Everyone loves the idea of cloud software that leverages open source. Indeed, an IDC report to be released next week notes that "72 percent of businesses say that the use of open source software, open standards, and/or open APIs are key factors when choosing a cloud provider or building their own cloud." (IDC surveyed 282 users from companies with 500 or more employees.)
What does this mean to the cloud computing market? The number of cloud technology companies that call themselves "open" is exploding. And organizations that want to use this technology are getting confused.
Let's just look at the news this week. As InfoWorld's Eric Knorr reported, EMC VMware asked to become a member of the foundation governing OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system. Suse tossed its hat in with OpenStack as well, with its own distribution. Rackspace recently announced its OpenStack-based private cloud software. I could go on. Each announcement becomes another more "me too" in the emerging OpenStack space of 200-plus companies on the OpenStack bandwagon.
Interesting article by Saroj Kar over at cloudtimes.org
This involves a lot of what BML focuses on with driving forward data driven strategies. Free the data, share the data, apply the data. Connecting dots that haven’t been connected before can involve a lot of newer technologies, particularly in the big data stack. It does involve architectural best practice to be fully realized. Architecture can be paid for now, and it can create new business opportunities and efficiencies at every bend. On the opposite side of the coin if you don’t pay for architecture now, you will eventually pay for it later. Here are some of the things Saroj covered in the report:
“Big data is a topic of growing interest for many business and IT leaders, and there is little doubt that it creates business value by enabling organizations to uncover previously unseen patterns and develop sharper insights about their businesses and environments,” said David Newman, research vice president at Gartner. “However, for clients seeking competitive advantage through direct interactions with customers, partners and suppliers, open data is the solution. For example, more government agencies are now opening their data to the public Web to improve transparency, and more commercial organizations are using open data to get closer to customers, share costs with partners and generate revenue by monetizing information assets.”
“With tight budgets and continued economic uncertainty, organizations will need leaders who can craft breakthrough strategies that drive growth and innovation,” said Mr. Newman. “As change agents, enterprise architects can help their organizations become richer through strategies such as open data.”
“The challenge for organizations is to determine how best to use APIs and how an open data strategy should align with business priorities,” Mr. Newman said. “This is where enterprise architects can help. While some internal IT functions may be using APIs to fulfill local or specific application needs, the enterprise architecture process harvests and elevates good works as first-class strategic priorities that create business-focused outcomes. As a strategic enabler, APIs are a powerful means with which to build an ecosystem, and a first step toward monetizing data assets.”
JP:
On the DevOps LinkedIn group, Ryan Cannon, BD at Stackify, asked an interesting question, “Name the number one issue that keeps development and production apart and not cooperating as easy as possible in your company. And how, in 20 words or less, can it be resolved?!”
Answers are ranging. They include trust, compensation, organization, culture, and lack of metrics, which just goes to show, there’s a lot of hurdles in the way of getting engineering and operations to work successfully together.
To paraphrase a Fortune 100 Global CTO I spoke to recently, “Operations team wants to understand the topology of the application. The application team wants to understand the infrastructure topology”
Most often the issues are cultural and organizational. I have been recommending the formulation of a cloud team that brings Dev and Ops together to design and deploy workloads in a cloud architecture. The new entity gets the chance to create new processes for working together, which either are emulated by the rest of IT or eventually subsumes IT.Information sharing and shared accountability goes a long way to correcting things in an existing IT environment.
I also noted, there is a benefit to keeping the firewall between Dev and Ops for purposes to ensure production is a controlled environment. Collaboration is key here.
