The KCSP program is a pre-qualified tier of vetted service providers that offer Kubernetes support, consulting, professional services and training for organizations embarking on their Kubernetes journey. The KCSP program ensures that enterprises get the support they’re looking for to roll out new applications more quickly and more efficiently than before, while feeling secure that there’s a trusted and vetted partner that’s available to support their production and operational needs.

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Containers and Kubernetes allow for code portability across on-premise VMs, bare metal, or multiple cloud provider environments. Yet, despite this portability promise, developers may include configuration and application definitions that constrain or even eliminate application portability. In this session we’ll describe best practices for «configuration as code» in a Kubernetes environment. We will demonstrate how a properly constructed containerized app can be deployed to both Amazon and Azure using the Kublr platform, and how Kubernetes objects, such as persistent volumes, ingress rules, and services, can be used to abstract from the infrastructure.

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GCP Marketplace is based on a multi-cloud and hybrid-first philosophy, focused on giving Google Cloud partners and enterprise customers flexibility without lock-in. It also helps customers innovate by easily adopting new technologies from ISV partners, such as commercial Kubernetes applications, and allows companies to oversee the full lifecycle of a solution, from discovery through management.

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Skeuomorphism usually means retaining existing design cues in something new that doesn’t actually need them. However, the concept of skeuomorphism can be thought of as relating more broadly to applying existing patterns to new technologies that, in fact, cry out for new approaches.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, Senior Cloud Strategy Marketing and Evangelism Manager at Red Hat, discussed why containers should be paired with new architectural practices such as microservices rather than mimicking legacy server virtualization workflows and architectures.

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The LA Clippers are moving their CourtVision game-watching platform onto Amazon Web Services (AWS) and using machine learning to drive greater insights.

Clippers CourtVision, which was created alongside the NBA’s video tracking technology provider Second Spectrum, will have its data stored and analysed on AWS in real-time. The system uses cameras in every NBA arena to collect 3D spatial data, including ball and player locations and movements.

The system will also utilise Amazon SageMaker to build, train and deploy machine learning-driven stats which will appear on live broadcasts and official NBA videos. Clippers fans will be able to access greater insights, from frame-by-frame shots and analysis of whether a shot will go in, to live layouts of basketball plays.

The move with the Clippers comes hot on the heels of the Golden State Warriors moving to Google Cloud, utilising the company’s analytics tools for scouting reports and planning to host a mobile app on Google Cloud Platform.

On the court the two clubs have had recent differing fortunes, with the Warriors having won three of the last four championships. Yet the sporting arena is one of mutual interest to the biggest cloud providers. One of the guest speakers during the AWS re:Invent keynote in November was Formula 1 managing director of motor sports Ross Brawn, who explained how the sport’s machine learning projects were being ramped up after a softer launch this season. Alongside Formula 1, Major League Baseball is another important AWS customer.

“The combination of cloud computing and machine learning has the potential to fundamentally redefine how fans experience the sports they love,” said Mike Clayville, vice president of worldwide commercial sales at AWS. “With AWS, Second Spectrum and the LA Clippers leverage Amazon’s 20 years of experience in machine learning and AWS’s comprehensive suite of cloud services to provide fans with a deeper understanding of the action on the court.

“We look forward to working closely with both organisations as they invent new ways for fans to enjoy the game of basketball,” Clayville added.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

It’s seconds out for round two of the cloud story – one which has hybrid and multi-cloud at its core, and is open but secured and managed properly.

That was the key message from IBM chief executive and chairman Ginni Rometty at IBM’s Think Conference in San Francisco earlier this week.

“I’ve often said we’re entering chapter two – it’s cloud and it’s hybrid,” Rometty told the audience. “In chapter one, 20% of your work has moved to the cloud, and it has mostly been driven by customer-facing apps, new apps being put in, or maybe some inexpensive compute. But the next 80%… is the core of your business. That means you’ve got to modernise apps to get there. We’re going from an era of cloud that was app-driven to ‘now we’re transforming mission critical.’

“It’s very clear to me that it’s hybrid,” Rometty added, “meaning you’ll have traditional IT, private clouds, [and] public clouds. On average, [if you] put your traditional aside, 40% will be private, 60% public. If you’re regulated it will be the other way around.

“The reason it’s so important to [have] open technologies is that skills are really scarce. But then you’ve got to have consistent security and management.”

Naturally, IBM has been reinforcing this strategic vision with action. The $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat announced in October, albeit not yet to close, is a clear marker of this. As this publication put it at the time, it plays nicely into containers and open technologies in general. Both sides needed each other; IBM gets the huge net of CIO and developers Red Hat provides, while Red Hat gets a sugar daddy as its open source revenues – albeit north of $3 billion a year – can’t compete with the big boys. It’s interesting to note that at the time Rometty said this move represented “the next chapter of the cloud…shifting business applications to hybrid cloud, extracting more data and optimising every part of the business.”

Rometty assured the audience at Think that IBM would continue to invest in this future journey. “This is going to be an era of co-creation,” she said. “It’s why we’ve put together the IBM Garage and the IBM Garage methodology. [It’s] design thinking, agile practices, prototype and DevOps… but with one switch – we do them all in a way that can immediately go from prototype and pilot to production scale.

“I think we are all standing at the beginning of chapter two of this digital reinvention,” Rometty added. “Chapter two will, in my mind, be enterprise driven.”

It is interesting to consider these remarks, along with those of Google Cloud’s new boss Thomas Kurian this week, and look back on what has previously happened in the process. Kurian told an audience at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference that Google was going to compete aggressively in the enterprise space through 2019 and beyond. This would presumably be music to the ears of Amir Hermelin, formerly product management lead at Google Cloud, who upon leaving in October opined the company spent too long dallying over its enterprise strategy.

If IBM and Google are advocating a new chapter in the cloud, it may be because the opening stanzas did not work out as well as hoped for either. As this publication has opined variously, the original ‘cloud wars’ have long since been won and lost. Amazon Web Services (AWS) won big time, with Microsoft Azure getting a distant second place and the rest playing for table stakes. Google’s abovementioned enterprise issues contributed, as well as IBM losing the key CIA cloud contract to AWS.

Today, with multi-cloud continuing to be a key theme, attention turns to the next wave of technologies which will run on the cloud, from blockchain, to quantum computing, to artificial intelligence (AI). Rometty noted some of the lessons learned with regards to AI initiatives, from putting in the correct information architecture, to whether you take an ‘inside out’ or ‘outside in’ approach to scale digital transformation.

There was one other key area Rometty discussed. “I think this chapter two of digital and AI is about scaling now, and embedding it everywhere in your business. I think this chapter two when it comes to the cloud is hybrid and is driven by mission critical apps now moving,” said Rometty. “But underpinning it for all of us is a chapter two in trust – and that’s going to be about responsible stewardship.”

The remark, which drew loud applause from the audience, is something we should expect to see a lot more of this year, if analyst firm CCS Insight is to be believed. At the company’s predictions event in October, the forecast was that the needle would move to trust as a key differentiator among cloud service providers in 2019. Vendors “recognise the importance of winning customers’ trust to set them apart from rivals, prompting a focus on greater transparency, compliance efforts and above all investment in the security,” CCS wrote.

You can watch the full presentation here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Clare Hopping

Bobby Hellard

Slack is launching two new tools for developers to build apps within the business communication service without the need for in-depth coding knowledge.

The first is called ‘Block Kit’, which is a user interface (UI) framework to help developers do more with the information inside Slack. Its aim is to provide more flexibility and control over app message interactivity. It’s comprised of blocks, or stackable message components, that make it easy to control and prioritise the order of information.

The second tool is a ‘Block Kit Builder’, which is a prototyping tool for testing interactions as they appear in Slack so developers of all levels can see, understand and use the code. The Block Kit Builder tool has customisable templates that provide a foundational example for how to use blocks.

«The combined power of these blocks gives you the ability to deliver information in a clear, actionable way, enabling users to get more work done faster,» the company said in a blog post.

Within the Block Kit are five new smaller Blocks for sectioning, contextualising, imaging, dividing and actioning content.

In its blog, Slack highlighted some examples of developers using the tools. The first from a knowledge management platform called Guru helps people capture information as it’s shared with them in Slack. Using dividers, Guru’s «help» message now contains clearer calls to action, including an overflow menu that enables users to access advanced app functionality without cluttering their screen.

Guru example – courtesy of Slack

A second example from Optimizely, an experimental platform, has a Slack app that enables product and marketing teams to brainstorm, test and track digital campaigns. The context block clarifies which marketing campaign a particular message is referencing. In this case «Attic and Button.»

Optimizely in action – courtesy of Slack

However, what makes this interesting is that rather than offering the chance for experienced developers to build upon the platform, the Block Kit Builder will enable those less skilled or with little experience to quickly prototype their apps with customisable templates. These have the majority of the code already populated, offering a head start to budding developers.

Considering that the language that underpins artificial intelligence (AI), LISP, turns just 60 years old this year, there can be little doubt now that the technology itself has been adopted by the masses. AI has become a critical part of how businesses operate in an extremely short stretch of time – in 2017 alone, 61% of business had implemented AI in some way. Meanwhile, worldwide spending on such technology jumped by over 50% last year to a staggering $19 billion.

A natural byproduct of such unprecedented growth and adoption has also been its impact on more traditional approaches, especially to IT, such as operations. This has given rise to “AIOps”, whereby AI is applied to either enhance or replace, partially, a number of IT operational processes. Given this relatively new approach, Gartner already predicts that 25% of enterprises will be using AIOps by the end of this year.  

Moving beyond the nitty gritty, AIOps is really seeking to deliver insight into the digital experience, but also why such technology isn’t working, or even worse, breaking down. While this is extremely powerful, there are a number of data visibility issues that AIOps, on its own. This is why, in order to address such data gaps, specific measures are taken that compliment AIOps technology.

In the digital era, undoubtedly, the experience is now vital for every company and brand. Yet with this in mind, how can you monitor to protect this experience? Firstly, getting the right data is paramount. In light of this requirement, IT ops should have visibility to address all the elements that affect the digital experience, but also, crucially be able to address the “why” when digital experience breaks.

How can it do this?

Visibility should include digital experience monitoring (DEM) including HTML server availability and response time, page load and web transaction data. Yet more needs to be known, especially in the modern, cloud and Internet-dependent era. For example, a website or a service, such as a Salesforce API endpoint, may not be responding in a timely manner, but what can the ops team actually do with such information? It simply isn’t enough to go on because they still need to know why it is happening in order to actually solve the underlying problem.

As illustrated by this example, we can really see a significant gap in most IT Ops visibility architectures in place. This is because the vast majority of IT Ops visibility is based on passive data collection from different pieces of an overall puzzle it still has control over.

In today’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment, IT teams simply don’t have oversight, or even control over the myriads of external apps, services, infrastructure and Internet networks. This will only become a bigger issue as there will be no slow-down in the use of SaaS, as evidenced by Gartner’s estimation that the market will grow by 17%. In reality, what does this actually look like? For example, your IT team can’t input application performance management (APM) code into a SaaS provider’s software, and they also can’t gather infrastructure data from a network that doesn’t belong to you. As Gartner, pithily puts it, “Infrastructure and operations leaders must rely on outside partners.”

Yet without having data on this vast part of the current IT landscape, you’re left with a pretty insurmountable data gap that means that no level of analytical intelligence can actually make up for it.

Undoubtedly AIOps has a role in dealing with IT ops challenges, but it’s not a panacea for all the issues raised. For example, AIOps, at its core, doesn’t address the visibility data gap around understanding the impact of the Internet and other non-IT-controlled assets on the digital experience.

However, the ability to employ network monitoring technology can bridge this gap. At its heart, this technology measures communications across any Internet protocol (IP) network path, inclusive of internal, multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), Internet, cloud and SaaS network infrastructures. Backing this detailed monitoring up, is the metrics it measures to identify exactly why a digital experience may be failing. Given that the Internet is ever-changing, it also has the ability to collect global data feeds, while also formulating a continuously, full view of Internet routing, to understand if a specific path is having a problem, leak, or even hijack.

While it is possible to input such monitoring data into an AIOps platform and tune it to give you answers that are relevant to business issues, there is a challenge to get the right streams of data and to define how you want the AIOps engine to answer your questions. Given the pressures to uphold the digital experience on a day-by-day, 24/7 basis, complimenting AIOps with network monitoring is the most efficient and effective approach for businesses.

In today’s highly complex IT infrastructure environment that every company now faces, there’s simply no one technology that businesses can solely rely on for everything.

(c)iStock.com/SimCh

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Dave Mitchell

A cloud VoIP service that sets the standard for ease of use, features, flexibility and affordability