The Upgrade Cycle

As we move through the year, there are often monthly and quarterly upgrade cycles to our virtual and cloud environments. These are caused by security issues, natural upgrades to hardware, software, or even application updates. Application updates are now continuous, using continuous integration and deployment strategies, while hardware and other upgrades come more slowly. Cloud …

How Much Private Cloud Do You Need?

How much private cloud do you really need? A private cloud is all about the IT department getting out of the way of its internal customers, enabling business units and individual developers to provision their own VMs and get on with doing their jobs. But building and operating a private cloud is a complex, and therefore …

Goodbye 2015, and Here We Go, 2016

Goodbye 2015 and here we go 2016. Since this is my first post of the New Year, I wanted to start the year with a post on one of my current favorite topics for discussion and that topic to start the year right is automation. For this post, let’s concentrate on the second day operations type of automation. Second day operations is really quite a different beast from the build and decommission automation in that second day operations incorporate several different approaches to the automation. It is these approaches that I discuss a little further.

Philosophies of Automation

Philosophical questions for automation; well, at least my humble opinion on the matter. In my opinion there are three main areas, or segments, that are established for automation in the modern day data centers. The first segment is provisioning, then second day operations and finally to complete the life-cycle management is the decommission process. Every data center is similar to each other, but yet what really makes things different is the choice of technologies that are used in the environment.

The Future for Cloud Native Applications

Container technologies and developers work with applications. End users use applications. Yet, administrators think about the systems that make up the applications with tools that are not application-centric but rather system-, VM-, or container-focused. Because the tools are not focused on the application, the definition of the application is unknown by those who support the …