Ask not what your cloud can do for you, but what it can do for your country.
The Defense Department’s IT infrastructure is on a mission of consolidation, standardization, security and access, the Defense Department’s principal deputy CIO told attendees at a recent cloud computing panel discussion, according to an article on Defense.gov.
The department is reducing the number of data centers from about 1,500 to “a number far below that,” Robert J. Carey said, and is implementing a coherent and consistent architecture across thousands of computing environments.
This process is taking place in part because of costs, but also because it makes sense when it comes to securing data within the network, Carey said.
In addition, DOD is shifting toward a cloud computing posture.
Cloud computing isn’t without its risks, Carey added, but the department is moving the paradigm of security from the infrastructure to the data layer. This includes continuous monitoring and cryptography.
Todas las entradas hechas por Latest News from Cloud Computing Journal
Elastic Scaling of APIs in the Cloud
As an Enterprise Architect for Intel IT, I worked with IT Engineering and our Software and Services group on the elastic scaling of the APIs that power the Intel AppUp® center. Our goal was to scale our APIs to at least 10x our baseline capacity (measured in transactions per second) by moving them to our private cloud, and ultimately to be able to connect to a public cloud provider for additional availability and scalability. Here’s a quick set of practices we used to achieve our goal:
Virtualize everything. This may seem obvious and is probably a no-op for new APIs, but in our case we were using a bare-metal installs at our gateway and database layers (the API servers themselves were already running as VMs). While our gateway hardware appliance had very good scalability, we knew we were ultimately targeting the public cloud and that our need for dynamic scaling could exceed our ability to add new physical servers. Using a gateway that scales in pure software virtual machines without the need for special purpose-built hardware helped us achieve our goal here.
Effectively Shifting from a Maintenance to an Innovation IT Philosophy
Innovation doesn’t just happen… it evolves out of business desires and it frequently involves changing your own view of the IT value statement. This article focuses on one of the key components needed to make the shift from maintenance to an innovation IT philosophy, Business Service Reliability. As a progressive IT department you must understand exactly what it is, how you can manufacture Business Service Reliability in real time so that you can measure and report your contribution in business language, and how adopting the framework shifts your organization into an innovative business partner.
Because of our long-lived traditional IT department philosophies, most IT organizations, whether or not they realize it, focus almost exclusively on component availability rather than the overall reliability of their business services and the related customer interactions. The problem, of course, is that you can achieve decent availability metrics for individual tiers of IT services – but still wind up with customer interactions (the business services) that are unpleasant. And frequent painful customer experiences drive customers and their money away from your company. They cause your customers to say bad things about you… in public and online. They undermine your credibility, so that the business sees you as a maintainer of poor systems and an overall liability, not an innovative business partner. The shift to innovation starts with your customer, and understanding what gives them a good experience, and proactively transforming your operating model to manufacture what the customer wants.
Is Cloud Computing On Course to Becoming a $100 Billion Market?
«Cloud computing’s not a panacea and it’s not the ideal solution for every business situation,» wrote Oracle SVP Bob Evans recently in Forbes, «but at the same time, it’s no longer some nebulous (pardon me) theory whose risk is high and whose potential benefits are impossible to quantify.»
Evans was commenting on the state of the infrastructure industry in response to a report by McKinsey consultants James Kaplan, Chris Rezek, and Kara Sprague in which they suggested that the recent IDC saying spending on third-party-managed and public-cloud environments will surpass $70 billion in 2015 might significantly under-estimate the true size of the market.
Weekly Roundup: Major Updates to PaaS
Over the last week the cloud world seemed to be showered with heaps of new offerings and releases from the cloud providers. There had been a few announcements and new feature release from Microsoft, Amazon, Cloudera and StackMob. Also, there was some good news for developers from Google, CloudFoundry and Hortonworks. Plus, HP Cloud showcased its new cloud migration service to the enterprises.
Beginning with the IaaS leader, Amazon has introduced a new High Memory Cluster Eight Extra Large instance for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Which is designed for memory-intensive applications, like in-memory analytics, databases, caching, and scientific computing. One of the new IaaS players, HP Cloud has showcased its Application Workload Migration services. They have presented a live demo on how quickly the Enterprise Applications can be migrated from a traditional data centre to the HP Public Cloud. Also, they have proved the efficiency by migrating a multi-tier web application from a dedicated server to the public cloud in just 12 minutes.
VMware Invests $30 Million in Puppet Labs
VMware has put $30 million in Puppet Labs, forming a strategic partnership with the young automation company to deliver management solutions for virtualization and the cloud in heterogeneous multi-vendor IT environments.
The investment, structured as a D round, follows VMware’s participation in Puppet’s $8.5 million C round in late 2011 along with Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures and Radar Partners.
Altogether Puppet has gotten $45.5 million.
VMware’s money will let Puppet accelerate product development, move into new geographies and have the virtualization king peddling its wares. Puppet has great ambitions to be to VMware what VMware was to EMC – the “next big, public IT management vendor for the next 10, 15 years.”
Envisioning Cloud Brokering for a New Year
Hopefully you watched Forrester’s Stefan Ried present his webinar on cloud brokering and the many opportunities for different kinds of companies to exploit this technology. Part of Stefan’s conversation included an explanation of the evolution to a unified cloud broker. If you missed it, you can catch up with it here.
As 2013 begins, it’s a natural time to explore where cloud brokering is headed. A cloud broker is the intersection of infrastructure, software and consultancy. Naturally, technology is a key enabler for a service provider adopting the broker role but it also impacts business models and consultancy.
Appcore Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that Appcore, provider of the industry’s only complete automated cloud computing platform, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Appcore delivers local cloud infrastructure for Enterprise Private Clouds and Service Provider Public Clouds. Appcore Onsite™ is a converged platform of automation, appstore, administration and architecture designed to be roll-in ready, accelerating the deployment and automating the operations of cloud environments. Appcore simplifies the complexity of cloud technology for data centers, telcos, software vendors and enterprises with flexible and scalable best practice solutions, backed by end- to-end management and support.
What’s in a Composite API Platform?
Intel recently released what we call a composite API platform with our new API Manager product. What exactly do we mean by this?
A composite platform is a single platform for API management that handles both Public (sometimes called “Open”) APIs and Enterprise APIs. It’s composite because it exhibits both the cost savings of “cloud” through a multi-tenant SaaS partner portal coupled with the control of on-premises gateway for traffic management. Like a composite material, the mingling of two or more constituents gives the final solution different properties not found in either alone.
For a public or open API it’s important to have developers interact in a shared manner, generally done through a public SaaS partner management portal. True multi-tenant SaaS offerings gives the Enterprise cost advantages, as the partner management piece is akin to running a website for potentially thousands of developers.Running a successful website means people, resources, archival and a higher cost of ownership.
Rackspace To Build Its Own Hardware
Exposed to Facebook’s Open Compute notion, Rackspace has been enticed into building its own servers for one of its next data centers so it can “break down the engineering barriers that lock users into proprietary technologies” save money and get systems deployed on the floor faster.
One might assume that they’ll be running the open source OpenStack cloud platform, a formula customers might follow to simplify hybrid cloud computing.