Enterprise Cloud Services

Azure Compute Instances – Choose Wise, Choose Right

Bobby Varghese

Microsoft offers numerous options to choose from when it comes to selecting the best Azure compute instance for your workloads. Currently, there are 80 different instance types and we understand that choosing the best one can be overwhelming. In this article, we have listed various Azure compute instance types to help you select the one that best fits your workload size­.

Azure Compute Instances

Here’s an overview of available Azure Compute Instances:

A-series: used for general purposes, these instances provide consistent processor performance with a moderate amount of memory and disk capacity. However, additional processor cores and more network bandwidth can be added to some of these instances to compute-intensive tasks.

D-series: as compared to the A-series instances, these have more number of cores and provide more computing power and disk performance. Apart from this, they also provide temporary storage in the form of Solid State Drives (SSDs).

Dv2-series: using the same memory and disk configurations, these offer 35% more power than the D-series because of the use of newer processors that run in turbo mode.

DS-series, DSv2-series, FS-series and GS-series: These offer a powerful combination of faster CPUs, High Storage and Network Bandwidth for enterprise-grade applications. They also offer SSDs for caching and faster operations.

F-series: These VMs provide the same processor cores as the Dv2-series but what sets them apart is the per-hour operational cost of usage, which is usually lower in comparison.

G-series: offering the highest storage capacity, these usually run on servers having powerful Intel Xeon E5 V3 processors.

H-series: designed and optimized for high-performance computing (HPC) and networking, these instances can also run cluster applications, Modelling, and Simulations.

N-series: These VMs help to tackle the most demanding workloads by adding the processing capabilities of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs).

For more information, you can view the detailed specifications of various Azure Instances here.

 

 

 

If you are still baffled by the number of options and are unsure about which instance to choose for your enterprise, you can schedule a call with our Cloud experts by writing to us at info@sysfore.com or you can give us a call at +91-80-4110-5555.

 

 

Key Cloud trends to watch in 2017

Bobby Varghese

The cloud market continues to grow at an explosive rate, with an increasing number of enterprises adopting the trend to realize cost and scale efficiencies.

Here are some key Cloud trends to watch in 2017:

Big public cloud providers will enjoy a sharp increase in their revenues: The global public cloud market is growing at a CAGR of 22%. According to Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti, the majority share of this growth will come from the big cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM. According to the Synergy group, Amazon’s share of the market for IaaS and PaaS was 30% with 53% growth in the revenue year-on-year. Microsoft’s share was over 10% with 100% revenue growth.

PaaS will continue to drive the cloud market: VC firm North Bridge predicts that Platform-as-a-Service will see the greatest growth (33 percent CAGR) followed by Software-as-a -Service (19 percent) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (18 percent).

The public cloud services market will gain momentum: Given the time and costs involved in building private clouds, CIOs may find themselves switching to the public cloud. CIOs feel that they were spending a lot of time, energy, effort, and management bandwidth to create an infrastructure that already exists out there in a much better state and is evolving at a furious pace.

Big public cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft are opening new data centers and making concessions but they won’t be able to service every request. Thus, smaller players will enjoy the business in 2017.

Multi-cloud options may persist: In the coming years, the use of multi-cloud strategies will become common to avoid public cloud lock-in. Enterprises will continue to look for various cloud providers and will move towards selecting a model where they can combine services from multiple partners to reach the optimal level of efficiency.

“Belief that one cloud vendor can meet all needs is simply out of touch with reality and smacks of vendor hubris,” said Julia White, Corporate VP for Azure.

Enterprise applications to run on the public cloud: CIOs have become more comfortable in hosting critical software and business apps such as SAP on the public cloud. Bartoletti believes that as CIOs rely more heavily on public cloud providers, this trend will continue. “Enterprise are turning great ideas into software and insights faster and the cloud is the best place to get quick insights out of enterprise data,” Bartoletti says.

Private data centers will continue to exist: Though many enterprises are shifting to a public cloud model, a great majority of organizations will continue to favor both, data-center-based computing and the public cloud for legal and privacy reasons.

According to North Bridge’s survey done for 1,351 cloud companies, majority companies (47%) are straddling between the public and private cloud, 30% are strongly favoring the public cloud, and 23% are favoring the private cloud.

Cisco confirms discontinuation of its InterCloud services in March 2017

Bobby Varghese

Not long ago in 2014, Cisco had first introduced InterCloud and in the recent news, Cisco has confirmed that it will discontinue its Cisco InterCloud Services public cloud infrastructure on 31st March 2017. The reason behind this decision is the huge growth of the big cloud services providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM and other smaller public-cloud services.

Many of the hardware makers in the industry, including, Hewlett-Packard, Hewlett-Packard Enterprises have stepped down from being a public-cloud company and have discontinued their cloud services earlier this year. VMWare, which once viewed AWS as its rival for cloud workloads, has now agreed to partner with AWS and is still offering its vCloud Air hybrid-cloud service.

At the time of the launch, Cisco anticipated a total spend of $1 billion over the two years building “a network of clouds” and “a way to lower the total cost of cloud services ownership and pave the way for interoperable and highly secure public, private and hybrid clouds.” In March 2014, Cisco said that it will be the world’s largest global InterCloud and will be the first of its kind service in the field of cloud IT services.

Cisco wanted to build the product which would be “architected for Internet of everything” and had planned to do this with its partners, including Telstra (an Australian service provider), Allstream (a Canadian business communications provider), Canopy (a European Cloud company), Ingram Micro Inc. (a cloud services aggregator) and others.

Cisco, in a market analysis, predicted that 83% of all data-centre traffic will be based in the cloud. Public cloud services like AWS and Azure are continuously designing their data centres using some off-the-shelf components. Thus, Cisco faced pressure to enter the cloud market but successfully competing in the public-cloud market requires more than what many had predicted and hoped.

According to the Synergy group, AWS’s share of the market for IaaS and PaaS was 30% with 53% growth in the revenue year-on-year. Azure’s was over 10% with 100% revenue growth. Share of IBM was about 8%, Google cloud’s 5% and the remainder collectively by the other companies.