Featured image courtesy of Adobe Max. This week, we’re heading to Adobe Max! We’re really excited to get to go to Los Angeles and hang out with so many creative leaders, designers, developers, strategists, video pros, photographers, and more! Come visit us on-site at Adobe Max at booth #615 to talk about all of the amazing work creative […]
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While testing is often ignored when it comes to DevOps – it could be the most important aspect of achieving true DevOps success. Without rethinking automated testing from the ground-up, the entire DevOps productivity gain cannot be realized.
Large tech companies build their own rapid test automation that runs in minutes across functional, performance, security and other tests.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Kevin Surace, CEO of Appvance, will discuss how we learn from these real-world successes and achieve a 95% time reduction in creating and running automated unified tests. Otherwise enterprises must make a tradeoff between velocity and quality. Learning from the leaders, that tradeoff does not need to be made.
(c)iStock.com/Hreni
It’s truly amazing that weddings actually work. The bride and groom bring together a vast collection of people and service providers for a celebration and expect it all to go to plan. It’s hard to imagine another scenario where all these personalities – your university mates, your buddies from work, the uncle you’ve not seen in years – would end up in the same room together, let alone in a conga line together.
The hybrid IT environment today isn’t dissimilar to a wedding. Companies combine independent application stacks, vendors, and facilities into one portfolio and hope it will work both as expected and effectively – the difference is that in IT, it has to work for an extended period of time, not just one special day.
Hybrid infrastructure is becoming the norm. Research from RightScale’s 2015 State of Cloud survey indicates that more than half (55%) of companies are planning for hybrid clouds and distributing their workloads across public and private clouds. We see customers begin their hybrid journey each day. Below are four ways you can set your business up for hybrid IT success.
When planning a wedding, it’s handy if possible to find vendors that are familiar with each other and can easily collaborate on things like food and entertainment. Hybrid environments can benefit from the same thing, except it’s almost equally important to know where familiarity is not possible.
The chance that all your infrastructure providers will use the same hardware vendors is extremely slim, but that’s okay. If you’re deeply into virtualisation, then a common hypervisor is helpful. The application or workload is the main thing that matters, but having the common thread at the virtualisation layer can simplify the migration and ongoing management process. You also should be able to find common identity management protocols across your hybrid providers.
Networking can be particularly risky — never assume that all the vendors within your hybrid architecture can support the same network topology and appliances. One underrated area of continuity is managed services. Having a single provider for managed services across your hybrid infrastructure can go a long way to simplifying operational costs.
One of the most fun – yet frustrating – parts of planning any wedding is the seating arrangements. Who can sit together? Who needs to stay far, far away from each other? Consider the same things when plotting out your application portfolio, especially when it comes to performance, and minimising latency.
Try not to overthink your migration. Instead of breaking them up into fragments, move entire systems as a single unit. Keep applications close to the data they use. You want to have the systems that require synchronous access to data to be physically co-located. For distributed systems, invest in your messaging backbone so that you can efficiently and reliably transfer data over a long distance when physical pairing is neither possible nor practical.
When you have shared resources, such as a data warehouse, there isn’t a single, ideal location to put it where each system can access it with low latency. Put those particular assets into the most logical place, then work out the paths that applications and users have to take to reach it.
In your hybrid environment, deploy applications and data together, and geographically near their user base. If that’s not possible, explore caching and replication options that provide those applications close access to data, even if it’s not the master copy.
When it comes to hybrid infrastructure, I have some bad news for you. The ‘single pane of glass’ is a myth. While incredibly seductive, the notion that you can manage your distributed IT assets from a single tool is not a reflection of reality.
Of course, there are some fantastic multi-cloud tools in today’s market. VMware’s vRealize does an excellent job brokering communication across clouds and provides operators with a handy day-to-day interface for managing infrastructure. But it’s difficult, perhaps even impossible, to find one, single platform that entirely aggregates all the functionality of both cloud and on-premises environments. Those applications are useful for many routine activities, but you often have to go directly to the vendor yourself when you need something specific such as account management, billing, or unique platform features.
We wholly recommend partnering with vendors that can help you manage your distributed assets more easily, but be careful not to fall into the trap of believing that this is the only way that you can manage your infrastructure. In the majority of cases, a native interface gives the best experience for dealing with that provider’s environment.
Your wedding day is often the biggest event of your life. The bride may have planned every detail in her head since the age of eight, but then real life happens. You’re not actually going to get Bon Jovi to sing for you all, and you couldn’t have anticipated that the charming ring bearer would bring a pet bunny to the ceremony.
The IT transformation that comes alongside a hybrid strategy is both exciting and scary. While you may think that tons of upfront planning will mitigate your risk, bringing a stack of “requirements” to your vendors may leave you very disappointed with the complexity needed to support it. You should instead be prepared to challenge your own status quo, and stay open minded about the process and technology changes that may need to happen as things evolve. Keep the plan adaptable as you learn more. This will yield you far better results than fixed specifications that your partners will struggle to comply with.
21st century companies do best when they’re positioned for adaptability, rather than just efficiency. You can unleash your organisation’s creativity with hybrid infrastructure, but only if your approach is practical and you keep your expectations realistic.
(c)iStock.com/serg3d
Google has unveiled a new data centre with three new zones in the US east coast region, adding South Carolina to Iowa, Belgium and Taiwan as its primary data centre locations.
The expansion move comes two weeks after Microsoft cloud platform marketing general manager Mike Schutz decried Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for having, at the time, 12 regions combined compared with Microsoft’s 19.
“This will open up our services to customers that were waiting on a US East Coast presence,” Jay Judkowitz, Google Cloud Platform senior product manager wrote in a blog post, adding: “Besides lowering latency to those on the US East Coast, the addition of the South Carolina location gives customers across North America the capability to build multi-region disaster recovery plans for their applications running on Google Cloud Platform.”
While this often comes down to a question of semantics, Google now has 13 available zones across four regions. AWS has four North American regions, with US East, in North Virginia, open since 2006, alongside four Asia Pacific regions, two European regions and one in South America. The most recent of these was the opening of the second European region, in Frankfurt.
The move correlates with a recent study put forward by Synergy Research on data centre location, which argued the US and China would remain the major hubs for data centres from the primary public cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google, and AWS. “While the hyperscale cloud operators continue to invest huge amount in their data centre footprints and to expand their geographic scope, there is no doubt that the US and China will continue to be the lead countries for locating major data centres,” said John Dinsdale, a Synergy chief analyst.
You can find out more about Google’s US East Coast data centre region here.
Clutch is now a Docker Authorized Consulting Partner, having completed Docker’s certification course on the “Docker Accelerator for CI Engagements.” More info about Clutch’s success implementing Docker can be found here.
Docker is an open platform for developers and system administrators to build, ship and run distributed applications. With Docker, IT organizations shrink application delivery from months to minutes, frictionlessly move workloads between data centers and the cloud and achieve 20x greater efficiency in their use of computing resources. Inspired by an active community and transparent, open source innovation, Docker containers have been downloaded more than 800 million times. Docker also provides enterprise subscriptions that deliver the software, support and maintenance organizations need to deploy a Dockerized application environment.
Somebody call the buzzword police: we have a serious case of microservices-washing in progress. The term “microservices-washing” is derived from “whitewashing,” meaning to hide some inconvenient truth with bluster and nonsense.
We saw plenty of cloudwashing a few years ago, as vendors and enterprises alike pretended what they were doing was cloud, even though it wasn’t. Today, the hype around microservices has led to the same kind of obfuscation, as vendors and enterprise technologists alike are saying they’re building microservices—even though a cursory look at what they’re really up to wouldn’t uncover a single one.
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.
Here are seven completely real, jaw-dropping applications of cloud computing that can transform humanity. Made possible with cloud technology, don’t be surprised if you have never heard about such applications.
1. Shoes Sold by the Step
Imagine buying the world’s best shoes or for that matter any pair of shoes and paying zero dollars for them upfront. That would be crazy right? Well the Internet of Things can make this possible. With new technologies that can power everything we do and create new ways of doing them, vendors of consumable items can sell items based on a unique measurement rather than on a flat fee. Shoes may be sold for the number of steps you are expected to take in them or car tire manufacturers may charge you based on the number of kilometers you drive. No matter what, the fundamental aspect of charging a customer will change with the Internet of Things and cloud computing. This idea is based on consumption cloud computing that measures the usage of a specific service or product and charges the end user in real time. The possibilities are endless.
Learn how IoT, cloud, social networks and last but not least, humans, can be integrated into a seamless integration of cooperative organisms both cybernetic and biological. This has been enabled by recent advances in IoT device capabilities, messaging frameworks, presence and collaboration services, where devices can share information and make independent and human assisted decisions based upon social status from other entities.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Michael Heydt, founder of Seamless Thingies, will discuss and demonstrate how devices and humans can be integrated from a simple cluster of Raspberry Pi/IoT devices, up through cloud connected devices, severs, wearables and humans.
Docker is hot. However, as Docker container use spreads into more mature production pipelines, there can be issues about control of Docker images to ensure they are production-ready. Is a promotion-based model appropriate to control and track the flow of Docker images from development to production?
In his session at DevOps Summit, Fred Simon, Co-founder and Chief Architect of JFrog, will demonstrate how to implement a promotion model for Docker images using a binary repository, and then show how to distribute them to any kind of consumer, being it a customer or a data center.