Monthly Archives: February 2016

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How to Create a High Performing API: A New Perspective for 2016 | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Performance is the elusive butterfly of API development. Everybody is intrigued with its beauty, yet few know how to capture it.

In the old days, the approach of many shops to ensure a performant API was to create some code and then pass it over to the wall to QA to do load testing. Later some integration testing took place. As long as the API worked and it was met some marginal performance benchmarks, things were good.
This worked well when a public, HTTP based API, consumed by a wide variety of distributed devices was more the exception than the rule. However, today APIs are a big deal and they are everywhere, so much so that companies are posting very big infographics prominently in the front page of the New York Times to create even more awareness about the technology to the general public.

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behind-the-scenes, Channel 9, Microsoft, Parallels Desktop, Parallels Desktop 11, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Parallels News

Behind the Scenes with Channel 9

Last week, Parallels was lucky enough to be invited on to Microsoft’s Redmond, WA campus and chat about virtual machines! We had a wonderful time playing with their fantastic studio, talking about virtual machines, Parallels Desktop for Mac, our advanced networking features, and our Visual Studio plugin. Check out our video on Channel 9, and some behind-the-scenes […]

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AWS, containers, Interviews, Open Source

AWS – we view open source as a companion

deepaIn one of the last installments of our series marking the upcoming Container World (February 16 – 18,  Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, USA), BCN talks to Deepak Singh, General Manager of Amazon EC2 Container Service, AWS

Business Cloud News: First of all – how much of the container hype is justified would you say?

Deepak Singh: Over the last 2-3 years, starting with the launch of Docker in March 2013, we have seen a number of AWS customers adopt containers for their applications. While many customers are still early in their journey, we have seen AWS customers such as Linden Labs, Remind, Yelp, Segment, and Gilt Group all adopt Docker for production applications. In particular, we are seeing enterprise customers actively investigating Docker as they start re-architecting their applications to be less monolithic.

How is the evolution of containers influencing the cloud ecosystem?

Containers are helping people move faster towards architectures that are ideal for the  AWS cloud. For example, one of the common patterns we have seen with customers using Docker is to adopt a microservices architecture. This is especially true for our enterprise customers who see Docker as a way to bring more applications onto AWS.

What opportunities does this open up to AWS?

For us, it all comes down to customer choice. When our customers ask us for a capability, then we listen. They come to us because they want something the Amazon way, easy to use, easy to scale, lower cost, and where they don’t have to worry about the infrastructure running behind it.

As mentioned, many of our customers are adopting containers and they expect AWS to support them. Over the past few years we have launched a number of services and features to make it easier for customers to run Docker-based applications. These include Docker support in AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS). We also have a variety of certified partners that support Docker and AWS and integrate with various AWS services, including ECS.

What does the phenomenon of open source mean to AWS? Is it a threat or a friend?

We view open source as a companion to AWS’s business model. We use open source and have built most AWS services on top of open source technology. AWS supports a number of open source applications, either directly or through partners. Examples of open source solutions available as AWS services include Amazon RDS (which supports MySQL, Postgres, and MariaDB), Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), and Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS). We are also an active member of the open source community. The Amazon ECS agent is available under an Apache 2.0 license, and we accept pull requests and allow our customers to fork our agent as well. AWS contributes code to Docker (e.g. CloudWatch logs driver), and was a founder member of the Open Container Initiative, which is a community effort to develop specifications for container runtimes.

As we see customers asking for services based on various open source technologies, we’ll keep adding those services.

You’ll be appearing at Container World this February. What do you think the biggest discussions will be about?

We expect customers will be interested in learning how they can run container-based applications in production, the most popular use cases, and hear about the latest innovations in this space.

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Microsoft’s Underwater Datacenter Is Cool as Cool Can Be | @CloudExpo #Cloud

Microsoft pulls a fast one! Good showing Microsoft.
Project Natick is Microsoft’s R&D feasibility project to explore, manufacture and operate a underwater.
Hey, you don’t look for cooling water, if you can take the salt out.
How is latency improved? drop the datacenter at the nearest ocean or lake.
Energy efficiency is no brainer considering the environment the datacenter is in.
Bring in 3D manufacturing and you can have a datacenter manufactured and deployed in no time at all, no need for expensive land acquisition, licenses, certificates etc.

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Linux, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Survey, Suse

Survey reveals support for OpenStack but fears over hidden costs

openstack logoAlmost all IT professionals want to adopt OpenStack but fear the hidden costs, according to a new study by SUSE Linux.

Positive sentiment could evaporate in the face of challenges such as difficult installation, skills shortages and the fear of vendor lock-ins, the report has warned.

The study was commissioned by enterprise Linux, cloud and storage infrastructure provider SUSE. Researcher Dynamic Markets interviewed 813 senior IT professionals in the US, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and the Nordics, along with 110 from the UK. According to SUSE, 80% of the UK group said they are planning to adopt or have already moved to OpenStack private cloud. But there is serious concern about the aforementioned private cloud installation challenges and possible vendor lock-in.

Though 88% of companies said they have a private cloud at work an even higher percentage (96%) said they would use a cloud solution for business-critical workloads. Almost as many, 94%, said they see infrastructure-as-a-service as the future for the data centre.

However, many respondents confessed that the practicalities of OpenStack might get in the way and gave a series of responses that indicate there may be a high degree of difficulty involved.

Almost half of UK enterprises that have tried to implement an OpenStack cloud have failed, according to SUSE. Another 57% said they found the implementation experience difficult. Meanwhile, another 30% could be about to endure an off-putting experience, according to SUSE, since this number plan to download and install OpenStack software themselves, which (says SUSE) could exacerbate their difficulties.

Despite the open ethos of OpenStack, an alarming 91% of UK respondents are wary about falling victim to vendor lock-in when they choose a private cloud infrastructure.

Keeping control of the infrastructure will be made even harder by the impossibility of finding staff, said the report, as 89% say a lack of available talent in the market is making them reluctant to embark on a private cloud project.

The Cloud may be the future but there are clear concerns about how it should be integrated and managed, according to Mark Smith, SUSE’s senior product marketing manager. With cost the primary motivator for adopting the cloud, many IT professionals worry that there will be a price to pay later, according to SUSE.

IaaS, News & Analysis, Oracle, Platform as a service, UK

Oracle launches a mission critical PaaS from its Slough data centre

OracleOracle has added new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offerings from its Slough data centre, which currently caters for 500 UK and global customers.

Clients from both the private and public sector are being promised tailored versions of the new services, which include Oracle’s Database, Dedicated Compute, Big Data and Exadata cloud services.

Oracles claims that it is offering enterprises a mission critical PaaS and outlined four main selling points for the new services. Clients will now be able to develop, test and launch applications much more rapidly and cheaply, it claims. No supporting figures were given to exemplify this, however. Secondly, the new service will give companies greater flexibility without compromising their security, Oracle claims.

It will also use Hadoop’s open-source software framework for storing data and running applications on clusters of commodity hardware. This, says Oracle, will provide massive storage for any kind of data, boost the available pool of processing power and allow the data centre to handle a far greater volume of concurrent jobs. Oracle claimed that this can be delivered as a secure, automated service that meshes with existing enterprise data in Oracle Database. The fourth plank of its new offering is instant access to a virtual computing environment to run large scale applications on the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle currently has 19 data centres running its Oracle Cloud from various points of the globe. Last week it announced the intention to open a new Cloud data centre in Abu Dhabi. Oracle will be investing in two new cloud sales centres in Amsterdam and Cairo along with new offices opening this year in Dubai, Dublin and Prague.

In December 2015, BCN reported that Oracle’s co-chief executive Safra Catz warned fiscal 2016 will be “a trough year for profitability as we move to the cloud.”

In January 2016, however, BCN reported that Oracle had announced aggressive expansion plans with a recruitment drive for junior and senior sales staff to be based in six cities across EMEA.

The cloud software giant is now actively headhunting for 1,400 new cloud sales staff to work out of sales HQs in Amsterdam, Cairo, Dubai, Dublin, Malaga and Prague.

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Microsoft Takes Giant Leap in Cloud Computing Market By @Dana_Gardner | @CloudExpo #Cloud

The arrival of the Microsoft Azure Stack Technical Preview marks a turning point in the cloud-computing market and forms a leading indicator of how dramatically Microsoft has changed in the past two years.
The cloud turning point comes because the path to hybrid-cloud capabilities and benefits has a powerful new usher, one with the enterprise, developer, and service-provider presence, R and D budget, and competitive imperative to succeed in a market still underserved and nebulous.

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Catalogic Software, hybrid cloud, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM and Catalogic Software combine to slash costs of data management

IBM and Catalogic Software have jointly launched a new set of systems which combine Catalogic’s copy data manager ECX with IBM’s storage offerings, in a bid to help clients trim the excessive costs of duplicate data.

The objective is to make DevOps and Hybrid Cloud initiatives easier and less wasteful for IBM clients by automating storage and data management, creating self-service options and creating access to Catalogic software though IBM’s RESTful API management.

Catalogic’s ECX is described as a virtual appliance that runs on a client’s existing infrastructure and acts as a lever of power over storage controllers, storage software systems and hypervisors. IBM claims it has validated the system through months of testing and the two can work in tandem to improve the operations of the core data centre. The combination of the two creates new tools that are necessary for supporting new workload environments and use cases, according to a Catalogic statement.

Today’s core data centre architecture and associated processes don’t lend themselves to agility and flexibility, though they are reliable and secure. Catalogic’s ECX has given IBM a method of creating the former, without sacrificing the latter, said IBM. The key to this is making the storage infrastructure more flexible so that data can be virtualised and kept in one place rather than endlessly replicated for a variety of different project teams. One of the benefits is that live environments can support key IT functions that rely on copies of production data without having to massively expand the data footprint. ECX and IBM’s service services can jointly create a culture of

elasticity and sharing of cloud resources across a variety of functions including Disaster Recovery, Test and Development, Analytics and other departments.

The lower operating costs of cloud resources and saved manual efforts through ECX’s cloud automation will bring up to a 300% return on investment, claims IBM.

Among the systems that ECX can now combine with are IBM’s Storwize family of hybrid flash/HDD systems, the SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystem V9000, Hybrid Cloud Operations with IBM SoftLayer and IBM Spectrum Protect.

“Copy data management can significantly improve data access and availability and create remarkable cost savings,” said Bina Hallman, VP of IBM Storage and Software Defined Systems.

Mac Management, managing macs, Microsoft SCCM, Parallels Business Solutions, Parallels Mac Management, Parallels Mac Management for Microsoft SCCM, SCCM, System Center

Why Aren’t You Managing Your Macs? Part 1

Most IT pros admit that Macs are coming into their environment for a variety of reasons. They also know that best practice proves that these Macs should be managed. Unfortunately, the task of managing Macs usually stalls before it even gets started. There are a number of reasons (excuses?) why—including budget, perceived complexity, prioritization, and […]

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