How an EMA Top 3 Product Is Selected – Quick Overview by the Example of Chef Habitat and InSpec

By Torsten Volk on Mar 2, 2018 10:56:35 AM

The EMA Top 3 report for Container Management and DevOps in Production and at Scale is a curated collection of a large number of data points that reflect individual priorities, pain points, technology adoption patterns, requirements, opinions, and so on, of 300 enterprises. It then dives deeper into these individual data points to provide readers with enough context to inform their technology selection process to some degree. However, each reader needs to pick out the nuggets that are the most relevant to him or her and then draw her own conclusions. Look at it this way: the EMA Top 3 polls 300 of your peers on 58 container and DevOps related questions and you can learn from the answers without having 300 separate conversations.

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Top 10 enterprise IT Predictions for 2018 – Release Faster, Cheaper, and at Higher Quality – Everything Is about Becoming a Digital Attacker

By Torsten Volk on Dec 10, 2017 2:26:13 PM

For readers who would like to see what happened to our 2017 predictions, please take a look. Jens Soeldner and the EMA Team sat down again this month to look into the crystal ball for 2018.

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AWS Re:Invent 2017 – Serverless Containers, Managed Kubernetes, Bare Metal, Machine Learning, and IoT

By Torsten Volk on Dec 1, 2017 9:56:21 AM

Breaking the Triangle of Cost, Quality, and Speed

This year’s AWS Reinvent delivered major announcements in DevOps, machine learning and IoT. All of the announced capability aim to eliminate infrastructure as the bottleneck for enterprises to become ‘digital attackers’. Observing the nearly 50.000 developers, architects, and software operators that came to Reinvent showed us a significant degree of genuine excitement about Amazon helping enterprises release new software faster, at a higher quality and lower cost.

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Intent Driven DevOps – A New Journey to NoOps

By Torsten Volk on Nov 27, 2017 6:07:38 PM

First Came Autonomic Computing
‘Autonomic Computing’ was the original concept of providing systems and apps with the power autonomously responding to unpredictable challenges. ‘Autonomic Computing’ came with all the right ideas (IBM deserves a good share of credit for defining this concept), but failed due to the same cultural and technological barriers DevOps is struggling with today. There simply was not enough ‘pressure to innovate.' This allowed inertia to prevail, leading to 'business as usual,' instead of magical self-healing and self-optimizing datacenter infrastructure.

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DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017 in SFO – Real Life DevOps Demystified

By Torsten Volk on Nov 17, 2017 1:39:24 PM

This year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) in San Francisco was carried by the enthusiasm of 1500 practitioners who were genuinely enthusiastic about how DevOps can transform their enterprises into a ‘digital attacker.’ Digital attackers rely as DevOps as their innovation engine to rapidly release high quality software that offers measurable business value. In short, digital attackers bully their competition by offering best in class customer value on an continuous basis and in a cost effective manner.

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SDDC 2.0 with Kubernetes, Apigee, and Istio – Cisco’s Collaboration with Google Follows a Grander Vision

By Torsten Volk on Oct 27, 2017 10:13:23 AM

On October 25, Cisco and Google announced their hybrid cloud partnership, where Google brings the container runtime (Kubernetes), the platform to provide, manage, and consume APIs (Apigee), and of course a wide range of consumable cloud services (visual recogngition, machine learning, text to voice, etc.). Cisco contributes the hyperconverged infrastructure (Hyperflex) with Kubernetes management (Harmony), networking (Nexus 9k), and hybrid cloud management software (CloudCenter) to integrate Google’s public cloud services with the customer’s local data center.

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Microsoft Pulling ahead of Amazon with its fully Managed Kubernetes Offering

By Torsten Volk on Oct 25, 2017 9:00:55 AM

Azure Container Service (now AKS where the K stands for Kubernetes) is now offers managed Kubernetes as Tech Preview. This new service provides single-line install (az aks create –n myCluster –g myResourceGroup), automated upgrades, self-healing, and scaling. Microsoft promises that the Azure control plane for Kubernetes will remain free (AWS charges for management servers), with customers only paying for worker nodes running applications. Like all other major vendors, Microsoft declares Kubernetes the winner of the container orchestrator and scheduler race and stresses its contribution to the open source project (only 37 commits, compared to 114 by IBM, 668 by Red Hat, and 1543 by Google as of October 25, 2017). Microsoft also stresses the importance of its Draft project (acquired through Deis) to make Kubernetes accessible to developers without any container experience. Today, Amazon does not offer managed Kubernetes, but it is expected that there will be an announcement in this regard at re:Invent in November.

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The Scheduler Race is Over – Why Kubernetes Won and What it Means to the Market

By Torsten Volk on Oct 19, 2017 11:51:23 AM

What Happened?

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VMworld 2017 – vRealize 2017 Announcement

By Torsten Volk on Sep 12, 2017 8:14:29 AM

Accelerated Deployment and Lower OPEX

Faster time to value, lower OPEX and deeper multi cloud support are the key elements of VMware vRealize Suite 2017, as it was presented at VMworld 2017
in Barcelona. The new vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (vRSCLM) provides
one central user interface tying together the formerly fragmented and complex deployment process for new vRealize environments. Additionally, vRSCLM enables health monitoring, product con guration, IAM integration, and simpli ed upgrades.

[embed width=500]https://youtu.be/Mk3b5UVaFIU [/embed]
Should You Care about the Release of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager?

VMware vRealize Suite has received much criticism in the past for its complicated and too brittle deployment, con guration, and integration process. Considering that vRSCLM addresses exactly this critical issue by offering a uni ed installation wizard and a centralized operations dashboard for one or multiple vRealize Suite environments, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) can only conclude that this new release is signi cant and deserves a close look.

New Deployment Wizard

The new vRS deployment process has been simplified and reduced to the following few steps:

Select whether to import an existing vRS environment or install a new one.

The “import” option lets enterprises manage and upgrade existing vRS environments. The installation process begins as follows:

  • Review the compatibility matrix
  • Select the target version for each component
  • Pick a deployment sizeSelect target data center for new deployment
    Select the vRealize Suite license to apply directly from MyVMware.com Provide the required network details, certi cates and product parametersReview the summary and start the installation process. Due to the new pre-checks it is now less likely for the installation process to fail and in the event of failure, the installation can be resumed from the administration panel, once the root cause has been addressed.

New Operations Management Dashboard

The vRLCM admin panel provides provides a UI to manage, upgrade, and con gure all corporate vRS environments, even across data centers or clouds, through a single pane of glass. vRLCM leverages vRealize Operations (vROps) for health monitoring and root cause analysis and enables administrators to set alerts in case of con guration drift.

Upgrade preparation: Before an upgrade, admins can create a complete snapshot of the environment and view the compatibility matrix.

Upgrades through GUI or Con g File: While the rst upgrade will often be done through the UI, future upgrades could simply leverage the con guration le created through the UI-driven process.

Best practice con guration: vRLCM tracks con guration drift, enables admins to restore previous con gurations, and apply best practice architectural principles.

Leverage VMware Identity Manager: Admins can either leverage an existing installation of VMware Identity Manager or use vRLCM to install a new one.

Final Words

After the initial private cloud hype died down, the race for market leadership is on once again. EMA research shows that in 2017 private cloud is high up on the list of investment priorities for enterprises
of all verticals and sizes. Vendors who will succeed in capturing a signi cant market share have to check the following boxes:

Support any cloud, offer developer friendly APIs and provide customers with a near turn-key deployment experience. With its recent announcements –Vmware Cloud Services, VMware Cloud on AWS, and Pivotal Container Service- Vmware is doing all the right things to be successful.

And then there’s of course one thing that’s needed to juggle apps between clouds and data centers: software de ned networking, where VMware is strategically well positioned with its NSX solution.

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VMware Goes SaaS-Ops and Multi Cloud: Launch of VMware Cloud on AWS and Six VMware Cloud Services for Consistent Data Center and Cloud Management

By Torsten Volk on Aug 28, 2017 7:45:57 AM

At VMworld 2017, VMware announced the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS and of the six initial VMware Cloud Services. VMware Cloud on AWS offers customers the long expected capability of deploying VMware's Cloud Foundation Suite of SDDC products (vSphere, NSX and vSAN) to AWS. VMware Cloud Services enable operators, developers, security experts and compliance staff to consistently deploy and operate application infrastructure across today's most popular clouds: AWS, Google, Azure and vSphere. Today, both offerings, VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud Services are available from AWS U.S. West (Oregon Region), but can be used worldwide. VMware and Amazon are planning to roll out both offerings worldwide during 2018.

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