Category: Uncategorised

Cloud manager

(2-3 minute read) 

TLDR: We talked to Fluid CTO, Alexander Turner about why Fluid will make your life easier. Think edge, K8s, containerization, and cost vantage points. 

Alex, what are your top three points for why CTO’s should take note of Fluid?  

1. Your competitors and peers are moving to the edge, right?  
   
   That means that their services to their end customers are going to be faster and they’re going to be quicker to deploy.  
    
   There’s no denying the drive to move more compute and workload closer to your end-user or consumer. Edge computing promises just that, but how?
    
   With cloud computing providers being forced into larger, more central facilities, how can you deploy scalable workloads on the edge? Fluid’s adds value in its ability to transform legacy or On-premise computing infrastructure into your own internet-accessible cloud.
    
   Fluid makes provisioning hardware a task simple enough for remote hands to complete in a few hours. All that needs to happen is cabling and rack-and-stack. Fluid’s orchestration platform automatically boots and installs your servers not before presenting them on our globally accessible management portal. Fluid makes it trivial to build your own mini-cloud wherever and whenever you want.
    

2. Future workloads are container-first.
    
   Modern organizations need to be able to quickly adapt their product and scale to customer requirements at the press of the button. Use of public cloud services have normalized the expectation of easily deploying applications with a single API call Wizard. Containers are the building block of rapid scale and empower innovation in product by abstracting time spent managing and converting it into time spent building. Future and present workloads and applications start with containers. They are small, nimble services that scale fast and run anywhere. Kubernetes has proven itself to be the de facto standard when it comes to container orchestrations and portability.  Kubernetes empowers applications to run across multiple cloud platforms and On-premise with tools like Fluid, so your technical teams can focus on creating IP and not keeping it running.   
    

3. On-premise VM-Backed workloads will burn a hole in your pocket.
   
   Let’s start with the number of resources it takes to just manage and run them! Building an alternative strategy that doesnt rely just on VMs, supports cost reduction in the cloud, or supports your cloud repatriation focus is required. It may or may not be the cloud, but the cloud itself comes with bill shock. With the consumption-based model, it doesn’t matter if you’re only running one VM, or a thousand VMs, you’re getting charged for what you use.
    
   With Fluid you have a running cost per node. You can run whatever resources you please. There’s no bill shock, it’s completely controlled. Traditional workloads need to run somewhere smart, somewhere that’s future-proofed and somewhere they aren’t going to drown the business in cost.

Fluid makes CTO’s work lives easier. Want to know more? Book a demo today.  

Cloud manager

(2-3 minute read) 

TLDR: We talked to Fluid CTO, Alexander Turner about which businesses Fluid can help and how implementing Fluid makes life easier for the user.  

What businesses do you see Fluid helping the most?  

Fluid is a ubiquitous tool. It makes sense for anyone who is unhappy with their cloud spend and wants to take control again to regain flexibility. It helps if you’re using Kubernetes in high-demand and high-throughput workloads. 
 
One of the challenges with the cloud is it is a seemingly infinite pool of resources. The cloud is limited by how fast you can get to the cloud, and not only do you have to organize that connectivity yourself, if you’re running workloads between offices or premises or studios, you must organize that connectivity too. You also must pay for each bit that you send into or out of the cloud.  

This is where Fluid really differentiates – building edge workloads and providing you control of the edge means that those data costs can completely disappear unless they’re for internet users. The storage and overheads that you’re paying for, just by virtue of using someone else’s intellectual property, don’t exist anymore. From my vantage point, for example in the media industry, this is truly exciting because it provides scale on-premises where it’s difficult to run these high bandwidth workloads off-premises, efficiently and effectively.  

One of the reasons people move away from on-premises infrastructure is that it’s generally challenging to run. It requires a lot of engineering resources. We’ve really put a lot of effort into making Fluid as easy as possible to deploy and manage, and with that in mind, it is attractive to a cloud engineer to run and deploy. Instead of requiring an on-premises engineering team or VMware engineers, a large complex cluster can be deployed by a data center’s remote hands and managed by them instead.  

How does implementing Fluid make the user’s life easier?  

Fluid brings that cloud management experience to your edge on-premises workloads.  

The tasks that you would have to spend in setting up network, and configuring compute, and booting compute are gone. We leverage the same technologies that large-scale cloud / hyperscalers use to automatically boot servers, automatically configure servers, automatically configure the network, and present that all in one single-management pane interface, so you can simply jump in the cloud portal and manage it.  

You can plug things in and turn them on and they will PXE boot. They will configure themselves automatically. It’s touchless, it’s hands-free, it’s a really, really simple way of deploying. The cost of that comes at the cost of network configuration flexibility, and we think that’s a good thing. The same trend that we see in cloud providers today, is that they have a way of configuring the network, and that’s designed for scale, security, and resiliency. We have taken that model and applied it on-premises, so there’s no consideration to be made around architecture. There is an architecture, and it makes it as easy as possible for the end-user to conform to that.  

We know it scales, we know it supports all sorts of workloads, from complicated Kubernetes workloads, all the way to VMs running in Windows Server 2008 running payment applications. We’ve had a wide range of supported applications and tooling on top of the platform. It’s easy. 

CTO

(2-3 minute read) 

TLDR: We spoke to Fluid CTO, Alexander Turner regarding why he saw there had to be a better way for on-premises environments to be created, and his favorite Fluid features, such as the bridge between cloud and on-premises infrastructure. 

Alexander, how did you become involved with Fluid?  

Coming out of a recent tenure with one of the large cloud providers, I was looking to instantiate and drive change in the industry where I felt that we had some real sticking points. I met Andrew Sjoquist (Fluid Founder), and he has brilliant ideas for Fluid. It was just a perfect match. Andrew had brilliant ideation around where the pain points were for his customers, we both had a vision, and both wanted to make a change.