Many people recognize DevOps as an enormous benefit – faster application deployment, automated toolchains, support of more granular updates, better cooperation across groups. However, less appreciated is the journey enterprise IT groups need to make to achieve this outcome. The plain fact is that established IT processes reflect a very different set of goals: stability, infrequent change, hands-on administration, and alignment with ITIL. So how does an enterprise IT organization implement change to achieve DevOps outcomes? Bernard Golden sat down with Andi Mann, VP in the Office of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies to address this thorny problem in a recent Cloud Luminary Fireside Chat. Andi and Bernard discussed topics such as: How does DevOps get started - top-down or bottom-up? Who should lead a DevOps initiative – Dev or Ops? Common pitfalls encountered in DevOps initiatives, and other considerations.
SYS-CON Events announced today that MetraTech, now part of Ericsson, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, NY. Ericsson is the driving force behind the Networked Society- a world leader in communications infrastructure, software and services. Some 40% of the world’s mobile traffic runs through networks Ericsson has supplied, serving more than 2.5 billion subscribers.
In a recent research, analyst firm IDC found that the average cost of a critical application failure is $500,000 to $1 million per hour and the average total cost of unplanned application downtime is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion per year for Fortune 1000 companies. In addition to the findings on the cost of the downtime, the research also highlighted best practices for development, testing, application support, infrastructure, and operations teams.
The OpenStack cloud operating system includes Trove, a database abstraction layer. Rather than applications connecting directly to a specific type of database, they connect to Trove, which in turn connects to one or more specific databases. One target database is Postgres Plus Cloud Database, which includes its own RESTful API. Trove was originally developed around MySQL, whose interfaces are significantly less complicated than those of the Postgres cloud database. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Fred Dalrymple, product manager for EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Cloud Database, will address the issues encountered in using Trove to abstract a complicated cloud database, including gaining access to database functionality not native in the standard abstraction, providing portability for the database interface into non-OpenStack contexts, and preventing the database from being commoditized by abstraction.
EMC Corporation on Tuesday announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Virtustream. When the transaction closes, Virtustream will form EMC’s new managed cloud services business. The acquisition represents a transformational element of EMC’s strategy to help customers move all applications to cloud-based IT environments. With the addition of Virtustream, EMC completes the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid cloud portfolio to support all applications, all workloads and all cloud models.
While there are hundreds of public and private cloud hosting providers to choose from, not all clouds are created equal. If you’re seeking to host enterprise-level mission-critical applications, where Cloud Security is a primary concern, WHOA.com is setting new standards for cloud hosting, and has established itself as a major contender in the marketplace. We are constantly seeking ways to innovate and leverage state-of-the-art technologies. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Mike Rivera, Senior Solutions Consultant at WHOA.com, will show how a flexible cloud environment enables you to have full visibility into your core infrastructure, enabling you to be proactive and address potential problems before they arise, while providing you with the data for proper capacity planning to support business demand.
There's Big Data, then there's really Big Data from the Internet of Things. IoT is evolving to include many data possibilities like new types of event, log and network data. The volumes are enormous, generating tens of billions of logs per day, which raise data challenges. Early IoT deployments are relying heavily on both the cloud and managed service providers to navigate these challenges. In her session at Big Data Expo®, Hannah Smalltree, Director at Treasure Data, discussed how IoT, Big Data and deployments are processing massive data volumes from wearables, utilities and other machines.
What winning sales organizations do to separate themselves from the competition by creating market advantage through improved user experiences and better information services. The next BriefingsDirect thought-leader interview focuses on what winning sales organizations do to separate themselves from the competition by creating market advantage through improved user experiences and better information services.
T-Mobile has been transforming the wireless industry with its “Uncarrier” initiatives. Today as T-Mobile’s IT organization works to transform itself in a like manner, technical foundations built over the last couple of years are now key to their drive for more Agile delivery practices. In his session at DevOps Summit, Martin Krienke, Sr Development Manager at T-Mobile, will discuss where they started their Continuous Delivery journey, where they are today, and where they are going in an effort to constantly bring new offerings to market.
Are your Big Data initiatives resulting in Big Impact or Big Mess? In her session at Big Data Expo, Penelope Everall Gordon, Emerging Technology Strategist at 1Plug Corporation, shared her successes in improving Big Decision outcomes by building stories compelling to the target audience – and her failures when she lost sight of the plotline, distracted by the glitter of technology and the lure of buried insights. The cast of characters includes the agency head [city official? elected official??] perpetually waiting for the report from the latest exploratory committee and the division executive relying on gut instinct; and the epilogue offers guidelines that you can use to more effectively influence decisions and improve strategic decision outcomes.
The cloud is everywhere and growing, and with it SaaS has become an accepted means for software delivery. SaaS is more than just a technology, it is a thriving business model estimated to be worth around $53 billion dollars by 2015, according to IDC. The question is - how do you build and scale a profitable SaaS business model? In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Jason Cumberland, Vice President, SaaS Solutions at Dimension Data, discussed the common mistakes businesses make when transitioning to SaaS; how to avoid them; and how to build a profitable and scalable SaaS business.
With the advent (or surge in popularity) of cloud computing, our use of the so-called ‘computer operating system’ is coming into question. Given that the cloud exists on the back end to drive power to our ‘endpoint’ devices (in whatever form they may be) today, the way those devices handle the user experience comes down to the user interface almost as much as it does the operating system, or so the argument goes.
Scott Jenson leads a project called The Physical Web within the Chrome team at Google. Project members are working to take the scalability and openness of the web and use it to talk to the exponentially exploding range of smart devices. Nearly every company today working on the IoT comes up with the same basic solution: use my server and you'll be fine. But if we really believe there will be trillions of these devices, that just can't scale. We need a system that is open a scalable and by using the URL as a basic building block, we open this up and get the same resilience that the web enjoys.
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 will address 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 reason a lot of entrepreneurs flock to cloud-based services for their business is the cost. Native applications require licenses that are either too expensive or require elaborate set-up across all devices. In a recent article on the Entrepreneur, Bask Iyer, the CIO and Senior Vice President of Technology at Juniper Networks responded to the question, 'what entrepreneurs should put in the cloud?' His answer: "Everything." Bask elaborates by pointing out the ability of cloud to scale-up and scale-down at ease, the ease with which you can deploy plug-and-play cloud solutions for almost everything and its ability to offer a level playing field to companies, big and small.
Enterprises are fast realizing the importance of integrating SaaS/Cloud applications, API and on-premises data and processes, to unleash hidden value. This webinar explores how managers can use a Microservice-centric approach to aggressively tackle the unexpected new integration challenges posed by proliferation of cloud, mobile, social and big data projects. Industry analyst and SOA expert Jason Bloomberg will strip away the hype from microservices, and clearly identify their advantages and disadvantages. He will then discuss the role microservices play in cloud-enabled enterprise integration. Finally, he will connect microservices to SOA and explain how microservices represent an update of the best elements of the SOA approach.
In their general session at 16th Cloud Expo, Michael Piccininni, Global Account Manager – Cloud SP at EMC Corporation, and Mike Dietze, Regional Director at Windstream Hosted Solutions, will review next generation cloud services, including the Windstream-EMC Tier Storage solutions, and discuss how to increase efficiencies, improve service delivery and enhance corporate cloud solution development. Speaker Bios Michael Piccininni is Global Account Manager – Cloud SP at EMC Corporation. He has been engaged in the technology industry for more than 15 years in business development and management roles. He supports several of EMC's most strategic Cloud Service Provider relationships, including Windstream. His organization focuses on identification, solution development and joint go-to-market execution.
"Our premise is Docker is not enough. That's not a bad thing - we actually love Docker. At ActiveState all our products are based on open source technology and Docker is an up-and-coming piece of open source technology," explained Bart Copeland, President & CEO of ActiveState Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The 3rd International @ThingsExpo, co-located with the 16th International Cloud Expo – to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY – is now accepting Hackathon proposals. Hackathon sponsorship benefits include general brand exposure and increasing engagement with the developer ecosystem. At Cloud Expo 2014 Silicon Valley, IBM held the Bluemix Developer Playground on November 5 and ElasticBox held the DevOps Hackathon on November 6. Both events took place on the expo floor. The Bluemix Developer Playground, for developers of all levels, highlighted the ease of use of Bluemix, its services and functionality and provided short-term introductory projects that developers could complete between sessions.
17th Cloud Expo, taking place Nov 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS – software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.
Hardware will never be more valuable than on the day it hits your loading dock. Each day new servers are not deployed to production the business is losing money. While Moore's Law is typically cited to explain the exponential density growth of chips, a critical consequence of this is rapid depreciation of servers. The hardware for clustered systems (e.g., Hadoop, OpenStack) tends to be significant capital expenses. In his session at Big Data Expo, Mason Katz, CTO and co-founder of StackIQ, discussed how infrastructure teams should be aware of the capitalization and depreciation model of these expenses to fully understand when and where automation is critical.
There is no question that the cloud is where businesses want to host data. Until recently hypervisor virtualization was the most widely used method in cloud computing. Recently virtual containers have been gaining in popularity, and for good reason. In the debate between virtual machines and containers, the latter have been seen as the new kid on the block – and like other emerging technology have had some initial shortcomings. However, the container space has evolved drastically since coming onto the cloud hosting scene over 10 years ago. So, what has changed? In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Tenko Nikolov, founder and CEO of Kyup, will discuss the security, speed, scalability, cost and outlook for the future of container cloud hosting.
While SAP is globally renowned as a provider of enterprise management software, the name is hardly ever associated with the spooky world of intelligence. That is one reason why I jumped at the opportunity to talk with SAP executives responsible for the company’s work in that clandestine marketplace. SAP National Security Services, Inc.™ (SAP NS2™) is an independent U.S. subsidiary of the company and offers a full suite of SAP enterprise applications, analytics, database, cyber security, cloud, and mobility software solutions. These offerings, however, are endowed with specialized levels of security and support needed to meet the unique mission requirements of US National Security Agencies and critical national infrastructure customers. SAP NS2 also provides secure consulting and support services from experts that hold current credentials in the national security space. Carmen Krueger, Senior VicePresident & General Manager, Cloud Operations, focuses on the critical security requirements of national security clients that adopt and deploy SAP technologies. Joining her in our discussion was Hunter Downey, NS2 Cloud Solutions Director.
It is critical to let the usage of cloud collaboration grow over time instead of migration in a swoop. This will give your employees sufficient time to evolve while ensuring your company is on the right path forward. A recent study published by Markets and Markets predicts the collaboration tools market to more than double between now and 2018. In 2014, the market for collaboration software tools was valued at around $10.5 billion. By 2018, this market is expected to reach a size of more than $21 billion. That is a staggering compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15%.
There is no doubt that Big Data is here and getting bigger every day. Building a Big Data infrastructure today is no easy task. There are an enormous number of choices for database engines and technologies. To make things even more challenging, requirements are getting more sophisticated, and the standard paradigm of supporting historical analytics queries is often just one facet of what is needed. As Big Data growth continues, organizations are demanding real-time access to data, allowing immediate and actionable interpretation of events as they happen. Another aspect concerns how to deliver data in a meaningful way, one that really delivers on what end users need to maintain a competitive position in fast-changing markets.