Disruptors

Devops to grow with cloud, data services (Q&A)

Devops is a relatively new concept that centers around the interdependence of development and operations and has been on the rise in the Web 2.0 world of virtualization and the cloud. The characteristics of devops include concepts like "architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager--all in one" and "ability to write code beyond simple scripts" all working toward an ideal of managing infrastructure in an automated fashion.

One of the players in this market is Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of the Puppet Labs, which provides support and service to users of the Puppet open-source server automation tool, and is hosting its Puppet Camp 2010 next month in San Francisco. (Disclaimer: I serve as an adviser to Puppet Labs.)

I asked Kanies some questions about devops, automation, systems management, and the cloud.

Q: Give us a brief overview of the rise of devops and why it matters? Kanies: Devops is essentially a cultural movement toward more development-like operations. First and foremost this means acknowledging and impressing the fact that your infrastructure is code, so you should be using developer tools and practice to maintain and interact with it. It also means that you should have the same requirements of your infrastructure as you do of your applications--you need an API, high quality data, version control, access control, auditing, and more.

The reason it matters is that the problems of IT have outstripped its ability to deal with them--our tools and practices largely aren't built for a world where you can turn up 36,000 machines in a week or deploy 1,000 machines an hour, nor where your boss can expect full deployment of an application across thousands of nodes in seconds or minutes rather than weeks or months. Devops attempts to fix these problems with a culture and practice that adopts and adapts development tools in the infrastructure and builds a culture of delivery and agility. … Read more

Survey: Virtualization and cloud need management

A new report set to be released this week from open-source systems management provider Zenoss shows that virtualization and cloud computing technologies are set to remain important growth areas in enterprise IT environments.

The overall results of the survey of 204 IT professionals weren't terribly surprising. For example, the report shows that VMware leads the pack with nearly 80 percent of respondents using the VMware hypervisor and that more than 40 percent of the users cite flexibility as the reason for using virtualization.

However, some of the more interesting results include the fact that more than 30 percent of … Read more

'Anti-Facebook' project releases first batch of code

The open-source Diaspora project released on Wednesday the first iteration of its so-called anti-Facebook social-networking application.

According to a blog post, the development team aims to work with the community to enhance and extend the software in order to create a better project. Hardly an original idea in the open-source world, but certainly a logical ideal in light of the fact that social-networking applications require a good bit of insight from users and developers--something we've seen Facebook embrace, occasionally forcibly by its own community.

There are a number of capabilities in the current release that start to outline how … Read more

French start-up bringing open-source BPM to U.S.

A relatively new French open-source start-up is set to soon make landfall in the U.S.--BonitaSoft, a maker of open-source business process management (BPM) software. BonitaSoft aims to provide an open-source alternative to proprietary suites from the likes of IBM, Oracle, and SAP that dominate the BPM market. (Other French open-source start-ups in the U.S. market include Talend and eXo.)

The company is built around the open-source Bonita project, first developed in 2001 at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA). The development team was then hired by French software giant Bull … Read more

How GE uses Hadoop to analyze big data

One of the most talked about open-source projects is having its second annual Hadoop World Conference next month in New York. On the heels of a successful inaugural event , 2010 promises more than 25 presentations from the likes of Bank of America, eBay, HP, Orbitz, Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo (full agenda here). Also, for the second year running, here is a code for my readers to get a 20 percent registration discount: CNETHW2010.

To provide a small taste of what the event will offer, I corresponded with Hadoop World speaker Linden Hillenbrand, product manager of Hadoop Technologies at General Electric, … Read more

Venture capitalists tire of Twitter-y start-ups

New data from research firm CB Insights shows that venture capital firms have tired of pure-play Twitter start-ups as investment financing has dropped by half over the last year.

From June 2008 to May 2009, $21.6 million was invested by venture capitalists and angel investors into pure-play Twitter start-ups. In the June 2009 to May 2010, time frame, the investment funding dropped more than 50 percent to $10.4 million. The average amount invested also dropped dramatically from a nearly $2 million average round last year to just over $1 million more recently.

According to CB Insight's Anand … Read more

Survey: Few companies virtualizing critical apps

The results of a new survey from application performance management provider AppDynamics shows that despite all the hype around virtualization, most companies haven't yet virtualized their mission-critical applications.

Despite widely acknowledging the benefits of virtualization, most companies noted that they need more evidence that mission-critical applications will succeed in virtual environments. Roughly 80 percent had already deployed or planned to deploy virtualization for nonmission critical applications so there's no need to worry for the state of the market.

This does however bring up a few questions, namely, why is virtualization not being used for mission-critical applications?

According to the survey, there are three main areas of concern:

Internal versus external facing--Comfort with internal applications running virtualized but a perceived risk in running customer-facing systems in virtual environments People, performance and design questions--A lack of skills, questions about performance, and overall application architecture insert a level of risk Lack of confidence--Despite all of the obvious benefits, many are concerned their applications won't run as well in virtual environments

In a Q&A with CNET, AppDynamics CEO Jyoti Bansal further explained the survey results: … Read more

Benchmarking-software industry remains profitable

Despite the fact the economy remains teetered on the edge of oblivion, software companies have increased their profitability dramatically over the last year, according to a recently concluded annual benchmarking study of the small and mid-sized software industry conducted by information services provider OPEXEngine.

Benchmarking is an important part of the software industry these days as companies look to ensure that they are providing what customers want and that your company meets the performance needs.

The 2010 benchmarks were developed in concert with SIIA and were based on the confidential data provided by approximately 50 small and mid-size software vendors … Read more

'Anti-Facebook' project nears launch

The open-source social networking project Diaspora reported on its blog this week that the code for its much-hyped "anti-Facebook" software will be released September 15.

Hatched by a team of New York University programming students, Diaspora raised $200,000 through a microfinancing strategy--nabbing small chunks of money from a lot of individuals.

The project has received a huge amount of press despite being little more than a vaporware reaction to Facebook's privacy snafus. That said, if the team is half as good at building software as it is at building hype, there might be something interesting … Read more