The OpenShift Developer Evangelist team is happy to release the first iteration of our work with Katacoda – interactive OpenShift tutorials! The idea with these tutorials is that you get your own individual OpenShift environment with instructions right next to it. You can work through the instructions at your own pace but you are using a fully-functioning OpenShift environment with working URLs and all.
Quelle: OpenShift
I can’t wait for IBM InterConnect 2017, where we will preview the new hybrid cloud management platform we are building for our clients. Why? Read on.
More companies are investing in hybrid cloud strategies. Many businesses have a multi-cloud strategy. And that strategy must include a cloud management platform that agnostically manages any cloud so developers are empowered to innovate. And they need it soon. IDC predicts that by 2018, 65 percent of companies will have a management platform for self-service automation that powers developers.
It’s my belief that today, most cloud services are managed in workload and platform silos. That needs to change. It is imperative that companies embrace a holistic approach to cloud management for service reliability, cost, and accessibility. IT leaders need to treat all cloud services as if they are one unified environment, and eliminate the multiple and redundant tools used to manage the cloud.
That’s why at IBM InterConnect 2017, we will preview the new cloud management platform we are building for our clients. We’re planning to show a comprehensive, multi-cloud management solution for IT operations and developers. And with the cognitive capabilities of IBM Watson, we’ll show how to use operational analytics across multiple cloud providers to optimize and govern public and private clouds.
InterConnect will feature IT leaders who will share their automation and hybrid cloud successes and lessons learned. Here are just a few of the sessions and client stories at InterConnect:
Session #4610: How Royal KPN leveraged IBM cloud technologies for automation and insourcing of operations work
With cloud automation, Royal KPN cut significant amount of cost and improved service level agreements by delivering a standardized process to IT operations. Learn how they achieved quality and speed of service, with policy-based governance and controls in the process flows such as management approvals.
Session #7187: Hybrid cloud management: Trends, opportunities and IBM’s strategy
In this session, we will have analysts, IBM experts, and clients discuss multicloud management trends and directions along with real use cases and IBM’s role in shaping the future of cloud management.
Session #4593: IT as business in SwissRe: ITSM processes using BPM in IBM Cloud Orchestrator
Swiss Re automated and standardized internal IT processes to reduce delivery time and increase flexibility. Join Swizz Re to discover the growing importance of BPM as a business driver for IT to better harvest the benefits resulting from digital transformation.
There’s much more to explore. Join us at InterConnect and learn how you can manage complex, multicloud environments with ease using cloud agnostic managements tools, to reduce costs and improve your time-to-value. Our subject matter experts and executives will meet with business leaders. We’re also running a hands-on demo lab where attendees can see first-hand what the new cloud management platform looks like and how it applies to their job role.
Learn more about InterConnect and register today.
The post See the latest in multi-cloud management at InterConnect appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud
Though the retail industry is rapidly changing, one fact remains constant: the customer is king.
Some 35,000 attendees made their way to the National Retail Federation’s “Big Show” (NRF) at New York’s Javits Center last month for a first-hand look into the future of retail. Talk of digital transformation created buzz on and off the show floor.
Just south of the show at the IBM Bluemix Garage in Soho, some of the industry’s revolutionary leaders gathered for a roundtable discussion on how cloud and cognitive technologies are becoming an integral part of how retailers reach and meet shopper’s expectations.
Attendees included Staples CTO Faisal Masud; Shop Direct CIO Andy Wolfe; Retail Systems Research analyst Brian Kilcourse; Forbes retail and consumer trends contributor Barbara Thau; The New Stack journalist Darryl Taft; IBM Bluemix Garages Worldwide Director Shawn Murray; IBM Blockchain program director Eileen Lowry; and Pace University clinical professor of management and Entrepreneurship Lab director Bruce Bachenheimer. The group took a close look at how retailers experiment with new ways to give customers what they want and drive that transformation using cloud and cognitive computing.
Consumers drive tech adoption
Retail is a famously reactive business; it’s slow to adopt new technologies and innovation. However, in today’s consumer-driven age, retailers must quicken their pace, often setting aside internal strategies to tune into consumers’ demands and adopt the technology necessary to keep up.
Yet that’s often not the case. The IBM 2017 Customer Experience Index study found that 84 percent of retail brands offered no in-store mobile services and 79 percent did not give associates the ability to access a customer’s account information via a mobile device. These are key services for a seamless customer experience.
Retailers must capture the attention of consumers armed with smartphones and tablets. They are comparing product prices and reading reviews on social networks all the time. The hyper-connected consumer is the new norm, and understanding and engaging with them in real time is essential.
What customers really want
While retailers are busy selling, customer expectations are changing by the second. Retail is now about providing high-quality, engaging experiences.. Forward-thinking retailers use cloud infrastructure and AI-powered innovations such as cognitive chatbots to amplify and augment, not replace, the core human element of retail.
For example, for a retail recommendations strategy, Masud said that Watson Conversation on IBM Cloud helped Staples discover a gap between what the company assumed customers wanted and what they actually wanted. When Staples worked with IBM to develop its “Easy Button” virtual assistant, Masud said, “We thought we would just be making recommendations for more office supplies based on their purchases.”
What Staples found was that customers were also seeking solutions to help track administrative details in their office. “They wanted us to remember things for them like the catering company they used or the name of the person who signs for the delivery,” Masud said.
A cloud-powered, cognitive technology solution provides clear benefits for Staples. As it continues to learn customer orders and preferences, the office-supply-ordering tool continues to improve its predictive and order-recollection capability, making it more valuable to users for everyday tasks. Staples can bring the on-demand world to customers, allowing them to order anytime, anywhere and from any device.
“The one thing customers want is ease,” added Shop Direct CIO Andy Wolfe. He noted people want to easily shop online from whatever device or online channel they prefer. Shop Direct is the UK’s second largest pureplay digital retailer.
Retailers must have actionable insights derived from backend systems data such as supply chains, as well as the data that customers produce and share.
Shop Direct had a wealth of data, but needed to identify the most important information, which is why the company adopted IBM Watson and IBM Cloud. Shop Direct wanted to better understand customers and run its business more efficiently to meet shoppers’ needs.
Wolfe and his team were able to use the power of cloud and cognitive to mine and understand data, turning it into a resource to personalize the company’s retail product offerings and make brands even more affordable for customers.
The future of retail and technology
“There will always be retail,” said Brian Kilcourse, analyst at Retail Systems Research. “It will just be different.”
The nature of shopping is evolving from a purposeful trip to a store or a website toward the &8220;ubiquitous shopping era&8221;: shopping everywhere, by any means, all the time. This has created a significant challenge for retailers to create an operationally sustainable and engaging experience that inspires loyalty as customers hop from store to web to mobile to social and back again.
That’s where cognitive and cloud comes into play. Retailers can harness the power of data from their business and their customers to better personalize, contextualize and understand who customers are and offer them the products they want when they want them.
Timing and convenience are key for customers now. Cloud and cognitive technologies enable brands to authentically connect with consumers in an agile and scalable way. Cloud is no longer an IT trend. With apps, chatbots and new ways to reach customers, it is the platform keeping retailers available to consumers and in business.
Learn more about IBM Cloud retail solutions.
The post Cloud and cognitive technologies are transforming the future of retail appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud
Hey everyone, I’m Charlotte M. Ellett, and I joined the OpenShift team this year as a Developer Evangelist! I’m excited to do a lot of interesting stuff with OpenShift as a .NET user, and to show you how you can, too. I’ll write some about future blog posts that you can look forward to in the coming weeks, but first, a little introduction. I’m coming to this team as a game developer who sees a lot of potential in OpenShift containers for game makers and studios, big and small.
Quelle: OpenShift
Recently, you may have seen news about recent consolidation in the application process management (APM) space. Some might see this as the industry making big bets on combining network management with application management.
But I see it differently. This is an area that has not yet yielded results because the personas using these tools have very different needs and expectations. Let me explain.
IBM has been in the application monitoring space for more than 20 years. I see a very different trend emerging. As applications get more complex in today’s cloud era, the data processed in the monitoring space is growing exponentially. To support hybrid applications and infrastructure, you must have solutions that provide useful visibility and insight into data performance with features such as predictive analytics and cognitive ChatBots.
Cognitive technologies are replacing labor-intensive techniques to help practitioners sort through data and prioritize the analytical options. The industry is beginning to see the true value of cognitive capabilities, including gathering historical application data, making predictions and fixing problems automatically.
The shift to hybrid applications and DevOps methodologies are also impacting who uses APM and they use it. With rapid innovation and continuous delivery becoming a priority of many digital businesses, the need for APM to be introduced in the early stages of development and testing phase has become a growing trend.
As a result, APM is “shifting left” to become an integral part of application development and testing—beyond its continued use as a monitoring tool post-launch. I’ve seen planning for monitoring and management being done before the first line of code is being written. Smart. It is critical for APM solutions to adapt to DevOps needs and deliver value to DevOps users to be successful in the future.
Some companies may see value by investing in monitoring and transaction profiling for IT Operations teams. But to me the trends show that APM users seem most interested in DevOps and cognitive technologies. One key to making users happy is to automate problem prevention and avoiding “war rooms.” This is a huge improvement over traditional uses cases of speeding up problem resolution.
Not every vendor can provide the solutions, integrations and insight to help companies keep up with the future of APM. But IBM can. IBM APM offers a deep view your infrastructure, application and user-experience to identify, isolate, diagnose and automatically resolve problems before they start affecting your users. With advanced cognitive capabilities, you’ll uncover source code problems long before an issue creates consequences. And you can diagnose problems using correlated log search and analysis and predictive insights.
Don’t settle for old fashioned, siloed application management when you can jump on the spaceship to the future. Check out what IBM APM has to offer here. And for more on the industry’s best expertise on APM and its future, join us at InterConnect 2017 this March.
The post Here’s what the industry is getting wrong about APM appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud
Heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting represent the largest energy costs for businesses and are prime targets for suppliers of Smart Building systems. Vendors claim that understanding detailed energy usage patterns while being able to control and manage consumption based on that information will quickly deliver bottom line results.
Building management as a service with IBM Watson
PhotonStar, a leading British designer and manufacturer of intelligent lighting solutions, uses the cloud-based IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) Platform to help deliver an affordable, integrated building management system that can be retrofitted to almost any building to reduce operational costs and increase service levels for building owners and tenants.
The company’s new product, halcyon cloudBMS, is based on PhotonStar’s next-generation wireless lighting control system, halcyonPRO2. With a halcyonPRO2 platform in each building and configurable cloud-based analytics, cloudBMS delivers an extremely capable, multi-site building-management-as-a-service (BMaaS) solution. The low cost of entry and monthly subscription approach enables owners of small- to medium-sized businesses to reduce energy and operating costs and discover new insights into their operations.
Getting started with building management services
PhotoStar CEO James MacKenzie
PhotonStar CEO James McKenzie said that, historically, PhotonStar was in the LED lighting business. Around 2008, the company began adding microprocessors to its products to help with circadian lighting systems that dynamically change spectral content throughout the day to mimic the light of the sun.
The company has a patented color-mix technology called ChromaWhite that allows it to manage spectral content via multiple LED channels efficiently.
The initial push to expand beyond lighting came from customers. “They started saying, ‘It&8217;s all very well having smart lights, this is great and saves us energy, but all these other environmental factors need controlling, too,’ ” McKenzie said.
Emergency lighting in the UK, for example, must be tested once each month. PhotonStar’s lighting customers in large installations already had onsite staff, but those with many remote locations had to send out a facilities person to each location on a monthly basis just to turn a key and test the system.
If you’ve got a large building, you usually can afford to have a facilities person on-site all the time, so that doesn&8217;t really cost anything. The expensive situation is where you’ve got lots of remote sites. A typical, 350-site retail outlet would require 4,200 emergency lighting tests per year. With Halcyon, the test is conducted monthly and reported via cloud and email, ensuring safety compliance at the lowest cost.
Nobody needs to visit, and the cost savings give a payback in less than one year.
Cost savings of intelligent control
Intelligent control has been shown to deliver 50 percent energy savings in wired control buildings. But 80 percent of the building stock in the developed world already exists, and businesses can’t afford to add that wired infrastructure to existing buildings.
PhotonStar started looking at the broader challenge of facilities management in existing buildings. The company has control functions over lighting, ventilation and air-conditioning, as well as emergency lighting, which costs people money.
One good way to do this cost-effectively is to start with the halcyonPRO2. It&8217;s based on industry-standard ARM technology and wireless protocols such as WiFi and 6LowPAN because it&8217;s so cheap and flexible. So how is that expanded to help manage energy in buildings?
This all sounds quite ambitious, but IoT technology is very cost-effective. Only one’s imagination limits what can be done.
Intelligent business management with cloud
PhotonStar started down that path in 2014 and started expanding halcyon into these other areas. By 2015, it was effectively a building management system by itself, but facilities managers with multiple sites have to make all the really important decisions centrally.
For example, in retail outlets or large offices, managers must aggregate globally the control functions and dashboard them, manage them and examine them. And then, of course, ultimately businesses should intelligently manage all their buildings.
PhotonStar’s leaders realized the company needed to connect the system to the cloud if it wanted to be able to deliver an effective service across multiple locations. And that’s when the company’s cloudBMS was born, building on the Halcyon wireless control system.
PhotonStar built its cloudBMS product and service on top of the IBM Watson IoT platform.
A version of this story originally appeared on the Watson Internet of Things blog.
IBM clients are poised for success using the IBM Cloud as their foundation.
The post Watson makes building management as a service possible appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud
The post SDN Mini-Bootcamp appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
The post SDN Mini-Bootcamp appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
Quelle: Mirantis
The post What’s New in OpenStack Ocata appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
The post What&8217;s New in OpenStack Ocata appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
Quelle: Mirantis
This video highlights the role-based access controls within Red Hat CloudForms and how they can be tied into Microsoft Active Directory, to leverage a company’s existing user and group structure. The goal of the video is to help customers understand how they can integrate CloudForms into their organizational structure with rather minimal setup.
Using this setup, operators can connect existing user and group structures and tie them to CloudForms roles. These roles can be customized and given granular permissions to most elements inside CloudForms.
Users can be granted access from the very top of the organization down to a specific resource (e.g. VM) and anywhere in between. Controls are used to grant users visibility into portions of the UI. For the UI they can see, controls can also be applied as to whether the user can perform the actions or simply view.
At a high level, the following areas are discussed in the video:
How to configure the integration with Active Directory/LDAP
How to map existing groups and users
Walk through role-based access control hierarchy
Additional details on authentication configuration, including LDAP, can be found on the Red Hat CloudForms Documentation.
Quelle: CloudForms
Containers are all the rage among developers who use open source software to build, test and run applications.
In the past couple of years, container interest and usage have grown rapidly. Nearly every major cloud provider and vendor has announced container-based solutions. Meanwhile, a proliferation of container-related start-ups has also appeared.
Hybrid solutions are the future of #cloud computing. They allow developers to more quickly and easily package applications to run across multiple environments. The open standardization of container runtimes and image specifications will help enable portability in a multi-cloud ecosystem.
While I welcome the spread of ideas in this space, the promise of containers as a source of application portability requires the establishment of certain standards. A little over a year ago, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) was founded with the mission of promoting a set of common, minimal, open standards and specifications around container technology. Since then, the OCI community has made a lot of progress.
In terms of developer activity, the OCI community has been busy. Last year the project saw 3000-plus project commitments from 128 different authors across 36 different organizations. With the addition of the Image Format specification project, OCI expanded its initial scope from just the runtime specification. We also added new developer tools projects such as runtime-tools and image-tools.
These serve as repositories for conformance testing tools and have been instrumental in gearing up for the upcoming v1.0 release. We’ve also recently created a new project within OCI called go-digest (which was donated and migrated from docker/go-digest). This provides a strong hash-identity implementation in Go and serves as a common digest package across the container ecosystem.
Regarding early adoption, Docker has supported the OCI technology through containerd. Recently, Docker announced it is spinning out its core container runtime functionality into a standalone component, incorporating it into a separate project called containerd and donating it to a neutral foundation in early 2017. Containerd will feature full OCI support, including the extended OCI image specification.
And Docker is only one example. The Cloud Foundry community was also an early consumer of OCI. It embedded runc through Garden as the cornerstone of its container runtime technology. The Kubernetes project is incubating a new Container Runtime Interface (CRI) that adopts OCI components through implementations like CRI-O and rklet. The rkt community is adopting OCI technology already and is planning to leverage the reference OCI container runtime runc in 2017. The Apache Mesos community is currently building out support for the OCI image specification. AWS recently announced its support of draft OCI specifications in its latest ECR release. IBM is also strongly committed to adopting the OCI draft specifications. The adoption is live today as part of the IBM Bluemix Container Service.
We are getting closer to launching the v1.0 release. The milestone release of the OCI Runtime and Image Format Specifications version 1.0 will hopefully be available later in 2017, drawing the industry that much closer to standardization and true portability. To that end, we’ll be launching an official OCI Certification program once the v1.0 release is out. With OCI certification, folks will be confident that their OCI-certified solutions meet a high set of criteria that deliver agile, interoperable solutions.
There is still a lot of work to do. The OCI community will be onsite at several industry events, including IBM InterConnect. The success of the OCI community depends on a wide array of contributions from across the industry. The door is always open, so please come join us in shaping the future of container technology.
If you’re interested in contributing, I recommend joining the OCI developer community, which is open to everyone. If you’re building products on OCI technology, I recommend joining as a member and participating in the upcoming certification program. Please follow us on Twitter to stay in touch: @OCI_ORG.
The post What’s next for containers and standardization? appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud
