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Hitch your IT career to a rising star with DevOps certification

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Hitch your IT career to a rising star with DevOps certification

Savvy IT industry watchers have probably been noticing something called “DevOps” come gliding into view for a while now, striking regular pings on the scope of anyone scanning for either hot trends or spiking salaries. Even proponents of DevOps, however, sometimes struggle to define it in layman’s terms, a challenge that anyone who has ever tried to explain development methods like Agile or Scrum to someone outside of IT will understand. Beneath the jargon, however, there’s an important development model that is quickly gaining in popularity. If you’re involved in IT, then this is something that’s probably worth taking the time to understand.

What is DevOps?
DevOps is a compound of “development” and “operations.” It’s a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration, integration, automation, and measurement of cooperation between software developers and other information technology professionals. DevOps is often shown graphically as three overlapping circles consisting of Development, Quality Assurance, and Information Technology Operations, with DevOps being the area of overlap that ties all three circles together.

DevOps is so much more, however, than the intersection of three circles. It’s often the intersection of five or ten circles — it just depends on the company that the DevOps is supporting. DevOps spans the entire delivery pipeline. This includes improved deployment frequency, which can lead to faster time to market, lower failure rate of new releases, shortened lead time between fixes, and faster mean time to recovery in the event of a new release crashing or otherwise disabling the current system. Simple processes become increasingly programmable and dynamic when using a DevOps approach, which aims to maximize the predictability, efficiency, security, and maintainability of operational processes. Automation often supports this objective.

DevOps integration targets product delivery, quality testing, feature development, and maintenance releases in order to improve reliability and security and provide faster development and deployment cycles. Many of the ideas (and people) involved in DevOps come from the enterprise systems management and agile software development movements.

DevOps aids in software application release management for an organization by standardizing development environments. Events can be more easily tracked as well as resolving documented process control and granular reporting issues. Companies with release/deployment automation problems usually have existing automation but want to more flexibly manage and drive this automation without needing to enter everything manually at the command-line.

Ideally, this automation can be invoked by non-operations employees in specific non-production environments. The DevOps approach grants developers more control of the environment, giving infrastructure more application-centric understanding.

The adoption of DevOps is being driven by factors such as:
● Use of agile and other development processes and methodologies
● Demand for an increased rate of production releases from application and business unit stakeholders
● Wide availability of virtualized and cloud infrastructure from internal and external providers
● Increased usage of data center automation and configuration management tools
● Increased focus on test automation and continuous integration methods

According to David Geer, 42 percent of IT pros surveyed had adopted or planned to adopt DevOps development approaches (Information Week, 2014 DevOps Survey). That number ballooned to 66 percent of U.S. companies using DevOps approaches by the time of a Rackspace survey only 10 months later. With DevOps clearly taking over the coder’s realm, most programmers will eventually have to yield to and master this mindset.

What does DevOps mean for a programmer’s profession?
There’s a lot of interest in DevOps in the IT world right now.DevOps introduces developers to operational requirements and the tools and methods necessary to ensure that the code they create is immediately functional, of high quality, and fit for the production environment. With solid training in these tools and methods, developers should find their talents highly sellable in a career world that is increasingly favorable to DevOps practitioners.

Adam Gordon, CTO of New Horizon Computer Learning Centers of south Florida, sats that important developer skills for DevOps environments include automating configuration management (infrastructure lifecycle management) using vendor-neutral tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, and Docker. These tools integrate with a host of popular platforms and software including Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services, CFEngine, Cisco, Eucalyptus, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, Jelastic, Jenkins, Linux (various distributions), Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, OpenSVC, Rackspace, Rightscale, Salt, SoftLayer, Vagrant, VMware, and a rapidly expanding number of examples.

Some of the most popular vendor-specific DevOps platforms include those from Microsoft and VMware, says Gordon. Microsoft’s DevOps-related products include System Center with its System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). These Microsoft developer tools enable functions such as automated configuration management, monitoring, and custom management pack development. VMware tools such as vCloud Air (vCloud Hybrid Service) bridge the VMware development platform to tools such as Puppet and Chef, according to Gordon, while the vRealize cloud management platform automates infrastructure and application delivery, monitoring, analytics, and management.

Finally, Red Hat Linux developers will find that learning to deploy this distribution can be useful for work in Red Hat-related DevOps environments.

Does everyone love DevOps?
No, not everyone. Take Jeff Knupp, for instance. In an April 2014 blog, Knupp claims that DevOps is “killing the developer.” Allow me to quote directly from Mr. Knupp’s post:

“There are two recent trends I really hate: DevOps and the notion of the ‘full-stack’ developer. The DevOps movement is so popular that I may as well say I hate the x86 architecture or monolithic kernels. But it’s true: I can’t stand it. The underlying cause of my pain? This fact: not every company is a start-up, though it appears that every company must act as though they were.

“DevOps is meant to denote a close collaboration and cross-pollination between what were previously purely development roles, purely operations roles, and purely QA roles. Because software needs to be released at an ever-increasing rate, the old ‘waterfall’ develop-test-release cycle is seen as broken. Developers must also take responsibility for the quality of the testing and release environments.

“The increasing scope of responsibility of the ‘developer’ (whether or not that term is even appropriate anymore is debatable) has given rise to a chimera-like job candidate: the ‘full-stack’ developer. Such a developer is capable of doing the job of developer, QA team member, operations analyst, sysadmin, and DBA. Before you accuse me of hyperbole, go back and read that list again. Is there any role in the list whose duties you wouldn’t expect a ‘full-stack’ developer to be well versed in?

“Where did these concepts come from? Start-ups, of course (and the Agile methodology). Start-ups are a peculiar beast and need to function in a very lean way to survive their first few years. I don’t deny this. Unfortunately, we’ve taken the multiple technical roles that engineers at start-ups were forced to play due to lack of resources into a set of minimum qualifications for the role of ‘developer.’ ”

“Imagine you’re at a start-up with a development team of seven. You’re one year into development of a web application that Xs all the Ys, and things are going well, though it’s always a frantic scramble to keep everything going. If there’s a particularly nasty issue that seems to require deep database knowledge, you don’t have the liberty of saying, ‘That’s not my specialty,’ and handing it off to a DBA team to investigate. Due to constrained resources, you’re forced to take on the role of DBA and fix the issue yourself.

“Now expand that scenario across all the roles listed earlier. At any one time, a developer at a start-up may be acting as a developer, QA tester, deployment/operations analyst, sysadmin, or DBA. That’s just the nature of the business, and some people thrive in that type of environment. Somewhere along the way, however, we tricked ourselves into thinking that because, at any one time, a start-up developer had to take on different roles, he or she should actually be all those things at once.

“If such people even exist, ‘full-stack’ developers still wouldn’t be used as they should. Rather than temporarily taking on a single role for a short period of time, then transitioning into the next role, they are meant to be performing all the roles, all the time. Most good developers can almost pull this off.”

Certifications in DevOps
The DevOps certification realm is taking root quickly. One organization that is out in front of the pack, however, is Amazon Web Services. If you want to make a strong move into DevOps, then consider any of the following credentials.

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional

Description
The AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam validates technical expertise in provisioning, operating, and managing distributed application systems on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include the ability to:

● Implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS
● Understand, implement, and automate security controls, governance processes, and compliance validation
● Define and deploy monitoring, metrics, and logging systems on AWS
● Implement systems that are highly available, scalable, and self-healing on the AWS platform
● Design, manage, and maintain tools to automate operational processes

Prerequisites
Required Prerequisite: status as AWS Certified Developer – Associate or AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate

Eligibility
● Two or more years’ experience in provisioning, operating, and managing AWS environments
● Experience in developing code in at least one high-level programming language
● Experience in automation and testing via scripting/programming
● Understanding of agile and other development processes and methodologies

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
170 minutes to complete the exam
Exam available in English
Exam registration fee is $300

DevOps is a hot trend in software development right now.AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate
Description

The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam validates technical expertise in deployment, management, and operations on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include:

● Deploying, managing, and operating scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS
● Migrating an existing on-premises application to AWS
● Implementing and controlling the flow of data to and from AWS
● Selecting the appropriate AWS service based on compute, data, or security requirements
● Identifying appropriate use of AWS operational best practices
● Estimating AWS usage costs and identifying operational cost control mechanisms

Prerequisites

No prerequisites; recommend taking System Operations on AWS
Eligibility

● One or more years of hands-on experience in operating AWS-based applications
● Experience in provisioning, operating, and maintaining systems running on AWS
● Ability to identify and gather requirements to define a solution to be built and operated on AWS
● Capabilities to provide AWS operations and deployment guidance and best practices throughout the lifecycle of a project

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
80 minutes to complete the exam
Available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese
Practice Exam Registration fee is $20
Exam Registration fee is $150

AWS Certified Developer – Associate
Description

The AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam validates technical expertise in developing and maintaining applications on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include:

● Picking the right AWS services for the application
● Leveraging AWS SDKs to interact with AWS services from your application
● Writing code that optimizes performance of AWS services used by your application
● Code-level application security (IAM roles, credentials, encryption, etc.)

Prerequisites
No prerequisites; recommend taking Developing on AWS
Eligibility
● One or more years of hands-on experience in designing and maintaining an AWS-based application
● In-depth knowledge of at least one high-level programming language
● Understanding of core AWS services, uses, and basic architecture best practices
● Proficiency in designing, developing, and deploying cloud-based solutions using AWS
● Experience with developing and maintaining applications written for Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Amazon Simple Workflow Service, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and AWS Cloud Formation.

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
80 minutes to complete the exam
Available in English, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese
Practice Exam Registration fee is $20
Exam Registration fee is $150

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
Description
The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional exam validates advanced technical skills and experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. Example concepts you should understand for this exam include:

● Designing and deploying dynamically scalable, highly available, fault tolerant, and reliable applications on AWS
● Selecting appropriate AWS services to design and deploy an application based on given requirements
● Migrating complex, multi-tier applications on AWS
● Designing and deploying enterprise-wide scalable operations on AWS
● Implementing cost control strategies

Prerequisites
Status as AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Eligibility
● Achieved AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
● Two or more years’ hands-on experience in designing and deploying cloud architecture on AWS
● Abilities to evaluate cloud application requirements and make architectural recommendations for implementation, deployment, and provisioning applications on AWS
● Capabilities to provide best practices guidance on the architectural design across multiple applications, projects, or the enterprise

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
170 minutes to complete the exam
Exam available in English and Japanese
Practice Exam Registration fee is $40
Exam Registration fee is $300

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Description

Intended for individuals with experience in designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include:
● Designing and deploying scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant systems on AWS
● Lift and shift of an existing on-premises application to AWS
● Ingress and egress of data to and from AWS
● Selecting the appropriate AWS service based on data, compute, database, or security requirements
● Identifying appropriate use of AWS architectural best practices
● Estimating AWS costs and identifying cost control mechanisms

Prerequisites
None, but it is recommended that candidates take the Architecting on AWS and AWS Certification Exam Readiness Workshop
Eligibility
● One or more years of hands-on experience in designing available, cost efficient, fault tolerant, and scalable distributed systems on AWS
● In-depth knowledge of at least one high-level programming language
● Ability to identify and define requirements for an AWS-based application
● Experience with deploying hybrid systems with on-premises and AWS components
● Capability to provide best practices for building secure and reliable applications on the AWS platform

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
80 minutes to complete the exam
Available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese
Practice Exam Registration fee is $20
Exam Registration fee is $150

There’s a lot of interest in DevOps in the IT world right now.AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
Description

The AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional exam validates technical expertise in provisioning, operating, and managing distributed application systems on the AWS platform. Exam concepts you should understand for this exam include the ability to:
● Implement and manage continuous delivery systems and methodologies on AWS
● Understand, implement, and automate security controls, governance processes, and compliance validation
● Define and deploy monitoring, metrics, and logging systems on AWS
● Implement systems that are highly available, scalable, and self-healing on the AWS platform
● Design, manage, and maintain tools to automate operational processes

Prerequisites
AWS Certified Developer – Associate
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate
Eligibility
● Two or more years’ experience in provisioning, operating, and managing AWS environments
● Experience in developing code in at least one high-level programming language
● Experience in automation and testing via scripting/programming
● Understanding of agile and other development processes and methodologies

Exam
Multiple choice and multiple answer questions
170 minutes to complete the exam
Exam available in English
Exam registration fee is $300

Click here to view complete Q&A of 70-697 exam

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Microsoft, Nokia, Tech

Leaving IT may be your best IT career path

The best way to ensure a successful IT career in the long run may be to go off the IT reservation. That was my takeaway from the Career Without Boundaries session at the Computerworld Premier 100 conference.

The panelists didn’t come right out and say that. But the IT executives on the stage all had done stints in other parts of the business – and brought that experience back. Kate Bass, CIO at Valspar, spent 21 years in finance. Dr. Katrina Lane, senior vice president and CTO at Ceasars Entertainment Corp., has a technical degree but cut her teeth in marketing, focusing on areas such as analytics, media planning and teleservices.
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Sheila McGovern, managing partner for the Human Capital division at IBM, has a degree in quantitative business analytics. She started in tech but then moved into the HR field before landing her current job. One day, she says, “I sat down with a business leader and he said, ‘You know Sheila, you’ll never go any higher with IT.'” So McGovern moved around, working in HR, supply chain, financial systems and finally HR consulting. “A few years ago I came back. I really benefitted from getting on the business side. I wouldn’t trade that experience,” she says.

Gaining business cred
This movement back and forth is more common between other business units than it is in IT, but such a move can help rising IT stars overcome a major stumbling block for IT executives: The general lack of understanding -– and lack of respect — for what IT does.

“Running an IT organization is like managing an iceberg. There’s only small piece of that anyone ever sees,” says Bass. And everyone and their mother thinks they can do that piece it better.

“When you go to legal or finance everyone knows you need an expert,” says McGovern. IT is different. “Most people go home and turn on consumer electronics and they work and work better than what they have at work,” she says. “And it’s only getting worse.”

“I left a finance organization, which is very highly respected. You don’t have to work at it, whereas in IT that’s not always the case,” says Bass. But coming in from another group can give an IT executive a level of credibility that may be difficult to achieve for those rising up within the IT ranks.

Leaving IT is not the only way to gain experience. Another way to attack this issue is to embed IT people directly into the business units, a strategy that David Zanca, vice president of IT at FedEx Services, has embraced. “If you want to understand the business units you have to walk in their shoes,” he says. But FedEx still fights the good fights against silo mentality. Marketing and IT, even when in adjacent offices, may still not be fully aligned. If you’re going to walk in their shoes, why not really walk in their shoes?

Increasingly, the IT career path demands this from IT leaders. IT careers are bifurcating into two groups: The uber-specialists with deep technical knowledge, and IT executives who can manage as business analysts. The great middle of IT organizations is falling away, says Barbara Cooper, CIO for Toyota Operations of North America. So getting very deep technically -– or getting that deep knowledge of the business, will be the career path choices.

The vast middle tier of administrative IT functions will become commoditized and “sourceable,” Cooper says. “What’s sweeping away is the bureaucratic layer of managers who are mostly administrative in nature. You’re either up and into this new frontier or you’re sourced.”

“The thing that’s left is the consultative roles around serious business problem solving and investment strategies for solutions sets for the business,” Cooper adds. She has actively recruited from the business to fill those new positions, but it’s easier to groom someone from the IT side to learn the business acumen than the other way around. It is, she says, “a new breed.”

At Toyota the door to IT now swings both ways. A former CIO for sales and distribution at Toyota, whom Cooper had managed and mentored, left IT to work in the business side. Three years later Cooper hired him back as part of her succession plan. If a tour of duty in the business is important, good mentoring is essential to develop a mature, nuanced management style and to develop the political skills to make it happen, Cooper says.

That’s what happened with another mentee of Coopers: 2011 Computerworld Premier 100 IT award winner Doug Beebe, formerly corporate manager of information systems, who was recently recruited by the business to a new position as corporate manager of real estate and facilities.

Cooper may have lost Beebe — that’s a consequence of developing strong business acument and leadership skills in your management. But she’s not worried about the brain drain. “This is a way station in his journey for broadening and rounding out his experience. I have a notion that he is destined to come back to the IT line of business.”

Facebook, Google, Tech, YouTube

Google, Facebook promise new IPv6 services after successful trial

Google leaves IPv6 on for YouTube; Facebook adds IPv6 to developers’ site; Yahoo sees ‘minimal risk’ to IPv6
One day after completing a successful 24-hour trial of IPv6, Facebook, Google and Yahoo said at a joint press conference that they would begin permanently supporting this upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol on some of their key websites.

 

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Joined by two content delivery networks — Akamai and Limelight, which also pledged their commitment to IPv6 deployment — these popular websites proclaimed the World IPv6 Day trial to be a resounding success. All three companies said they had handled a significant increase in IPv6 traffic on June 8 without suffering serious technical glitches.

IPv6 features an expanded addressing scheme, so it can handle vastly more devices connected directly to the Internet than its predecessor called IPv4. However, IPv6 is not backward compatible with IPv4, which means website operators have to upgrade their network equipment and software to support IPv6 traffic.

Google said it has decided to leave its main YouTube website enabled for IPv6 for the time being. Since 2008, Google has supported IPv6 on separate websites — such as www.ipv6.google.com — rather than on its main websites.

“We saw 65% growth in our IPv6 traffic on World IPv6 Day,” said Lorenzo Colitti, IPv6 Software Engineer at Google, who pointed out that Google added IPv6 support to several new services including Orkut for the trial. “This event has really been successful in galvanizing the community.”

“At Facebook, we saw over 1 million of our users reach us over IPv6,” said Don Lee, senior network engineer at Facebook. “There were no technical glitches in this 24-hour period. We were encouraged by the many positive comments on our blog. … It is really interesting to see how passionate people were about IPv6 around the world.”

Because of the positive results from World IPv6 Day, Facebook has decided to support IPv6 on its Website for developers, which is www.developers.facebook.com.

“We will continue to adapt our entire code base to support IPv6,” Lee added. “IPv6 will allow the Internet to continue its amazing development.”

BY THE NUMBERS: IPv6 traffic surges at launch of World IPv6 Day

World IPv6 Day was held yesterday and was sponsored by the Internet Society. The event attracted 400-plus corporate, government and university participants that deployed IPv6 on more than 1,000 websites for the day.

Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the Internet Society, said World IPv6 Day was designed to motivate service providers, website operators, hardware makers and software suppliers to test-drive IPv6 and to identify any remaining technical issues that need to be resolved with this emerging technology.

“It was perceived to be quite a successful day,” Daigle said. “It was an amazing display of cross-industry participation. … It’s an important step in the Internet’s progress. We are running out of IPv4 addresses, and IPv6 is definitely the way to move forward to make sure the Internet is a platform for innovation.”

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Logon Triggers – SQL Server 2008 R2

Logon triggers fire stored procedures in response to a LOGON event. This event is raised when a user session is established with an instance of SQL Server. Logon triggers fire after the authentication phase of logging in finishes, but before the user session is actually established. Therefore, all messages originating inside the trigger that would typically reach the user, such as error messages and messages from the PRINT statement, are diverted to the SQL Server error log. Logon triggers do not fire if authentication fails.

 

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You can use logon triggers to audit and control server sessions, such as by tracking login activity, restricting logins to SQL Server, or limiting the number of sessions for a specific login. For example, in the following code, the logon trigger denies log in attempts to SQL Server initiated by login login_test if there are already three user sessions created by that login.
Copy

USE master;
GO
CREATE LOGIN login_test WITH PASSWORD = ‘3KHJ6dhx(0xVYsdf’ MUST_CHANGE,
CHECK_EXPIRATION = ON;
GO
GRANT VIEW SERVER STATE TO login_test;
GO
CREATE TRIGGER connection_limit_trigger
ON ALL SERVER WITH EXECUTE AS ‘login_test’
FOR LOGON
AS
BEGIN
IF ORIGINAL_LOGIN()= ‘login_test’ AND
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sys.dm_exec_sessions
WHERE is_user_process = 1 AND
original_login_name = ‘login_test’) > 3
ROLLBACK;
END;

Note that the LOGON event corresponds to the AUDIT_LOGIN SQL Trace event, which can be used in event notifications. The primary difference between triggers and event notifications is that triggers are raised synchronously with events, whereas event notifications are asynchronous. This means, for example, that if you want to stop a session from being established, you must use a logon trigger. An event notification on an AUDIT_LOGIN event cannot be used for this purpose.

Google, Tech

Google Releases Stable Version of Chrome 12

Google Chrome 12 is now the stable release of Google’s web browser, bringing several improvements in security, privacy and graphics capabilities.

 

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Chrome now checks downloaded files for malware, and Google claims it has designed the feature in such a way that it doesn’t have to know which URLs you visited or which files you downloaded to be able to detect malicious files.

You can now also fine tune the data that websites store on your computer, including Flash Player’s Local Shared Objects (also known as Flash cookies), directly from Chrome.

On the graphics front, Chrome 12 includes support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, which enables some nifty effects such as rotating and scaling videos. Try this Chrome Experiment to see some of the new features in action.

Finally, Chrome 12 brings several minor improvements such as an improved interface for setting a homepage and searching for Chrome Apps directly from the address bar.

Google Chrome 12 is available at www.google.com/chrome. Existing users will be automatically updated to the new version in the next couple of days.

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Microsoft promises Windows 8 details tomorrow?

Microsoft appears to be readying a more in-depth look at its forthcoming Windows 8 platform at the Computex event in Taipei tomorrow.

According to Engadget, during Microsoft’s Computex Keynote Steven Guggenheimer, corporate VP for the OEM division, said that the company will announce plans for the ‘next version’ of Windows.

 

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Given the multiple claims and retractions around Windows 8 so far, we’re loathe to say Ballmer’s Bunch is going to show off screenshots or give a Windows 8 release date, but it seems the company is finally ready to talk to the world about the new platform.

Tablet time?

Earlier reports suggest that Microsoft will be showing off its new Windows 8 tablet platform, which may be limited to a single set of reference specifications, in a similar way to Windows Phone 7.

Windows 8 is set to be an evolution to the popular PC platform, featuring UI tweaks and mostly improving the speed of users’s systems

However, given that Microsoft only recently came out and denied Ballmer’s claims that Windows 8 even exists, we’re intrigued to see what will be spoken about tomorrow at 10AM Taipei time (2AM to us Brits).

Tech

Tips for picking an IaaS provider II

However, you will need to make sure your outsourcer’s expertise matches up with your IaaS of choice. “A lot of these guys already have a cloud practice, managing at least the Amazon cloud. But the key thing is to make sure the company can demonstrate experience managing the cloud instance you’ll be using,” he cautions.

 


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Managing the load

A second option is to select a traditional hosting company that has developed a cloud infrastructure and has a services arm that will help you manage the operating system, applications and anything else you’d like.

IaaS providers of this ilk include AT&T, Fujitsu, GoGrid, HP, IBM, NaviSite, Rackspace, SoftLayer, SunGard and Verizon Business, which includes Terremark.

“You’re making a decision that you’re going to use this particular cloud, and you’re not necessarily going to value portability nor are you going to value having multiple clouds,” Staten says.

“This company’s expertise is going to be limited to its cloud, but those consultants are probably the most knowledgeable about what the cloud can do, and they’ll have insider tricks because the guys who built the cloud sit right next to them,” Staten says.

The data center host-cum-cloud IaaS provider model has worked perfectly for SaaS provider Cycle30, Jim Dunlap says, company president.

When the Cycle 30 team received the go-ahead to create a subsidiary, it decided not to spend “precious capital” on building its own data centers but rather to partner with a traditional hosting company, SunGard. “And that gave us the opportunity to look at our business model and determine whether or not we could use cloud computing as a way to decrease our cost of going to market,” he says.

Its cloud theory was put to the test right off the bat, Dunlap says.

“We had the immediate need to test the process of giving SunGard our specs and systems to clone, and telling them that they’d need to turn up 25 to 50 new environments in the course of a week. And that we’d want to use that cloud computing facility for six to nine months, then we’d be done and they’d need to turn the facilities down and we’d stop paying for that infrastructure,” Dunlap says.

It worked – so much so that Cycle30 now handles all such projects via SunGard’s managed cloud service, he adds.

IaaS is smart choice for ConnectEDU

The third option for managed IaaS, Staten says, is pure-play cloud managers – companies such as Cloudscaling. “What you’re buying here is 100% pure expertise in the cloud. They know how to best take advantage of the cloud and what’s unique to cloud environments,” he says.
Cloud first

The difference between a Capgemini and a Cloudscaling, for example, is that the former approaches the cloud from an enterprise perspective, so manages the cloud from an operational point of view, while the latter thinks cloud first and so has an application design viewpoint.

“As a result, a pure-play cloud provider can put things in the cloud and can do things programmatically that can help you reduce your cloud bill, improve the availability of your application and recommend changes in your application design to get better cloud economics,” Staten explains. .

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Vendors offer a variety of options, from pure-play to managed services
By Beth Schultz, Network World
June 06, 2011 12:08 AM ET

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Making the leap to a public cloud infrastructure requires careful planning.

As Gartner analyst Lydia Leong cautions in a recent report, the cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market “is immature, the services are all unique and evolving rapidly, and vendors must be chosen with care.”

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With such a provider, for example, you could drop an application onto Amazon EC2 or other cloud and then have its consultants manage it for you. It’s not a bad way to go, he adds. “They can tweak your application and its deployment, push it across multiple geographies and do a whole bunch of other things that you don’t have a clue how to do and probably don’t even know that you could do such things in the cloud.”

Cloud IaaS services, managed or not, are becoming viable options for enterprise deployments of all sorts. They offer a nice foundational starting point in some cases, quick on and off in others and business-enabling infrastructure in others. There are caveats, of course, with the one painful lesson learned of late with the Amazon EC2 outage – have high availability and disaster recovery plans in place with your provider of choice.

Tech

Tips for picking an IaaS provider

Making the leap to a public cloud infrastructure requires careful planning.

As Gartner analyst Lydia Leong cautions in a recent report, the cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market “is immature, the services are all unique and evolving rapidly, and vendors must be chosen with care.”

 

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Six tough questions for your next IAAS vendor

The temptation may be to first look to vendors with which you have a pre-existing relationship, but experts say you want to be sure you ask the right questions.

For example, Post-n-Track, an online healthcare transaction and information exchange based in Wethersfield, Conn., decided to move to cloud computing for scalability and flexibility.

The company found out that its managed services provider, NaviSite, was building up a cloud infrastructure, says Randy Ulloa, vice president of technology at Post-n-Track. “We immediately jumped on that potential and dug into how it was going to achieve its cloud service,” he says.

But a good working history with NaviSite didn’t make the company a shoo-in for Post-n-Track’s cloud business, Ulloa emphasizes. “It wasn’t until we understood its physical cloud architecture – the underlying CPU and storage builds and the software and management layers on top – that we could put our minds at ease and decide to take the next step with it,” he says.

When moving to IaaS, some IT executives, such as Schumacher Group CIO Doug Menefee, look first to the market leader, Amazon EC2.

While already running 85% of its business processes in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, Schumacher only recently ventured into cloud IaaS. The impetus was an internal data center glitch experienced over the Christmas holiday, Menefee says.

10 SaaS companies to watch

“That was a big wake up call. And recognizing the maturity level of site services like Amazon EC2, we’ve now decided to leverage external cloud service providers to provide the infrastructure for anything we don’t have to put inside our own data centers,” he says. “We don’t want to be a single point of failure for the organization.”
Managed IaaS

To some users, IaaS is about being able to carve out a private space within the public cloud infrastructure. They get similar availability, cost and scalability benefits as they do with pure IaaS, without the security concerns related to sharing infrastructure with others. Others like the idea of cloud IaaS but want some hand-holding rather than the purely self-service model.

Many enterprises, like Post-n-Track, fall into this latter category, as might be expected given IT’s comfort level with using outsourcers and hosting providers for management help, says James Staten, principal analyst with Forrester Research.

Managed IaaS comes in three forms, Staten says.

If you’re already using an IT outsourcer such as Accenture, Capgemini or IBM, going with that provider for managed IaaS can be the “cleanest, easiest and quickest” option, he says. “It already knows your systems, your applications and what SLAs you care about.”

Google, Tech

Google Doodle Honors 92nd Birthday of ‘Busytown’ Creator Richard Scarry

Google’s Sunday homepage doodle honors what would have been the 92nd birthday of childrens’ book author Richard Scarry.

The doodle features a scene from “Busytown,” a fictional world created by Scarry, which is inhabited by well-known characters like Postman Pig, Huckle Cat, Sergeant Murphy, and Lowly Worm. Click through the main doodle, and the smaller homepage doodle on the top left replaces the “l” in Google with Lowly Worm.

 

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Scarry was born in Boston in 1919, and his comfortable childhood is reflected in the more than 300 books he produced during his life, according to a biography published by Sterling Children’s Book. He attended the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but was later drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II. He was sent to North Africa, where he was the art director, editor, writer and illustrator in the Morale Services Section of Allied Forces HQ.
Richard Scarry doodle

Scarry worked at various magazines after the war, but also pursued freelance work as an illustrator; he drew the pictures that went alongside the text for childrens’ books. His first book, “Great Big Car and Truck Book,” was published in 1951 by Little Golden Books. Simon and Schuster published five more that same year.

Scarry’s first best seller, however, came in 1963 with “Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever.” The book featured pages chock full of items for young children to discover; more than 1,400 in all.

Scarry is known for books featuring anthropomorphic animals living in the fictional Busytown. As he explained to Publishers Weekly, “children can identify more closely with pictures of animals than they can with pictures of another child. They see an illustration of a blond girl or a dark-haired boy, who they know is somebody other than themselves, and competition creeps in. With imagination—and children all have marvelous imagination—they can easily identify with an anteater who is a painter or a pig who transforms from peasant to knight.”
Lowly Worm

Scarry’s characters have not been confined to books. The “Best Ever” series was made into animated videos. The world of Busytown was also made into an animated series, “The Busy World of Richard Scarry,” which ran on Nick. Jr. from 1995 to 2000.

Scarry and his family re-located to Gstaad, Switzerland in 1972, where Scarry worked until his death in 1994. His books have sold over 200 million copies in 30 languages.

Google, meanwhile, has made headlines for its own in-house homepage doodles, including an interactive undersea-themed drawing in honor of author Jules Verne’s 183rd birthday and 17 holiday-themed doodles that were live for two days in December. Recently, Google.com also featured 16 homepage doodles in honor of what would have been the 76th birthday of children’s author Roger Hargreaves, who wrote the Mr. Men and Little Miss series, and dancer/choreographer Martha Graham.

Recently, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering “systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site.”

California second grader Matteo Lopez was recently selected as the winner of this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition. His space-themed doodle was featured on the Google homepage on May 20, and he took home a $15,000 college scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for his school.

For more on Google’s doodles, see the slideshow below.

Tech

The Peculiar Origins of Tech Terms

Earlier this year, PCMag offered up a brief history of malware. While researching the story, we had a little back and forth regarding the origin of the term “computer virus.”

One side had contended that the phrase first appeared in the science fiction book When HARLIE Was One. The other insisted that it was coined by computer scientist Fred Cohen. The former ultimately won out on account of chronology (1972 versus 1983), but Cohen got the nod for the first mention of the term in an academic paper. (Interestingly, it’s been subsequently brought to my attention that the term “computer virus” also popped up in a 1982 issue of The Uncanny X-Men, penned by Chris Claremont.)

 

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Interestingly, someone also commented that the term “worm” was also born in sci-fi—this time in John Brunner’s 1975 bit of dystopia, The Shockwave Rider. It’s likely not a major revelation to most that a number of well-known tech terms actually originated on the pulpy pages of sci-fi novels.

Science fiction authors often draw on current advances in technology in order to predict the future, and computer developers often read a lot of science fiction. Take, for instance, “cyberspace,” which entered the lexicon by way of William Gibson’s short story “Burning Chrome,” and later his beloved 1984 novel, Neuromancer.

This got us thinking about the origins of other well-known tech terms. Turns out, many were born from far more diverse sources than just the predictions of science fiction authors. In this slideshow, we’ve pointed out familiar terms that were born from comedy sketches, comic books, practical jokes, and children’s stories, and there’s even one that started life as an airport shuttle.