SYS-CON Events announced today that Tintri Inc., a leading producer of VM-aware storage (VAS) for virtualization and cloud environments, will exhibit at the 18th International CloudExpo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
IoT Disrupts the Cloud by @AllSeenAlliance | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #InternetOfThings
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Noah Harlan, Founder of Two Bulls and President of AllSeen Alliance, will discuss the coming move from Cloud to Edge and what this means for business.
Noah Harlan is President of AllSeen Alliance and a Founder of Two Bulls, a leading mobile software development company with offices in New York, Berlin, and Melbourne. He is also Managing Director of Digital Strategy for Sullivan NYC, a brand engagement firm based in New York. He has served as an advisor for the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy on gaming and the outdoors, has appeared as a commentator on Bloomberg TV discussing mobile technology, and has an Emmy Award for Advanced Media Interactivity.
Incident response on the AWS cloud and the case for outsourcing
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By Jason Deck, VP strategic development, Logicworks
It is 4pm on a Friday before a holiday, right before your team leaves for a long weekend. An engineer on your team suddenly cannot connect to certain instances in your AWS environment. The error is affecting the largest projects and biggest customers — across hundreds of instances — including DR.
What happens now?
The answer to this question depends on your support model. In most companies, an incident like this means that no one is going home for the holiday weekend; they will spend 15+ hours diagnosing the problem, then 200+ hours fixing it manually, instance by instance. If they do not get it fixed in time, they will lose data and have to tell their customers — a potentially damaging situation.
This is a true story, but what actually happened was very different. The company instead called their managed service provider (MSP) – us – who diagnosed the problem and fixed it over the holiday weekend.
Every system has weak points. Every system can fail. It is how you deal with catastrophe — and who you trust to help you during failure — that makes the difference. Every enterprise team needs an insurance policy against mistakes, large and small.
It turns out that one of the company’s internal engineers had caused the problem, inadvertently changing permissions for their entire environment. Logicworks was able to diagnose the problem in less than an hour, determine blast radius, get our smartest engineers in a room to develop a complex remediation strategy, and implement that fix before business resumed after the holiday. This involved writing custom scripts (in Python, BASH, and Puppet) to investigate the scope of the failure and another more complex script to partially automate the fix, so that each instance could be repaired in 3-5 minutes, rather than 2-3 hours. Ultimately it took 170+ hours of engineering effort, but the company readily admitted that it would have taken them two weeks to fix on their own.
Managed infrastructure service providers were born in an age when implementing a fix meant going to a data centre, swapping out hardware, and doing manual configurations. The value of an MSP to enterprises was not having to manage hardware and systems staff.
In the cloud, MSPs must do more. They must be programmers; instead of replacing hardware, they need to write custom scripts to repair virtual cloud instances. MSPs need to think and act like a software company: infrastructure problems are bugs, the solution is code, and speed is paramount.
Not all MSPs operate this way. Many MSPs would have looked at this company’s issue and applied the traditional incident response model: just reboot everything manually, one at a time. (Many also would have said “you caused the problem, you fix it.”) This is the traditional MSP line of thinking, and it would have meant that the company would have lost three to five days of data and customer trust.
MSPs need to think and act like a software company: infrastructure problems are bugs, the solution is code, and speed is paramount.
Running on cloud infrastructure comes with unique risks. It is often easier for your engineers to make a career-limiting mistake when a single wrong click of a button in an automated script can change permissions across an entire system. These new challenges require new answers and a new line of defence.
Importantly, this means that MSPs no longer replace internal IT teams; they provide additional expertise that the enterprise currently lacks (or is in the process of building) in fields like cloud security and automation. They provide an additional layer of defense. In the example above, the internal and MSP team collaborated to fix the problem, since there is shared control of the infrastructure.
In the cloud, the conversation no longer has to be insourcing vs. outsourcing. In fact, you will get the most out of an MSP if are also setting up internal DevOps teams or implementing software development best practices. As an MSP, companies with an existing or growing DevOps team are the most exciting to work beside. As an example, an MSP cannot automate your entire deployment pipeline alone; most only operate below the application level and can only automate instance spin-up and testing. But if the two teams are working together, they can balance application-specific needs with advanced scaling and network options and create a very mature pipeline very quickly.
An MSP can accelerate your DevOps team building strategies, not substitute them.
In other words, an MSP can accelerate your DevOps team building strategies, not substitute them. This is an incredibly powerful model that we have watched transform and mature entire cloud projects in a matter of months. Plus, they can subtract all the crucial compliance work your DevOps team dreads, like setting up backups and logging — and even improve the quality of that compliance work by creating automated tests to ensure logs and backups are always kept.
It is true that internal IT teams sacrifice some control by using an MSP. The key is that you are sacrificing control to a group of people who are held responsible for making your environment secure, available, etc. You control how and when the MSP touches your environment.
Cloud projects are complex, and cloud problems can be equally so. Just make sure that when they happen, you have the right team on the bench.
The post Incident Response on AWS Cloud: The Case for Outsourcing appeared first on Gathering Clouds.
Spotify shifts all music from data centres to Google Cloud
Music streaming service Spotify has announced that it is to switch formats for storing tunes for customers and is copying all the music from its data centres onto the Google’s Cloud Platform.
In a blog written by Spotify’s VP of Engineering & Infrastructure, Nicholas Harteau explained that though the company’s data centres had served it well, the cloud is now sufficiently mature to surpass the level of quality, performance and cost Spotify got from owning its infrastructure. Spotify will now get its platform infrastructure from Google Cloud Platform ‘everywhere’, Harteau revealed.
“This is a big deal,” he said. Though Spotify has taken a traditional approach to delivering its music streams, it no longer feels it needs to buy or lease data-centre space, server hardware and networking gear to guarantee being as close to its customers as possible, according to Harteau.
“Like good engineers, we asked ourselves: do we really need to do all this stuff? For a long time the answer was yes. Recently that balance has shifted,” he said.
Operating data centres was a painful necessity for Spotify since it began in 2008 because it was the only way to guarantee the quality, performance and cost for its cloud. However, these days the storage, computing and network services available from cloud providers are as high quality, high performance and low cost as anything Spotify could create from the traditional ownership model, said Harteau.
Harteau explained why Spotify preferred Google’s cloud service to that of runaway market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS). The decision was shaped by Spotify’s experience with Google’s data platform and tools. “Good infrastructure isn’t just about keeping things up and running, it’s about making all of our teams more efficient and more effective, and Google’s data stack does that for us in spades,” he continued.
Harteau cited the Dataproc’s batch processing, event delivery with Pub/Sub and the ‘nearly magical’ capacity of BigQuery as the three most persuasive features of Google’s cloud service offering.
Google launches Dataproc after successful beta trials
Google has announced that its big data analysis tool Dataproc is now on general release. The utility, which was one of the factors that persuaded Spotify to choose Google’s Cloud Platform over Amazon Web Services is a managed tool based on the Hadoop and Spark open source big data software.
The service first became available in beta in September and was tested by global music streaming service Spotify, which was evaluating whether it should move its music files away from its own data centres and into the public cloud – and which cloud service could support it. Dataproc in its beta form supported the MapReduce engine, the Pig platform for writing programmes and the Hive data warehousing software. Google says it has added new features and sharpened the tool since then.
While in its beta testing phase, Cloud Dataproc added features such as property tuning, VM metadata and tagging and cluster versioning. “In general availability new versions of Cloud Dataproc will be frequently released with new features, functions and software components,” said Google product manager James Malone.
Cloud Dataproc aims to minimise cost and complexity, which are the two major distractions of data processing, according to Malone.
“Spark and Hadoop should not break the bank and you should pay for what you actually use,” he said. As a result, Cloud Dataproc is priced at 1 cent per virtual CPU per hour. Billing is by the minute with a 10-minute minimum.
Analysis should run faster, Malone said, because clusters in Cloud Dataproc can start and stop operations in less than 90 seconds, where they take minutes in other big data systems. This can make analyses run up to ten times faster. The new general release of Cloud Dataproc will have better management, since clusters don’t need specialist administration people or software.
Cloud Dataproc also tackles two other data processing bugbears, scale and productivity, promised Malone. This tool complements a separate service called Google Cloud Dataflow for batch and stream processing. The underlying technology for the service has been accepted as an Apache incubator project under the name Apache Beam.
IBM launches object-based storage for the cloud
New object-based cloud storage could tackle the growing challenge presented by unstructured data, according to IBM.
Announcing a new Cloud Object Storage at its InterConnect 2016 event in Las Vegas, IBM said the object storage technology it acquired from Cleversafe creates a fast, flexible, hybrid cloud storage service that gives companies new options for managing and analysing data.
Researcher IDC says 80% of new cloud apps will be big-data intensive. The cloud, mobile, IoT, analytics, social media, cognitive and other technologies all conspire to increase the data management workload, said John Morris, general manager of IBM Cloud Object Storage. Bringing Cleversafe technology to the cloud will give clients a way to keep on top of the problem.
The service offers a choice of multiple application programming interfaces and the option to store massive amounts of data on-premise, on the IBM Cloud or in a hybrid of both.
In June, when the Cloud Object Storage services is launched, it will come in three configurations: Nearline, Standard and Dedicated.
Nearline is a cloud infrastructure for infrequently accessed data charged at a lower cost and ideal for archive; back-up and other non-timely workloads. The Standard offering will provide a higher performance public cloud offering based on the Cleversafe technology with three new APIs into S3 Object storage.
The Dedicated option gives a single-tenant IBM Object Storage system running on dedicated servers in IBM Cloud data centres. This is available as an IBM managed service or as a self-managed cloud solution and gives clients access to object storage without needing for extra hardware or data centre space.
IBM Cloud Object Storage will be available in a variety of licensing models, including perpetual, subscription or consumption. This means customers can buy storage capacity with the flexibility to move data between the enterprise and the cloud as business needs change. It will also support both file and object workloads, so enterprises can have a single data storage hub that supports both traditional and web-based applications.
When Hybrid Cloud Becomes Hybrid Fog By @CWvanOrman | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Hybrid cloud is an appealing infrastructure model. With hybrid cloud, you can keep hosting applications and data on your own premises where necessary, while taking advantage of cloud economics and elasticity as appropriate.
Unfortunately, IT organizations are often unprepared to manage application infrastructure that spans the on-premise data center and multiple clouds. The result: they achieve vastly superior infrastructure economics — but still can’t consistently ensure a great customer experience.
Provisioning the Entire Stack | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Microservices
As we move into the world of complete datacenter automation, there is a whole new selection of issues that we are learning to resolve – from custom hardware to a variety of provisioning tools at each level of automation. These are not unexpected issues, but they certainly provide us with plenty to do while we’re trying to reduce the amount of busy work we have to do.
We’re currently in the process of stringing together applications at the various layers to do server provisioning, application provisioning, and (for internal apps at least) application deployment. The options out there are a pretty broad swath that runs from all-in-one solutions like Puppet with Razor to specialized solutions hooked together to run the entire automation process. The end result is the same, the differences are in implementation, vendor lock-in, and whether a full solution that can be implemented all at once is more important to an organization than a solution that has the most suited parts that can be implemented in parallel but have to be tied together.
Continuous Delivery and Legacy Software | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Microservices
The future of software releases is clear. Continuous delivery is here to stay. But does that mean that legacy software systems and infrastructure need to be altogether abandoned? If you polled the people busy redefining best practices today, they’d agree that in a decade we’re going to be effortlessly collaborating on highly complex systems that are updated continuously. QA will…
The post Can Continuous Delivery Accommodate Legacy Software Systems? appeared first on Plutora Inc.
WebRTC’s Impact in Capital Markets | @ThingsExpo #IoT #RTC #WebRTC
WebRTC is bringing significant change to the communications landscape that will bridge the worlds of web and telephony, making the Internet the new standard for communications. Cloud9 took the road less traveled and used WebRTC to create a downloadable enterprise-grade communications platform that is changing the communication dynamic in the financial sector.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Leo Papadopoulos, CTO of Cloud9, will discuss the importance of WebRTC and how it enables companies to focus on building intellectual property into their platforms that support customer needs, while also providing the performance, service, and support levels expected by Fortune 100 companies.