For the past fifteen years, my professional life has been centered in Asia, with ten of these years as a resident. And throughout this time I have always held strong personal views on the economic potential of the region. However, the current and future growth projections have outpaced my most optimistic predictions and expectations.

Some recent stats from various sources which illustrate the extent of the growth that is occurring, include:

• Of the current 3+ billion global internet users, more than 46% reside within Asia-Pacific. It is estimated that Asia-Pac will represent more than 50% before the end of 2015.
• Global e-commerce transactions are currently estimated to be around ~USD $1.5 trillion. In 2014, Asia-Pacific became the world’s largest e-commerce market. By end of 2017, consumers in APAC will be responsible for more than USD $1 trillion of the estimated $2.3 trillion in global e-commerce sales.

Coupled with these growth trends, the region is also experiencing dramatic change. For example, Asia-Pacific is the fastest mobile device growth region in the world, and already accounts for more than 50% of global mobile phone ownership. In fact, many users from Asia-Pacific will connect to the Internet for the first time via a mobile device, and that...

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I’m excited to talk about new features coming soon to Cloud Application Manager. Whether you’re new or have been using Cloud Application Manager for a while to auto-provision infrastructure or speed up automatic deployments, this post will interest you.

In talking to many of our customers, we came across a common theme. While deployment profiles, which spell out all the metadata for a deployment on a particular cloud, are very useful to configure infrastructure, customers want to do more. They want to share deployment profiles and intuitively give access to a well-defined set of provider resources without giving access to the entire cloud provider.

To address these needs, we re-imagined our approach to defining and giving access to deployment metadata. Instead of thinking of them as tightly-coupled attributes of a box (a box is like a template that defines automation for an application or a micro component), we evolved deployment profiles to deployment policy boxes.

Boxes as you know them are now going to be ‘script boxes’. And deploying a script box will follow the same exact flow as deploying a box today. The only difference is at deploy time, you will select a deployment policy box instead of a deployment profile.

It’s easy...

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Cloud Bursting is a hot topic in cloud computing today. It’s a model that gauges an organization’s ability to use internal resources to host services critical to their business, and during demand spikes consume resources from public clouds on a pay-as-you-go approach.

Cloud Bursting Use Cases

Today only a handful of businesses face real cloud bursting challenges because of their special use cases. They run the sort of applications where the burst is high due to compute-intensive processes like image processing, scientific computing, monthly calculations, and such or relate to running the development, test environments. Since the latter typically don’t involve client data, they are not subject to strict regulatory compliance, which means you can run them on any infrastructure.

Support Model

To support a strong cloud bursting model, several parts must come together:

• Shared network between the public clouds and the datacenter.
• Automated and repeatable deployments to launch to the required clouds regardless of platform differences.
• Single management console to consistently support and maintain all deployment artifacts.
• Ability to specify the amount, ratio, and priority of cloud resources the applications can consume.
• Ability to identify the load needs of an application and configure them into the tools that manage scaling.

Most cloud providers offer the first piece today, either...

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Like most people, I have a mobile phone that is representative of my personality and productivity needs. Carefully chosen phone cases, background images, apps, and settings all create a level of personalization within the boundaries defined by my phone provider. My phone is basically a platform for delivering what I want, how I want it. Why can't your cloud behave the same way?

CenturyLink Cloud has offered a deep set of channel-friendly features for years. This month, we went even further to make sure that all our customers have greater control over their cloud experience. What does it mean to make our cloud your own?

Control the Appearance

Change how the CenturyLink Cloud Control Portal looks to your customers and users. Alter not only the color scheme and logos, but go deeper with modifications to listed support phone numbers, email addresses, and Knowledge Base links. Tweak the outbound email templates so that new users get a personalized message when they join the account.

Control the Access Point

With this latest software release, it's easy to use a non-CenturyLink branded domain to access the Control Portal. All customers can immediately use {account alias}.cloudportal.io to see a personalized login page with their logo. Soon, we'll make it...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Jessica Rampen from FoundationDB, a provider of polyglot database services focused on simplifying the database layer.

When CenturyLink announced their Hyperscale offering in early 2014, they were clearly focused on helping customers with their implementation of scale-out, NoSQL technologies. The proliferation of NoSQL databases is one response to the needs of modern applications, where not all data is best managed in a relational model. One challenge we've seen customers struggle with while experimenting with different database models: database bloat.

"If you're trying to choose a database technology for your application it can be really tough. The database market is evolving rapidly. From NoSQL, to NewSQL, to the mature relational systems, there's no shortage of solutions to sort through." – Stephen Pimentel, FoundationDB

Trying to run different databases together to power an application is an operational nightmare. Each has its own storage and retrieval requirements, and each requires developer and DBA skills that can be hard to find.

Why a multi-model database

We're one of the...

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It's great to have a thriving Cloud Development Center where we crank out new features for our platform, but we know we can’t do it all ourselves. As Al Gore once said on 30 Rock, “there's an old African proverb that I made up – If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We need to go far, quickly.”

Integrating with CenturyLink Cloud

We’ve been cultivating a technology ecosystem that we think will help our users go far, quickly. You can visit our newly-published CenturyLink Cloud Marketplace Provider Program to learn more. This new initiative supports integrations with a wide range of partner technologies who can "plug in" to the CenturyLink Public Cloud as part of their user experience.

Technology partners can choose from three different types of integration patterns, one of the most flexible in our industry:

• An Application Programming Interface (API) for automated interactions between any management system and the CenturyLink Public Cloud.
• Our Blueprint orchestration engine. This powerful tool enables automated provisioning workflows for partner technology that combine dozens of configuration steps into one single click.
• An Add-On framework (coming soon) for automating sign-ups to popular web services, while binding these external services to the

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The advent of cloud computing has brought about one of the largest business opportunities in decades for managed services providers, system integrators and VARs many of whom have adapted their business models to offer the agility provided by elastic infrastructure.

CenturyLink has been a popular destination for enterprises and partners alike, with some of our partners choosing to white label and resell our product. The capabilities that enable this are a major differentiator of our platform. We constantly look for ways to enable our partners to pass value onto their customers and today we are happy to add another tool to their belt.

We are pleased to announce that we are contributing our Cloud Cost Estimator tool to the open-source community under the Apache 2 license. This web app makes it easy to estimate a monthly bill for a customized set of resources on the CenturyLink Cloud service.

As we’ve marketed cloud to our own end user customers, this estimator has been an invaluable tool to help buyers understand the costs associated with building and managing apps in the cloud. Deep visibility and monitoring coupled with showback and chargeback capabilities extend the value once resources are up and running.

Now, our channel partners can...

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I bet you save on deployment costs today with the Instance Scheduler. But did you know you can keep track of when they expire?

A couple of months ago, we introduced the Instance Scheduler that lets you set custom shutdown and termination policies in Cloud Application Manager when launching an instance. This type of scheduling is great to test a new deployment configuration or to spin up a test or development environment for a limited timespan.

Scheduling is an effective way to control and manage resources and costs within an organization. However, there’s still a nagging question. How to know when the instances you’re working on will shut down or terminate? As a developer or operations engineer, I’d like to be notified some time before the scheduled instances that I have access to go offline or get decommissioned. Especially if I don’t have control over them, I need to ask the instance owner for more time, or prioritize work that requires those instances.

Email Notification Service

To address this need, Cloud Application Manager added a feature to notify the instance owners or collaborators by email of scheduled instances that are going to expire soon. Each day, around 12 pm UTC (4 am PST), those...

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Large-scale deployments are a pain when you think of the many things that can go wrong. That’s why we’re here to ease the pain with deployment automation. I want to focus this post on block storage specifically for EC2 and on how you can set it up in advance to scale automated deployments.

Amazon Web Services provides block devices called Elastic Block Storage (EBS) that range in gigabytes to terabytes in size at a pay-as-you-use cost. This type of storage gives instances far greater storage flexibility. The default volume on an EC2 instance generally assumes the lifespan of the instance, which means the data disappears once the instance does. Volumes, on the other hand, can persist in the after-life of the instance and make the data available for future use. You can take volume snapshots for backup or attach a volume to another instance, for example.

EBS Volume Types

Amazon offers three EBS types: Magnetic, General Purpose (SSD), and Provisioned IOPS (SSD).

• The Magnetic disk is the default volume of an EC2 instance and the lowest cost option if you don’t need high read performance and are okay with sequential I/O. It’s a good option to store log files (if you don’t use message

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OS X and Solaris are two of my favorite platforms for developing native Apple and Node.js applications. Thanks to the deployment support for OS X and Solaris in Cloud Application Manager, today I can easily solve a common problem many developers like me face when coding in these environments.

Here’s the problem: How do I integrate with Jenkins to automatically build the lifecycle of the application I’m coding so I can test and integrate code into different environments smoothly?

Deploying on OS X

When I develop native applications for Apple platforms (OS X or iOS), I need an OS X platform and the XCode tools to build and test my application. On top of this, I need VM instances to run builds and unit test the code in my development branch. So a private cloud like vSphere is the best scenario to do both. It allows me to create and dispose of OS X machine instances in an agile and flexible way.

The support for OS X in Cloud Application Manager makes things easy for me. I can quickly automate the way applications deploy on an Apple platform and share that process with other developers in the organization. As a result, all our development...

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Early this week we talked about OpenStack as a popular choice to deploy both to public and private clouds because of its unified platform. We explained that Cloud Application Manager auto provisions your workloads predictably no matter where you deploy. Today, we talk about how to auto configure storage for your OpenStack deployments.

Storage for OpenStack

First of all, to configure storage in OpenStack, you need to activate Cinder or block storage. A nice thing about automating deployments through Cloud Application Manager is you don’t have to configure disk storage separately. Along with the rest of the deployment, specify the volume storage with a simple add button and let Cloud Application Manager do the brunt of the work like clockwork.

We’ll show how to add volumes when you set up your deployment in your private OpenStack cloud or publicly managed HP Cloud through the Cloud Application Manager deployment profile. There are two types of volumes you can add, an image or a hard disk volume.

Hard Volumes

Click Add in the Additional Volumes section and set the disk size for each volume. Extra volume for an instance means you can store information such as databases or logs. It means you can move data from one...

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Metaphors are common in tech. They help explain new concepts to the masses in familiar terms. The most common cloud metaphor? Pets and cattle – often used to underscore how users should think differently about infrastructure and application design patterns in the cloud. The phrase was first publicized by Randy Bias (more good reading on the topic is here and here).

Cattle

Cloud-native apps — in the enterprise and otherwise — are almost exclusively run on instances best described as cattle. Why the term cattle?

• Cattle are given numbers
• They are similar to other cattle
• When one gets sick, you get another one

Instances that are cattle can be quickly destroyed and replaced thanks to automation and modern application architecture.

Startups tend to use cattle for their flagship IP, with SaaS products to run their IT ops.

Go even further, and platform-as-a-service offerings like Cloud Foundry abstracts the management of cattle away altogether.

Pets

In contrast, VMs that are pets are given names, and cared for extensively in the hopes of a long and happy life. Pets are more common in the enterprise world, where there’s an incumbent application portfolio that’s broad, diverse, and highly fragmented.

• Pets are given names like pussinboots.cern.ch
• They are unique, lovingly hand raised and

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