Containers have become one of many viable solutions to running software with high reliability when migrated from one cloud environment to another. This can be from a physical machine to a virtual machine in a private or public cloud, or from a staging environment into production.

Companies like Google, IBM, VMware and Microsoft are all investing in container offerings and are becoming more popular each day. This is largely due to the fact that containers let you pack more computing workloads onto a single server, resulting in less hardware purchase, lower facilities cost for your datacenter and reduction in experts required to manage that equipment. Meanwhile, Linux containers give each application its own isolated environment in which to run whereas multiple containers leverage the host servers’ operating system. Since you don’t have to boot up an operating system, you can create containers in seconds versus minutes like virtual machines.

So what should I expect to see for the foreseeable future?

Will containers eventually replace server virtualization?

The most reasonable answer nowadays is “No”, as virtual machines still offer better security than containers do. However, it’s not a “one-or-the-other” approach either, but management tools are evolving to orchestrate large numbers of containers in...

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Hadoop is one of the hottest enterprise big data technologies in the cloud today. To make big data in the cloud easier for our customers, 8 Cloudera Hadoop Add-on Services are now available for CenturyLink Cloud®. Through an ecosystem of open-source components, Hadoop Add-on Services fundamentally changes the way enterprises store, process, and analyze data to solve all kinds of big data problems.

For many, Hadoop is too difficult to deploy and manage. Automating a four-node cluster can be a daunting task. But not with the Cloudera Blueprint for CenturyLink Cloud! We've taken the complexity out of Hadoop by automating the dozens of deployment steps associated with a new cluster environment. We reduced all these steps to just a few clicks of the mouse.

Benefits of Cloudera Blueprint for CenturyLink Cloud

CenturyLink's Cloudera Blueprint simplifies the process of installing, configuring, and adding components for an entire Hadoop cluster. The Blueprints come in 1 and 4 server configurations. If you need more than 4 nodes, additional nodes can be added in minutes by upgrading the Cloudera Blueprint version.

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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 Tom Coffing, President and CEO at Coffing Data Warehousing.

Become a Cloud Rock Star

The best kept secret in cloud computing just might be the Nexus Chameleon software. It has been designed and developed for over a decade to integrate all databases as if they were one giant system. Coffing Data Warehousing is excited to be providing its amazing service on the Century Link Cloud platform.

One of the best complements we ever received was from a Vice President at the world’s largest bank who said, “Nexus is so powerful and easy-to-use that it puts the business user on the same playing field as the Data Scientist”.

The Challenges Solved by the Nexus Chameleon

The Nexus Chameleon has automated the most difficult challenges in today’s computing environment by doing things nobody else in the world is doing, but yet doing so with the click of the mouse.

Imagine that you have transactional legacy systems such as DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server and, on top of that, you...

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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 Mike Kane, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, for Dyn.

We’ve all done it at one time or another. You know… drawing a fuzzy arrow between two system components without really knowing exactly how the data is going to get from point A to point B. Almost every reference architecture scribbled on a white board has at least one such cloudy arrow. If the information has to travel between customers and users, as well as cloud and data center assets, typically the path is usually not well understood. Yet these paths can have as much impact on service performance as anything else. The situation requires deeper examination.

The chances are, unless you’re specialized in network operations, you may not be completely aware of the nuances and challenges involved in moving data and procedure calls on the Internet. It’s time to get on it though. As your organization transitions from on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based and Hybrid architectures, you will likely find yourself relying on...

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CenturyLink Cloud Runner from CenturyLink Cloud on Vimeo.

CenturyLink is excited to announce the launch of Runner, a configuration management and orchestration service that works across Hybrid-IT architectures and diverse cloud environments. Runner addresses the potential time and resource drain confronting organizations that want their own private clouds. It reduces private cloud complexity and administrative workload by allowing for fast and easy automation of infrastructure in any cloud or data center. It offers fast, easy automation and orchestration on the CenturyLink Platform, as well as on third-party cloud providers and on-premise infrastructures and devices. With Runner, you can quickly provision and modify resources on any environment.

What is Runner?

Runner is automation made simple! Runner exposes an open source automation and orchestration engine as a service. On top of the engine, we’ve created custom services and APIs to enhance job execution capabilities. Runner was created to enable users to quickly and efficiently manage their infrastructure, wherever it is. Runner securely connects customers to their infrastructure whether on the CenturyLink Platform, other clouds, or private data centers, allowing for both push and pull-based communication. Whether provisioning, configuring, or deploying, Runner makes it easy to quickly create and run jobs, report on the status,...

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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 Gautam Thockchom for Sureline Systems.

Sureline is leading the way with a complete, easy-to-deploy application mobility solution that is flexible, provides the highest quality recovery points and replicates them remotely for safety, delivers zero data loss failover and failback, and provides the ability to test disaster recovery (DR) plans easily and frequently without locking the customer to a specific cloud. We're an industry leader in cloud migration, DR software, and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions. Sureline fundamentally solves the problem of any-to-any DR and migration, enabling seamless data migration and DR from any environment -- physical or virtual -- to CenturyLink Cloud.

In our experience moving customers to the cloud and protecting thousands of machines on the cloud, we've noticed that customers are quite serious about beginning the conversion process. However, a lot of cloud projects are slow to start because of a simple reason -- the question of how to move to the cloud is typically not answered clearly.

In order...

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Unleash the Power of the Platform

Understanding not only what the CenturyLink Platform is, but how to use it to get the most out of the products, services, and offerings, requires more than a surface-level view. In essence, our goal is to show you how to really engage with the CenturyLink Platform. We created a quick "Platform Overview" video to cover a wide array of our platform offerings and to show you how you can easily build and customize our catalog of products and services to fit your specific business needs; and most importantly, manage them seamlessly with just a few clicks. Watch the video below to learn how to utilize the CenturyLink Cloud Platform and transform how you deliver services to your customers.

2016 CenturyLink Cloud Platform Walkthrough from CenturyLink Cloud on Vimeo.

Customizable Control at your Fingertips

The CenturyLink Platform is comprised of IaaS, PaaS, and cloud management features that make it easier to manage and operate resources. Users can engage the platform by using the Control Portal, API's, and SDK's. There's a lot that goes into managing and building a cloud environment, such as thinking about the entire lifecycle of your resources. The Control Portal unlocks full functionality and a host...

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CenturyLink is pleased to announce price reductions for several of our flagship public cloud services around the world.

Highlights:

• CPU and RAM for virtual servers and Hyperscale instances drop by 10% in all nine North America public cloud nodes and our two APAC sites.
• Hyperscale pricing for storage drops by 20% in North America and APAC, and by 10% in EMEA. Relational DB – which uses Hyperscale – receives these same price drops in the same locations.
• Block Storage price drops to coincide with the forthcoming retirement of Standard and Premium backup features.

The CenturyLink Cloud® online estimator, TCO tool, and product pages have been updated to reflect our lower prices. The lower prices are effective for customers retroactive to April 1, 2016. And the customer invoices delivered for April will reflect the price changes noted above.

Public Cloud Economies of Scale at Work for You

This is the benefit of the public cloud – large providers like CenturyLink buy the gear and write automation software to run it efficiently. Part of the scale we can achieve at CenturyLink with our public cloud is due to our other infrastructure services – colocation, and hosting products in over 60 data centers, as well as a world-class fiber network....

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Why Data Protection Services are Important

Data backup and restoration is critical on both a personal and business continuity level. From personal photos to customer financial information, data is always at risk of being lost. These risk factors range from user error to natural disaster; it’s not a matter of “if”, but "when." The associated downtime of these sudden events can cripple businesses. Those who are prepared can resume operations swiftly and not only minimize financial impact, but seize the opportunity to gain new business from competitors whose operations may be nonfunctional. The consequences of data loss can be so great that many businesses are forced on a regulatory level to maintain consistent copies of data.

What Solution is Right for You?

So you have important data that you don’t want to lose -- what next? With the myriad of choices, it may be difficult to determine what product provides the best fit for your needs. The first step in the selection process is to ask yourself “What am I trying to protect and why?”. Are you trying to ensure your precious memories are not erased forever? Perhaps you need to protect your sensitive client information from vandalism or system failure, or even...

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Background

I work as a Product Owner on the Advanced Storage team at CenturyLink Cloud®. My totally awesome team is comprised of 7 developers, an analyst (with dev chops) named Dan, and myself. One of the things I really enjoy about being a product owner at CenturyLink Cloud is that I have the autonomy to solve my own problems. I have access to, and I am encouraged to use, all the capabilities of our platform. It also helps that I have a development background, which gives me a desire to learn tech and use it to do fun things.

My team has been busy rolling out our next generation Object Storage product to Canada and the Eastern US. After we recently launched our product for the first time, Dan and I took some time to reflect on what tooling we needed in order to track against our business goals. We realized that we needed better visibility into how customers use our product. What customers and storage buckets are growing? At what rate are they growing? What customers are deleting their data? We desperately needed business intelligence on our product.

At CenturyLink Cloud, our internal Analytics team developed an ELK stack for our product...

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CenturyLink Cloud® is open for business Down Under.

The new Sydney location features our portfolio of compute, storage, and networking products, fully self-service, elastic, and on-demand.

Now, businesses operating or based in Australia can now turn to a single, trusted provider for public and private Cloud infrastructure, managed services, colocation, networking and support for advanced Hybrid IT scenarios. The Sydney site is our 14th public cloud node, and is federated with our other locations in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Singapore.

CenturyLink Cloud’s infrastructure and platform offers customers an enterprise-ready path to leveraging cloud services to meet their business and IT requirements. Users can deploy a wide range of applications on our infrastructure – lift-and-shift migrations, traditional three-tier apps, and new cloud native patterns.

Key CenturyLink Differentiators

So what's different about CenturyLink's services? What's unique for the Australian market?

• CenturyLink Public Cloud offers built-in cloud management, automation and orchestration capabilities to help customers enable business agility with self-service. Bundled billing and governance features reduce runaway spending or bill shock.

• Customers can provision highly-configurable virtual servers instantly. These can then be connected to our full portfolio of Hybrid IT services– Colocation, Managed Hosting and Network, to deliver real-world applications running in across different islands of

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Solving Business Challenges

Everyday new applications and services are requested and requires IT provisioning to deliver differentiated value back to the business as well as to end-customers. Leonteq is the latest customer to publicly share how IT is approaching the challenges of rapid deployment and management of modern applications across varying cloud infrastructures. Being an industry leader in technologies for investment solutions within the financial services sector, they have been addressing challenges with disparate infrastructure resources, exploding requests for services and a diverse set of application tools.

Check out the Leonteq case study to learn how Cloud Application Manager is helping IT:

Being able to empower teams to create environments on-demand and manage numerous application stacks helps to increase efficiency and focus on innovation for customers. Leonteq offers a great playbook on how enterprises consider their transition to the cloud and adoption of modern application delivery. With heavy investments in their own datacenter, having a platform that leverages on-premises deployments as well as offers consideration for other public cloud environments in the future is extremely valuable. This allows them, and similar organizations, to...

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