devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: interoperability

  • CNCF Advances CloudEvents Specification

    CNCF Advances CloudEvents Specification

    In a move that portends well for future cloud interoperability initiatives, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today announced that the open source CloudEvents specification for describing event data had achieved a version 1.0 milestone.

    Doug Davis, senior technical staff member of IBM and co-chair of CNCF’s Serverless WG and the CloudEvents project, said CloudEvents will make it possible to not only define common attributes of an event to facilitate interoperability, but also make it easier to share those attributes between, for example, a repository such as GitHub and an application or tool that needs to consume those events.

    With that foundation in place, it also should become easier to build tools spanning serverless and event-driven architectures, he added.

    Work on the CloudEvents specification began in May 2018 as a sandbox project. With the release of CloudEvents 1.0, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) is now designating CloudEvents as an incubation project. Active contributors to the CloudEvents project include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Red Hat and VMware. In fact, CloudEvents has already been implanted within the Eventing framework of Knative, an open source middleware project led by Google to integrate Kubernetes with various serverless computing frameworks. Other platforms that support CloudEvents include Microsoft Azure Event Grid, Red Hat EventFlow, Eclipse Vert.x and Debezium, SAP Kyma and the Event Gateway from Serverless.com.

    Davis said given the level of support for CloudEvents project, there is reason to be optimistic for future cloud interoperability initiatives. Cloud interoperability has been hampered by a dizzying array of application programming interfaces that often are proprietary. CloudEvents represents one of the few interoperability projects that has drawn support from all the major cloud service providers. Part of the success CloudEvents has enjoyed in that regard can be attributed to the limited scope of the initiative, he noted.

    It may be a while before organizations don’t have to worry about being locked into a cloud. However, as a general rule of thumb the more they focus on de facto specifications and application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed by platforms such as Kubernetes, the easier it will be to move applications from one platform to another. In many cases, DevOps teams today routinely struggle with moving applications that might have been developed on a public cloud onto an on-premises production environment. Longer term, it’s also expected IT leaders will want to be able to negotiate lower rates from cloud services providers by threatening to move workloads between cloud service providers.

    In the meantime, as event-driven architectures such as serverless computing frameworks continue to become more popular, IT leaders can take some comfort in the fact that interoperability across these architectures is advancing. Of course, it’s too early to say when the CloudEvents specification will become a fully graduated CNCF project, but it is already apparent many cloud service providers are not waiting on that official recognition before implementing it. The challenge and opportunity for DevOps teams now are to figure out how best to employ this capability to create new applications that previously would have been too difficult even to attempt.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Eclipse Foundation Looks to Create Cloud-Based IDE Standards

    Eclipse Foundation Looks to Create Cloud-Based IDE Standards

    The Eclipse Foundation today announced the formation of a working group to create standards for cloud-based integrated development environments (IDEs) led by Broadcom, EclipseSource, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, SAP, Software AG and Typefox.

    Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said the Eclipse Cloud Development Tools Working Group (ECD WG) will work to replicate the success the Eclipse Foundation had in establishing standards for desktop IDEs based on an Eclipse standard among a new generation of cloud-based IDEs.

    There already are several cloud-based IDEs available. However, because each of those IDEs is based on a codebase that differs from the codebase used to create the Eclipse desktop IDE, there is no interoperability across cloud-based IDEs. Milinkovich said that makes collaboration between developers using different cloud-based IDEs all but impossible as currently there is simply too much differentiation among providers of cloud-based IDEs.

    As standards for cloud-based IDEs emerge, the Eclipse Foundation also expects best DevOps practices revolving around the integration of cloud-based IDEs and continuous integration/continuous development tools to advance as well, Milinkovich added.

    Collectively, the ECD WG will drive adoption and standards for cloud-based developer tools, including language support, extensions and developer workspace definition. To achieve that goal, the ECG WD will pull together oversight of several existing open source projects being spearheaded by the Eclipse Foundation, including Eclipse Theia, an IDE framework for building TypeScript applications; Eclipse CodeWind, a project that adds support for containers to IDEs based on Eclipse; Eclipse Dirigible, a cloud-based development platform developed by SAP; Eclipse Sprotty, a diagramming framework; and Eclipse Orion, a browser-based integration platform.

    Milinkovich said via those efforts, the ECD WG hopes to accelerate the adoption of cloud integrated development environment (IDE) and container-based workspace management, including the recently launched Che 7 project that makes available a native instance of Eclipse to build Java applications for Kubernetes environments.

    It may be a while before the ECD WG can create a set of standards for cloud-based IDEs that will have a material impact on application development. The Eclipse Foundation still has to bring numerous application development powerhouses on board for this project, including Microsoft and, once the acquisition of Pivotal Software is completed, VMware. However, organizations that are shifting development to the cloud at the very least can take comfort in the fact that there is now some level of commitment to creating interoperability standards that one day could increase overall developer productivity as more applications are built in the cloud.

    In the meantime, it’s apparent the Eclipse Foundation is committed to remaining relevant in the age of the cloud by both fostering IDE interoperability and acting as the steward for Jakarta Enterprise Edition, the open source follow-on to Java. Of course, not every IDE may be employed to build applications using Java. But at the very least, many of the familiar interfaces and constructs developers know today on their desktops will be moving forward into the cloud.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Will Blockchain Move Past Hype to Reality?

    Will Blockchain Move Past Hype to Reality?

    Blockchain has hit peak “hype,” according to Gartner’s recently published “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.” The financial world has been very optimistic about blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT)—the underlying technology behind bitcoin—and the impending disruption it can bring to the way the financial system works.

    Although the initial buzz around bitcoin has gradually died down over the last couple of years, DLT has gained a lot of traction in the industry. As a concept, distributed ledger and open network with encrypted data brings vast opportunities for ideation. But will it only be hype? Or will blockchain graduate from the lab environment to the real world? Only time will tell, but the idea of distributed ledger is here to stay.

    From Idea to Adoption

    Any new technology will go through its hype cycle before settling down with the complex reality of business adoption. Blockchain is most likely going through the cycle at this point in time. It may not be panacea for all the challenges faced by the industry today, but it definitely shows some initial promise of being a game-changer.

    We have very rarely seen industry cooperation like this for a new technology.  Financial institutions are excited and rightly so. Global financial markets potentially can save as much as $80 billion in operating costs if blockchain becomes a mainstream technology.

    The application of blockchain will exceed hype only when it addresses the core issues financial institutions face today: simplification and security. While cost takeout is a great value proposition, I believe that adoption of blockchain as a technology fundamentally should revolve around rationalizing the process value chain and providing robust security. Some of the initial use cases for financial services firms show a lot of promise, from the process simplification and digitization perspective leveraging distributed ledger, but there is still significant ground to cover before it becomes real.

    Why Blockchain Isn’t There Yet

    There is exciting amount of exploratory traction around blockchain use cases, but the reality is that no financial institution has yet implemented blockchain in production, and I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.

    The success of blockchain as a technology hinges on three factors:

    Security – Recent lapses in bitcoin exchange and virtual robberies of digital money pose a significant threat to the underlying technology (blockchain itself). In a world where each participant will have his or her own private key, there will be many hurdles to cross in the barriers of data security. How safe will it be? How quickly will it scale up to expose all the vulnerabilities?

    Dealing with legacy – Many technologies have matured over the years, yet banks still run on mainframes! How blockchain interoperates with the legacy infrastructure in banks will be the most important aspect to watch out for. Is the idea to build a greenfield environment and re-imagine the financial world more pragmatic?

    Trust – Data ownership traditionally has been a source of power. Digital currency and federated data over blockchain will change the very existence of political hierarchies. How will businesses deal with it?

    Still, it’s a good bet to have in your long-term portfolio.

    Bill Gates once said, “we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.”

    Although its foundational blocks are really solid, blockhain’s mainstream adoption in the near future is going to be tough. Hawk-eyed regulators will be picky about security threats and any negative news. But the collaboration on this technology is unprecedented and bodes well for the future, so I’m optimistic blockchain will become a reality at some point in time. Going by the wisdom of Bill Gates, I’m looking at five to seven years.

    About the Author / Mohit Sinha

    mohit-sinhaMohit Sinha is a client partner in the Finance Solutions group at Wipro Digital and currently manages the relationship with a top tier Investment Bank in London. He has over 14 years of experience spanning domain consulting and client relationship management in the Investment Banking and Wealth Management domain. He has been part of successful delivery of transformation initiatives across UK and Europe CIB and PWM, Derivatives Operations, SEPA transformation and CIB/PB Order and Trade Management areas. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

  • Industry Alignment: Supporting Real-World DevOps Workflows

    Industry Alignment: Supporting Real-World DevOps Workflows

    In our ongoing work to advance the interests of customers around adoption of Agile, DevOps and continuous delivery, the theme of evolving workflows to better suit human-scale work cycles often comes to the fore.

    While  it’s easy to say that build, test, release and monitoring capacities should feed into each other to promote continuous collaboration, realizing this vision in the form of integrated tooling is still no trivial feat. And it is further exacerbated by the reality that DevOps teams typically utilize a wide range of products built by a diverse set of providers, from larger players such as CA Technologies to open-source projects.

    If the goal is to drive  application lifecycle processes and supporting technology to better support human work cycles—along with accelerating organizational velocity and improving quality—somewhere in this domain of tooling integration there’s a need for relevant vendors to participate.

    That work officially begins today.

    At the Jenkins World 2016 conference this week, CA, along with a dozen other leading DevOps solutions providers and the DevOps Institute, announced the DevOps Express consortium. Joining us, along with CloudBees and Sonatype, which spearheaded this effort, are Atlassian, BlazeMeter, Chef, GitHub, Infostretch, JFrog, Puppet, Sauce Labs, SOASTA and SonarSource.

    So what’s the big deal? The direction of this initiative—which will focus first on supplying reference architectures that describe field-tested integrations of best-in-breed solutions—strikes directly at the heart of the central DevOps tenet: collaboration.

    The immediate result is that these providers are moving to boost interoperability across a typical production DevOps toolchain. It is truly noteworthy that these solutions providers, some of whom maintain palpable competitive interests, are putting aside those considerations to advance the interests of end users; that is a very DevOps phenomenon.

    In many other areas of IT, this type of cross-pollination either never commences or doesn’t emerge until the sector is so well-established that industry collaboration seems more of an effort to fend off perceptions of commoditization. To anyone familiar with the incredible pace of innovation ongoing in the automation sector, and the potential for competition between many of the companies involved in DevOps Express, it should be immediately obvious that this is a partnership that truly puts customers first.

    Yet, if we’re serious about empowering the kind of wholesale software factory reinvention that we espouse around DevOps, this is something that had to take place. How can an industry talk endlessly about eliminating stovepipes and marrying long disparate processes, and then defer to a walled garden worldview as it relates to the enabling products? That certainly wouldn’t really add up.

    It’s amazing to see what’s going on in the world of technology these days, and ever more exciting to be a part of it. We’re proud to be a member of DevOps Express.

    It’s a great time to be involved in this space.

    — Jeff Scheaffer