WebRTC Summit has announced today that Peter Dunkley has been named summit chair of WebRTC Summit 2015 New York. The 4th International WebRTC Summit will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in Manhattan, New York. @ThingsExpo anticipates 90% of WebRTC companies & developers will monetize their products & services through IoT by 2016. Peter Dunkley is Technical Director at Acision. He graduated from The University of Edinburgh in 2000 with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science. After graduation Peter worked on a PSTN switch developing signalling stacks for SS7, ISDN and similar protocols and creating advanced routing and service applications. Since 2005 he has worked mainly with SIP first leading a team developing a PSTN gateway and then managing the development of a SIP Application Server. Peter joined Crocodile RCS in September 2010 and has made numerous contributions to the Kamailio open source SIP Router project (particularly in the areas of presence, WebSocket, MSRP, and SIP Outbound) since then. Peter is one of the authors of the MSRP over WebSocket draft (draft-pd-dispatch-msrp-websocket) and is a contributor to several open-source projects.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Vicom Computer Services, Inc., a provider of technology and service solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. They are located at booth #427. Vicom Computer Services, Inc. is a progressive leader in the technology industry for over 30 years. Headquartered in the NY Metropolitan area. Vicom provides products and services based on today’s requirements around Unified Networks, Cloud Computing strategies, Virtualization around Software defined Data Centers including, Servers, Storage, IT Management, Data Protection/Availability, Security, Infrastructure Services and IT Consulting Services.
SYS-CON Media announced today that Unitrends, cloud-empowered all-in-one continuity solutions that increase your IT confidence, has launched ad campaigns on SYS-CON's i-Technology sites, which include Cloud Computing Journal, DevOps Journal, Virtualization Journal, and IoT Journal. SYS-CON Media's interactive programs with an average 47 million pages views per month, have proven to be one of the most effective lead-generating tools for our advertising partners. With 1.2 million qualified IT professionals across SYS-CON's network of i-Technology sites, your company will have access to a multitude of influential enterprise development managers and decision makers in the marketplace that you're not currently reaching. These packages will put you in touch with your best customers and deliver the reach, impact and visibility necessary to stay competitive in today's market.
This digest provides an overview of good resources that are well worth reading. We’ll be updating this page as new content becomes available, so I suggest you bookmark it. Also, expect more digests to come on different topics that make all of our IT-hearts go boom!
The last couple articles presented an introduction to Application Performance Management (APM) and identified the challenges in effectively implementing an APM strategy. This article builds on these topics by reviewing five of the top performance metrics to capture to assess the health of your enterprise Java application.
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 16th Cloud Expo, Haseeb Budhani, CEO and Co-founder of Soha, will share 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.
What’s hot in today’s cloud computing world? Containers are fast becoming a viable alternative to virtualization for the right use cases. But to understand why containers can be a better option, we need to first understand their origins. In basic terms, containers are application-centric environments that help isolate and run workloads far more efficiently than the traditional hypervisor technology found in commodity cloud Infrastructure as a Service. Modern operating systems (Linux, Windows, etc.) are made up of two basic parts: kernel space and user space. As its name implies, Kernel space is home to the operating system kernel, or the low level instructions that boot the machine, control hardware, provide subsystems (e.g., networking, storage, etc.), and schedule tasks. Tasks (processes, threads, etc.) run in user space, which is home to applications and services. Different operating systems have different levels of modularity and functional “splits” between kernel space and user space, but most architectures are conceptually the same. While hypervisors run virtual machines that make up both spaces, containers encapsulate just the user space, greatly reducing complexity and redundancy. The immediate benefit is higher performance and less “bloat”, extremely important to the economics of cloud computing. The popularity of containers is a direct result of the realization that hypervisor-based technologies are expensive to host and manage for many types of applications.
SOASTA, the leader in performance analytics, today reported record growth of the CloudTest community, exceeding 30,000 registered users of the CloudTest platform in Q1 2015. SOASTA also announced widespread adoption of its Web and mobile testing solutions, with more than 1,600 customers completing more than 285,000 tests using CloudTest during the quarter. This rapid growth shows that DevOps-driven digital businesses are embracing a more continuous approach to testing, and CloudTest is meeting their needs for fast and efficient global performance measurement.
ProfitBricks, the provider of painless cloud infrastructure for IaaS, today announced the release of a Node.js SDK written against its recently launched REST API. This new JavaScript based library provides coverage for all existing ProfitBricks REST API functions. With additional libraries set to release this month, ProfitBricks continues to prove its dedication to the DevOps community and commitment to making cloud migrations and cloud management painless. Node.js is an open source, cross-platform runtime environment. It offers an asynchronous event-driven framework designed to build scalable network applications. Written in JavaScript, Node.js applications can be run within the Node.js runtime on OSX, Microsoft Windows, Linux and more.
“With easy-to-use SDKs for Atmel’s platforms, IoT developers can now reap the benefits of realtime communication, and bypass the security pitfalls and configuration complexities that put IoT deployments at risk,” said Todd Greene, founder & CEO of PubNub. PubNub will team with Atmel at CES 2015 to launch full SDK support for Atmel’s MCU, MPU, and Wireless SoC platforms. Atmel developers now have access to PubNub’s secure Publish/Subscribe messaging with guaranteed ¼ second latencies across PubNub’s 14 global points-of-presence. PubNub delivers secure communication through firewalls, proxy servers, and on unreliable mobile networks with a security model that guarantees no open ports on IoT devices. Developers can now implement important features like remote device control, firmware upgrades, and device provisioning using PubNub’s suite of IoT building blocks that includes realtime device presence detection, stream storage & playback, and data stream syndication. “PubNub’s realtime global data stream network combined with our embedded solutions helps IoT developers reduce time-to-market and solve the challenges of reliable IoT deployments,” said Reza Kazerounian, SVP and GM of Microcontroller Business Unit at Atmel. “By removing complexity and focusing on developer-centric tools and services, PubNub shares Atmel’s philosophy of driving competitive advantage for our customers.”
Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities. Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker's initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last year, CoreOS shook up the community with its Rocket containers announcement. Part of Rocket's strategy is apparently to return to the notion of a container as, well, a container, in the face of Docker expanding its container strategy upward into the overall PaaS realm. Meanwhile, Red Hat has its own view of containers. Along with that, there are viewpoints that perhaps containers haven't been used well up to this point. Red Hat's Gordon Haff, for example, a regular Cloud Expo speaker, recently wrote that developers and their customers need to re-think the concept of services themselves, and how they should be deployed discretely and loosely. Rather than just stuff an OS into a container, for example, developers and deployers should consider a spectrum of microservices and what they can do. Cloud Expo is still accepting submissions for this new track, so please visit www.cloudcomputingexpo.com for the latest information. As always, Cloud Expo is staying right on top of what's going on in this fast-evolving world. We look forward to seeing you in New York.
The stack is the hack, Jack. That's my takeaway from several events I attended over the past few weeks in Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia. I listened to and participated in discussions about everything from large datacenter management (think Facebook Open Compute) to enterprise-level cyberfraud (at a seminar in Manila attended by the US State Dept. and Philippine National Police) to the world of entrepreneurial startups, app deployment, and mobility (in a series of meetups and talks in both the US and Asia.) All had something to do with some sort of stack – IT is interconnected, globally, as never before. The increasingly ubiquitous nature of decent connectivity across the globe has joined billions of people into one large, mobile, data-driven stack of information and entertainment. All aspects of all this will be present in force at our upcoming Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11. The event, as has been its practice recently, will also feature the WebRTC Summit (chaired by Acision's Peter Dunkley) and DevOps Summit (chaired by CA's Andi Mann). This time out, there is also the IoT Bootcamp (taught by Janakiram MSV, who conducted a fabulous Cloud Bootcamp at Cloud Expo last November in Santa Clara), and for the first time, the DevOps Certification Foundation Track (taught by Alan Shimel of the DevOps Institute.) But back to the stack—or stacks. There are many ways to view the current era. One way is to look at SMAC—social media, mobility, analytics, and cloud computing: 93% of marketers now use social media for business (according to AdWeek) In the US, 89% of adults 18-29 are regular social media users. No surprise, but two-thirds of adults in the 30-64 age group are also active, as well as 43% of those age 65 and over (according to AdWeek). Mobile access has now reached a median of 100MB per person in the US, and an amazing 361MB per person in Asia (according to Sandvine). Mobile will represent more than 50% of all Internet traffic by the end of next year (according to Cisco). Analytics are driving a Big Data era that's going to put the world into the Zettabyte Age (a zettabyte is one million petabytes) by the end of next year (according to Cisco). Big Data is dovetailing with the emerging Internet of Things, which will see 82% annual growth rates in the machine-to-machine (M2M) market alone this year and beyond (according to Cisco). The IoT has almost 5 billion “things” deployed today, and will grow to 20 billion in 2020 (according to Gartner). Analytics are seen as forming a market greater than $40 billion by 2018 (according to IDC). Then there's cloud computing, which is reaching some level of maturity even as it still commands only about 8% of the world's $2.1 trillion in IT expenditures (according to several sources). Even at that, cloud now commands well over $100 billion in hardware services alone, and has the vibrant software ecosystem that will be on display at Cloud Expo. SMAC is of course just one way to look at the overall picture. The open-source world has given us OpenStack and Apache CloudStack, which continue to drive a lot of conversations if not enormous revenue just yet. The venerable LAMP stack and its many derivatives has quietly become a de facto way to build serious websites and connect them to serious back ends. The idea of stacking all this IT across compute resources, connectivity, and the software the drives it is taking hold. I've grown fond of telling people that I'm glad the dot-com crash occurred more than a decade ago, because had I been able to retire then (and oh how close so many of us came to doing so) I would have missed today, the greatest era of innovation and creativity in the history of computing. Things are stacking up for this to be a great year.
SYS-CON Events announced today the DevOps Foundation Certification Course, being held June ?, 2015, in conjunction with DevOps Summit and 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. This sixteen (16) hour course provides an introduction to DevOps – the cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration, integration and automation in order to improve the flow of work between software developers and IT operations professionals. Improved workflows will result in an improved ability to design, develop, deploy and operate software and services faster.
The list of ‘new paradigm’ technologies that now surrounds us appears to be at an all time high. From cloud computing and Big Data analytics to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the Internet of Things (IoT), today we have to deal with what the industry likes to call ‘paradigm shifts’ at every level of IT. This is disruption; of course, we understand that – change is almost always disruptive.
SYS-CON Events announced today that SoftLayer, an IBM company, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place June 9-11, 2015 at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place November 3–5, 2015 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. With a global footprint of data centers and network points of presence, SoftLayer provides infrastructure as a service to leading-edge customers ranging from Web startups to global enterprises. SoftLayer’s modular architecture, full-featured API, and sophisticated automation provide unparalleled performance and control. Its flexible unified platform seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices linked via a worldwide network for secure, low-latency communications.
Who needs to go out for dinner, when you have a tireless master chef waiting at home to prepare a gourmet meal for you, any time, day or night? That's the premise behind a new invention from Moley Robotics, a tech company based in London. Moley unveiled their new "robochef" prototype on April 14, 2015 at the Hannover Messe technology fair in Germany. Using hands produced by Shadow Robot Company, the robot chef is capable of producing meals from a collection of over 2,000 recipes, using natural motions learned from Tim Anderson, a human chef and winner of the BBC's MasterChef competition in 2011. Eventually, home chefs will be able to use a motion capture system to "teach" the robot new recipes, or download them from an iTunes-like service.
DevOps tasked with driving success in the cloud need a solution to efficiently leverage multiple clouds while avoiding cloud lock-in. Flexiant today announces the commercial availability of Flexiant Concerto. With Flexiant Concerto, DevOps have cloud freedom to automate the build, deployment and operations of applications consistently across multiple clouds. Concerto is available through four disruptive pricing models aimed to deliver multi-cloud at a price point everyone can afford.
The best mobile applications are augmented by dedicated servers, the Internet and Cloud services. Mobile developers should focus on one thing: writing the next socially disruptive viral app. Thanks to the cloud, they can focus on the overall solution, not the underlying plumbing. From iOS to Android and Windows, developers can leverage cloud services to create a common cross-platform backend to persist user settings, app data, broadcast notifications, run jobs, etc. This session provides a high level technical overview of many cloud services available to mobile app developers, including authentication, storage, caching, notifications, streaming, predictive analytics, logging and more.
Recent technology advances in miniaturization has positioned the wearables as the pinnacle of technology convergence with the human body. We inquire if wearables are mere standard miniaturized devices extended with the connectivity and present our views on considerations like design, applications, performance, efficiency, interoperability, usage scenarios, human device interaction and consequent trade-offs enabling wearables to impart optimal value.
So I guess we’ve officially entered a new era of lean and mean. I say this with the announcement of Ubuntu Snappy Core, “designed for lightweight cloud container hosts running Docker and for smart devices,” according to Canonical. “Snappy Ubuntu Core is the smallest Ubuntu available, designed for security and efficiency in devices or on the cloud.” This first version of Snappy Ubuntu Core features secure app containment and Docker 1.6 (1.5 in main release), is available on public clouds, and for ARM and x86 devices on several IoT boards. It’s a Trend! This announcement comes just as VMware announced its Project Photon, a Linux container OS that also follows the minimalist ethos. CoreOS and Project Atomic are other efforts in this area. Even Microsoft is joining the quest, with its Nano Server project for cloud computing and containers. The folks at Docker approve, noting in a recent blog, “VMWare’s announcement and other ecosystem announcements of this nature as being positive for the community because additional tools help to further liberate developers from the constraints of the infrastructure.” This is great, ironic stuff, in that as the IoT is introducing insane new levels of complexity in end-to-end computing infrastructures, the operating systems need to become much smaller. The underlying principle is taken from the world of single-purpose computing such as game machines--the days of the general-purpose PC with a bloated OS to manage any contingency seem to be fading into the mist. It’s wonderful that the leading edge is now crisp and snappy, even as it evokes quintessential old-man talk and old-man knowledge--to wit, the Wikipedia entry under “minimalism” in computer science has this marvelous chestnut: “In the late 1970s and early 1980s programmers had to work within the confines of relatively expensive and limited resources. 8 or 16 kilobytes of RAM was common; 64 kilobytes was considered a vast amount and was the entire address space accessible to the 8-bit CPUs predominant during the earliest generations of personal computers. The most common storage medium was the 5.25 inch floppy disk holding from 88 to 170kB.” As one sharing a birthday (more or less) with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Scott McNealy, I heartily approve of this new trend. It has nothing to do with ancient stories of how tough it was in the old days--Bronko Nagurski was a heck of a football player, too--and everything to do with creating a lean, flexible, massively scalable, highly performant IT infrastructure for this century, not the century just past.
5G is not just faster data and/or higher capacity only. It is much more than these obvious characteristics. For one thing for IoT to succeed; the grand vision created for its debut on a universal scale, 5G is a must. More users; more devices interconnected at any instant of time. The 5G must address the issues arising out of interconnected devices in addition to only users. Also for IoT to succeed additional items like coverage of the serviced region (Can you hear me now!) and more efficient networks. The data rates required by 5G are some 1000 times that provided by 4G to make things happen with low latency. One immediate challenge is the unavailability of spectrum (700 MHZ to 3 GHZ).
Financial services organizations were among the earliest enterprise adopters of cloud computing. The ability to leverage massive compute, storage and networking resources via RESTful APIs and automated tools like Chef and Puppet made it possible for their high-horsepower IT users to develop a whole new array of applications. Companies like Wells Fargo, Fidelity and BBVA are visible, vocal and engaged supporters of the OpenStack community, running production clouds for applications ranging from dev/test and backup/DR to customer-facing applications that give them a competitive edge by rolling out new and improved software products faster than their peers.
SYS-CON Events announced today that the DevOps Institute has been named “Association Sponsor” of SYS-CON's DevOps Summit, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. The DevOps Institute provides enterprise level training and certification. Working with thought leaders from the DevOps community, the IT Service Management field and the IT training market, the DevOps Institute is setting the standard in quality for DevOps education and training.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo® and DevOps Summit 2015 New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo® and DevOps Summit 2015 Silicon Valley, which will take place November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Many of the well-known examples of DevOps success we read in blogs on the Internet paint an idyllic picture of DevOps productivity. A team was facing a stodgy, slow-moving operations department, teams weren’t delivering software on time. Those teams moved to DevOps, became proactive about infrastructure and deployment automation, and an overnight transition to productivity ensues. People are promoted, projects are successful, and developers and system administrators dance hand-in-hand in a finale that has everyone applauding. DevOps is magic, and sometimes this is the reality for smaller projects and startups.