During 2016 cloud computing celebrated its tenth anniversary. Therefore, at the beginning of 2017, we’ll briefly look at what the next decade may bring. Also this brings to a close the version of Tune into the Cloud that was published monthly in the Dutch print publication Cloudworks, the magazine where we started this series. On your tenth birthday, as fresh teenager, you’re normally not yet an adolescent – a.k.a, a beginning adult – and you may not be seated at the adult table yet. But there are exceptions. Sometimes things just move faster. Just look at a Max Verstappen, our Dutch Formula 1 phenomenon who – by literally going faster – now starts standard from the front of the grid. And also the cloud has maneuvered itself in pole position for the 2017 race, with more and more “fans” who go for a ‘cloud first’, an ‘all-in cloud or even a “cloud-only” strategy.
Things are changing so quickly in IoT that it would take a wizard to predict which ecosystem will gain the most traction. In order for IoT to reach its potential, smart devices must be able to work together. Today, there are a slew of interoperability standards being promoted by big names to make this happen: HomeKit, Brillo and Alljoyn. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Adam Justice, vice president and general manager of Grid Connect, will review what happens when smart devices don’t work together, and will look at each standard in detail, highlighting strengths and weaknesses. He will also look at whether standards can co-exist, and what it would take to make this happen.
"Plutora provides release and testing environment capabilities to the enterprise," explained Dalibor Siroky, Director and Co-founder of Plutora, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.
It's been way too long, but the next in the series of IoT "Build-along-at-home" videos is done. In this edition I will show you the "Hello World" project for interacting with the IO ports on your Raspberry Pi. Please click here to watch the video and as always, comments and questions are appreciated and welcomed! If you are the type (like me) who just likes to figure stuff out on their own, I have heavily commented the code for you so you can get started quickly without the video, but it will help you with the hardware assemblies! Also I am already working on the next projects, using the moisture sensor (the original project), and another future project using a sound sensor to illustrate some of the "threshold" principals of IoT sensors
One of the hottest areas in cloud right now is DRaaS and related offerings. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Dale Levesque, Disaster Recovery Product Manager with Windstream's Cloud and Data Center Marketing team, will discuss the benefits of the cloud model, which far outweigh the traditional approach, and how enterprises need to ensure that their needs are properly being met.
Buzzword alert: Microservices and IoT at a DevOps conference? What could possibly go wrong? In this Power Panel at DevOps Summit, moderated by Jason Bloomberg, the leading expert on architecting agility for the enterprise and president of Intellyx, panelists peeled away the buzz and discuss the important architectural principles behind implementing IoT solutions for the enterprise. As remote IoT devices and sensors become increasingly intelligent, they become part of our distributed cloud environment, and we must architect and code accordingly. At the very least, you'll have no problem filling in your buzzword bingo cards. Evangelist for F5 Networks
DevOps tends to focus on the relationship between Dev and Ops, putting an emphasis on the ops and application infrastructure. But that’s changing with microservices architectures. In her session at DevOps Summit, Lori MacVittie, Evangelist for F5 Networks, will focus on how microservices are changing the underlying architectures needed to scale, secure and deliver applications based on highly distributed (micro) services and why that means an expansion into “the network” for DevOps.
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In his session at DevOps Summit, Tapabrata Pal, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Capital One, will tell a story about how Capital One has embraced Agile and DevOps Security practices across the Enterprise – driven by Enterprise Architecture; bringing in Development, Operations and Information Security organizations together. Capital Ones DevOpsSec practice is based upon three "pillars" – Shift-Left, Automate Everything, Dashboard Everything. Within about three years, from 100% waterfall, Capital One now has 500+ Agile Teams delivering quality software via Agile and DevOps practices.
As organizations realize the scope of the Internet of Things, gaining key insights from Big Data, through the use of advanced analytics, becomes crucial. However, IoT also creates the need for petabyte scale storage of data from millions of devices. A new type of Storage is required which seamlessly integrates robust data analytics with massive scale. These storage systems will act as “smart systems” provide in-place analytics that speed discovery and enable businesses to quickly derive meaningful and actionable insights. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Paul Turner, Chief Marketing Officer at Cloudian, addressed how and where we’ll see smart data first make an impact.
In the digital world, performance, availability, and reliability are key pillars of business that can impact revenue, reputation, and operational excellence. We often write about the impact that third-party services have on performance on our blog, but sometimes that impact is felt in our personal lives as well. Every year, we monitor major retailers’ performance and availability during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, testing to capture the inevitable failures and outages as traffic volumes climb to record highs. This year, however, most of these retailers did amazingly well and I am very happy for them.
Application Delivery got its start in the form of network-based load balancing hardware. It is the essential foundation on which Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) operate. The second iteration of purpose-built load balancing (following application-based proprietary systems) materialized in the form of network-based appliances. These are the true founding fathers of today’s ADCs. Because these devices were application-neutral and resided outside of the application servers themselves, they could load balance using straightforward network techniques. In essence, these devices would present a “virtual server” address to the outside world, and when users attempted to connect, they would forward the connection to the most appropriate real server doing bi-directional network address translation (NAT).
IoT is fundamentally transforming the auto industry, turning the vehicle into a hub for connected services, including safety, infotainment and usage-based insurance. Auto manufacturers – and businesses across all verticals – have built an entire ecosystem around the Connected Car, creating new customer touch points and revenue streams. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Sanjay Khatri, Head of Platform Product Marketing at Cisco Jasper, shared real-world examples of how IoT transforms the car from a static product into a dynamic hub, drawing from experience at Cisco Jasper working with the world’s top 23 automakers. He discussed how enterprises can leverage IoT to cultivate meaningful customer relationships and lucrative business opportunities.
Hardware virtualization and cloud computing allowed us to increase resource utilization and increase our flexibility to respond to business demand. Docker Containers are the next quantum leap - Are they?! Databases always represented an additional set of challenges unique to running workloads requiring a maximum of I/O, network, CPU resources combined with data locality.
Enterprises are rapidly implementing private clouds for sound business reasons. Private clouds offer greater agility, enabling companies to quickly adapt to constantly changing business needs and innovate faster than competition. Digital and cloud services can be provided to developers at a pace of innovation that equals any public cloud. Companies can maintain security and compliance, along with the reliability, availability and stability of IT systems of large enterprises. Private clouds also provide better SLAs for new services than most public clouds offer.
“DevOps is really about the business. The business is under pressure today, competitively in the marketplace to respond to the expectations of the customer. The business is driving IT and the problem is that IT isn't responding fast enough," explained Mark Levy, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Serena Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
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.
Every organization collects, stores and retains portions of dark data. It's the digital equivalent of emotional baggage which hangs around after every user interaction, transaction, and customer engagement. In fact, not using data effectively is costing United Airlines almost $1 Billion annually in lost revenue. Gartner Inc. describes dark data as "information assets that organizations collect, process and store in the course of their regular business activity, but fail to use for other purposes."
Has anyone not heard this phrase yet? This analogy was first presented by Clive Humby at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Senior Marketers Summit at Kellogg School in 2006. If you have been following and or are active in the analytics and data science community, I am sure that you have, and honestly I would hope so. This was not the first time we heard the phrase “data is the new oil,” and it certainly will not be the last.Interestingly enough this exclamation is actually at least ten years old. For example, marketing commentator Michael Palmer blogged back in 2006: “Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc., to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.”
In 2014, Amazon announced a new form of compute called Lambda. We didn't know it at the time, but this represented a fundamental shift in what we expect from cloud computing. Now, all of the major cloud computing vendors want to take part in this disruptive technology. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, John Jelinek IV, a web developer at Linux Academy, will discuss why major players like AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Bluemix, and Google Cloud Platform are all trying to sidestep VMs and containers with heavy investments in serverless computing, when most of the industry has its eyes on Docker and containers.
Another year has come and gone, and many of us are reflecting on the past and looking ahead to see how we can best prepare for the future. Let’s see what Gartner has to say about it in terms of the application development world. As last year was beginning to wind down, the research firm published the Predicts 2017: Application Development report authored by analysts Mike West, Maritess Sobejana, Joachim Herschmann, and Keith James Mann. It includes key findings in application development that will impact organizations and recommendations for application leaders to provide insight for planning in the years to come. These Gartner analysts make multiple predictions for 2017 and beyond, but two stand out to me as worth highlighting.
There has certainly been no lack of punditry and controversy in the US regarding the hacking of John Podesta’s email account (along with the DNC email hack), with some claiming they were responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s loss in the election. I will leave the impact of these claims to those who write and talk about politics. I don’t discuss politics in a work setting, so will leave that aspect to them.
Containers have changed the mind of IT in DevOps. They enable developers to work with dev, test, stage and production environments identically. Containers provide the right abstraction for microservices and many cloud platforms have integrated them into deployment pipelines. DevOps and Containers together help companies to achieve their business goals faster and more effectively. In his session at DevOps Summit, Ruslan Synytsky, CEO and Co-founder of Jelastic, reviewed the current landscape of DevOps with containers. In addition, he will discuss known issues and solutions for enterprise applications in containers.
All organizations that did not originate this moment have a pre-existing culture as well as legacy technology and processes that can be more or less amenable to DevOps implementation. That organizational culture is influenced by the personalities and management styles of Executive Management, the wider culture in which the organization is situated, and the personalities of key team members at all levels of the organization. This culture and entrenched interests usually throw a wrench in the works because of misaligned incentives.
2016 has been an amazing year for Docker and the container industry. We had 3 major releases of Docker engine this year , and tremendous increase in usage. The community has been following along and contributing amazing Docker resources to help you learn and get hands-on experience. Here’s some of the top read and viewed content for the year. Of course releases are always really popular, particularly when they fit requests we had from the community.