Hello to all fellow infrastructure administrators lost in the Cloud!

In the last couple of years there has been so much talk about the Cloud. The Cloud is everywhere, the Cloud is everything and all the services will run in the Cloud! At least, this is what we’re supposed to believe, influenced by the tons of marketing pouring over us.

I don't think anybody can tell whether this will be true or not twenty or thirty years from now - except for maybe some visionaries out there. But we exist in the present, and in this present, the customers are not ready and still do not feel convinced to abandon their own infrastructures and move to the Cloud. There are a lot of reasons for this, including but not limited to: they may have sensitive applications, they might not trust the cloud providers, they find it cheaper to stick with what they have, they could have recently invested heavily in their data centers and are not financially capable at the moment, and so on.

This doesn’t mean that nobody uses cloud services. On the contrary, we are seeing huge growth in the cloud businesses of companies like Microsoft, IBM, Amazon and Salesforce, which means that the customers are migrating slowly, carefully and not going all in.

It also means that the customers will continue to develop their data centers and infrastructures, because there they have full control, but at the same time they will use resources from the public clouds, thus creating hybrid clouds.

The Hybrid Cloud is convenient, because the customer has their own resources and at the same time can use resources from the Cloud, when and as much as needed.

It’s flexible! It’s cool! And it comes with much more control!

And ultimately, this means that the future belongs to the Hybrid cloud.

Now, all of this is great, but we are missing one of the most important issues when it comes to using a private, public, or hybrid cloud – in order for the developers to begin using the resources, somebody needs to set up and configure the infrastructure together with all the needed automation! And this means that the tasks of the data center administrators are changing – they need to know what can be done to upgrade the data center to a private cloud. They need to know what infrastructure is provided by public cloud providers and how to work with it. They need to know how they can integrate the private and public clouds - to build the hybrid cloud! How to design for and deploy the needed levels of security and management.

That’s why it is very important for the data center administrators to get as much information and knowledge as they can, so they can be ready and prepared for the inevitable – the Cloud!

And my recommendation is to start at the basics – for the public clouds, there are top-notch trainings from Amazon and Microsoft, which will give you the needed knowledge for their infrastructures, resources that you can manage, security that is already implemented as well as the security options that you have, and so on.

Furthermore, when it comes to the private cloud, you have all the offerings from the big vendors:

• VMware NSX and vCloud Director
• Cisco’s UCS Director, ACI and CloudCenter
• Red Hat – OpenStack, Ceph Storage, Cloud Forms, etc.
• and much more!

If you think that official training won't work for your team or environment, Fast Lane can always customize the training process and content.

The toughest thing in life is to ask for help, but now the time is right to get help, and Fast Lane is there for you!

Want more info which Fast Lane training can help you make the move from the data center to the cloud? Click here to contact us.