SYS-CON Events announced today that FierceDevOps 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.
FierceDevOps keeps software developers and IT operations personnel updated on the latest news and trends around the rapidly evolving role of the traditional IT worker.

read more

The Open Compute Project is a collective effort by Facebook and a number of players in the datacenter industry to bring lessons learned from the social media giant’s giant IT deployment to the rest of the world.

Datacenters account for 3% of global electricity consumption – about the same as all of Switzerland or the Czech Republic — according to people I met at the recent Open Compute Summit in San Jose.

With increasing mobility at the edge of the cloud and vast new dataflows being predicted with the growth of the Internet of Things (and The Coming Age of Many Zettabytes) in the near future, the carbon footprint of the datacenter industry has become an important issue.

Jay Parikh, VP of Engineering at Facebook, Canonical CEO and sometime astronaut Mark Shuttleworth, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, and HP Enterprise Group SVP Antonio Neri were among the keynote speakers.

Also speaking was OpenStack co-founder Cole Crawford, who now heads a startup called Vapor.io that’s dedicated to reforming the datacenter hardware industry. Open Compute CEO Corey Bell, who was named to this position in December, was also promiment during the conference.

Two Worlds, Meeting
Datacenter professionals are obsessed with the cost of electricity per kilowatt-hour, and talk in terms of PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness, the relative amount of power needed to keep all that iron in a datacenter running cool). The number of kilowatts that can be stuffed into a rack, the cost per megawatt to build a new center, and whether buildings really need to feel like meat lockers are all major topics of discussion.

Meanwhile, software professionals – like the thousands who’ve been trekking to New York and Santa Clara for Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo – think about hybrid cloud, lean and agile programming, the new trend toward microservices, and the revival of containers.

These two worlds meet in pieces of a couple of Venn diagrams—the first in their commitments to transparency and open source, the second in their renewed thinking about containers.

Open Up!
Three of the four largest datacenter operators in the world are anything but open, according to a number of speakers at the Open Compute Summit. The fourth, Facebook, was lauded for its willingness to break from the pack. It is, of course, in any datacenter operator’s interest to share knowledge, as even small increments in improved performance and best practices can have millions of dollars of operational impact annually to a major operator.

The impacts are also important to smaller players as well. All of IT collectively uses about 10 percent of global electricity, according to several sources I’ve seen. Additionally, the emergence of smart meters, smart grids, and smart appliances will, in theory, allow a magnified impact on electricity use if the IT itself can lower electricity use by all those things attached to the IoT.

To Dream the Impossible Dream
The research I’ve led at our Tau Institute for the past three years shows that dramatic increases in societal development throughout the world will not occur unless humanity as a whole vastly improves its energy efficiency. Most developing nations use 3 to 5% of the electricity per-person as the developed world, and it will simply be impossible, economically and physically, to replicate developed levels of energy use on a global scale.

Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo
More specifically, and in the short term, I need to note that we have just opened some key speaking opportunities on the topic of microservices and containers on the Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo program. Please visit the website or contact me via Twitter to learn more.

The Open Compute Project is large, ambitious, and peopled with passionate proponents. But it is just one way to make a difference. Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo are another. Please let me know any other ideas you have!

read more

Wearable technology was dominant at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) , and MWC was no exception to this trend. New versions of favorites, such as the Samsung Gear (three new products were released: the Gear 2, the Gear 2 Neo and the Gear Fit), shared the limelight with new wearables like Pebble Time Steel (the new premium version of the company’s previously released smartwatch) and the LG Watch Urbane.
The most dramatic difference at MWC was an emphasis on presenting wearables as fashion accessories and moving away from the original clunky technology associated with the industry. Along with more pleasing aesthetics, software updates and more capabilities also target early adopters.

read more

(c)iStock.com/maxsattana

The agile enterprise; it becomes ever more elusive the larger a business grows. As systems are developed over time, they can often hamper progress as they become inflexible and more complicated in comparison to the consumerisation of modern business technologies which are increasingly intuitive and blur the lines between the technologies that people use at home and work.

For some enterprises the answer is a large wholesale change, taking a phased approach to its implementation whilst others may have a business system that forms a solid foundation but wish to transform pockets of inefficiency or to introduce collaboration tools using cloud technologies. Whilst there is value in both approaches here we’re going to delve deeper into the factors that every enterprise should consider when extending their existing solution with cloud applications.

Today it’s more practicable on both the technology and financial front to pinpoint particular areas of inefficiencies in the business where it previously might not have been cost effective to do so. Take for instance expense management. Gone are the paper- or excel-based timesheets and the constant rekeying as cloud-based expense software means this can all be done online at the point of entry and tools such as in-app messaging is making it easier to resolve any issues with the ability to see if a person is online and discuss problems through live chat.

The number of expenses being processed each month will of course vary between companies but it is a prime example of an admin heavy, repetitive task where vast improvements can be made. At the other end are the collaboration and communication tools which help to join up the business; particularly useful where teams are dispersed or where a business wants to interact and collaborate with their customers using cloud-based communication technologies. The scale of what is possible for business now has greatly increased.

So what does an enterprise need to consider when extending existing solutions with cloud applications? It’s important when you’re creating your cloud plan to firstly understand where in the business the inefficiencies are – these are very often the areas of the business where the same tasks are being repeated over and over again, making them perfect candidates to replace with technology, speeding up processes and reducing mistakes. 

This planning stage should also consider what technologies are out there that fit your requirements, what are they going to integrate with, what technologies are they built on, does the software vendor have a strong development roadmap, what other software do they have that would help further down the line, what security standards and policies do they adhere to, and who exactly is going to be using the systems. This last factor is particularly important as these individuals need to be included to make sure that any new software is fully adopted. All of this should sit alongside the investment plan and return on investment calculations.

The size of the project will influence resource requirements for the migration process and whether this needs to be handled internally or outsourced to a third-party. Indeed, now would be a good time to clean up any data issues too so that the information being transferred across is as clean and up-to-date as possible. Whichever road a business takes, it will however, need to know not only which specific data is going to move to the cloud but also any regulatory or compliance issues that need to be taken into consideration. This also includes the maintenance of any on-premises assets, whether this is for instance legal compliance, data protection or security.

When the time comes to migrate your data, ensure that you have a back-up and recovery procedure in place to guard against loss whilst you’re synchronising the data. With the best will in the world issues do happen so you need to be able to get access to your original data if a problem occurs.

And finally the linchpin to this working effectively is integration between the different applications, data, network and so on, ensuring that the business logic and the data structures reflect what the organisation requires. This is fundamental to gaining the agility the business needs. This means that essential data should be available within the different parts of the system, as we highlighted earlier in our expense management automation example – and it should also help to bring together data from around the business.

However, where this is not possible there are some great cloud-based business intelligence tools, which can effectively sit over existing systems, pulling information from different sources. This allows huge value to be gleaned from information that already exists in the organisation which can be mapped over different data sources, and sliced and diced to uncover new insights, issues and trends.

Technology is changing at warp speed and many organisations are utilising cloud to expand their existing solution from absence management for HR to expense management for finance. The key drivers for this are many including the fact that it’s relatively quick and easy to deploy with immediate impact and return on investment and from a user’s perspective, it is easy to learn and accessible via most devices. At its best it fine tunes processes by either automating them or providing the tools to make the activity more efficient, leaving the business to focus on what it does best.

In recent years, we’ve watched mobile, cloud technologies and Internet of Things (IoT) enable increased connectivity for every network and every industry, ranging from connected cars to commercial vehicles and fleet management to smart cities to data centers. At MWC, it was clear that professionals in these areas are continuing to make strides in their fields. Below are a few of the major developments we noticed and look forward to hearing more as 2015 progresses.

read more

DevOps is a hot topic. It seems that everyone is talking about it. Some have built business models around DevOps-related tools and themes. There are conferences and trade shows dedicated to DevOps-strategies and techniques. Some people have even made their careers around talking about it. In light of all of that, I find it chuckle-worthy that very few people actually know what DevOps is (just follow #devops on Twitter for proof.) I am not going to be one of many trying to create a buzzword-infested definition of DevOps to suit my particular agenda. Instead, I’d like to talk about what DevOps is not.
So, without further ado, DevOps …

read more

The WebRTC Summit 2014 New York, to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, NY, announces that its Call for Papers is open. Topics include all aspects of improving IT delivery by eliminating waste through automated business models leveraging cloud technologies. WebRTC Summit is co-located with 16th International Cloud Expo, @ThingsExpo, Big Data Expo, and DevOps Summit.

read more