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Links for November 14th through November 23rd

Future of Java panel

A little something extra…

I’ve been off in The Lowlands for Devoxx (see foil-hats above) over the past few weeks, and a vacation. Hence the slow content around here.

Slim links today, and we’ll be back after Turkey Time.

The Links

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— November 23, 2010 at 6:24 pm

dev/ops and cloud at Devoxx 2010

Last week I was at Devoxx giving two talks on cloud computing and dev/ops. For the first one, I co-presented with my old buddy John Willis (co-host of the IT Management & Cloud Podcast) while the second one was just me talking on Agile and Cloud Computing.

It was a great show: I met and talked with all sorts of interesting folks. One of the better developer conferences I’ve been to in a long time.

Here are the presentations for the two talks:

Pragmatic Cloud Computing, or, Dealing with Morlocks, or, Agile Infrastructure

What’s the point of dev/ops?

As I recall the talks were recorded, so they should be up sometime. (Also, my wife, son, and I took a little vacation around the dates of the conference, there’s some photos up if you’re interested.)

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Categories: Agile, Cloud, Conferences, presentations.

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By cote
— November 23, 2010 at 4:47 pm

AccelOps in Action at the Austin Radiological Association – Overview and use of AccelOps integrated data center and cloud service monitoring platform from an end user perspective

I recently visited with Todd Thomas and Geoff Christy at the Austin Radiological Association to see their instance of AccelOps in action. Todd and Geoff explain how they came about to switch over to AccelOps in the first interview section, then shows us an extensive demo of how they’re using AccelOps. Seeing this kind of in-depth demo, with real data, is quiet a treat in the IT Management space where most demos are vendor-driven and filled with example data.

Interview

A full transcript is available as well. Also, see the extended version with 4 minutes more discussion.

Demo

A full transcript is available as well. Also, see the extended demo with 7 minutes more of the demo.

About ARA

The Austin Radiological Association recently changed the IT Management platform it uses to monitor and manage it’s distributed IT and data center. ARA is one of the largest providers of outpatient imaging services and professional services in central Texas serving the majority of area hospitals and thousands of referring physicians in the community. In addition, ARA operates as an outsourced solution provider and manages a turnkey digital imaging application for 10 regional SaaS clients. The company has invested heavily in IT, ITIL service processes and IT automation to support a variety of health care, imaging and business applications.

About AccelOps

I’ve covered AccelOps in the past (July 2009, Sep 2010), but as most good startups in the space, they’ve been rapidly pushing out features over the past year to fit with the evolving changes in IT.

Here’s a recent self-description of AccelOps:

AccelOps integrated data center and cloud monitoring solutions bring unparalleled operational intelligence, service insight, efficiency and security to enterprises and service providers. Delivered as a scalable virtual appliance or SaaS, the AccelOps platform cross-correlates and manages diverse operational data on-premise, off-premise and in cloud environments to provide proactive performance, availability, security, change and business service management. AccelOps enables service delivery with end-to-end visibility, efficient root-cause analysis, reduced MTTR and compliance.

Recently, they started a free trial program, and since they have an option to deploy as a SaaS, it’s pretty easy to check out.

Disclosure: AccelOps sponsored this video.

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Categories: IT Management Podcast, RedMonkTV, Systems Management.

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By cote
— November 19, 2010 at 2:17 am

Links for November 1st through November 6th

Charles' new beard

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— November 6, 2010 at 4:20 pm

Apache Mahout & the commoditization of machine learning with Grant Ingersoll at ApacheCon 2010 – make all #013

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The relatively academic field of machine learning has found wide, consumer technology use in recent years: all of those “you like this book, you might like this other book” type of things you see. For most people (or, maybe, just myself) machine learning was always a tedious, math-heavy computer science topic. In this episode of make all, I talk with returning guest Grant Ingersoll about Apache Mahout which is seeking to bring machine learning to a wider audience:

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

Show Notes

Disclosure: the ASF is a client.

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Categories: Development Tools, make all, Open Source.

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By cote
— November 4, 2010 at 8:07 am

Office 365 – Press Pass

I talk with the press frequently. Thankfully, they whack down my ramblings into concise quotes. For those who prefer to see more, I try to dump publish those slightly polished up conversations this new category of posts: Press Pass.

A little while ago week John K. Waters asked me about Microsoft’s Office 365 announcement (I missed his deadline), moving Office to the cloud to pick the easy summary. Thus, I answered the question, “what do you think?”

I think Microsoft sees the shift towards moving applications to “the cloud,” esp. when it comes to email and things like SharePoint. In the extreme version, everything that isn’t a core application to a business looks like something that’d be cheaper to run on the cloud. Email is, of course, a core application for most every business, but that technology has been around long enough to be more or less solid in outsourced (or “cloud”) situations. Except for companies with luxurious email needs and budgets, it’s starting to look absurd to run your own email server. To be clear, it seems like Office 365 isn’t exactly moving all of Office into the cloud, but more moving back-end services around the desktop applications and running some applications as a SaaS.

While there’s Google roll-out problem stories – mostly that City of LA case where it seemed like lack of training and acting like a “real” enterprise provider were the problems, not the technology – the pressure their simple model puts on  people like Microsoft is high. For years people have complained that Word, for example, is bloated and has too many features – something like Google Docs tests out people’s willingness to live otherwise.

Email is still the big thing here – it’s sort of a low-value, low margin service, but it’s the foot in the door for doing all sorts of other interesting things. The fact that people “live in their email” makes it the primary point to do integrations to higher value Enterprise 2.0 things. Scheduling meetings to start, but then all sorts of stuff. Google has added all sorts of interesting bells and whistles into GMail, and their Google Apps marketplace is starting to show the ease at which 3rd parties can add in and monetize applications. It’s not a runaway success at all at the moment, but it shows something that’s possible when you SaaSify all this instead of walling it up on-premise a la Exchange and Outlook. Getting access to that possibility will be valuable to Microsoft for protecting its existing revenue streams in the near future.

Disclosure: Microsoft is a client, RedMonk uses Google Apps and other Google services extensively.

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Categories: Cloud, Press Pass, The New Thing.

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By cote
— November 3, 2010 at 7:19 pm

At devoxx later this month

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I’ll be giving two talks at Devoxx later this month, one with John Willis and solo. Both are on the topic of cloud, which is always fun to talk about:

  • Does dev/ops matter for me? – When you mix together sysadmins and code-monkeys, you get a weird cocktail called “dev/ops” – development and operations. Pulled from the successful practices of high-scale web companies like flickr and enterprises developing on the bleeding edge of application delivery, the promise is to make the lives of each better and, hopefully, allow their organizations to deliver better software, faster, and more frequently. dev/ops theory is still new – even shorter in its buzzword pants than “cloud”! Still, this evolving body of theory, practice, and tools looks extremity attractive. In this session, Michael Coté and John Willis (the co-hosts of the popular IT Management & Cloud Podcast) will catch you up on what dev/ops is looking like and how it might help (or harm!) you. This session will give you a pragmatic overview of dev/ops and leave with a better idea of how dev/ops applies to you and your organization. If you have heard the term devops and it either offends, amusing or intrigues you, please plan to spend an hour with Michael and John in this session.
  • Pragmatic Cloud Computing, or, Dealing with Morlocks, or, Agile Infrastructure – As a software developer, what does cloud computing really, pragmatically mean for you? Technologies used by public web companies and now cloud computing are looking to offer a new way to deliver applications by addressing deployment and provisioning concerns. Agile software development has sped up the actual development of software, and now the bottle-neck is in operations who’re not always able to deploy software at the same velocity that Agile teams ship code. What do these technologies look like, are they realistic, and how might they effect your organization? RedMonk’s Michael Coté will tell you how to start benefiting from cloud computing without getting lost by hype or fleeced by vendors looking to cloud-wash their legacy offerings.

Disclosure: OpsCode, where John works, is a client.

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Categories: Cloud, Conferences, Systems Management.

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By cote
— November 3, 2010 at 7:16 pm

libcloud with Paul Querna at ApacheCon 2010 – make all #12

Working in downtown Atlanta this morning

While at ApacheCon this year, I got off the lobby bar with CloudKick‘s Paul Querna who works on Apache libcloud (currently in the incubator):

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

I’d gotten quick briefing from him yesterday and was interested in talking more about the libcloud framework which is trying to wrap one API around all the different clouds out there. We also talk about the kinds of applications Paul has been seeing people put on the cloud and also the monitoring and management services that CloudKick providers.

Disclosure: the Apache Software Foundation is a client.

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Categories: make all, Open Source, Programming.

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By cote
— November 2, 2010 at 9:49 pm

iPhone 3gs vs. Droid 2 Camera in a dodgy hotel room

Above you can see a slide show comparing the cameras on the Droid 2 vs. the iPhone 3gs, using the “native” camera and then with a few camera apps (FxCamera and Hipstamatic). The Droid 2 has a Flash, but I don’t get the feeling it works very well – lots of red eye and halos of light. I tend to take photos in poorly lit situations (inside), which explains the overall crappy quality of my pictures.

After receiving a Droid 2 (along with all the other attendees) at Adobe MAX last week, I’ve been testing it out here and there, as a substitute for my iPhone 3gs. I don’t have Verizon service activated on it, so that limits my use to wifi and no voice. So far, I like the Droid 2, though it’s much clunkier and not as responsive as the iPhone 3gs. In learning a new computer device (smart phone, in this instance) you realize how much learning you actually have to do: it makes me recall how much I had to force myself to hone my use of the iPhone, hunt down good apps, and learn how to use the touch-keyboard.

I’ll try for a fuller review at some point.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, paid my way to MAX, and Motorola gave Doird 2 phones to everyone at MAX for “free,” including myself.

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Categories: Reviews, The New Thing.

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By cote
— November 2, 2010 at 8:18 am

Links for October 28th through November 1st

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.

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Categories: Links.

By linkposter
— November 1, 2010 at 10:58 pm