The social media expansion has shown just how people are eager to share their experiences with the rest of the world. Cloud technology is the perfect platform to satisfy this need given its great flexibility and readiness. At Cynny, we aim to revolutionize how people share and organize their digital life through a brand new cloud service, starting from infrastructure to the users’ interface.
A revolution that began from inventing and designing our very own infrastructure: we have created the first server network powered solely by ARM CPU. The microservers have “organism-like” features, differentiating them from any of the current technologies. Benefits include low consumption of energy, making Cynny the ecologically friendly alternative for storage as well as cheaper infrastructure, lower running costs, etc.
Cloud Computing: Solving the Next Friction Point
Today, developers and business units are leading the charge to cloud computing. The primary driver: faster access to computing resources by using the cloud’s automated infrastructure provisioning. However, fast access to infrastructure exposes the next friction point: creating, delivering, and operating applications much faster.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Bernard Golden, VP of Strategy at ActiveState, will discuss why solving the next friction point is critical for true cloud computing success and how developers and business units can leverage service catalogs, frameworks, and DevOps to achieve the true goal of IT: delivering increased business value through applications.
Mongo! Santamaria! Database is «Revolutionary»
Just as no year is complete for me without a viewing of Blazing Saddles, no Red Hat Summit is complete without a talk with someone from MongoDB.
We therefore posed a few questions for Paul Cross, Vice President of Solutions Architecture at MongoDB, and here’s what he had to say.
Roger: Tell us about the latest at MongoDB. Growth? Company direction?
Paul: A lot has happened at MongoDB in the past few months. Just after passing 1,000 subscribers and over 500 customers of our fully managed backup service, we announced MongoDB 2.6, our biggest release ever.
It includes major updates to our management application, MMS, including continuous incremental backup, point-in-time recovery, and automation. We are especially excited about the automation capabilities — users will be able to create MongoDB systems of any size and topology, with a single button click. They’ll also be able to manage their systems, including scale out, and hot upgrades with no downtime to their apps.
This is consistent with a major focus for us now – make MongoDB as easy to operate at massive scale as it is to build applications.
We have also added advanced security to MongoDB, putting it ahead of all other NoSQL products, in our opinion, and more importantly making MongoDB supported for critical apps in banks, healthcare organizations, federal agencies and other industries that require strict security.
Roger: How are you doing with developers?
Paul: Developers love MongoDB. We are now well past 7 million downloads of the database — and MMS is incredibly popular in the community, with over 35,000 users. We think the new enhancements to MMS and MongoDB will be well received in the community because they allow users to focus on what differentiates their business from their competitors.
Roger: And customers?
Paul: Tens of thousands of organizations use MongoDB, including 30 Fortune 100 companies. Significant customers include Cisco, eBay, MetLife and Forbes, and just this week Silver Spring Networks announced they are using MongoDB to scale its real-time Grid Data Platform. We are constantly announcing new customers; more recent announcements are available here and information on our customers can be found here.
Roger: You have an event coming up soon as well…
Paul: MongoDB will be holding MongoDB World this June, which will feature more than 80 in-depth sessions, including speakers from Bouygues Telecom, Citigroup, Expedia, Genentech, LinkedIn and Sanofi-Aventis. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and Cloudera Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Mike Olson will also deliver keynote addresses.
Roger: I have a theory that all the world is hybrid cloud, or will be soon. How strongly do you agree/disagree with this?
Paul: From day one, MongoDB was designed for the cloud and will run optimally on any cloud deployments, with commodity hardware leveraged en masse to deliver scalability and availability beyond what is possible with monolithic, proprietary hardware.
Our customers need the flexibility to deploy in whatever environment is most advantageous, including costs, features, reliability, and their legal obligations. The bottom line is that flexibility wins. I’m excited to be at a company that embraces these challenges and provides options to our customers rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Roger: How key is the role of Big Data in developing your solutions?
Paul: Everyone’s definition of Big Data is different. Our founders started MongoDB – the name comes from “humongous” – because at a previous company they spent far too much time building out infrastructures to manage their data.
Recognizing early on that the mass amounts of volume of data being generated would become some of technology’s greatest pain points, they built a database that would eliminate the traditional friction points inherent in 30-year-old databases that weren’t designed for the challenges posed by modern application development.
In short, they built a database that would eliminate massive overhead, making it easy for users to deliver value to the world – simple to operate, fast development, open source, leveraging cloud architecture, and scaling to any size.
The result, five years later, is the fifth most popular database in the world, having quickly moved past other systems that have been on the market for decades. There is clearly something revolutionary about MongoDB, and it has a lot to do with the challenges Big Data poses in modern application development.
Outpacing Your Competition with a Cloud Services Brokerage
Every company worries about competition. When I ran a large enterprise solutions organization, I took steps every day to ensure we were outpacing the competition. Frequently this involved making “build” vs “buy” decisions for the various product parts or services we needed to drive our business. In each discussion, I would ask my staff: “What is going to help us move faster or be more efficient? What will help us beat our competition?”
In today’s business world, IT is a significant driver of competitive advantage and the same considerations of “build” vs “buy” apply to IT, just as they do to other parts of the business.
Imagine the following exchange between a Line of Business executive and CIO of a company:
Aereo Decision: the Cloud at a Crossroad?
Broadcasters’ latest legal target is 2-year-old upstart Aereo—which retransmits over-the-air broadcast television using dime-sized antennas to paying consumers, who can watch TV online or record it for later viewing. The case, before the Supreme Court, may have impact on cloud computing generally, not just on Aereo’s business. A federal appeals court said that Aereo’s service is akin to a consumer putting a broadcast antenna atop their dwelling. Aereo, the appeals court ruled, “provides the functionality of three devices: a standard TV antenna, a DVR, and a Slingbox”
Companies like Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Yahoo, and others are worried that a victory for the broadcasters could upend the cloud. The companies, in trade association briefs, told the justices in a recent filing that the “dramatic expansion of the cloud computing sector, bringing with it real benefits previously only imagined in science fiction, depends upon an interpretation of the Copyright Act that allows adequate breathing room for transmissions of content.”
Consider any file-hosting service that allows people to store their own material, such as Dropbox. What if it can be shown they are storing copyrighted work. Do they need a license?
Mitch Stoltz, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney, said in a telephone interview that, “If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the broadcasters, their opinion might create liability for various types of cloud computing, especially cloud storage.”
But, in urging the high court to kill Aereo, the broadcasters said that “The disruption threatened by Aereo will produce changes that will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.”
Maybe the Cloud Can Help Secure the Internet
As recent events have confirmed once again, no single company, organization or government is up to the task of securing the Internet. The never-ending cat and mouse game of exploits chasing vulnerabilities continues. The stunning Heartbleed discovery has shaken the online security establishment to the core. Claims of security and privacy for many Web servers were patently false.
We all know a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and the unintended back door information leak that is Heartbleed has undoubtedly allowed countless secrets to escape from secure servers, albeit as random pieces of a puzzle to be reassembled by the hacker. It will undoubtedly go down in history as the most widespread compromise of online services since the advent of the Web. Why? Because we now conduct an unprecedented number of so-called “secure” communications over SSL in every facet of commerce, government and the social web.
Moore’s Law Gives Way to Bezos’s Law
loud providers Google, AWS and Microsoft are doing some spring-cleaning – out with the old, in with the new – when it comes to pricing services.
With the latest cuts, here’s a news flash:
There’s a new business model driving cloud that is every bit as exponential in growth — with order of magnitude improvements to pricing — as Moore’s Law has been to computing. Let’s call it «Bezos’ Law,» and go straight to the math
MapDB: The Agile Java Database
MapDB is an Apache-licensed open source database specifically designed for Java developers. The library uses the standard Java Collections API, making it totally natural for Java developers to use and adopt, while scaling database size from GBs to TBs. MapDB is very fast and supports an agile approach to data, allowing developers to construct flexible schemas to exactly match application needs and tune performance, durability and caching for specific requirements.
Tech News Recap for the Week of 4/14/2014
Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick recap of news and stories you may have missed!
- Kentucky Enacts a Data Breach Notification Law and Protects Student Data in the Cloud
- The 10 Most Massively Popular Smartphones You’ve Never Heard Of
- The five characteristics of a new breed of CIO: Gartner
- Dropbox defends appointing Condoleezza Rice to board
- “Huge New York Development Project Becomes a Data Science Lab” via NYT Technology
- Are Touchscreens Melting Your Kid’s Brain?
- VMware launching new cloud service for disaster recovery
- Have You Seen this Email? ‘Microsoft Software Asset Management Review’
- The Explosive Growth of Cloud Computing [Infographic]
- How CIOs Can Influence Corporate Performance
- With Google Glass, the doctor can see you now
- 19-Year-Old Canadian Arrested for Heartbleed Hack
- VMware To Invest $500 Million In India
- 3 Million Customer Credit, Debit Cards Stolen in Michaels, Aaron Brothers Breaches
Corporate IT departments have progressed from keepers of technology to providers of complex solutions that businesses truly rely on {ebook}
Three Important Reasons for Privileged Access Management
In this report Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) analysts explore the ways in which gaining visibility and control over high-privilege access helps organizations achieve regulatory compliance, assure responsible governance, and improve security all while reducing IT operational costs. The characteristics of an effective privileged access management solution are examined, along with evidence from EMA research that supports the values of a more consistent approach to operational IT control.