With Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (9th Cloud Expo) beginning its final two days at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, let's remind you in greater detail about all the the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical program at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT? Just click on the speaker name of your choice to go straight to the relevant Cloud Expo Speaker Profile. Brett Adam - CTO at rPath Michael Adams - GPM at VMware Brian Adler - Sr. Professional Services Architect at RightScale Rahul Akolkar - Services Cloud Platform  team at IBM Allen Allison - Chief Security Officer at NaviS... (more)

HSBC Bank Deploys Centrify Suite to Centrally Manage Security and Auditing for Worldwide IT Operations

Leading Worldwide Financial Institution Uses Centrify to Secure Access, Improve Auditing, and Manage User Accounts SUNNYVALE, Calif, and BRACKNELL, UK - Nov 13, 2012 - Centrify Corporation, the leading provider of security and compliance solutions that centrally control, secure and audit access to on-premise and cloud-based systems, mobile devices and applications, today announced that HSBC Bank UK is deploying the Centrify Suite to centrally secure system access to HSBC's distributed IT infrastructure. Headquartered in London, HSBC is one of the largest banking and financial services organisations in the world. HSBC's international network comprises more than 7,200 offices in more than 80 countries and territories in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa. HSBC central IT staff manages thousands of user accounts across its UNIX an... (more)

Agile Architecture

The English language is well known for its subtlety. Sometimes it’s a delight, but on other occasions it can be very frustrating. If I use the term Gothic Architecture you will immediately understand I am describing a style of architecture that flourished in medieval times. And if like me you are interested in ecclesiastical architecture you will know that this style was used in many of the great cathedrals and churches across Europe, which were distinctive because of key architectural patterns that enabled great increases in height and internal light of the buildings without increasing the size of supporting pillars. Now if I use the term Agile Architecture, what am I referring to? In today’s Agile world I would hazard a guess that most readers will think I am referring to the architecture techniques and tasks undertaken in the context of an Agile software develop... (more)

DevOps and SQL Review By @Datical | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

Automating SQL Review to Save Time and Money I’ve spent the majority of my tech career in startups.  I love the fast pace, the opportunity to learn new things, and the sense of accomplishment that comes from bringing a successful new product to market.  I began my career in Quality Assurance.  In startups, you rarely enjoy the low ratio of Developers to QA Engineers that you might in a large enterprise.  As a QA engineer in a startup, your inbox is always much more full than your outbox. You are the last gate before the next release so you’re always under the microscope. In an early stage startup you are most likely also the “Customer Support” team, so when an issue is hit in production you become VERY popular. As someone in that position, I always kept an eye out for the right tools to lighten my load without sacrificing any of my own personal quality standards f... (more)

Chef Recipes By @ScripRock | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps #Containers #GuardRail]

Generating Chef Recipes from Existing Configs We've covered the benefits and pitfalls of configuration management tools like Chef in many articles. But let's assume you've done your homework and decided Chef is the tool for you. How do you get started? Funnily enough, one of the inspirations for ScriptRock was a not-so-successful Chef deployment. Only a poor craftsman blames his tools, so rather than pointing the finger at Chef we reflected on what we had done wrong. The problems we encountered trying to move a large, brown-field infrastructure to Chef, and to get culture, people, and processes to change at the same time, drove us to find a sound method for enterprise automation. Essentially, we had put the cart before the horse: we started automating our infrastructure before we understood it. Without documentation of existing configuration state and scalable valida... (more)

OpenStack Hits First Milestone

Three months after publicly starting down the road to imprint its NDA on the cloud by establishing a large-scale open source cloud platform called OpenStack free for anybody to use, Rackspace Hosting, its BFF NASA and a reportedly growing OpenStack community made their first official code drop Thursday. The milestone is called Austin - they're doing this alphabetically so presumably they have a ways to go - and it includes the all-important Amazon EC2-challenging OpenStack Compute provisioning engine that's supposed to blend the best of the Rackspace Cloud Servers widgetry that underlies its public cloud offering with NASA's own home-made Nebula cloud platform. OpenStack Compute, which has commanded most of the work these last few months, is the engine that provisions virtual machines complements of either Xen or KVM and basically supplies the glue that holds a clo... (more)

The Changing Roles of CTO, CSO, CFO and Consultants with Public Cloud

One of the most fun aspects of hosting The Cloudcast (.net) podcast is that we take a completely vendor-neutral and technology-neutral stance on what we discuss and who we invite onto the show. Lots of learning and lots of great discussions. And occasionally we ask a few questions and find some interesting needles in the haystack that we didn't expect. [APIs, data analytics and the business models they enable are top of mind for me these days] This is exactly what happened on this week's show with Mat Ellis (@matellis), CEO of Cloudability. I had learned about his company while doing some research for a blog I'd written about emerging Cloud Management vendors and trends. At first look, I thought Cloudability looked interesting because they seemed to make cost management for public clouds very simple. I thought we'd have an interesting conversation about comparing t... (more)

The Rebirth of SOA on the Wings of SaaS and Cloud Computing

Service Oriented Architecture was hailed as the next major leap ahead in the ICT industry and was predicted by many to be as big a leap forward as that achieved with Object-Oriented software design patterns. For example, in 2006, Joseph Bih introduced SOA in a research article as an innovative new way to conduct e-business[1]. While much published and promoted in the marketplace, SOA adoption has been the subject of significant controversy, not least of which is the publication of a landmark article by now Gartner Fellow Anne Thomas Manes in January 2009 in which SOA was declared "dead". This publication examines the health of SOA as a relevant paradigm in the ICT industry three years after some market opinion leaders declared SOA dead. Anne Thomas Manes from The Burton Group (now part of Gartner and with Ms Manes a Gartner Fellow) published a landmark article as lon... (more)

ActiveState CEO To Present Case Studies at DevOps Summit

All too many discussions about DevOps conclude that the solution is an all-purpose player: developer and operations guru, complete with pager for round-the-clock duty. For most organizations that is not the way forward. In his session at DevOps Summit, Bart Copeland, president and CEO of ActiveState Software, will discuss how to achieve the agility and speed of end-to-end automation without requiring an organization stocked with Supermen and Superwomen. Areas addressed include: Application lifecycle automation Key requirements for full end-to-end application automation Your DevOps solution: Build vs. buy Organizational requirements to integrate development and operations Typical benefits from development and operations integration Case studies of successful DevOps efforts will also be discussed. ActiveState's Bernard Golden during DevOps Power Panel at Cloud Expo New... (more)

Moore’s Law on Hadoop Deployments At Cloud Expo

Hardware will never be more valuable than on the day it hits your loading dock. Each day new servers are not deployed to production the business is losing money. While Moore's Law is typically cited to explain the exponential density growth of chips, a critical consequence of this is rapid depreciation of servers. The hardware for clustered systems (e.g., Hadoop, OpenStack) tends to be significant capital expenses. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mason Katz, CTO and co-founder of StackIQ, to discuss how infrastructure teams should be aware of the capitalization and depreciation model of these expenses to fully understand when and where automation is critical. Speaker Bio: Mason Katz is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of StackIQ. Prior to joining StackIQ, he co-founded the open source Rocks Clusters Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) l... (more)

DevOps vs Outsourcing By @SD_Architect | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

June 10, 2014 As we look at enterprises adopting DevOps (yes, enterprises are adopting DevOps, in droves), the question regarding outsourcing always comes up. Many (read: most) enterprises have at least some of their application delivery or IT operations outsourced to an external vendor. This may be the traditional ‘offshoring’ where work is offloaded to an external, offshore and usually cheaper provider; to a true supply chain model, where external and internal providers deliver components of the application delivery supply chain. Both scenarios have a significantly different impact on DevOps adoption. (Yes, I am over simplifying outsourcing, but it serves the purpose for this discussion). Strategic Outsourcing: This is the scenario where an enterprise decides that it is cheaper or from a business perspective, better to outsource all or part of their application ... (more)