It’s the time of pandemic. Given the order to “shelter in place” throughout most of the developed world, how can global networks cope when the majority of the workforce is working remotely?
For many knowledge workers, working remotely is not a new concept. “I’ve been working from home for twenty of the past thirty years,” said Eric Kavanagh, CEO of the independent research firm Bloor Group. “How to handle surges in traffic has been a topic of discussion for more than twenty years.” Kavanagh was the first speaker for the webinar, “Cloud Native Data: The Foundation of Modern Business,” presented through The Briefing Room on March 31, 2020.
He noted that the demands of the current Coronavirus-19 pandemic are a special instance of surge traffic. “Two days ago, Microsoft saw a 775 percent surge in cloud demand. … It’s a ‘cloud-ready world’ out there.”
The classic surge in traffic, known to occur every year, is Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the American calendar. Kavanagh said “there’s a real financial cost to not being able to scale up” because stores cannot process all the people who want to purchase.
Retailers “want to scale up,” he said, “but they also want to scale back down when the surge is over.” Although it seems like a contradiction in terms, organizations need a foundation that is both durable and elastic. “Sort of like a rubber band that will snap right back,” once the stretching is over.
“Limitless computing has arrived,” Kavanagh said. Thanks to the scalability of the cloud, in particular, the open-source Kubernetes, computational power can now easily scale up and down. Originally designed by Google, Kubernetes is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Kubernetes provides a platform for synchronizing the operations of software applications across clusters of hosts.
The real question is how to handle the data. “Organizations building next-generation apps with Kubernetes have learned to exploit the true power of the cloud,” Kavanagh said before turning the podium over to the second panellist, to describe one such instance of data management.
In closing, Kavanagh said, “Disruptive forces will be moving through all sectors of the economy.” When the pandemic is over, “I predict cloud-based solutions will dominate the landscape.”♠️