SYS-CON Events announced today that Cisco, the worldwide leader in IT that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Cisco makes amazing things happen by connecting the unconnected. Cisco has shaped the future of the Internet by becoming the worldwide leader in transforming how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Cisco and our partners are building the platform for the Internet of Everything by connecting the world of many clouds into the global interconnected Intercloud.

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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Equinix has announced that app hosting provider Cloud365 has selected its first Melbourne data centre to consolidate its push in Australia.

With Cloud365’s infrastructure deployed across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the US, the deal makes sense geographically as the Melbourne ME1 data centre can allow a high-speed, low latency and high availability cloud environment for its customers.

The deal represents a significant win for Equinix, who partnered up with Google last month to deliver services across three continents, including New York, Atlanta and Frankfurt, the current data centre darling.

“Cloud is the key driver for our clients and we’re seeing growing demand from customers as they realise the benefits of not having to invest in their own infrastructure and network capacity,” said Darren Moss, general manager and founder of Cloud365. “Equinix allows us to reduce costs and optimise infrastructure, giving us freedom to be great at what we do by serving our customers in migrating them to the cloud at the application layer.”

The state of the cloud in Asia Pacific is expected to grow to $31.9bn (£17.2bn) in 2020, from $6.9bn (£3.7bn) last year.  The Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) puts out yearly reports on the market, and this year’s version (pdf) saw the Pacific entrants – New Zealand and Australia – gain four places each, to second and third respectively.

Elsewhere, data released today from Synergy Research has found that Equinix is the market leader in three of the main seven countries for retail colocation revenues. The Redwood firm ranks highest in the US, the UK and Germany, with the US far and away the leader in global revenue with over 30% share.

“Looking ahead, the colocation market is actually reasonably well insulated against the huge shift in enterprises pushing IT workloads to the cloud,” commented Synergy Research chief analyst John Dinsdale. “The market will continue to grow.”

“We have developers who are really passionate about getting their code out to customers, no matter what, in the shortest possible time. Operations are very focused on procedures and policies,” explained Stan Klimoff, CTO of Qubell, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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ECMAScript 6 brings powerful new capabilities and some tasty syntactical sugar to the ubiquitous Javascript language, as it continues to grab an ever increasing slice of developer mindshare.

Now that the ES6 feature set is frozen and just minor refinements will be made over the coming months, much of this new functionality has already landed in modern browsers, and will continue to roll out with each new browser update.

For the impatient, there are also now several excellent precompile / polyfill / shim tools available, so you can start using these new features immediately; safely knowing that your code will run ‘natively’ on every Javascript platform.

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My first blog showed how to move to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) using Tomcat. This blog will show how to do the same using WebLogic Server, deploying webapps via eclipse to a remote WebLogic instance running in the cloud.

Let’s say we plan to move our app to production on Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2). We have already developed the application using eclipse and have tested it on WebLogic running locally. Now, we may want to test our app on an EC2 environment before moving to production.

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As cloud gives an opportunity to businesses to buy services externally – how is cloud impacting your customers?
In his General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Fabio Gori, Director of Worldwide Cloud Marketing at Cisco, provided answers to big questions: Do you see hybrid cloud as where the world is going? What benefits does it bring? And how does Cisco connect all of these clouds? He also discussed Intercloud and Cisco’s investment on it.

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The 3rd International @ThingsExpo, co-located with the 16th International Cloud Expo – to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY – announces that it is now accepting Keynote Proposals.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the most profound change in personal and enterprise IT since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago.
All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices – computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors – connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades.

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One of the biggest challenges when developing connected devices is identifying user value and delivering it through successful user experiences.
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Mike Kuniavsky, Principal Scientist, Innovation Services at PARC, described an IoT-specific approach to user experience design that combines approaches from interaction design, industrial design and service design to create experiences that go beyond simple connected gadgets to create lasting, multi-device experiences grounded in people’s real needs and desires.

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Software Defined Application Services (SDAS) are going hybrid. .

Organizations are turning to cloud not just as an option for applications but also for the network and application services that deliver applications to anyone, anywhere at any time. And not just "in" the cloud marketplace, available for immediate provisioning and deployment, but as part of the cloud itself; as a service.

One of the questions we asked of respondents in our survey this summer focused on the preferred deployment model across the breadth of application services. Security, I'm sure unsurprisingly, wound up with a significant number of services which organizations prefer to consume "as a service". Of those security services, the top three were SPAM filtering, DDoS protection and anti-fraud services.

The distinction between "cloud" as in marketplace and "cloud" as in a service is necessary for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that adoption of both can force organizations to deliver services across multiple architectures (with a variety of different management systems) if they want to preserve seamless application experiences for users.

For example, you might be able to subscribe to a DNS as a service (and many small and even medium businesses do), but it's management interface – whether API or service portal – are disconnected from everything else. Organizations might also choose to deploy apps in AWS or VMware vCloud Air and then choose to deploy application services to enhance security and improve performance from their respective marketplaces. But those, too, are likely to end up operationally disjoint from other, similar, services that may be delivered as a service or on-premise.

That disjointed operational state is double plus ungood. It inhibits visibility into the overall state of the business (applications) and the services upon which those applications rely. It can impede deployment, too, by introducing stops and starts in processes that might otherwise be orchestrated to improve time to market, because the tools and techniques used to provision and manage these other services are not well integrated with the rest of the IT toolbox.

That's why we continue to expand the ability of F5 Synthesis to deliver SDAS and have introduced yet another option for organizations seeking to ensure the security, performance and availability of applications across a growing portfolio of environments, architectures and business models.

F5 Synthesis: As a Service

F5's vision for application delivery is to enable organizations to take advantage of cloud and support a hybrid data center model without sacrificing the services applications need to stay secure, fast and available. That means not only expanding customer choices with respect to cloud environments and marketplaces, but making those application services available as a service and manageable as part of comprehensive, hybrid application service model spanning cloud, as a service and on-premise environments.

That's where F5 Silverline comes into play, extending F5 Synthesis ability to deliver SDAS on-premise and in the cloud with cloud-based services delivery platform. F5 Silverline will support enterprises by eliminating traditional constraints requiring an either on-premise or in-the-cloud deployment model for application services.

With an as-a-Service option to deliver F5 SDAS, customers gain the ability to shift the deployment of applications and adjacent services closer to the users and apps that benefit from them.

As a first step, building on our acquisition of Defense.Net, we've added a new security service option with F5 Silverline DDoS Protection. This new, hybrid offering combines on-premise DDoS protection capabilities with a high-capacity, cloud-based service that enables organizations to mitigate a complete spectrum of DDoS attacks. New data centers in Frankfurt and Singapore expand the global availability of this service.

F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

F5 Silverline DDoS Protection is a cloud-based traffic scrubbing service providing real-time, automated DDoS mitigation of volumetric attacks. Organizations benefit from cloud-based DDoS protection precisely because it's in the cloud, meaning attacks are scrubbed (stopped) before they ever get near the corporate network. That's important because the growing scale and volume of these attacks can overwhelm many organization's Internet links. While such attacks target services such as DNS and applications, simply oversubscribing the target's links has the same effect: the denial of service.

Scrubbing traffic external to those links, "in the cloud", provides ample reduction in traffic and effectively prevents services from becoming overwhelmed in the first place.

F5 Silverline DDoS protection offers three subscription models:

• Always On
  This offering is a first line of defense, continuously evaluating traffic to identify and eliminate bad traffic
• Always Available
  A first line of defense available on demand, this subscription enables organizations to turn on the service "on demand". This allows organizations to primarily rely on on-premise DDoS protection services but immediately react in the event of an attack.
• Ready Defense
  This is a "stand by", secondary protection option for organizations who are planning ahead and desire extra protection, just in case.

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