Continuous delivery provider CloudBees has shifted its company focus, dropping the platform as a service (PaaS) of its offering to focus exclusively on open source software Jenkins.

CEO Sacha Labourey told CloudTech it was a ‘hard’ and ‘emotional’ decision to move for CloudBees, which was founded in 2010.

“We realised at the beginning of this year that Jenkins Enterprise was growing very fast, beyond our expectations, and we knew that something was going on, but it took us a bit of time to really make the conscious decision that what we had to do was strictly focus on Jenkins,” Labourey said.

“The company had a lot of strong PaaS DNA and so, to take the conscious decision to move away from that was obviously a hard decision, and even I could say an emotional decision to make.

“As soon as we decided to do that, we spent a couple of months looking at what we should do about those [PaaS] customers, what would be the best way to treat them, and as soon as we were ready we decided to move forward and do the roll-out,” he added.

With that in mind, CloudBees is retiring its PaaS Run@Cloud service – a “big shift that the company’s taking”, as Labourey put it.

 “In the last year or two we’ve seen tremendous growth towards continuous delivery,” Labourey added. “The big difference here is it’s not just about developers, but Jenkins is becoming this hub where everybody can meet – developers, DevOps, IT, they all meet around the table to set out a unified pipeline that goes from code to transaction.”

Earlier this year Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of the Jenkins server, became chief technical officer at CloudBees, indicating a sign of things to come.

CloudBees has also announced a partnership with Pivotal Network to collaborate in developing enterprise-grade continuous integration. Labourey, who said the two companies were in talks for “quite a long time”, notes the strategy shift to Jenkins was also key in securing this move.

“They really liked our Jenkins portfolio and offering, and what we could bring to the table, but it always kind of hard to have discussions when in your back pocket you have a PaaS and they have a PaaS – [it] led to complicated discussions,” Labourey said.

“As soon as we decided to move on, and to solely focus on Jenkins, discussions with Pivotal became extremely simple, and it was obvious for both parties that there was a clear interest in bringing each other’s value to the table,” he added.

Labourey also confirmed the current work delivering PaaS onto Verizon’s cloud, as CloudTech reported back in February, will be discontinued, although adding the two companies are still keen on working with each other.

You know the cloud has taken over when even the most reticent of industries – legal, financial – shift to the cloud, and even discuss Europe-wide private clouds specifically for their industry.

It seemed for a long time that the traditional reasons for moving to the cloud – i.e. reduced cost, increased flexibility – were the key drivers behind the shift towards cloud-delivered software, but some professions are seeing wider benefits. Let’s look at the example of Human Resources – another of those industries initially reluctant to move to the cloud, but one which has now embraced it.

The HR Cloud

It’s easy to see why Human Resources professionals were initially reluctant to move to the cloud – personal data (lots of it) – accessible through a username and password. Many were stuck in the era of paper and pen (coloured-coded paper, too, as I remember it).

Cost and flexibility, therefore, may have been drivers for a move to the cloud, yet were hardly compelling to those stuck in the ‘HR past’.

It’s a legal thing

Across both payroll and HR, legislation is forever changing. One government will enact legislation every 6 months, and the next government may repeal or enhance that legislation. In the past, those with HR or payroll software would have had to update their software manually – through CDs delivered by post – in order to stay compliant with the new legislation.

Failure to comply would mean potential fines from HMRC, or could mean overpayments or underpayments to employees, the latter of course resulting in disgruntlement and in many cases, departure to a more trustworthy employer.

Keeping up with legislation, therefore, was part and parcel of HR. It was, of course, a nightmare for those running the software.

This all changed with cloud-delivered HR software. The updates are just rolled out online, usually overnight, in time for the next pay run, meaning that the business could a) ensure that employees were paid the right amount and b) the company avoided fines.

It’s an engagement thing

I often go back to my days of colour-coded paper for holiday forms as an example, but it’s a good one (and it wasn’t so long ago). Forms would be lost, or worse, rejected because of the wrong colour paper. You were, of course, not informed of that rejection until the day before your holiday was due to start.

We tend to look back on the ‘paper’ days in a bad light, they weren’t all that bad, but they were prone to error. And that error would lead to serious disgruntlement. 

Marks & Spencer had similar problems in that each store had its own HR person, with their own HR rules. It was hard to manage hundreds of stores around the country when there was no centralised HR policy being applied. A HR system built to centralise these rules and regulations actually ended up solving another problem – engagement.

Getting holidays signed off quickly may sound like a small thing, but the culmination of small things being done correctly makes a big difference. Being able to apply for leave online, at home, and have it signed off within a guaranteed timeframe does a world of wonder for employee engagement.

And therefore, you might think, for sales of elasticated knickers.

The takeaway

We’ve (finally) reached a stage where the cloud is considered more or less default. On-premise has its place in some instances, but with CRM and the like shifting to near 100% cloud by 2020 (or 85%, according to some recent research), we’re nearly there.

To accelerate this, we need to take the HR angle and look at not just the cost savings and the flexibility, but the actual ROI and day-to-day business improvement. For HR, this was about avoiding fines, increasing compliance and boosting employee engagement. The cloud has done what on-premise (or paper) could not – it has actually made HR better. 

We can’t keep trotting out the same arguments about cost & flexibility, but we can start looking at tangible improvements. Who knows, we might actually be able to improve the cloud systems we’ve already got in place?

Josh Garza, the CEO of GAW Miners, first made a name for himself by building one of the top online retail stores for cryptocurrency mining equipment. Garza has pivoted that operation into the cloud by launching what he has dubbed hashlets. These hashlets are designed to create Bitcoins using a combination of ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) and cloud data center technology.

CloudWedge first reported on organizations wanting to use cloud to mint Bitcoins back in March 2014. The write up chronicled CloudHashing.com’s method of selling cloud contracts that “Reserves a certain amount of computational power for your own Bitcoin mining endeavours.” Garza and GAW Miners look to gain a piece of this market share by shifting his company from the online retail world. Instead of selling Bitcoin mining hardware, GAW Miners has pivoted into selling cloud mining contracts. According to Garza, the move was met with unprecedented success.

Garza tells DCKnowledge, “I saw that shipping hardware to people wasn’t going to last forever, so I worked on a plan to migrate our business to a cloud model.” Garza continues by mentioning that his eCommerce provider was knocked offline by the enormous amount of interest in cloud bitcoin mining contracts. In fact, Garza said, “We had to slow down because we were running out of data center capacity.”

Garza’s candid comments continue as he talks about how he got into the Bitcoin industry. “I got into mining as a hobby, as a lot of people do. I ran into some unsavory companies and lost money on a couple of deals. I just wanted to create an alternative so people could do business with confidence. And it kind of exploded.”

Garza recently shelled out over $1 million for the domain name BTC.com and GAW recently bought out ZenMiner for $8 million in order to expand his this growing Bitcoin cloud mining endeavors. At current rates, Garza’s hashlet products are expected to give Bitcoin speculators a return on their investment within 2 months.

The post Mining Bitcoins in the Cloud Catches On appeared first on CloudWedge.

The problem with web application performance is directly related to the increasing page size and number of objects comprising pages today. Increasing corporate bandwidth (the pipe between the Internet and the organization) doesn’t generally help. The law of diminishing returns is at work; at some point more bandwidth (like more hardware) just isn’t enough because the problem isn’t in how fast bits are traveling, but how many times bits are traversing the network.

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Target. Home Depot. Community Health Systems. Nieman Marcus. Their names have been all in the news over the past year, though probably not in a way they would like. All have had very public data breaches affecting anywhere from 350,000 (Nieman Marcus) to 4.5 million (Community Health Systems) customers. Add the recent high-profile celebrity nude photo hacking scandal and cloud security has become the trending topic in all the news and social media. Some of the discussions reminded me of a line from a short-lived TV show called ‘Almost Human’ (yes I watched it, and since it was not renewed, apparently I was part of a small group). In the opening sequence of the show was the line ‘technology has forever altered the criminal landscape.’ Is that where we are? Are the barbarians at the gate? Will this, or should this, impact decisions about migrating to the cloud?

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In a society that celebrates the public broadcast of an individual’s life through multiple mediums, the return to a more modest ideal may be the only way forward.

Increasingly over the last ten years or so, Millennials, and what some refer to as Generation Z, have been pressured to share intimate aspects of their lives over the internet. If you look back, there has been an interesting trend with this.

Facebook let users share as much content as they wished with whomever they wished. There are adaptable security settings, so that users could decide what is fully public and what is just for their friends. Then came Instagram and Twitter. More popular with the younger Millennials and most of Generation Z, they developed the new phenomenon of broadcasting edited snippets of their lives, but with infinitely more people.

For Twitter, in 140 characters or less, information as menial as what someone ate for breakfast can be shared with the entire world. Alternatively, look at Instagram. You can see snapshots of someone’s day, all shown through their chosen filter. To anyone looking in, they see more, of less.

What I mean by this is, these social platforms created a performance space whereby Shakespeare’s “all the words a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” is truer than ever. Users were given the ability to post designed posts, and create whatever version of their lives they wish others to see. This is well shown in this video:

Now this incessant need to digitally capture and share intimate aspects of our lives has been challenged.

A large number of celebrities have had their phones/iCloud accounts (or whatever the culprit was) hacked, and extremely intimate photos published online for all the world to see.  What is crazy is just how many people have looked up those images, and don’t feel that there is anything wrong with it. Now Jimmy Kimmel is not necessarily a news source, but take a look at how these men feel about looking-up the images:

The publication of someone’s personal images without their permission is not only abhorrent, but in this case has been referred by some as a sex-crime.

As a reaction to the hacking/leak, a lot of people are starting to distrust online security, or more specifically the cloud. Back in May, it was discovered that Snapchat images were not necessarily as short-lived as people would hope. So what is the solution?

Two things need to happen. Firstly, people need to think of uploading to the cloud as getting a tattoo. Be aware that once something is online or in the cloud, it is there for life. This is extremely useful for businesses or other such organizations, or even for storing someone’s music collection. However, it is not necessarily the appropriate place to keep things you will regret down the line. If Facebook’s ever changing privacy settings will teach you anything, it should be that if something is online, it is open to being accessed by whomever.  Just look at this video to see what I mean:

Secondly, there needs to be a change in our attitudes to social media overall. I recently read a book by Ben Elton called ‘Blind Faith.’ It is set in a dystopian future where the golden rule is “only perverts do things in private.” In this world, much like Orwell’s 1984, there are cameras everywhere, except here instead of big brother watching – everyone is. Nakedness is celebrated and everyone blogs incessantly. What struck me about this book is that it is an exaggeration of a reality that we are fast approaching.

If nothing else, this celebrity leak should challenge this generation to rethink whether they want social media. Should it return to its’ original roots as a networking platform, to connect and share in the experiences of their friends? Or rather as a stage, whereby they are willing to broadcast all of themselves in the vain hope of being seen or heard, and therefore feel important? In 2010 The Guardian published an article on how Mark Zuckerberg felt that privacy is no longer a social norm.

Maybe it’s time we shaped a new norm.

The post Why Mistrust From the iCloud Leak Isn’t Necessarily a Bad Thing appeared first on CloudWedge.

Hybrid cloud refers to the federation of a public and private cloud environment for the purpose of extending the elastic and flexibility of compute, storage and network capabilities, in an on-demand, pay-as-you go basis. The hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities.

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Seth Bostock is CEO of IndependenceIT, a company that encourages its users to “think outside the boxes.” It is a pioneer in the idea of Desktop-as-a-Service (which can also be though of as Workspace-as-a-Service). Its core service is Cloud Workspace, designed to deliver apps, desktops, and entire corporate IT systems as a high-performance, secure cloud service. Cloud Workspace users can work from anywhere at anytime, and on any device with the same experience, in this environment. We had a few questions for Seth about the company and what it does: Cloud Computing Journal: How have you seen the idea of Workspace- or Desktop-as-a-Service grow over the past few years?

Seth Bostock: IndependenceIT has seen tremendous growth—337% through mid-year 2014)– in Workspace-as-a-Service.

Scale and integration have been key challenges for IT Administrators when implementing application and desktop virtualization. This has limited the promise of what the technology can deliver for many organizations.

The Cloud Workspace Suite solves this problem up front with a single pane of glass to manage all workloads across any public, private or hybrid cloud.  Coupled with the powerful API set for ease of integration with our customers’ existing operations and business support tools, simplifying deployment of the CWS platform while speeding time to market.

CCJ: What are the most important aspects of DaaS to your customers?

Seth: As our Customers are the Channel and IT Administrators, the most important aspects of DaaS is how to effectively scale and manage workloads across multiple platforms and domains. IndependenceIT’s automation is focused on taking all of the common, repetitive, time consuming and complicated tasks associated with a virtual environment and making them simple and efficient
 
IndependenceIT focuses its automation in three areas:

Initial platform installation, to speed time to market with new single tenant or multi-tenant deployment
New end user deployments, to rapidly deploy the entire end user environment in minutes speeding time to revenue
Operations and management of the environment, to simplify IT administration and user management for greater efficiency and scale.

CCJ: How is the continued proliferation of phones and tablets driving the need for workspaces and desktops in the cloud?

Seth: The influx of mobile devices throughout the enterprise, pervasive access to high-speed connectivity and more distributed workforce environments are causing companies to look to the cloud for desktop and application enablement.

The Cloud Workspace Suite provides location and device independence, allowing organizations to capitalize on the productivity advantages of mobility – all without compromise to security, performance or control.

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InMage earlier this year announced the release of Scout 7.1, enabling customers to leverage the public, hosted and private cloud as a target for backup and/or disaster recovery (DR). This next generation solution for hybrid cloud backup, recovery and migration is available in three form factors – software, SaaS and the InMage 4000 Series appliance. “We’ve always been ahead of the pack with our award winning technology, but with the addition of public and private cloud support for backup and DR, we’re now truly in a class of one,” said Kumar Malavalli, CEO, InMage Systems.

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