Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts

Tuesday, 6 May 2014

Virtualization – What is the ‘true’ cloud journey?

The adoption of cloud computing is happening today, or so say a wide variety of analysts, vendors, and even journalists. The surveys show greatly increased interest in cloud computing concepts, and even increased usage of both public and private cloud models by developers of new application systems.

But does your IT organization really understand its cloud journey?

Friend, colleague, and cloud blogger Chris Hoff wrote a really insightful post today that digs into the reality–worldwide–of where most companies are with cloud adoption today…at least in terms of internal “private cloud” infrastructure. In it, he describes the difficult options that are on the table for such deployments:

There is, however, a recurring theme across geography, market segment, culture, and technology adoption appetites; everyone is seriously weighing their options regarding where, how and with whom to make their investments in terms of building cloud computing infrastructure (and often platform) as-a-service strategy. The two options, often discussed in parallel but ultimately bifurcated based upon explored use cases, come down simply to this:

Take any number of available open core or open-source software-driven cloud stacks, commodity hardware and essentially engineer your own Amazon, or

Use proprietary or closed source virtualization-nee-cloud software stacks, high-end “enterprise” or “carrier-class” converged compute/network/storage fabrics and ride the roadmap of the vendors

One option means you expect to commit to an intense amount of engineering and development from a software perspective. The other means you expect to focus on integration of other companies’ solutions. Depending upon geography, it’s very, very unclear to enterprises [and] service providers what is the most cost-effective and risk-balanced route when use cases, viability of solution providers, and the ultimate consumers of these use-cases are conflated.

Hoff is pointing out that there are no “quick and easy” solutions out there. Even if, say, a vendor solution is a “drop in” technology initially, the complexity and tradeoffs of a long-term dependency on the vendor adds greatly to the cost and complexity.

On the other hand, open-source cloud stacks enable cheaper acquisition and more ways to implement the features that best suit your company’s needs, but only at the cost of requiring additional development, engineering, and operations skills to get it working–and keep it working.

All of which leads to the likelihood that, as a whole, global IT will take some time to take private cloud “mainstream.” So that means cloud computing isn’t as disruptive as it was made out to be, right?

Wrong. Bernard Golden, CEO of Hyperstratus and a leading cloud blogger in his own right, pointed out today that it isn’t the CIO or CTO that will control the pace of cloud adoption, but software developers:

The implication for organizations…is that decisions made by developers create commitments for the organizations they are part of–commitments that the organization does not recognize at the time they are made by the developer and may, in fact, be decisions that, had the organization understood them at the time they were made by the developer, it would have eschewed them. The result is that two or three years down the road, these organizations “discover” technology decisions and applications that are based on choices made by developers without organizational review.

This may account for the curious lack of respect given Amazon on the part of IT organizations and vendors. O’Grady addresses this in a second post titled “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Rise of Amazon Web Services.” In it, he primarily addresses the fact that most technology vendors evince little fear of Amazon, preferring to focus on private cloud computing environments. He attributes this, in part, to the vendors’ desire to keep traditional margins rather than descending into a pricing battle with Amazon.

Golden goes on to point out that, in his opinion, the reason many vendors aren’t seeing Amazon as direct competition in many deals is that they aren’t talking to the same people:

I might attribute it to a different factor: Vendors primarily seek to talk to senior management, those who control budgets that pay for the vendors’ products–and, as we’ve just noted, those managers often miss the reality of what developers are actually doing. Consequently, they won’t be telling vendors how much public cloud is being used, and the vendors will respond with the time-honored “we don’t really see them much in competitive situations” (I used to hear this a lot from proprietary software vendors about the open source alternatives to their products).

This, then, gets around to the point I made about the future of IT operations in my last post. If, indeed, cloud computing is an applications-driven operations model, and if application operations is managed separately from service or infrastructure operations, then application operations will almost certainly be developed/configured/whatever on an application-by-application basis.

If that is true, then the operations automation for applications will be:

Created as part of the software development process, therefore influenced much more by development decisions than by IT operations decisions, and

Will target specific deployment environments (clouds or cloud ecosystems), thereby predestining their ongoing operations requirements.

This is why I have said so many times on this blog that, though I believe that the short-medium term will see slow public cloud adoption, especially for critical workloads with legal compliance consequences, the long term will see an IT landscape in which hybrid IT rules, but public cloud will be a dominant deployment model (or acquisition model, in the case of software as a service).

The economics are just too compelling, and the technical issues just too solvable. Solving the legal issues remains to be seen, but there have been signs in the last year that both the courts and various legislative bodies are understanding the importance of protecting data in third-party environments. The corporate lawyers I’ve spoken to are reasonably sure that legal issues between cloud providers and their customers will be worked out in the next two to three years.

In the end, the journey to cloud computing won’t be a planned one. It will be, as disruptions often are, evolutionary and happen in often unexpected ways. The question is, can your IT culture handle that?

Read more: http://ift.tt/1fP4813

Canada to Pioneer Always On Cloud Computing

Pricing out cloud computing? Look at your workloads first

Cloud Computing in Retrospect

bodHOST Achieves Accelerated Momentum in $148 Billion Market with CEO Appointment

Cloud Options Proliferate Across the Channel

Know When to Upgrade to Cloud Services

Data, data everywhere: Data in the cloud computing era

IBM Announces OpenStack Cloud, Boosting Open Cloud Momentum

Cloud haters: You too will be assimilated

Hosted private clouds to experience rapid growth

Virtualization What is the true cloud journey?

Robert Recommends...

10 Defining Points for Cloud Computing

Virtualization with VMWare

IT as a Service (ITSM)

Cloud Computing Is More Than A Technology

The Evolution of Service Management

The Costs of Cloud Computing

Thursday, 27 February 2014

Create Time For Writing

The Secret to Creating Time To Write A Book

By Alissa Lukara

Are you not writing your book because you cannot find the time?

Or do you insist you need a longer amount of time than you have to give your subject matter the attention it needs. “I can’t write a book unless I have two or three hours a day, five days a week to devote to it.”

Right. That’s a surefire road to book writing failure. Would you force yourself to run a two hour marathon when you haven’t even jogged 1/2 a mile yet? Setting writing expectations that are too high is the same kind of recipe for disaster.

Not many with busy work, family and social life schedules have the time, energy, motivation or persistence to make that kind of commitment to write a book — or starting any new writing project. Even those of you who are professional, disciplined writers can have issues around creating enough time for writing the books you are most called to write.

Here is the first secret I have found about writing a book. If you wait until you have “time” to write that book, chances are, you won’t. The same goes for “enough time.” You will never have “time” to write a book.

Look at “time” as one of the “guardians at the gate” so to speak – whether you are a beginning writer or a well-published one. You and any writer on a journey to write a book face the “time to write” issue each time you take the first step of saying yes to your writer self–and for every book you write thereafter.

Myself included. Even after 25 years of writing books, articles and a blog, when I begin a new project or book or take a hiatus from writing and return to it, I am back at square one. I, too, need to reclaim the time for creating. I need to be like a wily coyote and gently trick it, entice it, ease it into being.

But then the miracle happens. The more I write, even if I only write 10 to 15 minutes at a time, the more I keep those appointments to write even for short time periods, the more actual time for writing opens, bends, flexes and stretches for me. And that pesky time guardian lets me pass–for the moment.

You can claim that time to write your book, too. And find yourself writing things you never thought possible–regardless of how much “time” for creating books you have or don’t have.

Here’s how to create time for writing:

Number One Secret to Managing Time for Writers:

Do less. Expect less of yourself. Take yourself off the “I’m not writing, self-flagellating, guilt” hook.

Eliminate saying you need at least two hours or you won’t be able to go “deep enough” to write something profound and meaningful.

Instead, stay in the “I don’t know.” Take the chance to give up that expectation and trust that you might surprise yourself and dive into those writing depths immediately.

Reduce that “2 hours a day, 5 days a week” to a commitment of “15 minutes a day, 3 times a week.”

If you still can’t find the “time,” reduce it even more to 15 minutes once a week or five minutes once a week. Then, add more time slowly.I recently went back to this practice myself. I had been on a hiatus from writing a novel. Initially, I tried to dive back into writing 2 to 3 hours a day, because I have the “discipline” to do that and have written books, been a professional writer for 25 years. But instead of writing, I found myself playing computer solitaire,wanting to research every nuance of my subject matter, reading email (the death knoll to any creative spark), extending the length of my meditation practice.

Did I berate myself for not living up to my commitment?

No. Well, maybe a little.

But then, I lowered my expectations. What a relief.

I remembered that being gentle and kind with my writer self is what had worked best for me in the past. Once more, I recognized that “resistance” is part of the package for most writers, including me. It goes with the writing territory.

So I dropped my commitment the first week to writing 15 minutes a day 3 times a week. I told myself that if I wrote more, fine. If not, fine.

As I felt ready in the next week or two, I added to the amount of time I spent writing in a week. I’m up to a commitment of one hour a day, 4 to 5 days a week. I am slowly working my way up to a regular schedule of 2 to 3 hours a day on the novel.

This method works for me. And in my case, I’ve astounded myself again and again about what I can actually write in those 15 minutes — if that’s the time I have set to write. In fact, many of my most profound, heart wide open, soulful, gifts-from-the-muses writing for my books have spontaneously flowed through me in 15 to 30 minutes. They can for you, too.

Important Tips for Independently Publishing Your Novel

How to Create Engaging Content (Even if You Think You’re a Horrible Writer)

Almost like it hurts (to write)

I write to cleanse my soul

Less Than 25% of Students Write at Proficient Level: 15 Year Old Novelist Shares a Technique to Get Students Writing

The Reason I Write

Getting to Know You, Fellow Writers: Emily Ashton (aka “Seas of Scribble”)

Let’s start at the very beginning: Why Write At All?

14 Content Marketing Tips You’ll Read Because They’re in a List

7 Easy RulesTo Write Your Best Chapter. (Rule 1: Write Your Worst Chapter.)

Robert Recommends...

How To Write And Publish Your Autobiography

6 Tips For Your Writing Journey

Don’t Give Up On Writing That Novel

A Writer’s Perspective on Taking Criticism

Seven Secrets of Creative Writers

An E-Book in 72 Hours

The post Create Time For Writing appeared first on Robert JR Graham.

Monday, 3 February 2014

Makeover’s all around

I’ve recently updated all of the sites I currently run, and I’ve added some much needed improvements. Some feedback on the old iWeb site was… not the best. Apparently iWeb and Frontpage have a great deal in common, in that they’re both fairly easy to use, your tied to one way of doing things, and there are barely any plug-ins. Also they both carry that familiar 1990′s, 14 year old school project feel, which looks oh so professional.

The new RobertJRGraham.com site is powered by MySQL and WordPress. A great combination, with plenty of themes to choose from. This one is a combination of a few different components, and right now I’m pretty happy with the result. Feedback is welcome.

My innerprocess blog, which I’ve dedicated to my experiences on the road to personal mastery has also received a major overhaul. The site now sports a new rainwater theme, stylish and modern… and much more appealing to read.

I’ve also spent time on other affiliated sites, which can be checked out by using the Sites menu on my home page. With this new look and feel, and the additions I’ve been integrating, it’ll now be much easier to update content. Check back often!