devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: softlayer

  • Lance Crosby’s Vision To Bring Scale, Speed and Security To Developers with StackPath

    Lance Crosby’s Vision To Bring Scale, Speed and Security To Developers with StackPath

    lancecrosby_headshot_2016The last most of us heard from Lance Crosby we thought he was riding off to an island sunset, to bask in the glow of a very successful exit from SoftLayer. The company he founded was bought by IBM for a few billion dollars to serve as the centerpiece of their cloud strategy. Many would have been content with that as their career. But Crosby isn’t done yet. His new vision is StackPath, whose mission is to bring scale, speed and security to developers.

    I had a chance to catch up with Lance recently and talk about StackPath. The company just emerged from stealth in July but already has over 100 employees and over thirty thousand customers. This is due to acquiring three companies pre-launch, “MaxCDN, a leading NextGen CDN company, Fireblade, an Israel-based company with patented cloud based WAF technology, and Cloak, a leading VPN technology company.” On top of this StackPath has developed some patented new DDOS mitigation technology. Of course DDOS attacks are all the rage now with everyone’s camera, refrigerator and any other connected device in on the action.

    From a DevOps point of view what I find interesting is that Crosby and StackPath have clearly targeted the developer, rather than the security admin or the Ops team with this offering. Even in the title of their press release announcing the StackPath platform and CDN they target developers, “StackPath Announces General Availability of Its Global Security Platform for Developers.”

    This is an interesting approach and one I spoke to Lance about. In Lance’s view there is a gap between those who build and design applications and those who operate and secure them. Empowering developers with a friction-less security solution is what StackPath’s mission is. It is the developers who need to be thinking about security and more importantly making it part of the equation. This idea is one that many in security have espoused, but usually because they feel developers have larger budgets than the security team.  But I don’t think that is the case here. Crosby knows both the security and developer markets from SoftLayer. He is trying to fill a need he saw while still at SoftLayer that he wasn’t able to offer then.

    The CDN service they announced wraps up the three technologies they acquired along with their DDOS mitigation. To me it seemed like a Cloudflare kind of offering. Crosby agrees that there are similarities, but the plan is to build out the platform far beyond what it offers now or what Cloudflare offers. Threat analysis and artificial intelligence are part of the future, as well as more.

    The company already raised a large first round led by ABRY Partners, a multi-billion dollar private equity fund. Of course Crosby has his own money available as well as no shortage of VC/private equity funds who would like to invest in his next adventure based on the success of SoftLayer.

    The security industry has been looking for cloud native, next generation solutions and StackPath could be one of these. At some point though you need to please multiple masters. In this case if you are going to sell developers security, at some point you need to get the security people on board as well. It will be interesting to see how StackPath continues to grow and expand in the market. Certainly a mix of organic solutions with a sprinkling of acquisitions appears to be the recipe Crosby and team are following.

    — Alan Shimel

  • SoftLayer Bare Metal Servers: Does the Cloud have to be virtual?

    SoftLayer Bare Metal Servers: Does the Cloud have to be virtual?

    SoftLayer announced new service level and features to their Bare Metal Servers today. Continuing their march towards delivering dedicated servers at virtual server pricing and service levels, SoftLayer announced that they will now offer setup in under 30 minutes and hourly billing options. The 30 minute set up is available on a variety of pre-configured hardware platforms with a choice of CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, or Ubuntu operating systems.

    I had a chance to speak with Marc Jones, CTO of SoftLayer about the new offering. Jones and SoftLayer have long held the belief that a hypervisor is not necessary for a cloud. In fact by giving customers their own dedicated hardware, it is SoftLayer’s view that they are providing a superior platform for their customers cloud requirements. The SoftLayer bare metal servers are integrated into the entire SoftLayer/IBM platform including storage, virtual and other assets.

    Two areas where virtual hypervisor based cloud solutions did offer an advantage perhaps was the time to get up and running and the flexibility of on demand computing billing.  Those are the two areas SoftLayer is hitting head on with this latest offering.

    By having pre-configured hardware specs, it makes it much easier for SoftLayer to spin up the server.  Imagine these different server configurations already mounted in a data center. Now when an order is placed it is just a matter of installing OS and other required software.  This could be done via scripts. In fact Jones mentioned that SoftLayer uses a variety of tools like Chef/Puppet and some home grown tools to accomplish server configuration. This automation is what is allowing SoftLayer to offer 30 minute set ups.

    The configurations available and the hourly rates for them are as follows:

    Processor Cores Core Speed RAM Storage Price/hour
    Intel 1270 4 3.4GHz 8GB 2x1TB SATA $0.46
    Intel 1270 4 3.4GHz 32GB 2x400GB SSD $1.09
    Intel 2620 12 2.0GHz 32GB 4x1TTB SATA $1.24
    Intel 1270 16 2.0GHz 64GB 4x1TB SATA $1.30

     

    Depending on who you speak to, spinning up a new server on AWS or other public cloud providers can take as little 10 minutes. So that is still significantly faster than having a dedicated server provisioned on SoftLayer. But really is there such a big penalty in waiting less than 30 minutes versus 10 minutes? In exchange you are getting a dedicated piece of hardware. Also from an hourly price perspective, the bare metal server option is still more expensive. But again with this latest release SoftLayer is moving closer to approaching virtual, hypervisor based IaaS levels.

    Jones said that further refinements and improvements will hopefully see SoftLayer continue to narrow the gap between speed of setup and pricing with virtual cloud offerings. But he firmly believes that the advantages to having your own server outweigh the shrinking set up gap and pricing difference.

    Another big plus in the SoftLayer model is its integration with IBM’s offerings. Blue Mix, IBM’s PaaS offering runs on SoftLayer. In fact most of IBM’s cloud offerings are powered by SoftLayer. As part of this SoftLayer is opening up 15 new data centers with the 6th of these in Melbourne, Australia opening today.

    To be sure there are critics who say that without the hypervisor, SoftLayer’s flavor of cloud is not “true” cloud. But as the old saying goes, if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, it must be a duck.  With hourly pricing, rapid fulfillment, scalability and more, bare metal servers is more than enough cloud with some distinct advantages.

  • Google Starts Cloud World War I, DevOps Wins

    Google Starts Cloud World War I, DevOps Wins

    No matter the outcome, a cloud pricing war will leave DevOps the winner

    By now you probably saw the news and all of the buzz about how Google dropped its drawers eh, pricing on its cloud hosting. This is of course a direct shot at Amazon’s AWS. It’s about time someone with big enough stones (and a big enough data center) took on Bezos and his band of merry cloud makers.  But the real winner in all of this may in fact turn out to be DevOps.

    Of course this is just the first salvo in what promises to go down in history as Cloud War I. Amazon is not going to stand still.  They are perfectly willing to compete on price and in fact part of the AWS mystique is that it is the most cost effective solution (cheapest) out there.

    This will not be just a tit-for-tat move though. In announcing the price cuts Urs Hölzle, VP of TI at Google said, “”We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30 to 85 percent.”  That means we are going to see cloud prices drop as the speed and power of chips goes up. That is good news! You can see Hölzle’s complete presentation including a cameo by SnapChat’s Bobby Murphy below (be warned this is about 1 hour and 20 minutes long).

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qokEYBNWA_0]

    Of course this begs the question, what about the other cloud providers.  How long can Rackspace sit up on its OpenStack perch before diving into this fray? What about Microsoft’s Azure? Redmond wants its piece of the cloud pie, does new CEO Satya Nadella have the stomach for this fight? Can they afford not to? The fact is that Microsoft has the girth and arsenal to compete here. Maybe Google starting this war is the opening they need to climb out of the tech cellar and be relevant again. Cisco just announced a billion dollar initiative to become a cloud powerhouse as well.  As big as a billion is though, that is penny stakes in this game I am afraid.

    Here is another one to watch, IBM’s SoftLayer. Fresh off of a 2b+ acquisition and pledging another billion in cloud dollars, IBM via SoftLayer has the profile to be a winner in this war as well.  They also have IBM’s minions out pushing the solutions. In fact Microsoft and SoftLayer/IBM may have the channels to win this thing in the long run (OK maybe not).

    So where does this leave DevOps? Think Switzerland.  From a DevOps perspective it really doesn’t make a difference which cloud provider emerges dominant. The cheaper and more attractive cloud becomes the more it will drive better DevOps tools, DevOps culture and philosophy.

    Of course there are those that say that if PaaS becomes the dominant cloud platform (and I think it will), that could spell trouble for DevOps.  As if somehow PaaS doesn’t need DevOps.  I say poppycock to that too. Maybe you won’t configure servers in a PaaS environment (and I am not conceding that either), but there will be plenty of places along path that will call for automation, continuous delivery, continuous monitoring and continuous management.  PaaS does not obliviate DevOps.

    That is not to say that applications are not king.  Applications are driving the cloud, DevOps and everything else tech today. A large reason why Google is so goo-goo over Cloud is because it drives more Android apps.  I think we will see more DevOps tools and practice around application development, configuration, management and monitoring. New Relic is already on it.  Anything related to Docker stands to do as well as munition and tank manufacturers did during WW II.

    So buckle in as it may get rough out there as these tech giants battle for cloud supremacy, there an will be winners and there will be losers.  It won’t be just the cloud providers either.  Wars create opportunity and those willing to take the chance will gain the most.

    But for DevOps it is all good. It is like we have a stash of chocolate and gold while we make watches here in Geneva. The war rages on around us but we need at the end of the day no matter what we win.

  • Survey Says: Positives and Negatives of DevOps are Two Sides of the Same Coin

    Survey Says: Positives and Negatives of DevOps are Two Sides of the Same Coin

    Isn’t that the way it always works? A person’s strength can also be their weakness. A company’s killer product becomes their Achilles heel as the market shifts. As more and more companies make the shift to DevOps, it’s interesting to learn what’s working, what the opportunities are, and what the impediments are. As many of you know, my company, JumpCloud, along with SoftLayer hosted the 2013 DevOps Conference in Boulder, CO. We had over 200 amazing people in the room – developers, ops folks, managers, execs, CEOs, and founders. Really, the whole gamut was represented in some way. It was an intense day full of presentations and panels, but with lots of time for discussion – with the audience even participating numerous times during talks!

    As part of the conference, we surveyed the audience on a number of topics related to DevOps. The results of the survey are here and the press release announcing the results with some analysis is here as well. As I sat back to take in the data, the most significant learning for me was that the movement to DevOps is constrained by time, first and foremost, and one of the opportunities of DevOps is automation. Let me say that again a different way: the very thing that companies are trying to solve – moving faster, is the thing that is preventing them from getting there.

    Lack of time is nothing new for IT people. We have been hearing that for decades. For some reason, the IT organization has always been crushed with the amount of work that they have and the resources available. Perhaps it is that they are involved in just about everything going on in an organization, or as is the case today in many businesses, the IT organization is the business. As a result, it is even harder for organizations to find the time to do the very things that will make them more efficient. Unfortunately, the cycle becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and as organizations get more busy, they find less and less time to ‘fix’ their business.

    The survey data from the DevOps conference showed that there are any number of opportunities to automate tasks. The group gravitated to a few – deployment, patching, user management, and log analysis – but there were many more. Each organization has their list of tasks that need to be automated that they never get to. The lost productivity from those missed opportunities is likely staggering. Automation is hard and painful. Especially when you are trying to run the day-to-day business. As one of my marketing friends liked to say, we are rebuilding the car while it’s going 60 MPH.

    It’s easy to say that the solution to this is just to spend some time automating. Allocate more hours to it and put it into each sprint. Yes, that is easy to say. Unfortunately, that rarely works. The pressures of the business take over and move automation back down the list very quickly. After all, features need to be built, bugs need to be fixed, and performance issues need to be resolved. All higher priority items than automation when you are in the crucible.

    The focus on automation has to come culturally to work long-term. There needs to be recognition from all levels of the organization that automation will take precedence over other tasks. Without that perspective, automation will almost always be pushed down the priority stack. Automation is a long-term play, not a short-term gain. Band aid fixes are quick and get you back to your task list. Automation takes deliberate time, effort, and focus to happen, and then the benefits are only seen afterward. Of course, the benefits are subsumed by other tasks until they too are automated, so it’s hard to see them for long, but they are there. And, in fact, as more and more becomes automated, a company starts to see their velocity increase dramatically. They’re not focused on manual tasks, they’re focused on driving new innovative features.

    The DevOps survey really said it all – organizations that can figure out how to get off the hamster wheel of manual tasks, will automate and build high-velocity organizations. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done.

  • Ops is dead, long live DevOps

    Ops is dead, long live DevOps

    Yes, that’s a bold statement, but if the vibe at the recent AWS re:Invent conference was any indication there are a number of methodologies, technologies, and companies working to make that a reality. This article isn’t focused on whether this is a good or bad thing (my personal belief is that ops will always be a critical part of the IT delivery process). Regardless, it is critical for IT operations personnel to understand the implications of this tectonic shift. As Marc Andreessen, founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has said, “software is eating the world.” As a result, ops professionals must have the ability to automate tasks that used to be managed manually. Whether or not you think that is the death of ops as we know it I will leave to you, but it does mean we will live in a world where DevOps will offer distinct advantages.

    Before we dive into what this change means to ops personnel, let’s review the underlying assumptions. The fundamental driver at the a high level has been the DevOps movement. Yes, DevOps is quickly becoming the buzzword dejour, but the underlying principles are lasting and changing IT to its core. DevOps is about integrating the various functions that it takes to release software or applications: software development, quality assurance, operations, and security among many others and rapid iteration. The process of integrating these tasks is accomplished through new processes and automation. Different functional areas such as development and operations are brought into the process earlier, and their processes are automated to the extent that they can be. This results in fast cycle times, increased quality, and hopefully increased innovation for the business. All of this is accomplished through software – at each functional level.

    Some technologies that have enabled this massive shift include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), automated configuration management, server management tools, virtualization, and software defined networking. IaaS and PaaS offerings are eliminating the need for organizations to procure, provision, and deploy servers. Further, this class of technology is also dramatically reducing the need to deal with the network layer. This allows organizations to concentrate on their applications and development, and focus less on their infrastructure. The amount of time and effort spent on server and network configuration is minimized. Configuration management solutions are enabling the automation of server setup. An organization’s technology stack can be pushed, pulled, cloned and copied versus manual configuration thereby saving time and adding consistency. Top performing organizations employing DevOps go a step further and automate the scaling of capacity based on utilization. To reduce day-to-day operational activities and costs, organizations are also automating the management of servers, including users access, patches, security, and other areas through both traditional written code and SaaS solutions. Another area changing the game for ops personnel is software defined networking (SDN), which is effectively morphing data center and hardware functions into software programs.

    In short, DevOps and associated innovative new technologies are driving a paradigm shift in the way operations is done. No longer are ops personnel required to manually provision, configure, and manage the network, servers, and application stack. Combining technologies from organizations such as AWS, Rackspace, and SoftLayer along with configuration tools such as Chef and Puppet drives the provisioning and configuration of applications through software automation rather than manual effort. Once applications are deployed, the underlying infrastructure can be managed with tools such as my own company, New Relic, this author’s own JumpCloud, and others. Ops personnel have more companies than ever focusing on helping them automate the tasks that they need to deliver applications for their organizations.

    The result from all of this effort is that ops as we know it won’t exist in the future. The network operations wizard that could manually troubleshoot routing and switching issues, provision servers quickly, and tweak configurations will be tasked with automating those tasks through software. Some of that automation will be through code that ops person writes herself, some delivered by third party providers, and other portions delivered by open source or SaaS-based solutions. But, don’t shed tears for the forced obsolescence of the IT ops people. They will still exist and perhaps be more important and powerful than ever. In fact, because of DevOps ops personnel will in essence be set free from mundane, repetitive “busy work” to perform higher value tasks as well as managing over the software and systems at work. The black magic of enabling different layers of the stack to function together will be less about art and more about science, or rather good software. Solutions will be engineered to work together and be tied together through code. Caveat: yes, service providers and some large enterprises will  still run their own data centers and networks, but the same reasons that DevOps works in IaaS or PaaS will apply to private data centers or private clouds as well.

    If all of this trends toward being true as we see it happening today, what are the opportunities for ops personnel to be at the forefront of this shift? Beyond embracing DevOps – which many operations personnel are doing already – learning to code is the most critical step that ops professionals can take. Many ops professionals already know how to script which is absolutely a minimum, but many will need to go further. Embrace the DevOps movement and push further towards the development side by learning how to code. There are any number of amazing services to teach us how to code or code better. Take the step. It may be the difference between a vestige of the old school versus driving the new world in your organization. The second significant step you can take is to automate your job. Leverage the very best automation tools to code your network, server, and application infrastructure. Not only will you spend less time on these tasks manually, but you will increase availability, reliability, and performance. In most organizations, that’s more than a gold star. Finally, make the mental shift that operations in the future will be less art and more science. DevOps is driving action through data, and the technology stack is responding to this demand with more telemetry than ever. Problems are now solved through understanding performance, availability, and other metrics. And code.

    DevOps is the future. Automation is key. Code is the answer. Developers and ops are in it together for the good of their organizations. Ops pros that embrace this will win! Ops is Dead, Long Live DevOps!

  • IBM Invests $1B to Deliver Unique Platform-as-a-Service Capabilities to Connect Enterprise Data and Applications to the Cloud

    Delivers Enterprise Software Capabilities – Integration, Security, Analytics, Commerce to Accelerate New Era of Hybrid Clouds

    ARMONK, N.Y. and LAS VEGAS, Feb. 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a unique new development environment and capabilities-as-a-service to help clients and developers speed the adoption of “hybrid” clouds, which have the potential to usher in a new era of innovation across the enterprise. As part of its initiative, IBM has invested more than $1 billion for software cloud development and is launching new capabilities running on SoftLayer.

    IBM Invests $1B to Deliver Unique Platform-as-a-service Capabilities

    With today’s news, IBM is addressing three fundamental issues to help speed the adoption of hybrid clouds.

    1)   Enabling enterprise developers for the cloud: According to Evans Data, there are more than 18 million software developers worldwide yet less than 25 percent are developing for the cloud today [1]. As the industry moves to the cloud era, millions of developers are looking to access tools and services that will enable them to leverage this fast-emerging opportunity.

    2)   Integrating across enterprise environments: Enterprises are looking to innovate and drive significant value in a new era of hybrid clouds, which link systems of engagement — built on mobile and social technologies and where consumers are engaging with organizations — with systems of record where data and transactions are processed.

    3)   An open ecosystem and platform for development that accelerates innovation and fosters growth: Developers are looking for a dynamic application development environment to support the cloud era. A new development platform should be open and flexible and make it easier for corporate developers and independent companies alike to create applications and connect them to existing computing systems.

    In response to these market dynamics, today IBM is announcing three new sets of cloud capabilities:

    1)     IBM is opening its extensive enterprise software portfolio to the cloud and launching an open beta codenamed BlueMix™, a new platform-as-service (PaaS) that combines the strength of IBM software, third-party and open technologies. BlueMix provides DevOps in the cloud — an open, integrated development experience that scales. DevOps services help developers, independent firms and enterprise teams get started to build enterprise applications more quickly and effectively. DevOps services enable developers to focus on continuously delivering new functions by learning from their users. Today, IBM also announced a definitive agreement to acquire Boston, MA-based Cloudant, Inc., a privately held database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider that enables developers to easily and quickly create next generation mobile and web apps.  Cloudant will extend IBM’s Big Data and Analytics, Cloud Computing and Mobile offerings and become an essential component of BlueMix.

    2)     IBM is bringing its middleware portfolio, such as WebSphere, to SoftLayer through pre-defined software “patterns” to easily extend existing applications to the cloud. With more than 200 application and middleware patterns available from IBM and IBM Business Partners, the IBM Software Patterns are differentiated in that they enable application portability across a hybrid cloud environment, providing the flexibility to deploy applications and middleware on-premise or off-premise, simplifying hybrid IT management.

    3)     IBM continues to invest in and expand the services running on SoftLayer, includingDevOps to provide essential capabilities to plan, develop, test, deploy and monitor applications, andsystems management as a service, extending its industry leading solutions to the Cloud. And IBM today announced that it is integrating its Power Systems into its SoftLayer cloud infrastructure to deliver a level and breadth of infrastructure services beyond what has traditionally been available over the cloud.

    “IBM is ushering in a bold new era of innovation by partnering with developers in an open environment to accelerate the emerging world of hybrid cloud computing,” said Robert LeBlanc, IBM Senior Vice President, Software and Cloud Solutions. “We are combining the strength of our developer ecosystem with the depth of subject matter expertise in domains such as mobile, Big Data and DevOps, to build a scalable model that easily spans from a single developer to global teams. Today’s announcement is another significant move in extending true cloud integration — not just to existing data and transaction services but to a new class of emerging applications.”

    IBM Launches Open Beta of Codename: BlueMix, Redefining Cloud Development
    This new application development environment delivers the speed and flexibility of a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to allow developers to more quickly compose and build enterprise-grade applications for the cloud era by providing access to IBM’s vast software portfolio as composable services.

    This PaaS/services combination, built on open standards and taking advantage of Cloud Foundry, enables developers to avoid vendor lock-in while leveraging their existing application development assets and skills, which is essential for building hybrid clouds. IBM is providing developers an open, flexible cloud environment connecting the enterprise and born-on-the-web developers using their choice of tools, whether IBM, third-party, or open technologies, in a scalable environment.

    Building on more than 20 years of commitment and leadership in driving open standards, IBM also announced it will serve as a founding member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. The goal of this foundation is to create and develop open source platform-as-a-service ecosystems.

    As part of BlueMix, IBM is building a lineup of developer services focused on mobile, web apps, integration, DevOps and data management. In addition, IBM is continuing to make available to developers its suites of business applications (SaaS) as composable API-based services, such as Watson, commerce, security, analytics, marketing and others. As an example, using BlueMix, developers can leverage middleware services to build a new sales app that can provide retail associates with access to inventory management information from systems of record at the time of customer engagement.

    BlueMix DevOps services provide an integrated experience to help developers accelerate time to market and improve quality. DevOps includes services to store and manage code (using the popular Git repository), a built-in Web integrated development environment (IDE), and Eclipse and Visual Studio integrations to let developers use whichever environment they prefer.  DevOps Services enable agile planning and tracking to share work and collaborate across team members, as well as application deployment automation to streamline the delivery of new function, mobile quality, and performance monitoring to help learn and iterate more quickly. By integrating across the software delivery lifecycle, DevOps services help developers move faster from an idea to an application that meets users’ needs.

    In the automotive industry connected vehicles will rely on a strong IT structure and the cloud has become increasingly important in this area. The international automotive supplier Continental is using the BlueMix platform to offer cloud-based connected solutions that will pave the way for Automated Driving.

    “The investment in IBM BlueMix addresses a much needed gap for Continental that allows us to move more quickly through the cloud in the development of our connected solutions. The automobile industry is following the same trajectory as other devices becoming connected and we see great opportunity for exciting connected features that will transform the future of mobility using the BlueMix platform to create value for motorists and make driving safer, more comfortable and efficient,” said Brian Droessler, Vice President, Software and Connected Solutions, Continental Automotive Systems.

    IBM Brings Its Middleware to SoftLayer with IBM Software Patterns
    IBM is bringing its extensive middleware portfolio to SoftLayer with IBM Software Patterns. Organizations can maximize existing application investments using these pre-defined patterns that are created to capture the many steps for deploying and managing an application.

    IBM Software Patterns are portable between on-premise and off-premise environments, providing the flexibility to deploy applications and middleware to meet dynamic business requirements. Available through the PureApplication Service on SoftLayer beta, IBM Software Patterns open up new possibilities to simplify common IT processes such as DevOps. IT teams can quickly create off-premise environments in the cloud to complete tasks such as application testing and quality assurance, then transfer the applications back to an on-premise production environment. Additionally developers can create their own patterns – writing them once and deploying them on-premise or off-premise – using IBM tools and services, or select from more than 200 Software Patterns provided by IBM and IBM Business Partners ranging from traditional ERP/CRM and Business Intelligence to Web and mobile applications.

    For example, independent software vendor (ISV) Exigen Insurance Solutions has created an application pattern for its insurance industry solution using the IBM Web Application middleware pattern.  With the PureApplication Service on SoftLayer, Exigen can now address new market segments offering clients the option to develop and run Exigen core systems across a hybrid cloud environment making it easier for clients to optimize total costs.

    Additional Services Running on SoftLayer
    IBM is making SoftLayer the foundation of its cloud portfolio.  Building on the company’s recent $1.2 billioninvestment to expand SoftLayer’s global footprint with new data centers worldwide, IBM is announcing additional new cloud services on SoftLayer.

    • IBM Systems Management as a Service – IBM is addressing the critical needs of IT operations by extending its industry leading service management solutions to the Cloud. Built on decades of experience in managing some of the most scalable IT systems in the world, IBM is introducing a comprehensive set of IT management solutions. With just a few clicks, IT practitioners can try and buy systems management as-a-service solutions providing instant insights and value. With these new solutions, IBM provides IT practitioners with the ability to optimize how they manage mixed workloads — both cloud and on-prem — along with connected devices and business applications across any given organization. The new offerings are available both as-a-service hosted on IBM SoftLayer and as on-premise installed software, providing clients with deployment and management choice and flexibility.
    • Power on SoftLayer – Beginning next quarter and continuing over time, SoftLayer’s first service built on Power Systems will be IBM Watson solutions, followed by additional offerings leveraging Power Systems’ advantages of optimization for data and analytics performance. The preliminary set of planned offerings includes:
      • Watson solutions  — includes Watson Discovery Advisor, Watson Engagement Advisor and The Watson Development Cloud, a platform as a service that contains the technology, tools, SDKs and APIs that enable third parties to design, develop and deploy cognitive applications.
      • Software as a Service — includes a wide range of data services optimized on Power Systems includingIBM DB2 BLU and IBM Cognos analytics solutions.
      • Infrastructure as a Service — bare metal Power Systems will be offered to clients as an on-demand infrastructure platform.
    • IBM Platform Computing Cloud Service on SoftLayer – IBM also announced Platform LSF and Platform Symphony software delivered as a service for technical computing and analytics workloads running on SoftLayer.

    About IBM Cloud Computing
    IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts around cloud engagements. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide.  Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 16 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more the 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM’s public cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com.  Join the conversation #ibmcloud. To learn more about today’s news please read Smarter Planet blog.

    [1] Source: Evans Data Developer Population and Demographics Study, 2013.

  • Automation Driving DevOps Adoption

    Survey of Attendees at JumpCloud and SoftLayer Hosted DevOps Conference Confirms High Adoption of DevOps Driven by Demand for Automation of IT & Time Constraints
    February 10, 2014 11:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

    BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–JumpCloud™, the leading automated server management tool for DevOps and IT pros, today published survey results from its DevOps Conference hosted in conjunction with SoftLayer. The survey confirms that the rapid adoption of DevOps is driven by the need for increased automation and constant pressure to complete tasks. When asked to describe their greatest challenges and most time consuming tasks, leading responses referenced deployment and patching activities. User management and log file analysis and forensics were also near the top of responses by the DevOps Conference attendees.

    “We decided to hold this DevOps conference with Foundry Group, TechStars, and Bullet Time Ventures companies in order to gain some base level insight and understanding into the state of the DevOps movement”

    Regardless of the specific challenges or tasks identified, attendees of the event unified around an increasing lack of time with expanding responsibilities and accelerated production cycles. Survey results pointed specifically to manual tasks as hurdles to time management. In order to address this issue, DevOps focused organizations are searching for ways to automate tasks and more effectively manage the explosion of online infrastructure.

    “We decided to hold this DevOps conference with Foundry Group, TechStars, and Bullet Time Ventures companies in order to gain some base level insight and understanding into the state of the DevOps movement,” said Rajat Bhargava, CEO, JumpCloud. “The conference aimed to advance the DevOps movement through the sharing of best practices and a compilation of survey data from a highly targeted respondent group of leading voices in the DevOps movement. We could not have been happier with the over 200 leaders in the field from over 100 companies who were able to attend and help us to gain and share some insight into this increasingly important movement.”

    Over three quarters of respondents classified themselves as DevOps organizations. Another 15% were on their way to becoming DevOps organizations.

    When asked which cloud providers respondents utilized:

    AWS – 55%
    Rackspace – 14%
    SoftLayer – 6%
    Digital Ocean – 6%
    Heroku – 6%
    Misc. – 13%
    When asked about steps to increase automation in their organizations:

    Over 75% reported using some form of configuration automation tool such as Chef or Puppet.
    Approximately one-third reported using some form of patching solution.
    Over half are utilizing pre-built images.
    When asked which tasks most commonly required manual management processes

    1. Deployment and patching tied for first
    2. User management
    3. Log file analysis and forensics
    The DevOps Conference was co-founded and sponsored by JumpCloud and SoftLayer. Gold sponsors included Authentic8, DH Capital, and VictorOps. Silver sponsors were Cooley, Pantheon, PivotDesk, SendGrid, and Silicon Valley Bank. For more information about the DevOps conference please contact info@jumpcloud.com. Conference organizers are planning to implement multiple events in 2014 in conjunction with devopsy.kinsta.cloud. The conference videos are available here. Full results of the survey are available here.

    About JumpCloud

    JumpCloud automates manual, tedious server management tasks from the cloud for DevOps and IT pros. Complementary to and integrated with Chef and Puppet, JumpCloud picks up where they leave off by automating management of users, patches, security, and compliance. JumpCloud returns days to DevOps and IT admins’ lives while increasing security. An automated SaaS-based offering, JumpCloud installs in seconds and deploys on physical, virtual, or cloud servers. For more information visit JumpCloud.com.