Shiny new toy syndrome. We all see it, we all experience it. Who doesn’t like the shiny new toy? Whenever a new technology hits the high points of hype, everyone starts talking about it like it will solve all their business problems. Sadly, frequently without even looking at what problem they are trying to solve. Blockchain is one of those technologies. According to Gartner’s latest report on the hype cycle of emerging technologies, blockchain has just passed the peak of their hype cycle curve. If you read the news articles about it, one would think it has taken over the technology world. The reality is, as Gartner put it, that ‘most initiatives are still in the alpha or beta stages’ and ‘Enterprises are still deciding how to navigate this technology.’
Which cloud is right for you?
The cloud industry is booming and almost every day, you hear a new platform or service from a company. The number of cloud-based products and services that are available today is truly mind-boggling. Amidst all this, how do you know which product is right for your company at this given point in time?
One of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make it the type of cloud that’s right for your organization.
Broadly speaking, there are three types of clouds, namely private, public and hybrid. A public cloud is the standard cloud resource where the provider creates the resources or platforms for you, so you don’t have to worry about anything. However, this is a public service that’s available to all Internet users, which means, you’ll be sharing the same infrastructure with other users.
Private cloud offers the same benefits as public cloud, except that you’ll be using a proprietary infrastructure that is not shared by other users. In other words, a private cloud is an infrastructure that’s dedicated to a single organization, but offers the same advantages such as flexibility and scalability.
A hybrid cloud, as you would’ve guessed by now, is a combination of private and public cloud with interoperability.
Choosing which of these is right for you is anything but easy. Here are some questions that can point you in the right direction.
What is the geographic spread?
If your organization has only one office or if you’re looking to downsize by moving all your IT operations from in-house, a private or hybrid cloud is your best bet. However, make sure that you meet the IT disaster recovery requirements as laid down by the PCI DSS standards.
What’s the monthly budget?
What is the IT budget you have in mind? Research shows that there are 12 different IT costs you should keep in mind while framing your budget and while calculating the total cost of ownership with cloud computing costs. In general though, if you want to keep costs to a minimum, a private cloud is a good choice.
How old is the infrastructure?
An important question is to determine the age of your infrastructure. If you’re using an old one and it’s time to replace, then opt for a public cloud as everything is handled by the provider. You can even consider a hybrid cloud infrastructure, if you ‘re particular about using proprietary hardware.
Have you ever been hacked?
If yes, then private cloud is your best bet as it greatly reduces the chances of hackers getting into your system. Today’s public cloud security has also improved greatly, but still a private cloud is better from a security standpoint.
We hope your decision has become much easier now. let us know what you think.
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Box introduces framework to apply machine learning to cloud content
Cloud content management company Box has unveiled Box Skills, a framework for applying machine learning tools such as computer vision, video indexing, and sentiment analysis to stored content. Box Skills will facilitate businesses to re-imagine the business processes considered as impractical to digitise or automate or too expensive.
At BoxWorks 2017, Box previewed three initial Box Skills currently in development, leveraging machine learning tools from IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to solve common business use cases, including:
Audio Intelligence: Uses audio files to create and index a text transcript that can be easily searched and manipulated in a variety of use cases; powered by IBM Watson technology.
Video Intelligence: Provides transcription, topic detection and detects people to allow users to quickly look up the information they need in a video; powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services.
Image Intelligence: Detects individual objects and concepts in image files, captures text through optical character recognition (OCR), and automatically adds keyword labels to images to easily build metadata on image catalogues; powered by Google Cloud Platform.
David Kenny, Senior Vice President, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, said: “Box Skills is an extension of our strategic partnership with Box aimed at helping businesses work more efficiently, solve challenges and seize opportunities for innovation.”
Scott Guthrie, EVP of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division, said: “Box Skills brings together Box’s cloud content management and Microsoft Azure’s industry-leading AI services to deliver intelligent insights for customers.”
Box also launched Box Skills Kit, a set of developer resources for building custom Box Skills. Box Skills Kit will enable an ecosystem of cloud services providers, independent software vendors, systems integrators, and enterprises themselves to create custom Box Skills implementations.
The company also demonstrated its Box Graph technology at BoxWorks 2017. It is an intelligent network of content, relationships, and activity that Box will leverage to power new experiences and services for both individual Box users and enterprises. Box launched the first new experience powered by Box Graph, called Feed. It is a personalised activity feed that curates and surfaces the most relevant updates, insights and content for each Box user.
Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer for Box, said: “Box Skills and Box Graph represent a truly practical application of intelligence for the enterprise, ensuring our customers can realise incredible value from every piece of content they have in Box.”
What are your thoughts on Box’s new framework? Let us know in the comments.
Announcing @AvereSystems to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | #Serverless #DataCenter #Storage
SYS-CON Events announced today that Avere Systems, a leading provider of hybrid cloud enablement solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Avere Systems was created by file systems experts determined to reinvent storage by changing the way enterprises thought about and bought storage resources. With decades of experience behind the company’s founders, Avere got its start in 2008 with a mission to use fast, flash-based storage in the most efficient, effective manner possible. What the team had discovered was a technology that optimized storage resources and reduced dependencies on sprawling storage installations. Launched as the Avere OS, this advanced file system not only boosted performance within standard, on-premises, network-attached storage systems but also within diverse, hybrid architectures that include cloud provider services and other types of object storage.
IBM develops new programming model to create serverless applications
IBM has announced a new capability at the Serverless Conference in New York City on October 10th, 2017 to further the development of serverless applications.
The new tool, Composer, comprises a library of patterns that are key for building serverless applications. It also has the inherent serverless features such as auto-scaling and pay-as-you-go built into it.
Currently, the programming model is available for use in only Node.js language, but developers can deploy the model to make it available in other programming languages such as Python, Swift, and Java.
Rodric Rabbah, principal researcher for IBM Cloud Functions, said: “Rather than forcing people to learn new programming languages, we’d rather bring the model into their favourite programming language.”
The library highlights the key features of serverless and Functions-as-a-Service, as Rabbah explains: “To make functions first class and still allow you to orchestrate the execution of all the functions and the data flow between them automatically, freeing the programmer from having to do that.”
IBM researcher Paul Castro explained that working with Composer is unlike the typical process wherein the developers building solutions with serverless either had to roll their own composition in an ad hoc manner or use a separate service, such as AWS Step Functions. Castro said: “Composer is bringing that composition into the development flow you would already use for serverless, and it’s well integrated into what we have in OpenWhisk / IBM Cloud Function.”
IBM is also introducing the functions shell, a new tool to help with developing, deploying, running, and debugging serverless Functions and compositions. For example, a developer can use it to edit code in a text editor instead of a drag-n-drop UI, or to validate compositions with visualizations without switching tools. It also helps developers deploy and invoke compositions using familiar CLI commands.
What are your thoughts on IBM’s new Composer tool? Let us know in the comments.
Cloud Bursting by @AvereSystems | @CloudExpo #SDDC #DataCenter #DevOps
When it comes to cloud computing, the ability to turn massive amounts of compute cores on and off on demand sounds attractive to IT staff, who need to manage peaks and valleys in user activity. With cloud bursting, the majority of the data can stay on premises while tapping into compute from public cloud providers, reducing risk and minimizing need to move large files. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Scott Jeschonek, Director of Product Management at Avere Systems, discussed the IT and business benefits that cloud bursting provides, including increased compute capacity, lower IT investment, financial agility, and, ultimately, faster time-to-market.
What is Cryptoeconomics?
Cryptoeconomics is an emerging field that revolves around the protocols involved in production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in a decentralized digital economy.
There is no official definition yet because this is a new field. But broadly speaking, it encompasses the latest technologies such as blockchain, game theory and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.
Before we understand about cryptoeconomics, let’s briefly look into how it evolved.
Evolution of cryptoeconomics
If you take any torrent system, users can share or download files freely. However, the unwritten rule was users who download these files and have to seed them as well. But, not all users followed this rule simply because there was no economic incentive to seed and the process of seeding took up a lot of unnecessary space on the computer. As a result, peer to peer network sharing failed as a concept.
In 2008, a group or an individual called Satoshi Nakamoto released a paper about bitcoins. This concept used blockchain technology to take peer to peer network sharing to new levels. The difference between the failed sharing system and this one is that, now people had an economic incentive to follow the rules.
As a result, bitcoin has caught on in a big way and has led to the development of a new form of digital economy called the cryptoeconomics. As you would’ve guessed, it’s a combination of two words – cryptography and economics.
Why is it so called?
Bitcoins are based on blockchain technology where each block contains the hash of the previous block, so the entire chain is continuous. Each of these blocks will have transactions and a state that can change based on the nature of the transactions. For example, if one person has 100 bitcoins and wants to send 40 to another person, then these blocks will reflect the new states of 60 and 40 respectively. All these information is protected by cryptography functions like hashing, signatures and zero-knowledge proofs. This means, you’re transactions are safe and only valid transactions are allowed.
Since money in some form is exchanged for goods and services, there is economics involved. Each user has some financial incentive to perform a particular action in the peer-to-peer network. Broadly speaking, there are two types of incentives they have. The first incentive is in the form of tokens or cryptocurrencies that are assigned to users for their contribution to the peer-to-peer network.
The second incentive is rewards for doing a good and responsible task on the network. Likewise, users can also pay a fine or can even have their rights taken away for any bad acts they do. So, there is enough incentive for a positive contribution and this leads to economics.
That’s how cryptoeconomics came about.
We’ll talk in depth about this technology and how it works in future pieces. Do check back to know more about bitcoins, blockchain technology and cryptoeconomics.
The post What is Cryptoeconomics? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
TidalScale to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | @TidalScale #Serverless #AI #SDN #SDS
SYS-CON Events announced today that TidalScale, a leading provider of systems and services, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
TidalScale has been involved in shaping the computing landscape. They’ve designed, developed and deployed some of the most important and successful systems and services in the history of the computing industry – internet, Ethernet, operating systems, programming languages and microprocessors. Their elite team has collectively earned dozens of patents, three film credits and grown record setting businesses. And collectively, they’ve shipped more than 2 billion licensed products. They are difference makers who have a reputation for delivering innovative products and accomplishing what many others don’t believe is even possible. They are truly passionate about making things happen for their customers, partners and investors. They know how to work hard and still have a life.
Migrating Your Network to AWS & Azure to Achieve Hyper-Flexibility
What to Consider When Migrating Your Network
Network Consultant, Bobby Mazzotti, discusses how to migrate Layer 2 MPLS Networks to AWS & Azure and by moving away from traditional networks, you can achieve hyper-flexibility in your network. He also discusses what you need to consider first when migrating your network. The Azure vs AWS showdown has been going on for some time now. There’s no easy answer, so always take the time to figure out which is best for you!
Contact your account manager or reach out to us and set up a meeting to discuss your AWS/Azure migration initiatives.
By Jake Cryan, Digital Marketing Specialist