Ben Kepes, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Ben Kepes

Author Archives: Ben Kepes

IDG Contributor Network: Authentic8 wants to protect users from bad websites

Many of us have experienced that moment of terror when clicking on a potentially risky link: Will it all be fine or will I start a torrent of bad outcomes from my action?But bad stuff sometimes happens and, sad as it sounds, sometimes the links we click on take us to dark places with bad outcomes. Authentic8 wants to limit those impacts by reducing the blast area of bad content.RELATED: Machine learning offers new hope against cyber attacks Authentic8, the vendor that created the secure, virtual browser Silo, today announced that its browser will enable organizations to selectively redirect particular URLs for safe rendering within an isolated browser. The idea of this approach is that rather than trying to block any suspect content, organizations can let it through, secure in the knowledge that it can do no widespread harm. Authentic8 was founded by the team from Postini (an email security product acquired by Google).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Skytap launches new container management solution

It was only a handful of years ago that the only time the topic of containers came up were at obscure open source conferences or, more usually, when someone was looking for a place to put the bulk load of gourmet kale they’d just opened for their on-site employer-supplied kitchen. Containers were plastic things with lids and, while handy, didn’t generate much excitement.But then Solomon Hykes, looking to pivot away from his ultimately unsuccessful platform as a service (PaaS) play, dotCloud, happened upon an existing technology that was in need of both some tech and some marketing luster. Docker (the project and the business) was borne, and Hykes went from being suave, motorcycle-jacket-wearing technologist to something of a playboy who was defining a new approach towards technology. (OK, playboy is a relative term. But given the dearth of sex symbols in the technology infrastructure space, Hykes will just have to do.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Portworx shows how its done—raises an impressive B funding round

There is significant enterprise interest in moving away from a server-centric application approach and instead exploring containers. While Docker, the company possibly most synonymous with containers, has struggled to gain the sort of traction that justifies its stellar valuation, that doesn’t call into question containerization per se. There is clearly an opportunity here, and it is incumbent on vendors to find their market fit, develop realistic objectives, and execute, execute, execute.INSIDER Review: Container Wars: Rocket v. Odin v. Docker And so it is for the vendors filling in the whitespaces around the container ecosystem. Weaveworks is a good example of such a company. Weaveworks is helping to solve many of the networking issues around the production use of containers. Another area that is problematic is around data services—the move to containers makes life more complex from a data storage perspective. Two companies, ClusterHQ and Portworx, were involved in this space.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: DigitalOcean moves into partners’ turf with monitoring

I’m a fan of DigitalOcean. In a space (public cloud infrastructure) dominated by far bigger and deeper-pocket vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, this plucky vendor has grown rapidly, continued to delight its customers, and retained a very focused view on what it is and, more important, what it isn’t.While other platforms grow increasingly complex as they try to be all things to all people, DigitalOcean focuses 100 percent on being a developer-friendly cloud platform. It’s offerings are known for their simplicity and ease of consumption.But that simplicity creates something of a difficulty—most every platform, even those focused on the small end of town, eventually needs to move up the food chain. As it does so, its customers start to demand more functionality. In delivering what these customers want, the platform invariably gets more complex, and what was once simple and elegant becomes big and unwieldy. While not a criticism per se, anyone who has taken a long look at (for example) Amazon Web Services’ list of available compute instance types will know what I mean.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Cloud Foundry Foundation launches developer certification

Many years ago I created and ran the CloudU program, a vendor-neutral cloud education initiative that, in its day, had many thousands of individuals participate and graduate from the program. The rationale for creating the program back then was what I saw occurring in the industry: much interest in cloud as a concept, but little understanding of what it actually is and how to use it. Bear in mind this was years ago, before cloud became the default position for everything.RELATED: 10 tech skills that will boost your salary The idea of providing education programs to help individuals transition into a new way of thinking and working is a good one. A similar situation exists today with the move away from server-based infrastructures (be they physical or virtual) and into container or serverless-based approaches. Essentially we’re seeing challenges around the understanding and implementation of new “cloud native” ways of building applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Smyte wants to get biblical on all those bad online actors

It’s really hard to come up with good startup names, especially names for which the URL is still available, so it is interesting to see startups go back, way back, to find names. One of those is San Francisco security startup Smyte.Smyte's reason for being is to smite (see what I did there?) bad online actors. Its SaaS software is already used by a number of peer-to-peer marketplaces and social apps to combat spam, scam, online harassment and credit card fraud. In other words, Smyte fights pretty much everything social media has, alas, come to be known for. Smyte is a graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2015 program.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Friends more than frenemies? Splunk and New Relic team up

Things were so simple in the old days when it was easy to place vendors. New Relic was firmly and squarely focused on performance monitoring. It helps organizations gain visibility into how their applications and infrastructure are working so that they can make decisions or take actions based on performance.Splunk was in an entirely different space and was all about allowing organizations to ingest a huge amount of their data in order to run analytics over that data. In doing so, Splunk promised to give organizations more visibility about what was going on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Realm ties PostgreSQL databases to mobile applications

Gartner, the analyst firm that makes squillions of dollars advising its enterprise clients on technology decisions, came up with a concept a few years ago entitled Bi-modal IT. From the expectedly wordy Gartner definition, the company defines this approach thusly: “Bimodal is the practice of managing two separate but coherent styles of work: one focused on predictability, the other on exploration. Mode 1 is optimized for areas that are more predictable and well-understood. It focuses on exploiting what is known, while renovating the legacy environment into a state that is fit for a digital world. Mode 2 is exploratory, experimenting to solve new problems and optimized for areas of uncertainty. These initiatives often begin with a hypothesis that is tested and adapted during a process involving short iterations, potentially adopting a minimum viable product (MVP) approach.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Digital transformation progress. Or not…

I go to a lot of conferences, and something I have noticed in the past year or two is that almost every conference will have a keynote speaker talking about digital transformation. Hell, people have even started calling it simply DT, and digital transformation keynoters have the usual suspects to call on for case studies—Uber, Airbnb etc.But every now and then I worry about how impactful the digital transformation story really is. I spend a reasonable amount of time with large organizations talking to them about their present and their future and helping them rethink what their business will look like in one, three or five years. Part of these conversations, obviously, center around digital transformation, since I am a firm believer that digital technologies will allow the agility and innovation with regards products, services and business models that these organizations need to survive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Digital transformation progress. Or not…

IDG Contributor Network: Datadog reduces the alert noise for IT support workers

The move to more complex and distributed applications has done wonders for organizational agility and the ability to innovate, but it has also had some flow-on effects for those poor people responsible for managing application uptime on a day to day basis.Lots of disparate application components means lots of new potential sources of error, and people who carry a pager to be alerted of any issues suffer an increasing number of ill-timed calls.+ Also on Network World: Application monitoring becomes table stakes in the digital age + A new offering from application monitoring vendor Datadog seeks to change this paradigm by offering a far more flexible alerting approach. Datadog’s new composite alert feature is intended to reduce alert noise for DevOps and operations teams. The idea being that these practitioners will have less call to spend time on insignificant alerts and will be alerted of orly major issues. In a kind of “boy who cried wolf” metaphor, this should result in better response to issues that matter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: NGINX ups the web app performance ante

NGINX isn’t what I’d call a sexy company. Its products are, by definition, solid and steady—and they need to be.NGINX offers an application delivery platform that powers a massive proportion of the world’s websites. Some 300 million sites rely on NGINX for its load balancing, web and mobile acceleration, security controls, application monitoring, and management needs. More than half of the internet’s busiest websites rely on NGINX, including Airbnb, Box, Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest, SoundCloud and Zappos.But NGINX, while undeniably having a huge footprint, isn’t alone in the space and needs to keep innovating to gain and retain market share. And so it does with the announcement of its latest release, NGINX Plus Release 12. R12 looks to upgrade NGINX’s load balancer, content cache and web server offerings to increase reliability, security and scale for its customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Mirantis shifts again, will offer managed solutions based on open-source technologies

Mirantis is (or, as we will see, was) known as the pure play OpenStack vendor. The company focused on offering large organizations products and services that helped them leverage the open-source, OpenStack cloud computing platform to build their own clouds for internal or external use.Over time, however, there has been some doubt cast upon how much of a market opportunity there is for these sort of OpenStack service providers. The OpenStack ecosystem has been the source of much angst as consolidation, rationalization and unrealized hopes and dreams too their toll.Mirantis' 'evolution' Mirantis was not immune from these impacts and last year announced its intention to move away from a pure-play OpenStack strategy and become an organization that helped its customers build infrastructure solutions based on a number of different platforms, OpenStack included. At the time, there were rumors that Mirantis wasn’t seeing the return customers it had hoped for and that most of its deals were one-time gigs that didn’t really allow it to build a recurring, sustainable business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Proving how bad enterprise software really is, Knoa delivers visibility

I have written at length about just how bad many legacy enterprise software products are. I was reminded about this recently when raising an invoice for one particular client. This client is an enterprise technology vendor, with some of the best software tools on the planet and extensive conceptual videos detailing just how its platforms enable enterprise application users to be as efficient as they are with their consumer technology tools.Alas, the reality of the internal tools that this particular vendor uses was very different from the hype. The task of raising a single invoice—a seemingly simple job—took on absolutely epic proportions with deep operating system and browser requirements, poor user experience, and, fundamentally, a system that didn't work. I came away, once again feeling nothing but sympathy for my friends who have to use these systems on a day-to-day basis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ScyllaDB another contender to the open source NoSQL database crown

The world of the database is one of those areas that sees lots of people obsessing over details that to outside observers would seem trivial. Graph, NoSQL, SQL, distributed—so many choices.So, when ScyllaDB told me about a funding round that they’d raised and their stated intention to replace Apache Cassandra, I was interested—if slightly skeptical. Not skeptical because of anything I know about ScyllaDB per se, but simply because of the busy-ness of the space.+ Also on Network World: Google’s new cloud service is a unique take on a database + The launch only a couple of weeks ago of Google’s Cloud Spanner database, an offering developed from the internal tools that Google itself uses, certainly upped the database ante. Google’s assertion that Cloud Spanner gives users all the benefits of both regular relational and NoSQL databases put all other database offerings on guard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ScyllaDB another contender to the open source NoSQL database crown

IDG Contributor Network: Filestack launches a new API and changes the game for file uploading

Once upon a time, the sign of credibility -- indeed, the mark of coming of age for a young man in my home country of New Zealand -- was buying his first car and being able to do an oil change on it himself. A rite of passage was for a father to teach his son how to perform routine maintenance on his vehicle, a skill passed down many generations.Fast-forward to today, however, and it is decidedly rare to find anyone who does their own oil changes. The fact of the matter is that it is a relatively messy and time-consuming task and one which isn't a particularly good use of time -- these days the thought seems to be, "Why do my own oil change when I can pay someone to do it and enjoy a long brunch with the time I save?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Nimble Storage delivers upon a practical hybrid cloud use case

Back in the history of the cloud (say, eight years ago), there were copious debates around the topic of cloudbursting. Cloudbursting, for those unaware of the term, describes an approach toward hybrid infrastructure whereby a workload could run on-premises for standard load periods and then, when spikes in traffic occurred, would magically "burst" into the cloud for extra capacity.While many appreciated the idea of cloudbursting from a conceptual viewpoint, others doubted its practicality.But despite cloudbursting not really coming to pass, the idea of hybrid infrastructure, whereby organizations have workloads across many setups (from on-premises to the public cloud and on to multiple private clouds), has become very much a reality. One of the reasons for this is for risk reduction -- the thinking goes that by using a variety of different service providers, critical issues with one provider are, in theory, less likely to have a negative impact on the organization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: AppDirect’s survey rings true, albeit self-serving

I quite like Henry Ford's approach toward choice: You can have any color you like so long as it's black. Too much choice makes for (in my case, at least) increased stress as choices from a bewildering array of automobile options become ever more difficult.And this situation of consumers being spoiled for choice occurs in our own sector: technology.When I started out on this tech commentary lark over a decade ago, it was still the early days of SaaS. Only a few vendors -- Salesforce and NetSuite among them -- existed at that time. At the small and midsize business (SMB) end of town, there was a similarly limited choice of tools. Indeed, the start of my blogging journey coincided almost exactly with Rod Drury founding Xero, a SaaS company offering accounting for SMBs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: People Power brings bots and A.I. to home security systems

Ever since smart thermostat maker Nest burst onto the scene with its unique combination of beautiful design and A.I.-powered automation, there has been increasing attention about how A.I. can be applied to the so-called smart home. The fact that Google acquired Nest and then, by all accounts, proceeded to screw up the opportunity that Nest created, doesn't in any way lessen the importance and opportunity that smart homes creates. So it was interesting to hear of another play, this time a combined software and hardware one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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