CIOs and those charged with running IT Operations are challenged to deliver secure, audited, and reliable compute environments for the applications and data for the business. Behind the scenes these tasks are often accomplished by following onerous time-consuming processes and often the management of these environments and processes will be outsourced to multiple IT service providers. In addition, the division of work is often siloed into traditional "towers" that are not well integrated for cross-functional purposes. So, when traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) meets the cloud, and equally, DevOps, there is invariably going to be conflict.
The arrival of the Microsoft Azure Stack Technical Preview marks a turning point in the cloud-computing market and forms a leading indicator of how dramatically Microsoft has changed in the past two years. The cloud turning point comes because the path to hybrid-cloud capabilities and benefits has a powerful new usher, one with the enterprise, developer, and service-provider presence, R and D budget, and competitive imperative to succeed in a market still underserved and nebulous.
Recognizing the need to identify and validate information security professionals’ competency in securing cloud services, the two leading membership organizations focused on cloud and information security, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and (ISC)^2, joined together to develop an international cloud security credential that reflects the most current and comprehensive best practices for securing and optimizing cloud computing environments.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Avere Systems, a leading provider of enterprise storage for the hybrid cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Avere delivers a more modern architectural approach to storage that doesn’t require the overprovisioning of storage capacity to achieve performance, overspending on expensive storage media for inactive data or the overbuilding of data centers to house increasing amounts of storage infrastructure.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Men & Mice, the leading global provider of DNS, DHCP and IP address management overlay solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. The Men & Mice Suite overlay solution is already known for its powerful application in heterogeneous operating environments, enabling enterprises to scale without fuss. Building on a solid range of diverse platform support, the Men & Mice Suite is taking overlay dexterity one step further into the cloud through full support for Microsoft Azure DNS (January 2016) and AWS Amazon Route 53 (from 2014). Major cloud platform support allows Men & Mice Suite users free rein to extend their infrastructure into the cloud if, and when, they need it.
Network communications are a top priority for DevOps teams working in support of modern globally-distributed systems and microservices. But basic network interface statistics like received and sent traffic aren’t as useful as they once were because multiple microservices may share the same network interface. For meaningful analysis, you need to dig deeper and correlate network-traffic metrics with individual processes. This is however just the beginning … In this article, I’ll show you how deep the network monitoring rabbit hole goes. The types of meaningful analysis that DevOps engineers have been waiting for are finally available.
As utility companies continue to track usage, consumers are growing equally cognizant of individual energy use as well, especially with the growth of private alternative energy practices such as home solar panels or wind power. That's why this week's IIoT top news is focused on the utility technology of tomorrow. This practice of selling privately generated energy back to the smart grid is in its infancy, but consumers now expect device connectivity to track, say, the amount of energy used by lights or the refrigerator during nighttime, off-peak hours. Because of that, the onus lies on utility companies to gather data and deploy advanced analytics that can be translated into relevant information for the average user.
Microservices are a type of software architecture where large applications are made up of small, self-contained units working together through APIs that are not dependent on a specific language. Each service has a limited scope, concentrates on a specific task and is highly independent. This setup allows IT managers and developers to build systems in a modular way. In his book, “Building Microservices,” Sam Newman said microservices are small, focused components built to do a single thing very well.
While the Internet of Things (IoT) being condemned by Gartner in August as one of the world’s most overhyped technology trends of 2015 makes a good headline, this assertion is itself misleading by failing to acknowledge the rapid progress now being made as IoT emerges in clusters to deliver real benefits to users, even if these are still early days. However, Gartner was correct that the full promise of IoT as a joined up ecosystem of interoperable components is indeed five to ten years away.
With some of the busiest shopping days of the year behind us, now is the time for retailers to pause for a moment to evaluate what worked, and to consider new online strategies and technologies for the 2016 shopping season. We don’t yet have numbers for 2015, but in 2014, holiday season retail e-commerce spending in the United States amounted to 53.3 billion U.S. dollars with the most money being spent online on Cyber Monday. Fujitsu is working with Grid Dynamics to deliver an Oracle Commerce Platform as a fully-managed cloud service. I had a chance to sit down with Victoria Livschitz, Executive Vice President of Grid Dynamics, and ask her a few questions during our preparations for the upcoming National Retail Federation (#nrf16) show in New York City, January 17-19, 2016.
At first adopted by enterprises to consolidate physical servers, virtualization is now widely used in cloud computing to offer elasticity and scalability. On the other hand, Docker has developed a new way to handle Linux containers, inspired by version control software such as Git, which allows you to keep all development versions. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Dominique Rodrigues, the co-founder and CTO of Nanocloud Software, discussed how in order to also handle QEMU / KVM virtual machines versions, they have developed a new tool, called Vm_commit, which can create commits, backup any commit, rollback to a previous commit or rebase all the commits up to a given one for any running virtual machine, on the fly.
As I read through the various 2016 technology predictions lists, I started discovering a common theme: the inclusion of real-time data initiatives as a main priority for IT. Real-time streaming data and analytics is rapidly becoming the lifeblood of today’s data-driven economy. Why? Because your customers live in an age of information immediacy.
Electric Cloud CEO, Steve Brodie, recently had the honor of speaking at an internal symposium at one of the largest banks in the United States about the benefits of DevOps for Financial Services (Finserv). Today, applications are the lifeblood of the business, and nowhere is that more true than in Financial Services, who rely on software to create economic value. Advances in virtualization, data integration, and consumer demand for new functionality have increased the pressure of these organizations to release software faster than ever before. This has led many to explore Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices as means to accelerate time to market and improve product quality.
The (re?)emergence of Microservices was especially prominent in this week’s news. What are they good for? do they make sense for your application? should you take the plunge? and what do Microservices mean for your DevOps and Continuous Delivery efforts? Continue reading for more on Microservices, containers, DevOps culture, and more top news from the past week. As always, stay tuned to all the news coming from@ElectricCloud on DevOps and Continuous Delivery throughout the week and retweet/favorite to get your favorite pieces featured in our weekly recap.
Teams that have embraced DevOps and begun using the practice of test driven development are familiar with the headaches that accompany testing legacy code. This is particularly true for companies that have applications out in production that have been working for years, but have no formal tests or testing regiment associated with its codebase. Most of the time the physical code for the applications is known; many times it is not. In fact, both the code and the developer who wrote the code might have left the building years ago.
I sat down with Michael Rösch, COO of POOL4TOOL, to chat about cloud computing. With a lot of buzz about the impact of the cloud on business, it was a chance to get a perspective, as well as a few hints and tips, from someone who has been at the coalface of procurement cloud services for the past 15 years. Michael has been at POOL4TOOL since 2000, becoming COO in 2012, and has worked on projects with German giants like Behr, Hansgrohe, Heidelberger Printing Presses, Carl Zeiss and ThyssenKrupp Presta in that time.
With an estimated 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, several industries will begin to expand their capabilities for retaining end point data at the edge to better utilize the range of data types and sheer volume of M2M data generated by the Internet of Things. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Don DeLoach, CEO and President of Infobright, will discuss the infrastructures businesses will need to implement to handle this explosion of data by providing specific use cases for filtering, cleansing, enriching, storing and analyzing granular data at the edge that will help businesses achieve powerful insights from the many use cases of the Internet of Things.
Enterprises across all industries are in the midst of difficult, bet-the-company changes we call digital transformation. And yet, there remains broad confusion about the scope of the word digital. While the rise of mobile technologies are the impetus for many such transformations, digital goes well beyond the choice of user device. In fact, digital transformation reflects the fact that customer preferences and behavior are driving enterprise technology decisions – and such technology decisions impact the entire organization, from innovative, customer-focused efforts all the way to the traditional IT organization.
Earlier this week it was reported that researchers at Boston-based security company, Rapid7, identified several security flaws in an app connected to a new toy from Mattel's Fisher-Price brand. The news of the security vulnerability caught our attention for a few reasons: The name of the toy - Smart Toy Bear - is strangely close to the name of our company SmartBear Software. More importantly, the story caught our attention because the security vulnerability brought up an important reminder about the important issue of security in today's connected world
I attended a HIVE-sponsored Meetup yesterday evening titled, “Rocking the database world with RocksDB”. Since I had never heard of RocksDB, I was curious to learn how it is rocking the database world. Facebook built this key value store storage layer originally to use for MySQL (instead of InnoDB), as MySQL is used heavily at Facebook. They claim that was not the only motivation. Then in 2013, they decided to open source RocksDB. Last evening’s speaker in an earlier post on November, 2013 had said, “Storing and accessing hundreds of petabytes of data is a huge challenge, and we’re constantly improving and overhauling our tools to make this as fast and efficient as possible. Today, we are open-sourcing RocksDB, an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage that we built and use here at Facebook.”
Super Bowl 50 is upon us and while millions tune in for the faceoff between the Broncos and Panthers this Sunday, software testers will hold their breaths as these same fans flock to promoted web and mobile applications in droves. To the players, Super Bowl Sunday presents two paths: one to glory and one to crushing disappointment. Obviously, vying for victory is a team effort. But sometimes, just sometimes, the difference between winning and losing falls to one individual. With the biggest game of the year on the line and everyone watching, the final play commences.
Over the past year, Microsoft has been introducing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) as the preferred way to provision and manage resources in its Azure cloud. ARM is the successor to the original Service Management model, also known as “Classic.”[1] While Classic will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future, ARM is the preferred deployment model and all new Azure features are being released on ARM only. Here is an overview ARM and the new features it provides.
Fortunately, meaningful and tangible business cases for IoT are plentiful in a broad array of industries and vertical markets. These range from simple warranty cost reduction for capital intensive assets, to minimizing downtime for vital business tools, to creating feedback loops improving product design, to improving and enhancing enterprise customer experiences. All of these business cases, which will be briefly explored in this session, hinge on cost effectively extracting relevant data from disparate devices and applying data analytics ultimately, business logic to that data. Properly implemented, IoT can effectively deliver these business outcomes.
The Year of the (Fire) Monkey is upon us and the curious, playful, smart, opportunistic and sometimes mischievous character could influence events throughout 2016. Whether you were born under the symbol or not, Monkeys thrive on challenges and 2016 is sure to bring some obstacles during the year. 2015 (Year of the Sheep) brought us a rash of high profile breaches, a bunch of new IoT devices and wearables, continued, bigger clouds and innovative attacks on vulnerable infrastructures along with the continuous deluge of big data. This is sure to continue as our digital, software-defined lives connect and intersect with the things around us. Organizations will need to extend their risk management focus to areas outside their control like the cloud and social channels but also consider the human element in all this. The new threats and heightened risk may put some companies in peril due to the lack of knowledgeable security IT personnel available.
The Net Neutrality fight has been all over the news this year with the latest installment on Net Neutrality coming in from T-Mobile. Private and public companies alike are tuned into to this continual saga to see how the eventual outcome will affect business and ultimately their online lives. But whether the FCC’s recent ruling on Net Neutrality stands the test of time or not, there is a new technology that will provide customers fast, reliable Internet services at much lower costs than private business lines.