We continue to see an increasing trend in cyber-attacks in line with the growth of new technologies, and enterprises have to protect themselves. It is critical for enterprises to devise their own measures to protect against cyber-attacks because any tolerance on this front is more than an IT issue but may affect the very existence and the business model of the enterprise. We have seen in a recent incident where a cyber-attack prevented a large enterprise from performing their basic business process.
DevOps was created to reduce many of these same conflicts and while DevOps has had several high-profile successes it still presents a challenge for larger organizations. Large enterprises managing mission-critical systems still have separate silos for development and operations. In this post I discuss how DevOps fits into the enterprise and what release managers can do to adapt and extend DevOps to meet the challenges present in larger businesses. First, I’m going to define DevOps. Then I’m going to discuss the impedance mismatch between DevOps and a larger enterprise. In conclusion I’m going to make some suggestions for how people practicing DevOps can adapt DevOps practices to these larger enterprises.
Our guest on the podcast this week is Mark Thiele, EVP of Data Center Technology at Switch. We discuss the idea that private clouds are often equated with do-it-yourself and why that should be changed. Taking sure you are receiving the private environment you need at a cost that can support your business. Listen in to learn the different ways to own and manage a private cloud.
Creating global change that is actually good for the entire world is a mammoth task. With a population of almost 7 Billion people as of 2015, the planet is taking a toll with surviving the brunt of keeping the works going. What role can Cloud Computing play in making it easier for all of us?
Exponential growth in data and information at hand is forcing organizations to rethink their business models. With the rise of digital channels (both as sales channel and marketing channel) the business environment is becoming more complicated and challenging, and the competition is intensifying. Firms are responding by setting up dedicated analytics (or information science or insights) divisions, or repositioning existing teams, to enable a culture of data-driven decision making. There has been significant momentum in recent years with rampant hiring of analytics talent. However, business need to assess if the investment has paid off by achieving the intended objective, or showing signs of positive ROI.
Connected cars will create new business models and provide opportunities for current businesses to greatly improve their service offerings. Areas like targeted marketing, fleet management, event planning, city planning, insurance, and auto repair will benefit immensely from the data that connected cars will provide in the not too distant future. Check out my latest post on Forbes to see how.
Welcome to my four-part series on what I’m going to call the Art of DevOps. We will embark on a mission to reveal the extremely valuable intelligence that’s been collected about a unique strategy to continuously deliver assets to the operational battleground safely, securely and quickly. This strategy drives optimal monitoring of the frontlines and enhanced communications with the troops supporting the initial development. I do make the assumption that most of you are battle-worthy veterans in one or more of the environments that I’ll review. Beyond this introduction blog, I’ll brief you on some of the best DevOps tactics to aid in your deployments while providing maximum situational awareness within each environment. I’ll also do my best to expand upon the best lines of defense with minimal disruption. Unfortunately, in my experience, many of you will be deficient either over lack of preparation such as test automation, damaged assets or organizational challenges in one or more areas of deployment. The goal of this series is to help you recognize where your deficits are, how to address certain scenarios and which tactics you need to use to lead a successful DevOps operation.
Immutable infrastructure, which I think is more appropriately called disposable infrastructure, has been enjoying a reinvigorated life with the success of Dockers and containerization over the past year. Too, DevOps has played a role in resurrecting the notion of disposable infrastructure with its association with automation and the use of templates to automate everything from the acquisition to configuration to provisioning of, well, just about everything in the application data path.
It’s easy to fall into a pattern of dysfunctional releases, release processes that are characterized by delay, inefficiency, and endless meetings that encourage people to view releases as a problem. These are the kinds of meetings that inspire references to the movie Office Space or emails that include clippings of the cartoon Dilbert - repetitive meetings to answer the same questions over and over again all because people lack the tools to connect the issue tracker with the change management systems. In organizations without a reliable process a release is also a time for production system outages and support calls that last well into the night as people try to diagnose errors that could have been anticipated with better communication and coordination. In short, if it’s not managed correctly a release can sap morale from entire departments and distract critical technical employees from being productive.
DevOps is all about removing barriers to rapid, safe delivery of new experiences to your customers. Much of this revolves around automating error-prone, human-driven processes so that processes can be standardized, scaled, and varied programmatically. Some of the types of tools used in a DevOps-minded organization might include version control systems, automation servers, and configuration management systems. Many tools can be used across categories, with varying amounts of success. Some vendors offer products that claim to address all of these needs with one solution – most rarely deliver on that promise.
Flexiant, today releases the new look of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator in its latest version to deliver a simplified experience for service providers and their end users. Using the latest design concepts, Flexiant has reduced complex common work processes into a few simple, wizard driven clicks. The result is a differentiated and easier experience for service provider’s customers helping to increase profit, revenue and growth from cloud services.
One of the more interesting data points to come out of our State of Application Delivery 2015 was the overwhelming importance placed on availability - even over security. When respondents were asked which service they would not deploy an application without, they chose availability. Security came in a close second. This caused a great deal of discussion. After all, one of the most often cited impediment to adopting, well, everything has been and remains security. One would think, then, that security is top of mind and clearly a priority for everyone. Yet availability beat it out for what amounts to the "most important application service."
Back in 2003 I wrote an article that described the forthcoming evolution of the Cloud, and with it the development towards the SIngularity. The growing use of XML Web services would see them evolve to become intelligent agents, forming the basis for this collective. This would fit well with the vision of the ‘Internet of Things’, where lots and lots of devices of all shapes and sizes will be equipped with an IP address and some small amount of self intelligence. Cars and traffic lights that are able to interoperate to better manage themselves for example.
Thanks to Docker, it becomes very easy to leverage containers to build, ship, and run any Linux application on any kind of infrastructure. Docker is particularly helpful for microservice architectures because their successful implementation relies on a fast, efficient deployment mechanism – which is precisely one of the features of Docker. Microservice architectures are therefore becoming more popular, and are increasingly seen as an interesting option even for smaller projects, instead of being reserved to the largest, most complex application stacks.
Microservices, for the uninitiated, are essentially the decomposition of applications into multiple services. This decomposition is often based on functional lines, with related functions being grouped together into a service. While this may sound a like SOA, it really isn't, especially given that SOA was an object-centered methodology that focused on creating services around "nouns" like customer and product. Microservices, while certainly capable of being noun-based, are just as likely to be verb-based, that is to say, based on a functional grouping like "login" or "checkout." SOA was essentially an extension of object-oriented design while microservices are more about decomposition for purposes of rapid (agile) development with the bonus of having significant scalability advantages over object-oriented architectures.
“In the past year we've seen a lot of stabilization of WebRTC. You can now use it in production with a far greater degree of certainty. A lot of the real developments in the past year have been in things like the data channel, which will enable a whole new type of application," explained Peter Dunkley, Technical Director at Acision, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
It didn’t hit me until after a second viewing of Jez Humble’s recent webinar with Perforce that his ways to predict high IT performance aren’t just a neat party trick; they’re absolutely essential. The days of bugs making it into production, distrust between departments, and delayed fixes and releases are becoming a thing of the past, at least among “high performers” of the world. And as the complexity of software grows year after year, being able to accurately predict success may be the only way to actually achieve it.
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture. Logentries has announced a new integration with Elasticsearch's Logstash, an open source solution for managing logs and event data. The new integration enables users to easily forward logs collected via Logstash into the cloud-based Logentries service for more meaningful analysis and visualization over time. Similarly the Logentries Open API allows easy extraction of data from the cloud service for Logstash users, promoting interoperability between both solutions.
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, will explain 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.
Experts predict that the cloud computing will continue to grow this year. According to the Computerworld Forecast Study, spending on cloud computing is expected to rise by 42% in 2015. Moreover, Esna projects that in a bid to increase the use of mobile, social, customer-facing and collaboration technologies, 40% of IT teams will spend more on software as a service and a mix of public, private and hybrid solutions this year.
As we kick off 2015, I predict that this will go down in history as the year of the Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP). We say goodbye to the year of the advanced persistent threat (APT) in 2014, just as this time last year we waved adieu to mobile device management (MDM). We’ve seen the security ecosystem evolve from all-in-one systems to point solutions to a bi-directionally integrated fabric knitting these silos together. This year that will extend into community-based, big security data digesting TIP systems.
Telum in Northeast Mexico improved their ISP services delivery reliability through quality assurance and higher availability using advanced monitoring software. The next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series delves into how Telum in Northeast Mexico improves their ISP services delivery reliability through quality assurance and higher availability using advanced monitoring software.
Over the last few years, Motus experienced a surge in business driven by its transformation to a mobile hub for their customers. As the company expanded their existing client footprint, they seized an opportunity to also integrate mobile workforce data with CRM, sales and expense management offerings. With the new business requirements, Motus knew they had to move from their legacy PHP single stack to a more nimble, service-based architecture to meet the demands of rapid development. As the new infrastructure development started, Motus' VP of Engineering Scott Rankin realized that Motus' existing log management and analytics solution, Splunk, was too difficult to manage and too costly to maintain within their environment. With a team of 11 developers, eight QA engineers and three operations professionals, Scott's team was losing tens of hours per week analyzing logs across 20 servers at once. The cost of the product, the necessity of on-premise hosting, and the unwieldy interface led Scott to seek out alternative options; he knew they needed an agile, easy-to-use and scalable log management solution.
A friend of mine's son recently returned from an extended absence which basically removed him from nearly all aspects of technology, including the Internet, for a bit longer than 5 years. Upon return, observing him restore his awareness of technologies and absorb all things new developed over the past 5 years was both exciting and moving. To be fair, the guy grew up in an Internet world, with access to online resources including Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications. The interesting part of his re-introduction to the "wired" world was watching the comprehension flashes he went through when absorbing the much higher levels of application and data integration, and speed of network access.
RingCentral Inc., has unveiled the RingCentral Connect Platform™, a set of tools and services to build, deploy, and manage custom integrations using RingCentral APIs. With this platform, developers can build out-of-the-box integrations with RingCentral to add powerful communication capabilities to business applications. "This is a significant step forward because businesses want to better connect with customers – and communications is at the heart of every customer interaction," said Vlad Shmunis, CEO, founder and chairman of RingCentral. "In the past, integrating communications into business apps has been complex and expensive. We're breaking down the barriers that have isolated communications from business applications."