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.
Monthly Archives: January 2013
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.
Cisco courts Parallels and “desktop virtualisation” in the cloud
Parallels is a global firm reputed in offering cloud service enablement, hosting and desktop visualisation. The company was founded in 1999 and currently boasts of over 900 employees spanning across the globe- North America, Asia and Europe.
To capitalise on Parallels’ success story, Cisco, the global networking giant, of recent has made an equity investment of $11 million to the desktop virtualisation firm. The investment was done through Almaz Capital Partners.
According to Hilton Romanski, V.P., Corporate Business Development Cisco, “Cisco is continuing its commitment to technology development and innovation through strategic investments. ” The collaboration with Parallels is geared to deliver easier to use and efficient cloud services.
In addition, Cisco is hoping to leverage on Parallels’ global presence – especially in Russia – to fuel innovation worldwide. The investment is a viable acquisition for Cisco, especially if the cloud infrastructure giant intends to incorporate virtualisation in its Cisco Unified Computing …
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.”
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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.
BitTorrent Sync Aims to Replace Cloud With Peer-to-Peer for File Synchronization
The folks responsible for peer-to-peer downloads of (mostly) appropriated music and videos are in pre-alpha with BitTorrent Sync, which aims straight at Dropbox and its ilk for multi-device file synchronization. They are looking for early testers and promise native clients for Windows, OS X and Linux, with hints of smartphone support.
Today, BitTorrent Sync is in a pre-Alpha stage. And we’re hoping that users like you can help us build something sick. If you’re comfortable using early, incomplete software, and if you’re committed to helping us figure out a better way to sync, we want to hear from you.
If you are interested, sign up here.
