Financial institutions, like other critical service industries such as health care and air travel, have the unique challenge of no room for failure. It’s a bad day if your ATM card doesn’t work. It’s a really bad day if you do a bunch of online trading based on incorrect information. Fintech startups, beware. Money, as it turns out, is kind of a big deal to a lot of people.
Monthly Archives: October 2015
Apache Spark vs. Hadoop | @CloudExpo #BigData #DevOps #Microservices
If you’re running Big Data applications, you’re going to want to look at some kind of distributed processing system. Hadoop is one of the best-known clustering systems, but how are you going to process all your data in a reasonable time frame?
MapReduce has become a standard, perhaps the standard, for distributed file systems. While it’s a great system already, it’s really geared toward batch use, with jobs needing to queue for later output. This can severely hamper your flexibility. What if you want to explore some of your data? If it’s going to take all night, forget about it.
RedHat to buy DevOps specialist Ansible
Open source vendor RedHat has announcement an agreement to buy DevOps specialist Ansible, which creates agentless automation systems designed to simplify the automation of pure and across hybrid cloud environments.
The upstream Ansible open source automation projects on GitHub have an active community of 1,200 contributors and Ansible automation is used by Fortune 100 companies to power large and complex private cloud environments. In 2015 it was granted the InfoWorld Bossie Award in recognition of being the best open source datacentre and cloud software on the market.
Ansible removes some of the most significant barriers to automation across IT, according to Joe Fitzgerald vice president of management at Red Hat. Adding Ansible to Red Hat’s hybrid management portfolio means customers can install and manage cloud applications more easily, use DevOps to improve service delivery, streamline OpenStack projects and make container adoption much easer to orchestrate and configure.
Acquiring the top IT automation and DevOps company will take Red Hat significantly closer to frictionless IT, according to Fitzgerald, but innovation has to be 100 per cent open source and built on open management. “Ansible can help us relentlessly focus on reducing cost and complexity through ease of use and automation,” said Fitzgerald.
The addition of Ansible to Red Hat’s portfolio puts it at the forefront of cloud and DevOps, according to venture capitalist Doug Carlisle, MD of Menlo Ventures.
The acquisition, which will close in October if all conditions are met, won’t affect Red Hat’s revenue for the third and fourth quarters of its fiscal year ending on February 29, 2016. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but VentureBeat reckons the price was over $100 million.
Management expects that non-GAAP operating expenses for fiscal 2016 will increase by approximately $2.0 million, or ($0.01) per share, in the third quarter and approximately $4.0 million, or ($0.02) per share, in the fourth quarter as a result of the transaction.
According to researcher IDC’s analysis in July 2015, the global cloud systems management software market achieved total revenue of $2.3 billion in 2014. The market is currently forecast to grow to $8.3 billion in 2019.
Infosys to use IBM’s Bluemix make next generation of cloud apps
IBM and Infosys have announced a joint venture where Infosys will use IBM’s Bluemix system to prototype, develop and roll out new cloud apps for its client base in 50 countries.
The partners will launch a Bluemix-powered Innovation Lab in which Infosys and its clients can work together to create applications. Infosys developers are to be trained on Bluemix and tutored on cloud app development. Infosys will also get access to the IBM Bluemix Dedicated, a library of cognitive computing and analytics systems and services for building client apps.
The Infosys Innovation Lab will be staffed with a dedicated team of designers, ‘extreme agile’ specialists and industry and technology architects. Infosys has 187,000 employees and a turnover of $8.7 billion.
IBM launched Bluemix with a US$ 1 billion investment in 2014 and it now claims to be the largest Cloud Foundry deployments in the world, with a catalogue of over 120 tools and software-services, with all the top open-source, IBM and third-party technologies.
The partnership is all about getting access to these technologies and sharing them with clients, according to Srikantan Moorthy, Head of Application Development and Maintenance at Infosys. “Our goal is to bring these advanced technologies to clients’ application landscape in the most rapid and collaborative way possible,” said Moorthy, “Infosys will also incorporate any Bluemix-related curriculum into its on-boarding and training process.”
The disruptive forces of cognitive computing, analytics and IoT are all delivered through the cloud and Bluemix will only exacerbate these changes, according to Steve Robinson, IBM Cloud’s General Manager. “Developers can accelerate the deployment of these next-generation apps and this collaboration with Infosys will advance our clients’ journey.”
OpenStack Liberty release features enhancements for SDN and containers
The twelfth release of OpenStack will tackle the cloud software toolset’s size limitations and will offer new options for software defined networking, says the Openstack Foundation.
The new version, Liberty, will help cloud software builders to create more manageable and scalable enterprise services with ‘the broadest support for popular data centre technologies’ the foundation says.
The OpenStack Foundation says Liberty was designed in response to user requests for more detailed management controls. OpenStack has also been criticised for its inability to step up to large scale installations. As a result, its operating core has been strengthened and its production environment will include more powerful tools for managing new technologies, such as containers.
Improvements include a new common library adoption, better configuration management and a new role-based access control (RBAC) for the Heat orchestration and Neutron networking projects. These control improvements, which were specifically requested by cloud operators, will allow them to fine tune security settings at all levels of network and orchestration functions and APIs.
OpenStack’s scalability challenges are to be tackled with an updated model to support very large and multi-location systems. The foundation also promised that Liberty users will see better scaling and performance in the Horizon dashboard, Neutron networking Cinder block storage services and during upgrades to Nova’s computing services.
Liberty also marks the first full OpenStack use of the Magnum containers management project. Magnum will support popular container cluster management tools Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. Magnum aims to simplify the adoption of container technology by tying into existing OpenStack services such as Nova, Ironic and Neutron. Further improvements are planned with new project, Kuryr, which integrates directly with native container networking components such as libnetwork.
The Heat orchestration project promises ‘dozens’ of new resources for management, automation and orchestration of the expanded capacity of Liberty.
1,933 individuals across more than 164 organizations contributed to OpenStack Liberty through upstream code, reviews, documentation and internationalization efforts. The top code committers to the Liberty release were HP, Red Hat, Mirantis, IBM, Rackspace, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, VMware, and NEC.
Ten Performance Strategies | @DevOpsSummit #APM #DevOps #Microservices
At some point you’ve probably heard the term “test early and often.” If you are in an Agile organization, that term perfectly captures the philosophy of iterative development and the commitment to rooting out defects sooner rather than later. It’s nice – maybe even ironic – that a phrase which had such unscrupulous origins is now a hallmark characteristic of a process that exemplifies teamwork and quality. It’s in that modern spirit that we wanted to share these 10 strategies to help you test early – and test often.
Join Parallels at Angelbeat in Miami!
Today, Parallels is again at Angelbeat, this time in Miami! Organized by Ron Gerber, CEO of Angelbeat, this event focuses on the latest trends in private/public/hybrid cloud computing, cross platform, mobility and security. At the event, the Parallels team will present our full suite of solutions: Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition, Parallels Mac Management and Parallels Remote Application Server. Angelbeat […]
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Every Adobe Creative Cloud Shortcut You’ll Ever Need
Coming off of our amazing time at Adobe Max just last week, the Parallels team is still feeling the love for anything and everything Adobe. After all, we use Creative Cloud almost every day in our office! Still, for users new to Adobe’s impressive suite of products, it can be daunting to learn how to […]
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Node.js ABC’s – N is for npm | @DevOpsSummit #Microservices
Whether you are ready to start coding your first Node.js project, or if you are a seasoned veteran and need finish up a new exciting project, odds are you will need some functionality that has been written many times before by others. One of the beauties of the internet is the ability to create and share things. Node.js is a great language set in itself, but one key selling point is the vast amount of code that is available for free download.
Who should look after cloud data – the CSP or the end user? Execs undecided
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The debate over whether the end user or the cloud service provider (CSP) should be responsible for data security has been reopened after new research from Armor and Ponemon Institute proved inconclusive.
The survey, which quizzed 990 US and UK-based CIOs, CISOs and directors of IT operations, found almost a third (31%) expect their cloud provider to keep SaaS applications secure, while 20% believe the customers are more responsible and only 16% argue it is a shared responsibility.
While 15% of organisations polled believe the IT security team should be most accountable for securing SaaS applications, 60% admit IT security is rarely or never involved when it comes to evaluating cloud services.
Not surprisingly, 79% of respondents say security is important always or most of the time, while three quarters (74%) see similarly with regards to compliance. Yet only a third (33%) of respondents express confidence in meeting security objectives in the cloud.
So is this issue related to the lack of consensus over cloud security responsibility? Dr. Larry Ponemon, founder of Ponemon Institute, believes so. “The fact there’s so much confusion about how to properly secure and understand compliance mandates isn’t surprising considering most organisations today still aren’t sure who – internally – should be managing security for the cloud,” he said.
“It’s my hope that organisations will review this report and look in the mirror to see if they’re part of this group that is still allowing for so much confusion when it comes to secure cloud implementations,” he added.
The imbroglio between cloud providers and their customers has been covered in this publication before, most notably research from iland which argued vendors did not give customers as much support as possible. A quarter (26%) of respondents said the onboarding process took too long, 21% said the onboarding lacked a human aspect, while 18% had bill shock over their support costs.
Elsewhere, more than half (56%) of respondents say the ability to save money is by far the primary reason to use cloud resources.