Densify: it's time to kill 'tribal knowledge' in cloud management
The technology industry likes to use the CRM acronym; it is normally used to shorten Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technologies.
But CRM now means something else too; in these cloud-native days, it’s all about Cloud Resource Management (CRM) software too.
One company that uses this term is Densify.
As an organisation that specialises to machine-learning cloud optimisation and management capabilities, Densify would probably add an additional C and it Cloud & Container Resource Management (CRM).
Looking at what its customers are saying in the cloud management space right now, Densify is keen to point to recent survey findings of a global enterprise cloud survey of IT professionals.
The survey suggests that the top [cloud] priorities for most organisations are focused on how to ensure applications perform well, how to keep the environments secure… and how to make sure they accomplish these goals within budget.
With 55% of the respondents coming from enterprises with over 1,000 employees, 66% of the organisations questioned are running multi-cloud environments, with the clear majority winner being AWS (70% usage), followed by Microsoft Azure (57% usage) and Google Cloud Platform at (31% usage). On-prem private cloud users were at 37%.
Container technology is rapidly being adopted to run applications and microservices, with 44% of the respondents already running containers, and another 24% looking into containers.
Killing tribal knowledge
One of the major issues highlighted here is news that 55% are using ‘best guess or tribal knowledge’ to specify container CPU and memory Request and Limit values, which is a major issue for running containers successfully
“The cloud is complex, with hundreds of services from each cloud vendor, making the selection of the right services for business really very difficult,” said Yama Habibzai, CMO, Densify. “It really is humanly impossible to align the workload and application demands to the right cloud resources, without automation and analysis.”
Habibzai says that while enterprises have fully embraced and adopted the cloud and containers, there are some issues in the way people adopt the cloud, that can introduce risk to their businesses.
“A surprisingly large number of participants (40%) shared that they are not certain or up to speed with the latest cloud technologies from the cloud providers, or how to leverage them for their own success. When asked about how they decide and select the optimal cloud resources to run their applications, 55% reported “best guess” and “tribal knowledge” as their main strategy,” he added.
Of the firms who took part in the Densify study, some 66% say that they run multi-cloud environments and not dedicated to one specific type of cloud… other selected findings follow:
- 55% admit to guessing or using ‘tribal knowledge’ to select workloads for their applications.
- 55% of respondents use Infrastructure as code (IaC) tools to automate the process of managing and provisioning cloud resources, such as Terraform, Amazon CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager — the same 55% don’t use any optimisation mechanisms to fine tune their workloads, which can drive increased application risk and overspending.
- Container adoption is on the rise from 19% to 44% adoption in the last 6 months.
The full results of the survey can be found here.