As Platform as a Service (PaaS) matures as a category, developers should have the ability to use the programming language of their choice to build applications and have access to a wide array of services. Bluemix is IBM’s open cloud development platform that enables users to easily build cloud-based, creative mobile and web applications without having to spend large amounts of time and resources on configuring infrastructure and multiple software licenses. In this track, you will learn about the array of services to support and accelerate application development, as well as building applications on Bluemix using Java and node.JS. Learn more about Bluemix at www.bluemix.net.
Monthly Archives: October 2014
Interview: @Bitium Brings Unified Security to Cloud | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Bitium, based in Santa Monica, CA, works in the cloud to provide secure management of an enterprise’s applications, users, and passwords in one place. We asked company Co-founder and CEO Scott Kriz a few questions about the company’s vision and strategy.
Cloud Computing Journal: What was the inspiration behind starting the company?
Scott Kriz: Both Erik Gustavson, Bitium Co-founder and CTO, and I have started and worked for multiple tech companies throughout our professional careers. Most recently we ran product and engineering at a company called Fastpoint Games. We used a ton of SaaS and web-based applications to get our work done and continuously grappled with how to manage our own internal tools.
We had a revolving door of seasonal or contract employees and the onboarding/off-boarding process became cumbersome and inhibited us from focusing on our core business. As we looked for solutions we realized that no one in the industry was solving this problem well, which is when we first came up with the idea for Bitium.
With the proliferation of enterprise SaaS, we knew that there were countless companies having the same problems. We created Bitium because we want to empower companies and people to realize the full potential of web-based software. This would enable those companies to focus on their core business and not get bogged down managing software.”
CCJ: You provide what could be called a “SaaS Operating System.” Could you elaborate on that?
Scott: We look at it more like a Unified Cloud Management System. Bitium is the centralized system, or tool, for managing a company’s SaaS, web, and mobile applications.
With Bitium, IT can automate workflows, control and monitor SaaS usage, and manage employees all in one place. Bitium provides single sign-on, password and application security monitoring, auto-provisioning, HRMS synching, directory integration, industrial-grade security, and much more.
CCJ: What advantages do your customers see once they’ve centralized management of their apps?
Scott: Once everything is centralized in Bitium, IT can effectively and efficiently monitor organizational health in terms of application security, password strength and compliance through our Insights.
Bitium centralizes the management of an organization’s applications and employees. Administrators can use Bitium’s Reports to monitor app utilization and see user activity. The Audit Log allows admins to track who is logging into apps, at what time, and their IP address in addition to deeper metrics on who grants and revokes access to applications.
Bitium’s features help companies optimize SaaS and web-app usage. While there are many benefits to using web based software, including efficiency and cost, we have recognized inefficiencies that have been created with the shift to the cloud and have created a solution to those solve those inefficiencies.
How to Monitor Logging By @AppDynamics | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
Applications typically log additional data such as exceptions to different data sources. Windows event logs, local files, and SQL databases are most commonly used in production. New applications can take advantage of leveraging big data instead of individual files or SQL. One of the most surprising experiences when we start monitoring applications is noticing the […]
The post How Do you Monitor Your Logging? written by Alex Fedotyev appeared first on Application Performance Monitoring Blog from AppDynamics.
AWS launches Frankfurt data centre, expands in European market
Picture credit: NandorFejer/Flickr
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened up a new European data centre in the German city of Frankfurt.
The move comes to assuage European customers they can keep all their data and services on the continent instead of the US, with the German data centre – or region, as AWS prefers – complementing their other European offering in Ireland. The Frankfurt launch brings the total number of AWS data centres to 11.
“To survive, businesses must be able to compete in today’s digital economy,” said Pontus Noren, co-founder of Cloudreach.
“Unrestricted use of the world’s number one cloud computing platform from AWS has become the essential part of any organisation’s ability to compete,” he added. “The German region for AWS will enable German businesses to do business in Germany without moving their data outside Germany.”
It can’t be said the move wasn’t coming. Back in March a Wall Street Journal article all but named Germany as the next data centre location for AWS. The new data centre will have two separate availability zones at launch, and is compliant with all applicable EU data protection requirements. Customers can also construct their cloudy architecture between the two EU regions.
“Our European business continues to grow dramatically,” said AWS SVP Andy Jassy in a statement. “By opening a second European region, and situating it in Germany, we’re enabling German customers to move more workloads to AWS, allowing European customers to architect across multiple EU regions, and better balancing our substantial European growth.”
AWS isn’t the only infrastructure provider looking to European expansion. IBM, through SoftLayer, launched a London data centre in July, and more recently announced expansion to France.
Earlier this week a report from Skyhigh Networks found that AWS remains the most popular enterprise cloud service, ahead of Microsoft Office365 and Salesforce.
Find out more about the AWS Frankfurt data centre here.
An ‘Internet of Things’ Fabric By @MuleSoft | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
How do APIs and IoT relate? The answer is not as simple as merely adding an API on top of a dumb device, but rather about understanding the architectural patterns for implementing an IoT fabric. There are typically two or three trends:
Exposing the device to a management framework
Exposing that management framework to a business centric logic
• Exposing that business layer and data to end users.
This last trend is the IoT stack, which involves a new shift in the separation of what stuff happens, where data lives and where the interface lies. For instance, it’s a mix of architectural styles between cloud, APIs and native hardware/software configurations.
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Sumit Sharma, Director of API Strategy at MuleSoft, will describe the different types of relationships between IoT, cloud, APIs and integration.
IBM’s ‘Internet of Things’ Presentations at @ThingsExpo [#IoT @IBMIoT]
Internet of @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley announced on Thursday its first 12 all-star speakers and sessions for its upcoming event, which will take place November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. @ThingsExpo, the first and largest IoT event in the world, debuted at the Javits Center in New York City in June 10-12, 2014 with over 6,000 delegates attending the conference. Among the first 12 announced world class speakers, IBM will present two highly popular IoT sessions, which will take place November 4-6, 2014 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. More than 150 all-star faculty members will discuss, including the hottest Internet of Things technology topics in November.
The Unicorn Every #DevOps Is Looking For By @TrevParsons | @DevOpsSummit
In my hunt for the mysterious DevOps practice, I’ve been let down. DevOps are hard to find. When you find them, they do not exactly do what you think they should do. Some DevOps teams only execute on automation for dev; while others are operations folks with a new name; and still others are internal consultants helping operations and developers (but not actually doing the work). In my DevOps scavenger hunt I have identified a new type of creature; shared services (aka the unicorn)
From CIOs to IT: Shining a light on cloud disaster recovery with attainable metrics
Picture credit: iStockPhoto
This publication has often banged the drum for organisations to ensure their cloud disaster recovery plans are in order. Now cloud service provider Databarracks has put together a series of resources designed to be the “complete DR toolkit.”
We know cloud exits are not the most thrilling topic of conversation. Everyone would much prefer to keep their heads in the sand and talk about how more productive, lean and agile their business will be once they’ve moved the kitchen sink to the cloud. But whether it’s a data breach, or something as extreme as a CSP going under, orchestrating a hasty retreat is of vital significance.
There are three separate documents to the Databarracks disaster recovery toolkit:
- The cost of downtime calculator: This simply calculates revenue divided by number of working hours in the year, as well as totting it up per department and per IT system
- Disaster recovery responsibilities: This is a flow chart designed to tell which job department – IT administrator, IT manager, IT director, CIO and CEO – is responsible for what action in creating a disaster recovery plan
- Disaster recovery runbook: A 20 page document, personalised to suit each company, which aims to detail key internal and external contacts, and a step by step guide to recovering and testing servers. The runbook is modular, so organisations don’t have to follow it to the letter.
“We wanted to be able to provide one kit that contained everything an IT team needs to create and maintain a watertight disaster recovery plan”, said Peter Groucutt, Databarracks managing director.
“It’s difficult for a board to ignore hard figures,” he continued. “Organisations in the UK are risking too much by not having solid [business continuity plans] and DR plans in place. Our DR toolkit shows that good plans don’t have to be complicated or overly expensive, but they do need to be there and they need to be maintained regularly.”
Downtime continues to be the Achilles heel for businesses, especially if their IT architecture is that of an inverted pyramid. At the bottom is the data centre service – at the cheapest end of the scale is a £20 rack that could support £50-£100,000 of hardware and software.
Last month a Databarracks survey found that only 30% of smaller businesses had a business continuity plan in place, compared to 54% of medium organisations and 73% of larger businesses.
The kit can be found here (registration required).
Meet @ActiveState Nov 4-6 @DevOpsSummit Silicon Valley [#DevOps]
Founded in 1997, ActiveState is a global leader providing software application development and management solutions. The Company’s products include: Stackato, a commercially supported Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that harnesses open source technologies such as Cloud Foundry and Docker; dynamic language distributions ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl; and developer tools such as the popular Komodo Edit and Komodo IDE. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, ActiveState is trusted by customers and partners worldwide, across many industries including telecommunications, aerospace, software, financial services and CPG. ActiveState is proven for the enterprise: More than two million developers and 97% of Fortune 1000 companies use ActiveState’s solutions to develop, distribute, and manage their software applications. Global customers like Bank of America, CA, Cisco, HP, Lockheed Martin and Siemens rely on ActiveState for faster development, ensuring IT governance and compliance, and accelerating time-to-market.
Cloud Computing in 2020: Looking into that Crystal Ball
Recently, @thedodgeretort of Enterprise CIO Forum held a Twitter chat about what cloud computing in 2020 will look like. I decided to write up a quick blog sharing my thoughts on the topic. Looking into the crystal ball, I see a few things happening with cloud by 2020 — call it 5 years out. First, cloud will transform into more of a utility and a grid of computing power. Second, we’ll see a much deeper manifestation of the core characteristics of cloud computing, especially with regard to flexible capacity, consistent access, and high portability. Third, I anticipate a lot of activity in machine-to-machine transactions and communications (call it IoT if you like). Fourth: superesilient applications. Fifth: compute traded as a commodity. And finally, within 5 years, I think IT and the overall business will come together to actually take advantage of these technologies. Read on for more detail.
Cloud Computing in 2020
1. A utility and computing grid
In 5 years, large companies will still hang on to their datacenters to run some services. However, with security more robust, I think that corporations will make available their own computing resources as much as they consume cloud resources – just like some households generate their own electricity and sell it back to the grid. I think Cisco’s Intercloud concept has an angle on this.
2. Flexible capacity, consistent access, and high portability
A cloud/compute socket just like an electrical socket. Standardized applications and connectors that “plug in” to the grid and are removed just as easily. Virtualization has the first stab at this, encapsulating the OS, data, and applications neatly in a VMX and VMDKs. Containers are the next stab. Redhat has an angle on this with their CloudForms PaaS. Raw compute power becomes more and more of a commodity as portability improves; meaning downward pressure on IaaS prices will remain to some degree (see #4).
3. IoT or machine-to-machine communications/transactions
One machine determines that it needs to acquire more compute power to complete its work. It makes a “deal” to go out and acquire that compute power, uses it, and gives it back to the grid. Or, on the flip side, a machine that knows when it can stand idle and rent its own power. Another angle on this, a virtual machine or application has knowledge of its SLA, and moves to the provider who can deliver on that SLA at the least cost. Love it or hate it, Apple’s Siri has an early angle on this. From what I’ve read about the technology, queries to Siri find their way back to Apple datacenters, not only to obtain answers, but to improve the accuracy of queries for all Siri users.
4. Superesilient applications
As prices for cloud trend downward and portability improves (see #2 and #5), disaster recovery will take a new shape. Instead of running on a 2-site/2-region DR architecture, applications will run on a 5, 10, 20, or 30-site “DR” architecture, with all nodes being active. Does it matter where your application is running at that point? Potentially, it’s running all over the east coast, or all over the country. Some services from AWS already have an angle on this with services that are redundant across regions (a.g., S3, elastic load balancing, etc.), not to mention things like DNS on the Internet. I think it will become cost-effective to do this, in general, within 5 years.
5. Compute traded as a commodity, just like crude oil
This might be a stretch in 5 years, but with the trend of IaaS being more commoditized and portability improving, we’ll see a day when compute power is traded in a commodities market. In the channel, this is already fairly common – IaaS providers are eager to cut favorable deals with resellers who agree to purchase large chunks of infrastructure upfront, only to resell at a later date.
6. IT and the business coming together
DevOps was the first marriage of two groups that had been previously at odds (oftentimes). Within 5 years, I think maturity in IT will improve to the point that they become as focused on the business as any other traditional LOB. IT becomes an Innovation Center — they are focused on the business, and behave proactively. Corporate IT shifts its focus from requirements to possibilities. See my previous posts on the emerging idea of a cloud architect who will be important in this shift.
To sum up… we’re just at the beginning of possibilities in cloud computing.
To hear more from John, you can download his eBook, “The Evolution of the Corporate IT Department“
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