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Scott Riley, Director at Cloud Nexus, argues that creative agencies can still do more when it comes to environmental responsibility - and it means more than justmoving to the cloud and giving up the office.

Sustainability in business has been huge for a while now, but since COP26, its been thrust into the spotlight and actually become a deciding factor for some as to whether a work partnership can be formed.

Theres no denying that every business should be making sustainability a top priority in 2022, but its not uncommon to get it wrong believing that moving to the cloud and giving up the office outweigh the overall impact of everyday activities. From email marketing to digital advertising, the impact when added up can be significant.

Im not by any means suggesting that the UKs creative industries dont have a valuable impact on society - in fact quite the opposite.

According to The Guardian, they generate 36 billion for the economy, employ 1.5 million people and bring so much to the world, from design to theatre. Andin a post-pandemic era where having a digital presence has never been more important, they play a vital role in keeping businesses relevant and profitable.

But creative agencies in particularhave an opportunity and responsibility to shape the world and the health of the planet by becoming more aware of how their operations impact the planet, looking beyond cloud computing.

Sustainability conversations to date focus in on fast fashion, recycling and food waste, but less about our own personal computing habits, which are having more of an impact than people recognise.

Cloud computing has become mainstream in recent years and in the creative sector, it's seen as a big move towards more sustainable personal computing - much of the narrative is around how we can use cloud computing to minimise use of physical products.

But simply putting everything on the cloud and thinking weve ticked the sustainability box is not enough. There needs to be closer attention to our overall digital carbon footprint and how this can be reduced company-wide.

Theres no doubt about it, cloud computing does have environmental benefits; but like many things in life, the journey to sustainability is about understanding the true impact of your actions - the misuse of cloud computing could, in fact, push back your sustainability efforts.

Whilehugely beneficial, cloud computing doesnt automatically give a business a sustainability stamp.

Most businesses are taking a step in the right direction by migrating their data to the cloud, but often dont envisage where their data is really going. I dont want to be the one to tell you this, but its not actually floating around freely and without harm.

Even though businesses have got rid of their physical hard disks, their data is still stored in a physical location, only out of sight. These are called data centres, or often server farms.

As you can imagine, these centres take an enormous amount of power to run. Luckily, many data centres and cloud providers have begun using renewable energy to source their power, as well as using smart facilities that use free-air cooling methods and energy monitor systems for the devices within the data centres.

An effective way to ensure you are practicing true sustainability is to ensure your data centre has BREEAM certification, a sustainability assessment for projects, infrastructure, and buildings. Certification means they're not using dirty energy to store your data.

Whileits easy to lobby for billboards and prints to use recycled papers and non-toxic ink, the sustainability of online creativity is much harder to understand.

But its something that the creative sector needs to. Carbon footprints need to be measured effectively in order to make real strides towards sustainability. Research shows that the internet represents 4% of global emissions, and whilst that doesnt sound like much, its almost double the aviation industry.

Take online advertising. It's not just the advert itself which is racking up the carbon usage. The graphics that the consumer sees are made up of pixels, which needs a lot of data to run.

What's more, third-party programmes that track the uptake of the ad and collect the data of the consumer to create targeted profiles are often forgotten when it comes to sustainability tracking - but these kinds of outputs are what's dampening the creative sectors sustainability efforts.

Creative agencies should be conscious of choosing green hosts for websites and be more conscious of how much carbon is racked up through third-party programmes. It's worthwhile to get a true calculation of how much carbon you are producing as an individual or creative agency.

Whether its emails, social posts, landing pages, or impressions, using a carbon footprint calculator can give you a more accurate understanding of the impact of your campaigns.

Im sure Im not the only one who can admit that their inbox has been filled with unwanted emails in the past. The thing is, an email equates to roughly 4 grams of CO, with an average business user creating a carbon footprint of around 135kg just from sending, reading and storing emails. This raises the question - does that email really need to be sent?

OVO Energy research suggests that if every adult in the UK sent one less thank you email, it could save 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year. For perspective, thats the same as taking over 3,000 diesel cars off the road.

The problem is that communication between stakeholders is key. Its imperative to have that contact in order to produce the work, but if we are deeming means of communication as unsustainable, how do we proceed?

Its all about circumstance and seeing the bigger picture. The truth is, an SMS text generates significantly less CO than an email, a phonecallgeneratesonly slightly more than a text, while a video call produces more than any of the above.

Sustainability is about perspective, though. If you jump on a video call with a global client, with whom you generally communicate via email, youre of course going to be much more sustainable than flying to meet in person.

We have to think about what works within the context of our businesses to keep the creative sector thriving, but with a priority of sustainable practices. Awareness is key. If we know the impact of the tools we're using, we can be more conscious of how much they are utilised in creative practice.

Creative agencies have a reliance upon a vast range of tools and platforms to operate, from creating graphicsand writing copyto analytics reports and CRM tools. We've already raised that there is an environmental cost to tools needed in the creative sector, but are agencies using an unnecessary amount?

Research by the Winterberry Group shows that marketers on average use 12 different platforms regularly, with around 10% saying they often need 31 or more different tools, platforms or systems to be able to do their job. Marketing is just one industry within the creative sector - the number of tools used across the industry is unimaginable.

The key to maintaining control with the amount of tool usage and its impact on sustainability is to try and opt for tools and platforms that offer integrated services and packages that give you multiple capabilities under one umbrella.

As a simple example, Office 365 offers built-in, collaborative features under one integrated experience. Being able to access apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as Online File Sharing and Video Conferencing allows you to use multiple different tools from one overriding system, meaning youre generating less power to run more of the tools you need.

Do you really need to be storing files in Google, Box, Dropbox, Sharefile and Microsoft? Allthose files being actively available online needs servers and datacentres, and that all adds the problem.

The fact the creative sector is looking for new ways to continue their professional practice in a more sustainable way is a step in the right direction. But a lot of improvements need to be made.

Cloud computing is a great step towards sustainability, but you still must be conscious of how it works, and mindful it does not grant you sustainable immunity.

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Sustainability in the creative sector goes far beyond cloud computing - Prolific North

Data-Protection-as-a-Service startup Calamu has just gained funding to develop double-encrypted, multi-site, multi-cloud, fragmented data protection technology that is self-healing, defeats ransomware, and meets compliance rules.

The company was started in 2019 by CEO Paul Lewis, incorporated in 2020, and took in two rounds of seed funding in 2021; $2.4m in April and an undisclosed amount from Dell Technologies Capital in June. It has just raised $16.5m in an A-round led by Insight Partners with Dell Technologies Capital putting in money again. Total funding is now more than $18.9m.

Lewiss funding announcement statement said: With billions spent on cyber resilience, the frequency of cyber attacks continues to escalate. Instead of trying to prevent an attack, Calamu is capable of absorbing an attack without impacting the business.

How does this Calamu Protect technology work?

A file or other piece of data to be protected is first possibly compressed and then encrypted. Then it is split into redundant fragments and the fragments re-encrypted using different keys. The fragments are then scattered across multiple geo-dispersed sites, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises storage (NAS and drives), as a Calamu diagram indicates:

The string of sites is called a data harbour and forms a redundant virtual storage environment.

The result is that if any one sites copy of the data is accessed, all you as a malware actor or hacker get is a double-encrypted fragment of data with no key and no indication where the rest of the data fragments are located. Its a string of meaningless bytes.

If this particular cloud or on-premises site goes down or is corrupted, Calamu Protects monitoring function will detect it, rebuild the list data from the other fragments in the other sites then store the rebuilt encrypted fragment in another location. In other words it is self-healing.

Because the data in its entirety is not stored in any one location and none of the storing locations can disclose the actual data they are storing, this technology can meet certain compliance regulations concerning data jurisdictions.

Lewis said: Calamu enables data to be stored with jurisdiction-independence. This intrinsically provides compliance with regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA, and opens the door for many businesses who wish to migrate to the cloud but are fearful of non-compliance.

Calamu Protect writes and reads data to the scattered locations using parallel engines so that access time for the data is typically faster than downloading the equivalent file in its entirety from any one single public cloud location; up to 30 per cent faster.

Users access a Calamu Console as a central pane of glass to create data harbours or add new storage locations. Calamu Drive operates with Windows File Explorer or macOS Finder to present items stored in Calamu Protect as familiar files in folders.

Data is written to/read from the multiple sites using Calamu Connectors, which support Amazon S3 buckets, local servers or database snapshots. They support a Docker or Kubernetes containerised architecture.

A Calamu document by chief software architect Rob Pledger discusses its technology. As the company only emerged from stealth last year and has just had an A-round, it is now developing its first real product version. You can request a demo here.

We found a downloadable patentUS9405926B2 Systems and methods for jurisdiction independent data storage in a multi-vendor cloud environment assigned to Calamus Paul Lewis. It states: This invention relates to data protection and security in a cloud-based environment. In particular, the invention allows data to be stored in a cloud environment whereby it is inaccessible to any third party and not subject to data privacy laws of any given jurisdiction.

Go here to read the rest:
Calamu scores funding for self-healing data protection tech Blocks and Files - Blocks and Files

Adapting to the changing times isn't an option. Entrepreneurs are taking control of the future of their businesses and shifting towards digitisation and connectivity so as to move forward and grow. This is why moving to the cloud should be on their agendas.

We already know that the pandemic has demonstrated the ability of the new technologies to make organisations more resilient. What no one could have imagined ended up occurring. And, in the same way, society adapted to keep on moving.

Large companies with financial muscle, developed infrastructures and a more evolved digital culture adapted quickly, as they were coming from an ongoing or highly advanced technological transition.

However, SMEs had to speed up or even jump into the void, without knowing exactly what was waiting for them below.

Small and medium-sized enterprises should view the adoption of digital technologies as an opportunity to grow, become more resilient, increase the efficiency of their business processes and and optimise their budgets. It's not just a matter of acquiring the latest generation of devices.

The major deployment of 5G and the changes in routines are factors that are making this commitment a real need in responding to the mobility of workers, the creation of new multimedia services and the development of new technologies such as the Internet of Things. Connectivity and the use of data are now a reality.

According to Gartner, unstructured data account for 95% of the information which is available. This unstructured information is any not contained in a database that may be found in videos, images, audios, texts generated via mobiles, sensors, medical devices, cameras and so on. Hence the need for the efficient storage of this huge amount of data.

Thus, the hosting of email services, the storage of files and databases and the hosting of software to manage teams and projects were the most frequent uses made by companies in the cloud, based on Eurostat data.

The cost minimisation brought by cloud services is one of the major (and best) reasons for adopting cloud services. The cloud enables SMEs to reduce their expenditure on large servers that are usually never fully optimised, as it's estimated that they aren't used 90% of the time, while companies pay only for what they use with cloud applications and services. And, because they're flexible services, they can cope with any eventuality caused by a peak in demand.

The hardware at these data centers is also more efficient, as it uses up 60%-70% less energy than a data center installed by an SME. These organisations can thus meet their carbon emission reduction targets. Moreover, the systems and software used in the cloud are always updated, secure and fast, making them easy for companies and their employees to use.

Solutions like these enable small and medium-sized businesses to accelerate growth with a return on investment of more than 200% in just three years, according to an IDC study.

Continued here:
Telefnica S A : Addressing the technological challenges of SMEs, better in the cloud - marketscreener.com

(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay )

Managecore sells itself as a different kind of company' in the SAP managed services market. Key to how it sets itself apart from other MSPs is its operational transparency, enabling customers to see exactly what Managecore sees, and automating SAP environments so that customers can focus on investing in innovation, rather than maintenance.

Both of these differentiators are underpinned by Managecore's use of Avantra, a platform that specializes in automating SAP operations. diginomica has previouslyspoken with Avantra CEO John Appleby about how the companyaims to help its customers shift the cost balance of their SAP environments from maintenance to investment.

Nick Miletich, Chief Technology Officer at Managecore, explains that the company's symbiotic relationship with Avantra is helping to deliver value to customers that are grappling with complex SAP landscapes. Miletich says:

We always want to be not only as efficient as possible, but to give our clients the best type of service we can. Over the years we've used many, many toolsets to monitor different aspects of SAP, the servers and the infrastructure that they run on.

And there was never a solution that was really great at SAP. They often try to be everything to everyone and Avantra is different. They focused on SAP, they started there, and then expanded the other way. They expanded outward, but they started with SAP as their core.

We want our consultants to really be consultants with these accounts, with these clients. Our clients expect a high level of service and they expect us to be providing value to them at every step of the way. And the value that we provide doesn't come in checking for really mundane trivial issues with the system. The value is: how do you use SAP to your best ability? How is your company or organization using SAP now and where should it go tomorrow?

Managecore says that it is using Avantra to take care of the trivial checks that customers would normally have to undertake manually, using the vendor's automation engine to carry out tedious work that operations managers would normally have to endure. Miletich says:

We use its core capacity, but then we've really built upon it, to allow us to automate certain aspects of what we do.

It allows us to be more responsive to issues and really prevent them. The way Avantra works, it allows us to really be preventative and really have that proactive support that everyone's looking for, versus being reactive.

Miletich does say that any monitoring or automation solution is only as good as you set it up to be, so Managecore has spent a lot of time on configuring the platform for its clients' needs. Some examples of how its works for customers include:

For example, if an alert says X, spin up another server. Or if a security issue comes up for SAP, we're able to quickly, across our whole organization, create a check to look for that. We can see, are these clients impacted by it?

You don't have to spend hours and hours and hours trying to look through that and figure it out. We can actually check within five minutes. And then Avantra has automation tools to do the fix for that, which happens to be a kernel patch. We have automation tools to do that, so Avantra can patch kernels automatically, instead of having to do every single system manually.

But as noted above, transparency is also key to Managecore's success, and it is also making use of Avantra's dashboards to give clients customized insight into their SAP environments. Miletich explains:

Each client is different - some may have multiple areas within their business function units - they may have an analytics practice, then they have the core ECC practice and then they may have finance.

All those entities use SAP differently. So what we tend to do is create dashboards that are relevant to them. So you may see just ECC on a dashboard, you may see just production. The IT staff at that organization may see it all - but on a dashboard showing red, green, yellow - versus parsing through every single system trying to figure out what's going on. So we use dashboards heavily to really customize the experience that each individual client gets with us.

Managecore utilizes the public cloud for its clients, particularly Google Cloud, and its use of Avantra is helping it bring public cloud capabilities to SAP. Miletich says that SAP hasn't traditionally lended itself to some of the benefits of this technology, which Managecore sees as an opportunity for its business. Miletich explains:

It's the limitation of the SAP software itself. SAP doesn't run in Kubernetes. It's not an environment that, from an IT administration standpoint, is as nimble as an environment you could put in Kubernetes, where one server goes down and everything still continues to operate.

So what we've done for some of the automation is what you'd almost call pre-planning. We're big in the public cloud space, so we use a lot of automation connectivity between the environments to make that magic happen. As an example, you can correlate a CPU utilization metric, and if it's 90% utilized for over 30 minutes, we can spin up another application server for SAP. Those are the types of automation that we tend to gravitate towards.

It's tying Avantra to SAP and it's tying the public cloud all together to make simple troubleshooting a non-issue.

Avantrarecently announced its latest Enterprise Edition, where it has rebuilt its automation engine for more sophisticated and complex use cases. Managecore is particularly interested in Avantra's autonomous patching capabilities and some of the AI/ML opportunities it has identified with SAP Graph.

But underpinning all of Managecore's use of Avantra is focusing on how it can ultimately shift its customers' time balance away from maintenance, towards new opportunities with SAP. Miletich says:

I would say at its foundation, Avantra allows you to be more flexible and nimble, but also allows you to be in that innovative type of role and environment, rather than a day to day troubleshooting role.

I'll give you an example from one of our clients. We moved them to Google Cloud and migrated them from one MSP to us. They've been with us since then, for four years. And this client, one of their key quotes was: "By moving to ManageCore as our managed services provider, using this product, it allows us to focus on innovation".

They're not on calls asking why their system is down, or asking for more memory, all the things that go into managing an environment. They now can do additional net new innovative deployments that are correlated to SAP to better their business. And I think that's the key takeaway from a product like that.

See the article here:
How ManageCore is automating SAP operations with Avantra - Diginomica

Too often, the debate about running Kubernetes on bare metal versus virtual machines is overly simplistic. Theres more to it than a trade-off between the relative ease of management you get with VMs and the performance advantage of bare metal. (The latter, in fact, isnt huge nowadays, as Ill explain below.)

Im going to attempt to walk through the considerations at play. As you will see, while I tend to believe that Kubernetes on bare metal is the way to go for most use cases, theres no simple answer.

Off the bat, lets address the performance vs. ease-of-use question.

Andy Holtzmann

Andy is a site reliability engineer at Equinix and has been running Kubernetes on bare metal since v1.9.3 (2018). He has run production environments with up to 55 bare-metal clusters, orchestrated Kubernetes installs on Ubuntu, CentOS and Flatcar Linux, and recently helped accelerate the bring-up of Equinix Metals Kubernetes platform to under one hour per new greenfield facility. Andy joined Equinix after working in senior software engineer roles at Twilio and SendGrid.

Yes, VMs are easier to provision and manage, at least in some ways. You dont need to be concerned with details of the underlying server hardware when you can set up nodes as VMs and orchestrate them using the VM vendors orchestration tooling. You also get to leverage things like golden images to simplify VM provisioning.

On the other hand, if you take a hypervisor out of the picture, you dont spend hardware resources running virtualization software or guest operating systems. All of your physical CPU and memory can be allocated to business workloads.

But its important not to overstate this performance advantage. Modern hypervisors are pretty efficient. VMware reports hypervisor overhead rates of just 2 percent compared to bare metal, for example. You have to add the overhead cost of running guest operating systems on top of that number, but still, the raw performance difference between VMs and bare metal can be negligible, at least when youre not trying to squeeze every last bit of compute power from your infrastructure. (There are cases where that 2% difference is meaningful.)

When its all said and done, virtualization is going to reduce total resource availability for your pods by about 10% to 20%.

Now, lets get into all the other considerations for running Kubernetes on bare metal versus Kubernetes on VMs. First, the orchestration element. When you run your nodes as VMs, you need to orchestrate those VMs in addition to orchestrating your containers. As a result, a VM-based Kubernetes cluster has two independent orchestration layers to manage.

Obviously, each layer is orchestrating a different thing, so, in theory, this shouldnt cause problems. In practice, it often does. For example, imagine you have a failed node and both the VM-level orchestrator and the Kubernetes orchestrator are trying to recover from the failure at the same time. This can lead to your orchestrators working at cross purposes because the VM orchestrator is trying to stand up a server that crashed, while Kubernetes is trying to move pods to different nodes.

Similarly, if Kubernetes reports that a node has failed but that node is a VM, you have to figure out whether the VM actually failed or the VM orchestrator simply removed it for some reason. This adds operational complexity, as you have more variables to work through.

You dont have these issues with Kubernetes on bare metal server nodes. Your nodes are either fully up or theyre not, and there are no orchestrators competing for the nodes attention.

Another key advantage of running Kubernetes on bare metal is that you always know exactly what youre getting in a node. You have full visibility into the physical state of the hardware. For example, you can use diagnostics tools like SMART to assess the health of hard disks.

VMs dont give you much insight about the physical infrastructure upon which your Kubernetes clusters depend. You have no idea how old the disk drives are, or even how much physical memory or CPU cores exist on the physical servers. Youre only aware of VMs virtual resources. This makes it harder to troubleshoot issues, contributing again to operational complexity.

For related reasons, bare metal takes the cake when it comes to capacity planning and rightsizing.

There are a fair number of nuances to consider on this front. Bare metal and virtualized infrastructure support capacity planning differently, and there are various tools and strategies for rightsizing everything.

But at the end of the day, its easier to get things exactly right when planning bare metal capacity. The reason is simple enough: With bare metal, you can manage resource allocation at the pod level using cgroups in a hyper-efficient, hyper-reliable way. Using tools like the Kubernetes vertical autoscaler, you can divvy up resources down to the millicore based on the total available resources of each physical server.

Thats a luxury you dont get with VMs. Instead, you get a much cruder level of capacity planning because the resources that can be allocated to pods are contingent on the resource allocations you make to the VMs. You can still use cgroups, of course, but youll be doing it within a VM that doesnt know what resources exist on the underlying server. It only knows what it has been allocated.

You end up having to oversize your VMs to account for unpredictable changes in workload demand. As a result, your pods dont use resources as efficiently, and a fair amount of the resources on your physical server will likely end up sitting idle much of the time.

Another factor that should influence your decision to run Kubernetes on bare metal versus VMs is network performance. Its a complex topic, but essentially, bare metal means less abstraction of the network, which leads to better network performance.

To dig a level deeper, consider that with virtual nodes you have two separate kernel networking stacks per node: one for the VMs and another for the physical hosts. There are various techniques for negotiating traffic between the two stacks (packet encapsulation, NAT and so on), and some are more efficient than others (hint: NAT is not efficient at all). But at the end of the day, they each require some kind of performance hit. They also add a great deal of complexity to network management and observability.

Running on bare metal, where you have just one networking stack to worry about, you dont waste resources moving packets between physical and virtual machines, and there are fewer variables to sort through when managing or optimizing the network.

Granted, managing the various networks that exist within Kubernetes, and this partially depends on the container network interface (CNI) you use, does add some overhead. But its minor compared to the overhead that comes with full-on virtualization.

As Ive already implied, the decision between Kubernetes on bare metal and Kubernetes on VMs affects the engineers who manage your clusters.

Put simply, bare metal makes operations and hence your engineers lives simpler in most ways. Beyond the fact that there are fewer layers and moving parts to worry about, a bare-metal environment reduces the constraints under which your team works. They dont have to remember that VMs only support X, Y and Z configurations or puzzle over whether a particular version of libvirt supports a feature they need.

Instead, they simply deploy the operating system and packages and get to work. Its easier to set up a cluster, and its much easier to manage operations for it over the long term when youre dealing solely with bare metal.

Let me make clear that I do believe there are situations where running Kubernetes on VMs makes sense.

One scenario is when youre setting up small-scale staging environments, where performance optimization is not super important. Getting the most from every millicore is not usually a priority for this type of use case.

Another situation is when you work in an organization that is already very heavily wedded to virtualized infrastructure or particular virtualization vendors. In this case, running nodes as VMs simply poses less of a bureaucratic headache. Or maybe there are logistical challenges with acquiring and setting up bare metal servers. If you can self-service some VMs in a few minutes, versus taking months to get physical servers, just use the VMs if it suits your timeline better. Your organization may also be wedded to a managed Kubernetes platform offered by a cloud provider that only runs containers on VMs. Anthos, Google Clouds managed hybrid multicloud Kubernetes offering, supports bare-metal deployments, and so does Red Hats OpenShift. AWSs EKS Anywhere bare metal support is coming later this year.

In general, you should never let a dependency on VMs stop you from using Kubernetes. Its better to take advantage of cloud native technology than to be stuck in the past because you cant have the optimal infrastructure.

VMs clearly have a place in many Kubernetes clusters, and that will probably never change. But when it comes to questions like performance optimization, streamlining capacity management or reducing operational complexity, Kubernetes on bare metal comes out ahead.

Feature image via Pixabay

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Kubernetes on Bare Metal vs. VMs: It's Not Just Performance The New Stack - thenewstack.io