Automation and Orchestration: Why What You Think You’re Doing is Less Than Half of What You’re Really Doing
One of the main requirements of the cloud is that most—if not all—of the commodity IT activities in your data center need to be automated (i.e. translated into a workflow) and then those singular workflows strung together (i.e. orchestrated) into a value chain of events that delivers a business benefit. An example of the orchestration of a series of commodity IT activities is the commissioning of a new composite application (an affinitive collection of assets—virtual machines—that represent web, application and database servers as well as the OSes and software stacks and other infrastructure components required) within the environment. The outcome of this commissioning is a business benefit whereas a developer can now use those assets to create an application for either producing revenue, decreasing costs or for managing existing infrastructure better (the holy trinity of business benefits). Read More »
Guest Post: Cloud Management
By Rick Blaisdell; CTO ConnectEDU
Cloud computing has definitely revolutionised the IT industry and transformed the way in which IT Services are delivered. But finding the best way for an organization to perform common management tasks using remote services on the Internet is not that easy. Read More »
Avoid the Security Umpire Problem
Have you ever been part of a team or committee working on an initiative and found that the security or compliance person seemed to be holding up your project? They just seemed to find fault with anything and everything and just didn’t add much value to the initiative? If you are stuck with security staff that are like this all the time, that’s a bigger issue that’s not within the scope of this article to solve. But, most of the time, it’s because this person was brought in very late in the project and a bunch of things have just been thrown at them, forcing them to make quick calls or decisions. Read More »
Cloud: Start Thinking IT Service Delivery…
Few of our clients understand the difference between operating a cloud infrastructure and operating a traditional datacenter, but it’s not that they’re dumb; it’s just that the whole idea of cloud is new and different. There aren’t a lot of fully functioning cloud infrastructures out there so, obviously, there’s not a lot of personnel experienced running those infrastructures. With this post I want to explain what it means to run a cloud infrastructure and by that I mean I will explain the difference between what you know now versus what you need to know—and change—later, when you’re faced with operating one of those beasts. Read More »
What Should I Do about Cloud?
The word of the day is “Cloud.” Nearly every software and hardware vendor out there has a product and shiny marketing to help their customers go “to the cloud.” Every IT trade rag has seemingly unique, seemingly agnostic advice on how their audience can take advantage of cloud computing. Standards bodies have published authoritative descriptions of cloud computing models. If you’re an IT decision maker or influencer, you’re in luck! Many reputable players in the industry have published reams of information to help you on your journey to take advantage of cloud computing. Pick your poison… Public, Private, Hybrid, Community, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS… even XaaS (anything as a service!). On-premises, off-premises… or even “on-premise” if you want! Read More »
Measure Twice…Cut Once: How to Avoid the Cloud Factory Default Button
This is one of those old woodworking adages that really applies when you are starting the process to build out your own private cloud. What does this mean and how does it apply today? Well, I can remember all too well my junior high school shop teacher repeating this over and over again to us as students. I think he told us measure twice, cut once almost as many times as he told us to remember to take the key out of the chuck in the drill press or to stop drag racing with the belt sanders. I can also remember telling my shop teacher it was a whole lot more fun to crank up the table saw and start cutting than to use a tape measure. Read More »
