When the science fiction writers of the mid-20th century wrote of artificial intelligence and the apocalyptic dangers contained therein, few speculated a problem as banal as the one we now face. This two-part problem, a syllogism, comes from the facts that AI is vastly useful. And that it is carbon-hungry on a scale few seem… Read more »
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IT services firm Accenture has expanded its strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create Accenture Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platform powered by AWS to help organisations adopt and scale AI rapidly with trust and confidence throughout their enterprise. The rapid rise of AI has created unique challenges and implications for business leaders who… Read more »
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TechForge recently spoke with VP of sales at Umbraco, Adam Bateson, as he explained the benefits of hyper-automation and digital workforces, and the importance of sustainability. Could you tell us a little bit about the company you work for? Umbraco is the largest Microsoft.net open source CMS. We are a Danish software company that’s been… Read more »
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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio. It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy… Read more »
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Could you tell us a little about what BMC does and your role within the company? BMC delivers industry-leading software solutions for IT automation, orchestration, operations, and service management to help organisations free up time and space as they continue to drive their digital initiatives forward. We work with thousands of customers and partners around… Read more »
The post Basil Faruqui, BMC: Perfecting cloud strategies, and getting the most out of automation appeared first on Cloud Computing News.
Lenovo has unveiled the next generation of ThinkEdge remote automation and orchestration with the introduction of new software solutions to accelerate the deployment of edge solutions. Lenovo’s new Lenovo Open Cloud Automation (LOC-A) 2.6 software delivers secure automated setup, enabling customers to complete global edge deployments for any number of locations in a matter of… Read more »
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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.”
I recently presented a session entitled, “Is the Cloud Right for You?” with Randy Weis and wanted to provide a recap of the things I covered in the presentation. In this video, I discuss some of the advantages of cloud including the access to enterprise class hardware that you might not normally be able to afford, load balancers, multiple data centers, redundancy, automation and more. I also cover some of the risks associated with the cloud. Enjoy, and as always, reach out with any questions!
Download eBook: The Evolution of the Corporate IT Department
By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect
I recently presented a session entitled, “Is the Cloud Right for You?” with Randy Weis and wanted to provide a recap of the things I covered in the presentation. In this video, I discuss some of the advantages of cloud including the access to enterprise class hardware that you might not normally be able to afford, load balancers, multiple data centers, redundancy, automation and more. I also cover some of the risks associated with the cloud. Enjoy, and as always, reach out with any questions!
Download eBook: The Evolution of the Corporate IT Department
By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect
Amazon has acquired ClusterK, which offers software that optimses deployments on AWS spot instances
Amazon has acquired ClusterK, a provider of software that optimises deployment on AWS spot instances for cost and availability.
Amazon confirmed the acquisition to BCN but declined to offer any details about how the technology would be integrated in AWS, or the financial terms of the acquisition.
One of the challenges with EC2 spot instances is that cost and availability can vary dramatically depending on overall demand.
At the same time when these instances are used for long jobs (say, running batch jobs on large databases) and those jobs are interrupted, those instances can actually disappear from right under you – unless failovers on reserved instances or similar techniques are deployed.
Those are some of the things ClusterK aims to solve. It offers an orchestration and scaling service that uses the AWS spot market in conjunction with on-demand or reserved instances to optimise workload deployments for cost and availability – an automated way of keeping workload cost and availability in check (the company claims it can reduce cloud costs by up to 90 per cent).
While it’s not clear exactly how Amazon intends to integrate the technology it is clear the company is keen to do what it takes to keep the price of its services dropping, which is where ClusterK could certainly add value. While disclosing its cloud revenues for the first time last week the company said it has dropped the prices of its services about 50 times since AWS launched ten years ago.