Cloud computing adds flexibility to enterprise IT. When companies wish to take advantage of this, they are finding they need to turn to microservices instead of their traditional, monolithic architectures to accommodate frequent change. Microservices can overcome the challnges presented by frequent change, “by splitting monoliths into multiple independent services, each with its own simple business logic,” according to Sergey Sverchkov, a Solutions Architect with Altoros. Doing so leads to another issue: “choosing either PaaS or IaaS for microservices is an open question, “ he says. Sergey recently posted a thoughtful piece on the topic of PaaS vs. IaaS when implementing microservices on the Altoros blog. Altoros provides system integration services for a worldwide client base with the Cloud Foundry PaaS, yet Sverchov's piece takes a balanced view of which approach to take. His fundamntal point is that a DevOps team will be spending a lot of time monkeying around (my phrase, not Sergey's) when companies work straight to the bare infrastructure; taking the PaaS approach. “An automated PaaS is a bigger investment,” he writes, “but it can shrink release cycles from weeks to hours and even eliminate some downsides of the microservices model.” In his post, Sergey covers six different areas regarding the implementation of microservices, and the differences between IaaS vs. PaaS in each of these areas, summarized as follows: 1. One service for one job. With IaaS, “every service is deployed as an (IaaS) instance; DevOps ar responsible for configuring valid communication interfaces.” With PaaS, “scalability can be controlled by a developer. Communication endpoints are served by the PaaS.” 2. Using different tools to implement different services. With IaaS, “DevOps needs to configure an application runtime.” With PaaS, “an application runtime is automatically deployed in a PaaS container.” 3. Loose coupling. With IaaS, “The DevOps team manages IaaS instances used for service deployment.” With PaaS, “containers are isolated elements for application deployment. Container lifecycle is managed by the Paas.” 4. Developer independence. With IaaS, “ DevOps may need to create multiple IaaS environments for each of the development groups.” Alternatively, with PaaS, development groups can be managed (using Cloud Foundry terminology) as “organizations” and “spaces.” 5. Continuous delivery. With IaaS, “DevOps engineers need to install and configure build-automation tools and integrate them with a project repository.” Specficially with Cloud Foundry, “build-automation solutions can be deployed as a regular application.” 6. Integration with external services. With IaaS, “the DevOps team deploys external services. Applications connect (to them) using properties.” With PaaS, “a service broker can be used to deploy and publish some external services. Service binding makes it easier to connect an application instance to external services.” In addition to the item about IaaS/PaaS and microservices, Sergey has authored a much longer technical whitepaper on the general topic of microservices vs. monolithic architectures, available through the blog section of the Altoros website. I heard a lot of talk last year about major public cloud infrastructure providers starting to subsume PaaS into their offerings. Besides the potential for a new era of vendor lock-in, the IaaS vs. PaaS debate also involves significant functionality issues and questions of the skillsets, and more important, efficiency enterprise IT will have as the presence of cloud – public, private, and hybrid – increases within their organizations. Sergey's post adds value to this debate.
"We have developers who are really passionate about getting their code out to customers, no matter what, in the shortest possible time. Operations are very focused on procedures and policies," explained Stan Klimoff, CTO of Qubell, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Is there a point where business can safely assume they have hit the limit of what traditional IT organizations have to offer? In an Internet and data driven world, does IT simply lack the agility and depth needed to fulfill business requirements and need for innovation? Parts of cloud computing have chimed a loud and painful wake up call for many IT managers. Even at the most simple level, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), it might be fair to say this is simply a utility to accelerate data center imagedecommissioning, and the process of physically decoupling underlying compute, storage, and network infrastructure from the business.
Grow your business with enterprise wearable apps using SAP Platforms and Google Glass. SAP and Google just launched the SAP and Google Glass Challenge, an opportunity for you to innovate and develop the best Enterprise Wearable App using SAP Platforms and Google Glass and gain valuable market exposure. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Brian McPhail, Senior Director of Business Development, ISVs & Digital Commerce at SAP, outlined the timeline of the SAP Google Glass Challenge and the opportunity for developers, start-ups, and companies of all sizes to engage with SAP today.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Nimble Storage, the flash storage solutions company, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL) is redefining the storage market with its Adaptive Flash platform. Nimble’s flash storage solutions enable the consolidation of all workloads and eliminate storage silos by providing enterprises with significant improvements in application performance and storage capacity. At the same time, Nimble delivers superior data protection, while simplifying business operations and lowering costs. At the core of the Adaptive Flash platform is the patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture and InfoSight, an automated cloud-based management and support system that maintains storage system peak health. More than 4,300 enterprises, governments, and service providers have deployed Nimble’s flash storage solutions across 38 countries.
I saw more discussion on big data at CES 2015 this week, compared to previous years. Everyone talked about data as the central core of everything. The IoT (Internet of Things), NFC (near Field Communication) and M2M (Machine to Machine) communication are enabling pieces for many industries - security monitoring, asset and inventory tracking, healthcare, process control, building environment monitoring, vehicle tracking and telemetry, in-store customer engagement and digital signage. Big data is the big deal here. The Big Data ecosystem includes - cloud computing, M2M/IoT, dumb terminal 2.0 (devices getting dumber - more cloud, better broadband, less about storage and more about broadband access and high quality display), and analysis. The big data business is slated to be a $200B business in 2015. Every company must insert the big data ecosystem into their future roadmap or get left out. The key here is not the technology, but its business value.
2014 has been another year of growth and change for the workload automation industry. As the industry continues to evolve and mature, we are seeing workload automation becoming a necessary staple for most enterprises. According to leading technology analysts, 2015 promises to continue the trend of digitalizing business. From cloud computing and Big Data analytics to the Internet of Things, digitalization is expanding into every corner of our business and personal lives. As a result of this digitalization, IT is continuing to play an integral role in today’s accelerating rate of business. Real-time data demands, SLA requirements, and software-defined applications and infrastructure all require more flexible and nimble IT operations.
SYS-CON Media announced today the IBM, which offers the world’s deepest portfolio of technologies and expertise that are transforming the future of work, has launched ad campaigns on SYS-CON’s numerous online magazines such as Cloud Computing Journal, DevOps Journal, Virtualization Journal, and IoT Journal. IBM's campaigns focus on application testing, improving application development processes, common challenges in testing composite applications, continuous testing as part of the DevOps lifecycle, and deploying higher quality software faster through continuous integration testing.
One of the biggest challenges when developing connected devices is identifying user value and delivering it through successful user experiences. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Mike Kuniavsky, Principal Scientist, Innovation Services at PARC, described an IoT-specific approach to user experience design that combines approaches from interaction design, industrial design and service design to create experiences that go beyond simple connected gadgets to create lasting, multi-device experiences grounded in people's real needs and desires.
OpenStack and Hadoop are both amazingly powerful platforms for those who need (and recognize that they need) them. We all know what private clouds and Big Data are, so I won't waste your time explaining them. I will point out for those who haven't had the pleasure of installing them that they are terribly difficult to install and manage. Not because they're poorly designed and written, and not because Open Source doesn't care about usability, but because they're that complex. To illustrate this point, I like to point people to this picture from the OpenStack documentation that shows a simplified depiction of the architecture.
Technology is enabling a new approach to collecting and using data. This approach, commonly referred to as the "Internet of Things" (IoT), enables businesses to use real-time data from all sorts of things including machines, devices and sensors to make better decisions, improve customer service, and lower the risk in the creation of new revenue opportunities. In his General Session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Dave Wagstaff, Vice President and Chief Architect at BSQUARE Corporation, discuss the real benefits to focus on, how to understand the requirements of a successful solution, the flow of data, and how to best approach deploying an IoT solution that will drive results.
There's no doubt that the Internet of Things is driving the next wave of innovation. Google has spent billions over the past few months vacuuming up companies that specialize in smart appliances and machine learning. Already, Philips light bulbs, Audi automobiles, and Samsung washers and dryers can communicate with and be controlled from mobile devices. To take advantage of the opportunities the Internet of Things brings to your business, you'll want to start preparing now.
Apache Hadoop is an open source big data processing platform that comes with its own extensive ecosystem to support various business and technical needs. Hadoop’s specialty is large-scale processing and analytics over volumes of data that cannot be efficiently handled by traditional technologies. Hadoop is often complemented by the class of database management technologies referred to as NoSQL, which is also great for large volumes of data, but NoSQL is more about fast reads and writes than about massive processing. NoSQL and Hadoop can work together to tackle big data challenges.
Operational Hadoop and the Lambda Architecture for Streaming Data Apache Hadoop is emerging as a distributed platform for handling large and fast incoming streams of data. Predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and Internet-of-Things analysis are examples where Hadoop provides the scalable storage, processing, and analytics platform to gain meaningful insights from granular data that is typically only valuable from a large-scale, aggregate view. One architecture useful for capturing and analyzing streaming data is the Lambda Architecture, representing a model of how to analyze real-time and historical data together.
Apache Hadoop is an open source big data processing platform that comes with its own extensive ecosystem to support various business and technical needs. Hadoop’s specialty is large-scale processing and analytics over volumes of data that cannot be efficiently handled by traditional technologies. Hadoop is often complemented by the class of database management technologies referred to as NoSQL, which is also great for large volumes of data, but NoSQL is more about fast reads and writes than about massive processing. NoSQL and Hadoop can work together to tackle big data challenges.
Working with Big Data is challenging, especially when decision makers depend on market insights and intelligence from your data but don't have quick access to it or find it unusable. In their session at 6th Big Data Expo, Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia; Zel Bianco, President, CEO and Co-Founder of Interactive Edge of Solgenia; and Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder at Solgenia, discussed how a revolutionary cloud-based BI along with mobile analytics is already changing the way organizations rely on data for decisions that affect operations as well as strategy. Also learn how combined predictive analytics, data modelling, mobile, and cloud BI are fast changing the key decision-making mechanisms in the enterprise.
In 2014, we saw AWS customers (especially in the small and mid-size segments) start to lay claim that they couldn’t make their own networks as secure as using Amazon’s EC2/S3 infrastructure services. This trend will accelerate in 2015. Small and medium businesses usage of cloud applications will increase because they are unable to keep pace with the rate of change of attacks and threats, as well as resulting legal and compliance requirements. Why? Mainly due to the cost and level of effort it would require to adequately protect against the myriad of data breach possibilities. They want to be experts in their businesses, not in IT Security, and their organizations don’t have the size and scale to justify in-house resources to do it themselves. As a result, they will rely partially on their service providers like Amazon Web Services. This doesn’t mean that these organizations are handing over all responsibility to Amazon. Amazon clearly states that security is a joint responsibility and spells out specific areas they will commit to versus end user responsibilities.
2014 has been another year of growth and change for the workload automation industry. As the industry continues to evolve and mature, we are seeing workload automation becoming a necessary staple for most enterprises. According to leading technology analysts, 2015 promises to continue the trend of digitalizing business. From cloud computing and Big Data analytics to the Internet of Things, digitalization is expanding into every corner of our business and personal lives. As a result of this digitalization, IT is continuing to play an integral role in today’s accelerating rate of business. Real-time data demands, SLA requirements, and software-defined applications and infrastructure all require more flexible and nimble IT operations.
What do we know so far about cloud computing? Well, first the hype-cycle slowed down and we started realizing that hybrid cloud (as a combination of public and private resources) was a relatively sensible idea, i.e., from both an expenditure (public) and security (private) perspective. Now we know which data and processing tasks to put where – and when, right? Not exactly, it’s still not all quite crystal clear in cloud is it? The nomenclature, taxonomy and classification of the cloud are all part of the problem. At the risk of introducing a new term, it may be useful to talk about the workload cloud.
What changes in the cloud computing, Internet of Things and Big Data landscape should you be expecting in 2015? This article offers a round-up of industry experts' opinions on the New Year. Now that cloud services have become part of IT’s “new normal,” commonly referred to as “hybrid,” it seems obvious that the approaches and tools we use to manage IT would also evolve and mature, though the pace of evolution varies amongs companies, of course. According to a Website Magazine article quoting a Gartner survey, more than 55% of CIOs indicate they would host all critical apps in the cloud by 2020. Cloud services use cases can vary greatly, but often hold common themes around converting traditional applications to SaaS, or adding disaster recovery to your existing datacenter with RaaS. What does this tee up for next year? Here are four key areas to watch in 2015:
Hosting a website shouldn't be a tedious task. With so many web hosting vendors to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. Before you begin shopping, it is imperative that you create a list of traits that each web host must possess before making your short-list. As many with experience will tell you, all web hosting companies are not created equally and depending upon the types of apps you are trying to launch, it may be important to note that not one size fits all when you are shopping for web hosting services.
The essence of cloud computing is that all consumable IT resources are delivered as services. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Yung Chou, Technology Evangelist at Microsoft, will demonstrate the concepts and implementations of two important cloud computing deliveries: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). He will discuss from business and technical viewpoints what exactly they are, why we care, how they are different and in what ways, and the strategies for IT to transition into and take advantages of these emerging service models.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a technology designed to make DevOps easier and allow developers to focus on application development. The PaaS takes care of provisioning, scaling, HA, and other cloud management aspects. Apache Stratos is a PaaS codebase developed in Apache and designed to create a highly productive developer environment while also supporting powerful deployment options. Integration with the Docker platform, CoreOS Linux distribution, and Kubernetes container management system brings more scalability and flexibility to Apache Stratos PaaS. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Lakmal Warusawithana, Director of Cloud Architecture at WSO2 Inc., will discuss installing and deploying sample applications using Docker, CoreOS and Kubernetes, and walkthrough how it can be extended to support new application containers. He will also demonstrate app deployment, provisioning, auto-scaling, and more.
The industrial software market has treated data with the mentality of “collect everything now, worry about how to use it later.” We now find ourselves buried in data, with the pervasive connectivity of the (Industrial) Internet of Things only piling on more numbers. There’s too much data and not enough information. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Bob Gates, Global Marketing Director, GE’s Intelligent Platforms business, to discuss how realizing the power of IoT, software developers are now focused on understanding how industrial data can create intelligence for industrial operations. Imagine a world where a turbine can call its operator weeks before it breaks thanks to analytics. Assets aren’t destroyed, operators save millions, and lives may be saved.
High-performing enterprise Software Quality Assurance (SQA) teams validate systems that are ready for use - getting most actively involved as components integrate and form complete systems. These teams catch and report on defects, making sure the customer gets the best software possible. SQA teams have leveraged automation and virtualization to execute more thorough testing in less time - bringing Dev and Ops together, ensuring production readiness. Does the emergence of DevOps mean the end of Enterprise SQA? Does the SQA function become redundant? In her session at DevOps Summit, Anne Hungate, Senior Director of Software Quality at DIRECTV, advocated for the evolution of Software Quality Engineering. She discussed how the role and impact of an SQA organization changes with DevOps and offer practical steps to move from assurance late in the lifecycle, to prevention, analytics, and customer insight. Anne also discussed how SQA teams are becoming more skilled in engineering methods and making the DevOps journey successful.