The cloud industry is continuing to grow every year. According to Gartner, the total market revenue was $260bn in 2017, and it’s expected to grow to over $410bn by 2020. Still dominated by some of the larger players, 2017 concluded with AWS holding 62% of the cloud industry’s total market share, Azure 20%, and GCP 12%. While there is obviously much at stake for these big three, smaller service providers are taking advantage of the growth by finding niches. The desire for more personalized, multilingual support as well as consideration around the appropriate private, hybrid, and multi-cloud strategies have specific demands that require specialized cloud providers. Such demands are made all the more urgent by the growing complexity of data sovereignty worldwide. There are many reasons why customers may choose to work with regional cloud providers - here are some key ones.
The European General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, came into effect in May promising fines for non-compliance of €20m or 4% of annual worldwide revenue. Many organizations scrambled to decipher how their application could be impacted by GDPR and what they could do to ensure compliance. A few months later not much has changed. Precedents have still to be set. Nonetheless, questions of sovereignty remain relevant as the dynamic nature of data storage and processing entails a fair amount of ambiguity. To that end, I’ve compiled a quick summary of how GDPR describes data sovereignty and what that means for Canadian businesses.
The slippery slope of data sovereignty was brought into the limelight again recently with the news that certain Canadian government agencies were entertaining discussions to store secret Canadian data on US-based hyperscale clouds - forbidden by current Canadian Federal policy. These discussions centered around the use of encryption to ensure that this data remained secret - with the premise being that as long as Canada held the keys to the encryption, the data would be safe. Encryption has also been front and center in many discussions concerning readiness for the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), already approved, and due to be enforced beginning in May 2018.
You’ve run containers locally, so running them remotely is just a matter of SSHing into a machine and running your container there instead, right? What happens when that machine is at capacity? Clearly you need to add another host, but stringing together API calls to create a remote host, install Docker on it, push Docker images to it, and finally run them can be a bit of a hassle.
cloud.ca Infrastructure Enables Rapid Growth of Innovative Company
Summary
CWP Energy sought to:
- Off-load its IT demands (web applications and virtual desktops) to trusted partners
- Integrate data flow between its data mining applications and financial software
- Enable the company to expand to new locations and triple its number of employees in the next five years
Joint Solution Enables Customers to Outsource IT and Focus on Core Business Value
Malicis sought to:
- Provide cloud-based virtual desktops as a managed service;
- Partner with a reliable Citrix Ready, Canadian Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) partner;
- Deliver IT services that allow customers to focus on their core competencies.
DNA-Based Healthcare Startup Trusts Sensitive Patient Data with Canadian Cloud Provider
Summary
BiogeniQ sought to:
- move from traditional hosting to a secure cloud infrastructure,
- increase its service reliability and uptime,
- maintain costs while increasing the number of customers it could serve.
After a thorough vetting process of several Canadian cloud providers, BiogeniQ chose cloud.ca due to its confidence in cloud.ca’s security, its excellent uptime and service guarantees, as well as its responsive and knowledgeable team. BiogeniQ now serves 10x the number of customers within the same infrastructure budget.
Getting up and running with container orchestration can be challenging. Luckily, cloud.ca has you covered: we’ve integrated with Rancher to make deploying containers on cloud.ca a snap. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a multi-host container environment running on cloud.ca.
Here at cloud.ca, we are big fans of HashiCorp’s tools like Terraform, Vault, and Consul. They are open source and deeply rooted in the belief that DevOps is the future of infrastructure management to help speed software delivery.
Join us tomorrow for a special, impromptu Kubernetes (K8s) meetup that will be hosted in conjunction with Canonical, in our space as of 6 pm. This event should not be missed! It includes a demo of containerized OpenStack and Kubernetes, as well as a hands-on workshop about Helm, Kubernetes’ packaging tool. Come enjoy pizza, drinks, learning and networking! Additional info about the topics and RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/Kubernetes-Montreal/events/239570055/
