Creating global change that is actually good for the entire world is a mammoth task. With a population of almost 7 Billion people as of 2015, the planet is taking a toll with surviving the brunt of keeping the works going. What role can Cloud Computing play in making it easier for all of us?
API Workshops for OAuth, Mobile, REST By @Axway | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
We regularly run API Workshops worldwide which bring together API practitioners in discussion, debate, and exposure to technologies such as OAuth 2.0, API developer portal design, and identity.
And when we say “worldwide”, we mean worldwide.
To illustrate this, my colleague Philipp Schöne has created an interactive map on CartoDB of the API Workshops over the past year, with photos of each. All that’s missing is a backing track of Daft Punk’s “Around the World” 🙂
Each API Workshop has been eventful in its own way, and for example I recall the spirited debate on SOA and API Management, led by Kevin Kohut from Accenture and Randy Heffner from Forrester, at our API Workshop in Phoenix in September.
Kanban or Scrum with Paul Barnhill By @MadGreek65 | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
Our guest on the podcast this week is Paul Barnhill, Senior Architect at Cloud Technology Partners.
We discuss the differences between DevOps management systems, Kanban and Scrum. While both offer compelling capabilities, Kanban will become increasingly popular over the next year.
Listen in to find out what Kanban can do that Scrum can not.
The Internet of Things Is Cybercriminal’s Dream Come True | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
The Internet Of Things Is A Cybercriminals Dream Come True
Connected technologies will have access to a huge repository of information about us and our families enabling devices to tailor themselves to our interests and needs.
Read my latest post on Forbes that discusses the security challenges that IoT presents.
Advice for the New On-Call Engineer By @VictorOps | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
There is more to being on-call than just knowing how to type in the latest ChatOps commands, reboot AMIs and print out java stack traces. There are life skills that come from being on-call for a while and fortunately, those are lessons that can be taught.
Here at VictorOps we’re currently adding six new engineers to our on-call roster, so I’ve been thinking about the experience of being on-call and how to make the best of it.
The first day you go on-call can be frightening. The most important thing to remember is that you’ve already passed the first test. You have the trust and respect of your teammates and are providing them with a valuable commodity: peace of mind. No one wants to be on-call, so stepping up to the plate and taking shifts helps to improve the lives of everyone on your team.
Tech Companies Competing To Be The Leader In Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a technology that allows centralized data storage and online access to computer services and resources through remote servers and networks. Many technology companies have begun to transition from IT resources into cloud computing and are competing to become the world leader. The better-managed companies will be able to make this transition more successfully than those who lack decent management. Here is a description of what some tech companies are doing to make this transition.
Cisco
Cisco’s transition into the cloud has allowed the company to grow further than its traditional routers and switches. Cisco has seen a dramatic increase in earnings from data relevant products and services. They also reported that its Unified Computing System data platform had a surge in users. Cisco is transitioning into software-defined networks (SDN), which will force current models to change their models. However, this will take a long time.
IBM
IBM’s cloud revenue shot through the roof last year, and this month its investors are planning on discussing the next steps to take for its hybrid cloud options. IBM hopes to make all the separate clouds act as one. They believe hybrid cloud arrangements are more appealing to companies and enable connections between new wave Web applications and traditional backend operations.
Oracle
Oracle’s earnings from cloud growth grew by almost 50% last year. This includes their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services. Oracle’s focus has been on growing their cloud business, and its been showing. Mark Hurd, the CEO of Oracle, recently said that within 5-6 years cloud applications will take up to 60% of the total enterprise application market due to the development speed of new functional and easy upgrades.
VMware
VMware was late to the cloud transition because they were profiting from server virtualization. This creates multiple operating systems on a single computer server. In 2013 they began to transition into the cloud and quickly started to distribute its own products. Like IBM, they went with the hybrid cloud idea so businesses could use private and public clouds depending on the level of security they want. They updated their vSpehere platform and the foundation on which its cloud service is built on in order to provide the hybrid cloud resources without change to any standard customs the customers use.
Workday
Workday builds and provides cloud applications for finance and human resource departments and is one of the fastest growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud space and big data business. Their revenues have been consistently increasing by more than 50%.
The post Tech Companies Competing To Be The Leader In Cloud Computing appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
CIA claims its Amazon Web Services cloud is at ‘final operational capability’
(c)iStock.com/EdStock
It was one of the most fascinating battles of 2013: who would win the lucrative CIA cloud computing contract? Two horses were in the race, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM; and it was the former who eventually came out on top despite appeals from the latter.
Now, according to CIA chief information officer Doug Wolfe, the AWS cloud has attained “final operational capability”.
As reported by Enterprise Tech, Wolfe told delegates at an industry event this week the CIA cloud would be “offset” on a private security network, and AWS had “made a big investment” in the project.
The AWS cloud will be unleashed across 17 US intelligence agencies according to the report, with Wolfe noting the CIA was “behind where [they] hoped to be” in terms of cloud adoption.
Wolfe had previously spoken at the Amazon Web Services government symposium in Washington back in June, where he said the AWS cloud would take “a few months to get online in a robust way.” In August, writing for Defense One, Frank Konkel reported the cloud was online.
It’s all a long way away from the argument and counter-argument when AWS and IBM were battling for the contract 18 months ago. AWS was given the decision, despite its proposal costing more than $50m a year than IBM’s.
There was a fair amount of mudslinging from both sides at the time. AWS said IBM had “belatedly” moved into cloud computing yet “does not even register on many leading commercial cloud computing analyses”, while IBM said that “unlike Amazon, IBM has a long history of delivering successful transformational projects like this for the US government.” The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report in which IBM’s complaint was both sustained and rejected, yet noting Amazon’s offer was both “the best value” and a “superior technical solution.”
IBM did lodge an appeal, in which it alleged the procedures used to rank Amazon’s proposal as technically superior were wide of the mark, but it fell on deaf ears in October 2013 when a federal judge ruled against the Armonk firm.
Wolfe defended the decision to award the contract to AWS, praising the vendor for delivering the cloud infrastructure and getting the project up and running in less than 18 months.
CIA claims its Amazon Web Services cloud is at ‘final operational capability’
(c)iStock.com/EdStock
It was one of the most fascinating battles of 2013: who would win the lucrative CIA cloud computing contract? Two horses were in the race, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM; and it was the former who eventually came out on top despite appeals from the latter.
Now, according to CIA chief information officer Doug Wolfe, the AWS cloud has attained “final operational capability”.
As reported by Enterprise Tech, Wolfe told delegates at an industry event this week the CIA cloud would be “offset” on a private security network, and AWS had “made a big investment” in the project.
The AWS cloud will be unleashed across 17 US intelligence agencies according to the report, with Wolfe noting the CIA was “behind where [they] hoped to be” in terms of cloud adoption.
Wolfe had previously spoken at the Amazon Web Services government symposium in Washington back in June, where he said the AWS cloud would take “a few months to get online in a robust way.” In August, writing for Defense One, Frank Konkel reported the cloud was online.
It’s all a long way away from the argument and counter-argument when AWS and IBM were battling for the contract 18 months ago. AWS was given the decision, despite its proposal costing more than $50m a year than IBM’s.
There was a fair amount of mudslinging from both sides at the time. AWS said IBM had “belatedly” moved into cloud computing yet “does not even register on many leading commercial cloud computing analyses”, while IBM said that “unlike Amazon, IBM has a long history of delivering successful transformational projects like this for the US government.” The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report in which IBM’s complaint was both sustained and rejected, yet noting Amazon’s offer was both “the best value” and a “superior technical solution.”
IBM did lodge an appeal, in which it alleged the procedures used to rank Amazon’s proposal as technically superior were wide of the mark, but it fell on deaf ears in October 2013 when a federal judge ruled against the Armonk firm.
Wolfe defended the decision to award the contract to AWS, praising the vendor for delivering the cloud infrastructure and getting the project up and running in less than 18 months.
Faster still: Analysing big data analytics and the agile enterprise
(c)iStock.com/sndr
By Mark Davis, Distinguised Big Data Engineer, Dell Software Group, Santa Clara, California
Big data technologies are increasingly considered an alternative to the data warehouse. Surveys of large corporations and organisations bear out the strong desire to incorporate big data management approaches as part of their competitive strategy.
But what is the value that these companies see? Faster decision making, more complete information, and greater agility in the face of competitive challenges. Traditional data warehousing involved complex steps to curate and schematise data combined with expensive storage and access technologies. Complete plans worked through archiving, governance, visualization, master data management, OLAP cubes, and a range of different user expectations and project stakeholders. Trying to manage these projects through to success also required coping with rapidly changing technology options. The end result was often failure.
With the big data stack, some of these issues are pushed back or simplified. For example, the issue of schematizing and merging data sources need not be considered up front in many cases, but can be done on a more on-demand basis. The concept of schema-on-read is based on a widely seen usage pattern for data that emerged from agile web startups. Log files from web servers needed to be merged with relational stores to provide predictive value about user “journeys” through the website. The log files could be left at rest in cheap storage on commodity servers beefed up with software replication capabilities. Only when parts of the logs needed to be merged or certain timeframes of access analyzed, did the data get touched.
Distributing data processing on commodity hardware led to the obvious next step of moving parts of the data into memory or processing it as it streams through the system. This most recent evolution of the big data stack shares characteristics with high performance computing techniques that have increasingly ganged together processors across interconnect fabrics rather than used custom processors tied to large collections of RAM. The BDAS (Berkeley Data Analytics Stack) exemplifies this new world of analytical processing. BDAS is a combination of in-memory, distributed database technologies like Spark, streaming systems like Spark Streaming, a graph database that layers on top of Spark called GraphX, and machine learning components called MLBase. Together these tools sit on top of Hadoop that provides a resilient, replicated storage layer combined with resource management.
What can we expect in the future? Data warehousing purists have watched these developments with a combination of interest and some degree of skepticism. The latter is because the problems and solutions that they have perfected through the years are not fully baked in the big data community. It seemed a bit like amateur hour.
But that is changing rapidly. Security and governance, for instance, have been weak parts of the big data story, but there are now a range of security approaches that range from Kerberos protocols permeating the stack to integrated ReST APIs with authentication at the edges of the clustered resources. Governance is likewise improving with projects growing out of the interplay between open source contributors and enterprises that want to explore the tooling. We will continue to see a rich evolution of the big data world until it looks more and more like traditional data warehousing, but perhaps with a lower cost of entry and increased accessibility for developers and business decision makers.
About the author:
Mark Davis founded one of the first big data analytics startups, Kitenga, that was acquired by Dell Software Group in 2012, where he now serves as a Distinguished Engineer. Mark led Big Data efforts as part of the IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative and is on the executive committee of the Intercloud Testbed Executive Committee, as well as contributing to the IEEE Big Data Initiative.
IBM Launches Ad Campaigns on Cloud Computing Journal | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
SYS-CON Media announced that IBM, which offers the world’s deepest portfolio of technologies and expertise that are transforming the future of work, has launched ad campaigns on SYS-CON’s numerous online magazines such as Cloud Computing Journal, Virtualization Journal, SOA World Magazine, and IoT Journal.
IBM’s campaigns focus on vendors in the technology marketplace, the future of testing, Big Data and analytics, and mobile platforms.