Tag Archives: devops

applications, Chef, containers, News & Analysis

Chef boosts application IQ with Habitat launch

June 14, 2016 Jamie Davies

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.”

containers, EMC, News & Analysis, Persistent Storage

EMC launches storage provisioning framework for containers

June 2, 2016 Jamie Davies

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.”

Digital Transformation, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM adds EZSource to bolster transformation capabilities

June 2, 2016 Business Cloud News

IBM has announced its intention to acquire EZSource as it continues efforts to build its offerings in the digital world. The additional of EZSource is touted as a means to bolster IBM’s capabilities to aide enterprise organizations in their digital transformation journey.

With a substantial proposition of companies targeting a hybrid cloud proposition within the next 12 months, developers are looking for new ways to reconcile the applications that reside on enterprise systems of record to digital forms of engagement such as mobile and social. As the majority of production IT workloads run on the mainframe, connecting these applications with mobile and cloud applications is important to increase customer engagement. This can be a time consuming task however.

EZSource provides a visual dashboard of an applications lines of code to show developers which have changed to ease the process of modernizing applications, exposing APIs and better leveraging development resources. EZSource’s application discovery technology will be coupled with IBM’s current DevOps offerings to enable developers to evolve legacy assets within the overall digital transformation strategy quicker, the company claims.

“The mainframe is the backbone of today’s businesses. As clients drive their digital transformation, they are seeking the innovation and business value from new applications while leveraging their existing assets and processes,” said Ross Mauri, GM of IBM z Systems. “By adding EZSource’s technology to our enterprise DevOps and API management offerings, we are making it easier and faster for developers to modernize key applications that previously were manually intensive and many times required specialized skills.”

Financials of the agreement have not been released, though this is the 14^th acquisition of an Israeli business made by IBM since 1998. The last acquisition, Trusteer in 2013, was for more than $600 million.

AWS, Docker, Microsoft Azure, Public Cloud

Cloud and software jobs surge over last 12 months

June 1, 2016 Business Cloud News

Rackspace has released the findings from its annual analysis of the IT job market which highlighted demand for positions in and around cloud computing are rising at a healthy rate.

Vacancies for AWS engineer roles increased by 125% over the last 12 months, where are those advertised for Microsoft Azure competencies also increased by 75% in the same period. The rise in job focused on tailoring cloud solutions for individual companies, and also migrating from legacy technologies, supports previous research and claims that cloud computing is penetrating the mainstream marketplace.

“Our industry moves so fast that we can’t rely entirely on traditional forms of education from schools and universities to fill skills gaps,” said Darren Norfolk, Managing Director for Rackspace in the UK. “Therefore, technology companies have a responsibility to address these shortages by growing and fostering talent through on the job training and experience.

“I expect the rise in demand for cloud related jobs to continue as a growing number of businesses adopt a multi cloud strategy, using platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Openstack and AWS. The highly competitive recruitment market for skills in these areas means that managing the platforms in-house could become more costly than it has been in the past.”

Software development is another area which has demonstrated healthy growth as the number of vacancies for individuals who have Docker expertise has risen by 341%, though this is down from the 991% increase which was reported in the 2015 findings. The accelerated rate in which new technologies are penetrating the market and being implemented by companies throughout the world is seemingly too fast for in-house resource to be trained on these competencies, leaving hiring new employees the only option for some. Docker expertise is now the second most sought after job function in the IT world, according to the research.

DevOps as a practise would also appear to be have accepted in the business world, as the number of roles grew 53% over the last twelve months, following a 57% increase from the findings last year. The rise in roles would appear to be an indicator DevOps has not been integrated within the IT ecosystem, though it may still be considered too early to be mainstream.

CTO, developers, Digital Transformation, Enterprise IT, Interviews, Rackspace

Rackspace CTO: no-one is bigger than the software revolution

May 13, 2016 Jamie Davies

Rackspace CTO John Engates speaking at Rackspace: Solve 2016

While the concept of cloud computing has been normalized to a degree, the industry is now leaning towards the perceived benefits which can be derived from the technology on the whole. For the majority of companies who are evaluating cloud technologies, reducing CAPEX and OPEX simply isn’t a strong enough business case anymore.

This is certainly the case for Rackspace CTO John Engates. In fact, we’re starting to see the beginning of a new trend which will define the future of a vast number of organizations, the ability and desire to experiment. Those who can experiment with new technology, and are prepared to fail, will succeed. And those who don’t, won’t.

Although there can be savings made through the transition to a cloud environment, early adopters are now looking beyond. Cloud will underpin the growth and success of the new wave of next generation technologies, whether it is virtual reality, artificial intelligence or autonomous vehicles. The early adopters are already defining how these technologies will take their business to the next level, though the risk for the rest is how far they will get left behind is they don’t get up to speed quickly.

“Cloud as a technology is just about hitting the mainstream now,” said Engates. “Everything pre-2015 has been early adopters, but for mass markets it was business as usual.

“The main problem is that the majority of these companies are two or three steps away from the cloud. The cloud is not about saving money, but freeing up your developers so they can experiment with new technologies, learn new language and take the company forward. If you’re not thinking about these technologies now, how far behind are you. And you’re probably going to be in a very difficult position in a couple of years.”

Blockbuster is a classic example. Blockbuster and Netflix were in a similar position pre-digitalization, as most people now forget Netflix initially rose to fame through the delivery of DVD’s to its customers through the post. Fast forward to the digital era, where Netflix evolved and created its current market position, one in which a number of major player are now trying to emulate, and Blockbuster no longer exists.

For Engates, this example highlights the importance of experimentation. Netflix was a company which allowed its developers to play with new technologies and methods of delivery, whereas Blockbuster attempted to hold onto the traditional model. This will be the same for other verticals in the coming years, those who embrace the new digital era, adapt their models and allow their developers’ freedom to innovate will continue to be competitive, those who don’t will take the same route as Blockbuster.

“The successful companies of the future will be software companies,” said Engates. “They may not sell software but they will use it as a means to define their business and be creative in the marketplace. The likes of Google, Facebook, Uber and Netflix are all software companies. They aren’t people companies or infrastructure companies, they are software. If you want to compete with these companies you need to get better at creating the software experience.”

Nike and Under Armour are two more companies highlighted by Engates. While both are lifestyle and sportswear brands, both have had to create a digital experience to meet the demands of customers. A few years ago industry giants such as Nike and Under Armour were too big to be bothered by such trends, but the cloud computing era has levelled the playing field. No-one is bigger than the software revolution.

“I think that companies have to enable some of their organization to be innovative and to be creative,” said Engates. “Most of IT has been behind the wall; they haven’t been innovators, they’ve been keeping the lights on. It wasn’t about transforming the company into something new and different that was product development’s job or marketing. But today, inventing the new it-thing means you have to have a digital component, to connect with you users through your mobile device.”

Mobile devices are now redefining business and consumer attitudes. For the most part this is how the consumer connects with new companies; it’s almost exclusively digital and if you’re company is not embracing this, Engates thinks it won’t be too long before you’re not relevant.

But will companies take those risks? “Not all of them will,” said Engates. “Not every company will make that leap. The ones that don’t will be left behind. Now even banks are starting to do this as you’re starting to see more automated investing and digital advisors. Why would you need to go to the branch if you can do it over the phone?”

For innovation to occur within an organization, the conditions have to be right. In the majority of large scale organizations, innovation is very difficult to achieve. There are too many risks, too much red tape and too much politics. The notion that a new idea might not succeed, or reap short term benefits, scares the board and stakeholders, which in turn will inhibit innovation. It’s a difficult loop to get out of, and for a number of larger, stodgy organizations, it will be immensely difficult.

“The reason cloud is so important is because to innovate you need to be using the most modern tools, for example data science, continuous integration, containers,” said Engates. “You need APIs to interact with, you don’t want to wait six weeks on a server. You want to experiment and do things quickly. If you want to do analytics, you need storage and compute power; you need to have the cloud.

“A lot of the people who want to work on these projects have a lot of options. There are a lot of smaller companies who have these conditions to be innovative, so they attract these developers. Companies have to adapt to them, not force them to adapt to the company. Decision makers need to change their organization to have the modern environment for these developers to work in, to be innovative and to make the company competitive in the digital era.”

Cloud Native, EMC, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis

EMC enters native hybrid cloud market

May 4, 2016 Jamie Davies

Chad Sakac (Right), President, VCE, Converged Platform Division speaking with Jeremy Burton (Left), President of Products and Marketing at EMC World 2016

EMC has expanded its cloud portfolio with the launch of Native Hybrid Cloud, a turnkey platform for cloud-native application development and deployment.

Hybrid cloud is proving to be the next major battleground for the tech giants of the world, and cloud native is another one of the industry buzzwords which is gaining traction in all corners. EMC claim the new offering with enable deployments of cloud-native application developer platform and infrastructure services in as few as two days, using Cloud Foundry. The turnkey offering combines the Pivotal Cloud Foundry cloud-native platform with VMware’s IaaS and cloud-native offerings, into a consolidated turnkey solution.

“In the new digital economy, innovation and agility trumps all. Enterprises differentiate themselves through rapid innovation and agile services delivery,” said Chad Sakac, President of VCE and Converged Platform Division at EMC. “Trying to build, iterate and maintain these stacks built on a series of constantly moving elements are completely a waste of resources – resources that can be better applied elsewhere, because EMC is investing many hundreds of engineers to make it a turnkey platform.

“An engineered platform that integrates cloud-native IaaS with Pivotal’s cloud-native platform, EMC’s Native Hybrid Cloud overcomes the challenge in business and IT transformation to enable developers to deliver innovation through new applications, software and digital services better and faster.”

Sakac also highlighted at EMC World that the team are starting to see new trends develop in the way enterprise organizations engage with vendors. In recent years there has been a tendency for enterprise organizations to build their own cloud-native stacks, though Sakac believes trends are now leaning towards consumption of technology as a service (as opposed to building in-house), as customers realize it is cheaper and simpler to buy a turnkey solution. Should the claim prove to be true, it would certainly be good news for EMC, who are one of the first to market with such an offering.

The growth of cloud native technologies and business practises is fuelled by pressure from various aspects of the business to increase the speed of innovation, deployment and experience, responding to the competitive nature of the digital economy.

“With Pivotal Cloud Foundry tightly integrated into Native Hybrid Cloud, developers now can drastically shorten the application development and deployment lifecycle and operators can manage thousands of apps with far fewer people,” said James Watters, SVP of Products at Pivotal. “An idea for an application on Monday can be running in production by Friday. This is the cloud-native way and it’s transforming how the world builds and runs software.”

AWS, containers, Enterprise IT, Google, Microsoft, News & Analysis

What did BCN readers say last week?

April 25, 2016 Jamie Davies

Over the past week, we took the opportunity to gauge the opinion of the BCN readership on industry trends and issues, through a number of polls. Here’s what we found out:

Microsoft is unlikely to be successful? 58% say no

For the most part, Microsoft’s lawsuit has been keep out of the headlines. This is unlikely to indicate the whole episode is unimportant to the industry, but maybe more due to the fact the story has been overshadowed by the ongoing saga between Apple and the FBI.

In any case, Microsoft filed a lawsuit against the US government, citing the first and fourth amendment with regard to government agencies using secrecy orders to access its customer’s emails or records. From Microsoft’s perspective, the company should have the right to tell customers the government is accessing their data, aside from in exceptional circumstances. The government disagrees.

While the tech giant has taken it upon itself to fight the good fight alone, BCN readers are a bit more sceptical on the success of the venture. Only 42% believe Microsoft’s lawsuit will be successful, though this is a question which is unlikely to be answered for a substantial period of time. Any decision will be appealed by the despondent party, dragging out any decisions or changes in government practise.

When will containers hit mainstream? 21% say right now

Containers are one of the hottest trends in 2016. We recently ran a buzzword-buster article not only discussing what containers actually are, but more importantly what the value to enterprise actually is. Since then there have been numerous announcement focused around the technology, from Microsoft to Red Hat to Juniper, indicating containers are starting to get some traction.

But how much of the press is a smoke-screen and how much is reality? In short, it’s looking quite positive.

Cloud took a healthy amount of time to be trusted and understood by the mainstream market, and maybe it is this longer adoption time which has accelerated containers as a technology. 21% of BCN readers highlighted that they are currently using the technology in a meaningful way in their business currently, 50% believe it will be in the next 1-2 years, and only 29% said longer than three years.

Who is the best innovator in the cloud industry? 75% still say AWS

Last week AWS launched a host of new features at the AWS Chicago Summit, ranging from new security features, tools which simplify the movement of data around an organizations cloud, platforms for automatically deploying and running apps on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, testing features, as well as authentication services.

Although this is the first major update from AWS in some time, Google and Microsoft have been feverishly bolstering their offerings over the last six months ranging from new hires, to new features and new acquisitions. Industry insiders have even told us at BCN that AWS could be seen to be sitting back to much, offering Google and Microsoft the opportunity to improve their own standing, and make up ground on the number one player in the cloud space.

BCN readers do not agree however. 75% believe AWS is still by far and away the industry leader, 10% believe AWS, Google and Microsoft are all on par, while 15% believe innovation has faltered at AWS, and the rest of the industry is catching up fast.

Is DevOps mainstream? 48% say no

DevOps is another of the buzzwords which has floated over from 2015 into 2016. However, as buzzwords go, few have captured the attention of the industry in the same manner. Such is the prominence of DevOps, it seems although every company is now a DevOps specialist, DevOps expert or DevOps orientated organization.

In fact, this isn’t only vendors who have adopted DevOps, but pretty much every enterprise decision maker has DevOps on the lips also. The main concern here is the definition of DevOps can be seen as lost on certain organizations. Yes, there are practitioners of the methodology, though there are also a host of people who have taken the phrase without fully understanding the implications and the means to implement such an idea.

And it would appear BCN readers also agree with that assumption. Despite DevOps being one of the most used words in the cloud industry, only 52% of our readers believe DevOps has hit the mainstream market.

containers, News & Analysis, Open Source, Red Hat

Red Hat bets on OpenStack, DevOps and Containers in new product offerings

April 20, 2016 Jamie Davies

Red Hat has launched general availability of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, leaning on wider DevOps trends within the industry.

The company claims the new offerings will assist enterprise organizations in bridging the gap between development and operations teams at the scale of cloud computing, and successfully implement a DevOps business model.

“Everyone is now aware that Uber doesn’t own a car or Facebook doesn’t generate its own content, this is nothing new, but it does highlight the digital disruption which is taking place in the industry,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager, OpenStack at Red Hat. “These disruptions are impacting decisions on infrastructure within the organization, but also what kind of development methodology gets adopted. Customers are demanding an agile infrastructure and a Devops model to ensure they can reduce time to market and accelerate innovation within their own organization.

“When you generally look at the CIO agenda, the need to be more responsive to business needs is a priority within almost every organization by default. Given that they are viewing DevOps as a means to facilitate the change in thinking and culture, DevOps is here now and it’s not a fad which the industry has grabbed onto.

“Even internally, we have been aggressive in embracing DevOps. Our oldest business is Enterprise Linux and security updates is an area which of key value to our customers. Heartbleed was a huge issue for our customers 12 months ago, and since we are following the DevOps methodology, we were not only able to provide a patch, but we also pushed out a tool which customers can use to see if they are now compliant. None of this would have been possible without DevOps, so we are seeing the benefits internally as well.”

Red Hat is currently pinning its ambitions on the growth of OpenStack and the belief it will become the choice operating system for cloud infrastructure and the data centres of the future. The company backed the growth of Linux in a similar fashion, effectively riding the wave to its $2 billion annual sales, and is now placing the same bet on OpenStack, and its adoption throughout the industry.

The launch is based on OpenStack Kilo, the release which came out last year, combining the Red Hat cloud, DevOps and container offerings on a single cloud suite, within a private cloud environment. Keeping on the theme of ‘openness’, the tools will also be available as individual products should customers want to work with other offerings also.

Building on another industry trend, Red Hat has also prioritized containers as a technology for its service offering.

“Containers are probably the most attractive technology we at Red Hat have seen in years. Every large customer we have wants to have a conversation around containers,” said Balakrishnan. “We’re including OpenShift in the cloud suite, which is a service offering which was designed from the ground up on Docker (for container image) and Kubernetes (for orchestration layer). We are excited about the fact that we are one of the first in the industry to be bringing container technology to mainstream.

“Containers are one of the biggest priority areas for us as a company, so much so that we include container technology in our Enterprise Linux offering. It’s pervasive both in our technology as well as in our customer minds.”

Actifio, CLA, Dynatrace, Opinion, Salesforce

What the buzz is DevOps?

April 4, 2016 Jamie Davies

In an industry where there seems to be a constant conveyor belt of buzzwords, you’ll struggle to find one that is currently more widely used that DevOps.

In its simplest form, DevOps is, among other things, a business practise which ensures greater collaboration between the development and operations function within the organization, the Holy Grail for most businesses! Development often considers operations too regimented, and operations tends to consider developers too wishy-washy. Finding a middle ground can be a tricky task.

But this is where DevOps fits perfectly; a cultural shift which enables collaboration between development and operations. It’s an ideology which strengthens communication, collaboration, integration and automation.

There are various nuances of the definition, but is more or less the same irrelevant of who you are talking to, but the use-case can vary. Not dramatically, but the output of DevOps can depend on the organization which you belong to, and the business case for the cultural change within the organization itself.

What is refreshing is that DevOps seems to be one of few concepts/technologies/ideologies which doesn’t seem to focus on being more cost effective. Almost every use case for DevOps focuses on proactive business benefits, as opposed to simply reducing CAPEX/OPEX.

The business applications for DevOps are potentially limitless, though here, we’ll focus on three areas; speed of delivery, improved quality and greater control/security.

First and foremost, speed. Speed is defining almost every facet of the digital business landscape, as well as consumer expectations. If you’re not working fast enough, your boss will start looking over your shoulder, and if you’re not releasing products fast enough your customers will buy elsewhere. In short, if you’re not fast, you’re not in business.

“DevOps enables IT to move applications from development and into production as quickly as possible,” said Brett Hofer, Global DevOps Practise Lead at Dynatrace.

“DevOps can also ensure testing doesn’t occur too late in the development lifecycle, to maximise its potential value. If you don’t integrate automated testing throughout development, operations teams will have to repeat tests manually every time a configuration is made, and problems will be found too late to make vital changes,” said Hofer.

The concept of DevOps brings development and operations teams together, ensuring that the team are working in a complimentary manner. The essence of collaboration which is driven by DevOps allows teams to work towards the same objectives to ensure that product delivery is more efficient.

“If companies align toolsets so teams are able to share insights and cooperate effectively, they can ensure everyone is working toward the same goals and that everyone is measured against the same benchmarks. With a unified view of performance data across teams, DevOps gives employees a unified comprehensive outlook that translates into an overall competitive advantage,” said Hofer.

Speed to market is all well and good, but this does not necessarily guarantee you will have the most effective product. An alternative objective for DevOps is evolution and continuous evaluation.

“As a DevOps user, Salesforce has seen benefits in several areas,” said Pauline Dufour, EMEA Developer Relations team at Salesforce. “The continual iteration, testing and collaboration that DevOps involves means it is much easier to incorporate customer feedback into products and to do this more quickly.”

“This has a big impact on our customers as we really do include much of their feedback into our product design and upgrades,” said Dufour. “The DevOps approach also enables us to be more innovative and nimble – values that are core to our company. Continual collaboration and iteration means that we are able to deliver continual innovation.”

While there are other uses for the concept, Salesforce have seemingly prioritized product relevance, keeping themselves ahead of competitors. Here, DevOps enables the team to update the product offering, building in new features and answering the call of customer feedback, while minimizing downtown and disruption to customers.

“In fact we believe that unless businesses adopt an open, integrated approach they will find themselves displaced by digital disruptors, as we’ve seen with Uber and Hailo in the taxi industry,” said Dufour. “For organisations with a less collaborative and open culture, DevOps may be harder to implement, but I believe it is definitely worth the effort – it can turn your development into a competitive advantage.”

Alongside Salesforce, the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) have also utilised this methodology of continuous development to develop its new product offering Digital Content Store. The offering is being trialled currently by five universities, and will enable CLA’s customers to more effectively manage extracts which are under licence, as well as making the content more widely available for the students.

“I’d define DevOps as a culture which enables IT (as a whole, not just Development and Ops) to be more productive and efficient,” said Adam Sewell, IT Director at the CLA. “Which in turn means they can be more reactive to changes in the market, more responsive in terms of delivering solutions to customer (e.g. by taking feedback from customers actually using new products early on in the product lifecycle and being able to develop and release new features faster and with confidence) and ultimately, be more innovative as a business.”

As with every other aspect of the community, security is another consideration here. While most people would now consider themselves cloud experts, let’s not forget that it is just entering the mass market. Most buyers are continually concerned with security, robustness and reliability. DevOps presents a very simple solution.

“In product development data has to be both accessible and secure,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO at Actifio. “It’s a tricky balancing act, made all the more difficult by excess physical copy growth. More data copies will just increase the ‘attack surface’. So the idea is to create fewer physical copies, decrease the number of security targets, mask sensitive data, create an audit trail and reduce overall risk.

“The control of sensitive data starts with the reducing excess physical copies. What’s essential is that the system incorporates all key technical standards and multiple levels of data security that will address physical, virtual and hybrid environments. It’s fast, simple to understand and operate. It supports and helps to reinforce broader enterprise security strategies.”

Although the question of cost will always arise, as we can see from the examples above, early adopters of cloud technologies and derived methodologies (including DevOps), can create new business opportunities, launching brands into new markets and attracting new customers. Cloud, DevOps and all the other buzzwords in this space are more than just a means of reducing cost.

ICLOUD PE