in Santa Clara, California, with an estimated 7,000 plus delegates attending over three days.
The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential. The DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo--to be held November 4-6 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley--will expand the DevOps community, enable a wide sharing of knowledge, and educate delegates and technology providers alike. Recent research has shown that DevOps dramatically reduces development time, the amount of enterprise IT professionals put out fires, and support time generally. Time spent on infrastructure development is significantly increased, and DevOps practitioners report more software releases and higher quality.Sep. 17, 2014 12:30 PM EDT Reads: 1,366
Enthusiasm for the Internet of Things has reached an all-time high. In 2013 alone, venture capitalists spent more than $1 billion dollars investing in the IoT space. With “smart” appliances and devices, IoT covers wearable smart devices, cloud services to hardware companies. Nest, a Google company, detects temperatures inside homes and automatically adjusts it by tracking its user’s habit. These technologies are quickly developing and with it come challenges such as bridging infrastructure gaps, abiding by privacy concerns and making the concept a reality. These challenges can’t be addressed without the kinds of agile software development and infrastructure approaches pioneered by the DevOps movement.
Software development, like manufacturing, is a craft that requires the application of creative approaches to solve problems given a wide range of constraints. However, while engineering design may be craftwork, the production of most designed objects relies on a standardized and automated manufacturing process. By contrast, much of moving an application from prototype to production and, indeed, maintaining the application through its lifecycle has often remained craftwork.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager at Red Hat, will discuss the many lessons and processes that DevOps can learn from manufacturing and the assembly line-like tools, such as Platform-as-a-Service, that provide the necessary abstraction and automation to make industrialized DevOps possible.
Today, almost every company has a directory that needs to be managed. Spending valuable company time monitoring servers, provisioning and deprovisioning users, auditing, and assessing security concerns takes away from the core competency of the team – building product and delivering to customers quickly. DaaS takes on the burden of those tasks, and allows the team to focus on what they do best. In his session at DevOps Summit, Rajat Bahargava, Co-Founder, Chairman, and President & CEO of JumpCloud, will talk about what DaaS is, how it eases the pain caused by AD and LDAP, and why cloud-based directories are where the industry is heading.
The recent trends like cloud computing, social, mobile and Internet of Things are forcing enterprises to modernize in order to compete in the competitive globalized markets. However, enterprises are approaching newer technologies with a more silo-ed way, gaining only sub optimal benefits. The Modern Enterprise model is presented as a newer way to think of enterprise IT, which takes a more holistic approach to embracing modern technologies. This model makes use of Composable Enterprise framework put forward by Jonathan Murray of WMG. 
Leysin American School is an exclusive, private boarding school located in Leysin, Switzerland. Leysin selected an OpenStack-powered, private cloud as a service to manage multiple applications and provide development environments for students across the institution.
Seeking to meet rigid data sovereignty and data integrity requirements while offering flexible, on-demand cloud resources to users, Leysin identified OpenStack as the clear choice to round out the school's cloud strategy. Additionally, the school sought a partner to provide OpenStack infrastructure deployment and operations expertise. They ultimately selected Blue Box’s Private Cloud as a Service, powered by OpenStack, leveraging Blue Box's Zurich, Switzerland data center. 
In a world of ever-accelerating business cycles and fast-changing client expectations, the cloud increasingly serves as a growth engine and a path to new business models. Dynamic clouds enable businesses to continuously reinvent themselves, adapting their business processes, their service and software delivery and their operations to achieve speed-to-market and quick response to customer feedback. As the cloud evolves, the industry has multiple competing cloud technologies, offering on-premises and off-premises cloud platforms for both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). In parallel, cloud standards are also evolving, including community standards like OpenStack and CloudFoundry. Most organizations who are adopting the Cloud today are ending up adopting it in complex ‘dynamic-hybrid’ environments. There is physical infrastructure that now co-exists along with the new dynamic-hybrid on-premises and off-premises Cloud hosted environments.
WaveMaker on Tuesday announced WaveMaker Enterprise, licensed software that enables organizations to run their own end-to-end application platform as a service (aPaaS) for building and running custom apps. WaveMaker Enterprise is a commercially available rapid API app development and deployment (RAADD) software integrated with a Docker container-architected aPaaS. WaveMaker Enterprise adds middleware and its Docker-architected PaaS to extend WaveMaker Studio, the company's free open source development platform, which has garnered over two million downloads and 30,000 loyal users around the world.
WaveMaker CEO Samir Ghosh is taking a new pass at aPaas, and leveraging the increasingly popular Docker open-source platform, with the announcement of WaveMaker Enterprise. The new version of the company's eponymous software “enables instant, end-to-end custom web app creation and management by professional and non-professional developers (alike) and development teams,” according to the company.
We asked Samir a few questions about this, and here's what he had to say:
Cloud Computing Journal: You've mentioned the previous challenge of business-side developers making that jump from design to deployment. What sort of learning curve will they still face with Wavemaker Enterprise?
Samir Ghosh: “Business-side developers” can include non-programming business users or professional developers under tight schedules or with limited mobile or front-end programming expertise. Both can use WaveMaker to meet their app development needs, but may have different deployment needs.
I think business users just want their app to run as easily as possible. In WaveMaker, they can literally click a button and their application will run, either on our public cloud or on the enterprise’s private...
Yahoo CIO Mike D. Kail will present a session on DevOps at the 3rd International DevOps Summit, November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Mike brings more than 23 years of IT operations experience with a focus on highly scalable architectures to Yahoo. Prior to Yahoo, he served as VP of IT Operations at Netflix. The Netflix culture highlighted the transformation we see within forward-thinking IT organizations today and its use of public cloud and ‘No Ops' is well known in the industry. Mike Kail worked to develop this culture within Netflix's own IT organization, where he focused not only on the technology, but also on hiring and training the right talent. In order to achieve the right mix of technology innovation and human talent, he concentrated on identifying the right mind set for a new way of IT (DevOps) and how to transition from IT Ops to DevOps
“DevOps” is one of those buzzwords that means everything and nothing at the same time. It is like the words “cloud,” “architecture,” and “Internet of Things”—terms so vague they lead to endless debates between IT people. DevOps seems to take this verbal sparring to a new level. On top of arguing over what it means, people also debate the proper method for delivering DevOps.
We (as in the industry at large) don't talk enough about applying architectural best practices with respect to emerging API and software-defined models of networking. But we should. That's because as we continue down the path that continues to software-define the network, using APIs and software development methodologies to simplify and speed the provisioning of network services, the more we run into if not rules, then best practices, that should be considered before we willy nilly start integrating all the network things.
This post is the first in a multi-part series of posts on the many options for collecting and forwarding log data from different platforms and the pros and cons of each. In this first post we will focus on Syslog, and will provide background on the protocol.
Syslog has been around for a number of decades and provides a protocol used for transporting event messages between computer systems and software applications. The protocol utilizes a layered architecture, which allows the use of any number of transport protocols for transmission of syslog messages. It also provides a message format that allows vendor-specific extensions to be provided in a structured way. Syslog is now standardized by the IETF in RFC 5424 (since 2009), but has been around since the 80's and for many years served as the de facto standard for logging without any authoritative published specification.
One funny thing about DevOps is that it is often touted that constant, on-the-fly changes are the way of the future in operations, and DevOps enables those changes. While this sounds really good, and some organizations are actually doing this type of DevOps, I think it is time that, for the enterprise, we strongly question that premise.
While it is really very cool to think about moving an entire web server from a farm to the cloud with just a script, upgrading a system while it’s hot, or spinning up more instances of a server without having to configure anything, I propose that, for the average enterprise, it is simply not necessary.
Skytap recently announced the availability of a Docker template in the Skytap Cloud Public Template Library. Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. This new template allows you to easily experiment with or deploy Docker-based containers within Skytap Cloud.
A funny thing has happened in the technology world, the hype cycle has become far more than a cycle that you watch and smile at. It has become a sales frenzy, while people try to make a name and/or sell you stuff before the idea or product category has even solidified. You can see it all around you, and as has been going on for years, the trend seems to be worsening. I call it a funny thing because the truly revolutionary technologies – like server virtualization – really didn’t need a full-on hype cycle at all. Virtualization just kept growing year after year. People would declare “the year of virtualization!” and the year would pass, with more servers virtualized but no mass shift from one paradigm to the other.
Picking up where we last left off, Yung Chou and Keith Mayer continue our Accelerate DevOps with the Cloud series as they welcome Andrew Weiss from Microsoft Consulting Services as they show us how we can manage Docker containers using PowerShell DSC...(
In today’s software-defined business era, uptime and availability are key to the business survival. The application is the business. However, ensuring proper application performance remains a daunting task for their production environments, where do you start?
Enter Business Transactions.
By starting to focus on the end-user experience and measuring application performance based on their interactions, we can correctly gauge how the entire environment is performing. We follow each individual user request as it flows through the application architecture, comparing the response time to its optimal performance. This inside-out strategy allows AppDynamics to instantly identify performance bottlenecks and allows application owners to get to the root-cause of issues that much faster.
So exactly how do you kick start a DevOps strategy? For example, say your organization is tied down to a very sequential, but cumbersome Waterfall approach to software development that is wasting precious dollars and hindering productivity? In the following we’ve outlined some strategy tips that every business leader will need to consider as they start down the path of DevOps adoption.
Whatever steps your organization takes on the DevOps path of rolling out software faster and more effectively and deployment will require the support of your senior level management team. Explain the advantages of DevOps to the executive team in terms that they can easily understand. Provide an outline of how DevOps and cloud computing can save on ROI and get your new mobile application into the hands of the customer faster and more effectively with higher quality. 
Elasticity is hailed as one of the biggest benefits of cloud and software-defined architectures. It's more efficient than traditional scalability models that only went one direction: up. It's based on the premise that wasting money and resources all the time just to ensure capacity on a seasonal or periodic basis is not only unappealing, but unnecessary in the age of software-defined everything.
The problem is that scaling down is much, much harder than scaling up. Oh, not from the perspective of automation and orchestration. That is, as the kids say these days, easy peasy lemon squeezy. APIs have made the ability to add and remove resources simplicity itself. There isn't a load balancing service available today without this capability - at least not one that's worth having.
The Internet of Things is only going to make that even more challenging as businesses turn to new business models and services fueled by a converging digital-physical world. Applications, whether focused on licensing, provisioning, managing or storing data for these "things" will increase the already significant burden on IT as a whole. The inability to scale from an operational perspective is really what software-defined architectures are attempting to solve by operationalizing the network to shift the burden of provisioning and management from people to technology.
In my first post, I discussed how software and various tools are dramatically changing the Ops department. This post centers on the automation process.
When I was younger, you actually had to build a server from scratch, buy power and connectivity in a data center, and manually plug a machine into the network. After wearing the operations hat for a few years, I have learned many operations tasks are mundane, manual, and often have to be done at two in the morning once something has gone wrong. DevOps is predicated on the idea that all elements of technology infrastructure can be controlled through code and automated. With the rise of the cloud it can all be done in real-time via a web service.
Infrastructure automation + virtualization solves the problem of having to be physically present in a data center to provision hardware and make network changes. Also, by automating the mundane tasks you can remove unnecessary personnel. The benefits of using cloud services is costs scale linea...
When Instagram was sold to Facebook in 2012, it employed only 13 people and maintained over 4 billion photos shared by its 80 million registered users.
Internally, Instagram was a small business. Externally, it was a web monster. Filling the gap between those two contradictory perspectives is DevOps.
Now to be fair, Instagram (like many other web monster properties today) has it easier than most other businesses because it supported only one application. One. That's in stark contrast to large enterprises which are, by most analyst firms, said to manage not one but one hundred and even one thousand applications - at the same time. Our own data indicates an average of 312 applications per customer, many of which are certainly integrated and interacting with one another.
Kirk Byers at SDN Central writes frequently on the topic of DevOps as it relates (and applies) to the network and recently introduced a list of seven DevOps principles that are applicable in an article entitled, "DevOps and the Chaos Monkey. " On this list is the notion of reducing variation. This caught my eye because reducing variation is a key goal of Six Sigma and in fact its entire formula is based on measuring the impact of variation in results. The thought is that by measuring deviation from a desired outcome, you can immediately recognize whether changes to a process improve the consistency of the outcome.Quality is achieved by reducing variation, or so the methodology goes. 
The epic changes brought about by mobile and cloud computing over the past 5 years have completely transformed the way organizations do business today. We now live in an age where mobile devices are the PCs of choice and mobile apps are the ubiquitous software of choice in this digital era. IT is shifting completely to the cloud and this new paradigm is leading organizations to adopt quicker and more agile frameworks for managing that software.
