While I am all for traditions like Thanksgiving turkey and Sunday afternoon football, holding onto traditions in your professional life can be career limiting. The awesome thing about careers in technology is that you constantly have to be on your front foot. Because when you’re not, someone, somewhere, will be and when you meet them, they’ll win. One tradition that has a limited lifespan at this moment is waterfall-native development and the security practices that go along with them. While the beginning of the end might have first been witnessed when Gene Kim and Josh Corman presented Security is Dead at RSA in 2012, we have more quantifiable evidence from the 2017 DevSecOps Community Survey. When asked about the maturity of DevOps practices in their organizations, 40% stated that maturity was improving, while 25% said that it was very mature across the organization or in specific pockets.
GreenPages-LogicsOne Celebrates 25 Years of Delivering IT Innovation
This April we are celebrating GreenPages’ 25th anniversary. As we mark this occasion and on behalf of Team GreenPages, I want to thank our customers—the driving force behind our 25-year journey. I also want to thank our technology partners for your ongoing support and dedication to innovation and excellence.
In April of 1992, an entrepreneur named Kurt Bleicken founded GreenPages as a resource for corporate IT professionals to efficiently procure the hardware and software required to drive their IT initiatives during the early stages of the client-server computing revolution. Prior to founding GreenPages, Kurt spent considerable time speaking to corporate IT leaders to better understand their challenges and best serve their business needs. Kurt embedded “a better way” into our core business systems and founded GreenPages with a strong customer focus and commitment to world-class execution and service, delivered by a customer-focused team working collaboratively in a strong, employee-focused culture. GreenPages saw great growth and success during the 1990s fueled by Kurt’s founding vision.
As I often tell our team, we are living in an amazing period of human history and our 25-year journey has occurred at the epicenter of what makes our time remarkable: the information technology revolution. When GreenPages was founded, we lived in a much different world. Microsoft had just launched Windows backed by a $10 million publicity blitz. The internet browser had just been invented, but few people used or even knew what the internet was. Digital had just announced the Alpha chip to enable 64-bit computing. The JPEG standard had just been finalized, and a prototype SSD module had been submitted for evaluation by IBM. We were still in the early stages of what would become a tsunami of technology innovation that would change the way we live, work, and play, and the very nature of humanity itself.
Through the internet becoming a pervasive force in our lives, to the logical abstraction of workloads driven by the virtualization wave, to the emergence of cloud computing and arrival of the cloud-mobile era, Team GreenPages has evolved in close collaboration with our customers and technology partners. We have moved from a supply chain organization that offered a faster, better, and cheaper method for procuring IT goods, to an industry leader in cloud computing, offering strategic consulting, architecture, systems integration, and systems management for the hybrid cloud computing models fueling the digital era.
As we celebrate our 25th anniversary we are very excited about the road ahead. The pace of change is accelerating and we see tremendous opportunities for our organization, our customers, and our technology partners in the digital era. Today, we are focused on enabling technological innovation to fuel our customers’ digitalization strategies that enable both agility and business velocity. Speed is everything today. The art of IT innovation is delivering this needed agility in a secure and compliant manner, and ultimately the next generation computing platforms backed by the old-world mandates of security and compliance, which are more important than ever.
I expect the next 25 years to be even more amazing than the past 25 and look forward to celebrating our 50th anniversary with you in 2042. As we drive into the future, our customer focus and commitment will remain the constant amidst the tremendous waves of change sweeping across our industry. We will continue to strive every day to deliver outstanding technology-driven business results with the best, brightest, and most committed team in our industry.
Sincerely,
Ron Dupler
CEO, GreenPages
Research reveals extent of ‘aggressive’ hyperscale operator growth in cloud markets
Hyperscale operators are ‘aggressively’ growing their share of cloud service markets, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.
The analyst firm identifies 24 companies in all which meet its definition of ‘hyperscale’ – not surprisingly including the four main infrastructure players, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM, and Google – and argues these companies accounted for more than two thirds (68%) of the overall cloud infrastructure services market.
Back in December, Synergy noted that hyperscale providers operated more than 300 global data centres between them, expecting this number to surpass 400 by 2018. Of that figure, almost half (45%) of data centres were in the US, with China (8%), Japan (7%) and UK (5%) trailing far behind. The company says the current figure is now approaching 320.
This time around, the focus is on the growing dominance of the biggest players in cloud infrastructure markets, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and private hosted cloud services. By comparison, in 2012 hyperscale operators accounted for 47% of each of those markets.
As Synergy puts it, the ‘scale of infrastructure investment required to be a leading player in cloud services or cloud-enabled services means that few companies are able to keep pace with the hyperscale operators…and they continue to both increase their share of service markets and account for an ever-larger portion of spend on data centre infrastructure equipment.’
“Hyperscale operators are now dominating the IT landscape in so many different ways. They are reshaping the services market, radically changing IT spending patterns within enterprises, and causing major disruptions among infrastructure technology vendors,” said John Dinsdale, research director and a chief analyst at Synergy. “Our latest forecasts show these factors being accentuated over the next five years.”
The value of hybrid: Operate for today and optimise for tomorrow
(c)iStock.com/rzoze19
The term “hybrid cloud” has grown in popularity among established technology vendors, but one could be forgiven for thinking it’s a convenient “cloudwash” for companies to showcase progress while delaying an inevitable shift to public cloud. I say that because to focus exclusively on cloud overlooks the reality that almost every CIO in an established enterprise today is contending with legacy as much as the need to embrace new technologies. Some critical data centre hosted systems just don’t move to cloud so easily.
It’s all simply IT, which is why I call the effective combination of public cloud, managed service provider cloud, and dedicated infrastructure “hybrid IT”. It is by no means intended as a “catch-all”, so I feel I owe it to the reader to explain precisely what I mean and how established companies are successfully exploiting the benefits of such choice on their terms.
Hybrid is about choice
At its core, hybrid is about choice: Choice to work with the appropriate combination of an organisation’s on-premises infrastructure, managed services, private cloud and public cloud infrastructure and services. With the right knowledge and information, companies can optimise IT to balance cost, risk and agility.
The first question to ask concerns value. Hybrid IT allows companies to choose the infrastructure or service that delivers the best value for them at that time. Over time, the value delivered could change and an application that is hosted on-premises could be migrated to a cloud IaaS or SaaS. Changes in cloud services (functionality and price), availability of skills, geographic requirements or software / hardware maintenance needs can all trigger the push-pull of value delivered.
Global presence is a big pull factor for cloud. Throughout the past two years the hyperscale cloud providers have battled for global coverage supremacy, opening data centres in important legal jurisdictions and population centres. Here cloud offers low-latency local infrastructure that is becoming vital to companies to improve the experience of their global customers. It also presents options for data sovereignty and regulatory compliance.
Don’t forget the workload: It is common for business critical applications to have resource, locality, dependencies, or indeed hardware requirements that mean they are both complex and costly to migrate to cloud. Some companies will choose to outsource to a specialist to reduce their support costs, and may consider a cloud migration as factors change over time.
Hybrid IT allows enterprises to exploit legacy investment
Most clients we work with have legacy systems that are core to their business and have run for 10 years or more. These legacy systems often run on platforms such as mainframes, IBM i and previous-generation enterprise servers that cannot be transferred to a public cloud or a commodity Windows/Linux environment.
Hybrid IT has allowed them to continue maximising their return on investment in functional legacy systems, while migrating applications to the public cloud that are easily refactored for that environment. This prevents enterprises being hindered in their ability to adapt and innovate, while also freeing up capacity in legacy infrastructure to absorb increased demands.
Hybrid IT mandates integration
No-one can deny the benefits of cloud when it comes to flexibility and future capital savings, but the cost associated with a wholesale cloud migration can vastly outweigh the benefits. It is also important to note the complexities associated with transferring applications and data to the cloud. Some systems simply aren’t suited for cloud environments and others require significant re-engineering.
Here’s the rub: New systems of differentiation and innovation are usually best placed in public cloud environments, and built cloud-native, but these can rely on transactions and datasets residing in legacy systems, for example a retail website that relies on back-office inventory management. The successful hybrid IT solution must cater for this integration, and in doing so an enterprise with legacy technology gains the agility to transform without going all-in to public cloud.
Success in hybrid also mandates integration of IT real estate. I have spent more than 15 years helping companies make sense of each wave of cloud, and there are many common mistakes that result from a simple truth: It’s all IT and it all needs managing wherever it runs. If an established IT department doesn’t pay the same attention to developing its toolset, skills and processes for cloud management as it does on-premises management, then things will go wrong. Furthermore, those tools and processes must be integrated. Only then, can you benefit from the choice and flexibility of hybrid IT.
Keeping pace with new technology deployment and management is unsustainable for all but the largest IT departments. As cloud service choices continue to expand an increasing number of businesses are seeking specialist help from managed service providers who are able to provide the integration, specialist tooling and skills needed to address the complexity and breadth of hybrid IT and make it work for businesses.
Journey’s end?
Hybrid is about the long-term evolution of IT estates. Almost every company has IT distributed across multiple infrastructures and service providers, and companies that embrace the Hybrid IT management challenge are empowered to move forward.
As technology becomes ever more critical to business, the world is not going to get simpler. The ultimate goal must be to deliver a single, consistent service experience across the combination of hybrid IT environments you choose, enabling an organisation to adapt and change with business and technology needs.
Is NoOps the End of DevOps? | @DevOpsSummit #NoOps #DevOps #SDN #AI
Automation, a key pillar of the DevOps movement, frees IT operations to focus on higher-levl work and collaborate with cross-functional teams. But what if your automation is so good that developers don’t need you anymore? Mike Gualtieri of Forrester Research coined the term NoOps in his controversial blog post “I don’t want DevOps. I want NoOps.” In the post, Gualtieri says, “NoOps means that application developers will never have to speak with an operations professional again.”
What ‘Software-Defined’ Really Means | @CloudExpo #AI #SDN #SDX #DevOps
The visual model to declarative metadata representation to immutable deployment vision is in essence what SD is all about.
The secret to making this approach practical, and thus the key to understanding why SD approaches have become so prevalent, is the word immutable.
Once we get an SD approach right, we no longer have to touch the deployed technology whatsoever. Instead, to make a change, update the model and redeploy.
Event Correlation and #DevOps | @DevOpsSummit #AI #APM #Analytics
The purpose of event management and monitoring is to make sense of events, and while this may require some analytics and intelligence, the goal is an actionable alert — a meaningful notification that enables the right person to take the right control action. So, we may leverage predictive analytics as a form of artificial intelligence to achieve this goal, and we might even need to perform further analytics in order to get the information required to make a good decision.
This right-to-left flow provides us with the knowledge and wisdom to make effective decisions, which is the basis for effective automation.
DevSecOps on Fire | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Serverless #AI #DevSecOps
In DevOps, those who can’t keep pace are often left behind. For many people leading DevOps initiatives over the past few years, this led to a painful choice of leaving security by the wayside. Many Waterfall-native approaches to security could not keep pace with their new DevOps-native requirements and they were shunned. Gene Kim and Josh Corman first sounded the death knell for security as we knew it during their 2012 RSA presentation, Security Is Dead. Long Live DevOps: IT at Ludicrous Speed. However, as with so many things in our world, necessity is the mother of invention. Leaving security out of the DevOps toolchain was not an option for some and unimaginable for others.
Fast forward four years and things have changed dramatically. We are on the cusp of a new era of security that lives at ludicrous speed. Software-defined security is crossing the chasm into the mainstream.
Top Continuous Integration Tools | @DevOpsSummit @Stackify #DevOps #AI #CD
Poorly managed development projects are bound to crash eventually. It’s likely happened to you a dozen of times already. While writing code can be a lot of fun, managing code and dependencies can quickly become a maze of its own when you’re dealing with the continuous growth of your codebase and feature branches. At Stackify, we aim to make the lives of developers easier (and less frazzling). One way to de-stress your work is with the aid of continuous integration tools.
What Is Regression Testing? | @DevOpsSummit @Stackify #SDLC #AI #DevOps
We talked a bit about the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) in a recent post, but today, we’re going to dig a little deeper into one specific and crucial element in the testing phase, particularly for Agile development: regression testing. Regression testing refers to the process of testing a changed or updated computer program to make sure the older software features – which were previously developed and tested – still performs exactly as they did before. One way to think about software regression is to think about somebody who implements a new air conditioning system in their home only to find that while their new air conditioning system works as expected, the lights no longer work.