July has been yet another productive month under the wave here at Tidal and in the cloud community at large; check it out!

Product News

• Tidal Tools v2.1.3 has recently been released at get.tidal.sh - download it today and get your cloud migration project cooking!

• You can now provide repository URLs and file paths to your source code during application interviews! This enhances your application inventory, flows through to your cloud readiness assessment reports and is included in your API endpoints. You can even filter applications by repository URLs within the search table: Which applications do I have in GitHub?

As always, we’re grateful for your product feedback and new feature ideas, so keep them coming at info@tidalcloud.com.

Hint: You can always see the latest improvements in the changelog.

TIDAL WEBINARS

Journey to the Cloud Series: Step 1 - Discovery

Aug 15, 2018 2:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)

This is the first of a series of short bi-weekly webinars that will walk you through the process and the activities needed to migrate successfully to the cloud - public or private. In this session, we’ll be covering data sources, discovery tools and methods for discovering and ingesting application data and identifying dependencies. Register now!

Upcoming Industry Events

1. O-Reilly Conferences: Velocity - At Velocity, systems and site reliability engineers, architects, and application developers learn to build and manage performant, distributed, resilient, and highly available websites and applications. Located in New York (Sep 30 - Oct 3, 2018), London (Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018), and San Jose (June 10 - 13, 2019).

2. REdeploy - REdeploy’s goal is to explore what it means to build solid, sustainable infrastructures. REdeploy was born from a passion for Resilience Engineering: the ability of a system to withstand changes in its environment and still function. The event takes place on aug 16th & 17th in San Francisco.

3. Think FaaS Live at ServerlessConf San Francisco - ServerlessConf is coming to San Francisco July 29-August 1 with Trek10 to lead workshops, run a sponsor booth, and much more. This year they’re also bringing their Think FaaS podcast to the event in live forum along with a variety of speakers.

Recent Cloud Conferences

Both the Microsoft Inspire and Google Next partner conferences just concluded and both were rich with announcements and new changes. We thought you might be interested in finding out what happened. Inspire sessions are here and Next sessions are here. You can also Watch the Google Next Keynote in Under 13 Minutes.

Cloud News

• Aliter Technologies makes Strategic Investment in Tidal - Aliter is recognizing the growth and demand for cloud migration services and is backing it up with an investment in Cloud migration experts, Tidal

• Organisations Continue to Hit Cost Pitfalls With Cloud Migration, says Rackspace - 40% of business have higher migration costs than expected, further emphasizing the importance of organization in the planning phase of a migration, proper vision and strategy definition, and employee acceptance driven by change management programs.

• Docker Container Adoption - Datadog notes that that the increasing rise of containerization shows no signs of slowing. By April 2018, 23.4% of Datadog customers had adopted Docker, and about 21% of all environment hosts now run Docker. Furthermore, docker usage rate are increasing with infrastructure size, and the average size of a Docker deployment has grown by 75% in a single year.

• Economics of ‘Serverless’ - BBVA examines serverless pricing from Amazon Web Services (AWS) compared with AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) under 4 use-case scenarios: a uniform rate of requests per second, a more humanized model, human users with localized traffic, and machine to machine-like service. General conclusions stress the importance of traffic distribution, traffic around the EC2/Lambda break-even point, cost savings of leveraging HTTP infrastructure to the cloud provider, and CPU throttling.

• DigitalOcean Quarterly Report on Developer Trends in the Cloud - DigitalOcean looks at the ever-shifting trends in the developer community and finds that: 49% of developers now use containers, serverless computing is still at an earlier stage of adoption, growth and development are what developers want most from their jobs, and bootcamp participants feel more prepared for the workforce than their college graduate counterparts.

• The Great Cloud Refactoring Debate - This blog examines how enterprises balance refactoring desires against time to value in cloud migrations. Even enterprises with a firm lift-and-shift migration strategy must allow for certain types of cloud native changes to applications moving out of a corporate data center, and business should develop a cultural principle around refactoring and modernization as a journey rather than a destination to avoid the woes of treating migration as a “one shot to cure all ills.”

• Digital Transformation for CFOs and Finance Departments - Cloud pricing, auditing concerns, and investment decisions related to digital transformation can be intimidating, and these decisions usually fall on the CFO. However, new digital transformation approaches should not be viewed as threatening, as their advantaged support virtually all the goals of the CFO.

• Survey Finds DevOps Playing Key Role in Cloud Migration - A survey of 450 C-level VP/director-level technology leaders found that lifting and shifting existing applications into the cloud is giving way to either refactoring or rewriting those applications to take advantage of cloud-native technologies. Most applications are not easily migrated, which makes reworking them for deployment in a cloud environment a high priority.

• New research Finds Enterprises are Own Worst Enemy in Cloud Adoption and People are Greatest Barrier to Success - A Skytap market study found that, despite the desire to modernize, the large majority of enterprise applications remain trapped on-premises, creating unexpected skills challenged aggravated by confusion about the best path to the cloud.

• Azure Storage Adds Static HTML Website Hosting - Microsoft’s Azure Storage service has added an option to host static websites comprised of not much more than HTML, JavaScript and other client-side goodies. The reason for Azure adding this service is to create a serverless Azure hosting option and therefore to offer a new way to build serverless web apps.

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Support Extended for Cloud - Microsoft is giving SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 deployments a new lease on life, provided they are migrated to the cloud. Businesses will have a new migration option sometime in the fourth quarter of 2018 when Microsoft is planning the general availability release of Azure SQL Database Managed Instance.

• Sunny Future for Cloud-Hosted AF Apps - The Air Force Portal at Hanscom Air Force Base has been hosted on the Amazon Web Service cloud since June 30. Farming this work out to cloud vendors has the potential to save costs and reduce infrastructure, power, and personnel requirements at DISA.

• Google’s Cloud Functions Serverless Platform is Now Generally Available - Cloud Functions, Google’s serverless platform that competes directly with AWS Lambda and Azure Functions, is now generally available. Google also announced its new Cloud Services platform for enterprises that want to run hybrid clouds.

• Google Cloud Case Study: Ocado - Ocado takes supermarket trips out of the equation by allowing shoppers to purchase items online through its web and mobile applications. The retailer saw improved operational efficiency and customer care with machine learning powered by Google Cloud Platform.

That is all for July 2018. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, please consider forwarding it and follow us on Twitter to stay up to date.

-Tidal
tidalcloud.com