It's the holiday season, and one IT wish list item may be cloud control and confidence. There's a whole new crop of companies offering cloud management and governance services to ease the adoption and maintenance of cloud. There are a lot of challenges to getting the best value out of cloud, like security, multi-cloud management and end-to-end visibility. This time of year is ideal for eating a lot and finding out where your gifts are hidden around the house. Soon enough, though, it'll be resolution time when the new year arrives and you take stock of your big-picture goals for 2017. We hear a lot about "digital transformation" and modernizing IT, which can seem like awfully lofty goals. What's the actual day-to-day plan? What are the actions IT teams, managers and CIOs can take to make sure they're improving upon their current technologies and processes?
Your car. My toaster. Our lights. The neighbor’s thermostat. With an average of 7.8 connected devices per home, according to recent surveys, there are twice as many “things” in the house as the average 3.14 people per household in the US in 2015. And all of them are “talking.” Not all talk to each other, yet, though the foundation for that is clearly laid out. But all of them talk to apps which talk to them over the Internet. When you or I interact with that app, we do so via HTTP (hopefully secured). Whether it’s via a native mobile app that uses APIs or a modern web app is irrelevant; it is safe to say that both do so via HTTP.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Enzu will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Enzu’s mission is to be the leading provider of enterprise cloud solutions worldwide. Enzu enables online businesses to use its IT infrastructure to their competitive advantage. By offering a suite of proven hosting and management services, Enzu wants companies to focus on the core of their online business and let Enzu manage their IT hosting infrastructure.
Telcos embarking on a journey to adopt and exploit the NFV trend face a big challenge of existing legacy complexity, and a key message I have been marketing is that there already are best practices that can be reused from the Enterprise sector, especially from leading ‘digital natives' like Netflix and Linkedin. NTT Communications is a great example of this, employing the same ‘toolchain' of DevOps apps like Github, Ansible, Docker and Jenkins to do exactly that, better automate their own operations practices such as distributing NMS updates across multiple global data centers.
"Avere Systems is a hybrid cloud solution provider. We have customers that want to use cloud storage and we have customers that want to take advantage of cloud compute," explained Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing at Avere Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
"There is a huge interest in Kubernetes. People are now starting to use Kubernetes and implement it," stated Sebastian Scheele, co-founder of Loodse, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
As the Microsoft Azure CTO explains microservices represents a major inflection point for the IT industry - An Application Revolution Powered by the Cloud. They themselves are pioneering the approach through new products like ‘Cognitive Microservices‘. My personal opinion is that they can be defined as the next major milestone in software engineering ever since, well software was invented and run on mainframes, they are that much of a landmark. They will re-write the agenda of software practices across corporations right through university curriculum. One critical aspect of course is the commercial opportunity, both in terms of exploiting them and also the vendor marketplace, which has been particularly impressive both in terms of their innovative embrace of the model and also their speed to market with significant plays.
Welcome back to our series on building out our own IoT projects and discovering the underlying tech and principals that make up the industrial internet and IoT. I wanted to add a couple of things I learned after recording, that didn't make it into this video but should have. After you get your Raspberry Pi running, the first thing you should do is open the terminal window, and execute the following commands:
SYS-CON Events announced today that Catchpoint, a leading digital experience intelligence company, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Catchpoint Systems is a leading Digital Performance Analytics company that provides unparalleled insight into your customer-critical services to help you consistently deliver an amazing customer experience. Designed for digital business, Catchpoint is the only end-user experience monitoring (EUM) platform that can simultaneously capture, index and analyze object-level performance data inline across the most extensive monitor types and node coverage, enabling a smarter, faster way to preempt issues and optimize service delivery. More than 350 customers in over 30 countries trust Catchpoint to strengthen their brand and grow their businesses.
"Splunk basically takes machine data and we make it usable, valuable and accessible for everyone. The way that plays in DevOps is - we need to make data-driven decisions to delivering applications," explained Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk and @DevOpsSummit Conference Chair, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Creating replica copies to tolerate a certain number of failures is easy, but very expensive at cloud-scale. Conventional RAID has lower overhead, but it is limited in the number of failures it can tolerate. And the management is like herding cats (overseeing capacity, rebuilds, migrations, and degraded performance). In his general session at 18th Cloud Expo, Scott Cleland, Senior Director of Product Marketing for the HGST Cloud Infrastructure Business Unit, discussed how a new approach is necessary, one that supports the attributes of the cloud with the millions of applications and users depending on it for their business and personal lives. Object storage is the millennial approach to cloud-based data storage, archival, retrieval and cost. Why? Because it delivers significantly higher data reliability and allows virtually unlimited expansion for storage. Perfect for a hash-tagging, selfie-taking, always communicating and collaborating in an on-demand world.
As the internet’s renowned programming language, Java has had a profound impact on how people navigate the digital world. Much of what users expect in terms of performance from their devices that access the internet has been set by Java functionality. You don’t have to be a developer, however, to recognize its influence. The story of Java goes back more than two decades and has evolved along with the digital transformation of the world. As consumer and business demands on scalability increases, Java is forced to grow and adapt in order to stay relevant. Stakeholders are approaching their work armed with a primer on Java’s history, current use, and future direction.
I’m told that it has been 21 years since Scrum became public when Jeff Sutherland and I presented it at an Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) workshop in Austin, TX, in October of 1995. Time sure does fly. Things mature. I’m still in the same building and at the same company where I first formulated Scrum.[1] Initially nobody knew of Scrum, yet it is now an open source body of knowledge translated into more than 30 languages[2] People use Scrum worldwide for developing software and other uses I never anticipated[3].
Providing secure, mobile access to sensitive data sets is a critical element in realizing the full potential of cloud computing. However, large data caches remain inaccessible to edge devices for reasons of security, size, format or limited viewing capabilities. Medical imaging, computer aided design and seismic interpretation are just a few examples of industries facing this challenge. Rather than fighting for incremental gains by pulling these datasets to edge devices, we need to embrace the immobile, heavy nature of this data by providing new opportunities for high-performance access and real-time collaboration.
Smart Cities are here to stay, but for their promise to be delivered, the data they produce must not be put in new siloes. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mathias Herberts, Co-founder and CTO of Cityzen Data, discussed the best practices that will ensure a successful smart city journey.
"LinearHub provides smart video conferencing, which is the Roundee service, and we archive all the video conferences and we also provide the transcript," stated Sunghyuk Kim, CEO of LinearHub, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Multiple agencies across the U.S. government are paying closer attention to the software they are buying. More specifically, they want to know what open source and third party components were used to build the software applications. The report notes: U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to know what open source components are being used in medical devices.
When new technology becomes available to the public, it is often met with trepidation by those who feel it’s unnecessary or even hindering. Typically, younger generations embrace technology while older people scorn it, but of course, this is not universal. The “Internet of Things” (IoT) or the growing trend to have internet connectivity in traditionally non-tech devices such as clothing, accessories, and home appliances, offers a lot of benefits to people of all generations. For example, being able to track your health data and fitness information is useful to young millennials trying to be fit, as well as older individuals who need to monitor specific health concerns.
The proper isolation of resources is essential for multi-tenant environments. The traditional approach to isolate resources is, however, rather heavyweight. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Igor Drobiazko, co-founder of elastic.io, drew upon his own experience with operating a Docker container-based infrastructure on a large scale and present a lightweight solution for resource isolation using microservices. He also discussed the implementation of microservices in data and application integration in general, shared the challenges they ran into using open source technologies like Apache Mesos and Marathon for Docker containers and what solutions they found to deal with them.
The many IoT deployments around the world are busy integrating smart devices and sensors into their enterprise IT infrastructures. Yet all of this technology – and there are an amazing number of choices – is of no use without the software to gather, communicate, and analyze the new data flows. Without software, there is no IT. In this power panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation; Alan Williamson, Principal at ParkerGale Capital; Chris Matthieu, Director IoT Engineering at Citrix; and Peter Vanderminden, Principal Industry Analyst at Flatiron Strategies looked at the protocols that communicate data and the emerging data analytics that bring its full value to the enterprise. The era of Big Data and "Little Big Data" has arrived, and will soon be eating an enterprise near you!
What are the new priorities for the connected business? First: businesses need to think differently about the types of connections they will need to make – these span well beyond the traditional app to app into more modern forms of integration including SaaS integrations, mobile integrations, APIs, device integration and Big Data integration. It’s important these are unified together vs. doing them all piecemeal. Second, these types of connections need to be simple to design, adapt and configure. Plus, with the proliferation of IoT, there is an explosion in the number of devices requiring interconnection - both in terms of asset monitoring and spatial analytics.
"A lot of times people will come to us and have a very diverse set of requirements or very customized need and we'll help them to implement it in a fashion that you can't just buy off of the shelf," explained Nick Rose, CTO of Enzu, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
A revolutionary change in the industry was the foundation of cloud on the automation of virtualization technologies. Initially it was meant for infrastructure, but with the advent of new and innovative cloud services it has crossed the boundary of Infrastructure and invaded the application space. The concept of ‘as a Service' model has three pillars: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service). Over a period of time cloud services have grown and diversified to the extent that clubbing the services into these three pillars is not only difficult but unattainable. That's the reason none of the public cloud providers classify their services in ‘as a Service' model category.
The Internet of Things will challenge the status quo of how IT and development organizations operate. Or will it? Certainly the fog layer of IoT requires special insights about data ontology, security and transactional integrity. But the developmental challenges are the same: People, Process and Platform and how we integrate our thinking to solve complicated problems. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Craig Sproule, CEO of Metavine, demonstrated how to move beyond today's coding paradigm and share the must-have mindsets for removing complexity from the development process, accelerate application delivery times, and ensure that developers will become heroes (not bottlenecks) in the IoT revolution.
While cloud may have formally entered the enterprise in 2006, it’s now a reality for nearly every company. The Cloud Era got its start with Software as a service (SaaS) offerings that paved the way for innovations in CRM and email deployments, to create new opportunities for the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft Office 365. Still in its “early stages,” cloud now encompasses legacy applications, backups, disaster recovery, security/audit log management and so much more. 2017 will be full of continued maturation and will give way to a whole new generation of cloud-native applications.