Has AWS Peaked?

There can be no real arguing against the fact that Amazon Web Services reigns supreme with regard to public cloud. Its recently announced quarterly results show that AWS is not only gaining revenue, but actually making a “small” surplus. OK, maybe not so small: a tad over half a billion dollars, compared to a $57 million loss for the same quarter in 2015. What …

Flip Side of the Coin: Automation Tools of the Trade

In my last post I started the discussion on the tools of the trade for automation and orchestration. The post mainly focused on Microsoft PowerShell as one of the primary tools of the trade when working within Microsoft, VMware and Citrix virtualization and orchestration solutions. One of the main reasons that I focused on Microsoft PowerShell. So why PowerShell? Quite simply it is a very powerful platform that has a very strong community to help support it and companies outside of Microsoft have invested a great deal of time and development to use this technology as one of the main administration and management platforms for working with VMware vSphere and Citrix Xen. For the sake of this discussion, I am going to refer to PowerShell as one side of the automation coin and now concentrate on the flip side of the automation coin.

A Look at Automation Tools of the Trade

A look at automation tools of the trade. In my last post, I spent a little time talking about the difference between automation, which is the automated task or scripted solution to perform a task, and orchestration, which is the complete process and then top it all off with how DevOps is a philosophy behind the orchestration. For this post I want to focus in on the some of the most common tools of the trade behind the automation and orchestration for the different types of environments.

Hoping for a More Open VMware

One of the things we associate with existing IT infrastructure vendors is their determination to go it alone for a major portion of their businesses. Vendor each believe that their solution is the best. They feel that integrating with competing solutions is unnecessary. Oracle and Microsoft were the most well-known examples, happily attracting users with a locked-in …