Category Archives: Open Source

News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace

Rackspace launches ‘cloud in a box’ offering for any data centre

Open gift boxRackspace has announced the launch of OpenStack Everywhere, delivering OpenStack as a managed service in any data centre the customer chooses.

Backing OpenStack as the preferred private cloud platform for enterprise, the company has built its new offering on the assumption that the complexity and cost of hiring talent to deploy and operate will boost demand for OpenStack as a managed service.

“Companies realise they can free up money and resources for more strategic business investments when they turn their IT capital expenses into operating expenses,” said Darrin Hanson, GM of OpenStack Private Cloud at Rackspace. “When OpenStack is consumed as a managed service, businesses can remove non-core operations, reduce software licensing, and minimise infrastructure acquisition and IT operations costs.”

In previous years, organizations wanting to enter into the OpenStack world would have had to front hardware and infrastructure costs, as well as hire experts for deployment and continuous management. The new product offers Rackspace support, on OpenStack, in a private cloud environment; the customer provides the floor space, power and cooling systems, but Rackspace does everything else.

The new ‘cloud in a box’ enables Rackspace to provide an integrated software, hardware and services product, which can be deployed in any data centre around the world. “Take for example I’m the IT Director for a German company who has a subsidiary in Italy,” said Frank Weyns, Director, OpenStack International at Rackspace “I want to give them local cloud capabilities, but ensure they are using the same technology as the subsidiaries in the UK and America. We can ship a complete hardware, software and services package to Italy, which operates on the same cloud platform as the rest of the business worldwide”

While the complexity of the cloud is no longer a particular challenge, Frank highlighted the main hurdle surrounding cloud computing, in particular OpenStack, is the internal resources. Now OpenStack is moving from the early adopter through to mass market stage, uptake is moving from the IT industry through to other verticals that wouldn’t necessarily have the same expertise internally. The demand for OpenStack may be present for these organizations, however the internal man power to successfully manage the platform at production level isn’t always there.

“The biggest hurdle for these companies to consume cloud, public, private or any cloud, is knowledge. Knowledge about the cloud, but also their internal resource,” said Weyns. “Using the cloud is not difficult; having a team which can manage the cloud 24/7 in a production environment is very different from a PoC however. This is the main reason we have created Rackspace in a box using OpenStack. We can deliver a product to any customer, irrelevant of where they are in their cloud journey, which works in production.

“The biggest concern now is how a business can remain true to their core operations. If you’re not an IT business, say you’re a bank or a car manufacturer, how can you ensure that you are operating in the cloud 24/7 without worrying about downtime or effective management of the technology? You probably won’t have the expertise in-house. This is a major barrier to adoption, and this is where Rackspace can help.”

Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Open Source

Microsoft announces R Server availability inside Azure HDInsight

MicrosoftMicrosoft has announced the availability of R Server inside Azure HDInsight, the company’s Hadoop-as-a-service aspect of Azure Data Lake.

Speaking at Strata + Hadoop World, the company is seemingly hoping to capitalize on the growing trend of open source technologies. Microsoft R is now 100% compatible with Open Source R and any library that exists can be used in the R Server context.

Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics in early 2015 as a means of entering the R-based analytics market, and has since delivered SQL Server R Services on SQL Server 2016 CTP3. R is one of the world’s most widely used programming languages for predictive analytics.

“By making R Server available as a workload inside HDInsight, we remove obstacles for users to unlock the power of R by eliminating memory and processing constraints and extending analytics from the laptop to large multi-node Hadoop and Spark clusters,” said Oliver Chiu, Product Marketing, Hadoop/Big Data and Data Warehousing at Microsoft. “This enables the ability to train and run ML models on larger datasets than previously possible to make more accurate predictions that affect the business.”

The company claims that by making the R Server available as a workload inside HDInsight, it will remove memory and processing constraints allowing developers to better utilize the power of Hadoop and Spark clusters. If correct, organizations will be able to run machine learning models on larger datasets, increasing the accuracy of business predications which are made by the model.

“This gives you the familiarity of the R language for machine learning while leveraging the scalability and reliability built into Hadoop and Spark,” said Chiu. “It also eliminates memory and processing constraints and easily extends their code from their laptop to large multi-terabyte files producing models that are more powerful and accurate.”

News & Analysis, Open Source, Private Cloud, Suse

SUSE targets simplification with OpenStack Cloud 6 release

Public privateGerman open source vendor SUSE claims its new OpenStack Cloud 6 is designed to overcome the fear of commitment that is putting IT buyers off engagement with the cloud. SUSE claims its new private cloud offering is a solution to the buying objections that potential customers have outlined.

According to SUSE’s own feedback, many companies want the cloud but think it’s too much hassle to install applications and can’t risk the disruption to their business. A recent study commissioned by SUSE found that more than 90% of large companies say they’ve already got at least one private cloud within their business, can see the advantages and would, in theory, use cloud computing for more business-critical workloads. But in practise they are not going to. Their worst fears are over installation challenges, possible vendor lock-in and a lack of OpenStack skills in the market.

SUSE claims it can address these fears and aims to convince potential clients that they won’t be subject to IT project creep. In response it is offering non-disruptive upgrades and a more business-friendly release cycle with longer support duration. This combination, it claims, will compensate for the limited skilled resources by requiring fewer upgrades and minimising disruption to production environments.

In addition, SUSE aims to offer more training to boost the available skills base with a new OpenStack training and certification scheme. SUSE is introducing the SUSE Certified Administrator-OpenStack  (SCA-OpenStack) certification along with a new training course on how to install and administer SUSE OpenStack Cloud. This is intended as a complement to, not a replacement for, existing SUSE OpenStack Cloud training. The training was developed in collaboration with the OpenStack Foundation exam development team.

A new course will specifically prepare students to take both the OpenStack Foundation Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam as well as the SCA-OpenStack exam. The new course will be held unveiled at an OpenStack Summit in Texas on April the 25th.

The Cloud 6 is based on the OpenStack release Liberty, has Docker and IBM z Systems mainframe support designed to make it easier to move applications and data to the cloud. Cloud 6 also supports Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and VMware hypervisor options and the OpenStack Manila shared file system service.

AWS, IBM, Networks, News & Analysis, Open Source

IBM launches Swift answer to Lambda at Interconnect 2016

open sourceIBM has unveiled a raft of new announcements today at Interconnect 2016, its largest ever cloud event. The rally, in Las Vegas, attracted 25,000 clients, partners and developers who were briefed on new partnerships with VMWare, IBM’s work with Apple’s Swift language, Bitly, Gigster, GitHub, Watson APIs and a new platform, BlueMix OpenWhisk.

The Bluemix OpenWhisk is IBM’s answer to Amazon Web Services’ event driven system Lambda, which allows developers to create automated responses to events when certain conditions are met. Automated responses have become a critical area for public cloud service providers and BCN recently reported how Google launched Google Cloud Functions in order to match the AWS offering to developers. All the systems aim to give developers a way to programme responses without needing to implement integration-related changes in the architecture, but IBM claims OpenWhisk is the only one whose underlying code will be available under an open-source license on the code publishing site Github.

By allowing all users open access to inspect code IBM says it can inspire greater levels of developer collaboration. IBM said OpenWhisk is highly customisable through either web services or using commands and it can be adapted to company requirements rather than being an inflexible cloud services.

OpenWhisk will work with both the server-side JavaScript framework and Apple’s increasingly popular Swift programming language. With a range of application programming interfaces (APIs) IBM claims the OpenWhisk service will have greater flexibility than the rival services from Google and AWS.

In a statement IBM explained the next phase of its plan to bring Swift to the Cloud with a preview of a Swift runtime and a Swift Package Catalog to help enable developers to create apps for the enterprise. The new Swift runtime builds on the Swift Sandbox IBM launched in December and allows developers to write applications in Swift in the cloud and create continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) condition that run apps written in Swift in production on the IBM public cloud.

IBM also announced a new option for users to run GitHub Enterprise on top of IBM Bluemix and in a company’s own data centre infrastructure.

In another announcement IBM gave details of a new partnership with VMware aimed at helping enterprises take better advantage of the cloud’s speed and economics. A new working arrangement means enterprise customers will find it easier to extend their existing workloads from their on-premises software-defined data centre to the cloud. The partnership gives IBM users the option to run VMware computing, storage and networking workloads on top of the IBM cloud. The new level of integration applies to vSphere, Virtual SAN, NSX, vCenter and vRealize Automation. In addition the IBM cloud is now part of the vCloud Air Network from VMware and the two partners will jointly sell hybrid cloud.

Black Duck, Box, IBM, News & Analysis, Open Source

Box, IBM and Black Duck announce security offerings amid open source vulnerabilities

Security concept with padlock icon on digital screenTwo more services have been launched with the aim of shoring up the security of the cloud, as its popularity sees it becoming increasingly targeted for attack.

File sharing company Box has launched a customer-managed encryption service, KeySafe, in a bid to give clients more control over their encryption keys without sacrificing the ease of use and collaboration features of Box. Meanwhile UK-based open source security vendor Black Duck has been recognised under IBM PartnerWorld’s ‘Ready for IBM Security Intelligence’ designation.

Box’s KeySafe aims to centralise sensitive content in the cloud, and promises new levels of productivity and faster business processes. Box Enterprise Key Management (EKM) uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a dedicated hardware storage module (HSM) to protect keys used to encrypt sensitive data. Box also has a service that integrates with AWS Key Management Service so customers can control their encryption keys. The service is intended to be simple and uses a software-based technology that doesn’t need dedicated HSMs.

Box says it can never access a customer’s encryption keys, which the customer owns. The main selling points of KeySafe, in addition to this independent key control, are unchangeable usage policies and audit logs and a ‘frictionless end user experience’ with simple data. Pricing is to be based on size.

In another security announcement, Black Duck’s new offering through IBM follows a research finding that 95% of mission critical apps now contain open source components, with 98% of companies using open source software they don’t know about. With 4,000 new open source vulnerabilities reported every year, Black Duck claims that cloud computing is creating greater vulnerabilities.

IBM has announced that Black Duck Hub has been validated to integrate with IBM Security AppScan in order to identify and manage application security risks in custom-developed and open source code. The hub now provides a clarified view within IBM Security AppScan which will help spot problems quicker. Black Duck Hub identifies and logs the open source in applications and containers and maps any known security vulnerabilities by comparing the inventory against data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and VulnDB.

“It’s not uncommon for open source software to make up 50 per cent of a large organisation’s code base. By integrating Black Duck Hub with AppScan, IBM customers will gain visibility into and control of the open source they’re using,” said Black Duck CEO Louis Shipley.

AWS, containers, Interviews, Open Source

AWS – we view open source as a companion

deepaIn one of the last installments of our series marking the upcoming Container World (February 16 – 18,  Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, USA), BCN talks to Deepak Singh, General Manager of Amazon EC2 Container Service, AWS

Business Cloud News: First of all – how much of the container hype is justified would you say?

Deepak Singh: Over the last 2-3 years, starting with the launch of Docker in March 2013, we have seen a number of AWS customers adopt containers for their applications. While many customers are still early in their journey, we have seen AWS customers such as Linden Labs, Remind, Yelp, Segment, and Gilt Group all adopt Docker for production applications. In particular, we are seeing enterprise customers actively investigating Docker as they start re-architecting their applications to be less monolithic.

How is the evolution of containers influencing the cloud ecosystem?

Containers are helping people move faster towards architectures that are ideal for the  AWS cloud. For example, one of the common patterns we have seen with customers using Docker is to adopt a microservices architecture. This is especially true for our enterprise customers who see Docker as a way to bring more applications onto AWS.

What opportunities does this open up to AWS?

For us, it all comes down to customer choice. When our customers ask us for a capability, then we listen. They come to us because they want something the Amazon way, easy to use, easy to scale, lower cost, and where they don’t have to worry about the infrastructure running behind it.

As mentioned, many of our customers are adopting containers and they expect AWS to support them. Over the past few years we have launched a number of services and features to make it easier for customers to run Docker-based applications. These include Docker support in AWS Elastic Beanstalk and the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS). We also have a variety of certified partners that support Docker and AWS and integrate with various AWS services, including ECS.

What does the phenomenon of open source mean to AWS? Is it a threat or a friend?

We view open source as a companion to AWS’s business model. We use open source and have built most AWS services on top of open source technology. AWS supports a number of open source applications, either directly or through partners. Examples of open source solutions available as AWS services include Amazon RDS (which supports MySQL, Postgres, and MariaDB), Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), and Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS). We are also an active member of the open source community. The Amazon ECS agent is available under an Apache 2.0 license, and we accept pull requests and allow our customers to fork our agent as well. AWS contributes code to Docker (e.g. CloudWatch logs driver), and was a founder member of the Open Container Initiative, which is a community effort to develop specifications for container runtimes.

As we see customers asking for services based on various open source technologies, we’ll keep adding those services.

You’ll be appearing at Container World this February. What do you think the biggest discussions will be about?

We expect customers will be interested in learning how they can run container-based applications in production, the most popular use cases, and hear about the latest innovations in this space.

Linux, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Survey, Suse

Survey reveals support for OpenStack but fears over hidden costs

openstack logoAlmost all IT professionals want to adopt OpenStack but fear the hidden costs, according to a new study by SUSE Linux.

Positive sentiment could evaporate in the face of challenges such as difficult installation, skills shortages and the fear of vendor lock-ins, the report has warned.

The study was commissioned by enterprise Linux, cloud and storage infrastructure provider SUSE. Researcher Dynamic Markets interviewed 813 senior IT professionals in the US, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and the Nordics, along with 110 from the UK. According to SUSE, 80% of the UK group said they are planning to adopt or have already moved to OpenStack private cloud. But there is serious concern about the aforementioned private cloud installation challenges and possible vendor lock-in.

Though 88% of companies said they have a private cloud at work an even higher percentage (96%) said they would use a cloud solution for business-critical workloads. Almost as many, 94%, said they see infrastructure-as-a-service as the future for the data centre.

However, many respondents confessed that the practicalities of OpenStack might get in the way and gave a series of responses that indicate there may be a high degree of difficulty involved.

Almost half of UK enterprises that have tried to implement an OpenStack cloud have failed, according to SUSE. Another 57% said they found the implementation experience difficult. Meanwhile, another 30% could be about to endure an off-putting experience, according to SUSE, since this number plan to download and install OpenStack software themselves, which (says SUSE) could exacerbate their difficulties.

Despite the open ethos of OpenStack, an alarming 91% of UK respondents are wary about falling victim to vendor lock-in when they choose a private cloud infrastructure.

Keeping control of the infrastructure will be made even harder by the impossibility of finding staff, said the report, as 89% say a lack of available talent in the market is making them reluctant to embark on a private cloud project.

The Cloud may be the future but there are clear concerns about how it should be integrated and managed, according to Mark Smith, SUSE’s senior product marketing manager. With cost the primary motivator for adopting the cloud, many IT professionals worry that there will be a price to pay later, according to SUSE.

News & Analysis, OneOps, Open Source, Walmart

Walmart open-sources its OneOps cloud platform on Github

Walmart OneOpsRetail giant Walmart has released it OneOps cloud management and application life cycle software on GitHub in a bid to invite improvements from the developer community.

“Walmart is a cloud user, not a cloud provider. It makes sense to release OneOps as an open source project so that the community can improve or build ways for it to adapt to existing technology,” said Jeremy King, CTO of Walmart Global eCommerce in the company’s IT division Walmart Labs.

OneOps can be used to run application on public cloud services such as Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and CenturyLink or to tailor private or hybrid environments using OpenStack. By allowing companies to port their software onto different service providers it gives the buyers of services more bargaining power, since they can change suppliers and enjoy greater flexibility over scale and features. It also frees developers from vendor lock in, as they are not trapped into creating a proprietary system that only works with a particular vendor.

The main benefits of OneOps are described as continuous lifecycle management, cloud portability and greater control of cloud environments. Users of the system said it encourages rapid innovation with safe guards. Software engineers can spin up virtual machines in minutes and start coding without having to spend hours specifying the intricacies of a specific cloud environment.

Walmart has previously released open source software such as Mupd8, which implements the MapUpdate framework, a MapReduce-style framework for processing fast/streaming data. It also released Hapi, a framework for building applications and services, to the open source community. It has also used and contributed to other popular open source projects such as React, Node.js and Openstack.

“After more than two years of development and testing OneOps is available to the open source community,” said King, “We hear from companies of all sizes that they want to spend less time and money on IT, and more time on delivering experiences to customers, faster. Today, that undertaking gets easier.”

Datacentre, EMC, News & Analysis, Open Source, RackHD

EMC launches new open source tech for the software defined datacentre

EMC2EMC is launching RackHD and revised version of CoprHD and REX-Ray in its quest to be a top open source influence on tomorrow’s software defined datacentre industry.

RackHD is a hardware management and orchestration software that promises to automate functions such as the discovery, description, provisioning and programming of servers. EMC says it will speed up the process of installing third platform apps by automatically updating firmware and installing operating systems.

Meanwhile, version 2.4 of storage automator CoprHD was improved with help from Intel and Oregon State University. It can now centralise and transform storage from multiple vendors into a simple management platform and interface, EMC claims.

The updated version of storage orchestration engine REX-Ray 0.3 has added storage platform support for Google Compute Engine in addition to EMC Isilon and EMC VMAX.

These products are aimed at modern data centres with a multi-vendor mix of storage, networking and servers and an increasing use of commodity hardware as building blocks of software defined hyperscale infrastructure. In these cases the use of low-level operating systems or updating firmware and BIOS across numerous devices is a cumbersome manual task for data centre engineers, says EMC. RackHD was created to automate and simplify these fundamental tasks across a broad range of datacentre hardware.

According to EMC, developers can use the RackHD API as a component in a larger orchestration system or create a user interface for managing hardware services regardless of the underlying hardware in place.

Intel and Oregon State University have joined EMC’s CoprHD Community as the newest contributors to the storage vendor’s open source initiative. Intel is leading a project to integrate Keystone with CoprHD, allowing the use of the Cinder API and the CoprHD API to provide block storage services.

“We discovered how difficult it was to implement any kind of automation tooling for a mix of storage systems,” said Shayne Huddleston, Director of IT Infrastructure at Oregon State University. “Collaborating with the CoprHD community will allow us avoid vendor lock-in and support our entire infrastructure.”

Chakra, Edge, Javascript, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Open Source

Microsoft goes open source on Chakra JavaScript engine

Microsoft is to make the Chakra JavaScript engine open source and will publish the code on its GitHub page next month. The rationale is to extend the functions of the code, used in the Edge and Internet Explorer 9 browsers, to a much wider role.

The new open source versions of the Chakra engine are to be known as its open sourcing ChakraCore. Announcing the changes at Java development show JS Conf US in Florida, Microsoft now intends to run ChakraCore’s development as a community project which both Intel and AMD have expressed interest in joining. Initially the code will be for Windows only but the rationale behind the open source strategy is to take ChakraCore across platforms, in a repeat of the exercise it pioneered with .NET.

In a statement, Gaurav Seth, Microsoft’s Principal Programme Manager, explained that as Java Script’s role widens, so must the community of developers that support it and opening up the code base will help support that growth.

“Since Chakra’s inception, JavaScript has expanded from a language that primarily powered the web browser experience to a technology that supports apps in stores, server side applications, cloud based services, NoSQL databases, game engines, front-end tools and now the Internet of Things,” said Seth. Over time, Chakra evolved to fit many of these and this meant that apart from throughput, Chakra had to support native interoperability, scalability and manage resource consumption. Its interpreter played a key role in moving the technology across platform architectures but it can only take it so far, said Seth.

“Now we’re taking the next step by giving developers a fully supported and fully open-source JavaScript engine available to embed in their projects, innovate on top of, and contribute back to ChakraCore,” said Seth. The modern JavaScript Engine must go beyond browser work and run everything from small-footprint devices for IoT applications to high-throughput, massively parallel server applications based on cloud technologies, he said.

ChakraCore already fits into any application stack that calls for speed and agility but Microsoft intends to give it greater license to become more versatile and extend beyond the Windows ecosystem, said Seth. “We are committed to bringing ChakraCore to other platforms in the future. We’d invite developers to help us in this pursuit by letting us know which other platforms they’d like to see ChakraCore supported on to help us prioritize future investments, or even by helping port it to the platform of their choice,” said Seth.