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Wednesday, December 14th, 2016
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| 1:00p | Kubernetes 1.5 Could Bring Pre-configured, Containerized Data to Bare Metal The real meaning of containerization in the data center — the trend that caught fire three years ago with the arrival of Docker — is the ability to deploy parts of workloads across a variety of servers, and scale those deployments up or down as necessary. This is different from firing up more virtual machines, with their built-in server operating systems and self-absorbed management consoles, and artificially balancing traffic loads among them. As the trend becomes more widespread among data centers in production, the focus is shifting from the containers themselves (e.g., Docker, CoreOS rkt) to the orchestration systems that maintain workload deployments across server clusters, and even between clouds. After a series of minor delays that have become commonplace in open source development, Kubernetes — the orchestration platform sponsored by Google, and based on Google’s own internal architecture — is declaring general release for version 1.5 this week. With it, the reasons for data center operators maintaining artificial boundaries between conventional, virtual machine-based workloads and newer, hyperscale, microservices-based workloads, may diminish yet again. At an industry conference Monday sponsored by CoreOS, a Google product manager made it official that intent-based configuration firm Datera has partnered with CoreOS, Google, and bare-metal server and switch maker Supermicro. Their partnership, at least as Google and Datera have put it, is intended to produce a standard around persistent data containers — the ability to deploy huge databases that maintain state (“stateful”), amid the seemingly chaotic environment of microservices, all within the same cloud. But Supermicro’s involvement implies a goal that looks a lot more like a physical product: namely, pre-configured hyperscale servers capable of hosting huge workloads at tremendous speeds. The management of those workloads would become significantly easier to accomplish with Kubernetes’ new deployment setup tool, called kubeadm (pronounced “koob-adam”) which premieres with version 1.5. A Datera company blog post published Tuesday explains the problem posed by typical microservices architectures, where small bits of data are replicated among thousands of containers simultaneously. It’s not an efficient system, and many organizations (for example, ClusterHQ) have been working to deliver alternatives. But Datera’s solution will have the backing of CoreOS, which produces the Tectonic platform — a commercial implementation of Kubernetes. “Datera has developed a new data architecture from the ground up with the core tenant to decouple application provisioning from physical infrastructure management,” the company writes. “Applications data should have zero knowledge of the underlying physical resources. It is built for highly distributed environments, can be deployed and managed as software storage and is tightly integrated with modern container orchestrators. . . through volume plug-ins.” Tectonic is already part of select Supermicro servers, delivered since the server maker first partnered with CoreOS in the spring of 2015. And Tectonic has the blessing of Google to back it up, since Google has been instrumental in the development of the plug-in architecture discussed in the blog post. All of this makes someone very familiar to Data Center Knowledge readers very happy indeed: Digital Realty. “I am a huge believer in containers,” announced Chris Sharp, Digital Realty’s CTO and senior vice president for server innovation, in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. “It really frees up the application lock-in that a lot of companies have been stifled by in the past. The admin of these containers, and the portability of those applications, is amazing. But one of the elements that’s overlooked is the interconnection between the two destinations. So even though your workload is containerized, and it can be ported between Amazon or Microsoft and your private cloud, the interconnections that a lot of people rely on are very prohibitive.” By Sharp’s measurement, the average lag time between the state of the art in microservices development, and their actual deployment in data centers, is still about two years. But he says he’s already faced customers who have colossal data containers, burgeoning on tens of terabytes in size, for whom connectivity has posed a major roadblock. Granted, Digital Realty’s Service Exchange, announced last September, is Sharp’s suggested remedy for the connectivity issue. But he’s looking forward to the possibility that a solution such as the one made feasible by Kubernetes 1.5 and this expanded partnership, could create more opportunities for customers to bring their workloads closer to DR’s points of presence. “If you’re moving a 50-terabyte workload that’s in a container across the Internet, that’s a month,” said Sharp. “That’s not very elastic. When you look at it as an aggregate, and you need to evolve and move those things around in the aggregate, is where you need high-throughput, low-latency connectivity.” |
| 2:00p | Docker to Donate Another Core Component to a Foundation In an announcement Wednesday morning, Docker Inc. — the company behind one of the most rapidly adopted software infrastructure components in history — said it will let go of a critical software component, called containerd (pronounced “container-dee”), donating it to an open source foundation yet to be determined. “Containerd is a daemon that runs on a single machine, that lets you create containers from that machine,” explained Patrick Chanezon, a member of Docker’s technical staff, in an interview with Data Center Knowledge. “Containers are based on isolation primitives from the underlying operating system. Linux has primitives that are called ‘namespaces’ and cgroups, that are used to create these containers.” A cgroup, or control group, is an artifice of the Linux operating system for staging resources within their own, private namespaces. It’s the root component of a container, and although Linux has made this feature available for years, it was Docker Inc.’s predecessor company that first had the epiphany of using this construct to stage workloads on cloud infrastructure. The component being donated to the community, containerd, is presently the part of Docker Engine that produces a container within such a control group, either to be deployed or stored in a registry, Chanezon explained. Back in the spring of 2015, the format for Docker containers and the runtime library inside of them, called runc, was donated to an open source organization now known as the Open Container Initiative (OCI). Docker Inc. acknowledged to Data Center Knowledge that this donation would make it feasible for other firms, including its own competitors, to produce OCI-compliant containers using their own engines. In the company’s discussion with us, David Messina, Docker’s vice president for enterprise marketing, said that’s fair, because the simple ability to produce an industry standard container is no longer a differentiating element of the platform. What’s more, he pointed out, containerd was already open source, stewarded by Docker Inc. but not owned by it. The donation to a foundation — which should take place during the first calendar quarter of next year, he said — will effectively cede stewardship to an independent entity. Runc stewardship was ceded to an entity of the Linux Foundation, though Messina made clear that his company is leaving its options open with respect to the maintainer of containerd’s new foundation. “The idea of containerd is that, if third-party technologies need a core container runtime, this is the perfect solution for them,” explained Messina, “in that it’s giving them exactly what they need, separate and distinct from all the other pieces of plumbing that they might not choose to use in their platform — which are effectively bundled in Docker Engine.” It’s this bundling to which Messina referred, which has fueled a storm cloud over his company this entire year. Last July, the company rolled out version 1.12 of its main Docker Engine platform, which for the first time was bundled with Docker Swarm, its container orchestration system. Open source advocates saw this as a potentially anti-competitive move, and a play against Kubernetes, the emerging leader in container orchestration which is stewarded by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (another entity of the Linux Foundation), and is championed by Google. The move led to a brief period of once-unthinkable speculation that some third party would take Docker’s open source code and produce a fork of Docker Engine, without Docker Swarm bundled with it. But even the storm around that discussion was squelched when contributors to Kubernetes, including Red Hat, began work on a stand-alone container engine of their own, called CRI-O. As this reporter first covered for the software developers’ publication The New Stack (to which he still regularly contributes), CRI-O is intended to serve as a free and open source container deployment mechanism (without the accompanying creation mechanism) for Kubernetes, substituting for Docker Engine or CoreOS rkt. That move was regarded by some as a way for Kubernetes to strike out on its own, Docker-free path. Yet Wednesday’s move by Docker Inc. may serve two purposes: One would be to render the creation of a stand-alone deployment mechanism for containers in Kubernetes both academic and moot at the same time. The other would be to appeal to open source developers who came to suspect Docker Inc.’s motives in bundling Docker Swarm, and in preparing to make similar moves with future versions of Docker Engine — reassuring them that it has no intent to stake any undue ownership claims now, on an open technology that it led the way in evangelizing. “We’re going to market with a great level of competition, and we’re excited by that,” said Messina. “I think it furthers innovation. Competing ideas are great for the market, and for user choice.” |
| 3:29p | CyrusOne Shares Just Spiked On Good News – Here’s Why It would not have been newsworthy during the first half of this year for Carrollton, Texas-based data center REIT CyrusOne (CONE) to post a 3.6 percent share price gain in a single trading session. It simply would have been chalked up as business as usual. On Tuesday, it was a welcome respite after many weeks of bearish trading. CyrusOne shares closed Monday at $44.78, and were up as high as $48.78 intraday, prior to closing at $46.56. Prior to the opening bell CyrusOne announced a leasing win in Texas, which appeared to be the reason behind the sharp move higher. However, good news hasn’t been a sufficient catalyst for data center REIT shares for quite some time. When Good News Doesn’t MatterIt has been rough sledding for REITs and data centers in particular for the past few months. In fact, as recently as two weeks ago, good news was ignored by investors. On Dec. 1, 2016 shares of CoreSite Realty sold off ~4 percent after announcing a 51 percent dividend increase. Seriously, that really happened. All REIT asset classes sold off heavily on December 1, on rising rate fears when money flowed out of the entire sector.
The exceptional good news for CoreSite shareholders was totally ignored. Last week an SEC filing revealed that CoreSite’s new CEO, Paul Szurek, bought 7,000 shares on the open market on December 5th at $68.92 per share. As of this writing CoreSite shares are now trading at $77.82 per share. Earlier this week Citi analysts upgraded CoreSite, Digital Realty, and DuPont Fabros from Neutral to Buy. In hindsight, the irrational CoreSite trading after announcing a huge dividend hike may have been the inflection point that signaled a near-term bottom for the entire data center sector. CyrusOne’s Good NewsData Canopy is a CyrusOne “ecosystem partner” that leases wholesale space and provides managed services to its own customers from locations in six US cities. On Tuesday, before the opening bell, the companies jointly announced that Data Canopy was providing “comprehensive disaster recovery services” for an unnamed $2 billion national insurance company at a CyrusOne data center facility in Austin, TX.
Source: Data Canopy facility footprint According to the joint release,
Data Canopy currently leases data center space in three facilities in Ashburn, VA owned by RagingWire, Zayo, and Equinix. Notably, this insurer has contracted for a 100 percent uptime SLA to ensure zero interruption for employees located across 48 states who work around the clock. No other lease terms were revealed in the announcement. CyrusOne also leases space to Data Canopy at its flagship 670,000 square foot Carrollton, TX campus north of Dallas. The Bigger PictureIt has been a bipolar year for shares of the six publicly traded data center REITs. Massive deployments by Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and other planet-scale cloud service providers have driven several consecutive quarters of record net absorption in many US Tier 1 data center markets. Read more: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last? During 2016, most data center REITs reported record leasing and booked-not-billed backlog, and analysts listened to management discuss large sales funnels and deal pipelines on quarterly earnings calls. These positive reports led to some irrational exuberance on the part of investors during the summer of 2016, driving up share prices to frothy FFO/AFFO multiples. Read more: Another Huge Quarter for Data Center REITs: What’s Next? Eventually, concerns regarding a rising interest rate environment began to chip away at the 50 percent average gains chalked up by data center REITs during the first half of the year.
Analysts and investors began to voice concerns regarding how long this leasing windfall could last, and wondering about what levels will actually become the “new normal” in various markets. CyrusOne – Specific Issues
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| 9:04p | Amazon Opens Data Centers to Boost U.K. Cloud Services (Bloomberg) — Amazon Web Services, the cloud-hosting arm of Amazon.com Inc., opened new data centers in the U.K. as it seeks to stay abreast of competitors in offering cloud computing services to government and health-care customers. The new data centers, announced in a statement on Wednesday, follow decisions by IBM and Microsoft Corp. in the past two months to expand their cloud computing infrastructure in the U.K. The U.K. data region, which comprises two zones, each consisting of multiple data centers, is the 16th Amazon Web Services operates worldwide and its third in Europe. A fourth in France has already been announced and will open next year. Governments are increasingly moving computing functions into the cloud. But they are often required for regulatory and security purposes to hold data within their national borders. The same applies for sensitive health-care information. Meeting these demands is one reason cloud providers are rushing to open more data centers around the globe. “This is a great enabler for data that has to remain in the U.K., like health-care,” Chris Hayman, who manages Amazon Web Services’ British government accounts, said in an interview. Liam Maxwell, the U.K.’s national technology adviser, said in a statement that the government had saved 3.5 billion pounds ($4.4 billion) so far by choosing to host data in the cloud rather than on its own servers. Financial-service firms are also often concerned with minimizing the time it takes to connect to trading venues, another reason to expand in the U.K., said Teresa Carlson, vice president for worldwide public sector operations for Amazon Web Services. “The U.K. is a really important part of the world, being a center of the financial industry,” she said. The decision to build new data centers in the U.K. predates the country’s June vote to leave the European Union, Carlson said. But giving customers the ability to store data in the U.K. has taken on increased importance since the Brexit vote as clients worry about whether British data privacy rules will diverge from European standards. “Now, whether the U.K. is in Europe or not, they have their own region,” she said. Amazon Web Services declined to specify exactly how many facilities it operates in the country, how many people will be employed or how much money it will invest. Karen Bradley, U.K. Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, said in a statement that Amazon’s action “is a strong endorsement of our approach to the digital economy” and “shows a clear confidence in the U.K. being open for business and one of the best places in the world for technology companies to invest in and grow.” |
| 9:49p | AWS Launches Managed Services  Brought to you by MSPmentor Managed services providers (MSP) today are still trying to get their brains around the implications of Amazon Web Services’ announcement that they now offer managed services. AWS Managed Services launched Monday and aims to provide a full suite of infrastructure operations management for users of its public cloud. Automated services offered include: change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, backup services and “full-lifecycle services to provision, run, and support” infrastructure.
“By implementing best practices to maintain your infrastructure, AWS Managed Services helps to reduce your operational overhead and risk,” the new product webpage states. “Our rigor and controls help to enforce your corporate and security infrastructure policies, and enable you to develop solutions and applications using your preferred development approach,” it continues. “AWS Managed Services improves agility, reduces cost, and unburdens you from infrastructure operations so you can direct resources toward differentiating your business.” Users can connect to the services via API from existing tools, or through the AWS Management Console. In a blog post announcing the launch, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote that the company has set up new training programs on business and technical essentials to help partners build practices “around AWS MS.” “I expect partners to help their customers connect their existing IT Service Management (ITSM) systems, processes, and tools to AWS MS, assist with the on-boarding process, and manage the migration of applications,” the blog states. “There are also opportunities for partners to use AWS MS to provide even better levels of support and service to customers.” The blog post also included the reaction of one AWS Premier Partner, expressing optimism about the move. “We see AWS Managed Services as a key solution in the AWS portfolio, designed to meet the need for a cost effective, highly controlled AWS environment, where the heavy lifting of management and control can be outsourced to AWS,” Tom Ray of Cloudreach is quoted as saying. “This will extend our relationship even further, as Cloudreach will help customers design, migrate to AWS Managed Services, plus provide application level support alongside AWS.” Amazon’s entry into managed services introduces a significant potential disruption of the MSP space. AWS is the largest player in public cloud by market share and channel firms have long speculated about the impact should major cloud vendors increasingly take do-it-yourself IT services directly to customers. Microsoft, IBM and Google are the next biggest players in cloud, and virtually all have begun flooding the market with cheap and innovative self-serve apps and tools for cloud computing. A recent CompTIA study found that managing the competitive implications of “cloud computing” was the number one concern keeping MSPs up at night. This article originally appeared here at MSPmentor. |
| 9:56p | Trump Tries to Soothe Tech Chiefs With Pledge He’s an Ally BLOOMBERG – Technology industry leaders including Facebook Inc.’s Sheryl Sandberg and Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos met with Donald Trump on Wednesday, seeking to persuade a man whose presidential bid many of them opposed to avoid policies they believe would hurt their companies. “I’m here to help you folks do well,” Trump told the executives as the meeting began on Wednesday. Trump has a prickly relationship with the industry. He differs with many tech CEOs on immigration, internet security and regulation and on government investment. This summer, more than 140 tech industry executives published an open letter denouncing his candidacy and declaring that he “would be a disaster for innovation.” Oracle Corp. co-CEO Safra Catz, who like most other CEOs at the Trump Tower meeting did not sign the letter, said that trade would be at the top of the agenda. Trump has promised to unwind the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement President Barack Obama negotiated with 11 other Pacific Rim nations. He’s also said he would seek to renegotiate the North America Free Trade Agreement. “This is a very important meeting,” Catz said before hand. “Better trade deals are tremendously important to us. We are net exporters. Over 60% of our sales are overseas. So better trade deals are very much in our interest.” Trump told the executives at the meeting that he would make “fair trade deals. We’re going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders.” The meeting also included Alphabet Inc.’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Intel Corp. CEO Brian Krzanich, Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella, Cisco Systems Inc. CEO Chuck Robbins, Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook, Palantir Technologies Inc. CEO Alex Karp and International Business Machines Corp. CEO Ginni Rometty. Rometty also serves on a panel of CEOs advising Trump on business and economic matters. Bezos is Amazon’s CEO; Sandberg is Facebook’s chief operating officer. Campaign DonationsEmployees of internet companies donated more than ten times as much money to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign than to Trump — $5.6 million compared with $54,472, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group that tracks money in politics. Before Wednesday’s meeting, some technologists debated whether invitees should even attend. A few top industry executives that were invited, including Uber Technologies Inc.’s Travis Kalanick and Airbnb Inc.’s Brian Chesky, didn’t go. Both companies said their CEOs had conflicting travel. Trump announced on Wednesday that Kalanick and Elon Musk would both join Rometty on his advisory panel, the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum. Despite any reservations, most corporate executives would jump at the chance to press their agendas with the new leader of the world’s largest economy. And there are areas of common ground. The largest U.S. technology companies hold hundreds of billions of dollars overseas and would like to bring that money back at a favorable tax rate. Trump has called for tax reform to allow such repatriation and has said revenue from the move could fund improvements to U.S. infrastructure. Trump noted that the U.S. stock market has enjoyed a “bounce” since his election — the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index was up about 5.7 percent since Nov. 8. ” “They’re all talking about the bounce so everybody in this room has to like me at least a little bit,” he said. Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Technology Association, said most of the disagreement between Trump and the tech industry has been over social issues rather than business. “Trump is in a transition from running for office to serving in office. He will want Apple and other major tech companies to succeed,” Shapiro said before the meeting. Trump’s three oldest children, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka, all participated in the meeting, as well as Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Trump has said that Donald Jr. and Eric will take over leadership of his business while he is president; their dual roles as influential advisers to their father has raised conflict-of-interest concerns. Trump sat at a long conference room table with Pence to his right, followed by Sandberg, Page and Bezos. To his immediate left sat Thiel, followed by Cook and Catz. Schmidt was among tech executives across the table. Trump thanked Thiel, perhaps his strongest supporter in Silicon Valley, for helping to organize the meeting, calling him “terrific and so outstanding.” Job MovesDuring his campaign, Trump criticized U.S. corporations for moving jobs to other countries, and since his election, he has threatened “consequences” for companies that send work offshore. Earlier in the year, he said that he’d aim to get Apple to make its products in the U.S. Apple has suppliers make most of its products in China; moving that work to the U.S. would likely increase the cost of iPhones and iPads. Some big technology companies made what appeared to be pre-emptive moves ahead of the meeting with Trump. IBM’s Rometty unveiled a plan to hire about 25,000 people in the U.S. over the next four years. Apple may back a $100 billion technology fund that aims to invest about half the money in the U.S. and has pledged to create 50,000 new domestic jobs. Hours before the meeting, Bezos announced Amazon’s first delivery of a consumer product by drone to a customer. The test was conducted in England because Amazon says the U.K.’s regulations are less restrictive. Trump has vowed to ease regulations across the government. |
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