The killer in any IT operation is unplanned work. Unplanned work may go by many names: firefighting, war rooms, Sev 1 incidents. The bottom line is that Operations must stop whatever planned work it was doing to manage this drill. This means little or no normal work is being accomplished. It is a scenario most of you will be familiar with: your application servers are humming along happily until suddenly, without an obvious reason, memory usage starts to increase, soon followed by longer garbage collection suspensions that finally force you to restart the application. The operations team is typically unaware of the actual impact on end users (other than a service being down), and it additionally lacks data and time to further investigate the issue. As communication between the traditional silos of operations, testing and development teams is often less than ideal, a scheduled restart in a “low impact” timeframe is often the easiest solution and turns into something resembling a “Production Best Practice” over time. This adds to the workload of an operations team because unplanned work becomes unnecessary preventative work. It also becomes a suspect every time there is a problem with the application. Wouldn’t it be better to actually fix the issues instead of just working around them? Shouldn’t there be a general understanding across all teams responsible for an application to fix the problem as fast as possible and make sure that it’s prevented in the future?
Archivo mensual: octubre 2013
OpenStack Fundamentals: Replacing Nova-Network with Neutron
If you’ve had an OpenStack deployment for any length of time the chances are very good that you are still using nova-network. With the planned deprecation of nova-network right around the corner with Icehouse it’s time to start planning your transition from nova-network to Neutron.
Nova-network is a single monolithic process, that while complicated, handled all your networking needs. Neutron is very different system from nova-network with numerous components. It can be hard to understand how all the different components fit together to replicate the functionality you’ve come to rely on from nova-network.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Chet Burgess, Senior Director, Engineering at Metacloud, will take a look at some of the core functionality in nova-network and show you how it maps to Neutron. He will start by describing a multi-project nova-network setup that utilizes fixed IPs, security groups, floating IPs, and VLANs for project isolation. Over the course of the session he will describe the Neutron components that provide this functionality. By the end he will have a complete Neutron-based architecture that replicates your existing nova-network deployment. Finally he will cover the gaps between nova-network and Neutron today as well as what pitfalls you might encounter during your transition.
Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie: Legacy data vendors should learn from history
With Oracle, SAP and IBM fighting for precious market share on the in-memory relational database market, and the likes of MongoDB, Couchbase and DataStax putting together momentum in the NoSQL space, it almost feels like whoever wins the battle will win the war of database customer buy-in.
Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold told CloudTech his company’s position was that the market was going to move to the “disruptive” NoSQL technologies that “ultimately are going to dominate.”
This, of course, may not be a hugely surprising admission – although the tone of it raised eyebrows – yet according to Matthew Finnie, CTO of cloud service provider Interoute, the incumbent legacy vendors should definitely be looking over their shoulders.
“For the incumbents of this world, they have a recognised revenue stream that they have to maintain and retain,” Finnie, who is speaking at Apps World Europe next week, explained in a call. “And they …
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: How to Manage Your Heterogeneous Cloud
Hybrid cloud sprawl is making life challenging for IT admins. Different environments, different functionalities and capabilities, different interfaces.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Kit Colbert, Chief Architect and Principal Engineer with the Office of the CTO at VMware, will discuss how the next generation of management tools will abstract over differences in heterogeneous environments to allow for a consistent approach to private, public, and hybrid cloud management.
Cloud Expo Launches DevOps Journal
Cloud Expo has launched DevOps Journal on Ulitzer.com featuring over 1066 original articles, news stories, features, and blog entries. DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing.
SYS-CON CEO Carmen Gonzalez is founder and publisher of DevOps Journal. Long-time IT editor/analyst Roger Strukhoff, who is currently Executive Director of the Manila-based Tau Institute, has been named Editor.
«We’ve seen explosive growth in web traffic for our Cloud Computing content, and in the number of attendees and exhibitors at our Cloud Computing Expo,» said Gonzalez. «We also have an outstanding group of speakers focused on DevOps at the upcoming 13th International Cloud Expo, November 4-7 in Santa Clara, CA. Launching DevOps Journal at this time demonstrates our commitment to maintain our industry leadership and provide valuable contributions to the global enterprise IT community.»
Cloud Expo Announces 2014 DevOps Fundamentals Event Calendar
Upcoming Cloud Expo Silicon Valley [Nov 4-7] has a special emphasis on DevOps. In 2014 Cloud Expo will be presenting three DevOps Fundamentals Events, which will take place February 18-19, 2014, in New York City, NY, April 22-22, 2014, London, and June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. DevOps Fundamentals at Cloud Expo® will feature three full days of intense educational sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players.
DevOps is a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) professionals.[1] DevOps Fundamentals will bring valuable information to DevOps professionals who are transforming the way enterprise IT is done.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Continuous Deployment Using the Cloud
Continuous Deployment is helping companies become more responsive to changing business needs without major disruptions or downtime.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Ed Leafe, Developer Advocate at Rackspace, will cover some of the issues when moving to a Continuous Deployment model, and how different cloud architectures can make managing application changes much simpler and more reliable.
Ed Leafe has been a developer for over 20 years, and is one of the original developers of OpenStack. After leaving the Microsoft world over a decade ago he has been primarily a Python developer, and has spoken at several PyCons around the globe. He also throws a mean Frisbee.
ThousandEyes to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that ThousandEyes will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
ThousandEyes provides detailed visibility into the performance of cloud apps and helps enterprises and cloud app providers collaborate to resolve performance problems quickly. Customers include members of the Fortune 500, 7 of the top SaaS providers and others.
Can We Finally Find the Database Holy Grail?
The world runs on transactional database systems. Every business depends on them, and we each interact with them many times each day. Furthermore the world needs to build thousands more applications of transactional database systems to support the next-generation web. Nothing controversial there, but there is a problem: transactional database systems have stubbornly refused to join the 21st century.
The rest of the world is moving toward data center architectures predicated on thousands of commodity machines, commodity networks, and «scale-out» designs. These data centers will offer on-demand computing services that can instantly increase or decrease capacity to applications as needed. It’s easy to just add more web servers, application servers, or storage servers as required. Unfortunately while that works at every other level in the computing stack it does not work at the database layer. Database systems are scale-up systems, not scale-out systems.
Fusing Cloud SOA & Cloud M2M – Building an On Demand, Real-time Enterprise
Back in 2002 Vinod Khosla, one of the elite of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur community (co-founded Sun Microsystems among others), wrote a white paper called the Real-Time Enterprise
At the same time I also wrote a similar paper entitled Building an On Demand Enterprise, which was based around the same principles. We both described utilizing a ‘loosely coupled’ and federated business model via the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), to build more agile organizational structures.
These service architectures were achieved by integration technologies and standards like SOAP, which as we zoom forward ten years we can see still persists in terms of the underlying model but has now been replaced by REST, a more web-oriented approach suitable to the new Cloud world.