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4 trends in action at InterConnect 2017

There are so many reasons to love IBM InterConnect. Some of the brightest people in technology will come together to talk about the trends and advancements that are shaping our industry.
Each year, InterConnect serves as a barometer for where we are as cloud technologists. And this year, I can confidently say that the outlook is very good. Here are four topics I can’t wait to discuss, along with some can’t-miss sessions you should plan to attend.
1. Open technology
Those who know me are familiar with my passion for open technology. At every layer of the cloud, IBM works with its partners to create an open and interoperable cloud — from the data center to the platform to containers and beyond.
In Las Vegas, join me on March 19 at 4 PM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) for the IBM Open Technology Summit. The summit will bring together leaders from some of the top open tech organizations, including OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, the Open Container Initiative, Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
(RELATED: Open Technology Summit returns to Las Vegas)
You can get the details on all the open tech sessions at InterConnect in the blog post Open tech @ InterConnect 2017 — Know before you go.
Featured sessions:

Open cloud architecture: Think you can out-innovate the best of the rest?
Open cloud demystified: Open source leaders tell all

2. Serverless
There’s no doubt that serverless architecture is changing the way we think about application development. But what is it? How does it work? Which workloads are suitable for a serverless architecture? If you want to keep your development teams ahead of the curve, you need to understand how serverless will shape the future. InterConnect is the perfect place to get up to speed.
Featured sessions:

Serverless architectures in banking: OpenWhisk on IBM Bluemix at Santander
Serverless, event-driven architectures and Bluemix OpenWhisk: Overview and IBM’s technical strategy

3. DevOps
For the past few years, IBM has been leading the DevOps charge. The IBM Bluemix Garage Method has become indispensable for fueling teams’ cultural, personal and technical transformations. The IBM approach blends cutting-edge methodologies and cloud-native approaches with proven automation patterns and existing on-premises development.
I hope you’ll join me in the Cloud Theater on Monday, March 3/20 at 2 PM to discuss DevOps: The new reality for enterprise transformation. Enjoy live demos, client stories and a talk from John Comas of NBCUniversal on how his team succeeded in DevOps.
Featured sessions:

Nationwide’s DevOps transformation
A journey you can relate to: DevOps at Rosetta Stone

4. Containers, microservices and Kubernetes
As dev teams race to find success with containers, microservices and Kubernetes, it’s critical for developers to understand how to connect the dots. At InterConnect, expect to hear plenty about the Open Container Initiative, the latest with the Cloud Native Compute Foundation and the single tenant cluster for Kubernetes. You’ll hear from the developers and architects behind IBM Bluemix Container Service, which brings these technologies together.
Featured sessions:

Architecture deep-dive into Docker containers, microservices and Kubernetes
From Docker to Kubernetes to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation: Open containers and community

These are some of the many exciting topics at InterConnect. Don’t miss this opportunity to train, network and learn about the future of cloud. If you haven’t signed up yet, register today.
The post 4 trends in action at InterConnect 2017 appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

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A Hard Road from Dev to Ops

The post A Hard Road from Dev to Ops appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
Last June, in his provocative blog, Mirantis’ co-founder Boris Renski proclaimed to the world that infrastructure software was dead. That blog was a battle cry for us as a company, and the beginning of an organizational evolution away from our exclusive focus on delivering software and towards providing customers with a turnkey infrastructure experience.
It was clear that the future consumption model for infrastructure is defined by public clouds where everything is self-service, API-driven, fully managed and continuously delivered. It was also clear that most vendors, Mirantis included, had misinterpreted where the core of cloud disruption was, overemphasizing disruption in software capabilities around “self-service and API-driven,” while largely ignoring the disruption in delivery approach codified as “fully managed and continuously delivered.” Private cloud had become a label for the new type of software, whereas public cloud was a label for a combination of software and, most importantly, a new delivery model. Private cloud had failed and we needed to change.
As we started piercing the market with our new Build-Operate-Transfer delivery model for open cloud last year, we pulled the trigger on changing the company internally. Mirantis had to reinvent itself, re-examine every part of the company and ask if it was built correctly and/or was needed in order to deliver an awesome customer operations experience. Organically and through acquisition, we added new engineering and operations folks who brought with them the relentless focus on keeping things simple, and emphasized continuously integrating and managing change. We went away from using advanced computer science as the only means to avoid failures in favor of selecting simple configurations that are less likely to fail and investing heavily in the monitoring and intelligence that predicts failure before it occurs and proactively alerts the operator to avoid failures all together.
In the meantime, and despite the challenges, things were picking up in the field. We weren’t alone in realizing that cloud operations are hard, so many OpenStack DIYers that had failed at operations got intrigued by our model. We started winning big managed cloud deals, and made meaningful strides in transitioning our existing marquee accounts like AT&T and VW toward managed open cloud. Most importantly, we weren’t just winning new deals; we were expanding existing ones – a much more important sign of delivering customer value. Today, some of the world’s most iconic companies are running their customer-facing businesses on our managed clouds without needing to pay much attention to how the cloud is run. They simply expect that it works.
Now we are staring at an explosion of new clouds in our sales pipeline. In order to scale and provide an awesome user experience, this week we’ve announced the final set of organizational changes that will complete our transformation, putting our 12 months of difficult transition behind:  

We are simplifying the services we offer in our portfolio, focusing less on one-off cloud infrastructure integration and more on strategy, site readiness and cloud tenant on-boarding and care.

We are combining our 24×7 software support team and our managed operations team into a single-focused customer success team.

Since many of our customers don’t accept managed services from Russia and Ukraine locations (due to regulatory, compliance and corporate security policies), we are shifting roughly 70 jobs from those locations to the U.S., Poland and Czech Republic.

As founders, we felt it was important to share this update publicly, not just because we want the world to know that Mirantis is changing, but also because this transformation is personal to us. We founded Mirantis back in 2000 &8211; originally a small IT services firm, and following this change, some of our best friends and colleagues who have travelled with us for well over a decade will no longer be with the company. We want those who are leaving to know that we are humbled by your brilliance and eternally grateful to have worked alongside such committed and true friends.
As we look at the last twelve months, we’re proud of the change we persevered through as a company. Evolving a company is never easy &8211; for management, employees, partners or customers. Many in our space will need to go through a similar evolution to stay relevant in the public cloud world, and not everybody will make it through. We are fully determined that Mirantis to be part of the pack that does.
Onwards and upwards!
The post A Hard Road from Dev to Ops appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
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Self-monitoring machines define the new industrial era

Cognitive and cloud technologies have made a new industrial era possible.
The Schaeffler Group uses big-data analytics to turn data into valuable insights that help us increase operational efficiency and develop innovative services. Using the IoT data from sensors, we can react more quickly, make better decisions and understand more about how to optimize product and equipment performance. Our machines can monitor themselves. This new industrial era is made possible by our leading products and innovation, combined with strategic partnerships, for example with IBM as our strategic partner.
The Schaeffler Group is one of the world’s leading integrated automotive and industrial suppliers and one of the world’s largest companies in family ownership. We develop, manufacture and service precision-engineered products that are used in wind turbines, automobiles, trains and aircrafts, among others. To execute on our “mobility for tomorrow” strategy, we are transforming our entire organization using digitalization.
As a technical foundation, Schaeffler has created a digital platform connecting products over all elements of their life cycle with the related processes and machines. This generates large amounts of data allowing us to improve value for our customers.
We chose a strategic relationship with IBM because of the company’s industry knowledge, our similarity in engineering DNA and a broad IBM portfolio from consulting to technology solutions.  We use a cloud solution with IBM Bluemix, agile development and access to all IBM Watson services.
The external focus of the transformation is optimizing maintenance and TCO in the wind energy sector, the digitized monitoring and optimization of trains, providing smart elements for autonomous vehicles, and more. You can read details about Schaeffler’s upcoming plans here or here and learn more about the Schaeffler and IBM teaming in this video.
The post Self-monitoring machines define the new industrial era appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud