This week container lovers are convening in Seattle for the annual Dockercon conference and a major theme this year is how to manage containers at scale.To kick off the conference Docker – the company that open sourced the popular container runtime of the same name and now sells commercially supported software for running containers – announced native integration of container orchestration platform named Swarm into its product.Swarm has been an open source project for managing groups of containers, but Docker today announced that its container runtime will ship with an optional Swarm Mode.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: HPE looks to move data between computers at the speed of light | Platform 9 is the latest to ease container deployment woes +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For years those who track the cloud computing market have predicted consolidation. The market is young enough, promising enough, and the barriers to entry for companies that want a slice of this market are high enough that mergers and acquisitions are to be expected. Stephen Lawson
At its 2016 developer conference in San Francisco this week, the company worked to get developers excited about its software and services as well as its hardware platforms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Chef, a company that has made a name for itself developing infrastructure automation software products, released a new open source project named Habitat this week that it says is defining a new category: Application automation.
Habitat is a way of packaging an application in a way that lets the app provision the infrastructure it needs to run. This process gives Habitat the ability to run on any type of infrastructure, from physical to virtualized servers, in data centers or in the cloud.
+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cisco unearths its inner startup culture via companywide innovation contest | This startup may have the world’s fastest networking switch chip +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In an effort to solidifying its footing in the still-shifting public IaaS cloud computing market, CenturyLink today announced plans to buy ElasticBox, a company that specializes in hybrid cloud management software.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: VMware buys Arkin to increase virtual networking adoption +During a week filled with mega M&A news, this deal cloud deal could fly under the radar, but it's worth noticing because it highlights important trends in the cloud industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The financial industry has been one of the most reticent to adopt IaaS public cloud computing services, but researchers at Deutsche Bank predict that big banks’ use of cloud will ramp up “materially” in 2017.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are using containers and cloud | What happened at Apple’s WWDC +Regulatory barriers, questions about security and legacy IT installations are the leading reasons financial services companies have not used public cloud compute and storage services thusfar, DB researchers say. Increasingly however, banks are facing pressure to cut costs and increase flexibility of IT environments. Meanwhile, public cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have become more compliance centric in order to cater to the financial services industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VMware Monday announced plans to acquire Arkin, a specialist in helping customers manage physical and virtual networks, for an undisclosed sum.Arkin says its tools provide “cross-domain visibility,” which means that it can aggregate operational data from both virtual and physical infrastructures. Correlating this data can help organizations root out the cause of problems and fix them faster.+MORE M&A: Microsoft buys LinkedIn for $26.2 billion | Symantec scoops up Blue Coat for $4.65 billion +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 2010, two entrepreneurs in Boston came up with the idea of turning shipping containers into miniature plantations, and Freight Farms was born.The company’s Leafy Green Machines, outfitted with LED lights and humidity-controlled ventilation systems, provide an ideal growing climate for up to 500 heads of lettuce per week, not to mention other crops such as herbs and micro-greens.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: The Most Powerful Internet of Things Companies +Since day one, the containers have been connected to the Internet so they can be monitored and managed remotely. “We’re able to improve the value of the container without customers even knowing it,” says Kyle Seaman, director of farm technology. Freight Farms remotely monitors crop production for each of its roughly 80 farms. Software updates are pushed to the Leafy Green Machines to more efficiently manage the crops, such as by adjusting temperature, humidity and lighting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Top techie companiesFortune is out with its latest list of the Fortune 500 for 2016 and tech companies appear frequently throughout the rankings. While the top tech company on the list likely isn’t a surprise, it is interesting to note that only two tech company broke the Top 10 largest publicly-traded companies based on full-year revenue last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s been a tumultuous past year for Hewlett Packard Enterprise but this week the company is unveiling a series of new offerings intended to solidify its standing in the private and hybrid cloud computing market.Key themes for HPE’s new cloud products are bundling software to make it more easily consumable, packaging that software with optional hardware to create an all-in-one cloud and being able to manage not only new, cloud-native workloads and technologies – such as application containers – but legacy and traditional workloads too.
Bill Hilf, SVP and GM of Helion Cloud at HPETo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few years ago VMware and OpenStack were foes. Oh, how times have changed.This week VMware is out with the 2.5 release of its VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO). The virtualization giant continues to make it easier to run the open source cloud management tools on top of VMware virtualized infrastructure.+MORE FROM NETWORK WORLD: OpenStack Foundation Director on why open source clouds should be the basis of your data center | How VMware aims to distinguish itself in the cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services reported a multi-hour service disruption to core features of its IaaS public cloud in Sydney, Australia over the weekend.It’s one of the highest-profile hiccups the cloud provider has had in recent months.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Father’s Day 2016 gift ideas for the techie Dad +According to the Amazon Web Services’ Service Health Dashboard, the company’s virtual machine service named Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) began experiencing connectivity issues at 10:47 PM PDT Saturday, which was 3:47 PM on Sunday in Sydney. The issue was finally resolved more than 12 hours later by 4:50 AM local Sydney time. AWS said a single Availability Zone within the region lost power (AWS regions are each made up of at least two or more Availability Zones). AWS said by 1 AM local Sydney time about 80% of the EC2 and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) instances that had been impacted were resolved. A handful of other ancillary services were almost impacted in the region.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Storage giant EMC today dipped its toe into the hot application container market, taking aim at one of the unresolved areas in this burgeoning technology: storage.EMC announced libStorage, which the company describes as an open-source, platform-agnostic storage provisioning and orchestration framework for containers.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: A guide to container networking + libStorage is a client that sits atop a storage array that can talk to container management platforms, allowing that storage system to interact with containers. EMC posted the code for libStorage on GitHub and made it available as a free download.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new report from 451 Research theorizes that the “race to the bottom” of public IaaS cloud prices is an unsustainable model that is not expanding market share. Instead vendors have transitioned to a “race to the top” to add higher-level application services on top of their clouds to grow their businesses.Three years ago IaaS vendors dropped prices regularly, sometimes within hours of each other, in what appeared to be a race to the lowest prices in the cloud. Today, public cloud IaaS vendors focus much more on providing higher-level application services that run on top of their infrastructure in an effort to attract and retain customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new report from 451 Research theorizes that the “race to the bottom” of public IaaS cloud prices is an unsustainable model that is not expanding market share. Instead vendors have transitioned to a “race to the top” to add higher-level application services on top of their clouds to grow their businesses.Three years ago IaaS vendors dropped prices regularly, sometimes within hours of each other, in what appeared to be a race to the lowest prices in the cloud. Today, public cloud IaaS vendors focus much more on providing higher-level application services that run on top of their infrastructure in an effort to attract and retain customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This week SaaS giant Salesforce.com and IaaS behemoth Amazon Web Services codified a partnership that the two have been discussing for months.The move is a coup by Amazon in the public cloud market, particularly against Microsoft Azure, and could turn out to be a big kick in the pants to Oracle.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Is Salesforce planning a post-Oracle future? +Salesforce and AWS actually have a long partnership that goes back years. In 2010 Salesforce.com bought an application development platform named Heroku, which was hosted in AWS and continues to be to this day. Salesforce could have chosen to bring Heroku’s underlying infrastructure in-house post acquisition, but it chose to keep its toe in AWS’s cloud through Heroku.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Comments by Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins last week that the networking giant is open to collaborations with VMware in virtual networking raise the question: Just how would Cisco's ACI and VMware's NSX platforms could work together?In an interview with CRN last week, Robbins spoke vaguely about potentially exploring collaborations between Cisco’s ACI and VMware’s NSX, but did not commit to any specific integrations of the two products, which have typically been seen as competitors in the market.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: VMware narrowing SDN gap with Cisco | The future of auto safety is seatbelts, airbags and network technology +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Comments by Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins last week that the networking giant is open to collaborations with VMware in virtual networking raise the question: Just how would Cisco's ACI and VMware's NSX platforms could work together?In an interview with CRN last week, Robbins spoke vaguely about potentially exploring collaborations between Cisco’s ACI and VMware’s NSX, but did not commit to any specific integrations of the two products, which have typically been seen as competitors in the market.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: VMware narrowing SDN gap with Cisco | The future of auto safety is seatbelts, airbags and network technology +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services consultancy 2nd Watch this week released the findings of an analysis of 100,000 public cloud instances to determine the 30 most popular services being used. It’s not surprising that AWS’s two core products: compute and storage, lead the pack. 100% of the environments 2nd Watch examined were using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), the massively scalable object storage service. 99% of customers also were using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the on-demand virtual machine service. 100% of customers use AWS Data Transfer, because if you have data in the cloud, you need to transfer it in or out at some point.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google is hiring the Chief Commercial Officer of the Caesar’s Entertainment to lead its enterprise sales division.Recode was the first top report the news of Tariq Shaukat, who also formerly worked at McKinsey, as Google’s newest executive. While at Caesar’s Shaukat oversaw sales, marketing, distribution, analytics, gaming and ecommerce across the company’s hotels, casinos, restaurants and nightlife. Caesar’s is a $9 billion annual revenue company.The move is just the latest expert Google has attracted to help bolster it’s enterprise sales efforts. Last year Google bought on VMware co-founder Diane Greene (check out InfoWorld’s Q&A with her here). Last year Google recruited former Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens to the Googleplex too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cool featuresImage by ThinkstockCars used to be just for driving. Today they’re equipped with Wi-Fi hotspots, self-parking technology and road hazard detection systems. Check out some of the coolest connected car features available today.RELATED: BMW’s vision for a world of connected cars To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brandon Butler