Mobile device shipments are growing in leaps and bounds. While more and more workers amalgamate both personal as well as corporate computing devices in order achieve their daily goals, this presents a daunting challenge for enterprises.
Starting from cost effectively deploying, managing, and supporting all the diverse devices to ensuring an optimal user experience, enterprises are scrambling to update their policies and legacy systems in order to embrace mobility.
Monthly Archives: April 2014
The Vision Times Named “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that The Vision Times has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
The Vision Times is the largest weekly Chinese newspaper in America; it has 21 editions and distributes to 17 countries.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10–12, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley, Nov. 4-6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The Vision Times Named “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that The Vision Times has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
The Vision Times is the largest weekly Chinese newspaper in America; it has 21 editions and distributes to 17 countries.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10–12, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley, Nov. 4-6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Best Web Design Agencies Media Sponsor Cloud Expo, Internet of Things Expo
SYS-CON Events announced today that Best Web Design Agencies, Visibility Magazine, anad topseos.com have been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo® and Internet of Things Expo, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 15th International Cloud Expo® and Internet of Things Expo, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Best Web Design Agencies Media Sponsor Cloud Expo, Internet of Things Expo
SYS-CON Events announced today that Best Web Design Agencies, Visibility Magazine, anad topseos.com have been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo® and Internet of Things Expo, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 15th International Cloud Expo® and Internet of Things Expo, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Docker & Containerization: “Milliseconds Matter”
Roger: Could you explain for our audience the significance of containerization, and how it differs from virtualization?
Ben: Traditional virtualization was created over a decade ago, when applications were long-lived, monolithic, and deployed to a single server. In this world, when the problem to be solved was proliferation of single purpose physical servers – e.g. one server for Microsoft exchange, one server for Mac Print, one server for a custom Unix inventory — it made sense to turn all of those single-purpose physical servers into single purpose virtual servers.
The VM was created, which takes an application measured in megabytes, combines it with a guest operating system measured in gigabytes, emulates disk etc., and creates a heavyweight, relatively static unit to run on top of a hypervisor.
Today, applications are short-lived and modified constantly. They are built from multiple loosely coupled components built on a multitude of stacks. And, they are deployed to large numbers of different servers.
Dockerization/containerization provides a much better alternative to virtualization for this kind of environment. Docker provides isolation, but in a lightweight format that runs directly on the host’s operating system, and that can be easily modified or updated.
Docker enables containerized apps or components to work consistently together, work seamlessly across multiple different hosts, and do so with often 10x greater density than VMs. The same Docker container can be deployed, without modification, in milliseconds to a VM, to a bare metal server running RHEL, to a bare metal server running Ubuntu, to Amazon, to Rackspace, to an open stack cluster, etc.
So in my opinion, containerization and Docker have the potential to revolutionize how applications are built, managed, and deployed.
If you use an Android phone, you are already using containers. Every application on an android is containerized. Docker takes this concept to the far more complicated and sophisticated world of back-end data center applications.
Roger: How critical is the real-time aspect of modern IT? How quickly is it growing?
Ben: It’s absolutely critical. Seconds matter in terms of time to deploy and update. Milliseconds matter in terms of scaling.
Docker enables customers to take a development>test>stage>deploy cycle that used to take weeks and shrink it to seconds or minutes. And, we make it possible to take applications and scale them and burst them across clouds in fractions of a second.
Roger: How key is the role of Big Data in developing your solutions? How important is the term Big Data to you?
Ben: Although we aren’t a Big Data solution per se, we are a great solution for many big data problems. In Big Data application, the same application is rapidly scaled across hundreds or thousands of machines and often scaled down just as quickly.
A Docker container, which is lightweight, easy to modify, and easy to migrate to any server, is far more appropriate for a scale-out, performance sensitive, big data application than a VM.
Roger: How do the issues outlined above affect DevOps? What skills must organizations have to develop in this intense environment successfully today?
Ben: Today’s organizations need to take complex and constantly changing applications and deploy them across complex and constantly changing production environments. Think of multiple applications, multiple versions, multiple components, and multiple languages being made to work across VMs, public clouds, private clouds, open stack clusters, and customer environments, and you quickly get what we like to call the matrix from hell.
This is compounded by the fact that you need to get a meeting of the minds between developers, who like to try new things and make changes; and operations, who like things consistent, repeatable, secure, and scalable.
Docker solves this problem by providing a clean separation of concerns. Developers can change things “inside” the container. But, the “outside” of Docker containers remains the same; all Docker containers stop, start, migrate, log, etc. the same way. This turns a devops nightmare into a devops dream come true.
Docker & Containerization: “Milliseconds Matter”
Roger: Could you explain for our audience the significance of containerization, and how it differs from virtualization?
Ben: Traditional virtualization was created over a decade ago, when applications were long-lived, monolithic, and deployed to a single server. In this world, when the problem to be solved was proliferation of single purpose physical servers – e.g. one server for Microsoft exchange, one server for Mac Print, one server for a custom Unix inventory — it made sense to turn all of those single-purpose physical servers into single purpose virtual servers.
The VM was created, which takes an application measured in megabytes, combines it with a guest operating system measured in gigabytes, emulates disk etc., and creates a heavyweight, relatively static unit to run on top of a hypervisor.
Today, applications are short-lived and modified constantly. They are built from multiple loosely coupled components built on a multitude of stacks. And, they are deployed to large numbers of different servers.
Dockerization/containerization provides a much better alternative to virtualization for this kind of environment. Docker provides isolation, but in a lightweight format that runs directly on the host’s operating system, and that can be easily modified or updated.
Docker enables containerized apps or components to work consistently together, work seamlessly across multiple different hosts, and do so with often 10x greater density than VMs. The same Docker container can be deployed, without modification, in milliseconds to a VM, to a bare metal server running RHEL, to a bare metal server running Ubuntu, to Amazon, to Rackspace, to an open stack cluster, etc.
So in my opinion, containerization and Docker have the potential to revolutionize how applications are built, managed, and deployed.
If you use an Android phone, you are already using containers. Every application on an android is containerized. Docker takes this concept to the far more complicated and sophisticated world of back-end data center applications.
Roger: How critical is the real-time aspect of modern IT? How quickly is it growing?
Ben: It’s absolutely critical. Seconds matter in terms of time to deploy and update. Milliseconds matter in terms of scaling.
Docker enables customers to take a development>test>stage>deploy cycle that used to take weeks and shrink it to seconds or minutes. And, we make it possible to take applications and scale them and burst them across clouds in fractions of a second.
Roger: How key is the role of Big Data in developing your solutions? How important is the term Big Data to you?
Ben: Although we aren’t a Big Data solution per se, we are a great solution for many big data problems. In Big Data application, the same application is rapidly scaled across hundreds or thousands of machines and often scaled down just as quickly.
A Docker container, which is lightweight, easy to modify, and easy to migrate to any server, is far more appropriate for a scale-out, performance sensitive, big data application than a VM.
Roger: How do the issues outlined above affect DevOps? What skills must organizations have to develop in this intense environment successfully today?
Ben: Today’s organizations need to take complex and constantly changing applications and deploy them across complex and constantly changing production environments. Think of multiple applications, multiple versions, multiple components, and multiple languages being made to work across VMs, public clouds, private clouds, open stack clusters, and customer environments, and you quickly get what we like to call the matrix from hell.
This is compounded by the fact that you need to get a meeting of the minds between developers, who like to try new things and make changes; and operations, who like things consistent, repeatable, secure, and scalable.
Docker solves this problem by providing a clean separation of concerns. Developers can change things “inside” the container. But, the “outside” of Docker containers remains the same; all Docker containers stop, start, migrate, log, etc. the same way. This turns a devops nightmare into a devops dream come true.
Strengthen Your Business Reputation with Every Application Interaction
In today’s application economy, enterprise organizations realize that it’s their applications that are the heart and soul of their business. If their application users have a bad experience, their revenue and reputation are at stake.
As public, private and hybrid cloud are becoming mainstream and applications are transitioning to these complex environments, IT has to effectively manage applications running on mobile devices to legacy mainframes and traditional multi-tier application servers and everywhere in the middle. Operational complexity due to running applications in the diverse and distributed environment makes it difficult for IT to have complete control over the environment. At the same time, tolerance for application downtime is decreasing, the cost of service slowdowns and interruptions is increasing, and the resources dedicated to manage the entire, complex, heterogeneous environment are flat at best if not shrinking. You don’t need a crystal ball to see that this is a recipe for disaster.
Understanding IoT: The Internet of Things explained
The Internet of Things (IoT) is not some future concept, nor is it just around the corner; it has been here for some time, and it’s growing. Fueled by the expansion of wireless and cloud computing technology, more things are now connected to the internet than people. That’s all people, not just people on the internet.
What are these “things” which make up the Internet of Things? The IoT is not limited to smartphones and tablets, laptops and desktops. Every year, more and more devices are released capable of internet access, exponentially expanding the universe of internet of things devices.
Heart monitors and insulin pumps generate real-time data available to healthcare professionals caring for patients. Cattle ranchers can monitor cows in the field, not only pinpointing their location, but also identifying those who are pregnant. Power stations, remote pumps feeding oil and gas lines, and even entire assembly …
Outpacing Your Competition with a Cloud Services Brokerage
Every company worries about competition. When I ran a large enterprise solutions organization, I took steps every day to ensure we were outpacing the competition. Frequently this involved making “build” vs “buy” decisions for the various product parts or services we needed to drive our business. In each discussion, I would ask my staff: “What is going to help us move faster or be more efficient? What will help us beat our competition?”
In today’s business world, IT is a significant driver of competitive advantage and the same considerations of “build” vs “buy” apply to IT, just as they do to other parts of the business.
Imagine the following exchange between a Line of Business executive and CIO of a company: