Software development, like manufacturing, is a craft that requires the application of creative approaches to solve problems given a wide range of constraints. However, while engineering design may be craftwork, the production of most designed objects relies on a standardized and automated manufacturing process. By contrast, much of moving an application from prototype to production and, indeed, maintaining the application through its lifecycle has often remained craftwork.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager at Red Hat, discussed the many lessons and processes that DevOps can learn from manufacturing and the assembly line-like tools, such as Platform-as-a-Service, that provide the necessary abstraction and automation to make industrialized DevOps possible.
Monthly Archives: May 2015
Delivering Agility in a Secure Cloud By @WhoaCloud | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
While there are hundreds of public and private cloud hosting providers to choose from, not all clouds are created equal. If you’re seeking to host enterprise-level mission-critical applications, where Cloud Security is a primary concern, WHOA.com is setting new standards for cloud hosting, and has established itself as a major contender in the marketplace. We are constantly seeking ways to innovate and leverage state-of-the-art technologies.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Mike Rivera, Senior Solutions Consultant at WHOA.com, will show how a flexible cloud environment enables you to have full visibility into your core infrastructure, enabling you to be proactive and address potential problems before they arise, while providing you with the data for proper capacity planning to support business demand.
EMC to acquire SAP specialist Virtustream in cloud push
EMC is buying SAP cloud specialist Virtustream
EMC announced this week that it will acquire Virtustream, a firm specialising in deploying SAP software in the cloud, for $1.2bn.
The all-cash deal will see Virtustream, a specialist in SAP software automation and cloud on-boarding, form EMC’s managed cloud services business and operate alongside other EMC businesses in the Federation including VMware and Pivotal, which offer their own cloud services.
Up until now EMC only sold on-premise cloud storage systems largely tuned for supporting VMware customers, offering them a hybrid cloud capability, and the company said the acquisition will enable it to bolster its capabilities in both private and public cloud.
“Virtustream is an exceptional company and this is a critical and transformative acquisition for EMC in one of the industry’s fastest-growing and most important sectors,” said Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and chief executive officer.
“With Virtustream in place, EMC will be uniquely positioned as a single source for our customers’ entire hybrid cloud infrastructure and services needs. We could not be more delighted that Virtustream will be joining the EMC Federation family. It’s a game changer,” Tucci said.
EMC also said it plans to offer Virtustream’s xStream cloud management software, which is already integrated with VMware vSphere, to its partners.
“Virtustream has established itself as an industry leader and innovator for running mission-critical enterprise applications in the cloud,” said Rodney Rogers, Virtustream chairman and chief executive officer.
“We’re proud to be joining the EMC Federation where our combined capabilities, products and services will allow us to accelerate our vision of delivering the platform of record for enterprise systems, and address the complete breadth of cloud computing needs,” Rogers said.
Virtustream’s unique sales point is its cloud workload management and automation software, which will almost certainly see deeper integration with similar offerings across the federation (particularly VMware’s).
The acquisition is a pretty significant step for the storage specialist which more recently, with the exception of Virtustream, has seemed more interested in acquiring its way deeper into infrastructure than software; the move is part of its broader goal, announced last year, of becoming more cloud-centric.
Tech News Recap for the Week of 5/18/2015
Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 5/18/2015.
A data breach at CareFirst could leave up to 1.1 million customers affected. According to Gartner, the cloud IaaS market is a $16.5 billion market. Google released Chrome 43, addressing 37 bugs. There were good interviews with the CIOs of GE and Whirlpool around the internet of things.
Tech News Recap
- Up to 1.1 Million Customers Could be Affected in Data Breach at Insurer CareFirst
- Cloud Storage Provider: Azure Faster Than Amazon Web Services
- Gartner: Cloud IaaS is a $16.5 billion market
- Helping Businesses Scale Is The Catalyst of Cloud Service Provider Growth
- VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: Which SDN solution is right for me?
- Google releases Chrome 43, addresses 37 bugs
- GE Capital CIO Jim Fowler On Driving The Internet of Things And Talent Development
- Cloud seen as top IT priority
- Drones could be the next big frontier for entrepreneurs
- CIOs Get Clever About Finding Needed Skills as IT Talent Shortage Grows
- Whirlpool CIO: The future of IoT demands a new IT paradigm
- Cloud IaaS Market to Grow Nearly 33% in 2015: Gartner
- The Cloud Revolution Requires High-Performance Attack Prevention
- Many businesses lack adequate policies, controls over mobile workers
- Transforming Technology Organizations By Investing in Culture and Practices
- Why CFOs Are Collaborating More with CIOs
- 5 Reasons Enterprises Have Difficulty Implementing New Technologies
- Cloud Security: Transparency Is Crucial for Service Providers
- How CIOs Can Ensure Their IT Teams Are a Good Fit
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By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
Analysing the differences between cloud orchestration and cloud automation
(c)iStock.com/TARIK KIZILKAYA
What is the difference between cloud orchestration and cloud automation? An exploration of these two terms is more than a vocabulary exercise; it highlights a key challenge for teams looking to improve IT processes.
In most situations, cloud automation describes a task or function accomplished without human intervention. Cloud orchestration describes the arranging and coordination of automated tasks, ultimately resulting in a consolidated process or workflow.
It is simplest to see this in an example. To create a standard process to spin up an environment to host a new application, IT teams need to orchestrate several automated tasks: they can automate the addition of new instances during an auto scaling event with auto scaling groups, elastic load balancers, alarms, etc; the environment might also include a deployment automation tool like Code Deploy; Puppet scripts might automate the configuration of the OS; etc. All of these functions are cloud automation processes.
These automation tools must occur in a particular order, under certain security groups/tools, be given roles and granted permissions. In other words, engineers must complete hundreds of manual tasks to deliver the new environment, even when the building blocks of that environment are automated. This is where cloud orchestration is key.
Orchestration tools, whether native to the IaaS platform or 3rd party software tools, enumerate the resources, instance types, IAM roles, etc. that are required, as well as the configuration of those resources and the interconnections between them. Engineers can use tools like AWS CloudFormation or VMware’s vRealize Orchestrator to create declarative templates that orchestrate these processes into a single workflow, so that the “new environment” workflow described above becomes a single API call.
Cloud automation describes a task or function accomplished without human intervention. Cloud orchestration describes the arranging and coordination of automated tasks, ultimately resulting in a consolidated process or workflow.
The creation of these templates is time-consuming and challenging. However, whether the IT team is small and needs such tools to multiply and preserve manpower, or the IT team is very large and needs to maintain a single source of truth, security configuration, and approximate cost per deployment across multiple teams, orchestration tools both simplify and de-risk complex IT processes.
How does orchestration relate to DevOps? Essentially, well-orchestrated IT processes enable and empower continuous integration and continuous delivery, uniting teams in the creation of a set of templates that meet developer requirements. Such templates are in many ways living documents that embody DevOps philosophy. Automation is a technical task, orchestration is an IT workflow composed of tasks, and DevOps is a philosophy that empowers and is powered by sophisticated, orchestrated processes.
As is already obvious, orchestration has the potential to lower overall IT costs, free up engineering time for new projects, improve delivery times, and reduce friction between system and development teams. However, every enterprise is in a different stage of implementing the tools and the philosophy orchestration implies. Some organizations have only begun the cloud automation process, and smaller organizations may still rely on a single individual or team to be the orchestration “brain” that is coordinating IT processes. (One can imagine what happens when this individual or team leaves the organization.) On the other end of the spectrum, organizations that orchestrate automation tasks into standard but flexible IT workflows under a single monitoring and orchestration software interface are true DevOps shops.
The post Cloud Orchestration vs. Cloud Automation appeared first on Gathering Clouds.
BMJ CTO: ‘Consumerisation of IT brings massive risks’
Sharon Cooper, CTO of BMJ
As we approach Cloud World Forum in London this June BCN had the opportunity to catch up with one of the conference speakers, Sharon Cooper, chief technology officer of BMJ to discuss her views on the risks brought about by the consumerisation of IT.
What do you see as the most disruptive trend in enterprise IT today?
For me it is the consumerisation of IT, but not because I’m worried that IT department is being put out of business, or because business users don’t know what tools they need to run their business. My concern about the disruption is that there is a hidden risk and potential massive costs and unknown danger because many of today’s applications and tools are so deceptively simple to use that business users are not aware of things that might be critical to them, in part because the IT department always controlled everything, and hid much of the complexity from them.
Tools are so easy to use, someone just sign ups with their email address, uploads a large spreadsheet full of personal customer data, and then they leave, they forget to tell anyone that they have that account, it might even be under their personal email address. So the company has no idea where its corporate assets are being stored, you have no idea where they are being stored, and when that customer asks to be removed from the company’s databases, nobody has any idea that the customers details are hidden away in locally used Google Drives, Dropboxes, or other applications.
If nobody in the company has a view over what tools are used, by whom and what’s in them, is the company even aware of the risk, or its individual employees who are using these tools? Business users are reasonably savvy people but they probably won’t check the T&Cs or remember that extremely boring information governance mandatory training module they had to complete last year.
I really encourage people in my organisation to find good tools, SaaS, cloud based, apps, but I ask them to ensure that my team knows what they are, give them a quick review to see if they are genuine and not some sort of route for activists, has checked over the T&Cs, remind them about the fact that they are now totally responsible for any personal customer data or sensitive corporate information in those applications, and they will be the ones that will be impacted if the ICO comes calling.
What do you think the industry needs to work on in terms of cloud service evolution?
Trying to get legislation to catch up with the tech, or even be in the same century.
What does BMJ’s IT estate look like? What are the major services needing support?
We have a bit of everything, like most companies, although I believe we have made fairly significant moves into cloud and SaaS/managed services.
Our desktop IT, which is provided by our parent company is very much traditional/on-premise, although we have migrated our part of the business to Google Apps for business, which has dramatically transformed staff’s ability to work anywhere. We’re migrating legacy bespoke CRM systems to cloud-based solutions, and use a number of industry specific managed services to provide the back office systems that we use directly, rather than via our parent.
Our business is in digital publishing and the tools that we use to create the IP and the products that drive our revenue are predominantly open source, cloud-based, and moving increasingly that way. Our current datacentre estate includes private cloud, with some public cloud, and we believe we will move more towards public over the next 2-3 years.
Can you describe some of the unique IT constraints or features particular to your company or the publishing sector? How are you addressing these?
Our parent company is in effect a UK trade union, its needs are very, very different from ours; we were originally their publishing department and now an international publisher with the majority of our revenues coming from outside the UK. There is some overlap but it is diminishing over time.
Our market is relatively slow to change in some ways, so our products are not always driven as fast by changes in technology or in the consumer IT markets.
Traditionally academic publishing is not seen as a huge target for attack, but the nature of what we publish, which can be considered by some to be dangerous, has the potential to increase our risks above that of some of our peers – for example, controversies over the accuracy of medical treatments, we were the Journal that produced the evidence that Andrew Wakefields research into MMR was wrong, and he has pursued us through the courts for years. If that story had broken today, would we have been a target of trolling or even hacktivists. We sell products into the Middle East that contain information on alcohol related diseases, and we’ve been asked to remove them because there is not alcoholic disease in those countries (we have not bowed to this government pressure),
As the use of knowledge at the point of care becomes ever more available via the use of devices that can be used by anyone, anywhere, so does the additional burden of medical device regulation and other challenges, which coming from a print publishing background, were never relevant before.
Are there any big IT initiatives on the horizon at BMJ? What are the main drivers of those?
We have probably under invested in many applications over the last several years, a policy to really sweat an IT asset was in place for years – and we have a range of systems we will be replacing over time, consolidating – for example we have 5 different e-commerce systems, revenue is processed in more than 3 applications.
As with most companies a focus on data and analytics in all of its guises will be critical as we move forward.
Why do you think it’s important to attend Cloud World Forum?
It’s always good to see what vendors are offering and to hear what others have done to solve problems in their industries which might have relevance to yours, quite often it means you don’t feel quite so bad about your own situation when you hear other people’s tales.
Capita buys Pervasive to boost mobility expertise
Capita is acquiring Pervasive to boost networking, mobility expertise
UK IT and professional services outfit Capita has acquired Pervasive, an IT solutions provider specialising in mobility and wireless networking services.
Pervasive, which consists of both Pervasive Networks (a large Aruba Networks channel partner) and Beovax Computer Services (an HP and VMware cloud technology specialist Pervasive bought in 2013), is an IT service provider catering mainly to higher education, local government and the health services sectors.
Capita said the acquisition will help bolster its position in those sectors as well as its expertise in networking.
Following the acquisition Pervasive will sit within Capita IT Enterprise Services as part of the Technology Solutions division, and will focus on networking, mobility, and BYOD.
“We are continuing to see a shift in working habits with the increased use of mobile devices, requiring flexible technology that enables employees to enhance productivity,” said Peter Hands, executive director, Capita IT Enterprise Services.
“Pervasive has a strong record of providing wireless networks to clients across multiple sectors, offering the agility to respond to changing customer requirements. The addition of Pervasive further enhances the range of services offered by our Technology Solutions division, which already offers clients expertise in information security, networking, unified communications, cabling and data management,” Hands added.
Equinix to bolster cloud in Hong Kong with $40m expansion
Equinix is investing $40m in expanding its datacentre estate in Hong Kong
American datacentre giant Equinix is looking to expand its cloud and colocation footprint in Hong Kong, the company announced this week.
Equinix said it will spend about $40m upgrading its existing Hong Kong datacentres, HK1 and HK2. The latest expansion of HK2 will provide space for an additional 900 cabinets, bringing the total capacity of the datacentre to 2,350 cabinets, while the HK1 expansion will add 275 cabinets.
The company said the upgrades should be completed by Q4, 2015.
“With the strong momentum of cloud and content companies deploying in Hong Kong, as well as datacentre services demand from worldwide customers including many in China, it was a clear strategic business decision to expand our presence in Hong Kong,” said Alex Tam, managing director, Equinix Hong Kong.
“The investment in HK1 and HK2 further positions Hong Kong as an important regional hub, not only for financial services firms but for cloud and content companies as well,” Tam said.
The company said it is expanding the datacentres to cater to growing demand for its cloud services, particularly from local content and media customers – a client segment it said grew by about 16 per cent year on year.
Equinix seems to be on a streak in the Asia Pacific region and abroad, adding a third datacentre in Singapore in March this year and its first datacentre in Melbourne late last year.
Last month the company also added its sixth datacentre in London, and approached European datacentre incumbent Telecity Group about a potential acquisition.
All the Feelings You Get When You Open Your Computer for the Day (In Stock Photos)
In a lot of ways, mornings are magical. You get up, you get ready for the day, and you (hopefully) get a steaming mug of coffee before you sit down at your desk. Then, you start (or open, or shake awake) your computer. A bevy of emotions hit you—here they are, expressed in stock photos: […]
The post All the Feelings You Get When You Open Your Computer for the Day (In Stock Photos) appeared first on Parallels Blog.
IT managers unconvinced on getting ROI from cloud adoption
(c)iStock.com/malerapaso
More than half of IT managers surveyed by West IP Communications say they expect to get full return on investment by moving to the cloud – but it’s an unconvincing figure.
54% of the more than 300 respondents said they would be able to fully recoup their costs of cloud computing adoption, which of course means 46% aren’t so sure. Yet those with bigger IT budgets were more confident: two thirds (66%) of managers with company IT budgets over $5m were “confident” the savings of cloud computing would cover the operating costs.
Of those who were expecting ROI, three quarters (74%) expected it to be through reduced costs of doing business, including maintenance costs and the size of the IT staff. 31% of respondents said they would recoup their costs in two years, and 21% said it would only take one year.
There were other interesting titbits from the research:
- 75% said that when moving telecommunications to the cloud, quality of service would either stay the same or improve
- 40% said their organisation has plans to move voice/telephony communications to the cloud
- 55% of those polled said they didn’t believe communication services providers offer requisite security checks alongside their cloud telecommunication offerings. Because of these security concerns, more than half (55%) said they would implement a private cloud solution. Another third (32%) said they would utilise a hybrid approach
A post on the West IP Communications blog concludes: “Overall, while hosting systems in the cloud has grown in popularity over the past few years, more IT managers should talk to their service providers to discuss important factors like cost and security.
“The fact is that pushing essential unified communications tools to the cloud can provide companies with a cost-effective, secure method of improving efficiencies within the IT department and the broader organisation,” it adds.
You can read more here.