SYS-CON Events announced today that CenturyLink, Inc., a leader in the network services market, has been named “Platinum Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
CenturyLink is the third largest telecommunications company in the United States and is recognized as a leader in the network services market by technology industry analyst firms. The company is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprise customers.

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ProfitBricks has launched its new DevOps Central and REST API, along with support for three multi-cloud libraries and a Python SDK. This, combined with its already existing SOAP API and its new RESTful API, moves ProfitBricks into a position to better serve the DevOps community and provide the ability to automate cloud infrastructure in a multi-cloud world.
Following this momentum, ProfitBricks has also introduced several libraries that enable developers to use their favorite language to code against its RESTful and SOAP APIs. This development provides users with multi-cloud support and enhances the portability of DevOps automation across clouds now supporting ProfitBricks. The libraries include: LibCloud, a Python library using a unified API; Fog, a Ruby cloud services library; and jclouds, a Java language multi-cloud library. ProfitBricks is also releasing a Python SDK, for coding against its new REST API, which both abstracts and provides complete coverage for all API functions. To add to this clear trajectory, the company plans to release additional libraries over the course of the next few months.

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No, not the head-banging, gritty, heavy metal Metallica song (though that’s certainly awesome too.. excuse me for a moment while I turn it up to 11) but the Puppet as in automation kind of master.
The importance placed on APIs – which are key to automation – in our State of Application Delivery 2015 survey was high, with 40% of respondents saying it was important to them that their infrastructure be API-enabled. Automation using those APIs is generally being accomplished through a variety of means with frameworks like Puppet being a popular toolset. 20% of respondents indicated they currently use Puppet, placing it firmly in the top 5 frameworks in use.

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GENBAND introduced its Real Time Communications (RTC) Client for Lync* to seamlessly combine real-time communications with Lync Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence.
“We’re shaking up the economics of delivering Unified Communications (UC) and offering a compelling way to integrate previously bespoke communications technologies,” said Carl Baptiste, GENBAND’s Senior Vice President, Enterprise Solutions. “We’re offering enterprises the best of both worlds by combining our own high availability voice, video and collaboration with Lync’s IM and Presence; creating a single, web centric, client. Our RTC Client for Lync is delivered like a web page but operates like a traditional desktop or mobile application. More importantly, it looks familiar to Lync users so they don’t need to be retrained and IT organizations aren’t burdened with the cost and complexity of expanding Lync infrastructure to support real-time communications.”

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What’s hot in today’s cloud computing world? Containers are fast becoming a viable alternative to virtualization for the right use cases. But to understand why containers can be a better option, we need to first understand their origins.
In basic terms, containers are application-centric environments that help isolate and run workloads far more efficiently than the traditional hypervisor technology found in commodity cloud Infrastructure as a Service. Modern operating systems (Linux, Windows, etc.) are made up of two basic parts: kernel space and user space. As its name implies, Kernel space is home to the operating system kernel, or the low level instructions that boot the machine, control hardware, provide subsystems (e.g., networking, storage, etc.), and schedule tasks. Tasks (processes, threads, etc.) run in user space, which is home to applications and services. Different operating systems have different levels of modularity and functional “splits” between kernel space and user space, but most architectures are conceptually the same. While hypervisors run virtual machines that make up both spaces, containers encapsulate just the user space, greatly reducing complexity and redundancy. The immediate benefit is higher performance and less “bloat”, extremely important to the economics of cloud computing. The popularity of containers is a direct result of the realization that hypervisor-based technologies are expensive to host and manage for many types of applications.

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Privileged Identity Management (PIM) is the lowest common denominator in today’s most treacherous corporate and governmental security breaches. Or more accurately: Privilege Mismanagement. Sony, Target, Anthem, JP Morgan Chase, the city of San Francisco and many others succumbed to the reality that the identity of a single super-user account can be subverted for the purposes of manipulating sensitive organizational data, correspondence, commercial goods and intellectual property.

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Who needs to go out for dinner, when you have a tireless master chef waiting at home to prepare a gourmet meal for you, any time, day or night? That’s the premise behind a new invention from Moley Robotics, a tech company based in London. Moley unveiled their new “robochef” prototype on April 14, 2015 at the Hannover Messe technology fair in Germany.

Using hands produced by Shadow Robot Company, the robot chef is capable of producing meals from a collection of over 2,000 recipes, using natural motions learned from Tim Anderson, a human chef and winner of the BBC’s MasterChef competition in 2011. Eventually, home chefs will be able to use a motion capture system to “teach” the robot new recipes, or download them from an iTunes-like service.

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Trends indicate that enterprise solutions, particularly enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software are still largely hosted on-premises. A 2014 study by Gartner found that only 2% of respondents ran their core ERP systems on the cloud. More enterprises are looking to shift to the cloud, with half of those surveyed indicating the intention to move to a cloud-based platform within the next five years.
The role of big data in ERPs until now, has been largely separate. Most of the time, Big Data becomes an input for ERPs, but data from an ERP can also become inputs for big data analytics.

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The clamor surrounding enterprise cybersecurity is to be expected, of course, with all the breaches – ahem, “incidents” – over the last year or so. Home Depot. Target. Anthem. The list goes on and on. And with breaches come enterprise dollars, frantically swirling over the proverbial barn door after the horse is long gone, having fallen victim to some central Asian DDoS attack, no doubt.
Warning: if you like a manageable inbox, then whatever you do, don’t get a press pass to the RSA Conference. I’ve had such passes to conferences before, even quite large ones, but nothing prepared me for the onslaught of PR pitches for this venerable enterprise security shindig.
To make matters worse, all the pitches sounded alike. Apparently there are only about a dozen or so buzzwords in the security industry, and it’s the role of each vendor – and especially their PR wonks – to put said buzzwords into a unique order, thus differentiating their products from the hundreds of other widgets and gewgaws looking to rise above the noise.

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One of the most frequently requested Rancher features, load balancers are used to distribute traffic between docker containers. Now Rancher users can configure, update and scale up an integrated load balancing service to meet their application needs, using either Rancher’s UI or API. To implement our load balancing functionality we decided to use HAproxy, which is deployed as a contianer, and managed by the Rancher orchestration functionality.

With Rancher’s Load Balancing capability, users are now able to use a consistent, portable load balancing service on any infrastructure where they can run Docker. Whether it is running in a public cloud, private cloud, lab, cluster, or even on a laptop, any container can be a target for the load balancer.

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