The Digital Transformation
The concept of “Digital Transformation” for executive teams at Fortune-sized companies is no longer a new and flashy phrase. An important part of this Digital Transformation is how companies think about cloud computing. When once, organizations seemed to have only 2 decisions: enter the cloud, or keep everything on premise; now the options are a bit more “cloudy” (pun intended).
In the digital transformation age, Fortune companies are looking at multi-cloud strategies. They understand that siloing data into one cloud provider decreases their flexibility and ability to negotiate discounts while increasing the risks of a provider outage affecting production workloads. When Fortune 1000 companies think about their multi-cloud strategies they basically have 3 options:
- Keep some data on-prem and put some in the cloud
- Put data in different regions or zones within a single cloud provider
- Place data in many separate cloud providers
What’s great about all three is that companies can be dynamic about how they solve business goals, allocate budget, and provision resources. With this multi-cloud shift, some of the traditional technologies used in businesses need to adapt and change.
One of our Fortune 500 clients who develops financial software and sells financial, accounting, and tax preparation software, came to us because they were switching an OS installation from RHEL to Amazon Linux. Clearly, they are deep into their Digital Transformation journey because though this workload was already in the cloud. Changing both the OS and automation toolchain of a cloud deployment this large is no easy feat.
As a small team, we pride ourselves in jumping high at client requests, and therefore within two weeks the work was done. The answer is “Yes. LINBIT now supports DRBD® 9.0 on Amazon Linux.” As client demand changes, as workloads migrate to the cloud, and as containers gain traction, we are doing our best to be dynamic by listening to community & client feedback.
With millions of downloads, we rely on clients and the open-source community users to tell us what they want. If you haven’t been following our progress, this means we are thinking about how to improve performance for Linux High Availability Clusters and Disaster Recovery clusters for traditional workloads on hardware like NVMe and Optane, while also looking into kernel technology’s role in Kubernetes environments in conjunction with public and private cloud environments. What challenges exist here that didn’t before? What do users want? These are the questions that drive our development.
So DRBD users: we’re here. We’re listening, feel free to chime in on the community IRC (#drbd on freenode) & mailing list forums, respond in the comments here, ask questions about our Youtube videos… & lets ensure that open-source continues to drive innovation as the commercial giants are deciding which technologies to choose in their 5 year technology goals.
