Our guest on the podcast this week is Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Creator of Jenkins and CloudBees. We discuss highlights and takeaways from the CloudBees Jenkins User Conference, which emphasizes the strong community around Jenkins. Jenkins makes continuous delivery a strategic enabler because it changes the speed at which optimizations can reach users’ hands. We also get a preview of what we can expect with Tiger from CloudBees.
Containers are revolutionizing the way we deploy and maintain our infrastructures, but monitoring and troubleshooting in a containerized environment can still be painful and impractical. Understanding even basic resource usage is difficult - let alone tracking network connections or malicious activity. In his session at DevOps Summit, Gianluca Borello, Sr. Software Engineer at Sysdig, will cover the current state of the art for container monitoring and visibility, including pros / cons and live demonstrations of each method. Special emphasis will be put on sysdig, an open source troubleshooting tool. Sysdig offers unprecedented container visibility without the need to break the "sanctity" of the container.
The IoT market is on track to hit $7.1 trillion in 2020. The reality is that only a handful of companies are ready for this massive demand. There are a lot of barriers, paint points, traps, and hidden roadblocks. How can we deal with these issues and challenges? The paradigm has changed. Old-style ad-hoc trial-and-error ways will certainly lead you to the dead end. What is mandatory is an overarching and adaptive approach to effectively handle the rapid changes and exponential growth.
Today’s connected world is moving from devices towards things, what this means is that by using increasingly low cost sensors embedded in devices we can create many new use cases. These span across use cases in cities, vehicles, home, offices, factories, retail environments, worksites, health, logistics, and health. These use cases rely on ubiquitous connectivity and generate massive amounts of data at scale. These technologies enable new business opportunities, ways to optimize and automate, along with new ways to engage with users.
Any Ops team trying to support a company in today’s cloud-connected world knows that a new way of thinking is required – one just as dramatic than the shift from Ops to DevOps. The diversity of modern operations requires teams to focus their impact on breadth vs. depth. In his session at DevOps Summit, Adam Serediuk, Director of Operations at xMatters, Inc., will discuss the strategic requirements of evolving from Ops to DevOps, and why modern Operations has begun leveraging the “NoOps” approach. NoOps enables developers to deploy, manage, and scale their own code, creating an infrastructure that minimizes bottlenecks in key processes.
Canary launches are a best practice in continuous delivery, used by teams at Google, Amazon and LinkedIn. A canary launch is rolling out features to a small number of users to assess the overall system reaction. Canary releases allow software teams to produce better software, quicker. In his session at WebRTC Summit, John Kodumal, CTO and cofounder of LaunchDarkly, will discuss the benefits of canary launches, as well as how you can use canary launches in your own development life cycle.
I have three words for everyone in software testing: prioritize, prioritize, and prioritize. You can't test every possible permutation of your software, especially so with APIs and IoT devices where you're placing much of the user experience in the hands of integrators to your core products and services. You just can't, so we should throw our hands up now and just give up, right?
Developing software for the Internet of Things (IoT) comes with its own set of challenges. Security, privacy, and unified standards are a few key issues. In addition, each IoT product is comprised of at least three separate application components: the software embedded in the device, the backend big-data service, and the mobile application for the end user's controls. Each component is developed by a different team, using different technologies and practices, and deployed to a different stack/target - this makes the integration of these separate pipelines and the coordination of software updates for IoT more problematic. How do you coordinate the diverse moving parts that must come together when your IoT product is updated?
Disaster recovery (DR) has traditionally been a major challenge for IT departments. Even with the advent of server virtualization and other technologies that have simplified DR implementation and some aspects of on-going management, it is still a complex and (often extremely) costly undertaking. For those applications that do not require high availability, but are still mission- and business-critical, the decision as to which [applications] to spend money on for true disaster recovery can be a struggle.
The APN DevOps Competency highlights APN Partners who demonstrate deep capabilities delivering continuous integration, continuous delivery, and configuration management. They help customers transform their business to be more efficient and agile by leveraging the AWS platform and DevOps principles.
Nowadays, a large number of sensors and devices are connected to the network. Leading-edge IoT technologies integrate various types of sensor data to create a new value for several business decision scenarios. The transparent cloud is a model of a new IoT emergence service platform. Many service providers store and access various types of sensor data in order to create and find out new business values by integrating such data.
As more and more data is generated from a variety of connected devices, the need to get insights from this data and predict future behavior and trends is increasingly essential for businesses. Real-time stream processing is needed in a variety of different industries such as Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Automobile, Finance, Online Retail, Smart Grids, and Healthcare. Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed distributed stream computation service that provides low latency, scalable processing of streaming data in the cloud with an enterprise grade SLA. It features built-in integration with Azure Machine Learning, enabling you to invoke machine learning modules over streaming data to perform anomaly detection, classification, and other predictive analytics in real time.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Secure Infrastructure & Services will exhibit at SYS-CON's 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIAS) is a managed services provider of cloud computing solutions for the IBM Power Systems market. The company helps mid-market firms built on IBM hardware platforms to deploy new levels of reliable and cost-effective computing and high availability solutions, leveraging the cloud and the benefits of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
Ten years ago, there may have been only a single application that talked directly to the database and spit out HTML; customer service, sales - most of the organizations I work with have been moving toward a design philosophy more like unix, where each application consists of a series of small tools stitched together. In web example above, that likely means a login service combines with webpages that call other services - like enter and update record. That allows the customer service team to write their own tools using the web, the command line, scheduled, or any other interface. Sound too good to be true, doesn't it? It is true, but it comes at a cost. For example, I never defined a mechanism to manage the explosion of APIs that will result under this approach. Consider this: uncontrolled growth is one definition of cancer. Since the rapid creation of APIs is not quite so deadly, I will call this the API Sprawl; I've seen it across every client that moved to web-services approach, typically two to four years into conversion.
Somebody call the buzzword police: we have a serious case of microservices-washing in progress. The term “microservices-washing” is derived from “whitewashing,” meaning to hide some inconvenient truth with bluster and nonsense. We saw plenty of cloudwashing a few years ago, as vendors and enterprises alike pretended what they were doing was cloud, even though it wasn’t. Today, the hype around microservices has led to the same kind of obfuscation, as vendors and enterprise technologists alike are saying they’re building microservices—even though a cursory look at what they’re really up to wouldn’t uncover a single one.
SYS-CON Events announced today that VividCortex, the monitoring solution for the modern data system, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The database is the heart of most applications, but it’s also the part that’s hardest to scale, monitor, and optimize even as it’s growing 50% year over year. VividCortex is the first unified suite of database monitoring tools specifically designed for today's large-scale, polyglot persistence tier, easing this pain for the entire IT department.
Interested in leveraging automation technologies and a cloud architecture to make developers more productive? Learn how PaaS can benefit your organization to help you streamline your application development, allow you to use existing infrastructure and improve operational efficiencies. Begin charting your path to PaaS with OpenShift Enterprise.
The cloud has reached mainstream IT. Those 18.7 million data centers out there (server closets to corporate data centers to colocation deployments) are moving to the cloud. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Achim Weiss, CEO & co-founder of ProfitBricks, will share how two companies – one in the U.S. and one in Germany – are achieving their goals with cloud infrastructure. More than a case study, he will share the details of how they prioritized their cloud computing infrastructure deployments and the details they’ve learned. From performance to network configurations, they've got interesting architectures running in the cloud now. ProfitBricks learned from these two customers and he will give you some tips on how to make your move to the cloud painless.
The iPad sales are down, but it is now possible to run most business apps on the iPad with the Citrix X1 Mouse. Can this make the iPad more relevant for business? Despite the mostly positive financial news from Apple, the one weakness that gets a lot of press is the decrease in iPad sales. For the second quarter of 2015, sales were down 18 percent from the same quarter a year earlier.
The OpenStack cloud operating system includes Trove, a database abstraction layer. Rather than applications connecting directly to a specific type of database, they connect to Trove, which in turn connects to one or more specific databases. One target database is Postgres Plus Cloud Database, which includes its own RESTful API. Trove was originally developed around MySQL, whose interfaces are significantly less complicated than those of the Postgres cloud database. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Fred Dalrymple, product manager for EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Cloud Database, addressed the issues encountered in using Trove to abstract a complicated cloud database, including gaining access to database functionality not native in the standard abstraction, providing portability for the database interface into non-OpenStack contexts, and preventing the database from being commoditized by abstraction.
DevOps has become synonymous with empowering developers to move faster and deliver more software, but has unintentionally moved software quality and testing into a corner. The pendulum that swings back and forth between very slow testing and staying far away from overly technical solutions has swung hard with DevOps, completely ignoring the value that testers can bring by forcing customers to test new code and creating teams that rely monitoring systems to find things that could have been caught before customers noticed.
Last month, my partners in crime – Carmen DeArdo from Nationwide, Lee Reid, my colleague from IBM and I wrote a 3-part series of blog posts on DevOps.com. We titled our posts the Simple Math, Calculus and Art of DevOps. I would venture to say these are must-reads for any organization adopting DevOps. We examined all three ascpects – the Cultural, Automation and Process improvement side of DevOps. One of the key underlying themes of the three posts was the need for Cultural change – things like trust, collaboration, communication, etc. I will elaborate more on these soon.
Through this series I've considered the changes disruptive technology is having on traditional models, the routes businesses are taking to embrace transformation and the skills challenge they are facing as a result. It's clearly a complex and all-encompassing challenge for business leaders, but here I try to boil it down to the five key things we talk to senior leaders in business about when considering their change; from legacy, to next-generation, software-defined businesses:
Communications cooperative HTC centralizes storage management to gain powerful visibility, reduce costs, and implement IT disaster avoidance capabilities. We’ll learn more about how HTC lowers total storage utilization cost while bringing in a common management view to improve problem resolution, automate resources allocation, and more fully gain compliance -- as well as set the stage for broader virtualization and business continuity benefits.
As businesses around the globe seek desperately to transform their business model and get them focused on increasing customer value, they need to rely on IT organizations, systems, and infrastructures that are specifically thought to delivery the tangible business benefits they desperately expect. Are CIOs and IT organizations aware of the business line expectations? Why the major IT vendors and consulting brands do not offer a model of the next IT organization? What is exactly the Complete ITaaS Delivery Model™? How CIOs can take advantage of it to meet business lines expectations are some of the key questions answered in this article.