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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We are excited to present a special evening with Jeff Sussna to discuss "Putting the Service in Micro-Services". The event will be hosted at our new Development Center in St. Louis on Wednesday, April 13th from 4pm to 7pm.

Jeff Sussna is an internationally recognized IT consultant and design thinking practitioner. He is known throughout the DevOps community for introducing DevOps to the importance of empathy. Jeff has nearly 30 years of experience in software development, QA, and operations, and has led projects for Fortune 500 enterprises, major technology companies, software service startups, and media conglomerates. He is the the author of Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT In the Digital Service Economy, and is a highly respected teacher, writer, and speaker on topics across the Agile/DevOps/Design Thinking spectrum.

At this event Jeff will cover:

• How to structure organizations to reflect the kind of systems they want to create • How to use continual redesign to have organizational flexibility for effective design • How to design and operate systems and organizations as continuous and inseparable

Jeff will explore the relationship between organizations and systems. He will delve into Conway’s Law. Melvin Conway made the observation that we are doomed to design systems that mirror the shapes of...

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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 Jean Masters, Customer Relationship Manager for Symas Corporation.

LDAP Directory Service Overview

Symas is pleased to announce that Symas OpenLDAP Silver, an OpenLDAP-compatible Directory-as-a-Service (DaaS) product, is available on CenturyLink Cloud via Blueprints. This product highlights our commitment to cloud technologies by providing developers with rapid access to a high-performance, enterprise-scale LDAP directory service that runs in CenturyLink’s standard Cloud Servers and Hyperscale Servers.

OpenLDAP Features

Designed for Enterprise and small and midsize business (SMB) customers, Symas LDAP Database Service includes:

• Availability in most CenturyLink data centers
• Performance-leading directory server based on OpenLDAP
• Enterprise-grade commercial Technical Support
• Ultra-efficient Lightning Memory-mapped Database (LMDB) and server core
• Full ACID semantics
• Flexible Provisioning – choose CPU, RAM and storage right for you
• Self-Service - scale CPU, RAM, and storage as your needs grow
• Daily backups with configurable backup time
• Replication option with auto-failover for high-availability
• SSL Certificate to encrypt connection and data in transit
• Built on enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure

Enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure is critical for database performance. The CenturyLink Cloud Platform powered by Hyperscale Servers out-performed other high profile competitors...

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Simple Backup Service Overview

Data is the lifeblood of day-to-day business operations in the modern enterprise. IT veterans are painfully familiar with the dreaded scenario of accidentally deleting something critical, like a production database. Imagine the impact to your business if this happened and you didn’t have a backup copy from which to restore. It's absolutely critical that your data is protected against unexpected loss or corruption.

Compounding the challenge of protecting critical data is the fact that data volumes are rapidly increasing to levels that stress a traditional legacy data protection approach. Legacy backup technologies may no longer be cost effective at scale. In many industries, data is also highly-regulated. New laws regulate where backup data can reside and for how long it must be retained in archive -- adding new complexity to the data protection strategy.

With those challenges in mind, the CenturyLink Cloud team is excited to announce the General Availability of Simple Backup Service (SBS), a new Internet-based cloud backup product that rethinks the “traditional” approach to enterprise data protection.

Flexible: No more “one size fits all” approach to backups. Create backup policies that match the precise location, frequency, and retention period required for your business.

Global Coverage: Store your backups...

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In Part 1 of our two-part series on Capacity Planning for Cloud Platforms, we tackled some major factors relating to what capacity planning is, why it's a constantly evolving exercise, and how best to prepare and forecast for future business, platform, and customer needs. Capacity planning for a cloud-based platform requires a careful look at the business landscape with regards to assessing future expected levels, and needs. Considerations such as purchasing decisions and patterns in conjunction with their associated cadences heavily impact and dictate capacity planning and implementation.

In Part 2 of the series, we're going to discuss capacity planning with regards to forecasting for different types of devices, customer behavior and process-orientated build patterns, integration strategies, and handling the unexpected.

How we Forecast for Different Types of Devices

The cloud platform is an infrastructure of connected devices of different types and different manufactures. Fortunately, there are many similarities between devices from different manufactures. For capacity planning purposes, these similarities between manufacturers often allow us to treat different devices similarly as long as they are the same type of device. There are many types of devices such as: network devices, storage devices, and compute devices. For both business and technical reasons, our forecast...

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Last night, the ElasticKube team sponsored a San Francisco Cloud Mafia meetup with AppOrbit. While containers have been around for a while, the varied topics and questions reflect the fact that most companies are in the early stages of using containers. Topics ranged from best practices for container management at scale, to namespaces, to picking a repo.

After some yummy Mediterranean and Mexican food (“mediterran-ican”), CTO and co-founder of Cloud Application Manager, Alberto Maestro, kicked off the evening with a review of the generational shifts in cloud management platforms, highlighting Generation 1 as being workflow driven with an emphasis on flexibility over reusability. Generation 2 is defined as model-driven or declarative with a premium placed on reusability over flexibility. Finally, he described Generation 3 as container driven with configuration management being done at build time, not deploy time. Gen 3 is typified by a single abstract container infrastructure model. Modern companies are moving towards Gen 3 cloud management.

With this context, Alberto then explained why we selected Kubernetes over other solutions in the market as the platform for our container management solution.

He then shared ElasticKube, an open source project for container management on top of Kubernetes. His demo included authorizing new users,...

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Developers love Docker. It’s simple, fast, and lightweight. There’s even an open-source community behind this tech that’s growing at an exponential rate. And there’s a decent chance that your organization is already using Docker; 70% of enterprises are using containers.

Further, Docker usage is serious business, notes Donnie Berkholz, Research Director at 451 Research (slide 13 of the deck):

Build or Buy

For organizations considering the next step in their evolution toward cloud-native development, a new choice emerges: Build on my current container usage today and advance it into a Platform with internal resources, or look outside my organization to buy these capabilities?

These two options are summarized nicely by Sam Ramji, CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Cloud Foundry is represented as the Platform option on the left. The Do It Yourself option on the right features the Kubernetes/Mesos approach to Docker.

Each option offers a thoughtful ways to embrace the 4 principles that will shape the future of IT. Both choices:

• Are based on open-source.
• Embrace the elastic, cheap compute of the public cloud (and private cloud where required).
• Offer significant abstraction, keeping IT out of the guts of the stack. Some assembly is required to get to this point for the "Do It Yourself" path,

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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 Sid Prasanna, CEO of FlexSecure Inc.(www.flexsecure.co).

As cyber attacks and data breaches continue to make headlines, Security-as-a-Service offerings are becoming more valuable by the day. In the IT world, there is now a fundamental understanding that any business with an on-line presence needs to think about data security for both their business and their customers. FlexSecure has joined with the CenturyLink Cloud Marketplace to make the process of providing robust, solid, and capable authentication easy and painless for any customer, regardless of their technical abilities.

Solution Overview

The FlexSecure platform enables organizations of all sizes to choose and combine user authentication solutions based on the individual needs of their company. Companies and developers can add pin and passwordless security to their existing authentication mechanisms. Users can also change authentication methods in near real-time through an easy-to-use interface.

Layered Security

Some of FlexSecure's primary advantages are:

Custom user and device authentication: The authentication standards can be "turned up or down" to suit the needs of the users. For...

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CenturyLink Cloud has an impressive track record over the past few years of delivering new features and functionality to its platform. To wit: Frost & Sullivan recently recognized CenturyLink as its Company of the Year for the North American Cloud Industry. The report details how CenturyLink is meeting the needs of the next generation of technical and line-of-business cloud users.

One aspect of CenturyLink Cloud’s approach worth highlighting is the simplicity of deploying add-on tech to complete a complex, hybrid cloud solution.

CenturyLink Ecosystem

CenturyLink introduced its Partner Ecosystem in early 2015. Since then, partners have introduced over 200 solutions that solve specific business needs.

What’s more, these solutions can be deployed instantly by using CenturyLink’s built-in orchestration framework called Blueprints. Blueprints are pre-packaged workflows that can be defined and re-played at any time on the platform. Custom configuration settings are entered in minutes during deployment.

How can this Ecosystem work for you? Let’s start with Disaster Recovery (DR), a common workload for enterprises just beginning their cloud journey. Public cloud is great for DR for three key reasons:

• No CapEx: No new capital outlays are required in the form of new hardware or a build-out of a secondary data center.
• Easy to Get Started: Point-and-click to

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Get In and Get Going

​ Whether you're a customer migrating to a new Cloud provider or you're an existing customer migrating from a legacy platform like VPDC, OCC, CDC, or DCC, migrating is seamless and simple with the experts at CenturyLink. It's important to get in, explore, and find the differences in meta models, map services from your old provider and the Legacy Platform, and try things out to get familiar with the new interface. ​ CenturyLink's Cloud Migration program entry requirements make the process easy-to-follow, as customers must: ​

• Meet pre-qualification requirements and complete The Cloud Provider Velocity Program document that details the terms and credit allocation. You can obtain the document by emailing a Cloud Specialist.
• Provide proof of active use from a competing Public Cloud, especially in light of some providers shutting down their Public Cloud offerings. If that situation applies to you, check out this trial offer.
• Establish a contracting process for CenturyLink Cloud prior to engagement.
• Pass through the pre-qualification process by March 30, 2016 for free migration on-boarding offer eligibility. ​ By migrating to CenturyLink Cloud® from another cloud provider with the help of CenturyLink's Migration and On-boarding teams, customers will benefit from CenturyLink's matching Cloud Credit offer. The offer includes on-boarding services and

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With so much angst in the market over new and innovative ways to deliver cloud application services, Cloud Application Manager has joined the open source community by introducing an entirely new project focused on container management called ElasticKube. Many of our customers have shown a keen interest in containers, although they’re looking to leverage Cloud Application Manager for “traditional” virtualized environments. However, I’m always intrigued at how cautiously optimistic IT organizations are and even sometimes, downright pessimistic, when it comes to management and security of containers. So it makes perfect sense that Cloud Application Manager has chosen to invest in containers and meet a huge need in the market.

Today’s launch is the first step in working with the community to help standardize the way enterprises deploy and manage containers. But what is ElasticKube exactly? Glad you asked; it is essentially a management layer on top of a Kubernetes cluster. Similar to the experience that you might see in our Cloud Application Manager offering, this is a web console and self-service template catalog of all the containerized services that are available in your repository (for example, GitHub). Our primary focus has been to add value with authorization and user management which...

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