cloud – Cloud Computing Today

On Tuesday, Walmart announced that OneOps, its DevOps platform for cloud applications, has been open sourced after two years of development and testing. OneOps delivers the capability to continuously monitor an application after its launch while auto-scaling or repairing the application as needed. In addition to providing application lifecycle management functionality, OneOps enables the migration of applications, databases and entire cloud environments from one cloud infrastructure to another. Moreover, OneOps facilitates the rapid provisioning of infrastructure on supported cloud platforms in conjunction with management functionality related to the ability to control attributes such as bandwidth and resource consumption. The ability of the OneOps platform to transport and monitor applications across a multitude of cloud platforms empowers developers to more easily avoid vendor lock-in by creating multiple instances of their deployments on several cloud platforms and leveraging the capabilities of various cloud environments for different use cases. By enhancing cloud portability, the platform facilitates the creation of hybrid, multi-cloud environments and thereby augments the ability of developers to compare cloud environments with respect to cost, performance and functionality. The platform constitutes a key addition to the cloud computing landscape by giving cloud developers access to the same tools that Walmart has used for its own cloud-based retail interfaces. The OneOps platform currently supports the deployment of applications on Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, CenturyLink Cloud and any OpenStack-based cloud. Couchbase integrates its NoSQL platform with OneOps, which also supports Node.js and ElasticSearch. Available on GitHub, the increasing maturity of OneOps represents yet another tool developers can leverage to create and navigate between multi-cloud environments until such time that the cloud computing landscape delivers a unified API capable of traversing the largely siloed cloud infrastructures specific to today’s cloud computing environment.

BMC Software (BMC) today announces news of three products that both define and illustrate the way in which mobile, cloud and social networking technologies are transforming the landscape of enterprise IT. Specifically, BMC revealed news of three applications that empower businesses to enable employees to more effectively obtain answers to business-related questions by taking advantage of crowdsourcing technology, visually rich user interfaces for organizing and accessing knowledge and interactive help desk platforms. BMC’s products aim to supplement the array of technological platforms that have become part of enterprise IT by delivering software applications that streamline the usage of technology within enterprise environments as detailed below:

•BMC MyIT 2.0 enables users to crowdsource answers to technical questions and efficaciously navigate information and technology-related resources within an organization. MyIT also dispenses with cumbersome paper forms required for IT management and help desk-related purposes.

•BMC AppZone 2.0 constitutes a centralized app store that allows organizations to publish and manage desktop, mobile and cloud-based applications throughout an organization.

•Remedyforce allows enterprises to create helpdesks, self-service scheduling centers and other easily searchable business repositories that allow businesses to automate access to information.

The screenshot below illustrates the social and crowdsourcing capabilities of MyIT:

Employees travelling from one location or another with questions about technology-related issues can log-in to MyIT and derive answers to questions about connectivity issues related to Microsoft Exchange, publicly available internet access or even operational issues involving travel plans. As such, MyIT provides an automated way to crowdsource responses to questions in ways that streamline productivity and dispense with the need to staff resources to answer questions from employees. Moreover, organizations can create web-based assistance centers that allow employees to quickly access non-transient data about technology as well as day to day operational anomalies such as application failures, connectivity disruptions or other technology malfunctions. Taken as a whole, the three applications illustrate the way in which the proliferation of technology into enterprise environments itself ushers in the need for a supporting layer of technologies to ensure the effective utilization of cloud, mobile and social technology platforms in high performing, operational environments. The market for turnkey solutions for enterprise app stores and help desk-related software with rich user interfaces is likely to continue to rise dramatically as organizations strive to curtail costs associated with technology-related operational downtime.