition and the Multicloud Thesis

At the time of the interview, Pivotal was in the process of being acquired by VMware—notable given that both companies were already under common Dell ownership. Andrews used the opportunity to explain how Pivotal’s culture had historically differed from VMware’s, and why the two companies had converged.

“When Pivotal was created in 2012, both EMC and VMware were really trying to figure out their next chapter. VMware had built a franchise inside the data centre, but the public cloud story was very uncertain. For a time they were fighting against it. For the team at Pivotal, it was clear that most of the world would end up with some on-premises, some public cloud, maybe multiple public clouds—but we didn’t have an invested franchise we were attempting to protect.”

He noted that a similar dynamic played out at the container layer: “First VMware was defensive, and this is now a core part of their strategy. Over the last year we’ve aligned on the way we see the world. It’s multi-cloud, it’s container-centric. That opened the opportunity to come back as one company.”

Spring Framework Integration and Reactive Programming

Pivotal is also the steward of the Spring Framework, one of the most widely used Java application frameworks. Andrews acknowledged that PAS includes some Spring-specific integrations—primarily around distributed tracing and metrics collection—but emphasized that the deeper investment has been at the architectural level.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work in Spring to add support for reactive programming, that historically Java was very poor at,” he said. “That’s allowed us to start thinking about real-time stream processing with Kafka. If you compare the number of developers writing for Spring to the number of Pivotal customers, the first far outstrips the second. But if you choose to deploy on our platform, there’s a simplification.”

Competing on Multicloud Portability Against Hyperscaler Lock-In

Removing the VMware dependency from PAS for Kubernetes means the platform will be deployable on any conformant Kubernetes environment—including Amazon EKS, Google GKE, and Microsoft AKS. Each of those hyperscalers also offers its own managed application services, creating an obvious competitive tension.

Andrews argued that Pivotal’s multicloud portability is a differentiator the hyperscalers structurally cannot match. “We have great relationships with Microsoft, we’ve done a lot of engineering work with Google, we have lots of customers running on Amazon—but they also have products that sit in our space. Our ability to give customers a way to migrate between clouds is antithetical to their approach, which is ‘Get the workload on our cloud and lock it in there forever.'”

The Decline of Imperative Automation Tools

Andrews offered a pointed view on the future of traditional configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, and OpsWare—the last of which was where he began his career.

“The model we took [at OpsWare] was: whatever the human had been doing before, we’re going to put that in a script, they’ll be an agent, and we can execute those tasks,” he explained. “If you look at the state of the art today, there is no human building little command scripts that say, ‘When the container fails, respawn another container on a different host.’ It’s built into the system.”

The shift, in his view, is from imperative scripting to declarative intent: operators specify the desired state—for example, “always run three replicas of this container on separate hosts”—and the platform enforces it continuously, without human intervention for routine operations.

“It’s a different model of automation that is necessary for the current scale of operation. We’re now at a scale that is too massive for humans to touch. The paradigm that Puppet, Chef, or OpsWare represents is just completely ineffective,” said Andrews.

Key Takeaways for DevOps Engineers

• PAS for Kubernetes was in alpha at the time of this interview, with the VMware dependency flagged as a temporary shortcut—not an architectural requirement.
• Kubernetes as infrastructure API: The longer-term vision is that Kubernetes (or its successor) becomes the single control plane for compute, storage, and networking, reducing operational complexity.
• Multicloud portability remains Pivotal’s/Cloud Foundry’s core competitive differentiator against hyperscaler-native platforms.
• Reactive Spring and Kafka integration reflects a shift toward event-driven, stream-processing architectures in enterprise Java.
• Declarative over imperative automation: At cloud-native scale, desired-state systems supplant script-based configuration management tools.

This article is based on an interview originally published by The Register in September 2019. It reflects the state of Pivotal, VMware, and the Kubernetes ecosystem at that time. Significant changes have occurred since, including the completion of the VMware acquisition of Pivotal and subsequent portfolio changes.

Overview

OPAQ Networks, a cloud-based network security provider, and Ingram Micro, a global technology distribution and supply chain services company, announced a global distribution agreement to make the OPAQ cloud platform available through Ingram Micro’s extensive channel network. The deal gives resellers and managed service providers a straightforward path to offering enterprise-grade network security-as-a-service (NaaS) without requiring their customers to build or maintain on-premises security infrastructure.

What the Agreement Covers

Under the terms of the agreement, both Ingram Micro and its subsidiary Cloud Harmonics will distribute the OPAQ cloud platform to their global network of channel partners. This includes:

• Value-Added Resellers (VARs) looking to add a differentiated security offering to their portfolio
• Managed Service Providers (MSPs) seeking scalable, centrally managed security services
• Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) that need a multi-tenant platform to serve multiple customer environments from a single console

What Is the OPAQ Cloud Platform?

OPAQ’s platform is designed to deliver network security as a fully managed cloud service, removing the burden of acquiring, staffing, and operating best-of-breed security tools in-house. Key characteristics of the platform include:

• Broad coverage: Protects on-premises and off-premises endpoints, mobile devices, IoT assets, multi-cloud environments, branch offices, and legacy systems.
• Single management console: Solution providers can centrally manage all customer security policies and telemetry from one cloud-based interface, reducing operational complexity.
• Security-as-a-service delivery: Rather than selling security appliances or perpetual licenses, channel partners can deliver recurring, subscription-based security services.
• Scalable architecture: The platform is positioned for both small and large organizations, with the stated goal of delivering Fortune 100-grade capabilities at scale.

OPAQ holds patents on its core approach to cloud-delivered network security, and the company was recognized as one of CRN’s 2019 Emerging Vendors at the time of this announcement.

Why This Matters for MSPs and MSSPs

One of the persistent challenges for small and mid-sized managed service providers is the cost and complexity of assembling an enterprise-grade security stack. Acquiring individual best-of-breed tools—next-generation firewalls, secure web gateways, DNS filtering, endpoint detection—and integrating them requires significant capital investment and specialized staff.

A cloud-native NaaS model like OPAQ’s shifts that burden away from the individual MSP. Instead of building and maintaining the underlying security infrastructure, partners consume it as a service and focus on delivering outcomes to their end customers. The Ingram Micro distribution agreement dramatically expands OPAQ’s reach by making this model immediately accessible to service providers in major global markets through a distributor they already work with.

Quotes from Key Stakeholders

Eric Kohl, Vice President of Security, Ingram Micro:

“OPAQ expands our solutions portfolio, providing our channel partners with an enterprise-grade security solution that is consumed as a service, and extends from the core to the edge. Today’s solution providers and MSPs demand easy-to-use and effective tools to secure their customers’ networks. We are pleased to bring OPAQ to market with Cloud Harmonics to bring new and emerging security technologies to our channel partners.”

Glenn C. Hazard, Chairman & CEO, OPAQ:

“Ingram Micro’s global footprint and deep resources are making the OPAQ Cloud accessible overnight to service providers in the world’s top markets. This strategic alliance gives Ingram Micro solution providers access to a fully integrated security-as-a-service platform designed to deliver enterprise-grade protection for any size customer without investing in security infrastructure. With the OPAQ cloud platform, solution providers can deliver high-demand, differentiated services and accelerate revenue growth.”

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Infrastructure Teams

• Cloud-delivered network security is increasingly viable for organizations that lack the in-house resources to operate complex security stacks.
• Distribution agreements like this one accelerate adoption by embedding new security platforms into existing procurement and channel workflows.
• The MSP and MSSP channel is a key delivery vehicle for security-as-a-service, especially for mid-market and SMB organizations that rely on managed providers rather than dedicated internal security teams.
• Multi-cloud and hybrid environments with IoT and legacy systems are among the most difficult to secure consistently—platforms that claim unified coverage across all of these surfaces warrant careful evaluation during proof-of-concept testing.

What Is Service Level Management Software?

Service Level Management software provides the tooling required to create and manage SLAs, operational-level agreements (OLAs), and underpinning contracts (UCs). Core capabilities typically include:

• SLA definition, tracking, and alerting
• Real-time dashboards showing service performance against agreed targets
• Escalation workflows triggered when thresholds are breached
• Reporting for stakeholder communication and compliance evidence
• Integration with ITSM platforms, monitoring tools, and CMDB systems

SLM software is a formal discipline within the ITIL service management framework, making it a standard component of enterprise IT service desks and managed service provider (MSP) platforms.

Key Vendors in the SLM Software Market

The market includes a mix of broad ITSM platform vendors that embed SLM capabilities and specialist tools focused on SLA and service desk management. Vendors commonly cited in market analyses include:

• ServiceNow – Enterprise ITSM platform with deep SLA management, workflow automation, and AI-assisted service operations.
• Micro Focus – Provides ITSM and IT operations management tooling oriented toward large enterprise environments.
• SysAid – Mid-market IT service desk platform with built-in SLA tracking and automation.
• Ivanti – Offers ITSM solutions with SLM capabilities, targeting both enterprise and mid-size organizations.
• Alemba – ITIL-aligned service management platform with strong SLA management features.
• Marval – Service management software focused on ITIL compliance and SLA monitoring.
• Interlink Software – Focuses on IT operations and service management integration.
• PhaseWare – Customer support and SLA management platform primarily for software vendors.
• NetHelpDesk – Help desk and ITSM tool with SLA configuration for MSPs and internal IT teams.
• SMART Service Desk – Cloud and on-premise ITSM solution with SLA tracking.
• Autotask (now part of Datto) – PSA platform popular among MSPs, with SLA and contract management.
• bpm’online (now Creatio) – Low-code CRM and service management platform with SLA support.

The competitive landscape ranges from large-scale enterprise platforms to focused MSP tooling, which means organizations need to evaluate vendors against their scale, integration requirements, and ITIL maturity.

Deployment Models: Cloud-Based vs. On-Premise

SLM software is available in two primary deployment models, each with distinct trade-offs:

Cloud-Based SLM

Cloud-hosted SLM platforms have gained adoption as organizations prioritize lower infrastructure overhead and faster time-to-value. Key advantages include:

• No hardware provisioning or maintenance burden on the IT team
• Subscription pricing that scales with usage or seat count
• Automatic updates and feature rollouts from the vendor
• Accessibility for distributed or remote teams

On-Premise SLM

On-premise deployments remain relevant for organizations with strict data residency requirements, complex integrations with internal systems, or regulatory constraints that limit use of public cloud services. Trade-offs include higher initial capital expenditure and ongoing maintenance responsibility.

Market Segmentation by Region

SLM software adoption is global, with demand driven by the growth of IT service operations, managed service providers, and digital transformation initiatives. Regional segments typically analyzed in market research include:

• North America (United States, Canada, Mexico) – Largest market by revenue, driven by mature enterprise IT spending and a large MSP ecosystem.
• Europe (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and others) – Strong ITIL adoption and regulatory drivers such as GDPR influence SLM tool selection.
• Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, India, South Korea, ASEAN, and others) – Fast-growing region as organizations in these markets invest in IT service operations maturity.
• Middle East and Africa (GCC, UAE, Turkey, South Africa, and others) – Emerging adoption, particularly in government and financial services sectors.
• Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and others) – Growing MSP and enterprise IT services markets driving incremental demand.

Factors Driving SLM Software Adoption

Several operational and strategic trends are contributing to sustained interest in SLM tooling:

• ITIL and service management frameworks – SLM is a defined process in ITIL 4, meaning organizations pursuing service management maturity need formal SLM capabilities.
• Growth of managed service providers – MSPs rely on SLA tracking and reporting as core contractual obligations to their clients.
• Hybrid cloud complexity – Managing service levels across on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud environments requires tooling that can aggregate data from multiple sources.
• Customer experience focus – Internal IT teams and external service providers face greater scrutiny on service quality, driving the need for measurable commitments and transparent reporting.
• Automation and AI integration – Modern SLM platforms increasingly incorporate machine learning to predict SLA breaches before they occur and suggest remediation actions.

Key Evaluation Criteria When Selecting SLM Software

When assessing SLM platforms, IT operations and service management teams should consider:

• Integration depth – Does the platform connect to your existing monitoring, CMDB, ticketing, and communication tools?
• SLA flexibility – Can you model complex, multi-tiered SLAs including nested OLAs and customer-specific exceptions?
• Reporting and audit trails – Does the platform produce defensible, exportable reports that satisfy contractual and regulatory requirements?
• Escalation automation – Are breach notifications and escalation workflows configurable without custom code?
• Scalability – Can the platform handle your current ticket volume and scale as the organization grows?
• Deployment model – Cloud, on-premise, or hybrid, depending on your security and compliance constraints.
• Total cost of ownership – Licensing, implementation, integration, and ongoing administration costs.

Summary

Service Level Management software occupies an important role in mature IT service operations, providing the structure needed to define commitments, measure performance, and demonstrate accountability to stakeholders. The vendor landscape spans large ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow through to focused MSP tools like Autotask. Deployment choice between cloud and on-premise remains a meaningful decision driven by compliance needs, integration complexity, and operational preference. As ITIL adoption continues to spread and hybrid cloud environments add service delivery complexity, the operational case for dedicated SLM tooling remains strong.

Dizzion Extends Its End User Cloud Platform to VMware Cloud on AWS

Denver-based End User Cloud (EUC) provider Dizzion announced in August 2019 the availability of a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution specifically designed for customers running VMware Cloud on AWS. The launch extended Dizzion’s existing End User Cloud Platform to a new delivery model, targeting organizations that need secure, scalable virtual desktops for geographically distributed teams.

The offering is positioned around a core challenge many enterprises face: giving workers reliable, secure access to applications and data from any device, in any location, without requiring organizations to manage on-premises VDI infrastructure themselves.

What Dizzion’s DaaS Solution Delivers

Dizzion’s platform is built for organizations in regulated industries where security and compliance are non-negotiable. Key capabilities included in the offering are:

• Compliance coverage: Solutions are designed to meet HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC requirements, making them relevant to healthcare, financial services, and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors.
• COSMOS analytics: Dizzion’s proprietary COSMOS platform provides business analytics, user experience insights, automated provisioning, and orchestration capabilities, giving IT teams visibility into how virtual desktop environments are being used and performing.
• Device and location agnosticism: End users can access their virtual desktops from any endpoint device, removing the dependency on corporate-managed hardware.
• Elastic scaling: Delivered on top of VMware Cloud on AWS, the solution inherits the elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure, allowing organizations to scale desktop capacity in line with business demand.

How VMware Cloud on AWS Enables the Integration

VMware Cloud on AWS combines VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) stack — including vSphere, VMware vSAN, and VMware NSX — with elastic, bare-metal infrastructure from Amazon Web Services. It is delivered, sold, and supported by VMware and its channel partners as an on-demand service.

A key architectural advantage of the platform for technology partners like Dizzion is operational consistency: if a partner solution already runs in an on-premises VMware vSphere environment, it can be deployed on VMware Cloud on AWS without re-engineering. This significantly reduces the time and cost required for partners to bring validated solutions to the VMware Cloud on AWS marketplace.

Jim Aluotto, Senior Director of Americas Cloud Provider Business at VMware, commented on the partnership:

“We believe that Dizzion’s solution will bring additional value to the VMware Cloud on AWS marketplace and ecosystem, by enabling IT teams to reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and create operational consistency across cloud environments.”

Jim Aluotto, Senior Director, Americas Cloud Provider Business, VMware

Real-World Use Case: Omaha Steaks

Omaha Steaks International was cited as an early customer using Dizzion’s platform to modernize its customer engagement center. Nate Rempe, Vice President and CIO at Omaha Steaks, explained the business driver:

“Dizzion’s solution provides the elasticity our business requires and delivers a reliable, fast, secure, and cost effective computing environment for our agents.”

Nate Rempe, VP and CIO, Omaha Steaks International, Inc.

Contact center and BPO environments are a natural fit for DaaS because agent workforces are frequently distributed, seasonal scaling requirements are significant, and compliance obligations around customer data handling are strict.

Why DaaS on VMware Cloud on AWS Matters for DevOps and IT Teams

For DevOps and infrastructure engineers, the Dizzion-VMware Cloud on AWS integration is significant for several reasons:

• Reduced operational overhead: Fully managed DaaS removes the burden of patching, upgrading, and maintaining VDI infrastructure, freeing engineering teams to focus on higher-value work.
• Consistent tooling across environments: VMware Cloud on AWS uses the same vSphere-based operational model as on-premises deployments, reducing the learning curve and enabling existing runbooks and automation to carry over.
• Elastic provisioning for variable workloads: Organizations with fluctuating workforce sizes — such as seasonal contact centers or project-based teams — can provision and de-provision desktop capacity programmatically rather than managing physical hardware lifecycles.
• Compliance by design: For teams supporting regulated workloads, inheriting HIPAA and PCI-aligned infrastructure reduces the scope of compliance audits and the effort required to document controls.

About Dizzion

Dizzion is a global provider of desktop virtualization and end user computing services, specializing in fully managed, high-performance virtual desktop environments for organizations in regulated industries including healthcare, financial services, and business process outsourcing. The company’s COSMOS platform differentiates it through analytics and observability tooling built natively into its EUC offering.

About VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Cloud on AWS is powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, the unified SDDC platform integrating vSphere, vSAN, and NSX. It enables organizations to run VMware workloads on AWS bare-metal infrastructure with a consistent operating model, supporting hybrid cloud strategies and workload mobility between on-premises and public cloud environments.

JEDI Contract Put on Hold

The U.S. Department of Defense’s $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract was placed on hold in mid-2019, following public statements from President Trump suggesting the bidding process may have favored Amazon Web Services. According to reporting by Politico at the time, the pause opened the door for rival bidders to reassert their positions. Oracle had been among the most vocal opponents of the contracting process, arguing publicly against Amazon’s perceived advantage. With Amazon’s frontrunner status now under scrutiny, Microsoft was seen as positioned to mount a stronger challenge for what would have been one of the largest U.S. government cloud contracts on record.

Azure Dedicated Host: Single-Tenant Physical Servers for Compliance

Azure Compute principal program manager Ziv Rafalovich announced the preview of Azure Dedicated Host, a service that deploys Windows and Linux virtual machines onto a single-tenant physical server. Unlike standard multi-tenant VM deployments, Dedicated Host gives organizations full visibility and control over the underlying hardware, which is particularly valuable for regulated industries that must demonstrate workload isolation for compliance audits.

Key features announced at the time included:

• Azure Hybrid Benefit extension: Customers with existing on-premises SQL Server and Windows Server licenses can apply Azure Hybrid Benefit to Dedicated Hosts, reducing overall hosting costs.
• Portal-based setup: Dedicated Hosts can be provisioned directly through the Azure portal without requiring additional tooling.
• Compliance-oriented design: The single-tenant model helps satisfy isolation requirements common in healthcare, finance, and government workloads.

Alongside the Dedicated Host announcement, the Azure Global team published new blueprint samples that include control mappings aligned to NIST SP 800-53 Revision 4. These blueprints cover policy areas such as account management, separation of duties, remote access controls, audit and review procedures, and denial-of-service protection — giving teams a head start on automating compliance enforcement within their Azure environments.

New Relic Adds Azure Database Integrations

The New Relic monitoring platform expanded its Azure integrations to cover three managed database services:

• Azure Database for MySQL
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL
• Azure Database for MariaDB

These integrations allow operators to consolidate telemetry from databases, containers, and servers into a single observability view. Within the New Relic One dashboard, teams can monitor all three database engines side by side, write custom NRQL queries against the collected data, and configure alert conditions based on performance thresholds. The additions reduce the operational overhead of switching between separate monitoring tools for different database engines running in Azure.

Azure Databricks Pre-Purchase Plan and Regional Expansion

Azure Databricks — already integrated with Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Machine Learning — introduced a pre-purchase pricing model effective August 6, 2019. Under this model:

• Customers commit to a one- to three-year term and receive up to a 37 percent discount compared to pay-as-you-go rates.
• Rather than paying for reserved capacity on an hourly basis, customers receive a pool of pre-purchased Databricks Units (DBUs) that can be consumed at any time during the commitment period, providing greater scheduling flexibility for batch and streaming workloads.

Simultaneously, Azure Databricks expanded its regional footprint to 26 regions with the addition of South Africa and South Korea, broadening availability for teams operating in those geographies.

New Developer Tools in Azure Cloud Shell

Azure Compute program manager Alfred Sin announced several additions to Azure Cloud Shell, the browser-based command-line environment that gives developers immediate access to Azure tooling without local installation. The new tools added in this update included:

• Puppet Bolt: An open-source, agentless task runner for automating ad-hoc workflows and orchestration tasks across nodes.
• HashiCorp Packer: A tool for automating the creation of machine images across multiple platforms from a single configuration source.
• Azure Functions Core Tools CLI: Enables local-style debugging of Azure Functions directly from Cloud Shell.

Incremental updates were also shipped to Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, and the Java Development Kit (JDK) bundled within Cloud Shell.

Pacemaker Support and RHEL High Availability in Azure Marketplace

Alfred Sin also highlighted the availability of Pacemaker, the open-source cluster resource manager, for managing high-availability compute clusters on Azure. For Linux workloads specifically, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Pay-As-You-Go images with the High Availability Add-On became available in Azure Marketplace, providing a flexible consumption model for HA-enabled RHEL deployments. A similar marketplace offering was announced for RHEL images pre-configured with SAP packages, addressing the needs of enterprise SAP on Azure deployments.

Summary

The first full week of August 2019 brought a broad set of Azure updates spanning government contracting, compliance infrastructure, observability integrations, analytics pricing, and developer tooling. The JEDI contract pause was the highest-profile news, but the Dedicated Host announcement and NIST blueprint samples were arguably more immediately actionable for enterprise DevOps and compliance teams building regulated workloads on Azure.

What Is Container as a Service (CaaS)?

CaaS is a cloud delivery model that abstracts container orchestration infrastructure — typically built on technologies such as Kubernetes or Docker Swarm — and exposes it as a managed service. Unlike Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), where teams provision and manage virtual machines, CaaS lets developers push container images and define scaling rules while the provider handles node provisioning, networking, health checks, and upgrades.

CaaS sits between IaaS and Platform as a Service (PaaS) in the cloud stack. It gives teams more control than a fully opinionated PaaS while removing the operational burden of self-managing a Kubernetes cluster at scale.

Core Benefits Driving CaaS Adoption

• Reduced operational overhead: Managed control planes, automated upgrades, and built-in monitoring reduce the Kubernetes expertise required on each engineering team.
• Portability: Container images are environment-agnostic, making it easier to move workloads between on-premises infrastructure and public clouds.
• Faster deployment cycles: Immutable container images and declarative configuration support CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows.
• Resource efficiency: Containers share the host OS kernel, achieving higher workload density than equivalent VM-based deployments.
• Scalability: Horizontal pod autoscaling and cluster autoscaling allow workloads to respond to traffic spikes without manual intervention.

Major CaaS Providers and Platforms

The CaaS market includes hyperscale public cloud providers, enterprise software vendors, and specialist container platform companies. Key players include:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS): Offers Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), along with AWS Fargate for serverless container execution.
• Microsoft Azure: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides managed Kubernetes with deep integration into Azure Active Directory, Azure Monitor, and Azure DevOps.
• Google Cloud: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is widely regarded as the most mature managed Kubernetes offering, given Google’s role in originating the Kubernetes project.
• VMware: VMware Tanzu provides enterprise Kubernetes across on-premises vSphere environments and public clouds, targeting organizations with existing VMware infrastructure.
• Cisco: Cisco’s container networking and AppDynamics observability tooling integrate with Kubernetes environments, and the company has invested in hybrid cloud container management capabilities.
• IBM: IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift (following IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat) are significant offerings in the enterprise CaaS space.
• Docker Inc: While Docker’s primary contribution is the container runtime and image format that underpins the entire ecosystem, Docker also offers Docker Hub and Docker Business for team-level container management.
• Mesosphere (now D2iQ): Provides enterprise Kubernetes management tooling focused on day-two operations such as upgrades, multi-cluster management, and policy enforcement.
• HPE: HPE Ezmeral Container Platform (now HPE Greenlake for Containers) targets enterprise on-premises and hybrid deployments.

Smaller and specialist providers such as Giant Swarm, ContainerShip, Joyent, CoreOS (now part of Red Hat), SaltStack (now part of VMware), DH2i, and Kyup have also contributed to the ecosystem, particularly in managed hosting and container networking niches.

Key Industry Verticals Adopting CaaS

CaaS adoption is not uniform across industries. The following verticals have been consistent early adopters:

• Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI): Strict regulatory requirements drive interest in reproducible, auditable deployments. Containers help BFSI organizations standardize environments and enforce security policies via admission controllers and image signing.
• Telecommunications: Network function virtualization (NFV) and the move toward cloud-native network functions (CNFs) make telcos a significant CaaS consumer, particularly for latency-sensitive edge workloads.
• Retail and e-commerce: Elastic scaling during peak demand periods (such as holiday sales events) is a primary driver. Containers allow retailers to scale microservices independently rather than scaling monolithic application tiers.
• Manufacturing: Industrial IoT edge deployments increasingly use lightweight container runtimes to run inference workloads and data-processing pipelines close to the factory floor.
• IT and Technology: Software-as-a-service vendors and internal platform engineering teams are the heaviest CaaS consumers, using managed Kubernetes to underpin multi-tenant product infrastructure.

CaaS Market Segmentation: What It Means for Platform Teams

Market analysts typically segment the CaaS market along two dimensions: deployment type and end-user application.

On the deployment side, the relevant distinctions for engineering teams are:

• Public cloud CaaS: Fully managed, consumption-billed services such as EKS, AKS, and GKE. Fastest time to productivity but limited control over the control plane.
• Private/on-premises CaaS: Platforms such as OpenShift and Tanzu deployed on owned infrastructure. Necessary when data residency, latency, or regulatory constraints prevent public cloud use.
• Hybrid and multi-cloud CaaS: Increasingly the default for large enterprises, using tools such as Anthos, Azure Arc, or Rancher to provide a consistent management layer across clusters running in different environments.

On the application side, CaaS is most commonly used to run workloads associated with microservices architectures — APIs, event-driven processing pipelines, batch jobs, and internal developer platforms — rather than legacy monolithic applications, which typically require re-architecture before they can take full advantage of container orchestration.

Competitive Dynamics: What Differentiates CaaS Platforms

For DevOps engineers evaluating CaaS platforms, the differentiating factors beyond raw Kubernetes conformance include:

• Control plane SLA and upgrade automation: Hyperscalers typically offer 99.9%+ uptime SLAs on the managed control plane and handle Kubernetes version upgrades with configurable maintenance windows.
• Networking and CNI integration: The choice of Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin and the depth of integration with the provider’s load balancing, firewall, and DNS services vary significantly across platforms.
• Security and compliance tooling: Features such as built-in image vulnerability scanning, pod security admission, secrets management integration (e.g., with HashiCorp Vault or cloud-native secret stores), and audit logging differ in maturity across providers.
• Ecosystem and marketplace: The availability of curated add-ons — service meshes, observability stacks, cost management tools — via a provider marketplace reduces the integration effort for platform teams.
• Developer experience: CLI tooling, local development integration (e.g., Docker Desktop, minikube, kind), and CI/CD pipeline integrations directly affect developer adoption velocity.

Geographic Distribution of CaaS Demand

CaaS demand is global, but adoption patterns reflect regional cloud maturity and regulatory environments. North America and Western Europe have the highest concentration of enterprise Kubernetes deployments. Asia-Pacific — particularly China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia — represents significant growth markets, driven by the expansion of domestic hyperscalers (Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Cloud) and rapid SaaS sector growth. Data sovereignty regulations in the EU (GDPR) and emerging regulations in other regions continue to influence how multi-national organizations architect their CaaS footprints.

Key Considerations for DevOps Teams Evaluating CaaS

• Total cost of ownership: Managed control planes carry a premium over self-managed clusters. Model your expected compute, networking egress, and support costs before committing to a platform.
• Lock-in risk: While Kubernetes itself is portable, heavy use of provider-specific load balancers, ingress controllers, and storage classes can increase migration friction. Prefer open standards where possible.
• Operational maturity required: Even fully managed CaaS still requires Kubernetes expertise for workload configuration, RBAC management, resource quota tuning, and incident response.
• Support for stateful workloads: If your use case involves databases or message brokers running in containers, evaluate the maturity of the platform’s persistent volume support and storage class offerings carefully.

Summary

The CaaS market reflects the broader industry shift toward cloud-native architectures. Managed Kubernetes from hyperscalers has lowered the barrier to container adoption, while enterprise platform vendors have extended CaaS capabilities to on-premises and hybrid environments. For DevOps engineers, the practical challenge is no longer whether to adopt containers, but how to select and operate a CaaS platform that matches your organization’s compliance requirements, operational maturity, and cost constraints — and how to build the internal engineering practices to use it effectively.