In today's digital world, change is the one constant. Disruptive innovations like cloud, mobility, social media, and the Internet of Things have reshaped the market and set new standards in customer expectations. To remain competitive, businesses must tap the potential of emerging technologies and markets through the rapid release of new products and services. However, the rigid and siloed structures of traditional IT platforms and processes are slowing them down – resulting in lengthy delivery cycles and a poor customer experience.
If you’ve spent any time at leading cloud computing conferences, you may have come across the meme “pets vs cattle.” (Here is a lengthy slideshare presentation by Randy Bias of EMC/Cloudscaling discussing the difference between pets and cattle in a cloud computing world.) The message associated with this meme is that we should have different attitudes about traditional infrastructure versus today’s cloud infrastructure. Traditional infrastructure is expensive and individuated – we give servers names, we lavish attention on them, and when they suffer problems we do evaluation, diagnosis, and nurse them back to health via hands-on administration. In other words, we treat them as part of a family. This is true whether the server is physical or virtual; they are long-lived and stable, and therefore deserve personal attention and emotional attachment – just like a pet.
Bring the world's best IaaS to the world's best PaaS. In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Animesh Singh, a Senior Cloud Architect and Strategist for IBM Cloud Labs, and Jason Anderson, a Cloud Architect for IBM Cloud Labs, shared their experiences running Cloud Foundry on OpenStack. They focused on how Cloud Foundry and OpenStack complement each other, how they technically integrate using cloud provider interface (CPI), how we could automate an OpenStack setup for Cloud Foundry deployments, and some of the best practices for configuring a scalable environment.
"Vormetric is a data security company. We secure information at rest and our customers are some of the largest organizations in the world. The threats that are coming around today are either from state-sponsored activities and organized crime, and the intent is to steal information," explained Derek Tumulak, Vice President of Product Management at Vormetric, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, John Meza, Product Engineer at Esri, showed how Esri products hook into Hadoop cluster to allow you to do spatial analysis on the spatial data within your cluster, and he demonstrated rendering from a data center with ArcGIS Pro, a new product that has a brand new rendering engine.
With Levi’s Stadium as a backdrop, I share a bit about the Internet of Things and the strain it will place on the Domain Name System (DNS) along with a preview of his DNS of Things session at CloudExpo/ThingsExpo at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Reporting from Silicon Valley.
The GoDaddy customer breaches didn’t have to happen and don’t have to happen to you. Cisco threat researchers recently reported a dramatic uptick in Angler Exploit Kit-based attacks connected to compromised GoDaddy domain registry accounts. GoDaddy, which manages nearly a third of all global domain names used on the Internet, has issued media statements clarifying that it was not breached. It was its customers who allowed their login credentials to be stolen and used to create malicious subdomains, the company explained, accurately stating this is an industry problem for cloud-based service providers.
A well-oiled APM solution comes from correlating bottom-up monitoring (infrastructure monitoring) with insights from top-down monitoring (real-time application monitoring) all within the context of the end-user-experience (EUE). But from what angle should we be looking at APM as it relates to IT strategy? Consider Australia for a moment. Is it a country, a continent, or an island? The answer depends upon your perspective, and, in much the same way, the unique spectrum of APM can be viewed as a framework, methodology, or platform. Understanding these attributes will help raise APM up the stack into the wheelhouse of IT Leadership for greater visibility.
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. Just the other day I was hanging out with my developer buddy. We entered what we thought would be an interesting topic on how you cannot call an environment "DevOps" without analytics.
As enterprises look to take advantage of the cloud, they need to understand the importance of safeguarding their confidential and sensitive data in cloud environments. Enterprises must protect their data from (i) system administrators who don't need to see the data in the clear and (ii) adversaries who become system administrators from stolen credentials. In short, enterprises must take control of their data: The best way to do this is by using advanced encryption, centralized key management and cutting edge access controls and policies. When an outside party owns, controls, and manages infrastructure and computational resources, how can you be assured that sensitive data remains private and secure, that your organization is protected from damaging data breaches, and that you can still satisfy the full range of reporting, compliance and regulatory requirements?
The Android Wear app that Hyundai demonstrated at CES several weeks ago is now available on Google Play, letting owners of appropriately-equipped models control their cars from their wrists. The app is basically a scaled-down version of the Blue Link app already available for Android phones — you can start and stop the engine, lock and unlock the doors, find the car if you can't remember where you parked it, and flash the lights, among other things. The app also supports voice controls, so you can just say things like "find my car" instead of tapping through the UI.
Michael Porter, author of the most highly regarded of all business strategy theories, Competitive Advantage, describes how there are now three distinct eras of how technology can be defined to impact upon the ability to achieve this advantage. Michael makes two very important points. The first point is that there has previously been two eras and now there is a third – the first being when corporations started to use IT for automation purposes, described in this 1985 article, followed then by when all of this IT became interconnected via the Internet, described in this 2001 article. Then in this 2014 article Smart Connected Products he describes a third era, the Internet of Things.
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Much of what is written about Continuous Delivery at present seems to revolve around technical challenges and technical choices: “Which is better: Puppet, Chef or Salt?”, “Should I use Jenkins, Go or XL Release?”, “How do I build a CD pipeline with containers?” etc. etc. If we’re looking at CD properly, though, this is the sideshow – an implementation detail at best. The real CD story is much bigger. Don’t get me wrong: as a technical kind of person, I can get very enthusiastic about the tech: there are a lot of cool tools and frameworks out there and the tooling landscape is expanding rapidly. Working with evolving technology is a lot of fun, and there are plenty of challenges to be solved around supporting Continuous Delivery at scale…which is why we develop XL Release, XL Deploy and XL Test.
If you’ve heard the term “DevOps” at all, you have Patrick Debois to thank for that. If you’ve ever been to a DevOpsDays event, you have Patrick Debois to thank for that as well! Just over 5 years ago, Patrick coined the term and started a movement that, to some degree, was already in motion. Professionals in the Agile and Continuous Delivery space needed something more that they could rally behind. Thus, the idea of developing greater empathy across business units (primarily Development and Operations) and focusing on ways to bring them closer together in the name of increased efficiencies and quicker software delivery cycles was given life and coined simply as “DevOps”.
Years ago companies saw a major improvement in efficiency in the heyday of virtualization. As the world looked to the cloud to solve business challenges these savings were forgotten. Today we live in a post cloud world with pre-virtualization efficiencies. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Jordan Jacobs, VP of Products at SingleHop, will discuss the common mistakes that as many as 90% of companies are making utilizing public clouds, what are causing these problems and how to avoid them.
Outages are typically expensive for your business, not to mention a headache for your team. Improving your processes and tools for responding to critical incidents can generate a lot of business value. However, you may be wondering how to prioritize projects and investments, or you may be asked by business stakeholders to justify the costs of new initiatives. Return on Investment (ROI) is one way to do that, but it can be difficult to determine. While the answer is unique to each company, we’ll share a few different approaches to calculating your incident management ROI.
Right off the bat, Newman advises that we should "think of microservices as a specific approach for SOA in the same way that XP or Scrum are specific approaches for Agile Software development". These analogies are very interesting because my expectation was that microservices is a pattern. So I might infer that microservices is a set of process techniques as opposed to an architectural approach. Yet in the book, Newman clearly includes some elements of concept model and architecture as well as process and organization.
Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis, Inc., a provider of on-demand systems management and monitoring software to 50,000 users spanning small businesses and Fortune 500 companies, has surpassed 1.5 million page views on the SYS-CON family of online magazines, which includes Cloud Computing Journal, DevOps Journal, Internet of Things Journal, and Big Data Journal. His home page at SYS-CON can be found at Montis.SYS-CON.com
SOA Software has changed its name to Akana. With roots in Web Services and SOA Governance, Akana has established itself as a leader in API Management and is expanding into cloud integration as an alternative to the traditional heavyweight enterprise service bus (ESB). The company recently announced that it achieved more than 90% year-over-year growth. As Akana, the company now addresses the evolution and diversification of SOA, unifying security, management, and DevOps across SOA, APIs, microservices, and more.
Performing this task will resolve a problem that occurs when using NetBeans to configure a JDBC Connection Pool and JDBC Resource for GlassFish. The default installation of NetBeans and GlassFish results in the naming of the JDBC configuration file as sun-resources.xml when it should be named glassfish-resources.xml. This is a Windows only problem. The first step is to install NetBeans if you have not already done so. I recommend the Java EE version. Download and install. All the defaults during install are acceptable. Install GlassFish but it is not necessary to install Tomcat. When GlassFish is installed with NetBeans it is configured as available to NetBeans. You can see this in the Services tab under Servers.
While putting my test code up on GitHub and writing the readme.md, I ran my NetBeans test code on my 2011 early MacBook Pro. To my surprise the times for both embedded and remote testing were between 25 and 35 seconds. My original blog was based on working on a much much faster Windows 8.1 system that took 16 seconds for embedded but 100 seconds for remote. So I guess we blame. Some very bright people will be looking at the code and hopefully they will have an explanation for why remote server testing on Windows 8.1 performs so badly.
FedRAMP is mandatory for government cloud deployments and businesses need to comply in order to provide services for federal engagements. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Abel Sussman, Director for Coalfire Public Sector practice, will review the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) process and provide advice on overcoming common compliance obstacles.
Analytics is the foundation of smart data and now, with the ability to run Hadoop directly on smart storage systems like Cloudian HyperStore, enterprises will gain huge business advantages in terms of scalability, efficiency and cost savings as they move closer to realizing the potential of the Internet of Things. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Paul Turner, technology evangelist and CMO at Cloudian, Inc., will discuss the revolutionary notion that the storage world is transitioning from mere Big Data to smart data. He will argue that today’s hybrid cloud storage solutions, with commodity hardware and in-place analytics capabilities, will help to yield high value insights without the high price tag.
Even as cloud and managed services grow increasingly central to business strategy and performance, challenges remain. The biggest sticking point for companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud is data security. Keeping data safe is an issue in any computing environment, and it has been a focus since the earliest days of the cloud revolution. Understandably so: a lot can go wrong when you allow valuable information to live outside the firewall. Recent revelations about government snooping, along with a steady stream of well-publicized data breaches, only add to the uncertainty
It is no surprise to anyone that service providers need to find new sources of revenue and increase profitability. The digital, cloud and as-a-service revolution provides a silver lining. As IT organizations feel the tension that comes from a combination of aging legacy B2B infrastructure, changing business mandates and rapidly evolving e-commerce requirements, they are increasingly looking at digital services and outsourcing to trusted providers. They want a trusted partner to deliver connected digital services; including mobile, cloud and M2M/IoT. The pressure is on for businesses to think about an end-to-end ‘order to cash’ process that spans multiple applications and systems, engages external business partners as well as taps into data and services that are increasingly located in the cloud. In other words – a giant mash-up of sorts. IT is not just about implementing an internal process as much as it is about structuring one shared multi-enterprise process(es).