It is no surprise that OpenStack has evolved into a widely adopted cloud management framework. As it hurtles on a trajectory of rapid growth, a new breed of demands are making themselves felt – demands that a mature platform of this nature and scope must satisfy. One such requirement is the ability to monitor traffic flowing in the myriad of virtual networks found in an OpenStack datacenter. Conceptually speaking, the monitoring process involves placing tap devices at appropriate locations within the network infrastructure and attaching traffic analyzers to them. These analyzers can then see the same packets passing through those network segments, as if they were also in-line. A logical tap device can be easily constructed using the port-mirroring function of a network switching element, which makes it possible to have a copy of the packets traversing one or more switch ports delivered to another port on the same switch. This capability is supported by almost all modern physical and virtual switches. So, why is it [still] not possible to monitor the activity in OpenStack virtual networks?
Telecommunications giant Sprint places an emphasis on orchestration and automation to bring IT culture and infrastructure into readiness for cloud, software-defined data center and DevOps. Learn how Sprint has made IT infrastructure orchestration and automation a pillar of its strategic IT architecture future from Chris Saunderson, Program Manager and Lead Architect for Data Center Automation at Sprint in Kansas City, Missouri. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
My father used to tell me that the key to success in life was to look people in the eye and give them a firm handshake. But the art of the handshake seems to have died in my generation. I grew up in the era of high fives, forearm smashes and fist pumps. I played baseball, so there were also a lot of butt pats, (but let’s not go into that). It seems like the importance of handshakes and eye-to-eye contact have diminished even further in my daughter’s generation. Every day I watch her friends look down at their smartphones while texting each other “omg hi bff” as they greet each other at school or at the mall.
The combined notions of open source and the ‘community contribution’ model of collaborative software application development are, of course, not new. The history of open source is actually traced back to early software exchanges between universities driven by academic principles of knowledge sharing in the 1960s. Sometime afterwards (August 25, 1991), Finnish computer scientist Linus Torvalds created Linux… and the rest is history.
The cloud. Like a comic book superhero, there seems to be no problem it can’t fix or cost it can’t slash. Yet making the transition is not always easy and production environments are still largely on premise. Taking some practical and sensible steps to reduce risk can also help provide a basis for a successful cloud transition. A plethora of surveys from the likes of IDG and Gartner show that more than 70 percent of enterprises have deployed at least one or more cloud application or workload. Yet a closer inspection at the data reveals less than half of these cloud projects involve production workloads, which suggests there is still apprehension in moving towards utilizing cloud for critical core infrastructure.
Regardless of perspective, everyone agrees that ensuring high-quality software isn’t solely the job of a “QA department.” It requires the collaboration of every discipline in the software development and delivery lifecycle from the inception of business requirements to the administration of the application in production -- and every point in between. Sure, testers test, developers build, business analysts develop requirements and the service desk helps users overcome issues, but it’s the interaction of these groups that drives quality into the application. And interestingly, the interaction of these groups tends to center on development artifacts such as defects and requirements.
NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is now available for download. Beta 2 comes bundled with MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers, and improvements to Ruby code completion and Woodstock 4.1 Build 14. The focus of NetBeans 6.0 is superior developer productivity with a smarter, faster editor, and the integration of all NetBeans products into one IDE.
NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is now available for download. Beta 2 comes bundled with MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers, and improvements to Ruby code completion and Woodstock 4.1 Build 14. The focus of NetBeans 6.0 is superior developer productivity with a smarter, faster editor, and the integration of all NetBeans products into one IDE.
Today air travel is a minefield of delays, hassles and customer disappointment. Airlines struggle to revitalize the experience. GE and M2Mi will demonstrate practical examples of how IoT solutions are helping airlines bring back personalization, reduce trip time and improve reliability. In their session at @ThingsExpo, Shyam Varan Nath, Principal Architect with GE, and Dr. Sarah Cooper, M2Mi’s VP Business Development and Engineering, explored the IoT cloud-based platform technologies driving this change including privacy controls, data transparency and integration of real time context with predictive analytics. They concluded with a look forward to tomorrow’s Smart Airports where airlines use connected baggage to predict plane fuel levels, security is ubiquitous and your seat remembers you.
As cloud computing continues to grow in importance, enterprises are now facing a new realization. In their almost rampant embrace of cost savings associated with public cloud, many are just now understanding the information technology governance challenge posed by vastly different traditional and cloud computing operational models. Often referred to as hybrid IT, supporting both models has left many executives trying to cope with a lack of hybrid IT operational experience. Challenges can also include security concerns, financial management changes and even dramatic cultural changes. This myriad of challenges translate into enterprise risk across multiple levels, namely:
The quickest way to understand Big Data is to visualize it. Big Data is the billions of call detail records that surround every phone call you make or data message you send. It is the masses and masses of DNA sequencing analyzed to discover biomedical breakthroughs. It is the millions of individual transactions that pass through a retailer's point of sale platforms every day. And it is the billions of financial transactions that personal, commercial and corporate customers execute through financial services systems.
Cloud computing delivers on-demand resources that provide businesses with flexibility and cost-savings. The challenge in moving workloads to the cloud has been the cost and complexity of ensuring the initial and ongoing security and regulatory (PCI, HIPAA, FFIEC) compliance across private and public clouds. Manual security compliance is slow, prone to human error, and represents over 50% of the cost of managing cloud applications. Determining how to automate cloud security compliance is critical to maintaining positive ROI. Raxak Protect is an automated security compliance SaaS platform and managed service, that enables cloud apps to be deployed securely, quickly, cost-effectively, and without human error.
As we’ve seen, each team required to deliver on an IoT product is inherently different from the others. Because of this, friction naturally occurs when the three teams must coordinate their integration and system test. If this friction – and possible failure points between the separate processes – is not minimized, releases would inevitably get delayed, and the product’s quality will suffer.
The tech industry has been abuzz about the potential of the Internet of Things for the past several years, and with good reason. As more devices become connected to one another, society steps even closer to the ultimate goal of an overarching, cohesive network facilitating communication between everyday objects and tools. The possibilities of a fully realized IoT are practically endless – so too, however, are the concerns surrounding IoT when it comes to software test management.
There are three things today that an application needs to survive in today’s demanding world: scale, security, and performance. It is for both reasons of scale and performance that memcached has become such a popular solution in modern application architectures. It aids in scalability by offloading database requests, which naturally increases the capacity of the database to answer queries not answerable by memcached. It improves performance, of course, by providing very fast responses to queries that in turn, are able to be returned to the user with greater alacrity.
It's been a busy time for tech's ongoing infatuation with containers. Amazon just announced EC2 Container Registry to simply container management. The new Azure container service taps into Microsoft's partnership with Docker and Mesosphere. You know when there's a standard for containers on the table there's money on the table, too. Everyone is talking containers because they reduce a ton of development-related challenges and make it much easier to move across production and testing environments and clouds. Containers are the technology that, many believe, deliver on the long-promised portability in the cloud to avoid vendor lock-in, and put developers, system administrators and their enterprises in the driver's seat.
Spirent Communications advances the use of big data to provide improved user experiences for telecommunications operators. Our next big-data case study discussion explores the ways that Spirent Communications advances the use of big data to provide improved user experiences for telecommunications operators. We'll learn how advanced analytics that draws on multiple data sources provide Spirent’s telco customers’ rapid insights into their networks and operations. That insight, combined with analysis of user actions and behaviors, provides a "total picture" approach to telco services and uses that both improves the actual services proactively -- and also boosts the ability to better support help desks.
Enterprises with internally sourced IT operations typically struggle with typical tensions associated with siloed application and infrastructure organizations. They are characterized by finger pointing and an inability to restore operational capabilities under complex conditions that span both application and infrastructure configurations. These tensions often are used to characterize the need for a DevOps movement, which focuses on organizational, process and cultural changes needed to bring about a more fluid IT delivery that embodies higher quality and greater overall agility.
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.
The next few years could see a paradigm shift in the way anti-virus applications work. A number of businesses have started migrating from traditional desktop based anti-virus packages to "lighter" software apps that process desktop security on the cloud. At the outset, this change is not entirely apparent - end users will still require to install software on their local desktop systems. However, the processing of information is now getting ported to the cloud.
Continuous processes around the development and deployment of applications are both impacted by -- and a benefit to -- the Internet of Things trend. To help better understand the relationship between DevOps and a plethora of new end-devices and data please welcome Gary Gruver, consultant, author and a former IT executive who has led many large-scale IT transformation projects, and John Jeremiah, Technology Evangelist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), on Twitter at @j_jeremiah. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing rapidly by extending current technologies, products and networks. By 2020, Cisco estimates there will be 50 billion connected devices. Gartner has forecast revenues of over $300 billion, just to IoT suppliers. Now is the time to figure out how you’ll make money – not just create innovative products. With hundreds of new products and companies jumping into the IoT fray every month, there’s no shortage of innovation. Despite this, McKinsey/VisionMobile data shows "less than 10 percent of IoT developers are making enough to support a reasonably sized team.”
Discussions of cloud computing have evolved in recent years from a focus on specific types of cloud, to a world of hybrid cloud, and to a world dominated by the APIs that make today's multi-cloud environments and hybrid clouds possible. In this Power Panel at 17th Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists addressed the importance of customers being able to use the specific technologies they need, through environments and ecosystems that expose their APIs to make true change and transformation possible.
The Millennial Generation, aged 18 to 34 is having an increased impact on business technology. Born into the age of the PC and early internet this demographic is more proficient and demanding of apps, devices and IT services than earlier generations. In the past progressive IT organizations would consider this group as a category to accommodate, making the company appealing to college recruits and new hires. More recently however, this generation is now mainstream with increased influence driving IT strategy. They now include partners at large firms, doctors that never used paper charts and executives making purchase decisions.
Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place June 7-9, 2016 at Javits Center, New York City and Nov 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with the 18th International @CloudExpo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world and ThingsExpo New York Call for Papers is now open.