Microservices & IoT Power Panel at @DevOpsSummit | #IoT #M2M #Microservices #InternetOfThings

Buzzword alert: Microservices and IoT at a DevOps conference? What could possibly go wrong?
In this Power Panel at DevOps Summit, moderated by Jason Bloomberg, the leading expert on architecting agility for the enterprise and president of Intellyx, panelists peeled away the buzz and discuss the important architectural principles behind implementing IoT solutions for the enterprise. As remote IoT devices and sensors become increasingly intelligent, they become part of our distributed cloud environment, and we must architect and code accordingly. At the very least, you’ll have no problem filling in your buzzword bingo cards.
Evangelist for F5 Networks

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[slides] Taking Cloud Databases to the Edge | @CloudExpo @IBMCloudant #API #IoT #Microservices

Database apps on mobile devices shouldn’t stop working when there’s limited or no network connectivity.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Bradley Holt, a Developer Advocate for IBM Cloudant, discussed how to bring data stored in a cloud database to the edge of the network (and back again), whenever an Internet connection is available.

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For the Past Four Years @ThingsExpo Has Been a Must-Attend Event for @MetraTech | #IoT #M2M #API #InternetOfThings

This week, the team assembled in NYC for @Cloud Expo 2015 and @ThingsExpo 2015. For the past four years, this has been a must-attend event for MetraTech. We were happy to once again join industry visionaries, colleagues, customers and even competitors to share and explore the ways in which the Internet of Things (IoT) will impact our industry. Over the course of the show, we discussed the types of challenges we will collectively need to solve to capitalize on the opportunity IoT presents.

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Announcing @JFrog to Exhibit at @DevOpsSummit Silicon Valley | #DevOps

SYS-CON Events announced today that JFrog, maker of Artifactory, the popular Binary Repository Manager, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @DevOpsSummit Silicon Valley, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Based in California, Israel and France, founded by longtime field-experts, JFrog, creator of Artifactory and Bintray, has provided the market with the first Binary Repository solution and a software distribution social platform.

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Only one third of UK public sector comfortable with cloud – survey

Survey research reveals UK public sector workers still aren't sold on cloud

Survey research reveals UK public sector workers still aren’t sold on cloud

Only 35 per cent of public sector staff are comfortable using cloud-based services according to a survey report published this week.

The survey, commissioned by enterprise collaboration cloud service provider Huddle and carried out by Dods Research, petitioned more than 5,000 UK public sector workers on their views towards cloud services and collaboration.

According to the results just a third of public sector staff seem comfortable using cloud services, while slightly more say they have never used cloud services before.

The results come at a time when the UK government is looking to cut billions of pounds by cutting programmes and improving operational efficiency through the use of cloud services, a key pillar in its ‘cloud-first’ strategy originally revealed in 2013.

“The public sector frontline is stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Alastair Mitchell, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Huddle.

“On the one hand, staff are being asked to remove £13bn of spend, but on the other, the new cloud-based IT infrastructures that are key to a large proportion of these savings are not yet sufficiently understood or trusted enough to be widely deployed. UK government has to up the rhetoric on cloud benefits and training, else the cuts are simply not possible,” he said.

“It’s really very simple. If public sector employees — and in particular those in IT roles — are not convinced of the benefits of cloud computing and the changes to working practices that can be delivered through it, then the £13bn public sector savings are not realistic.”

The UK government spent over £4.3bn on IT services last year, though the government has frequently said cloud services must play a leading role in reducing IT spending across the UK public sector.

Ericsson details strategic plans beyond telecoms sector

Swedish networking giant Ericsson has made no attempt to hide the fact that it needs to diversify in order to survive and the nature of that diversification just got a bit clearer, explains Telecoms.com.

In his exclusive interview with Telecoms.com late last year CEO Hans Vestberg detailed the five main areas of diversification his company has identified: IP networks, Cloud, OSS/BSS, TV & Media and Industry & Society.Ericsson has spoken freely about the first four but has chosen to keep quiet about its industry & society initiative until it was ready.

That moment has now arrived, so Telecoms.com spoke to Nadine Allen (pictured), who heads up Industry & Society for Ericsson in Western and Central Europe. She explained that Ericsson sees a massive opportunity in helping other industries to capitalize on the way the telecoms and IT industries are evolving and converging, with IoT being a prime example.

“The evolved use of ICT is becoming increasingly important to all industries as they address the opportunities and challenges that the networked society will bring,” said Allen. “There is a growing need for ICT connectivity and services in market segments outside the traditional customer base of Ericsson, such as: utilities, transport and public safety.”

Ericsson has identified five key industries to focus on: Automotive, Energy & Utilities, Road & Rail, Safety & Security and Shipping. As you can see these are mainly quite industrial sectors, and this is in keeping with how things like IoT are evolving, with the main commercial applications being of a B2B type.

Ericsson has been a transformation partner to our customers for many decades and supported them in shaping their strategies,” said Allen. “This is a key strength relevant to customers inside and outside the telco space as they develop their connected strategies.

“We are a leading software provider and developer across all areas of the network, including OSS and BSS – these capabilities we see as being key to what will be needed to flexibly support the plethora of future use cases, some of which we can only imagine right now.”

Allen brought our attention to some specific use-cases, illustrated in the slide below. In utilities, for example, things like smart grids and smart metering are already emerging as a way to increase efficiency, while intelligent transport systems are doing the same for that sector.

Ericsson industry & society slide

All of this makes a lot of sense on paper, and Ericsson unquestionably has a lot of tools at its disposal to help industries get smarter, but combining these capabilities into coherent solutions and competing against companies such as the big systems integration and consulting firms will be a challenge. The Ericsson brand is strong in telcos, but not necessarily in transport, and it still needs to establish its consulting credentials beyond its home territory.

To conclude we asked Allen how she sees these underlying trends evolving. We believe the Internet of Things will have a profound impact in the future, enabling anything to be connected and providing ’smartness’ to these connected things will bring value across many sectors,” she said.

“The vision of IoT is a key part of the networked society and in one line I would say it is well described by ‘where everything that can benefit from being connected will be connected’. For example in a world of connected things, value will shift from the physical properties of a product to the services that it provides.”

Recipharm taps Merit Globe, Infor for legacy ERP modernisation

Recipharm has sent its ERP platform to the cloud

Recipharm has sent its ERP platform to the cloud

Swedish pharmaceutical manufacturer Recipharm has enlisted Merit Globe and Infor to modernise the company’s ERP systems to help reduce application fragmentation across the organisations.

Recipharm said it wanted to streamline its ERP system and reduce risk associated with its fragmented suite of legacy applications. It deployed Infor’s M3 cloud-based ERP platform to replace its existing on-premise solution.

“We can see that new features are being developed and industry-specific functionality added, removing the need for customisation.  This is critical for us as we instigate business process improvement projects,” said Mikael Porat, director of supply chain, Recipharm.

“Looking ahead we are assessing options outside of the ERP such as electronic signature , as this is of major importance for compliance within the pharmaceutical industry,” he added.

The project also included integration with a host of third party systems as well as a migration from IBM AS/400 to Microsoft SQL.

“Success in the pharmaceutical industry depends on managing two contrasting factors, continual product innovation and complete compliance with regulations,” said Mark Humphlett, director, industry and solution strategy, Infor.  “From an operational perspective this means an agile ERP and standardised processes are critical.  Customisations must be kept to a minimum and integration must be lightweight and flexible to support growth.”

Pharma is a heavily regulated industry and one of the main inhibitors when considering a shift to cloud services. Results from the BCN Annual Industry Survey earlier this year, which included responses from over 715 senior enterprise IT decision makers, suggest Pharma was among the top three least likely sectors to shift to cloud services in the next two years, Aviation and Emergency Services being the other two.

KPN acquires cloud provider IS Group

KPN has acquired IS Group, a Dutch cloud service provider

KPN has acquired IS Group, a Dutch cloud service provider

KPN has acquired IS Group, a large Dutch hosting and cloud services provider, for an undisclosed sum. The operator said the move will help bolster its business solutions portfolio.

Founded in 1996, IS Group offers managed cloud services and virtual desktop solutions to businesses in the Netherlands.

The company only operates datacentres in the Netherlands and claims annual revenues of roughly €25m, KPN’s primary market, and although the Dutch operator already offers some cloud services to enterprises it said the acquisition would allow it to expand its managed hosting capabilities with services like cloud-based workspaces for SMEs.

“Our business customers are increasingly asking for cloud-based services to support their growth,” Frank van der PostKPN has acquired IS Group, a large Dutch hosting and cloud services provider, for an undisclosed sum. The operator said the move will help bolster its business solutions portfolio., chief operating officer of KPN. “Together with IS Group we will be better able to service our customers in their transition to the cloud, with solutions that increase efficiency and flexibility, while allowing for rapid scalability.”

The move fits with KPN’s broader strategy of divesting its operations in other European markets – Belgium and Germany – to build out a broader portfolio of services in its home market of the Netherlands. The company has been fairly proactive at bolstering its cloud cred at the same time.

Last year KPN joined the Cloud Team Alliance, a partnership inked between Belgian telco Belgacom and Numergy, a French cloud computing specialist, which enables participating organisations to extend the coverage of their cloud services by sharing networks and technical resources that help each operator optimise their network architectures for cloud computing. Earlier this year the company also joined the newly formed Dutch Datacentre Association (DDA), which represents close to two thirds of the local datacentre and cloud sector.

Is OpenStack ready for prime time?

OpenStack has become a force to be reckoned with in the cloud computing market. The 451 Research Group forecasts OpenStack related sales at $3.3 billion (£2.13bn) by 2018 – pretty good for an open source development project.  But is it truly ready for the big time?

A potted history

OpenStack was introduced in 2010 as a project of NASA, who dropped out in 2013, and Rackspace. In 2011 Ubuntu adopted OpenStack and became the first “vendor” to integrate with the platform. In 2012 Red Hat began a project to integrate with OpenStack and introduced commercial support by July 2013. Over time many other organisations have joined the foundation as sponsors and contributors. Recently released OpenStack Kilo (version 11) has approximately 400 new features and was the product of almost 1500 contributors.

There is a downside to the open source model: lots of developers with lots of ideas about what should be included breeds complexity

The intent of the project was to create an open source cloud platform that enabled organisations to build their own cloud environments and have them communicate with other open cloud environments. The intended benefits of the OpenStack project were:

  • An open source style support model where developers all over the world were ready to help.
  • A essentially free open source pricing model.
  • Seamless workload migration between OpenStack clouds, without worrying about the underlying virtualisation technologies. This was intended to give rise to a true hybrid cloud paradigm.
  • Do-it-yourself cloud environment setup, creation and management

As time went on and the OpenStack foundation grew, projects were added and the core began to take shape. An every six month release cycle was put in place and OpenStack seemed headed for greatness. But there is a downside to the open source model: lots of developers with lots of ideas about what should be included breeds complexity.

A sprawling ecosystem

Over time, what started out as a platform for creating cloud compute, network and storage instances has evolved projects and components to cover many ancillary items.

The core components generally available in OpenStack are:

  • Nova – cloud computing fabric controller
  • Glance – provides discovery, registration, and delivery services for disk and server images
  • Swift – a scalable redundant object and file storage system
  • Horizon – graphical interface dashboard services. Third party products compatible
  • Keystone – centralised directory based identity services
  • Neutron (formerly Quantum) – system for managing networks and IP addresses
  • Cinder – block storage services. Includes support for Ceph, Cloudbyte, EMC, IBM, NetApp, 3PAR and many others
  • Heat – Orchestration services for multiple could components utilising templates
  • Ceilometer – Telemetry Service provides a single point of contact for billing systems

Example components that have been added or are in the works are:

  • Trove – database as a service provisioning
  • Sahara – Elastic Map Reduce service
  • Ironic – bare metal Provisioning
  • Zaqar – multi-tenant cloud messaging
  • Manila – shared file system
  • Designate – DNS as a service
  • Barbican – security API

Once the core components were developed by the OpenStack foundation, the ancillary projects were layered into the infrastructure. These are all great ideas, but all contributing to a larger and more complex stack. This complexity shows itself mostly in the configuration and deployment of the infrastructure.

A typical OpenStack deployment looks approximately like the following:

The above diagram is highly simplified and based on the VMware Integration with OpenStack (VIO) product. Note the inclusion of the VMware Services Processor (VSP) virtual machine.

All of the components of an OpenStack infrastructure are deployed as virtual machines whose numbers can be increased or decreased easily according to demand. If a multi-segment cloud is necessary (for example geographically distributed) multiple replicas of the above can be created and associated as regions within the same cloud. Even with the use of a vendor integrated OpenStack product (as above), deploying an infrastructure of this type requires considerable planning, integration and configuration of the various components.

Another aspect that arises from the complexity of the deployment is that increasingly organisations will turn to a vendor for help in deploying OpenStack. A not totally unforeseen consequence is that many vendors have developed their own integrated versions of OpenStack – this is where that big number at the beginning of the article comes from.

The best practice is to roll out core services, and then only add the ancillary services that are necessary

Some of the vendors who market OpenStack integrations are VMware, Red Hat, IBM, HP, Cisco, Ubuntu and F5. Even my own company (CSC) when developing their hyper-converged private cloud offering set, chose to use integrated versions, from VMware and Red Hat, for two of the three offerings.

So, is OpenStack ready for prime time? I believe with the right planning, and the support of an integrated vendor, yes, OpenStack is a viable paradigm for creation of private and hybrid cloud environments. Let us look at the original list of intended benefits:

  • Open source support model – still holds true but you can (and should) add on vendor support to better protect your investment of time and money
  • Open source pricing model – vendor-integrated OpenStack solutions are still considerably less expensive than the vendor’s non-open Source solutions.
  • Seamless workload migration – If configured properly all of the benefits of workload migration can be realised.
  • DIY cloud – This requires either staff that are well trained in OpenStack deployment or help from a vendor. Once your staff is trained and has lived through a deployment or two (in the lab) it is all DIY from there. Our staff at CSC, having worked with both vendors is now capable of delivering a private cloud environment to a customer in a matter of days.

On the issue of complexity, a great deal of attention has been paid to the seamless integration of the core components, in recent OpenStack releases.

At its heart OpenStack is a pluggable, modular architecture where new components can be spun up easily. The best practice here is to roll out the core services and then only add the ancillary services that are necessary.