Monthly Archives: June 2016

containers, EMC, News & Analysis, Persistent Storage

EMC launches storage provisioning framework for containers

Empty road and containers in harbor at sunsetEMC has announced the launch of libStorage, an open source vendor and platform-agnostic storage framework released through the EMC {code} program.

Containers have been one of the biggest buzzwords to hit the IT industry through 2015 and 2016, complications surrounding unification of the individual containers has been a challenge for developers. While several container platforms may be running in an environment, each has its own language, requiring users to treat them as silos, though EMC believe libStorage is the solution.

The offering is claimed to provide orchestration through a common model and API, creating a centralized storage capabilities for a distributed, container-driven ecosystem. libStorage will create one storage language to speak with all container platforms and one common method of support.

“The benefits of container technology are widely recognized and gaining ground all the time,” Josh Bernstein, VP of Technology at EMC {code}. “That provides endless opportunity to optimize containers for IT’s most challenging use cases. Storage is a critical piece of any technology environment, and by focusing on storage within the context of open source, we’re able to offer users—and storage vendors—more functionality, choice and value from their container deployments.”

The offering, which is available on GitHub, will support Cloud Foundry, Apache Mesos, DC/OS, Docker and Kubernetes.

“DC/OS users—from startups to large enterprises—love the portable container-operations experience our technology offers, and it’s only natural they would desire a portable storage experience as well,” Tobias Knaup, CTO at Mesosphere. “libStorage promises just this, ensuring users a consistent experience for stateful applications via persistent storage, whatever container format they’re running.”

Digital Transformation, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM adds EZSource to bolster transformation capabilities

IBM2IBM has announced its intention to acquire EZSource as it continues efforts to build its offerings in the digital world. The additional of EZSource is touted as a means to bolster IBM’s capabilities to aide enterprise organizations in their digital transformation journey.

With a substantial proposition of companies targeting a hybrid cloud proposition within the next 12 months, developers are looking for new ways to reconcile the applications that reside on enterprise systems of record to digital forms of engagement such as mobile and social. As the majority of production IT workloads run on the mainframe, connecting these applications with mobile and cloud applications is important to increase customer engagement. This can be a time consuming task however.

EZSource provides a visual dashboard of an applications lines of code to show developers which have changed to ease the process of modernizing applications, exposing APIs and better leveraging development resources. EZSource’s application discovery technology will be coupled with IBM’s current DevOps offerings to enable developers to evolve legacy assets within the overall digital transformation strategy quicker, the company claims.

“The mainframe is the backbone of today’s businesses. As clients drive their digital transformation, they are seeking the innovation and business value from new applications while leveraging their existing assets and processes,” said Ross Mauri, GM of IBM z Systems. “By adding EZSource’s technology to our enterprise DevOps and API management offerings, we are making it easier and faster for developers to modernize key applications that previously were manually intensive and many times required specialized skills.”

Financials of the agreement have not been released, though this is the 14th acquisition of an Israeli business made by IBM since 1998. The last acquisition, Trusteer in 2013, was for more than $600 million.

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The future of AWS’ cloud: Infrastructure as an application

(c)iStock.com/foto-ruhrgebiet

By Thomas Rectenwald, senior engineer, DevOps, Logicworks

Infrastructure as code has defined the last five years of systems engineering, and will likely define the next five. But as we became better and better at manipulating infrastructure with declarative languages, we started to look beyond JSON to find more full-fledged, dynamic programming languages to create and configure cloud resources.

In many ways, this movement is mimicking the evolution of web development as web ‘sites’ became web ‘applications’; in a few years, systems engineers will be coding infrastructure applications, not hard-coding declarative templates.

What is CloudFormation?

Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure as code (IaC) offering, CloudFormation, enables engineers to manage infrastructure through the use of declarative templates, utilising the data format language, JSON. The value of this approach is tremendous. Templates can be checked into a source code management system, linted and validated using tools and IDEs. Entire environments can be quickly duplicated, modified and deployed in quick time to keep pace with the rapid change ever present in today’s IT world.

CloudFormation can also kick off bootstrapping through UserData, creating a seamless bridge into the operating systems where machine images and configuration management can take over. In addition, any infrastructure change can have an audit trail and proper process built around it, automated to reduce human error and disparate configurations.

Despite the significant gains present in using CloudFormation, on its own it has some downsides. At its core, CloudFormation uses JSON to declare resources used for infrastructure build out. JSON is a data format, meant to be read by both machines and humans. The JSON is interpreted, turned into API calls and run against the infrastructure to create, change and remove various components. Amazon provides excellent documentation on the service, but for any engineer that has to manage large-scale, dynamic and complicated environments using CloudFormation alone, issues soon arise.

Hand-coding JSON is not a pleasant experience. The format does not allow for commenting. Stacks created can quickly become unruly as resource and line limits are hit, and environments grow. Some of this can be resolved by using sub-stacks and splitting the templates into smaller, more manageable chunks, but issues then arise due to a lack of global configuration, so resources’ IDs need to be passed and hard-coded as parameters or mappings in each stack.

Stack names and resource names are also immutable. Make a typo? You will be looking at it for a long time to come. Whereas CloudFormation does include some intrinsic functions to map and locate resources, it is by nature not dynamic and that leads to significant hurdles when attempting to deploy and maintain dynamic environments with common code.

At its heart, CloudFormation is simply declarative JSON. And that is a good thing. What is needed is not to make CloudFormation more dynamic, but rather to build tools which can dynamically generate templates and manage stacks. This is happening now to some extent, but the expectation is that this practice will be the future.

CloudFormation and HTML parallels

In some ways, the state of CloudFormation, and perhaps IaC in general today, is history repeating itself. Parallels can be seen in the long and varied history of web development that gives us insight into what the future will bring.

20 years ago, developing for the web consisted of a lot of hand-coding HTML, another declarative templating language meant to be interpreted by a machine. As web ‘sites’ evolved into web ‘applications’, this soon gave way to technologies like CGI, mod_php, JSP and others that provided a means of developing in a full-fledged programming language that could generate the underlying HTML. This gave us easy access to databases, global configurations, sessions, commenting and proper code organisation – benefits that revolutionised and accelerated the pace of the Internet.

However, even this was not enough and on top of these technologies grew the fully-fledged web frameworks seen in play today such as Rails, Django, Spring, Laravel, and countless others. Yet if you right click and view source on even the most sophisticated web application, you will see HTML at its core.

For AWS today, CloudFormation’s JSON templates is that underlying core for IaC development. However, I do expect to see many people hand-coding JSON over the next few years directly. This is rapidly being replaced by a variety of tools that can dynamically generate the JSON using a proper programming language. Examples include Troposphere, cfndsl, and many others.

A quick search on GitHub will bring up many, many projects that generate CloudFormation in a variety of languages, including Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java, and even Scala. Any of these solutions give us the bare basics we need to take IaC within AWS to the next level in much the same way as CGI, Apache modules and other technologies did for web development back in the day. It does not stop here though. The next logical step is to develop frameworks that can be used to further abstract and control the stacks created. We’re seeing the beginnings of that with such utilities as SparkleFormation, StackMaster, and Cumulus. Other tools such as Terraform take a different approach by accessing the API directly and not using CloudFormation.

While that is a wonderful IaC solution for companies managing environments outside of or in addition to AWS, having tools that generate CloudFormation as a base allow you to move between AWS-centric solutions as needed, and keep the underlying work intact.

The future of IaC

CloudFormation is here to stay and is in our opinion an excellent service offered by Amazon to implement effective IaC. However, in a few years we will look back and say “remember the time we had to hand-code a ton of JSON?”

Initial tools that allow for dynamic generation of CloudFormation from other programming languages are available in full force. Stack management frameworks are starting to appear in bulk too. As the leaders of those categories rise, infrastructure as code in AWS will turn into ‘infrastructure as an application’. It will achieve the maturity and benefits of a full-fledged development environment, much as web development has evolved over the years. And whether it is HTML or JSON, having a proper language at its base will enable multiple technologies to compete and provide choices while keeping a solid underlying base.

The post The Future of AWS Cloud: Infrastructure as an Application appeared first on Logicworks Gathering Clouds.

Box, data protection, data residency, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Box sets target on US government and Europe following 37% growth in Q1

Box co-founder and chief executive Aaron Levie briefing journalists and analysts in London this week

CEO Aaron Levie briefing journalists and analysts in London 

Box has reported healthy growth over the last quarter, increasing revenues 37% to $90.2 million, which the company has attributed to a more diversified portfolio. Public sector organizations and the European market are now in the crosshairs for future growth.

The US government is an area which has seemingly been prioritized by CEO Aaron Levie and the Box team moving forward, following the announcement Box for Government achieved FedRAMP certification from the Department of Defence. As the Department of Defence claims it has some of the highest degree of scrutiny around cloud platforms and technology, the team believe the certification will create a ripple effect throughout the US.

As a number of state and local government agencies lean on federal standards for guidance on what cloud technologies to adopt, the certification could lead to positive strides for the company. Levie highlighted the certification, as well as the partnership with IBM, has created a healthy sales pipeline for the team over recent months in the public sector segment.

The company added more than 5,000 customers to its ranks over the period, taking the total number to more than 62,000 businesses. Box now has 46 million users worldwide, of which 13% are now paying. Levie also highlighted work on its customer services processes has paid off over the quarter as customer churn rate is now below 3%.

“In Q1 we achieved record revenue of $90 million, up 37% year over year,” said Levie. “We also continue to gain operational efficiency and demonstrate leverage in our business model as we move towards our commitment to achieve positive free cash flow in the fourth quarter and in January 2017. Looking ahead underlying demand for Box remains very strong and our competitive position in the market has never been better. “

We created record sales pipeline in the quarter with several seven figure deals in the mix. This has been driven by the growing demand for a modern approach to enterprise content management, our differentiated product offerings and our maturing partnerships that are becoming an integral part of our go to market strategy.”

Box’s expansion strategy over recent months has been built upon the diversification of its product portfolio, but also its partner ecosystem. Firstly from a product perspective, the team launches Box Zones which enables organizations to dictate where data is stored around the world. This offering was brought about through the partnership with IBM.

Data residency is proving to be a sensitive area in recent months due to the confusion over data residency concerns following the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union to strike down the Safe Harbour agreement, and the subsequent criticism its successor, EU-US Privacy Shield, has received. The Box Zones offering would appear to be the company’s means of negating the impact of data residency by removing the concern of transatlantic data transmission. The team claim the offering has not only gained traction with new customers, but also created a number of upselling opportunities for companies who have operations in regions where data protection rules are more stringent than the US.

Aside from Box Zones, the team has also launched a number of new offerings including its Governance product, KeySafe and the aforementioned Box for Government offering. Aside from creating new opportunities in the US, the product diversification has also been credited with growth in new regions, which is a key pillar for the Box expansion plans.

From a partner ecosystem perspective, the quarter saw a number of new announcements as well as positive wins out of longer standing relationships. Box announced a new partnership with Adobe in April, aiming to simplify working with digital documents in the cloud, though Levie was particularly focused on the relationship with Microsoft, which has yielded positive results throughout the quarter.

“And nowhere is our ecosystem strategy more relevant than our partnership with Microsoft which continues to yield significant dividends,” said Levie. “For the first time ever customers can now collaboratively edit their Office documents that are stored in Box or edit them on their iPad or iPhone. Adoption of Office 365 continues to be a key driver for new customers to invest in Box as well as allow existing customers to expand their usage of Box.”

Partnerships currently influence around 20% of Box’s revenues which aside from Microsoft also includes AT&T and IBM. The partnership with IBM has been particularly successful in the company’s drive towards Europe, where the option to store data in Big Blue’s German and Irish data centres is attractive, according to Levie.

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Immobile Data | @ThingsExpo #Mobile #BigData #IoT #DigitalTransformation

Providing secure, mobile access to sensitive data sets is a critical element in realizing the full potential of cloud computing. However, large data caches remain inaccessible to edge devices for reasons of security, size, format or limited viewing capabilities. Medical imaging, computer aided design and seismic interpretation are just a few examples of industries facing this challenge. Rather than fighting for incremental gains by pulling these datasets to edge devices, we need to embrace the immobile, heavy nature of this data by providing new opportunities for high-performance access and real-time collaboration.

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Millennial #Storage | @CloudExpo @HGSTStorage #BigData #DataCenter

Creating replica copies to tolerate a certain number of failures is easy, but very expensive at cloud-scale. Conventional RAID has lower overhead, but it is limited in the number of failures it can tolerate. And the management is like herding cats (overseeing capacity, rebuilds, migrations, and degraded performance).
In his general session at 18th Cloud Expo, Scott Cleland, Senior Director of Product Marketing for the HGST Cloud Infrastructure Business Unit, will discuss how a new approach is necessary, one that supports the attributes of the cloud with the millions of applications and users depending on it for their business and personal lives. Object storage is the millennial approach to cloud-based data storage, archival, retrieval and cost. Why? Because it delivers significantly higher data reliability and allows virtually unlimited expansion for storage. Perfect for a hash-tagging, selfie-taking, always communicating and collaborating in an on-demand world.

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[session] Government Cloud Enablement By @MajedSaadi | @CloudExpo #Cloud

While many government agencies have embraced the idea of employing cloud computing as a tool for increasing the efficiency and flexibility of IT, many still struggle with large scale adoption. The challenge is mainly attributed to the federated structure of these agencies as well as the immaturity of brokerage and governance tools and models. Initiatives like FedRAMP are a great first step toward solving many of these challenges but there are a lot of unknowns that are yet to be tackled.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Majed Saadi, Chief Technology Officer at Govplace, will focus on providing a quick update about the state of the cloud in the federal government with an emphasis on current trends and drivers. He will also introduce a new Government Cloud Enablement Model that codifies the different functional areas that enablement must confront.

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IoT and Big Data – Who Owns All the Data? | @ThingsExpo #IoT #BigData

We’ve been doing it for years, decades for some. How many websites have you created accounts on? Your bank, your credit card companies, social media sites, hotels and travel sites, online shopping sites, and that’s just the start. We do it often without even thinking about it, quickly entering our personal information, our data, in a plethora of systems. Sometimes we’re not even aware of the information we are providing. It could be very personal information (think of the security questions you provide answers to for protecting your information on these systems), to information about your behavior, your interests (websites visited, internet search topics). While possibly concerning from a privacy perspective, you had some level of control. For the backend systems involved, the volume and variety of the data was a manageable situation. The tradeoff between privacy and convenience is something we, for the most part, found acceptable.

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acquisition, CRM, eCommerce, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce ventures into e-Commerce with $2.8bn acquisition

Salesforce 1Salesforce has taken another step towards the e-Commerce market after announcing it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Demandware for $2.8 billion.

Demandware provides a cloud-based e-commerce platform and related services for retailers and brands worldwide, going public during 2012 after raising $88 million in its initial public offering of $16 a share. Salesforce has announced it will commence a tender offer for all outstanding shares of Demandware for $75 per share, with the deal set to complete by July 31, 2016, the end of Salesforce’s second quarter.

As with the Marketing Cloud proposition, Salesforce is seemingly happy to pay healthily above share value to break into new markets when it cannot develop the capabilities organically. The company acquired ExactTarget for $2.5 billion in 2013, this was previously Salesforce’s largest acquisition, which built the foundation of the Marketing Cloud proposition.

“Demandware is an amazing company—the global cloud leader in the multi-billion dollar digital commerce market,” said Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce. “With Demandware, Salesforce will be well positioned to deliver the future of commerce as part of our Customer Success Platform and create yet another billion dollar cloud.”

The idea of ‘omnichannel’ business would generally not be considered new to the industry, though this is one of the first major steps Salesforce has made in diversifying its core business offering. The company is widely recognised as a leader in the CRM space, though the Demandware acquisition offers a number of upselling opportunities for its current customer base (those who are using Marketing Cloud and its CRM offering), who may well favour having their CRM and e-Commerce platform from the same vendor.

Demandware currently works with a number of brands around the world including Design Within Reach, Lands’ End, L’Oreal and Marks & Spencer, to deliver customized experiences for customers across web, mobile, social and in the store. The acquisition is expected to increase Salesforce’s revenues by approximately $100 million to $120 million through the remainder of the financial year.

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The key cloud skills you need in 2016: AWS, Azure, Docker and more

(c)iStock.com/peshkov

Jobs relating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) have gone up 53% over the past year while job postings requiring Microsoft Azure experience have increased by 75%, according to new data from managed cloud provider Rackspace.

The research figures are not quite as marked as last year’s analysis, when job postings including Docker went up 991% year on year, but it’s still more of the same; Docker postings went up 341% over the past 12 months. DevOps skill sets went up a modest 53% in comparison with 3,723 jobs available on the market, yet Rackspace argues this is indicative of the area moving more into the mainstream, and companies willing to use budget to hire staff with particular expertise.

Vacancies for AWS engineer roles have gone up by 125%, while Microsoft Azure-based jobs have gone up 5% in salary on average.

Elsewhere, Python expertise saw a ‘significant’ rise, with 6,186 jobs spotted in 2016, up 32% from 4,694 in 2015. Linux and Puppet, again key to the DevOps and Docker scenario, again rose in the past 12 months.

Despite the recent widely publicised commercial launch of the BBC Microbit, aimed at being the first step to getting such skills on board at a young age, Rackspace argues organisations need to do more. “Technology companies have a responsibility to address these shortages by growing and fostering talent through on the job training and experience,” said Darren Norfolk, Rackspace UK managing director.

“I expect the rise in demand for cloud related jobs to continue as a growing number of businesses adopt a multi-cloud strategy, using platforms such as Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and AWS,” he added. “The highly competitive recruitment market for skills in these areas means that managing the platforms in-house could become more costly than it has been in the past.”

Firebrand Training, a firm which specialises in technical job skills, cited Python as well as Linux – with more than a quarter of servers powering Azure being Linux based – as key cloud skills back in February.