Kategorie: technology

IBM teams with Apprenda to bring .NET workloads to IBM Cloud

The world’s biggest companies are aggressively moving to the cloud as they undergo digital transformation. They’re competing with smaller, nimble startups and potentially disruptive competitors.
Being able to quickly build and market solutions that customers expect is important. Yet most large enterprises have decades of investment in existing IT applications, which they’re unable and, in many cases, unwilling to jettison as they move forward.
Modernizing .NET apps
Apprenda offers productivity tools to help developers build modern applications. The company usually focuses on large enterprises which may be building their own custom software or cloud enabling existing applications to modernize the investments they already have.
Apprenda’s typical customer has a lot of software developers working with a mix of Windows and .NET, as well as Java. They most likely have mixed into that a lot of cloud-native new development, so the offerings and the application portfolio that they carry is heterogeneous.
An Apprenda customer said, “We really love the .NET capabilities you bring to the table, and we also have IBM Bluemix, and we love what it has. We want to use both. But it’s not a dream come true for our management team to have to invest in two separate platforms.”
Thus, a new challenge emerged: how could a customer incorporate new cognitive services into .NET apps? Historically, there wasn’t an answer.
Offering Bluemix functionality to .NET developers
Apprenda’s relationship with IBM started organically, based on customer feedback and interactions. Both companies have a mutual interest in solving the joint problem of offering Bluemix support and services such as Watson to Apprenda customers while equipping IBM customers with the ability migrate existing Windows and .NET apps to Bluemix.
The companies started off with a set of whiteboard sessions, talking through business, customer pain and the engineering effort it would take. The goal was to support Windows and .NET for Bluemix customers and weave that in with Bluemix cognitive services.
Today, with .NET support in Bluemix, developers can very quickly cloud enable .NET applications without a lot of work. They simply move the application to the platform and can attach cognitive services or cloud-scale storage to mix their existing .NET view of the world with the more modern outcome that they want. The solution goes beyond an onboarding mechanism for existing .NET apps. It transforms applications in a low-friction way to be as cognitive as possible.
First-class integration
Apprenda and IBM wanted to keep the developer experience native and natural for the Microsoft and .NET community, so the companies built integration with Bluemix tooling and with tooling on the Microsoft platform. This was critical to ensure that the solution was a true integration and didn’t appear to be a bolt-on or afterthought. The solution is fully self-service with seamless onboarding. It’s a deep and rich experience for .NET developers.
It’s really exciting to modernize .NET applications without reworking them. Before the Apprenda on IBM Cloud solution, customers might have considered rewriting everything they had from the past decade, which would be a daunting process. Because of the partnership, now they can leverage the expertise they already have. It’s easy for them to start building .NET apps and take advantage of the full range of Bluemix services, including artificial intelligence and cognitive services. That’s a powerful combination to bring to market.
Find out how to get started with Apprenda on Bluemix.
The post IBM teams with Apprenda to bring .NET workloads to IBM Cloud appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Three patterns to accelerate your Salesforce development at TrailheaDX

Recently, IBM and Salesforce announced a global strategic partnership to help companies make smarter decisions faster than ever before. The partnership focuses on four major pillars of productivity:

Utilizing IBM Watson for actionable intelligence
Integrating weather insights from IBM into Salesforce client interactions
Leveraging Bluewolf Consulting Services with industry-based accelerators for expert implementation
Applying IBM Cloud Integration solutions to unite on-premises and Salesforce data

At Salesforce TrailheaDX, June 28 and 29, developers in the Salesforce ecosystem can get a deeper understanding of the various pillars of our landmark partnership. And they can dive into the intricacies and benefits of IBM Cloud Integration for Salesforce.
Attendees will have the opportunity to see real time demos during a featured session and engage in conversations with experts. IBM Cloud Integration aims to showcase myriad capabilities to accelerate your integration projects including real time events, on-demand integration, and bulk and wave analytics.
Unlock real time event processing
With ever-growing demands for access to the most current client data, real time event processing has become common for new integration projects. Salesforce offers multiple ways to generate events—and IBM Cloud Integration offerings support each method. Let’s look at specifics.
The simple, no-code approach is to use the IBM App Connect Designer experience to trigger flows in App Connect based on changes in other software as a service (SaaS) applications, including Salesforce. Through simple drag-and-drop configuration, App Connect automatically generates the Force.com Streaming API PushTopic required for the change and subscribes to it. Once active, any of the SaaS application actions available in App Connect can be used to trigger downstream updates.
For lower-level integration, you can also use the newly-released MQ Bridge for Salesforce. The bridge supports both Force.com Streaming API PushTopics, as well as the new Force.com Platform Events API. After creating your PushTopics or Platform Event in Force.com, this MQ runtime component allows you to subscribe to the specific message for delivery on your enterprise messaging infrastructure based on IBM MQ. At that point, any integration scenario that supports MQ can be used to provide assured, once-only deliver of your critical Salesforce updates.
Finally, the IBM App Connect Studio experience provides additional capabilities to support real time event processing using either polling mechanisms or support for Force.com Outbound Messaging. Both remain very popular options.
Add on-demand integration
In addition to change notifications handled by the real time events pattern, many integration projects require on-demand access to data in Salesforce for CRUD (create, read, update and delete) operations.
Once again, the simple, no-code approach is to use the IBM App Connect Designer experience to retrieve and update Salesforce data. The Salesforce connector is one of many SaaS applications available in the drag-and-drop experience to handle common integration routines.
For those developers with more complicated requirements, IBM provides Salesforce connectivity in both IBM App Connect Studio and IBM Integration Bus. Both provide full CRUD capability to help you more easily integrate your on-premises data with Salesforce data. In most scenarios, developers would start with the App Connect experience, but for cases where integration flows are running in Integration Bus, the Salesforce connector provides an easy way to integrate without requiring additional tools.
Light up bulk and wave analytics
IBM App Connect Studio provides extensive support for the Force.com Bulk API and Wave Analytics APIs to assist with your larger data integration scenarios and ongoing analytics. These bulk methods have been the bedrock of Salesforce integration for years, and IBM Cloud Integration supports these patterns.
IBM Cloud Integration also provides additional capabilities for creating, securing and managing APIs from both on-premises and Salesforce data sources as well as advanced capabilities to integrate with new, emerging technologies like OpenWhisk and blockchain.
Integration helps businesses to make better decisions, faster than ever before. IBM Cloud Integration for Salesforce helps developers capitalize on integrating data quickly and efficiently. To learn more about the capabilities provided by IBM Cloud Integration for Salesforce, visit the website. And don’t forget to stop by the IBM and Salesforce partnership booth and attend the IBM Cloud Integration for Salesforce session at TrailheaDX.
 
The post Three patterns to accelerate your Salesforce development at TrailheaDX appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Do cloud managed services make financial sense for your business?

With cloud-enabled applications and infrastructures, the approach that most businesses use to make financial investments in IT is undergoing a dramatic change.
Gone are the days when IT budgets were closely held by CIOs. Today, leaders from other departments exert influence over IT decision making. Now more than ever, companies are demanding a clear understanding of how technology decisions impact the financial health of organizations.
As CIOs encounter this new reality, they may find valuable allies in chief financial officers, who can provide financial insight into technology evaluations.
Consider the rise of  cloud managed services, infrastructure and application services hosted and delivered by an expert partner. According to a Stratecast survey, 32 percent of businesses currently use cloud managed services. That number is predicted to more than double in the next two years.
CIO perspective: Solving IT challenges
From an IT perspective, the managed services model is appealing. It reduces the burden of hardware and software maintenance; introduces flexibility to redeploy technical resources; and ensures consistent, service-level-agreement-backed application performance.
CIOs are sensitive to the high costs associated with self-managed cloud services, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). In the Stratecast survey, IT decision makers said for every dollar they spent on IaaS, they spent more than $3 to manage the service. Most of those costs are absorbed by managed service providers.
But do managed services make financial sense for the business? A CFO can help decide.
CFO perspective: Flexible investments, business agility
Contrary to some widely held beliefs, the CFO’s role is not to save money. It’s to ensure money is invested wisely. As such, the CFO brings a different perspective to the managed services decision.
The CFO is interested in:

Granular reporting. CFOs usually report revenue and margin at a business-unit or product level. Managed services may offer sophisticated workload-level cost and usage reporting.
Opex versus capex. Capital investments (capex) are rigid and come with accounting complexities for things like depreciation. As operating expenses (opex), managed services are a more flexible investment.
Financial compliance and risk management. The CFO is responsible for protecting corporate assets. The right managed services partner supports regulatory requirements and security needs.
Flexible workforce. CFOs consider the full costs of maintaining a workforce, including compliance with local laws. Managed services offer staffing flexibility.

Calculating total cost of ownership
Together, the CIO and the CFO can assess the total cost of ownership for managed cloud services by considering factors beyond subscription fees. The CIO calculates the costs that can be avoided with managed services, such as procurement and maintenance of hardware and software, as well as labor and training, while the CFO can help quantify the benefits associated with the continually optimized service delivery of managed services. For example, greater application availability and faster transaction times can result in revenue gains and increased employee productivity.
Whether you are in the information or finance organization, the smartest technology investment is the one that delivers maximum value to the business. By understanding the total costs and benefits, many companies determine that cloud managed services are their best choice.
To learn more about choosing cloud managed services that meets the needs of both the CFO and CIO, sign up for the full report: Are Managed Services the Best Financial Choice for your Business?
The post Do cloud managed services make financial sense for your business? appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Back to Boston! A recap of the 2017 OpenStack Summit

This year the OpenStack® Summit returned to Boston, Massachusetts. The Summit was held the week after the annual Red Hat® Summit, which was also held in Boston. The combination of the two events, back to back, made for an intense, exciting and extremely busy few weeks.
More than 5,000 attendees and 1,000 companies were in attendance for OpenStack Summit. Visitors came from over 60 countries and could choose from more than 750 sessions.
And of course all sessions and keynotes are now easily accessible for online viewing at your own leisure.

The Summit proved to be a joyful information overload and I’d like to share with you some of my personal favorite moments.

Keynotes: “Costs Less, Does More.”
As in previous years, the Summit kicked off its first two days with a lengthy set of keynotes. The keynote sessions highlighted a variety of companies using OpenStack in many different ways highlighting the “Costs Less, Does More” theme. GE talked about using OpenStack in healthcare for compliance and Verizon discussed their use of Red Hat OpenStack Platform for NFV and edge computing. AT&T and DirectTV showed how they are using OpenStack to deliver customers a highly interactive and customizable on demand streaming service. 
Throughout the keynotes it became quite clear, to me, that OpenStack is truly moving beyond its “newcomer status” and is now solving a wider range of industry use cases than in the past.
In his keynote Red Hat’s Chief Technologist Chris Wright’s discussed Red Hat’s commitment and excitement in being part of the OpenStack community and he shared some numbers from the recent user survey. Chris also shared an important collaboration between Red Hat, Boston University and the Children’s Hospital working to significantly decrease the time required to process and render 3D fetal imaging using OpenShift, GPUs and machine learning. Watch his keynote to learn more about this important research.

Image courtesy of the OpenStack Foundation
Another interesting keynote reinforcing the “Costs Less, Does More” theme was “The U.S. Army Cyber School: Saving Millions & Achieving Educational Freedom Through OpenStack” by Major Julianna Rodriguez and Captain Christopher W. Apsey. Starting just two short years ago, with almost no hardware, they now use OpenStack to enable their students to solve problems in a “warfare domain.” To do this they require instructors to react quickly to their students requirements and implement labs and solutions that reflect the ever-changing and evolving challenges they face in today’s global cyber domain. The school created an “everything as code for courseware” agile solution framework using OpenStack. Instructors can “go from idea, to code, to deployment, to classroom” in less than a day. And the school is able to do this with a significant cost savings avoiding the “legacy model of using a highly licensed and costly solution.” Both their keynote and their session talk detail very interesting and unexpected OpenStack solution.

Superusers!
Finally, of particular note and point of pride for those of us in the Red Hat community, we were thrilled to see two of our customers using Red Hat OpenStack Platform share this year’s Superuser Award. Both Paddy Power Betfair and UKCloud transformed their businesses while also contributing back in significant ways to the OpenStack community. We at Red Hat are proud to be partnered with these great, community-minded and leading edge organizations! You can watch the announcement here.
Community Strong!
Another recurring theme was the continuation, strength, and importance of the community behind OpenStack. Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst touched on this in his fireside chat with OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce. Jim and Jonathan discussed how OpenStack has a strong architecture and participation from vendors, users, and enterprises. Jim pointed out that having a strong community, governance structure and culture forms a context for great things to happen, suggesting, “You don’t have to worry about the roadmap; the roadmap will take care of itself.”

Image courtesy of the OpenStack Foundation
As to the state of OpenStack today, and where it is going to be in, say, five years, Jim’s thoughts really do reflect the strength of the community and the positive future of OpenStack. He noted that the OpenStack journey is unpredictable but has reacted well to the demands of the marketplace and reminded us “if you build … the right community the right things will happen” I think it’s safe to say this community remains on the right track!
The Big Surprise Guest.

There was also a surprise guest that was teased throughout the lead up to the Summit and not revealed until many of us arrived at the venue in the morning: Edward Snowden. Snowden spoke with OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier in a wide ranging and interesting conversation. Topics included Snowden’s view around the importance in assuring the openness of underlying IaaS layers, warning that it is “fundamentally disempowering to sink costs into an infrastructure that you do not fully control.” He also issued a poignant piece of advice to computer scientists proclaming “this is the atomic moment for computer scientists.”
I think any community that happily embraces a keynote from both the U.S. Army Cyber School and Edward Snowden in the same 24 hour period is very indicative of an incredibly diverse, intelligent and open community and is one I’m proud to be a part of!
So many great sessions!
As mentioned, with over 750 talks there was no way to attend all of them. Between the exciting Marketplace Hall filled with awesome vendor booths, networking and giveaways, and the many events around the convention center, choosing sessions was tough. Reviewing the full list of recorded sessions reveals just how spoiled for choice we were in Boston.
Even more exciting is that with over 60 talks, Red Hat saw its highest speaker participation level of any OpenStack Summit. Red Hatters covered topics across all areas of the technology and business spectrum. Red Hat speakers ranging from engineering all the way to senior management were out in force! Here’s a short sampling of some of the sessions.
Product management
Red Hat Principal Product Manager Steve Gordon’s “Kubernetes and OpenStack at scale” shared performance testing results when running a 2000+ node OpenShift Container Platform cluster running on a 300-node Red Hat OpenStack Platform cloud. He detailed ways to tune and run OpenShift, Kubernetes and OpenStack based on the results of the testing.

Security and User Access
For anyone who has ever wrestled with Keystone access control, or who simply wants to better understand how it works and where it could be going, check out Adam Young, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat and Kristi Nikolla, Software Engineer with the Massachusetts Open Cloud team at Boston University’s session entitled Per API Role Based Access Control. Adam and Kristi discuss the challenges and limitations in the current Keystone implementation around access control and present their vision of its future in what they describe as “an overview of the mechanism, the method, and the madness of RBAC in OpenStack.” Watch to the end for an interesting Q&A session. For more information on Red Hat and the Massachusetts Open Cloud, check out the case study and press release.
Red Hat Services
Red Hat Services featured talks highlighting real world Red Hat OpenStack Platform installations. In “Don’t Fail at Scale- How to Plan for, Build, and Operate a Successful OpenStack Cloud” David Costakos, OpenStack Solutions Architect, and Julio Villarreal Pelegrino, Principal Architect, lightheartedly brought the audience through the real-world do’s and don’t’s of an OpenStack deployment.

And in “Red Hat – Best practices in the Deployment of a Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure” Julio and Stephane Lefrere, Cloud Infrastructure Practice Lead, discussed the intricacies and gotchas of one of the most complicated and sophisticated deployments in the OpenStack space: NFV. Don’t miss it!
Red Hat Technical Support
Red Hat Cloud Success Architect Sadique Puthen and Senior Technical Support Engineer Jaison Raju took a deep dive into networks in Mastering in Troubleshooting NFV Issues. Digging into the intricacies and picking apart a complex NFV-based deployment would scare even the best networking professionals but Sadique and Jaison’s clear and detailed analysis, reflecting their real world customer experiences, is exceptional. I’ve been lucky enough to work with these gentleman from the field side of the business and I can tell you the level of skills present in the support organization within Red Hat is second to none. Watch the talk and see for yourself, you won’t be disappointed!
Red Hat Management
Red Hat’s Senior Director of Product Marketing Margaret Dawson, presented Red Hat – Cloud in the Era of Hybrid-Washing: What’s Real & What’s Not?. Margaret’s session digs into the real-world decision making processes required to make the Digital Transformation journey a success. She highlights that “Hybrid Cloud” is not simply two clouds working together but rather a detailed and complex understanding and execution of shared processes across multiple environments.
As you can see, there was no shortage of Red Hat talent speaking at this year’s Summit.
To learn more about how Red Hat can help you in your Digital Transformation journey check out the full “Don’t Fail at Scale” Webinar!
See you in six months in Sydney!
Each year the OpenStack Summit seems to get bigger and better. But this year I really felt it was the beginning of a significant change. The community is clearly ready to move to the next level of OpenStack to meet the increasingly detailed enterprise demands. And with strong initiatives from the Foundation around key areas such as addressing complexity, growing the community through leadership and mentoring programs, and ensuring a strong commitment to diversity, the future is bright.

I’m really excited to see this progress showcased at the next Summit, being held in beautiful Sydney, Australia, November 6-8, 2017! Hope to see you there.
As Jim Whitehurst pointed out in his keynote, having a strong community, governance structure and culture really is propelling OpenStack into the future!
The next few years are going to be really, really exciting!
Quelle: RedHat Stack