BetaBoston is reporting a shake-up at LogMeIn’s Xively Internet of Things division. «Several top execs focused on launching new services to support the “Internet of Things” — sometimes called machine-to-machine communication, or M2M — have left Boston-based LogMeIn in recent months. Among those who have left the Xively division in 2014 are chief technology officer Philip DesAutels; Chad Jones, a vice president of strategy; and Les Yetton, the one-time general manager of the group.»
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Interview: @Apcera Aims to Restore Order to the Cloud [@CloudExpo]
Cloud computing is one of the great disruptions in the history of IT, fundamentally because of its promise to deliver software, platforms, and infrastructure from afar. The SaaS/PaaS/IaaS continuum has brought a revolution to enterprise IT, and accelerated another revolution, the movement toward DevOps.
Disruption and revolution are very exciting things to talk and write about. But the topics bring chills down the spines of most IT executives and managers. Disruption and revolution can mean chaos to the people who are responsible for setting and maintaining policies and governance within the complex enterprise IT systems they build and manage.
Enter Apcera with a platform it calls Continuum, which aims to disrupt the disruptors in the PaaS space with “a policy-driven platform that gives IT the agility it wants and the governance it needs,” according to the company. Apcera has just announced the sale of a majority stake in the company to Ericsson,
Apcera was founded in 2012 by former Google and VMware executive Derek Collison, who serves as CEO, “with the intent of bridging the divide between developers and ops organizations with an enterprise-class platform that integrates policy and security from the start.”
We had a few questions for Derek, and here’s what he had to say:
Cloud Computing Journal: We think of Apcera as a PaaS vendor. Yet you say that you’re going beyond that, that “PaaS is not enough.” Why is this so?
Derek Collison: Traditional PaaS was designed with a limited purpose: To speed up the deployment and lifecycle management of modern greenfield apps. Essentially, it was designed by developers, for developers, to enable fast innovation and deployment.
When you take a holistic view of the enterprise, you will see that traditional PaaS doesn’t address traditional needs for security, access control, governance and additional features that are critical for other departments within the enterprise. And enterprises need a platform that is capable of handling more than just new apps.
A platform also must be able to handle legacy applications, operating systems and containers, such as Docker images. Traditional PaaS is simply a black box when it comes to handling such a diversity of workloads.
CCJ: And how do you go beyond this?
Derek: As we innovate beyond the traditional PaaS, we took these important considerations to heart and developed our policy-driven platform, called Continuum, which empowers both developers and operational teams to quickly and efficiently deploy, orchestrate and govern a diverse set of workloads on premise and in the cloud.
By integrating policy and governance a part of the core of the platform, Continuum will enable developers and operations teams to deploy workloads of any kind significantly faster without sacrificing crucial security requirements.
CCJ: Governance and policy are enterprise IT linchpins, along with security. They seem to cause anxiety to many enterprise IT managers who are starting to work with cloud computing. How are you addressing this anxiety?
Derek: The anxiety exists because, in increasingly complex and heterogeneous IT environments, enterprises often face a critical trade off. They can develop new services faster with increased risk or maintain security by implementing policy after solutions are developed, which hampers their agility.
These trade-offs in agility and security often cause conflicts between the developers and operations team within an enterprise.
Developers innovate at warp speed. But ops organizations often put the brakes on their development progress to ensure that the enterprise can maintain compliance and new solutions work well and adhere to policy within the current environment.
The reason for the hesitancy is because ops fear these innovations may break the complex balance they’ve created to prevent data breaches, outages and other problems, whether done unintentionally or with malice. They don’t want to be responsible for their companies being in the headlines because of significant data breaches or outages that impact large swaths of the economy.
CCJ: And your specific approach to this is…?
Derek: While there are many approaches being considered today for bridging this divide, most of them attempt to «bolt on» the security and governance to the existing platforms designed to enable them to innovate faster.
But these bolt-on solutions don’t work very well. The system quickly becomes very brittle and fragile, because one incorrect change can cause a spiraling effect across the entire system. And when these types of problems occur, it makes the ops team even more resistant to change.
What we’ve done with Continuum is to build a modern platform capable of deploying a diverse set of workloads, from a basic operating system, to a greenfield application, and everything in-between, while presenting the proper layer of abstraction for each. Our platform makes it possible to transparently compose systems, without any code changes or dependencies and offers a policy-driven core that drives compliance, trust and safety.
CCJ: What strategies and principles have you carried over into your present work from your days as architect of Cloud Foundry? What sort of journey has this been for you?
Derek: I carried many strategies and principles over from my experience with Cloud Foundry. With Cloud Foundry, we were really focused on just the developers.
But after that product launched, I realized that a platform had to be more universally useful to the enterprise, and address the needs of the whole organization. My fundamental belief is that technology should be presented to the enterprise in an intuitive, simple package that adds value to the business.
While the innovation coming from developers is incredibly important, I believe we must establish trust to effectively drive this innovation across the finish line. That is where Apcera is focused—enabling customers to derive real value and real innovation from our next-generation platform.
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@CloudExpo | OpenStack Deployment Practicality [#Cloud]
Goodness there is a lot of talk about cloud computing. This ‘talk and chatter’ is part of the problem, i.e., we look at it, we prod it and we might even test it out – but do we get down to practical implementation, deployment and (if you happen to be a fan of the term) actual cloud ‘rollout’ today?
Cloud offers the promise of a new era they say – and a new style of IT at that.
But this again is the problem and we know that cloud can only deliver on the promises it makes if it is part of a well-coordinated effort that brings together both existing IT infrastructure and these new service-based technologies.
Why @DevOpsSummit at @CloudExpo Is a Giant #DevOps Event
DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley announced today a limited time free «Expo Plus» registration option through September. On site registration price of $1,95 will be set to ‘free’ for delegates who register during special offer. To take advantage of this opportunity, attendees can use the coupon code, and secure their registration to attend all keynotes, DevOps Summit sessions at Cloud Expo, expo floor, and SYS-CON.tv power panels. Registration page is located at the DevOps Summit site. Your DevOps Summit registration will also allow access to @ThingsExpo sessions and exhibits. Register For DevOps Summit «FREE» (limited time) ▸ Here
@CloudExpo | @Cisco to Acquire Metacloud [#Cloud]
Cisco on Wedesday announced its intent to acquire privately held Metacloud. Based in Pasadena, Calif., Metacloud deploys and operates private clouds for global organizations with a unique OpenStack-as-a-Service model that delivers and remotely operates production-ready private clouds in a customer’s data center.
Metacloud’s OpenStack-based cloud platform will accelerate Cisco’s strategy to build the world’s largest global Intercloud, a network of clouds, together with key partners to address customer requirements for a globally distributed, highly secure cloud platform capable of meeting the robust demands of the Internet of Everything. Since announcing its Intercloud strategy in March, Cisco has made rapid progress, enlisting key technology partners, service and cloud providers, all of whom are standardizing upon the Cisco Cloud Services architecture, which is based on OpenStack open source software for building private and public clouds.
@CloudExpo | What Is Important for #Cloud Services?
Amazon is indisputably the biggest name in cloud service providers. They have built up a strong market presence primarily on the argument that access to cheap compute and storage resources is attractive to companies looking to shed IT costs as they move from on-premises solutions to the cloud. But after the initial push for cheap resources, how will this market develop?
Amazon has cut prices to their cloud offering more than 40 times since introducing the service in 2006. The way this gets translated in press circles is that cloud services pricing is approaching some floor. But is that true?
@DevOpsSummit | #DevOps Inspires Software Quality Assurance
High performing enterprise Software Quality Assurance (SQA) teams validate systems are ready for use – getting most actively involved as components integrate and form complete systems. These teams catch and report on defects, making sure the customer gets the best software possible. SQA teams have leveraged automation and virtualization to execute more thorough testing in less time – bringing Dev and Ops together, ensuring production readiness. Does the emergence of DevOps mean the end of Enterprise SQA? Does the SQA function become redundant?
@DevOpsSummit | Continuous Delivery and #DevOps by @ElasticBox
Achieve continuous delivery of applications by leveraging ElasticBox and Jenkins. In his session at DevOps Summit, Monish Sharma, VP of Customer Success at ElasticBox, will demonstrate how you can achieve the following using ElasticBox and the ElasticBox Jenkins Plugin: Create consistency across dev, staging, and production environments Continuous delivery across multiple clouds to handle high loads Ensure consistent policy management across environments: tagging, admin boxes, traceability Spin up machines and environments quickly Deploy applications to any cloud Enable real-time collaboration between developers and operations
@ThingsExpo | ‘Internet of Things’ (#IoT) Is Still a Vague Buzzword For Many
IoT is still a vague buzzword for many people. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Mike Kavis, Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners, will discuss the business value of IoT that goes far beyond the general public’s perception that IoT is all about wearables and home consumer services. The presentation will also discuss how IoT is perceived by investors and how venture capitalist access this space. Other topics to discuss are barriers to success, what is new, what is old, and what the future may hold.