Anytime we in IT encounter a new paradigm, our natural reaction is block, control, stop. In many shops, our first response is to prohibit users from accessing websites that the company has not approved, including cloud-based software, mobile applications, and other “bring your own apps” candidates. Instead, we ought to put more of our attention on words like partner or enable. That’s what IT is really striving for. IT managers want to serve their company’s needs and to enable employees to do their job better. But the perception of IT is that is has been on a long trajectory towards (let’s face it) irrelevance.
Setting up a single instance of a cloud application, let alone multiple ones, can be complex, time consuming, and prone to mistakes. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Alex Sousa, Senior Director, Cloud Solutions, at SHI, will show how the SHI Cloud Marketplace can quickly deploy sophisticated multi-tier applications across multiple geographically diverse servers, located at different cloud service providers. Alex Sousa is Senior Director, Cloud Solutions, at SHI. He oversees productization aspects of the SHI Cloud Backup as a Service (Baas). Combining business, technical, and legal expertise, Sousa is a cross-functional hybrid. Most recently, he was the legal counsel of two solar cell start-ups, where he drafted patents and negotiated commercial agreements. He was also in charge of building out and managing the datacenter at one of the start-ups.
For many enterprises, moving business processes and data to the cloud has become a next step for improving both operational and technological capabilities. The cost savings and efficiencies created by utilizing cloud applications continue to increase, including opportunities for more business functions to be put on the cloud. For those currently using the cloud or planning to begin or expand cloud adoption, a growing concern is cloud security and specifically this question – “Why is cloud security such a big challenge?” The challenges of cloud security begin with an enterprise’s need to keep control over their data and to ensure that their data is kept private and protected. Whether it is outsourced data storage or the use of popular cloud SaaS applications, putting more data in the cloud inherently means more opportunity for unwanted or unauthorized access to that information. But cloud adoption by the enterprise is simply too compelling because of its business benefits, so enterprise security and IT teams have to search for ways to secure their data in the cloud while permitting access and use by legitimate corporate users.
A recent article by Rob Livingstone on CFO.com [1] attracted my attention. In the article, Rob talks about the need for a tighter, ongoing working relationship between your company and its IT vendors for “as-a-service” technology-delivery models. We have in previous blogs also discussed the changes required in the everything-as-a-service (XaaS) movement. Clearly, Rob’s target audience here is primarily the CFO, and Rob’s suggestions are intended to help financial officers focus on some of the vendor selection issues that are emerging as the technology evolves, and as the customer-vendor relationship evolves in parallel. As a billing vendor, I look at this from the other side of the negotiation fence, but nevertheless I find I’m pretty much in agreement with Mr. Livingstone. The article contains a number of useful reminders, some of which I may return to in a future blog. However, for today, I’ve picked out a couple of Rob’s comments, because they happen to resonate with discussions we are constantly having with our customers and prospective customers. They both address adaptability and flexibility, important tag words for us here at MetraTech.
Recently, one of our customers, let’s call him PointInFact, had a very typical problem. After deploying a new version of its software, some user requests degraded horribly. Requests that should have taken half a second took up to a minute. Interestingly, the PointInFact team runs a multi-tenant SaaS solution in the AWS Cloud and relies heavily on cloud services. This reliance makes User Experience Management and fault domain isolation very challenging. Back Story: Application Running in the AWS Cloud PointInFact runs a SaaS service. Internally this results in a multi-tenant service where each customer has his own instance of the application he subscribes to. All of these applications and services are hosted in Amazon’s EC2 Cloud where they dynamically create new application environments and offload some functionality to AWS by using the provided services. As a SaaS business, customer satisfaction is very important to them, as a consequence they monitor all applications and services centrally and from an end-user and server-side perspective with Compuware APM.
To state the obvious, businesses of all sizes are moving their applications to the cloud or renting software as a service (SaaS) instead of licensing or buying the software outright. The number one reason people cite is cost. Businesses large and small are under the impression they can save a bundle by moving their apps to the cloud. At the same time, companies who handle a move to the cloud badly can suffer a negative backlash from their user community. When you consider all the cost factors, like your time, energy and risk to your business, will you save money in the long run by going with SaaS? The short answer is no. One thing is clear: businesses will pay less up front for cloud vs. on-premise. Modern SaaS systems are rented on a pay-as-you-go basis, or might have short-term contracts. Average license fees for equivalent on-premise software range from two to three years' worth of SaaS subscriptions. Add in 20% annual maintenance when you buy and install your own software and you are in concept paying three years' worth of subscription revenues up front for the same tools.
Why should enterprises move data and applications into the cloud? The discussion on cloud strategy is still to this day focused on cost-reduction, primarily featuring economies achieved in infrastructure, platform and even applications. Certainly no one is going to argue that this is all worth thinking about; every business needs to be aware of cost reduction opportunities. However a complete cloud strategy for an enterprise needs to be a whole lot more comprehensive than that. Enterprises, big and smaller, need to stretch their minds to take in the business opportunities that emerge from a cloud way of working, opportunities that are difficult or impossible to achieve in an environment of discrete platforms and applications.
By embracing End-User-Experience (EUE) measurements as a key vehicle for demonstrating productivity, you build trust with your constituents in a very tangible way. The translation of IT metrics into business meaning (value) is what APM is all about. The goal here is to simplify a complicated technology space by walking through a high-level view within each core element. I'm suggesting that the success factors in APM adoption center around the EUE and the integration touch points with the ITIL / ITSM processes. When looking at APM at 20,000 feet, four foundational elements come into view: Top Down Monitoring Bottom Up Monitoring ITIL / ITSM Processes Reporting & Analytics
Apache TomEE supported in Jelastic PaaS is a Java EE server, which provides you with the best technology stack that can be deployed to a simple Java EE container. It's lightweight and at the same time is a full-blown application server, which remains simple and avoids architecture overhead. Today you'll see how easy it is to deploy Java web apps into TomEE. In the following tutorial you'll learn the basics of web application development with the help of the Apache Struts framework, which is an absolutely free open-source solution for creating Java web apps.
Ruby on Rails 4 features Russian Doll caching. Here, I apply Russian Doll caching to one of my poorer performing Rails 3 pages using the cache_digests gem. ActionView puts forth a great development pattern of views and partials that is easy to understand, implement and maintain but that comes at a cost: The rendering process is complex and slow. With no caching at all, the ActionView layer averages roughly ~365ms for this URL. This represents over 80% of average request processing time and dwarfs all of the other layers combined.
Efficient Development Workflows save a ton of time. In part 2 of our new series 'The Codeship Workflow' we talk about the steps necessary to get a feature shipped: Pull Request, Code Review and Merging. Check it out! As I mentioned last week we use GitHub Flow on GitHub. But the whole workflow we describe is also possible when working with BitBucket. We do not have a policy when a pull request should be opened. Some of our developers open them when they start a feature, some wait until the feature is implemented. Then we push regularly to that branch as explained in the last post. Open pull requests are helpful as everyone can see what we are working on. One really important part of feature branches and pull requests are proper commit messages.
The bottom line for the telcos is that Cloud-based offerings are value-added services, where the value they add is added to the plumbing. In other words, their fundamental cultural perspective is to make more money with the telecommunications infrastructure. The problem with this perspective, however, is that it’s not the best way for a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to think. Those of us whose careers have centered on moving bits around can easily forget that telephone companies have been in existence since Alexander Graham Bell and his partners founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. For most of this century and a half of history, telecommunications has delivered plain old switched voice networks. The rise of mobile telephony, the Internet, and now the Cloud have each in turn shaken the telco world to its core. And yet, its history, and hence its culture, rest in the world of the Public Switched Telephone Network. In other words, once a phone company, always a phone company.
Developers need to be able to run tests quickly. In this blog post we talk about how to speed up your test suite boot time. The biggest bane of test driven development, or whatever variant you practice, is long boot times. Even when you just run one test a slow boot will make it a tedious job. There are a number of ways to reduce startup times in a Ruby on Rails project. Load less dependencies to get a faster test suite boot time Project dependencies need to be loaded every time you start your test suite, less dependencies means faster startup. Keeping project dependencies to a minimum is always a good idea, not just because of boot time. Let's jump into an example. We're assuming you're using the following, simplified, Gemfile for your dependencies:
VMware vCloud Hybrid Service can greatly reduce IT capital expenditure by removing the need for a remote offsite location for DR/CO-OP operations. IT departments can simply scale up the capacity during disaster operations, greatly reducing the operational cost for maintaining a DR site.
Let’s look at some best practices for using another powerful class: ThreadLocal from java.lang, which is also implemented using WeakReference. As its name suggests, a single instance of ThreadLocal can store different values for each thread independently. Therefore, the value stored in a ThreadLocal instance is specific (local) to the current running Thread, any other code logic running on the same thread will see the same value, but not the values set on the same instance by other threads. (There are exceptions, like InhertiableThreadLocal, which inherits parent thread's values by default.)
We all know that our computer systems are underutilized. Most new desktops come with far more storage than is going to be used (or, to be more exact – should be used given file servers). Processors desktops and servers are busy only 20% of the time, and we always buy more memory than we need just in case. We are left with spending large amounts of capital for hardware that will sit idle most of the time. The solution is Virtualization – one of the latest buzzword floating around Information Technology. It seems that we have been talking about virtualization for a while now, but what does it actually mean and how do I get there? The key thing to know is that virtualization is all about making the most efficient usage of your infrastructure while allowing for maximum flexibility.
Let’s begin with a leading question: Can’t the hybrid economy model live within the public cloud? From the enormous number of conversations with top cloud thought leaders, CIOs, startups, and the like, it seems that the answer is YES. In this post, I will raise some basic questions and will delve deeply into this topic to debate the common resistance to what I call “pure cloud deployment.” I started my journey in the technology world only 10 years ago. I started establishing an online cloud and SaaS solution for the SMB, and 6 years later I was exposed to the great wonderful world of enterprise IT factory. I experienced and documented the challenge of moving the multi-million dollar IT shop to AWS cloud. I also supported and kept records on projects of enterprises and ISVs that moved resources from their on-premise applications to the Amazon cloud, beginning with their initial integration and continual maintenance all the way to the education and implementation of the cloud pay-as-you-go and on-demand models. In my journey, I saw how Salesforce grows like crazy and how its ecosystem mushrooms along with it. I've closely followed Amazon's every step of building the AWS cloud, which, without a doubt, has been a revolution from IT markets.
Ohio-based LLT Barcode & Label, has found powerful new ways to develop sales and leads inexpensively using Ariba Discovery to better connect with qualified new customers. Social tools, big data and business networks are reshaping e-commerce in such a way that buyers and sellers are linking up in ways not possible even a few years ago. In one example, Ohio-based LLT Barcode & Label, has found powerful new ways to develop sales and leads inexpensively using Ariba Discovery to better connect with qualified new customers.
Give Cisco 60 minutes - well, 52 minutes, in fact - and watch the networking giant unveil a game-changing technology to help you capture new business opportunities by creating innovative experiences with greater IT simplicity and investment protection. That is the value proposition of the video webinar that you can see this morning, this afternoon, this evening or indeed whenever is most convenient for you. It is free and it is only one click away.
A new report suggests that most users neglect to protect their mobile devices with security software. The use of personal mobile devices for work purposes means security providers have an opportunity to assist enterprise bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives, as a report from IT research firm Gartner suggested consumer adoption and willingness to pay for antivirus software on mobile devices is low, according to an article on eWEEK.com. The report predicts that 30 percent of consumer product selection criteria will be based on requirements to secure new mobile computing platforms by 2015. While the average IT-savvy consumer has five or more devices at home that connect to the Internet, consumers are far more likely to have an antivirus program installed on their laptops and desktops while tablets, mobile phones and gaming systems that connect to the Internet are often left unprotected.
In this hypercompetitive era faced with multiple technology transitions, businesses must change the game and transform how they engage customers to promote future growth. See Cisco unveil the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) Enterprise Networks Architecture, a game-changing technology that helps you capture new business opportunities by creating innovative experiences with greater IT simplicity and investment protection. Hear customers discuss how they use innovative networking technologies to solve IT challenges and impact business. Watch Rob Soderbery and Inbar Lasser-Raab introduce next-generation technology architecture unveiled at Cisco Live Orlando. Learn about breakthrough networking solutions that will help you to stay ahead of technology transitions.
It seems that everyone is a cloud provider these days. Much like the early Internet period of the ’90s or the early PC period of the ’80s, there is a lot of promise but also some peril. Standards are still being solidified, implementations vary even at the same service provider, and cloud deployments are hard to migrate. This last point is particularly problematic should the service provider choice be unfortunate. In his Opening Keynote at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Rich Place, Lead Partner - Cloud Services at SHI, will discuss the following trends: Needs-based vs. capability-based provisioning Cloud service portability Cloud service aggregation by meta-providers
Why has cloud computing failed to deliver on the promise of true high availability? Have we reached the limits of operational performance? Or are there emerging technologies that may make terms, like ‘downtime,’ ‘scheduled outage,’ or ‘unreachable’ obsolete? In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Dr. Jay Smith, CTO of Lagrange Systems will review weaknesses inherent in today’s approach to cloud computing and showcase how the next generation of technological advances will enable 99.999% or better.
There has been a lot of talk among vendors and industry experts in the last year about how APM fits in with the DevOps philosophy. There have been many claims that because a vendor is easy to install and use, it automatically make it a solution catered for a DevOps crowd. This can’t be further from the truth. Most vendors provide simple monitoring solutions that provide alerts on performance degradations. The problem is that to do performance properly in a DevOps setting you have to transition away from monitoring the performance of an application and start managing it –not just in the production environment, but across all phases of the software development and deployment process. DevOps is also about the equal share of application ownership between development, testing and operations teams. In order to share ownership you have to share a common language – a common set of tools and data – that is automated and integrated in your continuous application deployment process. But what does that really look like? Here is our perspective.
New reports show that when the NSA was conducting its surveillance programs, perhaps including XKeyscore and PRISM, the agency was not following its own legal guidelines. These reports, based on internal NSA audit reports leaked via the “Snowden leak”, showing the NSA violated its own privacy rules and overstepped its authority thousands of times in the past few years, will serve to further unsettle many enterprises abroad, even leading some to conclude that utilizing U.S. cloud applications is not worth risking unauthorized data access by the government and others. Recent reports estimate this new hesitation to use U.S. cloud applications may cost providers more than $35 billion in the coming years. With new revelations that the NSA broke its own privacy rules, enterprises globally may find even more reason to hold back from U.S. cloud providers, potentially making the size of the impact even worse for U.S.-based cloud providers. As we stated in a recent press release on the topic, when enterprises allow fears of surveillance to slow down or stop their adoption of U.S. cloud applications, it has the potential to put those enterprises at a competitive disadvantage to others in their industries – specifically in cases where they are “forced” to adopt a less beneficial/efficient cloud service for managing their business.