Datical: Why DevOps is right for every organisation

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For a concept which merges different stakeholders within a business, it is perhaps not surprising that recent research concerning DevOps shows a fractured landscape. 84% of respondents surveyed by Gleanster Research in August defined DevOps in a multiple choice poll as “developers and system administrators collaborating to ease the transition between development and production”, while 69% opted for “using infrastructure automation to facilitate self-service provisioning of infrastructure by development teams.”

As a result, with every company being different, DevOps might not be for everyone. But Robert Reeves, chief technical officer of database automation provider Datical, disagrees. “Is DevOps right for every organisation? Yes,” he tells CloudTech. “Because the alternative is silos, and those are wrong for every organisation.”

Reeves explains this is due to a change in employee mindset rather than anything technological – if there are role-based silos, a ‘not my job’ mentality pervades, as CloudTech writer David Auslander espoused in this publication earlier this month. “Every person’s job in an organisation is to control cost and increase revenue – period,” says Reeves. “The biggest hurdle is having siloed employees recognise that fact. If a DBA [database admin] has an issue with a SQL script, then it’s the whole team’s issue because the software is not being released.”

The end goal of DevOps, as Reeves puts it, is to “trivialise releases and make them a non-event.” Providing database automation therefore makes sense, he argues, to keep up with demand. “In the past, when we had one release a quarter, it made good sense to have the DBA review each database change and manually look at each script,” says Reeves. “However we now have hundreds of applications and organisations are releasing updates monthly.

“That means one release each quarter has now become 100 releases a month – DBAs absolutely cannot continue to manually review every change.”

Datical recently received series B funding to the tune of $8 million (£5.6m), saying the money will go towards further sales, marketing and support activities. The message is simple: database admins are no longer custodians of the database, and the traditional response to turn down change requests is causing a bottleneck.

Yet Reeves explains getting this message across, with customers including eBay Enterprise, Deloitte, and the state of North Dakota, is easier than one might think. “Our customers recognise database automation is a challenge because they have previously automated application code delivery,” he says. “That makes it clear that database change is by far the biggest choke point in application release cycles.”

Reeves argues that until companies get database automation and move through changes more quickly, the full benefits of agile and DevOps will not be realised. But going back to the Gleanster survey results – is there still a need for a unified message? “More people need to be educated, but I think the market will take care of that,” says Reeves.

“Companies will start to realise that DevOps provides innumerable benefits,” he adds. “Many Fortune 500 IT executives are well aware of the benefits of DevOps and they realise that those [who] adopt DevOps will see more success.”

Navigating the Path to DevOps | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Microservices

The founders of RedMonk unpack the often tricky path to DevOps and to explore how enterprises can find ways to make pan-IT collaboration a rule, not an exception.
Gentleman, let’s look at DevOps through a little bit of a different lens. Often, it’s thought of as a philosophy. It’s talked about as a way of improving speed and performance of applications and quality, but ultimately, this is a behavior and a culture discussion — and the behavior and culture of developers is an important part of making DevOps successful.

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Digital transformation has increased the speed at which organizations must adapt. As they do so, it’s more important than ever to be able to choose solutions that will give them a comprehensive, real-time view of the network. Several factors contribute to this new priority:
Root causes and threats must be quickly identified, so network and security ops personnel must have the ability to view and share real-time data from multiple network environments.

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We’ve seen the statistics about the continued growth of cloud adoption in the enterprise in 2016 (not surprising). What some people might not realize is the projected growth of hybrid cloud adoption – what experts believe to be the next phase in the evolution of the cloud. The global market for hybrid cloud adoption was over $25 billion in 2014, and analyst firm IDC predicts the same market to reach $84 billion by 2019. The model is growing so rapidly because organizations want to take advantage of the cost-savings enabled by the public cloud, but they realize the model can’t provide the levels of security and regulatory compliance needed to protect sensitive or mission-critical on-premise data. A hybrid solution is the most secure and cost-effective approach for many organizations.

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Beginning with Ruxit Agent v1.83, Ruxit now supports Node.js 4. But that’s not all! With Ruxit Agent v1.85 we also show you the heap spaces and GCs of all Node.js 4.x processes.
Click the Further details tab to view details about V8 heap spaces and garbage collection runs.
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Although MIT makes the specific point that the Platform Business Model is exactly that, a business model not a technology, there is naturally a clear and powerful link with the Cloud model ‘PaaS’ – Platform as a Service.
This offers literally that, a Platform as a service, and so it can play a central component part in enabling the Platform Business Model.

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A Realistic Approach to Achieving Flexible Networks for Today and Tomorrow By @LeonAdato | @CloudExpo #Cloud

With another New Year upon us, I’ve found that as an industry we’re once again spending a lot of time looking forward, which is a good thing, but also not enough time grounded in the present or even the past, which absolutely can be a bad thing, especially for network administrators. After all, as the old adage goes: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”
Remember when the Internet became ubiquitous in the workplace? We weren’t prepared for that spike in capacity and had to scramble to fix existing issues to accommodate the influx of network usage. The same thing happened with BYOD – once people started sharing resources among an explosion of new devices, it exposed existing problems within our networks that needed to be resolved before BYOD could really be successful.

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Public cloud spending predicted to double by 2019 with storage booming

Cloud storageThe boom in public cloud service spending will propel AWS and Microsoft into the top five of the world’s biggest storage vendors, according to analysts.

Separate reports from IDC and the 451 Group suggest that the public cloud will growth overshadow the rest of IT and change the power balance.

The latest Public Cloud Services Spending Guide from IDC predicts that global spending on public cloud services will grow at six times the rate of the rest of the IT industry. With a 19.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) public cloud spending will double from last year’s $70 billion to $141 billion in 2019.

The popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS) will continue as it makes up two thirds of all public cloud spending in the forecast period. However Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) will grow faster, with spending on each rising by 27.0% and 30.6% respectively.

By 2018, most software vendors will have fully shifted to a SaaS/PaaS code base, predicted Frank Gens, Chief Analyst at IDC. This means the software industry is at a tipping point where SaaS becomes the preferred option.

The industries with the largest public cloud services expenditures in 2015 were discrete manufacturing at $8.6 billion, followed by banking and professional services at $6.8 billion and $6.6 billion, respectively. Telecommunications will be the fastest-growing vertical industry over the 2014-2019 forecast period with a worldwide CAGR of 22.2%. Other industries expecting a five-year CAGRs of over 20% are the media, government, education, retail, transport and utilities.

“The cloud is the future of IT but every organisation’s journey to the cloud is different and won’t always result in moving to a public cloud,” said Mark Ebden, strategic consultant at Trustmarque. However, he warned that companies need to assess the functions that can be moved to the cloud with the least disruption.

The fast growth of public cloud service companies is already disrupting the storage market, according to a 451 Research study. It found that public cloud storage will account for 17% of enterprise storage spending by 2017, up from 8% today. In some verticals like retail the public cloud will account for 25% of total storage spending by 2017.

Public cloud will shift the IT budget so that more money is spent on storage, according to the report. In addition, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft will become top five storage vendors by 2017. While the traditional storage players like leader EMC can dominate now, in two years spending on traditional SAN and NAS products will be more muted, said the report. Dealing with data and storage capacity growth is by far the single greatest pain point for storage managers and improving backup and disaster recovery will be the top storage objectives for 2016, according to 451 analyst Simon Robinson.

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The ability to check the status of IronPort’s health and usage is critical — and we allow you to do so from the same dashboard that also monitors the messaging servers. When IronPort fails, the entire email flow is shut down, meaning nobody in your organization can send or receive emails.
JF Piot, VP Product Management of GSX Solutions: The original IronPort Systems, Inc., was a company that designed and sold products and services to protect enterprises against internet threats. IronPort is now owned by Cisco Systems and called ESA (Email Security Appliance), and is mainly used for mail security such as email encryption, anti-spam, and antivirus.

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Tech News Recap for the Week of 1/18/2016

Were you busy last week? Here’s a tech news recap of articles you may have missed for the week of 1/18/2016!

Microsoft is cutting Azure prices by up to 17%. Citrix has hired a new CEO. Microsoft is donating $1B in cloud services to nonprofits. Wal-Mart is pushing for a greater online presence. Cloud infrastructure spend continues to grow. There were also a couple of good interviews that came out with new VMware CIO Bask Iyer and FCC CIO Dr. David Bray, as well as some good articles around wearables, app security, and the worst passwords of 2015. 

Tech News Recap

  • Microsoft Azure Prices Being Cut by up to 17%
  • Ex-Microsoft, BMC Exec Tapped for Citrix CEO
  • New VMware CIO Explains Approach to Containers
  • Cloud infrastructure spend grew by 23% in the third quarter of 2015
  • Google paid Apple $1 billion in 2014 to remain the default iOS search option
  • Which CFO Personality Is Right for IT?
  • IT Infrastructure Trends: 5 Worth Watching
  • Network security vs. app security: What’s the difference, and why does it matter
  • 2016 Roundup of Cloud Computing And Enterprise Software Predictions
  • Microsoft plans to donate $1B in cloud services to nonprofits
  • The cloud will own and drive your car
  • Cyber war isn’t turning out quote how it was expected
  • Wal-Mart merges tech teams in online push
  • Wearables are everywere, but are they part of BYOD
  • How will cloud computing influence the business world in 2016
  • These are the worst passwords of 2015
  • FCC CIO on fostering a team of creative problem solvers
  • 8 Ways Cloud Storage Delivers Business Value
  • Trends in CIO hiring: The road to the C-suite passes through operations

Download on-demand webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality.”

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist