Public Cloud IaaS started its life in the developer and startup communities and has grown rapidly to a $20B+ industry, but it still pales in comparison to how much is spent worldwide on IT: $3.6 trillion. In fact, there are 8.6 million data centers worldwide, the reality is many small and medium sized business have server closets and colocation footprints filled with servers and storage gear. While on-premise environment virtualization may have peaked at 75%, the Public Cloud has lagged in adoption as teams delay their cloud migrations or seek alternatives like the public cloud or await SaaS alternatives for their essential apps. Today's mass market for cloud computing IaaS is made up of non-cloud natives and the industry needs to respond to grow. In his talk, William Toll will break down the reasons for the delays and how existing IT teams can accelerate their plans to migrate to the public cloud - without expensive consultants or big cloud migration projects.
Towards the end of 2014, Docker expanded support for three major players in the cloud space: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute. Series D funding of Docker reached almost $100 million. With growing adoption, Docker is an important trend for future application architectures. But this isn’t new here at AppNeta. We’ve heard announcements for Docker […]
Towards the end of 2014, Docker expanded support for three major players in the cloud space: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute. Series D funding of Docker reached almost $100 million. With growing adoption, Docker is an important trend for future application architectures. But this isn’t new here at AppNeta. We’ve heard announcements for Docker […]
JavaScript is primarily a client-based dynamic scripting language most commonly used within web browsers as client-side scripts to interact with the user, browser, and communicate asynchronously to servers. If you have been part of any web-based development, odds are you have worked with JavaScript in one form or another. In this article, I'll focus on the aspects of JavaScript that are relevant within the Node.js environment.
Digital Transformation is the ultimate goal of cloud computing and related initiatives. The phrase is certainly not a precise one, and as subject to hand-waving and distortion as any high-falutin' terminology in the world of information technology. Yet it is an excellent choice of words to describe what enterprise IT—and by extension, organizations in general—should be working to achieve. Digital Transformation means: handling all the data types being found and created in the organization understanding that through mobility, data is being generated and analyzed on the edges of the enterprise more than at the center mixing and matching that data in an ecosystem of specific, loosely connected applications and services automating processes; analyzing and acting upon data in short timeframes to develop, improve, and enhance products and services directly through IT having enough well-trained people at all levels of the organization to address the inevitable technology glitches while also maintaining a high-level strategic view of what's going on. I recently attended the Cloud Foundry Summit 2015 in Santa Clara, CA, and listened to many stories of Digital Transformation. The catalyst in these cases was, naturally, Cloud Foundry, an open-source PaaS that is used to handle the complex infrastructure that underlies cloud-computing development, provisioning, and operations. I was struck by the impatience of much of this discussion; many presenters spoke of the old ways of doing things versus the new, slick, automated, loosely coupled, transformative way and how great progress was being made and would continue to be made this year. One could get the idea that Digital Transformation is a product or service itself, and one that needs to be installed right now. This type of thinking is only natural in a modern business environment that does not reward patience. Things must be accomplished in a few months, rather than years. In an era where servers can be ordered up and deployed “within seconds,” according to many glowing reports, the idea of a true long-term strategy gets lost in the excitement. But Digital Transformation is something that should be thought of in terms of years, and decades. We must retain the ability to look back over a period of 20 years and longer, to see what's truly been fundamentally accomplished. My twitter handle of “IoT2040” reflects my viewpoint, as I'm researching, covering, and instigating progress over the next 25 years, whether I'm around to see the end-state of this progress or not. Taking the long view does not mean throwing a bunch of exotic visions and soothing words in the air. It means setting measurable goals and focusing day-to-day efforts to turn those goals into self-fulfilling prophesies. I'm inspired by Moore's Law, which is not an absolute, but rather something that people have assumed is an absolute and therefore worked their tails off for decades to adhere to it. A similar commitment to measurable Digital Transformation would seem to be in order. I can dovetail this thought into our ongoing research at the Tau Institute, which measures dynamics of IT environments in the nations of the world; and in my role as Conference Chair of Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo, which continues to offer a mix of proven use cases and envelope-pushing vision. In the first role, we can argue that a lack of commitment to IT in Greece is a reflection (or perhaps precipitator) of the country's perilous economic state, whereas an overheated technology environment has caused (and is causing) societal disruption in several countries throughout the world. In the second role, I'm pleased to point to some slight yet significant tweaks to the eight core tracks being offered at the next Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo, to be held November 3-5 in Santa Clara. Cloud APIs have their own unique track this time, Containers and Microservices have their own track, and our three IoT-focused tracks have been focused more tightly on the latest developments. Here's a list of the specific tracks: Track 1 – Enterprise Cloud Adoption Track 2 – Mobility | Enterprise Security Track 3 – Containers & Microservices | PaaS Track 4 – Cloud APIs Track 5 – IoT | Big Data & Analytics Track 6 - IoT | Consumer/Wearables Track 7 - IoT | Enterprise/Industrial Internet Track 8 – WebRTC Summit | Hot Topics We'll also be holding another DevOps Summit at the same time, with tracks devoted respectively to Development and Operations.
If you are the VP of Sales, it is quite likely you want and need to know up to date sales numbers, pipeline status and forecasts. If you are meeting with a prospect to close a deal, it is quite likely that having up to date business intelligence and CRM information would be useful. Likewise traveling to a remote job site to check on the progress of an engineering project is also an obvious trigger that you will need the latest project information. Developing solutions integrated with mobile applications that can anticipate your needs based upon your Code Halo data, the information that surrounds people, organizations, projects, activities and devices, and acting upon it automatically is where a large amount of productivity gains will be found in the future.
Imagine building your software like it was ordering furniture from Ikea. You pick out a desk, add a corner piece, raise it up to be a standing desk with some props for the legs, and add small things like organizers to better fit how your work. Things are modular, you can add and remove bits and pieces to build the projects that fits the customer's needs. In software projects, this is usually done with a configuration flag that lives in either a system configuration file on the server, or in the database. This flag controls the visibility of all the things in a feature and can be turned on and off as needed. At worst, you might have to restart apache in between. Another way to build components is through a set of APIs. Programmers create the front-end, then mix and match APIs that already exist to create the back-end.
Forbes called 2015, the Year of the Mobile Beacon. AdWeek talks about how beacons are already influencing the way we network, get drunk, vacation, shop, and even how we buy sausage. Ten experts at Marketing Land predicted that this year the whole world of mobile marketing will become acutely location-aware. Plus, if Google, Apple, and Facebook are betting on it, shouldn't you? We'll dive in and learn how beacons interact with APIs, how the different beacon protocols work, and what makes for a quality beacon experience.
How do you securely enable access to your applications in AWS without exposing any attack surfaces? The answer is usually very complicated because application environments morph over time in response to growing requirements from your employee base, your partners and your customers. In his session at DevOps Summit, Haseeb Budhani, co-founder and CEO of Soha, will share five common approaches that DevOps teams follow to secure access to applications deployed in AWS, Azure, etc., and the friction and risks they impose on the business.
Nobody wants to be in the news with headlines like this, but it happens. I’d like to share an interesting experience I had when meeting on site with an anonymous customer. I’ve since noticed this same problem a few times, concerning email marketing, conversion impact, nervous operators, CDNs and what happens if there is no communication between the marketing teams and IT operations.
"robomq.io connects any device, system, application or cloud together. We have built connectors and support for all the protocol," explained Bramh Gupta, founder and CEO of robomq.io, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.
With containerization using Docker, the orchestration of containers using Kubernetes, the self-service model for provisioning your projects and applications and the workflows we built in OpenShift is the best in class Platform as a Service that enables introducing DevOps into your organization with ease. In his session at DevOps Summit, Veer Muchandi, PaaS evangelist with RedHat, will provide a deep dive overview of OpenShift v3 and demonstrate how it helps with DevOps.
Malicious agents are moving faster than the speed of business. Even more worrisome, most companies are relying on legacy approaches to security that are no longer capable of meeting current threats. In the modern cloud, threat diversity is rapidly expanding, necessitating more sophisticated security protocols than those used in the past or in desktop environments. Yet companies are falling for cloud security myths that were truths at one time but have evolved out of existence.
While DevOps is roughly a journey towards the ideals of agility through continuous delivery, there are no set rules for its implementation. How the initiative starts out is subjective to each business, and is a continuous path of improvement and collaboration. Automic CMO, Dr. Chris Boorman, proposes seven steps towards a sustainable DevOps transformation. Watch the video or read about the seven simple steps to implement DevOps:
Microservices are hot. And for good reason. To compete in today’s fast-moving application economy, it makes sense to break large, monolithic applications down into discrete functional units. Such an approach makes it easier to update and add functionalities (text-messaging a customer, calculating sales tax for a specific geography, etc.) and get those updates / adds into production fast. In fact, some would argue that microservices are a prerequisite for true continuous delivery. But is it too soon to talk about keeping microservices lifecycle costs under control?
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, explained 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.
SYS-CON Events announced today that ProfitBricks, the provider of painless cloud infrastructure, 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. ProfitBricks is the IaaS provider that offers a painless cloud experience for all IT users, with no learning curve. ProfitBricks boasts flexible cloud servers and networking, an integrated Data Center Designer tool for visual control over the cloud and the best price/performance value available. ProfitBricks was named one of the coolest Cloud Providers of 2015 by CRN and was also the recipient of two CODiE awards and a Frost & Sullivan Cloud innovation award for 2014.
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.
In his General Session at 16th Cloud Expo, David Shacochis, host of The Hybrid IT Files podcast and Vice President at CenturyLink, investigated three key trends of the “gigabit economy" though the story of a Fortune 500 communications company in transformation. Narrating how multi-modal hybrid IT, service automation, and agile delivery all intersect, he will cover the role of storytelling and empathy in achieving strategic alignment between the enterprise and its information technology.
Security can create serious friction for DevOps processes. We've come up with an approach to alleviate the friction and provide security value to DevOps teams. In her session at DevOps Summit, Shannon Lietz, Senior Manager of DevSecOps at Intuit, discussed how DevSecOps got started and how it has evolved. Shannon Lietz has over two decades of experience pursuing next generation security solutions. She is currently the DevSecOps Leader for Intuit where she is responsible for setting and driving the company’s cloud security strategy, roadmap and implementation in support of corporate innovation with a DevSecOps mindset.
The middle is where self-declared reasonable minds gather to split the difference between seemingly irresolvable extremes. And so it is with OpenStack. Back in the wild-West days of Diablo and Essex, agile app dev ardents attracted by the open alternative of OpenStack had two choices: build it yourself (DIY), or sign up with Rackspace. Polar opposites in just about every regard. Then, a wave of startups pledged to offer a middle ground, populated with software distributions and appliances to simplify the path from zero to OpenStack. While the promise of this new-found middle ground was grand, it hasn't quite panned out. Today, the only distributions gaining any traction are primarily from Mirantis and Red Hat, the former fueled by crafty strategy and dogged determination, the latter fueled by a massive RHEL install base and account control. Back in the wild-West days of Diablo and Essex, agile app dev ardents attracted by the open alternative of OpenStack had two choices: build it yourself (DIY), or sign up with Rackspace. Polar opposites in just about every regard. Then, a wave of startups pledged to offer a middle ground, populated with software distributions and appliances to simplify the path from zero to OpenStack.
Rapid innovation, changing business landscapes, and new IT demands force businesses to make changes quickly. The DevOps approach is a way to increase business agility through collaboration, communication, and integration across different teams in the IT organization. In his session at DevOps Summit, Chris Van Tuin, Chief Technologist for the Western US at Red Hat, will discuss: The acceleration of application delivery for the business with DevOps
It is one thing to build single industrial IoT applications, but what will it take to build the Smart Cities and truly society-changing applications of the future? The technology won’t be the problem, it will be the number of parties that need to work together and be aligned in their motivation to succeed. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jason Mondanaro, Director, Product Management at Metanga, discussed how you can plan to cooperate, partner, and form lasting all-star teams to change the world and it starts with business models and monetization strategies.
Microservices are individual units of executable code that work within a limited framework. They are extremely useful when placed within an architecture of numerous microservices. On June 24th, 2015 I attended a webinar titled “How to Share Share-Nothing Microservices,” hosted by Jason Bloomberg, the President of Intellyx, and Scott Edwards, Director Product Marketing for Service Virtualization at CA Technologies. The webinar explained how to use microservices to your advantage in order to deliver products that are competitive in the application economy.
Providing the needed data for application development and testing is a huge headache for most organizations. The problems are often the same across companies - speed, quality, cost, and control. Provisioning data can take days or weeks, every time a refresh is required. Using dummy data leads to quality problems. Creating physical copies of large data sets and sending them to distributed teams of developers eats up expensive storage and bandwidth resources. And, all of these copies proliferating the organization can lead to inconsistent masking and exposure of sensitive data. But some organizations are adopting a new method of data management for DevOps that is delivering transformational business outcomes in faster time to market, lower costs, and great control. In his session at DevOps Summit, Brian Reagan, Managing Director of Blackthorne Consulting Group, an Actifio company, reviewed the core concepts of using data virtualization to power DevOps, including Central Administration by Operations, Self-Service for developers and testers, and Automating Data Masking for enhanced control of sensitive information. He shared real life case studies and provided a practical perspective on the benefits and considerations for these projects.