When the OpenNebula project started in 2008, we intended to create an open solution to make Enterprise Cloud simple. From the beginning, we understood enterprise cloud computing as en evolution of data center virtualization to host both cloud-aware and traditional applications. So we aimed to combine existing virtualization technologies with multi-tenancy, automatic provision and elasticity, following a bottom-up approach driven by the real-life needs of sysadmins and devops, and the following main principles.

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Nathan Pearce and I yuck it up on camera again, this time commiserating about Cloud Federation and the challenges associated with identity and access management in the cloud.

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Nathan Pearce and I yuck it up on camera again, this time commiserating about Cloud Federation and the challenges associated with identity and access management in the cloud.

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Yesterday over lunch, a good friend of mine from the Limelight Marketing Group and I started talking about my recent transition. As you can imagine being in the DC metro area our discussion centered on the many business challenges associated with sequestration and our deadlocked government leaders. After a short while, she then hit me with the quintessential question,”So what kind of consultant are you?”
“Our baseline offerings are social media, business analytics, cyber security and hybrid information technology (IT) ecosystems. The modern organization continually engages its customers, constituents and stakeholders through social media. Analytics provides institutional knowledge of those customers needs and wants. Cyber security protects your customers, their transactions and your business processes. Finally, your hybrid IT ecosystem delivers your essential business processes – commerce, offering catalog, service delivery and customer support – through a cloud-based business engine.”

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How Parasoft Service Virtualization helped Comcast increase the scope & accuracy of performance testing, slash testing costs and cut downtime by 60%.
There were two primary issues that led Comcast to explore service virtualization. First, we wanted to increase the accuracy and consistency of performance test results. Second, we were constantly working around frequent and lengthy downtimes in the staged test environments.
My team executes performance testing across a number of verticals in the company-from business services, to our enterprise services platform, to customer-facing UIs, to the backend systems that perform the provisioning and activation of devices for subscribers on the Comcast network. While our testing targets (AUTs) typically have staged environments that accurately represent the performance of the production systems, the staging systems for the AUT’s dependencies do not.

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There is no doubt that a focus on software defining the network – enabling automation, analytics, and orchestration via open APIs and other technologies – is changing the way network elements are viewed and compared across the industry.
In the past, we lined up products and compared the basics: speeds, feeds, and cost. The network elements in question had better perform at line rate (speeds). have a port density (feeds), and be affordable (price per port).
Many experts claim the shift from hardware to software is changing that focus. And they are right, at least on the surface. We’re no longer so worried about speeds, feeds and costs in terms of network ports but we are, as we shift toward a software-defined world, concerned with service speeds, feeds, and costs.

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How many net-connected doodads are secure? The answer: none of them. Every device is woefully unprotected from various attacks, and to make matters worse, many of them might contain confidential information ripe for the picking. And if all that weren’t sufficiently disconcerting, the vendors of such miscellany aren’t particularly motivated to make them secure – even if they knew how to do it properly. Which they don’t. Nevertheless, we blindly forge ahead, building out the Internet of Things (IoT), as though the security issues will somehow resolve themselves. Just how worried should we be?

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Too often companies are faced with a choice: elasticity or security.

On the upside, the benefits of cloud computing are achieved through elasticity as much as anything else. As Craig Sheridan notes:

“More specifically then, elasticity in the cloud is the ability of an application to automatically adjust the infrastructure resources it uses to accommodate varied workloads and priorities, while maintaining availability and performance in a context-aware environment.”

Elasticity, then, enables businesses to tap into what can be understood as the cost saving mechanisms of cloud. The ability to scale up and down resources as you need them enables businesses to pay for what they actually use rather than provisioning a guestimate for what they will need and accepting the potential money lost.

However, for many enterprises, elasticity of cloud is at odds with their current abilities. These enterprise architectures are not designed to take advantage of elasticity benefits for …

It’s an all Nathan Pearce Wednesday at F5’s AWS booth. I meet with Sr. Technical Marketing Manager Nathan Pearce – who also pulls in Geoff Huang, Dir, Product Management – to chat about all the F5 solutions for AWS. We talk Bring Your Own License, pay by the hour along with the free F5 test drive on AWS.

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It’s an all Nathan Pearce Wednesday at F5’s AWS booth. I meet with Sr. Technical Marketing Manager Nathan Pearce – who also pulls in Geoff Huang, Dir, Product Management – to chat about all the F5 solutions for AWS. We talk Bring Your Own License, pay by the hour along with the free F5 test drive on AWS.

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