Regardless of where you begin, it’s important to internalize the analogy that a DevOps transformation is a journey. “Adopting DevOps is not a ‘one-and-done’ project. It is adopting a mindset, a culture,” says Sanjeev, “It is a commitment to a journey of continuous improvement by adopting a set of capabilities and practices that are based on Lean principles.” That journey consists of a number of steps, or smaller transformations that each will serve to improve the flow of value through your develop/test/deploy process, and bring benefits to the business at each successive stage.
The Evident.io Security Platform (ESP) is a cloud-first security and threat analysis service for AWS. ESP provides security best practice checks that give you visibility into your part of the AWS Shared Security Responsibility model. This visibility can scale from one to thousands of AWS accounts and dives deep into many AWS services. At Evident.io, one of our core beliefs is that security tools should be simple to use and make the job of security teams easier, not harder. One of the ways we do that is by ensuring that Evident security alerts are always actionable. So, it came as no surprise that our customers started asking us to integrate the Evident.io security platform with PagerDuty, an Operations Performance Platform that makes identifying and resolving incidents easier and faster.
Those watching federal cloud security in the defense space were pleased to learn the Defense DOD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (v1) (SRG) last month. This 152-page document outlines the security requirements that Department of Defense (DOD) mission owners must adhere to when procuring cloud-based services. While the document is very thorough and is required reading if you currently, or intend to provide, cloud-based services to the DOD, I wanted to cover some of the things that stood out to me.
BroadSoft has announced that Wavenet Limited has selected BroadSoft’s BroadCloud® managed services to offer its customers and channel partners an integrated IP voice and Unified Communications (UC) service. Wavenet, which has over 2,000 customers and supports 20,000 users in the United Kingdom, provides companies and associated partners with core telephony services. Wavenet’s arrangement with BroadSoft will enable the company to accelerate delivery of its hosted software and services, as customers demand the flexibility and scalability afforded by cloud-based infrastructure.
Technology is driving the world. Innovation, fuelled by demand and the right amount of push through angel and venture backed funds are putting fuel into the fire. Here is what is driving demand, why demand is growing and where the growth is heading. Overall the global technology arena is set for tremendous growth. here we are not specifically talking about Consumer or Enterprise growth but overall. Today, innovation is taking place in every small city to the large metropolis. Companies like whatsapp, drop box and many others that started in dorm rooms and garages are becoming mainstream application purely because of the massive disruptions they create. Do expect a number of smaller companies to grow rapidly and provide very focused and niche applications. Being narrow and catering to a very small need that is felt by a large audience is the place to grow.
BroadSoft has announced that Andrew M. Geisse, has been elected to the Board of Directors, effective as of February 5, 2015. Mr. Geisse, who previously held several key senior executive leadership positions at AT&T, will draw upon 35 years of telecom industry experience to help further extend BroadSoft’s global leadership position in delivering cloud-enabled Unified Communications and Collaboration services. Mr. Geisse’s understanding of the factors that drive large enterprise adoption of technology products and services – and proven track record building strong partnerships that empower service providers – will prove invaluable to BroadSoft’s strategic partners and enterprise customers.
VentureBeat and GigaOm are both reporting that Pivotal will be announcing some big shifts in their Hadoop and other related offerings (recall that Pivotal is the firm spun off from EMC and VMware and has GE as a major investor). VentureBeat first announced that Pivotal will be ditching its Hadoop distribution and pulling out of the Hadoop market. This would be a huge (and unbelievable to many) announcement, even though Pivotal gets far less buzz than the other Hadoop-centric companies like Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR. GigaOm reported that Pivotal will be open sourcing much of its proprietary offering. They referenced an email from Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz that indicated big announcements involving multiple parties are coming (GigaOm reports that one of these partners will be Hortonworks).
As cloud gives an opportunity to businesses to buy services externally – how is cloud impacting your customers? In his General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Fabio Gori, Director of Worldwide Cloud Marketing at Cisco, provided answers to big questions: Do you see hybrid cloud as where the world is going? What benefits does it bring? And how does Cisco connect all of these clouds? He also discussed Intercloud and Cisco’s investment on it.
On the surface, many network management products seem the same. But any network management system claiming to be a solution will, at a minimum, maintain an inventory of the network devices, understand their interconnectivity, monitor (and alert on) each device’s response (availability), monitor each device’s performance to some degree, and may note configuration changes. But beauty is only skin deep. How, how well, and how deeply an NMS does these makes all the difference.
NaviSite, Inc. has received the Global and Americas VMware Partner Network Award in the Service Provider Partner of the Year category. The award was presented at VMware Partner Exchange 2015, VMware’s annual partner event, held in San Francisco. “I am pleased to recognize this select group of partners who distinguished themselves at the global level in 2014,” said Dave O’Callaghan, senior vice president, Global Channels and Alliances, VMware. “VMware is dedicated to educating and equipping our partners with the resources they need to thrive, while providing more agile delivery of IT services – to organizations of all sizes. We congratulate NaviSite on winning a Global VMware Partner Network Award and look forward to our continued mutual success in 2015.”
Our guest on the podcast this week is Erik Sebesta, Co-Founder and CATO of Cloud Technology Partners. We discuss recent Internet of Things projects, including those of two healthcare intelligence companies, and explore exactly what it takes to delivery real-time data, safely and efficiently to end consumers. Listen in to learn how we’re building the next generation of IoT platforms and helping companies leverage this emerging technology.
Dynatrace monitors your entire application delivery chain. All of your transactions are tracked end-to-end, from user clicks to individual lines of code, using Dynatrace PurePath technology. Dynatrace constantly monitors your servers’ host and process health, and will automatically notify you if your business-critical transactions are running slower than normal with automatic baselines. Dynatrace comes with several incidents configured out of the box, but you can also create custom incidents to get as granular as you want. However, even with all of this information, alerts are only as good as how well you can respond to them. Too often, missed or ignored incidents can lead to severe consequences, so it’s important to make sure every incident gets noticed.
While small and midsize businesses are often keen to move their applications to the cloud, the benefits of cloud migration don’t simply rain down from the sky. In order to take advantage of the flexibility (and cost savings) of virtual server hosting, organizations need to address some common challenges. Fortunately, there are a few simple steps businesses can take to enable successful transition of applications to the cloud. The first step is determining which applications to move to a virtual server. As with any IT project, businesses must balance risk and reward, cost and benefit. They must assess the cost/benefit of moving the application to a cloud server, assess its technical suitability for the cloud, and manage the migration process to ensure success.
The security landscape is evolving more than ever before – not only must chief information security officers (CISOs) deal with constant increasing cyber-attack threats and security breaches but they must keep up with mobility trends and concerns about access to data and protecting identities. Mobility is growing at a fast pace, and though it may be easy to construct more barriers to data access, there are much more effective approaches.
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. Cloud Expo is the single show where delegates and technology vendors can meet to experience and discuss the entire world of the cloud. Only Cloud Expo brings together all this in a single location: Cloud Computing | Big Data | IoT | DevOps | WebRTC
I recently poured over F5’s “The State of Application Delivery in 2015” and InformationWeek’s “2015 App Dev Priorities Survey” that they presented with Dr. Dobb’s. The similarity of their titles, and even their release dates made me wonder how unique each of their findings would be, and I challenged myself to flush out any interesting findings or patterns that emerged from their collective research. Both reports were really well done, and I would recommend them to anyone looking to see if your organization is on the right path of change, or to anyone who knows you’re not on the right path, but you’re willing to get on it—if you could just figure out where it is.
Imagine the scenes from any of the last few Black Fridays with people lined up for days to grab the new flat screen TV or a new iPhone. The moment the gates open up there is usually a crowd of people swarming like bees, trying to get their hands on what they can, and yes there were also many reported cases of snatching, grabbing and what not. If only the world of cloud storage could be so dramatic!
As healthcare providers move into mobile device applications and across enterprise and cloud technologies in the U.S. and abroad, businesses and consumers are demanding more layers of protection. And it’s needed: Recent online security breaches highlight the importance of security, especially as cloud transactions and the IoT become more commonplace. Attracting new customers and retaining old ones is paramount for most companies, and creating trust goes a long way when it comes to the monetization of online data. Concern over online security can determine what companies customers use, and that trust can be a major factor in choosing one company over another.
Kafka 0.8.2 has a pile of new metrics for all three main Kafka components: Producers, Brokers, and Consumers. Not only does it have a lot of new metrics, the whole metrics part of Kafka has been redone — we worked closely with Kafka developers for several weeks to bring order and structure to all Kafka metrics and make them easy to collect, parse and interpret. We could list all the Kafka metrics you can get via SPM, but in short — SPM monitors all Kafka metrics and, as with all things SPM monitors, all these metrics are nicely graphed and are filterable by server name, topic, partition, and everything else that makes sense in Kafka deployments.
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. Containerization and micro-services are changing how development and operations teams design, build and monitor systems. Containerization of environments regularly results in systems with large numbers of dynamic and ephemeral instances that autoscale to meet demands on system load. In fact, it's not uncommon to see thousands of container instances, where once there were hundreds of (cloud) server instances, where once there were tens of physical servers,
In the spirit of Valentine's Day, here's a little love letter from "the Cloud" that originally appeared in our partner Parasoft's perspective guide to Service Virtualization. But we think it's especially appropriate now. Enjoy! - N.W., Ed. Hey, I know it’s been a while since we started being “a thing.” When we met, everyone said you were just mocking, and that I wasn’t real enough to make a living, with my head in the clouds. Yet, here we are, a few years later.
"Programmability in the network" is a wordy yet simpler way to describe the extension of network capabilities through the use of software-defined techniques. See what I mean? In any case, whatever you want to call it, there are two distinct methods of leveraging programmability in the network. One is specifically tied to SDN, using the extensible capability of an SDN controller supportive of a plug-in, module or app-based model. The second is more broadly applicable (in that it can be used for SDN but also as part of traditional or legacy architectural approaches as well) and implements an in-path model for executing logic (programmability) on inbound and outbound traffic. As usual, I think a picture can probably suffice to explain it fully instead of inundating you with words, words and more words.
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.
While layer 1 (physical) interconnection of network resources will always be required – the bits need to flow on fiber or wireless at some point, the future of carrier and service resource intercommunications must evolve to accept and acknowledge the need for user-driven, near real time provisioning of network and other service resources, on a global scale.
What happens when the gadgets you wear also control the things around you? No doubt you’ve heard of various internet-connected things like light bulbs, coffee makers and thermostats making their way into our homes. And no doubt, you’ve probably heard of such devices that you wear (or insert) to track your fitness, sleeping or even blood sugar levels. But when that sleeping monitor can alert the light bulb and coffee machine that you are about to wake up, that’s called the Internet of Self. Data from your body that is used to control the objects around you. Your body controls the your environment, without you even knowing. Cool and for me, a bit unnerving at the same time.