We’ve all experienced that jarring, soul-sucking moment when you’re already at work and realize you forgot your smartphone at home. When this happens to you, here’s exactly what to do, step-by-step: Step 1 Don’t panic! Step 2 Seriously, calm down. You’ve got this! You can make it one day without your smartphone. We promise. Step 3 […]
The post What to Do When You Forget Your Phone at Home appeared first on Parallels Blog.
At DevOps Summit NY there’s been a whole lot of talk about not just DevOps, but containers, IoT, and microservices. Sessions focused not just on the cultural shift needed to grow at scale with a DevOps approach, but also made sure to include the network ”plumbing” needed to ensure success as applications decompose into the microservice architectures enabling rapid growth and support for the Internet of (Every)Things.
Picture credit: Chef
IT automation and DevOps provider Chef has announced its availability in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace, expanding its collaboration with the infrastructure giant and offering one click deployment for AWS users.
Chef, whose clients include Facebook, Splunk and GE, now enables AWS customers to migrate workloads from on premise data centres to AWS, as well as migrate, deploy, automate, and manage change in the cloud.
Ken Cheney, VP business development at Chef, said: “Chef is excited to expand our collaboration with AWS. AWS’s market leadership in cloud computing, coupled with our expertise in IT automation and DevOps practices, brings a new level of capabilities to our customers.” Dave McCann, AWS Marketplace VP, added: “Our customers want easy to use software like Chef that is available for immediate purchase and deployment in AWS Marketplace. This new partnership demonstrates our focus on offering low-friction DevOps tools to power customers’ business.”
The two companies are also coming together on the AWS Loft talks series in New York and San Francisco, with Chef providing training and content focusing on DevOps success patterns.
According to Gartner research, DevOps will evolve from a niche strategy to a mainstream play by 2016, potentially being employed by a quarter of Global 2000 organisations. As things stand at the moment, however, companies are not so sure. As Kelly Stirman, VP strategy at MongoDB, told this reporter at the recent Cloud World Forum event, it is not for every company.
“What DevOps is really about is developers taking more and more control of the stack, [and] at the same time automating more and more of the stack,” he said. “There’s this happy story about getting ops and developers to work more closely together, and understand each other more. That’s nice, but it’s really about developers continuing to advance and take on more and more ownership of an entire stack.”
This publication has also examined the importance of DevOps when utilising AWS. As LogicWorks wrote in November 2014: “With a DevOps approach to deployment of cloud apps in an AWS environment, it may very well be possible that while the shift to cloud computing may test the reliability of the technology, in reality, it is not something that one needs to be overly concerned about.”
You can find out more about Chef for AWS here.
«We got started as search consultants. On the services side of the business we have help organizations save time and save money when they hit issues that everyone more or less hits when their data grows,» noted Otis Gospodnetić, Founder of Sematext, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.
We’ve been researching national IT dynamics for the past few years at the Tau Institute, covering more than 100 nations. We believe that aggressive adoption of IT on a national basis is the key to sustained economic and societal growth.
We also realize that larger forces can derail the most aggressive commitments and best intentions. The largest force is violence, whether local and endemic, terroristic, or a function of war. A second major force is overarching economic strategy, which is not explicitly violent but can continue to cause great disruption and distress.
Making Your Bed
Thus, we arrive at the Euro crisis, Greece, and the Procrustean Bed. The fundamental challenge within the Eurozone, known from the start, is that of yoking several unlike nations into a single economic sled.
The Euro was largely driven by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who saw a common currency between his nation and France as a way to eliminate the possibility of future wars between the two, and thereby achieve a long-term peace that Europe had not seen previously. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 shortly followed the unification of Germany in 1990, both occurring during Kohl’s time as Germany’s leader.
But the common currency didn’t end with the two largest (and similar) economies of Europe as members. The Maastricht Treaty allowed many other nations to become part of the Eurozone, if they promised to adhere to certain criteria.
Thus came a number of smaller and poorer nations with economies that were quite dissimilar to those of giants Germany and France. The yoke had been placed; the Bed (which in ancient Greek history is one in which hapless travelers are brutalized by the evil Procrustes until they fit into it) had been made.
Discrepancy
Per-person incomes in the Eurozone range from about $15,000 to $50,000 for the most part, unemployment rates vary widely, income parity varies widely, and our Tau Institute rankings of national IT environments vary widely as well.
It can be pointed out that there are also significant income and unemployment disparities across the United States, another single-currency zone. But the US has a very free flow of labor—if you can’t find a job locally you can move to a different state or region relatively easily—and a common (if unofficial) national language.
It is much, much easier, for an unemployed worker in high-unemployment South Carolina to seek work in high-employment Nebraska, for example, than for an unemployed worker in Greece to do the same in Germany. The US Federal Reserve Bank also has the ability to print money and have it flow through the states with a relatively politics-free flexibility that the European Central Bank simply does not.
As I write these words, it appears as if the crisis of Greece staying in the Euro will be resolved. Helmut Kohl himself has been sharply critical of positions within the current German government that are rigid in interpreting the letter of the law but fail to appreciate the notion of a united Europe within the united currency.
Tilting at Windmills
That said, it seems that a unified currency is a quixotic quest. As an example, below is a chart of where the currencies of four quite similar Southeast Asian nations (Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand) have traveled over the past five years. The lines moving upward the most quickly represent the weaker currencies.
Had these four similar nations been yoked to a common currency, the pressures on Indonesia (the blue line) to maintain budget discipline would be considerable when compared to the Philippines and Thailand (at the bottom). Malaysia (green line in the middle) would face considerable pressure not only to conform to an overall agreement, but would also be affected by economic stress from its neighbors below and above it.
There is rudimentary talk of creating a single Southeast Asian currency some day—this chart illustrates the difficulty of doing so.
Tying it Together
All of this discussion ties back into our ongoing research at the Tau Institute, and the work I do as Conference Chair of Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo.
At the Tau Institute, we seek to measure the relative dynamics of national IT environments, as well as their real-time momentum. By viewing the chart above, it should be no surprise that Indonesia lags within its region, whereas the Philippines is a leader. Malaysia actually follows the Philippines closely, with Thailand a bit further behind, for reasons other than currency fluctuation.
But the overall correlation is strong throughout Asia and other regions of the world. Back in Europe, for example, Greece trails every country but Italy and Russia (another under-performer with a serious currency dilemma).
Another significant point about Europe is that several non-Eurozone nations emerge among the leaders, including Denmark, Hungary, the UK, Sweden, Poland, and Bulgaria, all of whom outrank Germany.
That said, the Eurozone nations Estonia, the Netherlands, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania also score better than Germany. (It’s worth remembering that our rankings adjust for income and cost of living to provide a relative, not absolute picture of IT infrastructure development.)
Closer economic cooperation and even a united currency can bring great regional benefits if said region is viewed more like the US than completely independent nations. Giving up even small bits of sovereignty is an incendiary issue everywhere, so such thinking must be advanced very cautiously.
But my question is, if Greece is able to remain in the Eurozone, how will it be able to increase its commitment to IT development? From where will the money come? How can investors, governmental and private, be confident in an economic environment that looks to be one of continued austerity?
Meanwhile, the world continues to turn. My work with Cloud Expo | @ThngsExpo means bringing together 150 or so speakers twice a year to discuss the latest use cases, developments, and great thoughts about cloud computing and all that it entails.
These are the products, services, and solutions that are being adopted worldwide with the aim of improving economies and societies. It starts with these people, as I continue to wish for the day when violence and ham-handed government policy does less for those in power and more for everyone else.
Today air travel is a minefield of delays, hassles and customer disappointment. Airlines struggle to revitalize the experience. GE and M2Mi will demonstrate practical examples of how IoT solutions are helping airlines bring back personalization, reduce trip time and improve reliability.
In their session at @ThingsExpo, Shyam Varan Nath, Principal Architect with GE, and Dr. Sarah Cooper, M2Mi’s VP Business Development and Engineering, will explore the IoT cloud-based platform technologies driving this change including privacy controls, data transparency and integration of real time context with predictive analytics.
They will conclude with a look forward to tomorrow’s Smart Airports where airlines use connected baggage to predict plane fuel levels, security is ubiquitous and your seat remembers you.
SQL injections are unique compared to other cyberattacks. These threats are very common and have been around for a while. One would think that this would mean businesses should have an idea of how to stop these incidents from happening, right? Unfortunately, SQL security remains a thorn in the side of many companies today.
Everyone from pre-teens to granddads, does social media today. With Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and many newer ways to stay in the know popping up every day, picking the right platform can be a difficult task. While the personal value of this modern convenience seems obvious to most, the task of proving the channel’s worth to a business can be very challenging.
With this said up front, many larger companies have taken the plunge anyway. According to a recent eMarketer survey, 88 percent of U.S. companies with 100 or more employees that were surveyed are using social media for marketing purposes. This figure is actually expected to rise slightly to 89.5 percent in 2016. Dell has been a leader in the use of social media for business and recognizes that it has value for more than improved brand awareness. This large global corporation has become especially adept with social media, learning how to meaningfully increase business sales and revenue.
A similar survey of 350 small businesses done by the research firm Clutch, however, found that nearly half of those organizations don’t actively use social media to promote their businesses and 25 percent say they have no plans to do so in the future. Do these numbers represent a business “social media gap”? Are small businesses missing the boat?
As a small business owner myself, this question is more than just academic. When I founded GovCloud Network over a year and a half ago, using social media for marketing and opportunity identification was one of my strategic planks. In my simplistic view, we would use Twitter to advertise new content posted on the company’s blog, Cloud Musings. The expertise and knowledge demonstrated by thought-leadership pieces would, in turn, drive our targeted customer segment straight to the company website.
After reading this study though, I began to second guess both the money and time investments. So
prior to finalizing next quarter’s budget, I decided that an objective and quantifiable evaluation of our social media program’s ROI was needed.
The good news was that because social media was in the plan from the very beginning, we already had site visit data from the initial launch of all our sites. The bad news was that, being a startup, we couldn’t afford any fancy customized social media tracking service. We could only use what was freely provided by Google Analytics and Twitter. Luckily those tools are very good, and we were able to pull robust data sets from two three-month periods, August-October 2014 and March-May 2015. That data enabled us to measure Twitter engagement rate and the number of company blog and website users.
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| Social Media Engagement Model |
The engagement rate measures all clicks on a tweet, including retweets, replies, favorites, follows and link click-throughs. It is also used as a measure of how well a tweet resonates with its audience. By defining visitor segment characteristics in Google Analytics, we were also able to quantify how many users were members of specific market segments. The segments we selected corresponded to specific GovCloud Network business lines.
With this data and the use of relative percent difference as a comparative measure, the results were
stunning! Except for a reduction in the overall number of pages per session at the company website, our documented increase in Twitter engagements drove increases in the number of blog and company website users. This trend was also seen across all of our customer segments
Does this mean that social media is right for your small business? No, it doesn’t, but it does show how a small business can monitor, quantify and analyze the ROI of a social media strategy. My best advice is to not ignore the value that social media can bring. Using these services strategically does take an investment in time and sometimes even a little money, but the value could be significant. Have an open mind, plan a pilot, give it a little time, and don’t forget to do the numbers.
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| Social Media Engagement Results |
(This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. To learn more about tech news and analysis visit PowerMore. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies)
( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS – © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2015)
Data security breaches and hacker attacks on private businesses, health organizations and government agencies in the U.S. have grabbed headlines with increasing frequency, it seems. There is zero doubt about the damage these events cause. Cybercriminals and hackers walk away with customers’ payment card information and employee data while companies and federal authorities investigate the source of the leaks and spend millions of dollars to repair the harm.
(c)iStock.com/JVT
At DockerCon 2015 last week, it was very clear that Docker is poised to transform enterprise IT.
While it traditionally takes years for a software innovation — and especially an open source one — to reach the enterprise, Docker is defying all the rules. Analysts expect Docker will be the norm in enterprises by 2016, less than two years after its 1.0 release.
Why are Yelp, Goldman Sachs, and other enterprises using Docker? Because in many ways, enterprises have been unable to take full advantage of revolutions in virtualisation and cloud computing without containerisation.
If there ever was a container battle among vendors, Docker has won — and is now nearly synonymous with container technology.
Most already understand what containers do: describe and deploy the template of a system in seconds, with all infrastructure-as-code, libraries, configs, and internal dependences in a single package, so that the Docker file can be deployed on virtually any system.
But the leaders of the open-source project wisely understand that in order to work in enterprises, there needs to be a “standard” container that works across more traditional vendors like VMware, Cisco, and across new public cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services. At DockerCon, Docker and CoreOS announced that they were joining a Linux Foundation initiative called the Open Container Project, where everyone agrees on a standard container image format and runtime.
This is big news for enterprises looking to adopt container technology. First, in a market that is becoming increasingly skittish about “vendor lock-in”, container vendors have removed one more hurdle to moving containers across AWS, VMware, Cisco, etc. But more importantly for many IT leaders, this container standardisation makes it that much easier to move across internal clouds operated by multiple vendors or across testing and production environments.
A survey of 745 IT professionals found that the top reason IT organizations are adopting Docker containers is to build a hybrid cloud. Despite the promises of the flexibility of hybrid clouds, it is actually quite a difficult engineering feat to build cloud bursting systems (where load is balanced across multiple environments), and there is no such thing as a “seamless” transition across clouds. Vendors that claim to facilitate this often do so by compromising feature sets or by building applications to the lowest common denominator, which often means not taking full advantage of the cost savings or scalability of public clouds.
By building in dependencies, Docker containers all but eliminate these interoperability concerns. Apps that run well in test environments built on AWS will run exactly the same in production environments in on-premises clouds.
Docker also announced major upgrades in networking that allow containers to communicate with each across hosts. After acquiring SocketPlane six months ago, the SocketPlane team is working to complete a set of networking APIs, it looks like Docker is hard at work making networking enterprise-grade, so that developers are guaranteed application portability throughout the application lifecycle. Read all the updates from DockerCon 2015 here.
Docker does add another level of complexity when engineers are setting up the environment. On top of virtualisation software, auto scaling, and all of the moving parts of automation and orchestration now in place in most enterprises, Docker may initially seem like an unnecessary layer.
But once Docker is in place, it drastically simplifies and de-risks the deploy process. Developers have more of a chance to work on application knowing that once they deploy to a Docker file, it will run on their server. They can build their app on their laptop, deploy as a Docker file, and type in a command to deploy it to production. On AWS, using ECS with Docker takes away some of the configuration you need to complete with Docker. You can achieve workflows where Jenkins or other configuration integration tools run tests, AWS CloudFormation scales up an environment, all in minutes.
This simplified (and shortened) deployment cycle is even more useful in complex environments, where developers often must “remember” to account for varying system and infrastructure requirements during the deploy process. In other words, the deploy process happens faster with fewer errors, so developers can focus on doing their jobs. System engineers do not have to jump through the same hoops to make sure an application runs on infrastructure it was not configured for.
Many large start-ups, like Netflix, have developed workarounds and custom solutions to simplify and coordinate hundreds of deploys a day across multiple teams. But as enterprises are in the nascent stages of continuous delivery, Docker has come at a perfect time to eliminate the pain of complex deploys before they have to develop their own workarounds.
We mentioned it above, but it is important to note that setting up Docker is a specialised skill. It has even taken the senior automation engineers at Logicworks quite some time to get used to. No wonder why it was announced at DockerCon that the number of Docker-related job listings went from 2,500 to 43,000 in 2015, an increase of 1,720 percent.
In addition, Docker works best in environments that have already developed sophisticated configuration automation practices (using Puppet or Chef), where engineers have invested time in developing templates to describe cloud resources (CloudFormation). Docker also requires that these scripts and templates change. Most enterprises will either have to hire several engineers to implement Docker or hire a managed service provider with expertise in container technology.
On top of this, there are lingering concerns over the security of Docker in production — and rightly so. While many enterprises, like Yelp and Goldman Sachs, have used Docker in production, there are certain measures one can take to protect these assets for applications carrying sensitive data or compliance obligations.
Docker did announce the launch of Docker Trusted Registry last week, which is a piece of software that securely stores container images. It also comes with management features and support, which meets Docker’s paid support business objectives. This announcement is specifically targeted at the enterprise market, which has traditionally been skittish of open source projects without signatures and support (e.g., Linux vs. Red Hat). AWS and other cloud platforms have already agreed to resell the technology.
Over the next 12 months, best practices and security protocols around containers will become more standardised. And as they do, enterprises and start-ups will benefit from Docker to create IT departments that function as smoothly as container terminals.
The post Why Enterprises Need Containers and Docker appeared first on Gathering Clouds.