"What Dyn is able to do with our Internet performance and our Internet intelligence is give companies visibility into what is actually going on in that cloud," noted Corey Hamilton, Product Marketing Manager at Dyn, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 16th Cloud Expo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Discussions about cloud computing are evolving into discussions about enterprise IT in general. As enterprises increasingly migrate toward their own unique clouds, new issues such as the use of containers and microservices emerge to keep things interesting. In this Power Panel at 16th Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists addressed the state of cloud computing today, and what enterprise IT professionals need to know about how the latest topics and trends affect their organization.
One of the charter responsibilities of DevOps (because it's a charter responsibility of ops) is measuring and monitoring applications once they're in production. That means both performance and availability. Which means a lot more than folks might initially think because generally speaking what you measure and monitor is a bit different depending on whether you're looking at performance or availability*.
How do you securely enable access to your applications in AWS without exposing any attack surfaces? The answer is usually very complicated because application environments morph over time in response to growing requirements from your employee base, your partners and your customers. In his session at @DevOpsSummit, Haseeb Budhani, CEO and Co-founder of Soha, shared five common approaches that DevOps teams follow to secure access to applications deployed in AWS, Azure, etc., and the friction and risks they impose on the business.
"Search-based application is a new breed of application architecture. The top two requests we get from our clients is how do I bring new information in and how do I improve the performance of existing applications," explained Sushil Prabhu, CEO of OpenCrowd, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 16th Cloud Expo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Business service management and data access improvements at a Swiss insurance company and a Turkish mobile phone carrier lead to new business and IT benefits. The next BriefingsDirect applications performance management case study panel discussion explores how improved business service management and data access improvements at a Swiss insurance company and a Turkish mobile phone carrier lead to new business and IT benefits. By more deeply examining how applications are performing via total performance monitoring and metrics these enterprises slashed mean time to resolution and later significantly reduced the number of IT incidents.
"We are a 'build your own business application' platform, kind of a Platform as a Service in the cloud," explained Dave Landa, chief operating officer of Cybozu Corp (kintone US), in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 16th Cloud Expo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Supporting real-time mobility is more than just a technology issue. It also requires companies to support real-time operational tempos. An operational tempo, in the context of this article, is defined as the speed or pace of business operations. Achieving a satisfactory operational tempo in order to support real-time mobility is a significant challenge and extends far beyond the IT environment and deep into decision-making and business processes.
"Stackato is a commercial distribution of Cloud Foundry. It's geared primarily for private Platform as a Service," explained Troy Topnik, Technical Product Manager at ActiveState, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud data governance was previously an avoided function when cloud deployments were relatively small. With the rapid adoption in public cloud – both rogue and sanctioned, it’s not uncommon to find regulated data dumped into public cloud and unprotected. This is why enterprises and cloud providers alike need to embrace a cloud data governance function and map policies, processes and technology controls accordingly.
Apache Hadoop is emerging as a distributed platform for handling large and fast incoming streams of data. Predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and Internet-of-Things analysis are examples where Hadoop provides the scalable storage, processing, and analytics platform to gain meaningful insights from granular data that is typically only valuable from a large-scale, aggregate view. One architecture useful for capturing and analyzing streaming data is the Lambda Architecture, representing a model of how to analyze real-time and historical data together.
"We have a tagline - "Power in the API Economy." What that means is everything that is built in applications and connected applications is done through APIs," explained Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at Akana, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 16th Cloud Expo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.
The speed of software changes in growing and large scale rapid-paced DevOps environments presents a challenge for continuous testing. Many organizations struggle to get this right. Practices that work for small scale continuous testing may not be sufficient as the requirements grow. In his session at DevOps Summit, Marc Hornbeek, Sr. Solutions Architect of DevOps continuous test solutions at Spirent Communications, explained the best practices of continuous testing at high scale, which is relevant to small scale DevOps, and if there is an expectation of growth as the number of build targets, test topologies and delivery topologies that need to be orchestrated rapidly grow.
"ciqada is a combined platform of hardware modules and server products that lets people take their existing devices or new devices and lets them be accessible over the Internet for their users," noted Geoff Engelstein of ciqada, a division of Mars International, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.
While DevOps is roughly a journey towards the ideals of agility through continuous delivery, there are no set rules for its implementation. How the initiative starts out is subjective to each business, and is a continuous path of improvement and collaboration. Automic CMO, Dr. Chris Boorman, proposes seven steps towards a sustainable DevOps transformation. Watch the video or read about the seven simple steps to implement DevOps:
The cloud isn’t a fad. Businesses that don’t make the move are falling behind the competition. According to a recent ComputerWorld study, more than 40% of IT executives said that their organizations will spend more on Software as a Service (SaaS) and a mix of public, private hybrid and community clouds in 2015. Companies of all sizes are increasing spending and transitioning to the cloud due to the slew of bottom-line and competitive benefits including efficiency, cost and, in some cases, security.
Learn how to solve the problem of keeping files in sync between multiple Docker containers. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Aaron Brongersma, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Modulus, discussed using rsync, GlusterFS, EBS and Bit Torrent Sync. He broke down the tools that are needed to help create a seamless user experience. In the end, can we have an environment where we can easily move Docker containers, servers, and volumes without impacting our applications? He shared his results so you can decide for yourself.
SYS-CON Events announced today that CommVault has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of 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. A singular vision – a belief in a better way to address current and future data management needs – guides CommVault in the development of Singular Information Management® solutions for high-performance data protection, universal availability and simplified management of data on complex storage networks. CommVault's exclusive single-platform architecture gives companies unprecedented control over data growth, costs and risk. CommVault's Simpana® software suite of products was designed to work together seamlessly from the ground up, sharing a single code and common function set, to deliver superlative Data Protection, Archive, Replication, Search and Resource Management capabilities. More companies every day join those who have discovered the unparalleled efficiency, performance, reliability, and control only CommVault can offer.
Providing the needed data for application development and testing is a huge headache for most organizations. The problems are often the same across companies - speed, quality, cost, and control. Provisioning data can take days or weeks, every time a refresh is required. Using dummy data leads to quality problems. Creating physical copies of large data sets and sending them to distributed teams of developers eats up expensive storage and bandwidth resources. And, all of these copies proliferating the organization can lead to inconsistent masking and exposure of sensitive data. But some organizations are adopting a new method of data management for DevOps that is delivering transformational business outcomes in faster time to market, lower costs, and great control. In his session at DevOps Summit, Brian Reagan, Managing Director of Blackthorne Consulting Group, an Actifio company, reviewed the core concepts of using data virtualization to power DevOps, including Central Administration by Operations, Self-Service for developers and testers, and Automating Data Masking for enhanced control of sensitive information. He shared real life case studies and provided a practical perspective on the benefits and considerations for these projects.
The true value of the Internet of Things (IoT) lies not just in the data, but through the services that protect the data, perform the analysis and present findings in a usable way. With many IoT elements rooted in traditional IT components, Big Data and IoT isn’t just a play for enterprise. In fact, the IoT presents SMBs with the prospect of launching entirely new activities and exploring innovative areas. CompTIA research identifies several areas where IoT is expected to have the greatest impact.
SQL injections are unique compared to other cyberattacks. These threats are very common and have been around for a while. One would think that this would mean businesses should have an idea of how to stop these incidents from happening, right? Unfortunately, SQL security remains a thorn in the side of many companies today.
The second pillar in the DevOps stack is that of Integration. DevOps integration targets quality testing, feature development, and product delivery. Integration, or more specifically, Systems Integration is the process of linking together different computing or component systems and software applications physically or functionally to perform as a single consolidated unit. Systems integration requires a wide skill set in areas such as network architecture, protocols, systems, software engineering, documentation and communication. A DevOps Engineer needs to have a unique skill set that combines that of both the traditional software developer with that of the IT engineer. Typically DevOps engineers are either developers who get interested in the deployment process of their applications or system administrators who have a passion for scripting and software development.
Digital Transformation is the ultimate goal of cloud computing and related initiatives. The phrase is certainly not a precise one, and as subject to hand-waving and distortion as any high-falutin' terminology in the world of information technology. Yet it is an excellent choice of words to describe what enterprise IT—and by extension, organizations in general—should be working to achieve. Digital Transformation means: handling all the data types being found and created in the organization understanding that through mobility, data is being generated and analyzed on the edges of the enterprise more than at the center mixing and matching that data in an ecosystem of specific, loosely connected applications and services automating processes; analyzing and acting upon data in short timeframes to develop, improve, and enhance products and services directly through IT having enough well-trained people at all levels of the organization to address the inevitable technology glitches while also maintaining a high-level strategic view of what's going on. I recently attended the Cloud Foundry Summit 2015 in Santa Clara, CA, and listened to many stories of Digital Transformation. The catalyst in these cases was, naturally, Cloud Foundry, an open-source PaaS that is used to handle the complex infrastructure that underlies cloud-computing development, provisioning, and operations. I was struck by the impatience of much of this discussion; many presenters spoke of the old ways of doing things versus the new, slick, automated, loosely coupled, transformative way and how great progress was being made and would continue to be made this year. One could get the idea that Digital Transformation is a product or service itself, and one that needs to be installed right now. This type of thinking is only natural in a modern business environment that does not reward patience. Things must be accomplished in a few months, rather than years. In an era where servers can be ordered up and deployed “within seconds,” according to many glowing reports, the idea of a true long-term strategy gets lost in the excitement. But Digital Transformation is something that should be thought of in terms of years, and decades. We must retain the ability to look back over a period of 20 years and longer, to see what's truly been fundamentally accomplished. My twitter handle of “IoT2040” reflects my viewpoint, as I'm researching, covering, and instigating progress over the next 25 years, whether I'm around to see the end-state of this progress or not. Taking the long view does not mean throwing a bunch of exotic visions and soothing words in the air. It means setting measurable goals and focusing day-to-day efforts to turn those goals into self-fulfilling prophesies. I'm inspired by Moore's Law, which is not an absolute, but rather something that people have assumed is an absolute and therefore worked their tails off for decades to adhere to it. A similar commitment to measurable Digital Transformation would seem to be in order. I can dovetail this thought into our ongoing research at the Tau Institute, which measures dynamics of IT environments in the nations of the world; and in my role as Conference Chair of Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo, which continues to offer a mix of proven use cases and envelope-pushing vision. In the first role, we can argue that a lack of commitment to IT in Greece is a reflection (or perhaps precipitator) of the country's perilous economic state, whereas an overheated technology environment has caused (and is causing) societal disruption in several countries throughout the world. In the second role, I'm pleased to point to some slight yet significant tweaks to the eight core tracks being offered at the next Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo, to be held November 3-5 in Santa Clara. Cloud APIs have their own unique track this time, Containers and Microservices have their own track, and our three IoT-focused tracks have been focused more tightly on the latest developments. Here's a list of the specific tracks: Track 1 – Enterprise Cloud Adoption Track 2 – Mobility | Enterprise Security Track 3 – Containers & Microservices | PaaS Track 4 – Cloud APIs Track 5 – IoT | Big Data & Analytics Track 6 - IoT | Consumer/Wearables Track 7 - IoT | Enterprise/Industrial Internet Track 8 – WebRTC Summit | Hot Topics We'll also be holding another DevOps Summit at the same time, with tracks devoted respectively to Development and Operations.
SYS-CON Events announced today that kintone has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of 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. kintone promotes cloud-based workgroup productivity, transparency and profitability with a seamless collaboration space, build your own business application (BYOA) platform, and workflow automation system.
In my last Cortex newsletter, I discussed the history of Conway’s Law, and took a close look at how this erstwhile law can help us understand the reorganizations and deeper cultural shifts behind devops and digital transformation. The law – “any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure” – is more of an observation of correlations between system designs and communication structures, rather than anything resembling a law.