Public cloud is an important part of enterprise IT.  Why?  Self-service.  APIs.  Automation.  Access to new features regularly.  Global reach. Outsourcing of infrastructure management.  OpEx consumption.

But it’s not the be-all, end-all.

Enterprise apps will always require a range of infrastructure options – Hybrid IT – including bare metal, traditional hosting…and private cloud.

The private cloud market is relatively immature (more on this in a forthcoming blog post).  The more we looked at this segment, the more we saw an opportunity to offer customers a unique value proposition.

“You got chocolate in my peanut butter…”

With CenturyLink Private Cloud, we’ve combined our approach to public cloud with the most important elements of a private cloud.

Public cloud-style agility, scale, and automation – running on dedicated hardware with physical isolation.  Available in over 55 data centers worldwide.  That’s CenturyLink Private Cloud.

We spare customers from the drudgery of infrastructure management, while offering more control over what truly matters: everything that happens from the platform up.

For example, administrators dictate who has access to the pod and what they can do on it – while wielding complete authority to govern how the node is used day-to-day.  If an instance in the public cloud is an apartment in a large building,...

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CIOs are adopting the hybrid cloud paradigm in droves, as we recently pointed out in a Forbes.com contributing article. As public cloud adoption continues to surge, organizations are turning their attention to connecting public compute resources to infrastructure residing in on-premises data centers. Can you just set up a VPN between the sites and call it a day? Hardly. Establishing a meaningful hybrid cloud requires considerate planning across many dimensions. How will you secure it? What does it mean to maintain services across organizational boundaries? Are workloads portable between environments? In this first of four blog articles, we’ll look at some of the biggest challenges that you’ll face as you set up a hybrid cloud environment.

What Challenges Will You Face?

Any vendor or consultant who promises a “seamless and straightforward” hybrid cloud is not being realistic. There are technical, cultural, and logistical challenges that await you. Let’s discuss a few that you should prepare for.

Security. This is usually the first item in any list regarding cloud computing, so why not this one too? As you plan out or mature your hybrid cloud, issues like compliance, identity management, and data protection will be front and center. Can you ensure data sovereignty...

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Nowadays, a majority of cloud service providers offer an API that allows users to interact with their infrastructure for the creation or deletion of resources, volumes, and images, to name a few. To use these APIs, users have to first authenticate using mechanisms based on key-password pairs.

However these mechanisms are quite cumbersome as users often have to search for their credentials on cloud provider websites or in their file systems. Besides, these key-password pairs are in the format of long and difficult chains of alphanumeric characters, which make them impossible or pretty difficult to remember. Even though the use of these key pairs is justified by security reasons, it clearly affects a user’s experience when having to access these APIs. In Cloud Application Manager, as well as in many other cloud platforms, users have to specify their credentials, in order to interact with cloud vendors such as AWS, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Microsoft Azure, VMware, Openstack or Cloudstack among others.

Our philosophy at Cloud Application Manager is to alleviate and minimize all tedious management operations which affect a user’s experience, as long as they don’t present security issues. In the following, we will focus on Google Compute Engine’s API which supports...

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If you’ve been reading cloud-related news lately or you follow any developers or system admins on Twitter, then you’ve undoubtedly seen the words “container”, “Docker”, and “CoreOS” written a few thousand times over the past year or so. Chatter has particularly picked up in the last few months with Docker 1.0 being released in June and CoreOS announcing their first stable release within the past few weeks. CoreOS also received an 8 million dollar investment just a couple of months ago, and Docker just got another $40 million in funding a few days ago. And just yesterday, CenturyLink joined the container party and announced the release of the open-source Docker management platform, Panamax. Developed by the recognized thought-leaders at CenturyLink Labs, Panamax was described by RedMonk principal analyst James Governor as “Docker management for humans. It dramatically simplifies multi-container app deployment.”

This is bleeding edge technology we’re talking about here, so if you haven’t heard about any of it yet, there’s no time like the present. Docker is one of the fastest-growing open-source projects ever, with more than 550 contributors and 7 million downloads in just over a year since its release. The power of Docker lies in its ability to...

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When using Cloud Application Manager, you bring your own cloud. To deliver the absolute best experience of deploying applications on any cloud, we are working very closely with all the cloud providers that we support – Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, CloudStack, and VMware. One of the topics that often comes up is security. Today, we’re adding enhanced security for our AWS support.

Our friends at Amazon have built comprehensive Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) features, which enable enterprises to grant and control secure access to specific AWS resources. For instance, with AWS IAM, cloud administrators can set up password policies for the user groups, delegate user and application rights with roles instead of sharing credentials and even enable multi-factor authentication for more privileged users. AWS IAM helps cloud administrators to narrow down the user rights and grant the least needed privileges for the users and applications.

At Cloud Application Manager we are putting a lot of emphasis on security and hence we are proud to take advantage of the AWS IAM features. It is essential for us that we always comply with the industry standards and best practices of security and risk management. Starting July 11th,...

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Are you getting the full benefit of the cloud if you don’t take advantage of its elasticity? To be sure, there are many ways that cloud environments—running dynamic OR static workloads—can positively impact your business agility. But cloud computing fundamentally changes the relationship between infrastructure and workloads that run upon it; you can constantly right-size by adding and removing capacity on demand instead of being stuck with over-sized or under-powered environments. To do this effectively, you need flexible options for automatically and manually adjusting your infrastructure resources. In this post, I outline five different application scenarios, and which CenturyLink Cloud scaling capability delivers the optimal elasticity solution.

1. Modern web application with variable usage? Horizontal Autoscale!

Are most of your internal or external facing web applications in constant, heavy use? If so, I’d be surprised! The applications that your employees rely on may be busy during predictable periods, or, experience load whenever random business conditions occur. Public web applications may spike in usage when marketing campaigns are in flight, or when an avalanche of traffic follows a social mention.

Instead of standing up gobs of (costly) infrastructure that only add value during random usage spikes, consider services like CenturyLink Cloud Horizontal Autoscale. Our...

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With Cloud Application Manager, you can easily deploy a self replicating MongoDB cluster in just a few minutes. In order to accommodate Cloud Application Manager’s data needs, we rely on MongoDB clusters that run on two public clouds and one private data center.

This way we can provide redundancy, high availability and excellent read and write performance around the world. Using Cloud Application Manager, and our concept of Boxes, which are application or infrastructure components made available as a service, we can consistently deploy a MongoDB cluster in just a matter of minutes on any of our Cloud Providers.

To get started deploying MongoDB clusters on Cloud Application Manager, sign up today for our free account! If you’re interested in other resources on MongoDB, check out how you can easily use Splunk to monitor MongoDB using Cloud Application Manager.

The Basics

What is MongoDB? MongoDB is an open-source document store database.

Why would you want to cluster MongoDB? To provide redundancy and high-availability for production deployments.

How We Use MongoDB

In our case, MongoDB is using a replica set model. A replica set is a group of MongoDB instances that host the same data set. One MongoDB, the primary, receives all write operations. All other instances, secondaries,...

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If you’ve ever traveled London by the underground tube, you’ve likely heard the station speakers announce “mind the gap.” They’re warning you of a gap between the train and the platform. But why build a curved train platform in the first place? Were the engineers not aware of its dangers?

Bridging Decades of Software Gap

Now, London is an old city. Generations of engineers and architects have added their vision to the city’s foundation. Our software industry is not as old, but in comparison has seen such fast paced innovation and reinvention that it has generated decades of software on which our modern civilization is built. As a result, the only way to bridge the gap between decades of generated software is to build the equivalent of a curved station.

It’s hard to look both forward and back at the same time. For years as they combined old with new technology–ranging from hardware to application runtimes–IT tried to stabilize operations with very little room for error. That stabilizing process has been arduous and expensive.

On the other hand, the software development process is marked by continual change. Most organizations reconciled the operations and development worlds by introducing release cycles measured in years, even naming...

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One of the biggest problems facing software engineers since the dawn of the multi-tier application is, well, how to make it multi-tier.

It’s more than just having several supporting applications – it is about connecting the layers correctly and allowing them to communicate with each other. All this is to create a scalable and responsive deployment that can be easily updated and adapted to changing business needs.

It is about ensuring that your infrastructure can co-ordinate the order in which your application tiers are spun up, even when the apps themselves have not been designed to perform these critical dependency checks.

What Are You Looking For?

Intelligently handling your solution’s dependencies is an inherent problem in multi-tier deployments – at whatever scale you are operating. For instance,

As a developer working on a project:

“I want to ensure that my database is up and running before my web-server is deployed.”

As the CTO of a rapidly growing startup:

“I want to bootstrap on basic AWS services (such as managed cache, load balancing, and managed databases), but as the product evolves, I want to give myself the freedom to evolve the services I connect to and consume – experiencing as little downtime as...

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New cloud node in Toronto gives customers more choice and flexibility for Canadian-based cloud services

The CenturyLink Cloud global footprint expansion continues.

Today, we’re excited to give customers a new public cloud deployment option in Canada. Effective immediately, customers can deploy and manage virtual resources in our “CA3” cloud node in our CenturyLink Toronto “TR1” facility.

For businesses based in Canada, and those that do business in Canada – this new CenturyLink Cloud node offers several benefits: data sovereignty (for compliance), performance (host your apps close to your users) and the best aspects of having the CenturyLink Public Cloud available in a CenturyLink facility:

• Scale.  The CA3 node is built to handle the pent-up demand for cloud services in Canada.
• Advanced connectivity. CenturyLink customers who already deploy resources in our TR1 location can now connect existing infrastructure to our public cloud offering. Customers using nearby TR3, our new Toronto data center opening later this year, will also be able to take advantage of this capability.
• Self-service access to a robust set of cloud services.Users have Lots of options to build and manage enterprise cloud environments, including Hyperscale instances with 100% flash storage for Hadoop and NoSQL workloads.

Have additional questions?  We’ve got answers!

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What cloud services are...

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Today, we announce a new way to consume managed services - a cloud-friendly way.

This is exciting news for us, given CenturyLink’s expertise in both cloud and managed services.  Our CTO Jared Wray posted his thoughts here on what this news means for our company and the industry.

Let’s look into the details of these powerful new cloud-based managed services.  The heart of our value proposition to customers is two-fold:

• Automation, front-and-center.  We’ve automated best practices for the configuration, monitoring, and ongoing administration of 8 managed services.  The provisioning of each service is also automated, via our Blueprints orchestration engine.
• Humans, when you need them.  Of course, humans play a key role in uptime and performance of managed environments.  But our managed services involve them intelligently, with proactive notifications.  These alerts indicate that a decision, or perhaps a manual action, is required.  That means our team is engaged, and hands-on with your environment whenever it’s needed, 24x7.

Both of these principles are hallmarks of public clouds – automation to the Nth degree, with humans jumping in only when needed.  This approach yields self-service, hourly billing, and scale.  All three are big wins for customers.

Here’s what is available on CenturyLink Cloud, effective June 30.  8 managed...

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We are in the business of solving real problems. That’s what our customers expect.  And today, we are announcing a new managed service that does just that.  Today we are introducing a cloud-based managed services offering that will help corporate managers minimize costs, complexity and risk while increasing agility and freeing budget for capabilities that transform the business and create competitive differentiation.  At CenturyLink, we believe that one of the most significant measures of problem solving is doing what we do best – managing the infrastructure that underpins the critical business initiatives of our clients and infusing that management with the automation and economics of our cloud platform.  Combined, those two elements deliver a value that no other provider can compete with today.  Infrastructure and people to run that infrastructure on-demand, paid for by the hour. Simply put, we are making cloud easier to manage for our customers.

We all know that Cloud is crossing a threshold into a new level of enterprise adoption possibilities. Enterprises now consider the cloud to be a basic necessity; a core element of their IT portfolios.  The challenge, however, is that most cloud platforms still operate on the do-it-yourself basis as cloud providers have...

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