The 5th International DevOps Summit, co-located with 17th International Cloud Expo – being held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA – announces that its Call for Papers is open.
Born out of proven success in agile development, cloud computing, and process automation, DevOps is a macro trend you cannot afford to miss. From showcase success stories from early adopters and web-scale businesses, DevOps is expanding to organizations of all sizes, including the world’s largest enterprises – and delivering real results. Among the proven benefits, DevOps is correlated with 20% faster time-to-market, 22% improvement in quality, and 18% reduction in dev and ops costs, according to research firm Vanson-Bourne. It is changing the way IT works, how businesses interact with customers, and how organizations are buying, building, and delivering software.

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SYS-CON Media announced today that Blue Box as launched a popular blog feed on Cloud Computing Journal.
Cloud Computing Journal aims to help open the eyes of Enterprise IT professionals to the economics and strategies that utility/cloud computing provides.
Blue Box Cloud gives you unequaled agility, without the burden of designing, deploying and managing your own infrastructure. It’s the right choice when public cloud just won’t do.

Blue Box Cloud is a managed Private Cloud as a Service (PCaas) product available in both hosted and on-prem versions from Blue Box, powered by OpenStack.

Blue Box Cloud gives you unequaled agility, without the burden of designing, deploying and managing your own infrastructure. It’s the right choice when public cloud just won’t do.

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Today, the demand for new applications is growing at an unprecedented rate throughout lines of business and across industries. Customer expectations for mobile and e-commerce capabilities are transforming software development speed and quality into a competitive differentiator for even the most unlikely businesses. For existing software development shops, the proliferation of platforms, increasing need for total global uptime, and accelerating pace of industry disruption by fast-paced startups have all put increased pressure on development. In every vertical, more code must be shipped than ever before, faster and at higher quality.

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The benefits of cloud computing have already been well documented, from increased productivity among employees to giving companies added capabilities to expand their business. While the benefits are certainly helpful, that doesn’t mean the innovation that drives the cloud has gone away. If anything, new innovations are propelling the cloud to new levels, and one of those breakthroughs may be the next big thing in cloud computing: ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) processors. While ARM processors are an entirely new technology, their inclusion in servers used for the cloud could represent the next leap of evolution for cloud computing.

The basic idea is to employ servers that are powered by ARM processors. At present, most cloud servers use x86 chips, most of which are produced by companies like Intel. These chips have been used for years and are considered the most reliable technology to ensure continuous cloud usage. As is the way of all things in the business world, however, innovative solutions may end up supplanting the old technology. Announcements in the past year or so have shown major companies are seriously looking into how best to use ARM-based servers for cloud computing purposes.

Dell and Hewlett-Packard have indicated interest in developing an alternative to x86 data centre technology mostly through ARM processors. Lenovo is also getting in on the action, announcing a partnership with the UK-based Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to develop and test ARM-based servers.

It isn’t just high-tech companies hopping on the ARM bandwagon either; major cloud providers have taken an intense interest in just what ARM technology can give to improve the cloud. Amazon and Microsoft – two of the biggest cloud providers in the world – have both taken steps in experimenting with ARM-based servers. Amazon in particular, with its Amazon Web Services, has made waves by hiring experts in ARM processing from a recently failed startup company. While Amazon has been tight-lipped about the endeavour, the goal may be to creating custom-made chips that work well with ARM architecture. If Amazon and Microsoft both dive deep into ARM technology, the x86 model may no longer be the dominant cloud option in a few years.

While it’s clear that many companies both large and small have targeted ARM-based servers for cloud use, some may still ask about the actual benefits that ARM processors bring to the cloud. Perhaps one of the biggest beneficiary aspects of ARM technology is that it is far more energy efficient than the alternatives.

This results in a number of helpful consequences for cloud providers and businesses, the most impactful being the reduction of costs. Cloud servers require a significant amount of energy to keep running, and any technology that saves energy immediately cuts down on costs. The demand for greater efficiency is growing as well. Beyond the cloud, big data and mobile technology have increased the need to have an energy efficient solution to cut down on rising costs. ARM-based servers may be the answer, so many are looking for by putting more operating power in a smaller physical space.

ARM processors may also be a necessary component for the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the future, especially when it comes to providing an environment for testing the use of so many internet-connected devices.

With greater energy efficiency and lower costs, ARM-based servers may come to play a larger role in the cloud computing landscape. That’s not to say that the traditional x86 chip technology will completely go away; ARM-based servers may not be a good choice when it comes to the largest databases that are considered the most mission-critical to organisations. Even so, ARM processors may be a useful way to get even more out of the cloud through an innovative advance that magnifies many of the benefits of cloud computing. In time, ARM-based servers could help the cloud evolve to help businesses in fascinating new ways.

Chef and Canonical announced a partnership to integrate and distribute Chef with Ubuntu. Canonical is integrating the Chef automation platform with Canonical’s Machine-As-A-Service (MAAS), enabling users to automate the provisioning, configuration and deployment of bare metal compute resources in the data center. Canonical is packaging Chef 12 server in upcoming distributions of its Ubuntu open source operating system and will provide commercial support for Chef within its user base.

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Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture.
Today, everything must be faster. Faster releases; faster and larger backlogs; faster complaints; faster bugs. The speed and performance of the modern software delivery pipeline brings a new set of challenges. How do you keep up? There really is only one option – automation and measurement. You need a method for automatically collecting data about your application and how it is being used. But also a good way to find the relevant information and act on it. And in order to do this your development team needs to lead with analytics first.

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Latest survey research from Cloud Sherpas has revealed while seven in 10 IT leaders view enterprise cloud software as central to their company’s success, only half have a formal cloud strategy in place.

82% of the more than 200 global respondents to the2015 Enterprise Cloud Report said cloud technology was a key part of their IT strategy. 36% of those polled said they were currently using multiple applications, while 31% said they were regularly using cloud daily. 52% of high tech and manufacturing respondents said they were using multiple cloud applications, compared to 50% for education and 44% real estate.

The survey data shows the driving forces behind enterprise cloud adoption. In a multiple choice question 57% of respondents cited the CIO as the primary driver, ahead of the CEO (22%) and CTO (19%). The organisation’s customers were cited by 19% of those polled. Efficiency (71%) was the key organisational factor to improve according to respondents, ahead of collaboration (66%), innovation (55%) and engagement (50%).

One of the more curious parts of the survey came when answering statements on security and privacy.

To the statement “Security concerns have prevented one or more of my company’s business functions from adopting cloud technology”, 28% strongly agreed while a further 31% agreed. Regarding the statement “The complication of our legacy system has challenged my organisation from taking it to the cloud”, 62% overall agreed, with 24% strongly agreeing. Almost two thirds (63%) agreed with the statement “Privacy concerns have prevented one or more of my organisation’s business functions from adopting cloud technology.”

The overall consensus of the survey again relates to the lack of clear strategy organisations deploy when moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud. “A transition to the cloud requires companies to consider multiple factors beyond price and vendor, including a thorough analysis of the existing application stack and proper alignment with business needs,” said Matthew Johnson, Cloud Sherpas vice president of advisory services.

“When stakeholders across the business, including executives, come together on a strategy and execution, companies will get the most benefit from moving to the cloud,” he added.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Jim Haughwout, Chief Technology Architect at Savi Technologies. We discuss Internet of Things sensors and the growing demand for data driven architectures to support the sheer volume of data being collected. It’s clear that many businesses adopting the Internet of Things are unprepared for the volume of data that needs to be processed. Listen in to learn how to put your Internet of Things strategy into place as the technology continues to evolve.

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