Data center models are changing. A variety of technical trends and business demands are forcing that change, most of them centered on the explosive growth of applications. That means, in turn, that the requirements for application delivery are changing. Certainly application delivery needs to be agile, not waterfall. It needs to deliver services in hours, not weeks or months. It needs to be more cost efficient. And more than anything else, it needs to be really, dc infra axisreally, super focused on applications. Especially those services that are particularly application affine. You know the ones - caching, load balancing, web app security, and performance. These are the services whose configurations are tied (tightly coupled) to the applications they deliver. Thus, they need to be closer to the app. Topologically if not physically.
In the midst of the widespread popularity and adoption of cloud computing, it seems like everything is being offered “as a Service” these days: Infrastructure? Check. Platform? You bet. Software? Absolutely. Toaster? It’s only a matter of time. With service providers positioning vastly differing offerings under a generic “cloud” umbrella, it’s all too easy to get confused about what’s actually being offered. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Kevin Hazard, Director of Digital Content for SoftLayer, an IBM Company, breaks down the most commonly used industry buzzwords and discusses what each “aaS” is good for. No BS(aas).
According to Google Trends, web users across the world have been searching less frequently for the terms “CRM” and “customer relationship management” over the past 12 years. In that same time frame, however, there have been notable rises in the amount of searches for “customer service” and “cloud computing.”
Almost every functional department in a business is thinking about how the cloud applies to them. The benefits are clear – it is easier for geographically diverse teams to access and collaborate over data, it is convenient for users, and it can cost far less. When it comes to performance testing, the benefits of the cloud are very compelling. All that load you need to generate to truly test your application can come from external, elastic, on-demand sources. You don’t have to build it out yourself. However, you may also perceive some challenges that might prevent you from conducting load testing from the cloud.
Where’s my data? Not in the ‘where did I leave my glasses’ sort of way, but rather thinking of data resilience, a key concern for many businesses putting their data and applications in the cloud. It’s especially crucial in light of the recent EMC Global Data Protection Index, which showed that almost two thirds of companies surveyed suffered disruption due to data loss and unplanned downtime—losing as much as $1.7 trillion.” That’s a staggering number, larger than the GDP of many countries. That’s why, when assessing their operational problems – be that those caused by people (e.g. users demanding more from their applications), process (e.g. new data protection or e-discovery requirements) or technology (an application underperforming , failing to scale or costing too much to maintain) many organizations are also looking for a solution that will solve the disaster recovery issues they face; a continuous availability solution that combines production, high availability, disaster recovery, and continuity of operations in a single solution. This is something that we have been looking to address with EMC Federation Hybrid Cloud disaster recovery, and why we’ve spent a lot of time making sure we get it right.
Internet of Things is moving from being a hype to a reality. Experts estimate that internet connected cars will grow to 152 million, while over 100 million internet connected wireless light bulbs and lamps will be operational by 2020. These and many other intriguing statistics highlight the importance of Internet powered devices and how market penetration is going to multiply many times over in the next few years.
I just read a new booklet from O’Reilly called The Software Paradox by Stephen O’Grady. You can access it here. Here is a direct quote: “This is the Software Paradox: the most powerful disruptor we have ever seen and the creator of multibillion-dollar net new markets is being commercially devalued, daily. Just as the technology industry was firmly convinced in 1981 that the money was in hardware, not software, the industry today is largely built on the assumption that the real revenue is in software. The evidence, however, suggests that software is less valuable—in the commercial sense—than many are aware, and becoming less so by the day. And that trend is, in all likelihood, not reversible. The question facing an entire industry, then, is what next?”
The building processes inside the new mechanics of the cloud are difficult. There, we’ve said it – do we feel better now? Okay so maybe not so much difficult as such, but more complex in many cases… and definitely more varied. The ‘more varied’ element here is simple to understand. Sometimes we will be looking to cloud-enable traditional workloads, while in many other instances we will be looking to create the next generation of so-called ‘cloud native’ apps using the technologies that surround us today such as OpenStack, Cloud Foundry or perhaps Docker.
Docker containers have become hugely popular for automating application deployment and isolating application processes. Monitoring is however still problematic. Yes, Docker provides APIs for monitoring CPU and memory at the container level, but let’s face it—who really cares about container health? It’s what’s running inside containers that matters to users and require monitoring. And now, with Docker support provided by Ruxit, that’s exactly what you get. Ruxit offers a zero-configuration approach to the automatic monitoring of the contents of Docker containers, all without changing your container images, your start-up scripts, or anything else.
In a recent survey of eighty IT and business professionals, 73 percent responded that having optimized mobile applications and user experiences was "very important to critical" to their company's future success. In the same survey however, 78 percent reported their mobile strategies and plans were inhibited or limited by their existing IT environment. These results reveal a critical gap between the requirements for success and the reality of the obstacles enterprises are facing. Overcoming these challenges is the strategic imperative facing large enterprises today.
Caesars Entertainment Corp. is transforming supplier discovery and improving supplier diversity through collaboration across cloud-based services and open business networks. The next BriefingsDirect business trends interview focuses on Caesars Entertainment Corp. and how they're transforming supplier discovery and improving their supplier diversity through collaboration across cloud-based services and open business networks. Learn from Caesars' best practices on how they expand diversity across their supply chain and how that’s been accomplished using Ariba Discovery. We’ll hear first-hand how one supplier, M and R Distribution Services, has benefited from such supplier visibility on the business network.
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.
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.
DevOps tends to focus on the relationship between Dev and Ops, putting an emphasis on the ops and application infrastructure. But that’s changing with microservices architectures. In her session at DevOps Summit, Lori MacVittie, Evangelist for F5 Networks, will focus on how microservices are changing the underlying architectures needed to scale, secure and deliver applications based on highly distributed (micro) services and why that means an expansion into “the network” for DevOps.
Can wearable technology help to prolong your life? We already know more conventional forms of tech, can save lives in a definitive manner, as well as keep people in comas and other unconscious states alive for an indeterminate period of time, but how can smaller, wearable gadgets help to perform similar tasks to benefit our health? As unlikely as it might seem, wearable tech is actually beginning to shape the future of healthcare. The most obvious use for wearables within the health industry is for patients to don a wristband, or something similar, to monitor their vital statistics and other aspects of their internal health and remotely provide medical professionals with real-time information. This will, not only, put less financial pressure on families and care homes, where funding might be difficult to find, but could also eventually lead to the end of the "pulling a sickie" era, as the information provided by wearable tech could allow employers to determine how unwell you actually were.
Sharding has become a popular means of achieving scalability in application architectures in which read/write data separation is not only possible, but desirable to achieve new heights of concurrency. The premise is that by splitting up read and write duties, it is possible to get better overall performance at the cost of a slight delay in consistency. That is, it takes a bit of time to replicate changes initiated by a "write" to the read-only master database. It's eventually consistent, and it's generally considered an acceptable trade off when searching for higher and higher scalability.
Last month I spoke at the Conversion Conference, and after my talk I met a developer who had been tasked with single handedly making her company’s site faster. We talked for quite a while, and she expressed good-humored frustration at the vagueness of this directive. Some of the things we talked about: What does “faster” mean? Who defines “fast” within an organization?
With careful planning and the right technology, Federal, State and Local Government IT Leaders can overcome fears of data migrations, breaking free from archaic procedures to lead the pack . Jurassic World, the latest installment in the Jurassic Park film series, opened this week - and there's a lot of hype surrounding the premiere as fans immerse themselves in a world of Mesozoic Era-inspired fantasy. While the creatures that make the theme park their home are strikingly realistic, their real-life counterparts became extinct millennia ago. Many believe that the once mighty dinosaur population fell in large part because it failed to evolve with the changing world around it. Public sector institutions face a similar plight today, especially as technology advancements demand they constantly evolve in order to keep up.
Logentries offers a variety of ways to get logs out of your containerized environment, including our Linux Agent, application plugin libraries, and Syslog. In this post we’ll cover collecting and forwarding logs via our Docker Logentries Container, which requires Docker 1.5 or higher. To configure the Docker Logentries Container you'll need to do the following: Create a destination log in your Logentries account to record your Docker logs.
IBM is delivering of enterprise class containers that make it easier for clients to deliver production applications across their hybrid environments. Containers give developers flexibility to build once and move applications without the need to rewrite or redeploy their code. IBM Containers, based on Docker and built on Bluemix, IBM's platform-as-a-service, provide a more efficient environment that enables faster integration and access to analytics, big data and security services. Enterprises will now be able to use the combination of IBM, Docker, Cloud Foundry and OpenStack to create a new generation of portable distributed applications.
Cloud Migration Management (CMM) refers to the best practices for planning and managing migration of IT systems from a legacy platform to a Cloud Provider through a combination professional services consulting and software tools. A Cloud migration project can be a relatively simple exercise, where applications are migrated ‘as is’, to gain benefits such as elastic capacity and utility pricing, but without making any changes to the application architecture, software development methods or business processes it is used for.
APIs permeate the connected world, used by technical and non-technical professionals alike. At some point, we all work with APIs, building them, selling them, maintaining them and consuming them. With so many viewpoints and opinions, misconceptions can quickly emerge, clouding the decision-making process and hindering execution of improvements to the business of API delivery. This article focuses on dispelling some of the most common myths around the API lifecycle, so that you don't fall at the mercy of misinformation in your own process. The points in this article are graciously lent by Ole Lensmar, CTO at SmartBear, based on his recent talk at AppsWorld North America on the topic.
The web app is Agile. The REST API is Agile. The testing and planning are Agile. But alas, Data infrastructures certainly are not. Once an application matures, changing the shape or indexing scheme of data often forces at best a top down planning exercise and at worst includes schema changes which force downtime. The time has come for a new approach that fundamentally advances the agility of distributed data infrastructures. Come learn about a new solution to the problems faced by software organizations as their products become successful and the data grows beyond the initial scope of the database,whether it starts out as relational SQL, NoSQL, or somewhere in between.
Being able to append documentation to an alert is very powerful and provides the on-call person with information to help solve the problem baked right into the alert. Imagine wikis, links to runbooks or graphs right when and where you need them. But that’s only addressing half of the problem. If you really want to decrease alert fatigue, you need a way to route alerts to the people who can solve them….which is the other useful part of our Transmogrifier feature. The process of intelligent routing gives teams the ability to change the state of alerts, which includes everything from cleaning up and quieting alarms during certain parts of the day to ensuring alarms are directed to specific people, and creating alarms for custom monitoring solutions or emails.
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.