Hardware will never be more valuable than on the day it hits your loading dock. Each day new servers are not deployed to production the business is losing money. While Moore's Law is typically cited to explain the exponential density growth of chips, a critical consequence of this is rapid depreciation of servers. The hardware for clustered systems (e.g., Hadoop, OpenStack) tends to be significant capital expenses. In his session at Big Data Expo, Mason Katz, CTO and co-founder of StackIQ, discussed how infrastructure teams should be aware of the capitalization and depreciation model of these expenses to fully understand when and where automation is critical.
There is no question that the cloud is where businesses want to host data. Until recently hypervisor virtualization was the most widely used method in cloud computing. Recently virtual containers have been gaining in popularity, and for good reason. In the debate between virtual machines and containers, the latter have been seen as the new kid on the block – and like other emerging technology have had some initial shortcomings. However, the container space has evolved drastically since coming onto the cloud hosting scene over 10 years ago. So, what has changed? In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Tenko Nikolov, founder and CEO of Kyup, will discuss the security, speed, scalability, cost and outlook for the future of container cloud hosting.
While SAP is globally renowned as a provider of enterprise management software, the name is hardly ever associated with the spooky world of intelligence. That is one reason why I jumped at the opportunity to talk with SAP executives responsible for the company’s work in that clandestine marketplace. SAP National Security Services, Inc.™ (SAP NS2™) is an independent U.S. subsidiary of the company and offers a full suite of SAP enterprise applications, analytics, database, cyber security, cloud, and mobility software solutions. These offerings, however, are endowed with specialized levels of security and support needed to meet the unique mission requirements of US National Security Agencies and critical national infrastructure customers. SAP NS2 also provides secure consulting and support services from experts that hold current credentials in the national security space. Carmen Krueger, Senior VicePresident & General Manager, Cloud Operations, focuses on the critical security requirements of national security clients that adopt and deploy SAP technologies. Joining her in our discussion was Hunter Downey, NS2 Cloud Solutions Director.
Are your Big Data initiatives resulting in Big Impact or Big Mess? In her session at Big Data Expo, Penelope Everall Gordon, Emerging Technology Strategist at 1Plug Corporation, shared her successes in improving Big Decision outcomes by building stories compelling to the target audience – and her failures when she lost sight of the plotline, distracted by the glitter of technology and the lure of buried insights. The cast of characters includes the agency head [city official? elected official??] perpetually waiting for the report from the latest exploratory committee and the division executive relying on gut instinct; and the epilogue offers guidelines that you can use to more effectively influence decisions and improve strategic decision outcomes.
Enthusiasm for the Internet of Things has reached an all-time high. In 2013 alone, venture capitalists spent more than $1 billion dollars investing in the IoT space. With "smart" appliances and devices, IoT covers wearable smart devices, cloud services to hardware companies. Nest, a Google company, detects temperatures inside homes and automatically adjusts it by tracking its user's habit. These technologies are quickly developing and with it come challenges such as bridging infrastructure gaps, abiding by privacy concerns and making the concept a reality. These challenges can't be addressed without the kinds of agile software development and infrastructure approaches pioneered by the DevOps movement.
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, will explain 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.
As the world moves from DevOps to NoOps, application deployment to the cloud ought to become a lot simpler. However, applications have been architected with a much tighter coupling than it needs to be which makes deployment in different environments and migration between them harder. The microservices architecture, which is the basis of many new age distributed systems such as OpenStack, Netflix and so on is at the heart of CloudFoundry – a complete developer-oriented Platform as a Service (PaaS) that is IaaS agnostic and supports vCloud, OpenStack and AWS. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Raghavan Srinivas, an Architect/Developer Evangelist for EMC, will discuss the microservices architecture in detail and how to architect applications for the cloud in general, CloudFoundry in particular. He will harness the power of dependency injection that Spring provides to pick a variety of data sources and services.
Passing the Net Neutrality Act is not going to make us more competitive in the global marketplace. It is not going to give “the little guy” a better platform for a start-up business. It is not the answer. Net Neutrality has to somehow be forged into a more strategic initiative to build out the current network infrastructure with only two design constructs: It must be the fastest in the world and the most resilient in the world when it comes to reliability and redundancy built into its framework. Maybe Global Net Superiority (GNS) is more descriptive as to what we really need to facilitate. We need to push all network carriers and other organizations, such as municipalities, to build out networks and create mega-capacities as well as accelerate network speeds if we are to accommodate the growth anticipated by those who talk about the Internet of Everything (IoE).
While SAP is globally renowned as a provider of enterprise management software, the name is hardly ever associated with the spooky world of intelligence. That is one reason why I jumped at the opportunity to talk with SAP executives responsible for the company’s work in that clandestine marketplace. SAP National Security Services, Inc.™ (SAP NS2™) is an independent U.S. subsidiary of the company and offers a full suite of SAP enterprise applications, analytics, database, cyber security, cloud, and mobility software solutions. These offerings, however, are endowed with specialized levels of security and support needed to meet the unique mission requirements of US National Security Agencies and critical national infrastructure customers. SAP NS2 also provides secure consulting and support services from experts that hold current credentials in the national security space. Carmen Krueger, Senior VicePresident & General Manager, Cloud Operations, focuses on the critical security requirements of national security clients that adopt and deploy SAP technologies. Joining her in our discussion was Hunter Downey, NS2 Cloud Solutions Director.
It is critical to let the usage of cloud collaboration grow over time instead of migration in a swoop. This will give your employees sufficient time to evolve while ensuring your company is on the right path forward. A recent study published by Markets and Markets predicts the collaboration tools market to more than double between now and 2018. In 2014, the market for collaboration software tools was valued at around $10.5 billion. By 2018, this market is expected to reach a size of more than $21 billion. That is a staggering compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15%.
There is no doubt that Big Data is here and getting bigger every day. Building a Big Data infrastructure today is no easy task. There are an enormous number of choices for database engines and technologies. To make things even more challenging, requirements are getting more sophisticated, and the standard paradigm of supporting historical analytics queries is often just one facet of what is needed. As Big Data growth continues, organizations are demanding real-time access to data, allowing immediate and actionable interpretation of events as they happen. Another aspect concerns how to deliver data in a meaningful way, one that really delivers on what end users need to maintain a competitive position in fast-changing markets.
There is no doubt that Big Data is here and getting bigger every day. Building a Big Data infrastructure today is no easy task. There are an enormous number of choices for database engines and technologies. To make things even more challenging, requirements are getting more sophisticated, and the standard paradigm of supporting historical analytics queries is often just one facet of what is needed. As Big Data growth continues, organizations are demanding real-time access to data, allowing immediate and actionable interpretation of events as they happen. Another aspect concerns how to deliver data in a meaningful way, one that really delivers on what end users need to maintain a competitive position in fast-changing markets.
Thanks to Docker, it becomes very easy to leverage containers to build, ship, and run any Linux application on any kind of infrastructure. Docker is particularly helpful for microservice architectures because their successful implementation relies on a fast, efficient deployment mechanism – which is precisely one of the features of Docker. Microservice architectures are therefore becoming more popular, and are increasingly seen as an interesting option even for smaller projects, instead of being reserved to the largest, most complex application stacks.
Thanks to Docker, it becomes very easy to leverage containers to build, ship, and run any Linux application on any kind of infrastructure. Docker is particularly helpful for microservice architectures because their successful implementation relies on a fast, efficient deployment mechanism – which is precisely one of the features of Docker. Microservice architectures are therefore becoming more popular, and are increasingly seen as an interesting option even for smaller projects, instead of being reserved to the largest, most complex application stacks.
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.
Once the decision has been made to move part or all of a workload to the cloud, a methodology for selecting that workload needs to be established. How do you move to the cloud? What does the discovery, assessment and planning look like? What workloads make sense? Which cloud model makes sense for each workload? What are the considerations for how to select the right cloud model? And how does that fit in with the overall IT transformation?
At its core DevOps is all about collaboration. The lines of communication must be opened and it takes some effort to ensure that they stay that way. It’s easy to pay lip service to trends and talk about implementing new methodologies, but without action, real benefits cannot be realized. Success requires planning, advocates empowered to effect change, and, of course, the right tooling. To bring about a cultural shift it’s important to share challenges. In simple terms, ensuring that everyone knows what everyone else is doing can create a real team spirit and social cohesion that will drive DevOps forward. Here are six tips that can be implemented to help you get there.
Hardware will never be more valuable than on the day it hits your loading dock. Each day new servers are not deployed to production the business is losing money. While Moore's Law is typically cited to explain the exponential density growth of chips, a critical consequence of this is rapid depreciation of servers. The hardware for clustered systems (e.g., Hadoop, OpenStack) tends to be significant capital expenses. In his session at Big Data Expo, Mason Katz, CTO and co-founder of StackIQ, discussed how infrastructure teams should be aware of the capitalization and depreciation model of these expenses to fully understand when and where automation is critical.
What do a firewall and a fortress have in common? They are no longer strong enough to protect the valuables housed inside. Like the walls of an old fortress, the cracks in the firewall are allowing the bad guys to slip in - unannounced and unnoticed. By the time these thieves get in, the damage is already done and the network is already compromised. Intellectual property is easily slipped out the back door leaving no trace of forced entry. If we want to reign in on these cybercriminals, it's high time we start thinking the way these thieves think. If we don't, malware, rootkits, AETs and other nefarious threats will continue to undermine our sense of security.
I recently saw an unusual post online that caught my eye. It was a standard weather radar picture from a Wisconsin TV Station (WFRV-TV Ch. 5). In the image you can see a large green area that normally denotes rain. What particularly caught my eye was that this image labeled the large green swatch over Lake Winnebago as “Lake Flies!” My first reaction was that clearly this had to be a joke, but a quick internet search on ‘lake flies radar’ proved me wrong – there was even a great article last year from Wired discussing it. Each “lake fly” by itself is small (less than 1/2 inch), but have a mass hatching in May every year. The sheer volume of the hatching can fill the sky, as well as show up on weather radar, looking like a storm stretching for miles in all directions. Fortunately for all living in the area, the life cycle of these flies is measured in weeks and the skies will soon clear.
Passing the Net Neutrality Act is not going to make us more competitive in the global marketplace. It is not going to give “the little guy” a better platform for a start-up business. It is not the answer. Net Neutrality has to somehow be forged into a more strategic initiative to build out the current network infrastructure with only two design constructs: It must be the fastest in the world and the most resilient in the world when it comes to reliability and redundancy built into its framework. Maybe Global Net Superiority (GNS) is more descriptive as to what we really need to facilitate. We need to push all network carriers and other organizations, such as municipalities, to build out networks and create mega-capacities as well as accelerate network speeds if we are to accommodate the growth anticipated by those who talk about the Internet of Everything (IoE).
Shipping daily, injecting faults, and keeping an extremely high availability "without Ops"? Understand why NoOps does not mean no operations. Agile development methodologies require evolved operations to be successful. In his keynote at DevOps Summit, David Tesar, Microsoft Technical Evangelist on Microsoft Azure and DevOps, will discuss how Microsoft teams who have made huge progress with a DevOps transformation effectively utilize operations staff and how challenges were overcome. Regardless of whether you are a startup or a mature enterprise, whether you are using PaaS, Micro Services, or Containerization, walk away with some practical tips where Ops can make a significant impact working with the development teams. Operational teams and functions are increasingly more important as the industry delivers software at a blazing pace.
SYS-CON Media announced today that 9 out of 10 " most read" DevOps articles are published by @DevOpsSummit Blog. Launched in October 2014, @DevOpsSummit Blog offers top articles, news stories, and blog posts from the world's well-known experts and guarantees better exposure for its authors than any other publication. The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.
NuoDB just introduced the Swifts 2.1 Release. In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Seth Proctor, CTO of NuoDB, Inc., discussed why scaling databases in the cloud is challenging, why building your application on top of the infrastructure that is designed with this in mind makes a difference, and what you can do with NuoDB that simplifies your programming model, your operations model.
In comparison to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has experienced a slower rate of adoption. However, PaaS is coming into its own as evidenced by increased usage and top technology companies such as HP and IBM supporting open source projects like Cloud Foundry by bringing their own PaaS to market. PaaS is important because apps are an important part of our lives. With this relatively new dependency on web and mobile applications, organizations need to find a way to automate their app deployment and management process just to stay in the game. If you are not looking for a way to speed up your pipeline, you can bet that your competition is. And PaaS is a critical component to achieving this.