Cloud Management Tools Still Elusive

Google’s Cloud team, this week, discussed multicloud integration with their own platform and AWS using Google Cloud Endpoints and AWS’ Lambda. The Cloud Endpoints let you develop open APIs, and you can then call those APIs up from Lambda. This may be the way forward for businesses eager to get their multiple public cloud providers integrated. We’re interested in the network dependency that’s now been introduced as the two providers connect. We’ll see what other integration or multicloud management tools come out as this trend grows.

On the topic of clouds working together, the theme of this week’s ONUG Spring 2017 conference was hybrid cloud. ONUG, the Open Networking User Group, concerns itself with developing and using the open technologies that can help businesses run. Group members decided on hybrid cloud because there’s still a lot missing from public cloud computing, like standard APIs, security, monitoring tools and IT skills. As many businesses have discovered, it’s no easy feat to extend on-premises infrastructure to the cloud for critical workloads.

Cloud infrastructure management is emerging as a new class of products for enterprises trying to make cloud less complex. Cloud management runs the gamut from using legacy technology to manage a private cloud to third-party public cloud management tools. Then there’s that multicloud and hybrid cloud management challenges that businesses are encountering. Since those kind of cloud management tools aren’t exactly readily available, buyers should read the fine print carefully when looking at products that say they can manage all your cloud deployments.

Finally, here’s a network horror story to send you off into the weekend. One network engineer’s tiny code mistake knocked out mobile access to millions of people. The code error was compounded by other mistakes, some human-powered and some process-related. The lessons learned are particularly valuable: Take blame where it’s due, but do the fixing first, then the finger-pointing. Test planning and actual testing are essential. And one human error tip that we can all use: Don’t make the same mistake twice. There are even more “How I Broke My Network” stories from the Network Collective podcast.

Until next week, dot your t’s and cross your i’s.