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TeleClinic makes healthcare more efficient with IBM Cloud-based app

Imagine being on vacation in a foreign country when you begin having some unsettling medical symptoms. You don’t know the local language, so how would you be able to explain what is going on to a medical professional?
If you have the TeleClinic app on your smart phone, it’s like having a doctor in your pocket. (The application is also available via a web interface.)
Patients contact a doctor or a nurse through the app, describe their symptoms in their own language and get advice regarding whether they should see a doctor, as well as which doctor to see. TeleClinic doctors submit an electronic, signed referral to the patient and insurance company, streamlining the process and saving time.

Making healthcare more digital
TeleClinic started as an online doctor’s office in Germany, with a vision to provide easy and fast access to patients and doctors using different communication channels including chat, telephone and video.
It wasn’t long before the company evolved from a telemedicine service connecting patients and doctors to a digital hospital, providing digital treatments for patients such as the chronically ill who need to track their heath data. TeleClinic acts as a gatekeeper to help these patients know when to contact a doctor.
Making healthcare more digital means patients and doctors have full transparency. The app can store health history that can be shared with online and offline doctors.
Searching for the right cloud provider
As the vision for TeleClinic grew, the company was looking for cloud infrastructure services to manage the solution. It would have to be highly secure, due to strict data protection laws in Germany. TeleClinic reviewed several providers, and ultimately applied and was accepted to the IBM Global Entrepreneur program, which helped with go-to-market support, business mentorship, services, discounts, technical guidance and networking opportunities.
Now the TeleClinic solution is implemented on the IBM Bluemix infrastructure in the Frankfurt, Germany, data center and includes the IBM Cloudant NoSQL database component.
IBM is one of the few providers that can provide an infrastructure that is allowed to host German healthcare data.
Giving doctors a helping hand
The Bluemix platform provides the scalability and flexibility that TeleClinic needs to add more capacity or services. The company is currently considering employing Watson to determine if patients may be at risk for diseases. For example, if someone has high blood pressure, they’re smoking and have gained weight, Watson would predict the likelihood of diabetes. Watson could also act as a doctor’s helping hand in analyzing symptoms, but would not replace a doctor.
Today, 400,000 patients have access to the platform and TeleClinic gets an average of 150 calls a day. One of the features that is most used is the health profile. Patients love the convenience of having all their information in one place.
Read the case study to learn more.
The post TeleClinic makes healthcare more efficient with IBM Cloud-based app appeared first on Cloud computing news.
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Prelude To Operational Simplicity – A Two Act Play

The post Prelude To Operational Simplicity – A Two Act Play appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
MCP heralded the coming of continuous innovation for cloud infrastructure by including DriveTrain as a lifecycle management system capable of consuming incremental technology.  Instead of large integrated releases after every OpenStack Foundation release as before, with MCP, Mirantis embarked upon continuous delivery on the order of every few weeks.  DriveTrain could then methodically consume some or all of the latest innovation, bring it through a CI/CD pipeline, validate it in a staging environment, and promote it into production without downtime.  Thus, the difficulties historically associated with the lifecycle management of OpenStack have been replaced by an automated, repeatable process, and can be done with little or no downtime.
Even better, this innovation is not limited to OpenStack, but applies to all the open cloud components of MCP, including containers with Kubernetes, SDN services with Mirantis OpenContrail, and more.
Act 1 – OpenStack Upgrades Made “Doubly” Simple
Initially, because there were no major upgrades of OpenStack or other components to upgrade to just yet, the innovation DriveTrain consumed consisted of new features for MCP as well as updates and fixes.  Now, with support for the latest OpenStack release, Ocata, that has changed.  
A detailed description and demo of DriveTrain completing an OpenStack upgrade from MCP’s initial support of Mitaka to Ocata (skipping Newton with a “double upgrade”) can be seen here. As you can see from the overview of this process from one of our best and brightest engineering directors, Jakub Pavlik, what used to take days of careful planning followed by days of downtime for an OpenStack upgrade and validation can now be automated by DriveTrain within a few hours, with zero workload downtime!  
Here is a summary of the highlights:

Preparation and testing of one Ocata VM takes about 40 minutes during which the production Mitaka cloud is live.
After validation, the upgrade to an Ocata-based highly available production control plane takes about 42 minutes with zero downtime for running workloads while the Mitaka control plane is offline.
Next, the Mitaka compute nodes can connect to the Ocata control plane and cascade through upgrades to Ocata at a later time.  
Jakub also demonstrated a rollback to Mitaka, which requires about 9 minutes based on restoring the original Mitaka database from the first step in the process.  

Amazing.  Simply amazing.
Act 2 – Now With OpenContrail Too
But it’s not just OpenStack that’s benefiting from DriveTrain, and not just in the lab. It’s also great to see Mirantis customers taking advantage of continuous delivery live in their Managed Open Clouds. 
Let’s take another example, this time with Mirantis OpenContrail at one of our customers. This is no demo; we are talking about the SDN of a major running OpenStack cloud in production and serving thousands of users.  Again, in the past this would have taken days of planning and many days, if not weeks, of downtime.
But not anymore.  Overall this upgrade required about 5 hours, including cascading through all the compute nodes.  Highlights on this one include:

A major upgrade of Mirantis OpenContrail 3.0.2 to 3.1.1
Over 1000 code changes executed by DriveTrain with zero issues
The pull from github took about 10 minutes, installing the latest OpenContrail salt formula required about 2 minutes, the DB backup took about 10 minutes, the upgrade of the Mirantis OpenContrail control plane took 1 hour
80 compute nodes were upgraded in a cascading fashion at ~20/hour (or ~4 hours in total)
Zero downtime.

Now that is continuous innovation and operational simplicity!
Curtain Drops
If you’d like to see a live demo of DriveTrain in action, join us on Thursday, September 14, for Get Control of Your Cloud Infrastructure, Upgrades and LCM with Mirantis DriveTrain.
(Image courtesy of Famartin)
The post Prelude To Operational Simplicity – A Two Act Play appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
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Video interviews at the Denver PTG (Sign up now!)

Earlier this year, at the PTG in Atlanta I did video interviews with some of the Red Hat engineering who were there.

You can see these videos on the RDO YouTube channel

Or you can see the teaser video here:

This year, I’ll be expanding that to everyone – not just Red Hat – to emphasize the awesome cooperation and collaboration that happens across projects, and across companies.

If you’ll be at the PTG, please consider signing up to talk to me about your project. I’ll be conducting interviews starting on Tuesday morning, and you can sign up here

Please see the “planning for your interview” tab of that spreadsheet for the answers to all of your questions about the interviews. Or contact me directly at rbowen AT red hat DOT com if you have more questions.
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3 trends taking attention away from what’s running on your cloud

So much software is headed to the cloud. Gartner predicts the worldwide public cloud services market will grow 18 percent this year. That’s on top of years and years of growth.
Great. But is your company getting the most out of the software you’re moving onto the cloud? Do you have the info you need in order to make your cloud better? Hopefully you do. But if not, it’s because you are rightfully distracted by three familiar tech trends with new challenges in 2017.
Embracing shadow IT
I’d say that security is the number priority for all in IT. After all, it always seems like another day, another story about a major hack. Often IT security looks to limit the risks of a breach. But the long-troubling trend has IT architects asking: what happens when an employee uses a cloud-based solution or external service without the knowledge or approval of the business? This opens the business up for unplanned and unknown risks. And it happens quite a bit.
That’s where shadow IT comes in. Once thought of as a negative, these projects, which often live on the cloud, are now admired for their business innovation. For example, if the marketing department wants to try a new digital approach, they can test and then fold into the IT business if it’s successful.
Getting ahead of the Internet of Things (IoT)
It’s not like no one saw IoT coming. But the challenges it presents IT architects are ever-emerging. So architects are looking how to address the impact of the IoT, including increased network complexity and resource demand, emerging standards and which platforms to use for implementation. What is absolutely certain: IoT needs the cloud.
Betting on big data
The exabytes and zetabytes of data storehouses keep growing. (Does anyone think a terabyte is big anymore?) What has IT architects challenged here is that traditional solutions need numerous systems to handle different data processing tasks. In a cloud-is-a-must environment, new data architecture can streamline the business. For starters, your business can connect existing data to cloud applications.
Seeing without a spreadsheet
With all eyes focused on these new challenges, IT architects are looking to move their eyes off outdated and cumbersome spreadsheets. You probably know these spreadsheets: those endless rows of data that show your software instances running on premises and in the cloud.
A new dashboard puts that info into an easily-digestible dashboard can show you what software you are running on and off your cloud and help sure that your deployment is in line with your investment. You can also see what versions you are running to ensure you are ahead of the latest security vulnerabilities. The dashboard can also suggest new and different cloud-based services to bolsters your investment.
That’s thanks to cognitive capabilities that can help you make those decisions. See how to make smart moves with IBM Product Insights.  And help free up your time to tackle shadow IT, IoT and big data challenges.
The post 3 trends taking attention away from what’s running on your cloud appeared first on Cloud computing news.
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Cloud powers fan experiences at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium

A sports stadium is a special place for a fan.
At one time, stadiums may have simply been considered a place to watch a game, but now, fans expect more. They want immersive, interactive experiences that make them feel like they’re part of the action. They want to be able to access the necessities such as parking, managing tickets, finding seats, buying concessions, all with just one click.
Arthur Blank, owner of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons team and Major League Soccer’s Atlanta United Football Club, wanted to create a new kind of stadium. So Arthur M. Blank Sports and Entertainment, the company that manages the stadium for both teams, worked with IBM to use design thinking to map out how to create the ultimate fan experience at every touchpoint.
The result is Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which opens later this month. The stadium will be the go-to place for technologically savvy fans, with a fully integrated IT system, Internet of Things (IoT) technology and a suite of three fan experience applications built by IBM Services and delivered and hosted on IBM Cloud.
The Falcons and United each have their own fan applications, and there’s another application for other Mercedes-Benz events.
The apps include Watson Content Automation to personalize notifications and alerts fans receive, and offer exclusive content such as articles, videos, photo galleries, player statistics, and more. They also include functionality to buy and sell tickets, pay in advance for parking in guaranteed spots, find one’s way around the stadium, rate and review points of interest, find transit options, and even learn about stadium policies and activities through a mobile concierge chatbot.
The Falcons and United are the first sports teams to use the IBM 360/365 platform. Each app is designed to be a constant companion for each team’s fan base.
In addition to hosting the new fan experience applications, the IBM Cloud is also hosting critical operational applications for the stadium to ensure fans have a consistent, high-quality game day experience. Local and offsite back-up to the IBM Cloud is provided by IBM Spectrum Protect Suite, which will store as much as 50 terabytes of data, primarily the enormous 4K video files that are used for the Halo Board.
Mercedes-Benz Stadium uses a single, high-speed, integrated network to deliver content to more than 70,000 fans and give them the ability to create their own via social media. The stadium has a network of more than 15,000 Ethernet ports and 1,700 Wi-Fi access points, which operate via nearly 4,000 miles of fiber optic cables. IoT plays a role in many of the stadium’s day-to-day operations, including cameras, sound, security, and even lighting in hallways and corridors.
While giving fans more enjoyable game experiences, the stadium’s integrated network also provides valuable data for Arthur M. Blank Sports and Entertainment, as well as the teams. By collecting and analyzing customer data, the organizations can further improve fan experiences.
When the clock runs out and the game is over, fans will leave their seats at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, but with the technology available to them year-round, they won’t have to be far from the action.
Learn more about cloud and IoT at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
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Cloud as the disruptor for organisational change

The post Cloud as the disruptor for organisational change appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
Cloud and agile are tools used to build a technology business.
There are two things that cloud computing and agile development techniques have in common. First, in order to take advantage of either, the processes that you follow to build new products and define new business markets needs to change. Second, the point at which you start to have an impact on the people in the organization who actually deliver these new products is the point at which you start making those changes — not, as you may think, the point at which you complete the implementation of the new technology.
The reality is that like the changes that came with agile, the changes cloud computing brings can, and likely will, have a wide-reaching and large impact on not just the way work is delivered, but also how it is planned and measured. The traditional top down approach to planning and measuring delivery provides for certainty in the timeline for delivery of work but provides no guarantees as to the quality and completeness of the work. The result is that whilst it gives managers and budget holders a certain amount of peace of mind when it comes to spend, it does nothing to ensure that work delivered is of the highest quality and is actually what is required by the business.
Like cloud computing, the introduction of agile development methodologies in an organization can be very disruptive and cause a lot of growing pains while everyone is ramping up and getting used to the new mechanisms and processes. These mechanisms, contrary to the way they seem, do not require that managers give up their budget controls and deliverables, only that they participate in the process in a more regular and granular way. What’s more, these changes need to happen at all layers of the organization. For example:

Cloud supports rapid deployment and rapid development cycles, as developers are able to quickly and automatically test applications. This reduces the time needed to find bugs and to fix them, enabling them to deploy more often, and with better results.
Hardware agnostic or reduced dependence on specific hardware means greater choice in hardware vendors, as well as the ability to move workloads across regions to maximize performance or minimize cost.
Cloud architectures enable you to move services closer to the consumer, reducing latency and better distributing the load throughout the network.
Cloud native architectures drive cost reduction through standardization and better utilization of available resources. Additionally, the provide the opportunity to manage greater numbers of servers with fewer people.
Cloud can remove many traditional bottlenecks enabling service pivoting. This is important, because the quicker we can grow, adapt or change a service to meet consumer needs, the more uptake that service will get.
Support for automation helps drive down development cost and enables rapid deployment and a host of other advantages.
Cloud enables better resource utilization; sharing resources allows for costs to be distributed, and can reduce the impact of maintaining legacy equipment.
Democratizing access to resources, as cloud computing does, supports faster application development and reduces lag in go to market strategies.
Cloud based applications can be provided to a wider audience, as they typically don’t need client applications.
Cloud provides better uptime due to more resilient design strategies, as well as far more rapid recovery through automation. This also provides support for self healing through automation and the ability to redirect traffic and service automatically.

To reiterate, the change wrought on business by cloud is not only in the change of technologies, but primarily on the people and process within the organisation. When embraced, these changes can help a company be better able to deliver its products and take advantage of newer and possibly more efficient ways of working at all levels. These process, if implemented effectively, will also drive in a more collaborative approach to developing products and tools, breaking down the traditional silos between business and IT.
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