In my last post, I wrote about the value of IT / business collaboration, and the importance of a common language, a common definition of end-user experience – user transaction response time – as the one performance metric both IT and business have in common. In it, I provided some background on the importance of understanding exactly how we define response time, since this definition dictates the usefulness of the measurement. For the sake of brevity, I’ll summarize three common definitions here:
Chris Van Tuin, Chief Technologist for the Western US at Red Hat, has over 20 years of experience in IT and Software. Since joining Red Hat in 2005, he has been architecting solutions for strategic customers and partners with a focus on emerging technologies including IaaS, PaaS, and DevOps. He started his career at Intel in IT and Managed Hosting followed by leadership roles in services and sales engineering at Loudcloud and Linux startups.
The buzz continues for cloud, data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) and their collective impact across all industries. But a new conversation is emerging - how do companies use industry disruption and technology enablers to lead in markets undergoing change, uncertainty and ambiguity? Organizations of all sizes need to evolve and transform, often under massive pressure, as industry lines blur and merge and traditional business models are assaulted and turned upside down. In this new data-driven world, marketplaces reign supreme while interoperability, APIs and applications deliver unique customer value for new go-to-market models based on a cloud and IoT way of working. Analytics, IoT service mashups, fail fast business models and contextual data streams enable data to become the new currency for digital citizens and businesses and will determine business success or failure.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing rapidly by extending current technologies, products and networks. By 2020, Cisco estimates there will be 50 billion connected devices. Gartner has forecast revenues of over $300 billion, just to IoT suppliers. Now is the time to figure out how you’ll make money – not just create innovative products. With hundreds of new products and companies jumping into the IoT fray every month, there’s no shortage of innovation. Despite this, McKinsey/VisionMobile data shows "less than 10 percent of IoT developers are making enough to support a reasonably sized team.”
There are many considerations when moving applications from on-premise to cloud. It is critical to understand the benefits and also challenges of this migration. A successful migration will result in lower Total Cost of Ownership, yet offer the same or higher level of robustness. Migration to cloud shifts computing resources from your data center, which can yield significant advantages provided that the cloud vendor an offer enterprise-grade quality for your application.
Latest figures from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) indicate that cloud adoption is at its highest figure to date, with 78 per cent of organisations now having formally adopted at least one type of cloud-based service. TechNavio echoes this surge and in particular the surge in growth of Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service, forecasting a compound annual growth rate of 54.64 per cent between 2014 and 2018. However, despite the striking numbers and growth expectations there are still many IT professionals out there who have fears about adopting Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service.
Our guest on the podcast this week is Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Creator of Jenkins and CloudBees. We discuss highlights and takeaways from the CloudBees Jenkins User Conference, which emphasizes the strong community around Jenkins. Jenkins makes continuous delivery a strategic enabler because it changes the speed at which optimizations can reach users’ hands. We also get a preview of what we can expect with Tiger from CloudBees.
Ten years ago, there may have been only a single application that talked directly to the database and spit out HTML; customer service, sales - most of the organizations I work with have been moving toward a design philosophy more like unix, where each application consists of a series of small tools stitched together. In web example above, that likely means a login service combines with webpages that call other services - like enter and update record. That allows the customer service team to write their own tools using the web, the command line, scheduled, or any other interface. Sound too good to be true, doesn't it? It is true, but it comes at a cost. For example, I never defined a mechanism to manage the explosion of APIs that will result under this approach. Consider this: uncontrolled growth is one definition of cancer. Since the rapid creation of APIs is not quite so deadly, I will call this the API Sprawl; I've seen it across every client that moved to web-services approach, typically two to four years into conversion.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Key Information Systems, Inc. (KeyInfo), a leading cloud and infrastructure provider offering integrated solutions to enterprises, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Key Information Systems is a leading regional systems integrator with world-class compute, storage and networking solutions and professional services for the most advanced software-defined data centers. These competencies are tightly complemented by a full suite of data center capabilities, including private and hybrid cloud offerings, connectivity services, colocation facilities and managed services.
A somewhat controversial title because of course DevOps promises a lot of value. But now I have your attention, what I really want to outline is the importance of value stream mapping in regards to DevOps adoption. I think that the famous “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland” should be updated for modern IT as DevOps would make a great new Wonderland. This is because one of the most popular questions that I have been asked and heard being asked, over the last couple of years is – “Where do you start with DevOps?”
There once was a time when testers operated on their own, in isolation. They’d huddle as a group around the harsh glow of dozens of CRT monitors, clicking through GUIs and recording results. Anxiously, they’d wait for the developers in the other room to fix the bugs they found, yet they’d frequently leave the office disappointed as issues were filed away as non-critical. These teams would rarely interact, save for those scarce moments when a coder would wander in needing to reproduce a particularly finicky error.
In recent years, at least 40% of companies using cloud applications have experienced data loss. One of the best prevention against cloud data loss is backing up your cloud data. In his General Session at 17th Cloud Expo, Bryan Forrester, Senior Vice President of Sales at eFolder, will present how organizations can use eFolder Cloudfinder to automate backups of cloud application data. He will also demonstrate how easy it is to search and restore cloud application data using Cloudfinder.
Organizations already struggle with the simple collection of data resulting from the proliferation of IoT, lacking the right infrastructure to manage it. They can't only rely on the cloud to collect and utilize this data because many applications still require dedicated infrastructure for security, redundancy, performance, etc. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Emil Sayegh, CEO of Codero Hosting, will discuss how in order to resolve the inherent issues, companies need to combine dedicated and cloud solutions through hybrid hosting – a sustainable solution for the data required to manage IoT devices/technology. There is no one-size-fits-all to the question of data collection and security, but hybrid is the only solution that seamlessly adapts to fit any and all.
Mobile messaging has been a popular communication channel for more than 20 years. Finnish engineer Matti Makkonen invented the idea for SMS (Short Message Service) in 1984, making his vision a reality on December 3, 1992 by sending the first message ("Happy Christmas") from a PC to a cell phone. Since then, the technology has evolved immensely, from both a technology standpoint, and in our everyday uses for it. Originally used for person-to-person (P2P) communication, i.e., Sally sends a text message to Betty – mobile messaging now offers tremendous value to businesses for customer and employee-facing communication. This is most notably done through application-to-person (A2P) messaging platforms that send things like appointment reminders, shipping alerts, IT status updates, to name a few.
For almost two decades, businesses have discovered great opportunities to engage with customers and even expand revenue through digital systems, including web and mobile applications. Yet, even now, the conversation between the business and the technologists that deliver these systems is strained, in large part due to misaligned objectives. In his session at DevOps Summit, James Urquhart, Senior Vice President of Performance Analytics at SOASTA, Inc., will discuss how measuring user outcomes – including how the performance, flow and content of your digital systems affects those outcomes – can bridge that “conversation gap,” and enable DevOps to seamlessly align work priorities with business objectives.
Somebody call the buzzword police: we have a serious case of microservices-washing in progress. The term “microservices-washing” is derived from “whitewashing,” meaning to hide some inconvenient truth with bluster and nonsense. We saw plenty of cloudwashing a few years ago, as vendors and enterprises alike pretended what they were doing was cloud, even though it wasn’t. Today, the hype around microservices has led to the same kind of obfuscation, as vendors and enterprise technologists alike are saying they’re building microservices—even though a cursory look at what they’re really up to wouldn’t uncover a single one.
“All our customers are looking at the cloud ecosystem as an important part of their overall product strategy. Some see it evolve as a multi-cloud / hybrid cloud strategy, while others are embracing all forms of cloud offerings like PaaS, IaaS and SaaS in their solutions,” noted Suhas Joshi, Vice President – Technology, at Harbinger Group, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff.
“The Internet of Things transforms the way organizations leverage machine data and gain insights from it,” noted Splunk’s CTO Snehal Antani, as Splunk announced accelerated momentum in Industrial Data and the IoT. The trend is driven by Splunk’s continued investment in its products and partner ecosystem as well as the creativity of customers and the flexibility to deploy Splunk IoT solutions as software, cloud services or in a hybrid environment. Customers are using Splunk® solutions to collect and correlate data from control systems, sensors, mobile devices and IT systems for a variety of Industrial Data and IoT use cases. These use cases include operational efficiency, predictive maintenance, industrial cybersecurity and asset analytics.
For VMware customers shops under pressure from users to improve their app and desktop experience, gain greater infrastructure flexibility and simplify end user computing management, Citrix has announced a free service to migrate VMware Horizon View virtual app and desktop deployments to XenApp and XenDesktop. Powered by the new Citrix Lifecycle Management Service - now available from Citrix Workspace Cloud - the new service enables administrators to do an in-place migration in less than 15 minutes by easily exporting application and desktop settings from Horizon View into the Citrix app and desktop delivery solution. The creation of the migration service addresses numerous requests Citrix has received to salvage failed, stalled and small VMware VDI deployments.
Here are seven completely real, jaw-dropping applications of cloud computing that can transform humanity. Made possible with cloud technology, don't be surprised if you have never heard about such applications. 1. Shoes Sold by the Step Imagine buying the world's best shoes or for that matter any pair of shoes and paying zero dollars for them upfront. That would be crazy right? Well the Internet of Things can make this possible. With new technologies that can power everything we do and create new ways of doing them, vendors of consumable items can sell items based on a unique measurement rather than on a flat fee. Shoes may be sold for the number of steps you are expected to take in them or car tire manufacturers may charge you based on the number of kilometers you drive. No matter what, the fundamental aspect of charging a customer will change with the Internet of Things and cloud computing. This idea is based on consumption cloud computing that measures the usage of a specific service or product and charges the end user in real time. The possibilities are endless.
SYS-CON Events announced today that ProfitBricks, the provider of painless cloud infrastructure, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. ProfitBricks is the IaaS provider that offers a painless cloud experience for all IT users, with no learning curve. ProfitBricks boasts flexible cloud servers and networking, an integrated Data Center Designer tool for visual control over the cloud and the best price/performance value available. ProfitBricks was named one of the coolest Cloud Providers of 2015 by CRN and was also the recipient of two CODiE awards and a Frost & Sullivan Cloud innovation award for 2014.
This complete kit provides a proven process and customizable documents that will help you evaluate rapid application delivery platforms and select the ideal partner for building mobile and web apps for your organization.
We talk about optimization a whole lot. There’s cloud workload optimization, there’s mobile optimization for website presentation and there’s every other type of optimization as we move through the ‘full stack’ of information technology from the base logic layer all the way up to the Graphical User Interface (GUI). You get the picture, there’s a lot of optimization going on – but this is a natural thing, i.e., we spent the end part of the last century trying to get more processing speed, better form factors for devices and cheaper memory and storage.
According to Forrester, public cloud platforms are evolving, blurring the lines between Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) in order to satisfy the needs of enterprises and widen their appeal to developers. In The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Public Cloud Platforms, Q4 2014, Forrester evaluates the 16 most significant Enterprise Public Cloud Platforms and details how each vendor fulfills the 19 evaluation criteria points.
Learn how IoT, cloud, social networks and last but not least, humans, can be integrated into a seamless integration of cooperative organisms both cybernetic and biological. This has been enabled by recent advances in IoT device capabilities, messaging frameworks, presence and collaboration services, where devices can share information and make independent and human assisted decisions based upon social status from other entities. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Michael Heydt, founder of Seamless Thingies, will discuss and demonstrate how devices and humans can be integrated from a simple cluster of Raspberry Pi/IoT devices, up through cloud connected devices, severs, wearables and humans.