H&R Block teams with IBM for cloud-based Watson tax services

When you&;re watching the big game this Sunday, keep an eye out for H&R Block&8217;s new ad that highlights an initiative to use cloud-based IBM Watson services to help customers make sense of the time-consuming and often confusing process of filing their taxes.
The first phase of the two companies&8217; collaboration involves training Watson to knowledgeably answer the numerous questions that come up during the tax preparation process. To do so, H&R Block fed the IBM supercomputer all 74,000 pages of the US tax code. That&8217;s just the first step. NetworkWorld explained what comes next:
IBM said that Watson’s initial training was validated by H&R Block tax experts – who have filed some 720 million returns since 1955 – and the initial corpus will expand over time through each subsequent tax season. During the next phase, H&R Block tax professionals will work with IBM to continue teaching Watson all about tax and apply the technology to innovate in other areas of their business.
Applying Watson&8217;s machine learning, natural language and image recognition capabilities to world of tax preparation adds another industry to its skillset. It has also worked in fields including healthcare and cybersecurity.

For more, check out NetworkWorld&;s full article.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Supporting our global community

OpenStack is a global open source community. The OpenStack Foundation serves members in 180 countries focused on advancing the capabilities and accessibility of open infrastructure everywhere. We fundamentally believe diversity and collaboration are a powerful force for innovation, and it has been amazing to see the product of tens of thousands of people around the world over the last 6+ years.
Lauren, Mark and I disagree with the executive order issued by President Trump that targets individuals from 7 countries. The order restricts the travel and movement of people in a discriminatory way that  results in a restriction on access to talent and ideas. It is still unclear how the policies will play out and be enforced, but we will be watching, advocating for and supporting our community members to the best of our ability.
This executive order will not impact the governance of the Foundation or the way the community operates globally. We will continue to support user groups and community members that are active in the seven countries named by the executive order, alongside our 120+ user groups around the world. However, we have two scheduled events in the United States within the next six months that will attract a global audience: the PTG (Project Teams Gathering) in Atlanta, Feb 20-24, a smaller event that will bring together hundreds of upstream contributors, and the OpenStack Summit in Boston, May 8-11, our larger event that happens every six months.
This executive order could impact some community members&; ability to travel to Atlanta and Boston, but unfortunately it is too late at this point to change the location of these events. The following three OpenStack Summits, however, are now scheduled to occur outside of the United States. The next Summit will be in November 2017 in Sydney, Australia and we are working to finalize the details so we can announce the following two Summit locations soon.
We’ve already heard from one community member, Mohammed Naser, who is concerned that his plans to travel from Canada to Atlanta to attend the PTG may be restricted, simply because he a dual citizen of Canada and Iraq.  Mohammed has been contributing code to OpenStack since 2011 and is the CEO and Founder of Vexxhost. Blocking his travel would serve no purpose and rob the community of a valuable contributor during an important event. If you are concerned about the impact or have any questions, please don&;t hesitate to reach out to me at jonathan@openstack.org.
Political actions like this highlight the importance of our collective values. The Four Opens, the founding principles of our community, exist to ensure the free flow of talent and ideas, across geographic, national, organizational or other lines that might divide us. We believe in humanity. We believe in opportunity. We believe in the power of collaboration across borders, and we will continue to carry forward our mission.

Jonathan Bryce
Mark Collier
Lauren Sell
Quelle: openstack.org

A dash of Salt(Stack): Using Salt for better OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Cloud — Q&A

The post A dash of Salt(Stack): Using Salt for better OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Cloud &; Q&;A appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
On January 16, Ales Komarek presented an introduction to Salt. We covered the following topics:

The model-driven architectures behind how Salt stores topologies and workflows

How Salt provides solution adaptability for any custom workloads

Infrastructure as Code: How Salt provides not only configuration management, but entire life-cycle management

How Continuous Delivery/ Integration/ Management fits into the puzzle

How Salt manages and scales parallel cloud deployments that include OpenStack, Kubernetes and others

What we didn&;t do, however, is get to all of the questions from the audience, so here&8217;s a written version of the Q&A, including those we didn&8217;t have time for.
Q: Why Salt?
A: It&8217;s python, it has a huge and growing base of imperative modules and declarative states, and it has a good message bus.
Q: What tools are used to initially provision Salt across an infrastructure? Cobbler, Puppet, MAAS?
A: To create a new deployment, we rely on a single node, where we bootstrap the Salt master and Metal-as-a-Service (formerly based on Foreman, now Ironic). Then we control the MaaS service to deploy the physical bare-metal nodes.
Q: How broad a range of services do you already have recipes for, and how easy is it to write and drop in new ones if you need one that isn&8217;t already available?
A: The ecosystem is pretty vast. You can look at either https://github.com/tcpcloud or the formula ecosystem overview at http://openstack-salt.tcpcloud.eu/develop/extending-ecosystem.html. There are also guidelines for creating new formulas, which is very straight-forward process. A new service can be created in matter of hours, or even minutes.
Q: Can you convert your existing Puppet/Ansible scripts to Salt, and what would I search to find information about that?
A: Yes, we have reverse engineered autmation for some of these services in the past. For example we were deeply inspired by the Ansible module for Gerrit resource management.  You can find some information on creating Salt Formulas at https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/development/conventions/formulas.html,  and we will be adding tutorial material here on this blog in the near future.
Q: Is there a NodeJS binding available?
A: If you meant the NodeJS formula to setup a NodeJS enironment, yes, there is such a formula. If you mean bindings to the system, you can use the Salt API to integrate NodeJS with Salt.
Q: Have you ever faced performance issues when storing a lot of data in pillars?
A: We have not faced performance issues with pillars that are deliverd by reclass ENC. It has been tested up to a few thousands of nodes.
Q: What front end GUI is typically used with Salt monitoring (e.g., Kibana, Grafana,&;)?
A: Salt monitoring uses Sensu or StackLight for the actual functional monitoring checks. It uses Kibana to display events stored in Elasticsearch and Grafana to visualize metrics coming from time-series databases such as Graphite or Influx.
Q: What is the name of the salt PKI manager? (Or what would I search for to learn more about using salt for infrastructure-wide PKI management?)
A: The PKI feature is well documented in the Salt docs, and is available at https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ref/states/all/salt.states.x509.html.
Q: Can I practice installing and deploying SaltStack on my laptop? Can you recommend a link?
A: I&8217;d recommend you have a look at http://openstack-salt.tcpcloud.eu/develop/quickstart-vagrant.html where you can find a nice tutorial on how to setup a simple infrastructure.
Q: Thanks for the presentation! Within Heat, I&8217;ve only ever seen salt used in terms of software deployments. What we&8217;ve seen today, however, goes clear through to service, resource, and even infrastructure deployment! In this way, does Salt become a viable alternative to Heat? (I&8217;m trying to understand where the demarcation is between the two now.)
A: Think of Heat as part of the solution responsible for spinning up the harware resources such as networks, routers and servers, in a way that is similar to MaaS, Ironic or Foreman. Salt&8217;s part begins where Heat&8217;s part ends &; after the resources are started, Salt takes over and finishes the installation/configuration process.
Q: When you mention Orchestration, how does salt differentiate from Heat, or is Salt making Heat calls?
A: Heat is more for hardware resources orchestration. It has some capability to do software configuration, but rather limited. We have created heat resources that help to classify resources on fly. We also have salt heat modules capable of running a heat stack.
Q: Will you be showing any parts of SaltStack Enterprise, or only FREE Salt Open Source? Do you use Salt in Multi-Master deployment?
A: We are using the opensource version of SaltStack, the enterprise gets little gain given the pricing model. In some deployments, we use the salt master HA deployment setups.
Q: What HA engine is typically used for the Salt master?
A: We use 2 separate masters with shared storage provided by GlusterFS on which the master&8217;s and minions&8217; keys are stored.
Q: Is there a GUI ?
A: The creation of a GUI is currently under discussion.
Q: How do you enforce Role Based Administration in the Salt Master? Can you segregate users to specific job roles and limit which jobs they can execute in Salt?
A: We use the ACLs of the Salt master to limit the user&8217;s options. This also applies for the Jenkins-powered pipelines, which we also manage by Salt, both on the job and the user side.
Q: Can you show the salt files (.sls, pillar, &8230;)?
A: You can look at the github for existing formulas at https://github.com/tcpcloud and good example of pillars can be found at https://github.com/Mirantis/mk-lab-salt-model/.
Q: Is there a link for deploying Salt for Kubernetes? Any best practices guide?
A: The best place to look is the https://github.com/openstack/salt-formula-kubernetes README.
Q: Is SaltStack the same as what&8217;s on saltstack.com, or is it a different project?
A: These are the same project. Saltstack.com is company that is behind the Salt technology and provides support and enterprise versions.
Q: So far this looks like what Chef can do. Can you make a comparison or focus on the &;value add&; from Salt that Chef or Puppet don&8217;t give you?
A: The replaceability/reusability of the individual components is very easy, as all formulas are &;aware&8217; of the rest and share a common form and single dependency tree. This is a problem with community-based formulas in either of the other tools, as they are not very compatible with each other.
Q: In terms of purpose, is there any difference between SaltStack vs Openstack?
A: Apart from the fact that SaltStack can install OpenStack, it can also provide virtualization capabilities. However, Salt has very limited options, while OpenStack supports complex production level scenarios.
Q: Great webinar guys. Ansible seems to have a lot of traction as means of deploying OpenStack. Could you compare/contrast with SaltStack in this context?
A: With Salt, the OpenStack services are just part of wider ecosystem; the main advantage comes from the consistency across all services/formulas, the provision of support metadata to provide documentation or monitoring features.
Q: How is Salt better than Ansible/Puppet/Chef ?
A: The biggest difference is the message bus, which lets you control, and get data from, the infrastructure with great speed and concurrency.
Q: Can you elaborate mirantis fuel vs saltstack?
Fuel is an open source project that was (and is) designed to deploy OpenStack from a single ISO-based artifact, and to provide various lifecycle management functions once the cluster has been deployed. SaltStack is designed to be more granular, working with individual components or services.
Q: Are there plans to integrate SaltStack in to MOS?
A: The Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP) will be powered by Salt/Reclass.
Q: Is Fuel obsolete or it will use Salt in the background instead of Puppet?
A: Fuel in its current form will continue to be used for deploying Mirantis OpenStack in the traditional manner (as a single ISO file). We are extending our portfolio of life cycle management tools to include appropriate technologies for deploying and managing open source software in MCP. For example, Fuel CCP will be used to deploy containerized OpenStack on Kubernetes. Similarly, Decapod will be used to deploy Ceph. All of these lifecycle management technologies are, in a sense, Fuel. Whether a particular tool uses Salt or Puppet will depend on what it&8217;s doing.
Q: MOS 10 release date?
A: We&8217;re still making plans on this.
Thanks for joining us, or if you missed it, please go ahead and view the webinar.
The post A dash of Salt(Stack): Using Salt for better OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Cloud &8212; Q&038;A appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Quelle: Mirantis

Docker & Prometheus Joint Holiday Meetup Recap

Last Wednesday we had our 52nd at HQ, but this time we joined forces with the Prometheus user group to host a mega-meetup! There was a great turnout and members were excited to see the talks on using Docker with Prometheus, OpenTracing and the new Docker playground; play-with-docker.
First up was Stephen Day, a Senior Software Engineer at Docker, who presented a talk entitled, ‘The History of According to Me’. Stephen believes that metrics and should be built into every piece of software we create, from the ground up. By solving the hard parts of application metrics in Docker, he thinks it becomes more likely that metrics are a part of your services from the start. See the video of his intriguing talk and slides below.

&;The History of Metrics According to me&; by Stephen Day from Docker, Inc.

&8216;The History of Metrics According to Me&8217; @stevvooe talking metrics and monitoring at the Docker SF meetup! @prometheusIO @CloudNativeFdn pic.twitter.com/6hk0yAtats
— Docker (@docker) December 15, 2016

Next up was Ben Sigelman, an expert in distributed tracing, whose talk ‘OpenTracing Isn’t Just Tracing: Measure Twice, Instrument Once’ was both informative and humorous. He began by describing OpenTracing and explaining why anyone who monitors microservices should care about it. He then stepped back to examine the historical role of operational logging and metrics in distributed system monitoring and illustrated how the OpenTracing API maps to these tried-and-true abstractions. To find out more and see his demo involving donuts watch the video below and slides.

Last but certainly not least were two of our amazing Docker Captains all the way from Buenos Aires, Marcos Nils and Jonathan Leibiusky! During the Docker Distributed Systems Summit in Berlin last October, they built ‘play-with-docker’. It is a a Docker playground which gives you the experience of having a free Alpine Linux Virtual Machine in the cloud where you can build and run Docker containers and even create clusters with Docker features like Swarm Mode. Under the hood DIND or Docker-in-Docker is used to give the effect of multiple VMs/PCs. Watch the video below to see how they built it and hear all about the new features.

@marcosnils & @xetorthio sharing at the Docker HQ meetup all the way from Buenos Aires! pic.twitter.com/kXqOZgClMz
— Docker (@docker) December 15, 2016

play-with-docker was a hit with the audience  and there was a line of attendees hoping to speak to Marcos and Jonathan after their talk! All in all, it was a great night thanks to our amazing speakers, Docker meetup members, the Prometheus user group and the CNCF who sponsored drinks and snacks.

New blog post w/ videos & slides from the Docker & @PrometheusIO joint meetup! To Tweet

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Your Docker Agenda for December 2016

Thank you community for your amazing Global Mentor Week Events last month! In November, the community organized over 110 Docker Global Mentor Week events and more than 8,000 people enrolled in at least one of the courses for 1000+ course completions and counting! The five self-paced courses are now available for everyone free online. Check them out here!
As you gear up for the holidays, make sure to check out all the great events that are scheduled this month in Docker communities all over the world! From webinars to workshops, to conference talks, check out our list of events that are coming up in December.
Official Docker Training Courses
View the full schedule of instructor led training courses here!
 
Introduction to Docker:
This is a two-day, on-site or classroom-based training course which introduces you to the Docker platform and takes you through installing, integrating, and running it in your working environment.
Dec 7-8: Introduction to Docker with AKRA Hamburg City, Germany
 
Docker Administration and Operations:
The Docker Administration and Operations course consists of both the Introduction to Docker course, followed by the Advanced Docker Topics course, held over four consecutive days.
Dec 5-8 Docker Administration and Operations with Amazic &; London, United Kingdom
Dec 6-9: Docker Administration and Operations with Vizuri &8211; Atlanta, GA
Dec 12-15: Docker Administration and Operations with Docker Captain, Luis Herrera &8211; Madrid, Spain
Dec 12-15: Docker Administration and Operations with Kiratech &8211; Milan, Italy
Dec 13-16: Docker Administration and Operations with TREEPTIK &8211; Aix en Provence, France
Dec 19-22: Docker Administration and Operations with TREEPTIK &8211; Paris, France
 
Advanced Docker Operations:
This two day course is designed to help new and experienced systems administrators learn to use Docker to control the Docker daemon, security, Docker Machine, Swarm Mode, and Compose.
Dec 7-8: Advanced Docker Operations with Amazic &8211; London, United Kingdom
Dec 15-16: Advanced Docker Operations with Docker Captain, Benjamin Wootton &8211; London, United Kingdom
North America 
Dec 3rd: DOCKER MEETUP AT VISA &8211; Reston, VA
Visa is hosting this month’s meetup! A talk entitled &;Docker UCP 2.0 and DTR 2.1 GA&; by Ben Grissinger (from Docker) followed by &8216;Docker security&8217; by Paul Novarese (from Docker).
Dec 3rd: DOCKER MEETUP IN HAVANA &8211; Havana, Cuba
Join Docker Havana for their 1st ever meetup! Work through the training materials from Docker’s Global Mentor Week series and !
Dec 4th: GDG DEVFEST 2016 &8211; Los Angeles, CA
Docker&8217;s Mano Marks with be keynoting DevFest LA.
Dec 7th: DOCKER MEETUP AT MELTMEDIA &8211; Phoenix, AZ
Join Docker Phoenix for a &8216;Year in Review and Usage Roundtable&8217;. 2016 was a big year for Docker, let&8217;s talk about it!
Dec 13th: DOCKER MEETUP AT TORCHED HOP BREWING &8211; Atlanta, GA
This month we&8217;re going to have a social event without a presentation in combination with the Go and Kubernetes Meetups at Torched Hop Brewing.Come hang out and have a drink or food with us!
Dec 13th: DOCKER MEETUP AT GOOGLE &8211; Seattle, WA
Tiffany Jernigan will do a talk Docker Orchestration (Docker Swarm Mode) and Metrics Collection and then Tsvi Korren will follow with a talk on securing your container environment.
Dec 14th: DOCKER MEETUP AT PUPPET LABS &8211; Portland, OR
A talk by Nan Liu from Intel entitled, &8216;Trust but verify. Testing docker containers.&8217;
Dec 14th: DOCKER MEETUP AT DOCKER HQ &8211; San Francisco, CA
Docker is joining forces with the Prometheus meetup group for a holiday mega-meetup with talks on using Docker with Prometheus and OpenTracing. As a special holiday gift we will be giving away a free DockerCon 2017 ticket to one lucky attendee! Don’t miss out &8211; RSVP now!
 
Dec 15th: DOCKER MEETUP AT GOGO &8211; Chicago, Il
We will be welcoming Loris Degioanni of sysdig as he takes us through monitoring containers. The good, the bad.. and best practice!
 
Europe
Dec 5th: DEVOPSCON MUNICH &8211; Munich, Germany
Docker Captains Philipp Garbe, Gianluca Arbezzano, Viktor Farcic and Dieter Reuter will all be speaking at DevOpsCon.
Dec 6th: DOCKER MEETUP AT FOO CAFE STOCKHOLM &8211; Stockholm, Sweden
In this session, you’ll learn about the container technology built natively into Windows Server 2016 and how you can reuse your knowledge, skills and tools from Docker on Linux. This session will be a mix of presentations, giving you an overview of the technology, and hands-on experiences, so make sure to bring your laptop.
Dec 6th: D cubed: Decision Trees, Docker and Data Science in the Cloud &8211; London, United Kingdom
Steve Poole, DevOps practitioner (leading a team of engineers on cutting edge DevOps exploration) and a long time IBM Java developer, leader and evangelist, will explain what Docker is, and how it works.
Dec 8th: Docker Meetup at Pentalog Romania &8211; Brasov, Romania
Come for a full overview of DockerCon 2016        !
Dec 8th: DOCKER FOR .NET DEVELOPERS AND AZURE MACHINE LEARNING &8211; Copenhagen, Denmark
For this meetup we get a visit from Ben Hall who will talk about Docker for .NET applications, and Barbara Fusińska who will talk about Azure Machine Learning.
Dec 8th: Introduction to Docker for Java Developers &8211; Brussels, Belgium
Join us for the last session of 2016 and discover what Docker has to offer you!
Dec 14th: DOCKER MEETUP AT LA CANTINE NUMERIQUE &8211; Tours, France
What&8217;s new in the Docker ecosystem plus a few more talks on Docker compose and Swarm Mode.
Dec 15th: Docker Meetup at Stylight HQ &8211; Munich, Germany
Join us for our end of the year holiday meetup! Check event page for more details.
Dec 15th: Docker Meetup at ENSEIRB &8211; Bordeaux, France
Jeremiah Monsinjob and Florian Garcia will talk about Docker under dynamic platform and microservices.
Dec 16th: Thessaloniki .NET Meetup about Docker &8211; Thessaloniki, Greece
Byron Papadopoulos will talk about the following: What is the Docker technology, in which cases used, security, scaling, monitoring. What are the tools we use Docker. (Docker Engine and Docker Compose). Container Orchestrator Engines, Docker in Azure (show Docker Swarm Mode). Docker for Devops, and Docker for developers.
Dec 19th: Modern Microservices Architecture using Docker &8211; Herzliyya, Israel
Microservices are all the rage these days. Docker is a tool which makes managing Microservices a whole lot easier. But what do Microservices really mean? What are the best practices of composing your application with Microservices? How can you leverage Docker and the public cloud to help you build a more agile DevOps process? How does the Azure Container Service fit in? Join us in order to find out the answers.
Dec 21st: Docker Meetup at Campus Madrid &8211; Madrid, Spain
Two talks. First talk by Diego Martínez Gil: Dockerized apps running on Windows.
Diego will present the new features available in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 to run dockerized applications. Second talk is by Pablo Chico de Guzmán: Docker 1.13. Pablo will demo some of the features available in Docker 1.13.
 
Asia
Dec 10th: DOCKER MEETUP AT MANGALORE INFOTECH &8211; Mangaluru, India
We are hosting the Mangalore edition of &;The Docker Global Mentor Week.&; Our goal is to provide easy paced self learning courses that will take you through the basics of Docker and make you well acquainted with most aspects of application delivery using Docker.
Dec 10th: BIMONTHLY MEETUP 2016 &8211; DOCKER FOR PHP DEVELOPERS &8211; Pune, India
If you are aching to get started with docker, but not sure how to, this meetup is right platform. In this meetup, we will first start by explaining basic docker concepts like what docker is, its benefits, images, registry, containers, docker files etc, followed by an optional workshop for some practical.
Dec 12th: DOCKER MEETUP AT MICROSOFT &8211; Singapore, Singapore
Join us for our next meetup event!
Dec 20th: DOCKER METUP AT MICROSOFT &8211; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Join us for a deep dive into Docker technology and how Microsoft and Docker work together. Learn about Azure IaaS and how to run Docker on Microsoft Azure.
Oceania
Dec 5th: DOCKER MEETUP AT CATALYST IT &8211; Wellington, New Zealand
Join us for our next meetup!
Dec 5th: DOCKER MEETUP AT VERSENT PTY LTD &8211; Melbourne, Australia
Yoav Landman, the CTO of JFrog, will talk to us about how new tools often introduce new paradigms. Yoav will examine the patterns and the anti-patterns for Docker image management, and what impact the new tools have on the battle-proven paradigms of the software development lifecycle.
Dec 13th: Action Cable & Docker &8211; Wellington, New Zealand
Come check out a live demo of adding Docker to a rails app.
Africa
Dec 16th: Docker Meetup at Skylabase Inc. &8211; Buea, Cameroon
Join us for a Docker Study Jam!

Check out the list of docker events, meetups, workshops, trainings for the month of December!Click To Tweet

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American Airlines soars into cloud with IBM

American Airlines, the largest passenger air carrier in North America, announced this week that it has chosen IBM as a cloud provider.
Specifically, the airline intends to move some of its applications to the cloud and make use of IBM infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) tools. The agreement also means American will have access to the 50 IBM data centers around the world, the Bluemix development platform and analytics capabilities.
Patrick Grubbs, vice president of travel and transportation at IBM Cloud, said the work between IBM and American will include &;customer facing systems as well as back office.&;
American has been looking integrate and streamline its systems since merging with US Airways in 2013.
Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President of IBM Cloud, said, &8220;This partnership is about delivering the flexibility to American Airlines&; business, allowing them to enhance their customer relationships and further gain a competitive advantage.&8221;
The new IBM agreement with American Airlines extends a longstanding relationship. In the 1950s, the two companies collaborated to create the first-ever electronic reservation and ticketing system in the air travel industry.
For more, check out ZDNet&;s full story.
(Image via Wikimedia Commons)
The post American Airlines soars into cloud with IBM appeared first on news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Conquering impossible goals with real-time analytics

“Past data only said, &;go faster&; or &8216;ride better,’&; Kelly Catlin, Olympic Cyclist and Silver Medalist, shared with the audience at IBM World of Watson event on 24 October. In other words, the feedback generated from all her analytics data sources — the speed, cadence, power meters on her bicycle — was generally useless to this former mountain bike racer who wanted to improve her track cycling performance by 4.5 percent to capture a medal at a medal at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.

USA Cycling Women&8217;s Team Pursuit

While I am by no means an Olympic level athlete, I knew exactly what Kelly meant. I’ve logged over 300 miles in running races over 8 years, and just in this past year started to see some small improvements in my 5Ks and half-marathons. Suddenly, I started asking, “How much faster could I run a half marathon? Could I translate these improvements to longer distances?” I downloaded all my historical race information into an excel chart. I looked at my Runkeeper and Strava training runs. Despite all this data, I was stuck. &;What should I do to improve?&8221; I asked a coach. He said, “Run more during the week.”
But I wanted to know more. How much capacity do I really have? How much does my asthma limit me? Should I only run in certain climates? During which segments of a race should I speed up or slow down? Just like Kelly, who spent four hours per session reviewing data, I understood how historical data had limited impact on improving current performance.
According to Derek Bouchard-Hall, CEO of USA Cycling, “At the elite level, a 3 percent performance improvement in 12 months is attainable but very difficult. For the USA Women’s Team Pursuit Team, they had only 11 months and needed 4.5 percent improvement which would require them to perform at a new world record time (4.12/15.4 Lap Average). The coach could account for the 3 percent in physiological improvement but needed technology to bring the other 1.5 percent. He focused in two areas: equipment (bike/tire, wind tunnel training) and real-time analytic training insights.”

How exactly could real-time analytics insight change performance?
According to Kelly, “Now, we can make executable changes.” She and her teammates now know when to make a transition of who is leading the group, how best to make that transition, and which times of the race to pick up cadence.
The result: USA Women’s Team Pursuit finished in the race in 4:12:454 to secure the silver medal behind Great Britain, finishing in 4:10:236.
The introduction of data sets and technology did not alone lead to Team USA’s incredible improvement. Instead, it was the combination of well-defined goals, strategic implementation of technology, and actionable, timely recommendations that led to their strong performance and results.
As you consider how to improve an area of your business, keep in mind these three things from the USA Cycling project with IBM Bluemix:

Set well-defined goals. Or, as business expert Stephen Covey would say, “always begin with the end in mind.” USA Cycling clearly articulated they needed to increase performance by 4.5 percent, and that would take more than a coach.
Choice and implementation of technology matters. Choose the tools that will not only deliver analytics data and insights, but do so in a timely and relevant manner for your business. Explore how to get started with IBM Bluemix.
Data alone doesn’t equal guidance. You must review the data, and with your colleagues, your coach, your running buddy, set clear, executable actions.

The IBM Bluemix Garage Method can help you define your ideas and bring a culture of innovation agility to your cloud development.
A version of this post originally appeared on the IBM Bluemix blog.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

IBM wins Frost & Sullivan 2016 Cloud Company of the Year award

Market research firm Frost & Sullivan has conferred its 2016 Cloud Company of the Year award to IBM, citing hybrid integration and affordability as major factors.
Lynda Stadtmueller, Vice President of Cloud Services for Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan, explained the choice of the IBM Cloud platform because it &;supports the concept of &;hybrid integration&; — that is, a hybrid IT environment in which disparate applications and data are linked via a comprehensive integration platform, allowing the apps to share common management functionality and control.&;
The capabilities she noted enable Bluemix users to tap into analytics functionality and Watson.
Stadtmueller continued: “IBM Cloud offers a price-performance advantage over competitors due to its infrastructure configurations and service parameters — including a bare metal server option; single-tenant (private) compute and storage options; granular capacity selections for processing, memory, and network for public cloud units; and all-included technical support.”
IBM VP of Cloud Strategy and Portfolio Management Don Boulia said the award &8220;recognizes the extraordinary range and depth of IBM&8217;s cloud services portfolio.&8221;
Other IBM capabilities Frost & Sullivan cited were its scalable cloud portfolio, extensive connectivity and microservices.
For more, check out Read IT Quik’s full article.
The post IBM wins Frost &; Sullivan 2016 Cloud Company of the Year award appeared first on news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Your Docker agenda for the month of October

From webinars to workshops, meetups to conference talks, check out our list of events that are coming up in October!

Online
Oct 13: Docker for Windows Server 2016 by Michael Friis
Oct 18: Docker Datacenter Demo by Moni Sallama and Chris Hines.
 
Official Docker Training Course
View the full schedule of instructor led training courses here!
Introduction to Docker: This is a two-day, on-site or classroom-based training course which introduces you to the Docker platform and takes you through installing, integrating, and running it in your working environment.
Oct 11-12: Introduction to Docker with Xebia &; Paris, France
Oct 19-20: Introduction to Docker with Contino &8211; London, United Kingdom
Oct 24-25: Introduction to Docker with AKRA &8211; Krakow, Germany
 
Docker Administration and Operations: The Docker Administration and Operations course consists of both the Introduction to Docker course, followed by the Advanced Docker Topics course, held over four consecutive days.
Oct 3-6: Docker Administration and Operations with Azca &8211; Madrid, Spain
Oct 11-15: Docker Administration and Operations with TREEPTIK &8211; Paris, France
Oct 18-21: Docker Administration and Operations with Vizuri &8211; Raleigh, NC
Oct 18-22: Docker Administration and Operations with TREEPTIK &8211; Aix en Provence, France
Oct 24-27: Docker Administration and Operations with AKRA &8211; Krakow, Germany
Oct 31- Nov 3: Docker Administration and Operations by Luis Herrera, Docker Captain &8211; Lisboa, Portugal
 
Advanced Docker Operations: This two day course is designed to help new and experienced systems administrators learn to use Docker to control the Docker daemon, security, Docker Machine, Swarm, and Compose.
Oct 10-11 Advanced Docker Operations with Ben Wootton, Docker Captain &8211; London, UK
Oct 26-27: Advanced Docker Operations with AKRA &8211; Krakow, Poland
 
North America & Latin America
Oct 5th: DOCKER MEETUP AT MELTMEDIA &8211; Tempe, AZ
The speaker, @leodotcloud, will discuss the background, present ecosystem of the Container Network Interface (CNI) for containers.
Oct 6th: DOCKER MEETUP AT RACKSPACE &8211; Austin, TX
Jeff Lindsay will give a preview talk to container days where he will cover what the different components of a cluster manager are and what are things you should pay attention to if you really wanted to build your own cluster management solution.
Oct 11th: DOCKER MEETUP AT REPLICATED &8211; Los Angeles, CA
Marc Campbell will share some best practices of using Docker in production, starting with using Content Trust and signed images (including the internals of how Content Trust is built), and then discussing a Continuous Integration/Delivery workflow that can reliably and securely deliver and run Docker containers in any environment.
Oct 12th: DOCKER MEETUP IN BATON ROUGE &8211; Baton Rouge, LA
This Docker meetup will be hosted by Brandon Willmott of the local VMware User Group.
Oct 12th: DOCKER MEETUP AT TUNE &8211; Seattle, WA
Join this meetup to hear talks from Nick Thompson from TUNE, Avi Cavali from Shippable and DJ Enriquez from OpenMail. Also Wes McNamee, a winner of the Docker 1.12 Hackathon, will also be presenting his project Swarm-CI. This is not to be missed!
Oct 13th: DOCKER MEETUP AT CAPITAL ALE HOUSE &8211; Richmond, VA
Scott Cochran, Master Software Engineer at Capital One, will be talking about his journey in adopting docker containers to solve business problems and the things he learned along the way.
Oct 17th: DOCKER MEETUP AT BRAINTREE &8211; Chicago, IL
Tsvi Korren, director of technical services at Aqua, is going to present a talk entitled &;Docker Container Application Security Deep Dive&; where he will discuss how to integrate compliance and security checks into your pipeline and how to produce a secure, verifiable image.
Oct 18th: DOCKER MEETUP AT THE INNEVATION CENTER &8211; Las Vegas, NV
Using the Docker volume plug-in with external container storage allows data to be persisted, allows per-container volume management and high-availability for stateful apps. Join this informative meetup with Gou Rao, CTO and co-founder of Portworx, where we’ll discuss: Best practices for managing stateful containerized applications.
Oct 18th: DOCKER MEETUP AT WILDBIT &8211; PHILADELPHIA, PA
Ben Grissinger, Solutions Engineer at Docker, will discuss Docker Swarm!  He will cover the requirements for using swarm mode and take a peak at what we can expect in the near future from Docker regarding swarm mode. Last but not he will be doing a demo using swarm mode and using a visualizer tool to display what is taking place in the swarm cluster during the demo of swarm mode in action.
Oct 18th: DOCKER MEETUP AT SANTANDER &8211; Sao Paulo, Brazil
Join Docker São Paulo for their 8th meetup. Get in touch if you would like to submit a talk.
Oct 29th: DOCKER MEETUP AT CI&T &8211; Campinas, Brazil
Save the date for the first Docker Campinas meetup. More details to follow soon.
 
Europe
Oct 4th: LINUXCON EUROPE / CONTAINERCON EU  &8211; Berlin, Germany
We had such a great time attending and speaking at LinuxCon and ContainerCon North America, that we are doing it again next week in Berlin – only bigger and better this time! Make sure to come visit us at booth and check out the awesome Docker sessions we have lined up.
Oct 4th: THE INCREDIBLE AUTOMATION DAY (TIAD) PARIS &8211; Paris, France
Roberto Hashioka from Docker will share how to build a powerful real-time data processing pipeline & visualization solution using Docker Machine and Compose, Kafka, Cassandra and Spark in 5 steps.
Oct 4th: DOCKER MEETUP IN COPENHAGEN &8211; Copenhagen, Denmark
Learn to be a DevOps &8211; workshop for beginners.
Oct 5th: WEERT SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT MEETUP &8211; Weert, Netherlands
Kabisa will host a Docker workshop. The workshop is intended for people who are interested in Docker. Last year you have heard and read a lot about Docker. “Our workshop is a next step for you to gain some hands-on experience.”
Oct 6th: DOCKER MEETUP AT ZANOX &8211; Berlin, Germany
Patrick Chanezon: What&8217;s new with Docker, covering Docker announcements from the past 6 months, with a demo of the latest and greatest Docker products for dev and ops.
Oct 6th: TECH UNPLUGGED &8211; Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Docker Captain Nigel Poulton is presenting on container security at @techunplugged in Amsterdam.
Oct 11th: DOCKER MEETUP AT MONDAY CONSULTING GMBH &8211; Hamburg, Germany
Tom Hutter prepared some material about: aliases and bash-completion, Dockerfile, docker-compose, bind mount: access folders outside build root, supervisord, firewalls (iptables), housekeeping.
Oct 11th: London Dev Community Meetup &8211; London, United Kingdom
Building Microservices with Docker.
Oct 12th: GOTO &8211; LONDON &8211; London, United Kingdom
GOTO London will give you the opportunity to talk with people across all different disciplines of software development! Join Docker captain Adrian Mouat talk about Docker.
Oct 13th: DOCKER MEETUP AT YNOV BORDEAUX &8211; Bordeaux, France
David Gageot from Docker will be presenting.
Oct 15th: DOCKER MEETUP AT BKM &8211; Istanbul, Turkey
Event will be handled by Derya SEZEN and Huseyin BABAL and there will be cool topics about Docker with real life best practices and also we have some challenges for you. Do not forget to bring your laptops with you.
Oct 15th: DOCKER MEETUP AT BUCHAREST TECH HUB &8211; Bucharest, Romania
Welcome to the second workshop of the free Docker 101 Workshop Meetups!
This is going to be a 5h+ Workshop, so be prepared! This workshop is an introduction in the world of Docker containers. It provides an overview about what exactly is Docker and how can it benefit both developers looking to build applications quickly and  IT team looking to manage the IT environment.
Oct 17th: OSCON LONDON &8211; London, UK
Hear the latest about the Docker project from Patrick Chanezon.
Oct 18th: DOCKER MEETUP AT TRADESHIFT &8211; Denmark, Copenhagen
We are going to talk about Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment. Why is that important, why should you care? CI/CD as it is abbreviated is not only about the technical, it is also about how you can improve your team with new tools that help you deliver features faster with fewer errors.
Oct 18th: DOCKER MEETUP AT HORTONWORKS BUDAPEST &8211; Budapest, Hungary
This Meetup will focus on the new features of Docker 1.12.
Oct 26th: DOCKER MEETUP AT DIE MOBILIAR &8211; Zürich, Switzerland
We are happy to announce the 11th Docker Switzerland meetup. Talks include an introduction into swarmkit by Michael Müller from Container Solutions.
Oct 26th: DOCKER MEETUP AT BENTOXBOX &8211; Verona, Italy
Join us for our first meetup! Docker Captain Lorenzo Fontana, DevOps Expert at Kiratech, will be joining us!
 
APAC
Oct 18th: DOCKER MEETUP AT DIMENSION DATA &8211; Sydney, Australia
“Docker inside out, reverse engineering Docker” By Anthony Shaw, “Group Director, Innovation and Technical Development” at Dimension Data. Summary: In this talk Anthony will be explaining how Docker works by reverse engineering the core concepts and illustrating the technology by building a Docker clone live during the talk.
Oct 18th: DOCKER MEETUP IN MELBOURNE &8211; Melbourne, Australia
Continuous Integration & Deployment for Docker Workloads on Azure Container Services. Presenter: Ken Thompson (OSS TSP, Microsoft).
Oct 18th: DOCKER MEETUP IN SINGAPORE &8211; Singapore, Singapore
Docker for AWS (Vincent de Smet) with a demo on using docker machine with a remote host by Sergey Shishkin.
Oct 22nd: DOCKER CLUSTERING WITH TECH NEXT MEETUP &8211; Pune, India
Dockerize a multi-container data crunching app.
 
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Report: IBM public cloud empowers developers

The latest edition of Forrester Research’s Forrester Wave report which evaluates global public cloud platforms characterized IBM as a “strong performer” in public cloud.
IBM earned “the highest possible score for its private and hybrid cloud strategy as well as the top ranking for IBM’s infrastructure services,” eWeek reports. Forrester’s study used 34 evaluation criteria to evaluate eight global cloud platform service providers.
In particular, IBM empowers enterprise developers with the tools they need to build applications, Forrester’s report contends. It cites “platform configuration options, app migration services, cognitive analytics services, security and compliance certifications, complex networking support, growing partner roster and native DevOps tools” as strengths.
In a statement, Bill Karpovich, general manager of the IBM Cloud Platform, said:
We believe being recognized as a strong performer in Forrester&;s latest Wave report reinforces what we hear from our clients every day—that cloud is not &;one size fits all.&8217; Enterprises require choice and expertise to evolve their diverse application portfolios, and IBM Cloud was designed to deliver on those core tenets.
For more about the Q3 Forrester Wave study, check out eWeek’s full report.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud