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Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services — Architect Perspective

Financial institutions have embraced digital innovation at a recorded pace to adopt new ways of working, serving the financial needs of customers, and keeping the markets performing. Moreover, they have done so while still operating within their control frameworks and regulatory requirements needed to serve in all parts of the world.

According to the 2020 Frost and Sullivan Global Cloud User Survey, “multi-cloud adoption has skyrocketed among financial firms in the past year, up nearly 70%. In addition, hybrid cloud adoption — already higher among financial firms than other industries — is up 8%. In response to the pandemic, financial firms are accelerating their cloud journeys, knitting together disparate IT environments (on‑premises, edge, and multiple clouds) as a foundation for digitalization.”

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The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

Learning about the pros and cons of cloud computing will better your company’s understanding of this concept. Cloud computing is considered a promising technology for organizational entities to deal with computing issues, especially data storage, in the future.

What Is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand management of all computer system services (e.g. software, networking, or big data analytics) in virtual portals.

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Edge Computing: The Future of Cloud

The IDC forecasts the global edge computing market to reach $250 billion by 2024, with a compounded annual growth of 12.5%. No wonder the industry is talking about Edge Computing.

Edge computing is one of the “new revolutionary technologies” that can change organizations wanting to break free from previous limitations of traditional cloud-based networks. The next 12–18 months will prove to be the natural inflection for edge computing. Practical applications are finally emerging where this architecture can bring real benefits.

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How Is 5G Relevant in the Present Day?

As 2021 approached, 5G was predicted to reach around 34% of the global population in the next 4 years. How will 5G revolutionize the present scenario of the market? What are my predictions for a 5G-enabled future? What are the risks associated with 5G? Read this article to know what I expect from the 5G-enabled future.

5G networks are part of a major digital transformation trend that is impacting consumer, public sector, and enterprise spaces. New devices and applications are emerging in the market that takes advantage of the dramatically reduced latency and much higher throughput than 5G offers.  Examples include accelerated adoption of smart cities, smart factories, next-generation in-store experiences, healthcare services autonomous cars, and much more. It’s an exciting time.  By now, you are familiar with the excitement surrounding the 5G revolution.

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Cloud Technology News of the Month: September 2021

Autumn is officially here and with it another portion of fresh cloud technology news. 

This series brings you up to speed with the latest releases, acquisitions, research, and hidden gems in the world of cloud computing – the stuff actually worth reading.

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Mainframe Modernization to Cloud

Despite the efficacy and benefits of Cloud-native development, the Mainframe remains a core and valuable enterprise technology for large enterprise customers (especially in finance, insurance, manufacturing, retail, and the public sector). Maybe because Mainframe offers resiliency, reliability, and trusted security. But it isn’t enough to sustain in today’s disruptive business environment. 

Faster time to market, employee, and customer experience has become a business imperative, and the Mainframe systems are a significant barrier in achieving the same. The flexibility and versatility of Cloud DevOps are overshadowing the Mainframe’s ability to innovate in the current business environment. Cost considerations and changes in the workforce also impact Mainframe’s viability as a long-term technology solution.

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The Green Lining in Cloud Computing

In current COVID times, the mantra for success includes a healthy mix of innovation with thoughtfulness and corporate social responsibility. As the efforts toward digital transformation are accelerating, so are the pressures to operate as responsible businesses. More and more CXOs are working on striking the right balance between accelerating digital transformation and their sustainability strategy, in addition to adopting a more digitized stand with a “cloud-first” approach.

Sustainability in the Cloud

Companies have historically driven financial, security, and agility benefits through the cloud, but sustainability is becoming imperative. According to the United Nations Global Compact-Accenture Strategy CEO Study on Sustainability, more than 99% of CEOs from large companies now agree that “sustainability issues are important to the future success of their businesses.” Two-thirds of the CEOs view the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies as a critical factor for accelerating socio-economic impact. 59% of CEOs say that they are deploying low-carbon and renewable energy across their operations today. 

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What Is MLOps?

I recently started a new job at a Machine Learning startup. I’ve given up trying to explain what I do to non-technical friends and family (my mum still just tells people I work with computers). For those of you who at least understand that “AI” is just an overused marketing term for Machine Learning, I can break it down for you using the latest buzzword in the field:

MLOps

The term “MLOps” (a compound of Machine Learning and Operations) refers to the practice of deploying, managing, and monitoring machine learning models in production. It takes the best practices from the field of DevOps and utilizes them for the unique challenges that arise when running machine learning systems in production. 

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Nextcloud and Kubernetes in the Cloud With Kuma Service Mesh

I recently decided I wanted to start cutting third-party cloud services out of my life. I purchased a shiny Raspberry Pi 400 (which reminded me of the Amiga computers of my youth) and decided to try Nextcloud on it as a personal cloud. It was a far quicker process than I expected thanks to the awesome NextCloudPi project. Within twenty minutes, I had a running Nextcloud instance. However, I could only access it locally on my internal network, and accessing it externally is complicated if you don’t have a static IP address, or use dynamic DNS on a router that supports it.

There are of course myriad ways to solve these problems (and NextCloudPi offers convenient solutions to many of them), but I was also interested in how Kubernetes might handle some of the work for me. Of course, this can mean I am using cloud providers of a different kind, but I would have portability, and with a combination of an Ingress and Service Mesh, could move my hosting around as I wanted.

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Serverless Computing vs Cloud Computing

The abundance of terms makes you feel confused and wonder how to differentiate one concept from another. The statistics show that people aren’t aware of these terms. Only one of the four customers may thoroughly explain the difference between cloud computing vs serverless. 

This article will define the terms and briefly explain the peculiarities of each one. 

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Remote Debugging: What It Means for Java Applications

Following the lingering promise of managed infrastructure, reduced operational cost, and resiliency, cloud computing has seen phenomenal trends in adoption since the past decade. As software development marches towards the cloud, we soon realize that this shift warrants the need to rethink our debugging strategies. This is because as software systems are now leveraging these advancements in cloud computing and distributed systems we see gaps emerging in debugging that cannot be satisfied by the traditional methods of logging and breakpoints.

For example, a major issue while using breakpoints is that the codebase needs to be run in debug mode. Therefore, we are not actually replicating the actual state of our systems taking into consideration multi-threading, distributed services, and dependencies on remote services in a cloud-native environment along with multi-service architecture. Similarly, logs offer no respite, as they may be cumbersome and even costly to execute and store.

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Comparison of Apache Kafka Products and Cloud Services

Apache Kafka became the de facto standard for event streaming. The open-source community is huge. Various vendors added Kafka and related tooling to their offerings or provide a Kafka cloud service. This blog post uses the car analogy - from the motor engine to the self-driving car - to explore the different Kafka offerings available on the market. I also cover a few other vehicles, meaning (partly) Kafka-compatible technologies. The goal is not a feature-by-feature comparison (that would be outdated the day after the publication). Instead, the intention is to educate about the different deployment models, product strategies, and trade-offs from the available options.

Disclaimer: I work for Confluent. However, the post is not about comparing features but explaining the concepts behind the alternatives. I talk to enterprises across the globe every week. I can assure you that many people I talk to are not aware or mislead about what you read in the following sections. Hence, I hope that the following helps you to make the right decision. Either choose to run open-source Apache Kafka or one of the various commercial Kafka offerings, or even a combination of both.

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Migrating to Serverless and Making It Work Post-Transition

The Cloud Spectrum

To understand more easily the wider context of migrating legacy systems into a serverless form, we should first understand the cloud spectrum. This spectrum ranges from on-premises workloads to virtual machines, containers, and cloud functions. Serverless typically falls within the cloud functions area, as function as a service (FaaS), but now it’s an umbrella term growing to include back-end as a service (BaaS), such as fully managed databases.

The first thing when looking at legacy transitions is understanding where you are on the cloud spectrum.

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Top 5 Tips To Enhance Cloud Computing Security Solutions In 2021

Introduction

Do you know that cloud service acquisition is evolving so swiftly that it has grown up to 35% in 2021? Nearly every business that you can possibly think of is utilizing public cloud computing services for most of their critical business applications. 

But simultaneously, we cannot neglect the fact that we are witnessing an unprecedented level of vulnerability in this tech-oriented world. Cyberattacks and data breaches associated with cloud services are making headway alongside the growth of cloud usage. Unfortunately, 63% of companies claim that their data was potentially compromised during the past 12 months. 

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KubeMQ Bridges for Edge Computing

Introduction

For years, companies have been moving to the cloud. With the ubiquity of internet-connected devices, it seems only natural to rely on cloud-based services for the majority of applications today. However, the rise of edge computing has demonstrated that there is also a need for hyper-local, distributed computing which can offer latencies and resilience that the cloud cannot match. With these benefits come ever-increasing complexity both in terms of individual application development as well as overall infrastructure management.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the unique benefits and challenges of edge computing, as well as how a lightweight, Kubernetes-based messaging queue can meet those challenges.

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10 Mistakes to Avoid When Sizing Your Cloud Resources

One of the most common concerns when moving to the cloud is cost. Given that cloud allows you to turn IT costs from CAPEX (long-term investments ex. in hardware equipment and software licenses) into OPEX (day-to-day operating expenses), it’s crucial to choose the right service and estimate it properly. In this article, we’ll look at the common pitfalls and discuss how you can avoid them to truly benefit from the cloud’s elasticity.

#1 Following the Lift and Shift Approach

The lift and shift approach means that you are moving an exact copy of your workload to the cloud with as few changes as possible. Even though this pattern may be useful if you want to move to the cloud quickly, it may lead to suboptimal usage of your resources. AWS acknowledged that this is a difficult problem by creating services to make this migration easier (CloudEndure Migration and AWS Server Migration Service). Still, for the best possible resource utilization, it’s best to consider rearchitecting your solution for the cloud.

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Should You Avoid The Hype Around Cloud Adoption? [Podcast]

Cloud computing refers to several technologies in a multi-cloud reality delivering on-demand computing services over the internet. The cloud is a key pillar of digital transformation and is one of the services that is being invested in by organizations.

Notably, this does not just concern the IT sides of an organization as business executives are now involving themselves in making and purchasing IT decisions for their organizations as well.