F5 Forum London 2013: Nathan Pearce on cloud strategy

@pearcenathan’s second speaker slot at F5’s UK forum, on cloud strategy and SDN’s place in enterprise application delivery.

Scene setter: people, even within the same company, use cloud-based tools like Box to share content and files.  The point: it’s not easy to tell how much people are using cloud within your business.  People talk about adopting cloud at an enterprise level when the reality is that cloud services are in use all over the organisation already.

Has anything really changed in the context of application delivery?  In many senses, no.  Connectivity, application access and resource allocation are just as important to users that access cloud-based apps.

What has changed is how services and applications are orchestrated.  If your company is using cloud services, even in part, to deliver applications, then you have a vested interest in using these paid-for resources efficiently.  It is efficient if your cloud or your provider’s cloud can spin up servers and provision apps when needed, and – just as importantly - de-provision them when not.

More here, and a nice video on Rackspace’s use of F5 for cloud services provision can be found here.