DevOps the hot topic at this year’s Cloud Expo

Fresh from attending this year’s Cloud Expo Europe 2017, Lee Ganly, Acora’s CIO and Craig Hurt, Acora’s Chief Architect offer up their views on this year’s key topics.

Acora makes a point of attending Cloud Expo Europe and other large industry shows as it’s a way of validating their portfolio against the new challenger technologies so they can be sure they’re always discussing the most modern and contemporary solutions with their clients.

While they appreciate it’s not all end-user companies, a gathering of cloud industry people in one area is still a good benchmark of “what’s hot” and “what’s not”. And there what was no doubting what was hot this year at Cloud Expo Europe 2017: in a word DevOps.

Maybe because it’s relatively new and shiny in the mainstream, or that is was well promoted pre-event and people were attending just to see this. DevOps theatres were packed with attendees keen to find out about this latest technology trend, creating a huge buzz in that part of the hall. DevOps, paired with cloud deployment and security, promotes greater compliance and faster time to value from software development investments. Companies who rely on technology to make their money were challenged to consider themselves as tech companies that operate within a sector. Whilst the landscape of available DevOps tooling is still vast, standard reference architectures were presented and demonstrated, with common components forming the backbone of most solutions.

From attending these sessions, Acora’s leading consultants were assured that the DevOps platform the company had developed to support its clients digital transformation programmes represents a solid foundation from which to build and innovate. It is consistent with industry leading DevOps practices on show and has the potential to be hugely compelling to mid-market firms who rely on their technology to make money.

What else?

Well lots and lots of backup/storage vendors were showing how far their journey into the cloud had progressed, with integrated hybrid cloud offerings, either utilising resources from public cloud to extend their platform or protect cloud based and on-site assets from a single management pane. Major security players were well represented as well as more specialist cyber security vendors like Dark Trace. GDPR made an appearance, but the gut feeling was that people were preferring to get their proposition straight before promoting too hard.