All posts by Business Cloud News

developers, Enterprise IT, Infectious Media, Interviews

Infectious Media CTO on how DevOps is affecting ICT teams

people_daniel_de_sybelThe fourth employee of Infectious Media, Dan de Sybel started his career as an Operations Analyst for Advertising.com, where during a six year tenure, he launched the European Technology division, producing bespoke international reporting and workflow platforms, as well as numerous time saving systems and board level business intelligence.

Dan grew the EU Tech team to 12 people before moving agency side, to Media Contacts UK, part of the Havas Media Group. At Havas, Dan was responsible for key technology partnerships and spearheading the agency’s use of the Right Media exchange under its Adnetik trading division.

At Infectious Media, Dan’s Technology division yielded one of the first Big Data analysis systems to reveal and visualise the wealth of information that RTB provides to its clients. From there, the natural next step was to produce the Impression Desk Bidder to be able to action the insights gained from the data in real time and thus close the loop on the programmatic life cycle. Dan’s team continues to enhance its own systems, whilst integrating the technology of other best-in-class suppliers to provide a platform that caters to each and every one of our clients’ needs.

Ahead of his presentation at DevOps World on November 4th in London, Dan shares his insights on how he feels DevOps is affecting ICT teams, the DevOps challenges he is facing as well as what he is doing to overcome it.

What does your role involve and how are you involved with DevOps?

​Infectious Media runs its own real-time bidding software that takes part in hundreds of thousands of online auctions for online advertising space every second. As CTO, it’s my job to ensure we have the right team, processes and practices in place to ensure this high frequency, low latency system remains functional 24×7 and adapts to the ever changing marketplace and standards of the online advertising industry.

DevOps practices naturally evolved at Infectious Media due to our small teams, 1 week sprint cycles and growing complexity of systems. Our heavy use of the cloud meant that we could experiment frequently with different infrastructure setups and adapt code to deliver the best possible value for the investment we were prepared to make. These conditions resulted in far closer working of the developers and the operational engineers and we have not looked back since.

How have you seen DevOps affecting IT teams’ work?

Before adopting the DevOps philosophy, we struggled to bring the real-time bidding​ system to fruition, never sure if problems originated in the code, in the operational configurations of infrastructure, or in the infrastructure itself. Whilst the cloud brought many benefits, never having complete control of the infrastructure stack led to ​many latency and performance issues that could not be easily explained. Furthermore, being unable to accurately simulate a real-world environment for testing without spending hundreds of thousands of pounds meant that we had to work out solutions for de-risking testing new code in live environments. All of these problems became much easier to deal with once we started following DevOps practices and as a result, we have a far happier and more productive technology team.

What is the biggest challenge you are facing with DevOps and how did/are you trying to overcome it?

​The biggest challenge was overcoming initial inertia to switch to a model that was so far unproven and regarded as a bit of a fad. Explaining agile methodologies and the compromises it involves to senior company execs is hard enough, but as soon as you mention multiple daily release cycles necessitating fewer governance processes and testing on live, you are bound to raise more than a few eyebrows.​

​Thankfully, we are a progressive company and the results proved the methodology. Since we adopted DevOps, we’ve had fewer outages, safer, more streamlined deployments and, crucially, more features released in less time

Can you share a book, article, movie that you recently read/watched and inspired you – in regards to technology?

​The Phoenix Project. ​Perhaps a bit obvious, but it’s enjoyable reading a novel that covers some of the very real problems IT professionals experience in their day-to-day roles with the very solutions that we were experimenting with at the time.

15880-DevOps-World-LogoWhat are you hoping to achieve by attending the DevOps World?

​Really my goal is to understand and help with some of the problems rolling DevOps practices out across larger companies can yield. In many respects, rolling out DevOps in small startups is somewhat easier as you have far less inertia from tried and trusted practices, comparatively less risk and far fewer people to convince that it’s a good idea. I’ll be interested to hear about other people’s experiences and hopefully be able to share some advice based on our own.

Apcera, AT&T, container, Ericsson, News & Analysis, NFV, PaaS, Platform as a service, Telco Cloud, Virtualisation

AT&T, Ericsson and Apcera demonstrate NFV in a PaaS environment

Voice and video can work in the most complicated clouds, according to an integration breakthrough demonstrated at the OpenStack summit in Tokyo.

AT&T and Ericsson claim they’ve created an improvement to container technology that makes cloud telco platforms far more secure and yet easier to set up. They jointly presented their invention in proof of concept exercise, along with cloud service provider Apcera.

Container technology, previously used for creating secure environments for text based office and enterprise productivity applications, has been tweaked in order to overcome some of its security limitations, when telecoms is handled in the cloud.

Telco AT&T, equipment maker Ericsson and cloud service provider Apcera described how they came together in order to bring their own perspectives of the multiple levels of the OpenStack hierarchy. The joint problem they faced is that the virtualization of telecoms still has some teething problems that need to be resolved, such as the interaction of various web browsers and video and audio services.

The companies demonstrated how they have tweaked container technology to create a containerised policy driven PaaS that can use the telecoms related Virtualized Network Function (VNF). The resulting telecoms-charged ‘advanced container’ was able to house a Web Communication Gateway (vWCG) that fully integrated with OpenStack.

The proof of concept exercise showed audio and video communications actually worked between multiple Web browsers on the virtualized telephony system.

Never mind the complexity of what’s happening across the comms stack and the cloud, the main thing to take home is that this system works with a few clicks of a mouse, said Magnus Arildsson, Head of IaaS and PaaS at Ericsson. “This is an important step toward fast, secure and policy-integrated deployment of Telco VNFs on micro-services-based containers,” he said.

Ericsson and Apcera accelerated the development of the micro-services-based PaaS environment, said Derek Collison, CEO of Apcera. “This exercise paves the way for cost-effective, efficient deployments and further collaboration with telco operators to integrate carrier-grade requirements with our cloud platform.”

Helion, HP, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack

Second coming of HP Helion OpenStack will concentrate on hybrids

HP has unveiled its latest incarnation of HP Helion OpenStack with a demonstration of Version 2.0 at the OpenStack Summit 2015 in Tokyo.

After it recently announced the imminent closure of its OpenStack driven public cloud offering, the vendor is thought to be concentrating its efforts to help enterprise clients cope with the challenge of straddling private and hybrid cloud environments. This, according to analyst IDC, is the biggest market in the industry with $118 billion of business being generated in 2015.

HP said it has marshalled all the resources withdrawn from the public cloud and sent them to fight on the Hybrid cloud front. The numbers will help the vendor establish confidence among its enterprise customers, according to Bill Hilf, the general manager of HP’s cloud division. “Customers want to put OpenStack technology into production with the confidence that they are backed by the experience and support of a trusted end-to-end technology partner,” said Hilf.

From a technical perspective, the HP platform will be easier to use, said Hilf. In the new version of Helion, created out of the OpenStack Kilo stable, laying on new infrastructure will be a lot easier for system builders and CIOs, he said. The cost of ownership will be lowered, and projects will advance quicker, thanks to a much more user-friendly administrator interface. The problems of integrating different clouds into one hybrid will be easier to confront now, Hilf told the OpenStack Summit audience, because HP is instilling an internal policy of strict adherence to OpenStack application programme interface (API) standards in a bid to speed up cross-cloud compatibility.

HP also claimed that Helion OpenStack 2.0 will allow customers to create and manage software defined networks (SDN) in a distributed, multi-datacentre environment through integration with HP Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) and Nuage Networks’ Virtualized Services Platform. This, it claims, removes the boundaries of traditional networking and unlocks the full automation and liquidity needed for running a proper hybrid cloud.

cloud exchange, Datacentre, Equinix, News & Analysis, Oracle

Equinix creates direct link to Oracle Cloud Services via Cloud Exchange

CloudData centre operator Equinix has agreed to give its Cloud Exchange users direct access to Oracle Cloud Service, the software vendor’s public platform for infrastructure services.

Equinix claims that Oracle users will get quicker response times and better performance as data is accelerated through its Cloud Exchanges in its Amsterdam, Chicago, London, Singapore, Sydney and Washington data centres.

It should also provide a better framework to support the hybrid cloud systems that most enterprises run, as well as solid support for migrations to the cloud, according to Oracle. “It gives Oracle’s enterprise customers the flexibility to pick the network services best suited to their diverse workloads,” said Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s president of product development.

The Oracle Cloud aims to simplify the building of new applications and migration of existing on-premises applications to the cloud. The Oracle Cloud Platform offers customers and partners the same platform as a service (PaaS) foundation upon which Oracle runs its own software as a service (SaaS) offerings. According to Oracle 19 of the world’s top 20 SaaS providers now use its Cloud service. In October it announced that Oracle Cloud Services it launched 24 additional PaaS and IaaS services.

Oracle’s 400,000 customers include all 100 of the Fortune 100 companies and it has sold 1,000 ERP systems running in the cloud. By offering direct access on Equinix Cloud Exchange, Oracle said it can create much faster connections between the on-premise systems many companies still use and the Oracle public cloud.

“The addition of Oracle Cloud to Equinix Cloud Exchange helps our customers execute on their business strategies,” said Equinix CEO Steve Smith.

Cloud is the fastest growing part of Oracle’s business. It supports 62 million users and 23 billion transactions each day. Oracle Cloud runs on 30,000 devices and 400 petabytes of storage in 19 data centres around the world.

CISA, data protection, News & Analysis, Policy and Regulation, Safe Harbour

Opinion divided on impact of CISA ruling on Safe Harbour

Open DataThe new US Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), passed in the US Senate on Tuesday, has made it even harder for data sharing between the US and EU, according to critics.

However, attitudes to data sovereignty and the institution of a new Safe Harbour agreement seem to be polarising across both sides of the Atlantic.

Former White House cyber security advisor French Caldwell, chief evangelist at GRC software company MetricStream, said he recognised the ‘libertarian’ argument but that those at the front line in the IT industry have a more realistic grasp of the immediate issues. “Libertarians are strongly opposed and it’s easy to sympathise with that position. Once the door opens to information sharing, the arrangement might go from voluntary to mandatory over time,” said Caldwell.

However, security people on the ‘front lines’, at banks, electrical utilities, energy companies and hospitals, are fighting a war, he said. “Well financed gangs of criminal hackers are attacking businesses and government agencies daily. And as we’ve seen over the last few years, nation-states are probing for weakness. These cyberattacks amount to cyberwar,” said Caldwell.

The significant privacy protections in the CISA legislation will provide protections from anti-trust rules. Better still, it would bring data holders into a protective information sharing culture with federal agencies, he argued.

However, a UK counterpart saw the CISA ruling differently. “This is bad news. Just as the EU makes it clear that it’s a serious problem if security agencies get easy access to personal data, the US Government makes it even easier for this snooping to happen,” said Mike Weston, CEO of data science consultancy Profusion.

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act will make it significantly harder for the US and Europe to agree a replacement for the collapsed Safe Harbour provisions, according to Weston. “Without assurances that European citizens’ personal data is protected, it’s hard to see how such an agreement might be reached. The biggest stumbling block is that while US citizens are afforded some protection by the USA Freedom Act, none applies to citizens of other nations.”

In a Microsoft blog posting its chief legal office Brad Smith called on the US government to respect European Union privacy laws for transatlantic personal data in the post-Safe Harbour era.

The note describes privacy as a ‘fundamental human right’ and urges the US government to commit to only accessing private information stored in the United States about EU citizens in a manner that ‘conforms with EU law, and vice versa’.

Infrastructure as a Service, Networks, News & Analysis, Tata

IZO Private Cloud will snatch back IT assets from the public cloud, says Tata

Money cloudTata Communications claims its new IZO Private Cloud service will help CIOs wrestle back control of their IT from the public cloud. It could reunite CIOs with their IT and give them unprecedented access to their public and private clouds after half a decade of having their entire data centre estate wrenched from their grasp in a painful breakup.

The new service, unveiled at Cloud Expo Asia, is described as a ‘game-changing’ cloud enablement platform that, by seamlessly integrating hybrids with public clouds, extends the control of the CIO over all the IT assets affecting their employer. Tata claims it will empower enterprises to connect to the world’s biggest clouds and build high-performance IT infrastructures. It will achieve this by creating a union of different cloud, colocation and managed hosting environments and making this hybrid work together as one unit.

The new service will eventually be available in 12 locations worldwide but is currently installed in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, the US and UK. The multi platform integration will be tempered with enterprise-grade security, says Tata, and offers its CIO administrators ‘unparalleled visibility’ and control via a single-pane-of-glass management, claims Tata.

Tata Communications’ ecosystem comprises 20 service providers and includes Microsoft Azure, Office365, Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform and Salesforce, with over 50 data centres across the globe. Currently 24% of the world’s Internet routes travel over Tata’s network, which is the largest wholly-owned subsea cable network in the world. Its Tier 1 IP network provides backbone connectivity to over 240 countries and territories across 400 points-of-presence.

The IZO Private Cloud breaks down the final barriers blocking enterprise cloud adoption, claimed Tata Communications’ president Genius Wong. “This is the next step on our mission to harness our partners and data centre infrastructure so CIOs can be put back in control of their cloud and data centre estate.”

Big Data, Data, Database, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Veritas

Veritas warns of ‘databerg’ hidden dangers

Deep WebBackup specialist Veritas Technologies claims European businesses waste billions of euros on huge stories of useless information which are growing every year. By 2020 it claims the damage caused by this excessive data will cost over half a trillion pounds (£576bn) a year.

According to the Veritas Databerg Report 2015, 59% of data stored and processed by UK organisations is invisible and could contain hidden dangers. From this it has estimated that the average mid-sized UK organisation holding 1000 Terabytes of information spends £435k annually on Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT) data. According to its estimate just 12% of the cost of data storage is justifiably spent on business-critical intelligence.

The report blames employees and management for the waste. The first group treats corporate IT systems as their own personal infrastructure, while management are too reliant on cloud storage, which leaves them open to compliance violations and a higher risk of data loss.

The survey identified three major causes for Databerg growth, which stem from volume, vendor hype and the values of modern users. These root causes create problems in which IT strategies are based on data volumes not business value. Vendor hype, in turn, has convinced users to become increasingly reliant on free storage in the cloud and this consumerisation has led to a growing disregard for corporate data policies, according to the report’s authors.

As a result, big data and cloud computing could lead corporations to hit the databerg and incur massive losses. They could also sink under a prosecution for compliance failing, according to the key findings of the Databerg Report 2015.

It’s time to stop the waste, said Matthew Ellard, Senior VP for EMEA at Veritas. “Companies invest a significant amount of resources to maintain data that is totally redundant, obsolete and trivial.” This ‘ROT’ costs a typical midsize UK company, which can expect to hold 500 Terabytes of data, nearly a million pounds a year on photos, personal ID doc, music and videos.

The study was based on a survey answered by 1,475 respondents in 14 countries, including 200 in the UK.

News & Analysis, Open Source, OpensStack, Project Navigator

OpenStack claims Project Navigator will lead adopters through development hell

openstack tokyo summitThe OpenStack Foundation’s chief operating office Mark Collier has lifted the lid on Project Navigator, a scheme to help users see their way through the myriad of component projects, different levels of software maturity and documentation involved in taking part in the project.

The involvement of 200 vendors in the open source project is both a strength and a weakness in such a large complex community with diverse projects, according to Collier, speaking at the OpenStack developer conference. Project Navigator aims to help companies chart a course more easily, he said.

“It’s good to have options but it can be overwhelming,” said Collier, “we have over two dozen different services now that you can put into production. There’s a small number of projects that every cloud uses, but there are quite a few projects that give you optional services.”

These days users need help in making sense of the various projects before they can progress, said Collier. The project aims to offer intelligence, drawn from a number of sources, to help them make quicker and faster decisions.

Users know a little about a lot of projects but can rarely have complete information, Collier said. In response, the foundation has gathered metadata about various projects, on everything from their breadth of adoption to the documentation to the age and will publish this on its web site.

Collier admitted this would be a best effort. “We can’t fly everywhere and talk to everyone. It makes more sense to distil it down and make it digestible online,” said Collier.

The objective of the Navigator tool is to educate users about the core set of services that they’ll need in any cloud and provide a clear delineation between those and the services that are optional.

In a related support development, the OpenStack Foundation announced the launch of a certification program for OpenStack cloud admins. Like Project Navigator, the scheme is a formal recognition of the growing complexity of OpenStack. The large number of sub-projects make it hard for businesses to find qualified administrators before they can adopt the technology.

OpenStack COO Mark Collier said similar certifications are planned for OpenStack developers and other roles in the project.

Enterprise IT, Internet of Things, News & Analysis, OpenWorld 2015, Oracle cloud

Oracle announces new levels of cloud, mobile and IoT integration in its Cloud Platform

Oracle openworld 2015Oracle has announced at OpenWorld a ‘comprehensive’ suite of integration services to help clients connect their cloud mobile and IoT systems into the Oracle Cloud Platform.

The Oracle Cloud Platform for Integration portfolio now includes Oracle’s IoT Cloud, Integration Cloud, SOA Cloud and API Manager Cloud range of services.

Oracle says its Integration Cloud is ideal for non-technical users such as citizen integrators, the applications staff in IT departments and line of business managers who need to integration software as a service (SaaS) applications. To this end it comes with a simple, intuitive Web-based, point-and-click user interface.

On the other end of the technical competence spectrum, Oracle’s SOA Cloud was designed for integration developers. It provides a full integration platform, including service virtualisation, process orchestration, B2B integration, managed file transfer and business activity monitoring dashboards. In accordance with the more detailed nature of the work of the typical user it has fine-grained control and the capacity to support various use cases.

Oracle’s integration cloud services are fully portable, it claims, so that users can switch their integration workloads between on-premise and the cloud, as business requirements change.

The IT architectures that organizations have relied on for decades are too rigid and inflexible for the digital age, according to Amit Zavery, Oracle’s senior VP of Cloud Platform and Integration products at Oracle. “Organisations need to rethink API management and service integration across cloud, mobile and IoT initiatives,” said Zavery.

Oracle Cloud Platform’s suite of integration services will provide the flexibility to allow them to adapt, which will boost productivity, slash costs and catalyse the inventive processes, Zavery argued.

Oracle Internet of Things Cloud Service should make it easy to connect any device, whether it generates or analyses data and extends business processes within enterprise applications, says Oracle. This, it says, will lead to faster development of IoT applications, with preventive maintenance and asset tracking pre-integrated with other Oracle systems such as Oracle PaaS, Oracle SaaS, Oracle JD Edwards, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle Fusion.

Meanwhile, the Oracle API Manager Cloud Service will help developers to create and expose APIs to internal or external consumers quickly but without compromising on security, according to the vendor.

The Oracle Cloud Platform is part of the Oracle Cloud. Oracle says its Cloud offering supports 70 million users and more than 34 billion transactions each day and runs on more than 50,000 devices and more than 800 petabytes of storage in 19 data centres around the world.

China, Mirantis, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, UCloud

Mirantis and UCloud in joint bid to tap massive potential of Chinese cloud market

ChinaSoftware and services vendor Mirantis and Chinese cloud operator UCloud have announced a joint venture to speed OpenStack adoption in China’s finance, telecom, state-owned enterprises and large internet businesses.

The venture, dubbed UMCloud, will be led by UCloud CEO and founder Xinhua Ji with head offices in Shanghai, China.

Investment in cloud computing infrastructure in China is estimated by consultancy Bain & Company to be growing faster than overall IT spending and projected to reach $20 billion by 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 40% to 45%. In 2014, China had more than 640 million internet users – more than the USA, India and Japan combined. In 2013, smartphone use in China exceeded 700 million units and 530 million of these Chinese smartphone users accessed the internet from their mobile device.

Cloud computing is a national strategic policy and the government included it in the nation’s 12th Five-Year Plan. Last December, the Ministry of Industry and Information (MIIT) officially declared its intention to support OpenStack ecosystems and to encourage state-owned enterprises to use OpenStack-based cloud products.

California based software and service vendor Mirantis is described as pure-play OpenStack company with installations at AT&T, Ericsson, Walmart and Wells Fargo. It has been funded by a quarter of a billion dollars in venture capital since 2012 and is the second highest contributor of open source software code to OpenStack. Mirantis’ Chinese clients include telco hardware makers Jiesai, Huawei and ZTE.

UCloud is China’s top independent public cloud service provider with clients using e-commerce, gaming, mobile internet and SaaS services, from data centres in China, Hong Kong and the US. The company announced a $100 million Series C financing round in April, with $160 million raised to date.

“China and the United States are two countries where cloud computing is developing the fastest,” said Alex Freedland, president and co-founder of Mirantis, “we see unlimited potential for OpenStack as a major cloud engine in China.”