Comparing cloud providers is complicated. With constant price drops and the frequent introduction of new instance types, no matter what answer you come up with today it is sure to change in three months. Taking into account differences in performance, it gets even more confusing when you realize that applications run differently on different clouds. One thing is certain though: price in a vacuum doesn’t tell you the whole story. In fact, it’s a lot like selecting a car based on sticker price and assuming the fuel efficiency of the cylinders is equal across manufacturers. It’s not.
When something as simple as an API can integrate massive amounts of data into, and through, a wide variety of applications, any company can be a digital enterprise. There is a perception that some industries are using technology to innovate, while others languish in antiquated ways of running their business. But in our massively connected age, it’s rare to find examples where technology isn’t making an impact on helping organizations grow and become more efficient. John Deere is one of the world’s largest and most successful manufacturers of agricultural machinery, and it’s not a stretch to say that they are responsible for much of the food on your table. They’re enabling an entire ecosystem of innovation for everyone involved with agriculture through the APIs they offer in their developer program.
ScriptRock makes GuardRail, a DevOps-ready platform for configuration monitoring. Realizing we were spending way too much time digging up, cataloguing, and tracking machine configurations, we began writing our own scripts and tools to handle what is normally an enormous chore. Then we took the concept a step further, giving it a beautiful interface and making it simple enough for our bosses to understand. We named it GuardRail after its function - to allow businesses to move fast and stay safe. GuardRail scans and tracks much more than just servers in a datacenter. It works with network hardware, Cloud service providers, CloudFlare, Android devices, infrastructure, and more.
The impact is that it's really difficult to apply access controls to something in the cloud using traditional models that force users and consumers to come to the enterprise data center where that service is hosted first. That has a very negative impact on performance, at a minimum. Similarly, applying acceleration or other performance enhancing services at the enterprise edge when the app is out there, in the cloud, might negate with additional travel time across the Internet any gains that might be had. Some services should be closer to the user - SSO, secure web gateway, GSLB - and others should be closer to the app - SSL, load balancing, web application firewall. But when apps are way over there and users are, well, anywhere, that's much easier said than done.
The next release candidate for 1.11.0 will be out very shortly, but I thought it best to post a brief update on the past week’s work as this week saw a concentrated effort on core optimization. First we took another look at the use of arguments lists throughout the framework and found several more occurrences of it being accessed in an inefficient manner. Depending on the browser, accessing arguments in such a way that causes it to be allocated can be up to 80% slower and so it’s really good to have these all fixed.
Many agile DevOps teams rely on communication via HipChat, which provides an API and mobile apps to receive messages while being away from one’s desktop. SPM Performance Monitoring‘s new integration via WebHooks provides the capability to forward alerts to many services, including HipChat. The integration of both services can be achieved by collecting the room_id and an access token from HipChat and then building a WebHook in SPM. The SPM Wiki explains how to get this information from HipChat and build the WebHook in SPM: Alerts – HipChat integration
The major cloud platforms defy a simple, side-by-side analysis. Each of the major IaaS public-cloud platforms offers their own unique strengths and functionality. Options for on-site private cloud are diverse as well, and must be designed and deployed while taking existing legacy architecture and infrastructure into account. Then the reality is that most enterprises are embarking on a hybrid cloud strategy and programs. In this Power Panel at 15th Cloud Expo (http://www.CloudComputingExpo.com), moderated by Ashar Baig, Research Director, Cloud, at Gigaom Research, Nate Gordon, Director of Technology at Appcore; Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia; Paul Turner, CMO of Cloudian; Dave Peters, Manager of Systems Integration at Esri; Derek Tumulak, Vice President of Product Management at Vormetric; Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software, discussed how enterprises should develop their processes for choosing the cloud option that truly fits what they need.
While the initial usage of the Cloud Platform was clearly for the IaaS offerings, the trend is shifting and the PaaS delivery model is gaining a lot of attention. Most of the analysts like IDC and Gartner have predicted huge growth for PaaS in the coming years. IDC predicts Platform as a Service (PaaS) and cloud storage services will be the fastest-growing categories, driven by major upticks in developer cloud services adoption and Big Data-driven solutions, respectively.
SaaS and cloud computing continue to gain real traction in the enterprise – and that trend is sure to continue for a long time to come. But the reality is that, to date, those gaining real benefit from cloud at the enterprise level have been limited largely to isolated pockets; e.g., software development and operations teams leveraging Infrastructure and Platform as a Service (IaaS and PaaS) to slash costs and improve agility; sales teams licensing their own SaaS CRM systems; or lines of business “going rogue” and sidestepping IT by using apps like Dropbox to facilitate easier file sharing inside and outside the company.
Mobile commerce traffic is surpassing desktop, yet less than 20% of sales in the U.S. are mobile commerce sales. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Dan Franklin, Segment Manager, Commerce, at Verizon Digital Media Services, defined mobile devices and discussed how next generation means simplification. It means taking your digital content and turning it into instantly gratifying experiences.
Mobile commerce traffic is surpassing desktop, yet less than 20% of sales in the U.S. are mobile commerce sales. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Dan Franklin, Segment Manager, Commerce, at Verizon Digital Media Services, defined mobile devices and discussed how next generation means simplification. It means taking your digital content and turning it into instantly gratifying experiences.
AppDynamics, the application intelligence leader for software-defined businesses, announced the general availability of the AppDynamics Fall '14 Release. Serving the combined needs of IT and business teams across the enterprise, the latest release provides a comprehensive view across all aspects of digital performance in ultra large scale deployments. AppDynamics delivers Application Intelligence by building out advanced capabilities across the key areas of analytics, unified monitoring and DevOps. The Fall '14 Release of the AppDynamics Application Intelligence platform introduces: powerful new DevOps collaboration capabilities in the 'Virtual War Room'; AppDynamics Application Analytics, which capture operational and business events and metrics across entire application environments; support for additional integration platforms; a massively scalable data store; and integration of AppDynamics database monitoring into the main platform.
As enterprises engage with Big Data technologies to develop applications needed to meet operational demands, new computation fabrics are continually being introduced. To leverage these new innovations, organizations are sacrificing market opportunities to gain expertise in learning new systems. In his session at Big Data Expo, Supreet Oberoi, Vice President of Field Engineering at Concurrent, Inc., discussed how to leverage existing infrastructure and investments and future-proof them against emerging technologies with Cascading. Cascading is the widely used application development framework for building data-centric applications, allowing developers to easily build enterprise-grade applications on emerging fabrics like Tez and Spark with existing skill sets. Cascading's community also supports an ecosystem capable of connecting existing infrastructure with new investments.
"Desktop as a Service is emerging as a very big trend. One of the big influencers of this – for Esri – is that we have a large user base that uses virtualization and they are looking at Desktop as a Service right now," explained John Meza, Product Engineer at Esri, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"At our booth we are showing how to provide trust in the Internet of Things. Trust is where everything starts to become secure and trustworthy. Now with the scaling of the Internet of Things it becomes an interesting question – I've heard numbers from 200 billion devices next year up to a trillion in the next 10 to 15 years," explained Johannes Lintzen, Vice President of Sales at Utimaco, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"For over 25 years we have been working with a lot of enterprise customers and we have seen how companies create applications. And now that we have moved to cloud computing, mobile, social and the Internet of Things, we see that the market needs a new way of creating applications," stated Jesse Shiah, CEO, President and Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 15th Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Companies in all industries have been moving some aspects of their operations away from traditional IT and data center functions to the cloud – but usually not everything. Doing so can be somewhat scary, for a myriad of reasons, especially if a company’s cloud strategy isn’t locked up, secure and ironed out ahead of time. More often than not, companies are finding their way to the hybrid cloud – commonly defined as the combination of an on-premise cloud or IT operation and a public cloud service.
@ThingsExpo has been named the Top 5 Most Influential M2M Brand by Onalytica in the ‘Machine to Machine: Top 100 Influencers and Brands.' Onalytica analyzed the online debate on M2M by looking at over 85,000 tweets to provide the most influential individuals and brands that drive the discussion. According to Onalytica the "analysis showed a very engaged community with a lot of interactive tweets. The M2M discussion seems to be more fragmented and driven by some of the major brands present in the M2M space. This really allows some room for influential individuals to create more high value interactions amongst community members."
Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, has published the results of a survey conducted at the beginning of 2014, on ICT usage in enterprises with a special focus on the use of cloud computing services in the EU Member States. Eurostat’s “finding” centered on the “fact” that cloud computing services have been used (in 2014) by only one out of every five (19%) enterprises in the EU28.
VASCO Data Security International, Inc., announced on Wednesday that The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. (BTMU) has implemented VASCO's two-factor authentication solutions to protect retail banking customers accessing the bank's online banking services. DIGIPASS for Mobile for smartphones will be deployed as a one-time password (OTP) service to secure the bank's "Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Direct" retail banking service. VASCO's VACMAN Controller, a large-scale authentication platform, will provide the verification engine for high volume authentication requests. DIGIPASS authenticators are being offered to customers free of charge.
More and more file-based and machine generated data is being created every day causing exponential data and content growth, and creating a management nightmare for IT managers. What data centers really need to cope with this growth is a purpose-built tiered archive appliance that enables users to establish a single storage target for all of their applications - an appliance that will intelligently place and move data to and between storage tiers based on user-defined policies. In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Janae Lee, Senior Vice President of Strategy at Quantum, will discussed how VM applications can simply send user file data via NAS or HTTP to an intelligent storage target and user content will automatically route content to the appropriate archive tier(s) to deliver the desired mix of resiliency and access - whether it is private or hybrid cloud storage for broad access, or tape for less active long term protection. She also discussed how this simplified blending of storage to enable protection and timely access to valuable data and content is the future of archive
The cloud is everywhere and growing, and with it SaaS has become an accepted means for software delivery. SaaS is more than just a technology, it is a thriving business model estimated to be worth around $53 billion dollars by 2015, according to IDC. The question is - how do you build and scale a profitable SaaS business model? In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Jason Cumberland, Vice President, SaaS Solutions at Dimension Data, discussed the common mistakes businesses make when transitioning to SaaS; how to avoid them; and how to build a profitable and scalable SaaS business.
The follow up article to Welcome to the Age of the Consumer: No Opinion Matters More Now we go into how to take advantage of those essential first few days or even minutes that you have your potential customer’s attention in order to follow through on heightened expectations of stellar customer service.
SYS-CON Media announced that Splunk, a provider of the leading software platform for real-time Operational Intelligence, has launched an ad campaign on Big Data Journal. Splunk software and cloud services enable organizations to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine-generated big data coming from websites, applications, servers, networks, sensors and mobile devices. The ads focus on delivering ROI - how improved uptime delivered $6M in annual ROI, improving customer operations by mining large volumes of unstructured data, and how data tracking delivers uptime when it matters most.