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Tag: distributed computing

  • Akamai Launches Gecko Edge Computing Services

    Akamai Launches Gecko Edge Computing Services

    Akamai Technologies today launched an initiative that promises to make it simpler to centrally manage and deploy application workloads on edge computing platforms.

    Shawn Michels, vice president for product management for cloud computing Akamai, said a Generalized Edge Compute (Gecko) offering leverages the global points of presence (PoPs) that Akamai uses for its content delivery network (CDN) to now deploy application workload managed via the Linode cloud service the company acquired in 2022.

    At the core of this offering is a set of virtual machines that enable a full stack of application software to be deployed in an edge computing environment to eliminate latency that would otherwise be encountered when transferring data to a cloud computing environment. The ultimate goal is to provide IT organizations with a federated set of services they can employ to process data where it makes the most sense based on performance requirements, said Michels.

    For example, applications infused with artificial intelligence (AI) will need to be able to invoke enough compute resources to run inference engines at the edge, while other less compute-intensive application workloads are best deployed in cloud computing environments, he noted.

    Michels added that rather than locking IT teams into a specific architecture, Akamai is committing to meeting IT organizations where they are, including adding support for containers running on Kubernetes clusters in its PoPs later this year.

    Akamai has more than 4,100 points of presence around the globe. With the acquisition of Linode, Akamai added a set of cloud computing services to compete directly against hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google by making cloud services available at a lower cost at a time when more organizations than ever are concerned about the total cost of IT.

    In its first phase of Gecko, Akamai will provide access to virtual machines in 100 locations by the end of the year. Akamai has already deployed Gecko servers in Hong Kong SAR; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Querétaro, Mexico; and Johannesburg, South Africa, as well as in cities without a concentrated hyperscaler presence, including Bogotá, Colombia; Denver, Colorado; Houston, Texas; Hamburg, Germany; and Marseille, France. Deployment of a tenth Gecko region this quarter is planned for Santiago, Chile. Akamai is committing to adding hundreds of cities to its global cloud computing footprint over the next several years.

    In the longer term, Akamai also plans to add automated workload orchestration to make it easier for developers to build applications across hundreds of distributed locations.

    More workloads than ever are being deployed at the network edge as IT teams look to deploy software closer to the point where data is being created and consumed. That will require extending the reach of existing DevOps workflows to edge computing environments that will be based on everything from x86 and Arm processors to graphical processor units (GPUs).

    The challenge, as always, will be finding a way to effectively manage those workloads when the IT teams responsible for them are often physically located thousands of miles away.

  • Quali Adds Control Plane to Platform to Manage IaC

    Quali Adds Control Plane to Platform to Manage IaC

    Quali has added a control plane to its Torque platform to give DevOps teams the ability to consistently provision and orchestrate infrastructure across a heterogeneous distributed computing environment.

    Amir Rosenberg, vice president of product for Quali, said the control plane allows DevOps team to centrally manage the provisioning of infrastructure via reusable blueprints accessed via a self-service portal, which individual developers can access. That approach eliminates a bottleneck that occurs when DevOps teams manually provision infrastructure on behalf of development teams, he said.

    The latest release of Torque also adds enhanced visibility and cost control capabilities such as the ability to set limits for maximum duration and number of concurrent environments and limits for the total cost of an environment. Also included are cost reporting tools for Kubernetes clusters and improved forecasting and resource consumption policies that can be applied to blueprints, sandboxes and spaces.

    Security enhancements include new customizable role-based access to blueprints, API Token Controls and integrations with secrets management platforms.

    Through its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Quali makes it possible to access Torque via either a cloud account or a user interface that connects to a GitHub account where blueprints are stored. The goal is to enable DevOps teams to maintain some control over how infrastructure is provisioned without impeding developer productivity, said Rosenberg, noting at a time when more organizations than ever are launching multiple application development projects, there is more sensitivity concerning developer velocity than ever.

    It’s a fact that infrastructure misconfigurations happen because developers make mistakes. It’s not uncommon for a port to be left open, for example, which cybercriminals later exploit to exfiltrate data. Quali is offering a DevOps platform that makes it possible to centrally apply policies that act as guardrails to prevent developers from making provisioning mistakes. An alternative to scripts created using tools such as Terraform, the blueprints can deploy complete application environments automatically. That approach also provides more visibility into how resources are being consumed.

    Every minute a developer spends managing infrastructure theoretically is one less minute they could be spending writing code. As application environments become more complex, Rosenberg noted it’s becoming that much more challenging for developers to cope with managing infrastructure as code. The issue is that DevOps teams who could provision infrastructure for developers are being overwhelmed by the number of projects they need to manage. As a result, DevOps teams are becoming bottlenecks. Naturally, that only encourages more developers to provision infrastructure on their own, which, Rosenberg noted, leads to more mistakes being made.

    It’s not clear when or even whether IT organizations will look for an alternative to provision infrastructure in a way that doesn’t rely on developers as much, but most seem to agree that developers have far better things to do with their time.

  • The 4 Stages of Distributed Computing

    The 4 Stages of Distributed Computing

  • Is Your Infrastructure Ready for Edge Computing?

    Is Your Infrastructure Ready for Edge Computing?

    Like many IT innovations, edge computing began with engineers as a natural extension of technology to address a growing need. The concept isn’t new; distributed computing has been around for decades. But, at the same time standards began to converge and edge hardware started making the rounds at trade shows, the hype machine saw an opportunity. It amplified edge’s considerable promise in reducing latency, offering software-defined deployment, decreasing cloud networking costs and more. But as is too often the case, the bold feature bullets ignored the production concerns businesses must address, including edge computing’s rough spots and the additional operations complexity it adds.

    Of course, edge computing will survive a little overexcited promotion, just like many of the once improbable technologies before it. People used to say, “What? Abstract all my data center applications away from the hardware as virtual servers? Impossible!” A decade later, we can’t imagine how we’d deliver traditional enterprise services, cloud computing, online retail, media streaming and everything else in between without exactly this. Virtualization survived its awkward hype adolescence, and edge computing will, too. The needs edge computing addresses are only growing.

    Thanks to engineers and operations teams, the edge distributed model is moving toward practical use. It’s proving itself capable of meeting requirements for new levels of network performance through reduced latency, scalability and, more importantly, manageability. For some businesses, it’s even reducing costs over the long haul.

    Not All Data Is Created Equal

    With the proliferation of connected devices and a growing focus on 5G-enabled technology, tech pros should set aside their natural reluctance to wade through the edge hype and consider it a genuine possibility. Its adoption is following the rise of emerging technologies and the applications taking best advantage of it: 5G, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, IoT and smart manufacturing. These environments require not only low upstream latency, but high-performance compute and timely result data. Light only travels so fast, pushing infrastructure closer and closer to consumers for faster, more seamless processing in the form of brand-differentiating user experiences.

  • The Mystical, Magical World of Distributed Computing

    The Mystical, Magical World of Distributed Computing

  • NetFoundry Network Overlay Advances DevSecOps

    NetFoundry Network Overlay Advances DevSecOps

    NetFoundry, at the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 conference, announced the general availability of a developer platform designed to make it easier for organizations to bake a zero trust networking framework within their applications.

    Company CEO Galeal Zino said NetFoundry has created a network fabric overlay to manage and secure communications between endpoints and applications. Developers now can embed a programmable zero trust networking framework within their applications using a NetFoundry Developer Platform, which consists of software development kits, application programming interfaces (APIs) and connectors, said Zino. DevOps teams can either consume the entire NetFoundry Developer Platform or only the open source components that have been included.

    At the same time, NetFoundry announced it has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to advance the adoption of open source networking services for containerized applications.

    NetFoundry

    Rather than having to become intimately familiar with networking protocols, Zino says NetFoundry provides a layer of abstraction using software to eliminate the need to rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) or network address translation (NAT) tools.

    As the number of endpoints and applications they need to connect to have significantly increased, DevOps teams are finding they need to master each type of dedicated network established for endpoints ranging from mobile computing devices to internet of things (IoT). That endeavor can be cumbersome at best. NetFoundry is making the case for a programmable network overlay that allows endpoints to access applications over public internet connections securely.

    As programmable overlays become more widely available, the rate at which network operations will be incorporated into best DevOps processes is likely to increase. Network managers will continue to set up the physical underlay that enables networking; however, how applications employ that underlay increasingly will be determined by invoking a programmable overlay. A programmable network overlay also provides the benefit of further separation of duties between DevOps teams and networking professionals in a way that doesn’t require networking teams to become deeply involved in every application development project.

    That approach should reduce significantly the amount of time now required to deploy or update a distributed computing application. DevOps teams today may be able to push code into production faster than ever. However, configuring the networking services those applications require remains a set of manual tasks that have become a significant bottleneck to making IT teams more agile.

    It remains to be seen to what degree programmable network overlays will provide something of a demilitarized zone (DMZ) between DevOps teams and networking professionals. Today most networking services are provided via either directly on top of networking infrastructure or using network overlays controlled by networking teams. But it still takes days to weeks for networking professionals to respond to requests for services from DevOps teams. It’s clear the way networking services are provisioned across the enterprise needs to change substantially.

    — Mike Vizard

  • DevOps in the Age of Blockchain

    DevOps in the Age of Blockchain

    The current state of software development results in a lot of redundant efforts. The same functionality is built repeatedly, which is a waste of time and resources for a company. Open source has been a partial solution, but doesn’t fully solve the problem of reliable code upgrades, which are critical for sustaining a high speed of innovation. This especially acute in decentralized networks, where new releases must be pushed to potentially thousands of independent nodes. While blockchain has become one of the biggest buzzwords of 2018, it’s important to explore how this technology will apply to developers’ workflow in the coming years.

    The DevOps culture has been making inroads to fixing this central issue by streamlining and automating the delivery processes. By taking ownership of all levels of the development cycle—increased release frequency, construction, testing, integration—software developers have been better able to keep up with business objectives.

    From a business perspective, the principles inherent in DevOps are great, but they are only the first step. While automation and continuous integration has helped speed up the development process, utilizing blockchain technology can become one way to help make the process both instantaneous and transparent.

    Upgrading Contracts

    A major distinction between a DevOps team in its current iteration and blockchain-era continuous integration is smart contract upgradability. A traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) company has full control over versions of software it publishes to its servers. In distributed blockchain-based networks, upgrading smart contract code is not that trivial and often is not even supported natively (e.g. in Ethereum).

    Distributed governance is still in the early days, and since every upgrade to smart contracts has to go through the governing procedures it is difficult to come up with a single solution addressing most models. This leads to manual error-prone implementations of smart contract migrations that can cause bugs, financial losses and even inability to make further upgrades. Standards and tools are yet to emerge in this arena.

    That said, it is easy to see how blockchain-based code migrations adds transparency and accountability comparing to centralized systems, where a single entity has full control over the application logic and can alter it at any time without regard for consumer interests. Use of the blockchain in this case is not meant to take over a DevOps team, but rather to integrate with the work of the team and make the process more transparent to all parties involved.

    Supporting Developers

    Not all developers currently have the skill set to create on the blockchain. But this is an issue of interest in protocol-level details, and time. Instead of expecting developers to learn every line of code and configuration used in blockchain applications, we need tools for common use cases in enterprise software so that developers aren’t reinventing the wheel every time. Again, this speaks to the complementary nature of blockchain technologies to DevOps. We want to create a suite of tools to make the DevOps experience even more effortless.

    In the emerging age of blockchain, DevOps still contributes the best practices needed in getting software released. By adding blockchain applications and tools to the development cycle of DevOps teams, DevOps will reach new heights of productivity.

    — Andrei Anisimov