Early in my DevOps Journey, I was introduced to a book of great significance circulating within the Web Operations industry titled The Phoenix Project.
(You can read our review of Gene’s book, if interested.)
Written as a novel and loosely based on many of the same principles explored in The Goal, this book has been read and referenced by many who have adopted DevOps into their continuous improvement and software delivery processes around the world.
As I began planning my travel schedule last summer, I learned of a workshop taking place in Nashville by Gene Kim, co-author of The Phoenix Project. I jumped at the chance to not only meet and speak with Gene, but absorb as much as possible from his workshop.
Monthly Archives: August 2015
The Case for Cloud Foundry
Cloud computing is emerging to solve numerous enterprise IT problems at organizations of all sizes, and Cloud Foundry has emerged as a leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to develop and launch applications in their private enterprise clouds.
Cloud Foundry is open-source software, and available in “plain vanilla” code from the Cloud Foundry Foundation. It is also available in proprietary versions from a few vendors.
However, it’s important to understand that Cloud Foundry is not owned by a single, proprietary provider, and its availability is not limited to the small number of proprietary vendors.
[section label=”Common themes”]
Common themes
A few common themes have emerged from organizations who are working with Cloud Foundry as part of their overall cloud computing strategy:
Governance, risk and compliance management
Information privacy and security
Flexibility, speed, and the ability to scale quickly
Short deployment time
Balancing agility, cost and control
With those goals in mind, Cloud Foundry is being used across many industries. Brief summaries are provided below, and a series of use cases across industries can be found in this section of CF Live.
Do you have a compelling use case to add to the mix? If so, please let us know!
[section label=”Logistics and supply chains”]
Logistics & supply chains
Logistics and supply chains represent an intense competitive space today. One Cloud Foundry user describes it as “a race” to develop supply chains in the cloud. This pace makes it impractical to deploy and manage new and updated applications in local data centers. There is a need for an enterprise-ready platform such as Cloud Foundry that allows for a quick expansion to meet new customer demand.
A fully integrated cloud platform and infrastructure also allows Cloud Foundry clients to address major tasks such as database management and performance tuning, monitoring, security testing, patching and updating, reconfiguring servers, and testing updated environments.
[section label=”Real estate reality”]
Real estate reality
The highly competitive real estate sector is another that has benefited from the use of Cloud Foundry in an overall cloud environment. Virtual tours, work progress photos and community websites for home builders are examples of solutions that have been created.
One image database, for example, has more than 10 million files, accessed by millions of visitors. Real estate firms have found that it’s better for them to focus on their core competencies rather than maintaining and deploying the software and hardware requirements of their customer-facing portals.
One application in this sector encompasses 25 separate servers that serve more than 50,000 agents, with increasing annual visitor traffic and new features being rolled out continuously. The development and deployment team manages source code, addresses the various hardware compatibility issues, with the ability to spin up environments as needed. The company can thus conduct constant development in an agile, flexible environment.
[section label=”Big manufacturing”]
Big manufacturing
Sometimes it’s the technology manufacturers themselves who face the most daunting problems. One of them employing Cloud Foundry in it cloud strategy faces what it describes as a “sprawling collection of (almost 200) ad hoc, independently managed systems.”
In this case, the company’s IT department was required to offer a secure solution to internal clients, building in control, bringing about cost reductions, but without curbing agility and innovation. Before Cloud Foundry and the cloud, provisioning requests sent to IT could take two to three weeks to complete.
Department managers started to circumvent the IT department, building in significant shadow IT and complicating the situation enormously. The resultant lack of visibility and control gave IT management little idea of what was really going on, often with limited knowledge of what data was being hosted offsite and where certain business assets were specifically located. Security risks therefore abounded, with no guarantees that security patches were being implemented, and significant financial waste was occurring.
The development of a new IaaS initiative that integrated Cloud Foundry at the PaaS level got everything back into the corral, and now enables the company’s IT department to offer internal clients a self-service environment for new resource provisioning in the cloud. This on-demand, automated suite of services supports the company’s app lifecycle and also makes fabric services universally available. APIs enable access and deployment across the company’s range of services.
[section label=”MSBs benefit, too”]
MSBs benefit, too
Midsize businesses (MSBs) have been benefited from affordable, multi-tenant cloud, letting them be free of single-tenant legacy solutions. Through the use of Cloud Foundry in overall cloud environments, they are able to spin resources up quickly, scale easily, and avoid the previous approach of simply buying more servers or renting more hosted services.
Particular examples include companies in the legal services business as well as logistics firms that need Warehouse Management Systems (WMSs) deployed to the cloud.
[section label=”Financial services’ golden challenge”]
Financial services’ golden challenge
Nothing moves and evolves more quickly than the global financial services industry. Within that context, there is a focus on mitigating operational risks and the costs associated with increasingly complex corporate actions processing. Developing a proven, automated solution continues to be a top priority and a much sought-after goal among financial institutions worldwide.
One firm that was hosting its entire IT infrastructure in-house required a renewed commitment to availability, flexibility and scale. The company must be able to adjust to changes in its markets and client demands in a rapid and agile fashion, and be able to do so through mobile devices as well. The ability to provision and deploy in minutes in a virtual environment is golden.
Welcome to F5 Agility 2015 By @PSilvas | @CloudExpo #Cloud
#F5Agility15 registration is open! I show you where to get registered and get your badge along with where many of the breakout sessions are occurring. He gives a quick preview of the theme – Innovate, Expand, Deliver along with a sneak peek of special guests this week. Welcome to F5 Agility 2015 at the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center!
Enterprise Modernization – The Next Big Thing By @DavidSprott | @CloudExpo #Cloud
All enterprises, be they large or small, national or multinational, commercial or government agency, American or Chinese, Japanese or European, are carrying the dead weight of their history and almost certainly continuing to add unnecessary complexity and excessive cost that will progressively reduce effectiveness, with the potential to trigger existential crises. Newer enterprises including Internet platform and Cloud based companies are not immune from this effect. As Horace Dediu has commented, Nokia is a classic case of a large enterprise brought from market leadership to irrelevance and zero value in an extremely short space of time.
Announcing @VividCortex to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud
SYS-CON Events announced today that VividCortex, the monitoring solution for the modern data system, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The database is the heart of most applications, but it’s also the part that’s hardest to scale, monitor, and optimize even as it’s growing 50% year over year. VividCortex is the first unified suite of database monitoring tools specifically designed for today’s large-scale, polyglot persistence tier, easing this pain for the entire IT department.
[session] Cloud Data Management By @RDeMeno | @CloudExpo #Cloud
As organizations shift towards IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection and E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist – Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships at CommVault, will show how to cut costs, scale easily, and unleash insight with CommVault Simpana software, the only singular data and information management solution for cloud data protection and beyond.
Why AWS Marketplace is changing the software industry
(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/fotostorm)
The launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006 revolutionised the concept of technology infrastructure. AWS Marketplace is marching along the same path to transform the way software is sold and deployed.
As Amazon consistently pushes out innovative products on AWS, the enterprise software world sees the AWS Marketplace as a thriving environment for their customer deployments. Marketplace has improved the software search and implementation process for consumers and will likely change the way we think about software in the years to come.
How AWS Marketplace became a $1bn platform
There are a number of reasons why Marketplace became the Apple Store of infrastructure as code. Most importantly, the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) standard enabled software vendors to publish pre-built EC2 images into the AWS Marketplace with optimised environments for their products to run smoothly and efficiently. For more complex deployments, AWS Marketplace vendors can also leverage CloudFormation templates to deploy servers, network components, databases and storage to support their software.
This means software on Marketplace is fundamentally different from traditional software: no software installs, no lengthy configurations, and of course no custom hardware to support it. It is software in line with how engineers consume resources on the cloud.
Software on Marketplace is also less risky to adopt from a business standpoint. AWS Partner Orbitera worked with Amazon to offer AWS Test Drive, a combination of AWS infrastructure, software installation and licensing, and free usage time that allows customers to experience solutions offered by ISVs and AWS Consulting Partners before actually buying them. Test drive packages range from simple content management systems to complex, highly secure solutions comprised of products from several vendors. Solutions are made available as AMIs, CloudFormation templates, or instant connections to a SaaS service hosted on AWS. Test drives are browseable by industry, software vendor, and by specific AWS regions offering the test drive.
The AWS Marketplace, along with Test Drive, have turned the often labyrinthine process of purchasing and licensing enterprise software into something far closer to Amazon’s roots in e-commerce.
Marketplace has also required software vendors to simplify licensing, a welcome change for most IT consumers. To showcase their wares in the Marketplace, software vendors must sign contracts with Amazon to sell their products at set prices, without the confusing EUAs and SPLAs of the pre-cloud era.
There are over 2,200 products in the Marketplace now, and that number is increasing at a rapid rate. This past year, AWS expanded the reach of the Marketplace from data center products to a suite of managed desktop products, called Workspaces. With Workspaces, businesses of all sizes can access secure, managed desktop computing tools, including hosted email and all popular business software products from a wide variety of hardware platforms.
At the 2015 AWS Summit in San Francisco, Andy Jassy, head of AWS, boasted that AWS is now not only the fastest growing enterprise IT company in the world, but that it is the only company showing double-digit year over year growth. The AWS Marketplace may be the fastest growing part of the overall offering at this point, contributing about a billion dollars to the AWS revenue stream.
Innovators on the marketplace
Innovation on the Marketplace is driven by AWS Partners. It is likely that these partners will be the ones to help large Fortune 1000 enterprises move to AWS.
For example, look at Logicworks’ partner New Relic, who offers its software in the Marketplace with two different methods of delivery. Existing New Relic customers are offered an AMI that can be activated with pre-configured dashboards ready to immediately monitor their AWS environment. New customers can set up an account on their SaaS portal to begin monitoring their deployed applications.
CloudEndure offers AWS Migration and Disaster Recovery tools in the Marketplace with SaaS-based delivery. The fascinating thing about CloudEndure is that it can literally take a virtual machine and clone it into AWS with no impact on the source machine. It is one-click DR. This will be revolutionary for enterprises looking to migrate to the cloud.
While the Marketplace contains great products, the sheer quantity of vendors on the Marketplace can be overwhelming for consumers. That is why Consulting Partners have become increasingly valuable for enterprises. Last month, Amazon added Consulting Partners to the Marketplace alongside software vendors and resellers, further strengthening the Marketplace as an enterprise-grade e-commerce channel.
As AWS continues to innovate and launch exciting new computing products for its customers, the software partners featured in the Marketplace will continue to build the best possible products to run in the AWS public cloud.
Amazon is focusing on innovating in the right areas, especially mobile development (they announced AWS Device Farm last week) and database. They wisely leave specialised migration, DR, monitoring, etc. tools to partners. Together, AWS and the AWS Marketplace will shape what we expect – and get from – software vendors.
Relentless Drive to Innovate By @FerhatSF | @CloudExpo #Cloud #BigData
This year marks the 80th birthday of Fujitsu, and we continue with an accelerated drive of putting innovation in action. The company was originally founded in 1935 as a producer of telecommunications switches and spread out into computers and many other areas of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Today, Fujitsu is one of the world’s largest IT services providers and number 1 in Japan.
Lighting and the Internet of Things
Philips is experimenting with using connected lights to for everything from keeping us abreast of important messages to making video games more interactive and impactful on our senses
When was the last time you thought about your lights? Whether you are outside or in, you will probably see 4, 5 or more sources of artificial light within view. There is an estimated 50 billion individual light points in the world today – seven or so per person; of all technology, the light bulb is arguably the most ubiquitous.
It is perhaps because of this ubiquity that light has all but disappeared from our conscious minds. We utilise it with minimal thought, though sometimes its complexities are impossible to ignore. If we were preparing a romantic dinner, for instance, we would tailor the lighting accordingly. We do this because lighting doesn’t merely reflect mood, but dictates it, something connectivity is increasingly enabling us to take advantage of.
“We’ve evolved for the last however many millions of years to expect light from the sun,” says George Yianni, head of technology at Philips Lighting Home Systems. “If there’s a bright, cool white light at midday from the sun, our brain is hardwired to be awake and alert. If there is a very warm dim light such as you get around sunset, our brain is hardwired to start winding down and relaxing.”
Yianni is a technological evangelist. In a very literal way he has seen the light, and he wants to harness this physiological sensitivity to light (among other responses) to help us to relax, to deal with jet lag, to concentrate better and much more. Due to the degree to which we take lighting for granted, however, it’s an area that poses obvious challenges to innovators: “As a consumer, the only time you think about a light bulb inside your house is when one breaks and you have to try to find one that fits in the same socket and gives the same light output. But actually it is amazing how light can transform how a space looks, how you feel in a space.”
One of the first projects Yianni was involved in was the use of tunable white light in some German schools, giving teachers the ability to modify the lighting by changing the colour temperature, to calm students down, help them wake up, or enhance concentration (Yanni says their test scores improved significantly as a result). It was after working on a succession of such projects – including outdoor street lighting, office lighting, football stadiums, and more – that he accepted the challenge of introducing these kinds of effects and improvements into the home in the form of Philips Hue connected lighting for the home. “I wanted to make this kind of lighting accessible, understandable and impactful for normal people. I wanted people to think about lighting more than just when it’s broken.”
Some of the results and available use cases will be familiar to anyone with an eye open to contemporary commercial IoT. Lighting that knows when you’ve come home, for example, and can ensure that you don’t step into a dark, inhospitable house after a trip or long day at work. By the same token, remotely controllable or programmable lighting that can give people added peace of mind when they’re away – by making it look like they’re not.
Familiar as this latter use case might be, it also points towards another intriguing capacity of lighting. Usually, we turn lighting on and off according to whether we need it: but a house burglar may translate this as whether we are at home or out. Far from being oblivious to lighting, lighting speaks volumes to would-be burglars.
The potential of lighting to communicate in other, less nefarious contexts is something Phillips is encouraging its customers to exploit.
“We’re enabling people to use Philips Hue lights inside their homes and by extension the homes themselves to communicate simple notifications,” says Yianni. “So, in the morning, if the Philips Hue light in your porch is blue you know it’s going to rain that day, if it’s yellow you know it’s not so you can plan whether to bring a umbrella or not. Other customers are using Philips Hue lights to notify them about important email messages. There’s a wide range of way where people are actually using connected lighting in their homes to keep them informed in a less distracting way than an alarm or a buzzer.”
Another popular use case for smarter lighting concerns home entertainment. Whether we’re watching movies or TV, playing video games, or listening to music, Philips Hue is unique in that it can greatly enhance the experience through more than 300 third-party apps. Philips Hue launched the first video game, movies and TV shows with ‘scripted’ lighting programmed by the content creators to sync with their lights delivering a more immersive experience in the home. Yianni provides some examples: “As your health is dropping down in the video game Chariot, the Philips Hue lights turn red in your lounge. As a protagonist enters a dark cave in a movie, the Philips Hue lights will dim down.”
“For the last hundred years, people have been used to expecting nothing more on and off from a light bulb,” says Yianni. “We are changing that.”
In September Yianni will be appearing at Internet of Things World Europe in Berlin, where he’ll be using lighting to really illuminate the potential for IoT to revolutionise some of the most fundamental and taken-for-granted details of our day-to-day lives, as well as the central importance of communicating this to consumers.
UK SME cloud adoption swells on flexible working growth
UK SMEs are turning to the cloud to support their flexible working needs
UK SMEs are upping their use of cloud services in a bid to cater to more flexible working practices, recently released research from the BT Business and the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) suggests.
According to a survey of over 300 decision makers working in small and medium-sized business in the UK, nine out of ten (91 per cent) of companies have at least one member of staff working from home, and a fifth of businesses (19 per cent) said more than half of their workforce working away from their main office location.
The BCC said the results are directly linked to growing cloud service use. About 69 per cent of businesses use cloud-based applications, and more than half (53 per cent) saying that they are critical to effective remote working.
As one might have guessed, internet connectivity was also rated quite highly on the list of core elements required to effectively facilitate flexible working (63 per cent), and smartphones are seen as the technology that has made the biggest difference to businesses in the last 12 months (according to 68 per cent of respondents).
“It is vital to ensure that UK businesses have access to world-class digital infrastructure if they are to maintain their competitiveness in a global marketplace,” said Adam Marshall, executive director of policy and external affairs, BCC.
“Cloud and mobile technologies are becoming increasingly important as firms expand into new markets and explore new ways of working – especially overseas. It is encouraging to see that so many British firms are adapting their working practices to take advantage of these developments,” he added.
Legislation that came into effect last summer means employees in the UK with over 26 weeks service are eligible to request flexible working hours, allowing more employees to set up home offices and work remotely. Research from the Office for National Statistics found that in the first three months of 2014, 4.2 million staff across the country worked from home, equating to 13.9 per cent of the workforce, a figure that is only set to grow since the law’s passing.