Amazon improves performance of CloudFormation management platform

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added new features to the company's management platform CloudFormation that aim to improve performance and simplify updates.

As companies get more used to running applications in the cloud, they are putting together more complex systems. That in turn puts higher demands on management platforms, which have to allow users to take better advantage of the programmability and scalability of the cloud.

CloudFormation aims to give developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

The latest additions to the platform are parallel stack processing and nested stack updates.

The first feature allows CloudFormation to create, update, and delete resources in parallel in order to improve the performance of these operations. For example, provisioning a RAID 0 setup, which involves the creation of multiple Elastic Block Store volumes, is now faster because CloudFormation can provision the volumes in parallel, Amazon said in a blog post.

The platform automatically determines which resources in a template can be created in parallel. Templates are used as a blue print when running CloudFormation to describe the stack of applications and resources needed.

The second new feature, called nested stack updates, deals with how resources are updated. Using CloudFormation, a three-tier application consisting of, for example, a web tier, app tier, and database tier can be created together and in the correct order. With the introduction of nested stack updates, users can also update all the parts in one swoop, instead of having to update each part individually.

Gartner forecasts a return to IT investment as economy improves

Global IT spending is set to reach $3.7tn by 2014 as the economy improves, according to Gartner's Worldwide IT Spending Forecast.Spending on mobile devices is set to increase

by 6.5% in 2014 to $740bn, compared to $695bn in 2013.Speaking to Computer Weekly, Richard Gordon, research vice-president at Gartner, said: “We are seeing a lower growth in 2013 due to spending being deferred due to folks holding on to smartphones as new operating systems extend the life of handsets.”The data does not take into account whether devices are being bought by IT or by the consumer. Gordon added: “Enterprise IT spending on devices will decline but spending will be picked up by the consumer.”Depending on how companies account for purchases, Gordon did not expect IT budgets to change as a result. He said the IT budget was shifting.

"Businesses are outsourcing and using software as a service (SaaS), rather than investing in their own datacentres," he added.Enterprise software spending is on pace to grow 6.4% in 2013. Gartner's Worldwide IT Spending Forecast showed expanded spending on e-commerce, social and mobile as organisations boost customer relationship systems.According to Gartner, buyers in the customer relationship management (CRM) market are focusing on technologies that enable more targeted customer interactions in multichannel environments – including online channel and marketing campaign management – and technologies enabling customer loyalty management.“Across the board we expect organisations to make strategic investments in CRM. Companies want to invest in big data, social and multichannel marketing to improve CRM,” Gordon explained.The improving economic climate will boost services, according to Gordon.

“As the economy improves there will be an increase in consultancy spend with big programmes around social and mobile as companies make strategic investments in these areas.”Worldwide IT spending forecast (billions of US dollars)Source: Gartner (July 2013)He said Gartner was seeing a decline in the growth of client operating systems, reflecting the decline in the PC industry.The forecast also showed a gradual shift towards SaaS-type licensing over traditional software licensing.