European organisations are still beleaguered by storage bills as 50% of all cloud storage costs in EMEA go to data access and usage fees rather than capacity, according to the 2024 Global Cloud Storage Index from Wasabi Technologies. Still, EMEA companies see the value of cloud storage services and plan to increase their spend in… Read more »
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Cloud consultancy Rebura, which specialises in supporting AWS cloud migrations and modernisations across the UK, Nordics and central Europe, has been acquired by global technology distributor Westcon-Comstor. Founded in 2017, London-based Rebura supports companies of all sizes as they build and optimise their apps and workloads on AWS, increasing productivity, scalability, cost efficiency and security.… Read more »
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Benchling has launched its inaugural 2023 State of Tech in Biopharma report, which has shed light on the obstacles that biopharma encounter when striving to fully implement and embrace these technologies. The report surveyed 300 R&D and IT experts from biopharma companies large and small to do a first-ever investigation into biopharma’s use of an… Read more »
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Vertice, an optimisation platform for SaaS and cloud spend, has unveiled the results of its global survey, ‘The State of Cloud Cost Optimisation’, which reveals that organisations are being held back from controlling their cloud spending and gaining ROI because of a lack of alignment between finance and tech leaders. Amidst cloud costs rising by… Read more »
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The post below was written by GreenPages Enterprise Consultant Chris Williams and was published on his Mistwire blog.
So what does this mean? Is this (potentially) bad news for VMware and Microsoft?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss*
*VMware and MS are working on projects to get in on the containery goodness, so I won’t speak about that here. Instead I’m going to walk through how to set up your first Docker engine ON CentOS ON ESXi in your existing vSphere environment.
To read the rest of Chris’ post, click here!
Looking for more information around Docker? Download this whitepaper, “10 Things to Know About Docker.”
The Mozilla Firefox team has announced it will integrate a new containers driven feature to allow users to sign into multiple accounts on the same site simultaneously.
While the concept of using technology to manage multiple accounts and different personas is not a new idea, the practicalities have been out of reach. With the new feature, users will be able to sign into multiple accounts in different contexts for such uses as personal emails, work accounts, banking, and shopping. Twitter is one of the most relevant examples in the immediate future, as it is not uncommon for individuals to have multiple twitter account for work and personal life.
“We all portray different characteristics of ourselves in different situations,” said Tanvi Vyas, one of the security engineers working on the project, on the company blog. “The way I speak with my son is much different than the way I communicate with my coworkers. The things I tell my friends are different than what I tell my parents. I’m much more guarded when withdrawing money from the bank than I am when shopping at the grocery store. I have the ability to use multiple identities in multiple contexts. But when I use the web, I can’t do that very well.
“The Containers feature attempts to solve this problem: empowering Firefox to help segregate my online identities in the same way I can segregate my real life identities.”
The Mozilla Firefox team are one of the first to have cracked the equation, though it does admit there are a number of challenges to come. Questions which the team now need to answer include:
“We don’t have the answers to all of these questions yet, but hope to start uncovering some of them with user research and feedback,” said Vyas. “The Containers implementation in Nightly Firefox is a basic implementation that allows the user to manage identities with a minimal user interface.”
Chef has launched a new open source project called Habitat, which it claims introduces a new approach for application automation.
The team claim Habitat is a unique piece of software which enables applications to be freed from dependency on a company’s infrastructure. When applications are wrapped in Habitat the runtime environment is no longer the focus and does not constrain the application itself. Due to this USP applications can run across numerous environments such as containers, PaaS, cloud infrastructure and on premise data centres, but also has the intelligence to self-organize and self-configure, the company claims.
“We must free the application from its dependency on infrastructure to truly achieve the promise of DevOps,” said Adam Jacob, CTO at Chef. “There is so much open source software to be written in the world and we’re very excited to release Habitat into the wild. We believe application-centric automation can give modern development teams what they really want — to build new apps, not muck around in the plumbing.”
Chef would generally be considered a challenger to the technology industry’s giants having only been founded in 2008, though the company has made positive strides in recent years specializing in the DevOps and containers arenas, two of the more prominent growth areas. Although both of these areas are prominent in marketing campaigns and conference presentations, applications into the real-world have been more difficult.
The Habitat product is built on the idea that infrastructure dictated the design of an application. Chef claims by making the application and its automation the unit of deployment, developers can focus on business value and planning features that will make their products stand out rather than on the constraints of infrastructure and particular runtime environments.
“The launch of Habitat is a significant moment for both Chef and the entire DevOps community in the UK and EMEA,” said Joe Pynadath, GM of EMEA for Chef Software, Chef. “It marks our next evolution and will provide an absolutely transformative, paradigm shift to how our community and customers can approach application management and automation. An approach that puts the application first and makes them independent of their underlying infrastructure. I am extremely excited to see the positive impact that our Chef community and customers throughout Europe will gain from this revolutionary technology.”
EMC 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.”
London-based Container Solutions has released the latest version of its minimesos project, an open source testing and experiment tool for Apache Mesos, which it claims brings production orchestration testing to the development environment.
The new offering targets the challenge of moving microservice applications from a developer’s laptop to the production environment, which can prove to be complicated as the target platform is different than the local one. The offering allows developers to bring up a containerised Apache Mesos cluster on their laptop, creating a production-like environment on their desktops for building, experimenting and testing.
“When we started building a number of Mesos frameworks, we found it hard to run and test them locally,” said Jamie Dobson, CEO of Container Solutions. “So, we ended up writing a few scripts to solve the problem. Those scripts became minimesos, which lets you do everything on your laptop. We later integrated Scope so that developers could visualise their applications. This made minimesos even more useful for exploratory testing.”
The company claims developers can now start a Mesos cluster through the command line or via the Java API, which is logically isolated as each of the processes run in separate Docker containers. Minimesos is aslo integrated: it exposes framework, state and task information to its Cluster State API.
Joyent has launched its next generation container-native (G4) and KVM-based (K4) instance package families, which are now available on its Triton-powered public cloud platform.
The company’s cloud platform runs on containers, as opposed to traditional VM’s which the majority of other cloud platforms run on, which it claims will notably improve efficiency. The software used to run the Triton Cloud service is 100% open source and available for customers to use to operate in their own private data centres within a hybrid cloud model.
“Workloads are more efficient on Triton Cloud,” said Bill Fine, Vice President Product and Marketing at Joyent. “This is because Triton allows you to run containers natively, without having to pre-provision (and pay for) virtual machine hosts. The result is less waste and more cost savings for you.
“Consider our recent blueprint to run WordPress in containers. A minimum running implementation requires six g4-highcpu-128M instances and costs just over $13 per month. That minimal site may be perfect for a small blog or staging a larger one. Should you need to scale it, you can resize the containers without restarting them or scale horizontally with Docker-compose scale (or another scheduler of your choice).”
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Joyent’s value proposition and marketing campaigns are seemingly built on the claim it is cheaper and more efficient than AWS, as it would appear the team are set on taking the fight to the incumbent industry leader. The company claim there is a notable price-performance cost advantage, more specifically, Elasticsearch clusters on Triton complete query requests 50% to 70% faster, Sharded MongoDB clusters complete tasks 100% to 150% faster and Standard primary/replica Postgres configurations up to 200% faster, in comparison to AWS.
“The cost of running on Triton is about half the cost of running on AWS,” said Fine. “With enough experimentation and determination you might be able to narrow this cost gap by more efficiently bin-packing your containers into VMs on AWS, but on Triton those efficiencies are built in and the cost and complexity of VM host clustering is removed. Each container just runs (on bare metal) with the resources you specify.”