What is the Internet of Things?

We live in complicated times governed by the interconnectivity of processes, schedules, tasks, and systems. Activities are constantly monitored, analyzed, and calibrated to maximize efficiency. But what does all this connectedness and integration amount to? In short -- the Internet of Things (IoT), which we can think of as the intelligent approach to connect devices, integrate systems, and improve networks by leveraging and mining data gathered from reporting tools and sensors in physical objects and machines.

In essence, the Internet of Things is taking over the world.

Think of the IoT as an umbrella that forms a connected web of collective communications, operations, and procedures in an ever-growing array of industries. It does this all in an effort to make our lives easier, by mining data to be streamlined in a more automated and efficient world. In 2014, Gartner cited that the Internet of Things was the year’s most-hyped technology. But what does Gartner's (an American market research and advisory firm) message really mean?

But Just How is the IoT Taking Over the World?

Starting with the seemingly mundane task of waking up, imagine your alarm clock triggering a series of processes to help expedite your morning routine. Televisions...

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Jacob Himmelstein, Partner Manager for CloudBerry Lab.

CloudBerry Lab has integrated their backup technology with the CenturyLink Platform. This integration allows the user to achieve rapid time-to-value for this Backup to Cloud Object Storage solution.

Solution Overview

The evolution of cloud technology saw cloud storage as a great tool to offload on-premise storage economics into the cloud. Thanks to ever-increasing Internet bandwidth and declining storage prices, keeping backups in the cloud has become a viable alternative to traditional on-site data storage for SMBs. Many companies often overlook key considerations when it comes to online backup, with Cloudberry Lab for CenturyLink Cloud, the user can be assured that important components are available, such as:

Reliable Cloud Storage that you control: When moving backup data off-site, a company should ensure the cloud storage service is reliable, cost-effective, yet high-performing. With CloudBerry Backup, you backup to customer-owned CenturyLink Cloud Storage, which you fully control and manage. Automate files and folders backup from your Windows desktop to the CenturyLink Cloud...

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How many times have you felt less-than-confident about the stability of your most critical applications in case of a disaster? We have all experienced the frustration of losing control of our systems, processes, applications and infrastructure resources while not being able to easily recover from downtime (planned or unplanned).

With the latest release of Cloud Application Manager, those times have come to an end.

Cloud Application Manager has expanded its support to a new type of deployment in case of a scenario where a failover is needed. Our appliance supports an active/passive topology. So…how does it work?

The recommended way to implement this capability is to run a two-node cluster (the main node and the backup node which has the data shared). This active/passive configuration offers resiliency in the event of a failover and is fairly easy to operate, as the back-up node can be activated and configured so you can continue working normally. Important considerations to get you started!

Make a snapshot of your Cloud Application Manager VM so you can recover to the previous instance before setting a new appliance as replica. Once a failure is detected, you can execute the failover via scripts and ensure that no data is lost or compromised.

Let’s...

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In today's growing market, we are seeing customers of all sizes migrate to the cloud for a variety of reasons. The cloud is certainly showing its value in the market, from the small developer looking for a free, disposable, or cost efficient server to large corporate customers looking to optimize IT agility and expenses.

Unfortunately, whether it's cloud or traditional managed services, many clients opt for nothing more than an anti-virus application and perhaps a firewall to cover their information security compliance requirements. However, as attacks grow more sophisticated and Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) grow more prevalent, using nothing but anti-virus and a firewall can leave gaps in your security profile, exposing you and your customers to unnecessary risks.

To get an idea of the risks you might face, consider this article - MySQL servers hijacked with malware to perform DDoS attacks. In this case, the attacker was able to upload a Trojan Horse application directly into a database, most likely through a SQL injection. An Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), unlike an anti-virus application, would have detected the SQL injection attempt and blocked it at the web interface. However, because the system was inadequately protected, the attacker slipped the Trojan Horse past...

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In meeting with customers and partners over the past several months, I hear one question on a regular basis: "We like the flexibility of your Hybrid IT portfolio, but why are you building a public cloud?" As recently stated by our CTO, we are committed to a next generation cloud user experience for the delivery of our primary business: managed services across data center and network .

To understand why we are using this approach, it’s helpful to think about the writings of Nick Carr. His 2003 Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn’t Matter," touched off a firestorm of debate throughout our industry, especially within the vendor community.

It’s easy to see what Mr. Carr got right. He correctly observed that the client-server era led to companies over-estimating the discrete value of IT device technology. He stressed the importance of strategic alignment between information technology and business stakeholders. He predicted the rise of cloud computing and utility-like pricing based on consumption.

And while there are valid criticisms afforded by a decade of hindsight, Carr’s fundamental truth holds up today. IT isn’t valuable unto itself; its value is derived from what it allows the larger organization to...

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Vendor Lock-In Withers

As long as there have been IT vendors, there has been worry about vendor lock-in from buyers. Businesses squirm at the notion of having data and systems stuck with a particular provider over time, without an easy out.

Public cloud infrastructure, and more specifically, add-on tech from cloud brokers (remember them?) promised to alleviate this anxiety. So did OpenStack, with lukewarm results so far, years after the original promise.

To date, tinkering with interoperability for cloud has been a non-starter for businesses. Once again, the effort to achieve compatibility just hasn’t been worth it.

A New Hope

Now, containers and application services offer the legit possibility of vanquishing the lock-in "boogeyman" once and for all. Why might this time be different? Ruthless commodification is creeping up the stack, where nearly everything besides the actual code the developer is writing can be operated, managed, and maintained by a 3rd party on the cheap.

Which brings us to today’s news regarding Cloud Foundry Certification. This is a big development for enterprises striving to remain relevant as software gobbles the world. Cloud Foundry Certification ensures that application code running in one Cloud Foundry service will run seamlessly in another. Providers who display the Cloud Foundry Certification...

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In today's IT market place, decision makers are often burdened with finding the right hosting mix. The challenge is often determining where the business services would best fit: into Colocation, Managed Hosting, or Cloud? Or is it possible that a Hybrid IT model is most effective? The answers to those questions are not always clear. This blog focuses on Colocation Services; and how to determine when Colocation Services may be the right choice for you. While Cloud Services seem to demand a majority of the market attention, Colocation offers the value of owners economics. Colocation allows for more control and predictable traffic patterns, as it provides monthly OpEx. We aim to provide a comprehensive definition of the Colocation space while focusing on some of the more prominent benefits of Colocation. In addition, this post will distinguish when Colocation may make more sense versus other IT spaces.

What is Colocation?

At its core, Colocation is pretty simple. Retail Colocation providers offer space, physical security, power, and cooling for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms. Colocation providers further offer the ability to connect to an ecosystem of cloud, platform, ISV, telecommunications and network service providers - with minimum cost...

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What is WordPress?

Today, nearly 25% of the sites on the Internet are WordPress sites. WordPress is an open source project that started out as just a blogging site has grown into a robust user-driven Content Management System (CMS). With WordPress, the use-cases are unlimited. There are thousands of plugins, themes, and widgets that help extend and add to the functionality available in WordPress.

In addition to all that WordPress has to offer, there is an extensive and helpful community of WordPress users around the world. Questions and answers can be found in support forums, mailing lists, WordCamps and, if that is not enough, thousands of video presentations exist and are being added to on wordpress.tv to help everyone, from the beginner to the expert.

Ways to Integrate WordPress on CenturyLink Cloud

WordPress - Blueprint

The CenturyLink Blueprint provides a click-through solution to install and configure WordPress on a new or existing server in the Linux platform.

CenturyLink Cloud works with Bitnami to provide open source software integrations to its customers. Bitnami is a library of popular server applications and development environments that can be installed with one click, either in your laptop, on a virtual machine (VM) or hosted in the cloud. Bitnami takes care...

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New application architecture visualization advances enterprise deployment and management.

We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear. And as such, today marks the formal release of ElasticBox 3.5 which is filled with new capabilities to enable IT to drive value, productivity and confidence throughout the enterprise. As a result, we continue to focus on the enhancements that simplifies the daily routine of IT experts by providing a highly adaptive model for standardizing the process of deployments and environment provisioning.

Company	Feedback
	“ElasticBox does a good job of supporting the application deployment process and infrastructure management with its self-service portal and box blueprints for popular and widely-used software components, including containers. This means application owners and IT operations can more effectively collaborate on applications and releases with visualization for traditional, production, mission-critical and multi-tiered applications.” ~ Jay Lyman, Research Manager, Cloud Management and Containers, 451 Research
	“ElasticBox allows us to create predictable and repeatable processes removing the need for manual infrastructure provisioning and configuration. The solution offers a very powerful IT workflow and provisioning automation platform combined with an intuitive user interface we are proud to expose to our internal customers. Adding ElasticBox to our continuous delivery pipeline has virtually eliminated the human element from our application

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In regards to Colocation, the saying: "You get what you pay for...” is especially true. Generally, the least expensive quote does not always offer the best value. In this article, we will cover an array of important topics that affect the cost-to-benefits ratio in an effort to arm you with the necessary knowledge to make educated decisions throughout the process. Whether you are just beginning the quest of determining if Colocation is a viable option for your business, or are just starting to shop the market for providers, this guide highlights some of the things to consider throughout the process.

Meet with the Prospective Teams

Talk with the sales and technical staff to gauge if their knowledge and routines are a match for your business needs, which is important because they will become an extension of your existing team. The staff will help you support equipment, answer questions, and you can leverage them to provide additional insight on the best practices for deploying and scaling your operations.

Schedule a site visit.

A site visit is a must. Evaluate the site and confirm everything is "as promised" while gaining a deeper understanding of what will be available in the future. This is a great time...

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The PaaS Promise - as Implemented

As an industry we see a need for faster iteration on business solutions and an expectation of higher quality. AppFog, like all cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, is supporting this by changing the way these applications are developed, hosted, and deployed. This change permeates throughout organizations far more deeply than the adoption of Information-as-a-Service (IaaS). In his Forbes article Mike Kavis pointed out the following:

The intent of PaaS was to abstract away all of the messy and challenging IT plumbing work so developers could just write code. PaaS’s original promise was “forget about infrastructure and operations, we will handle that for you.”

This usually presents itself as developers operating with less day-to-day involvement with IT processes as well as the staff focused on infrastructure operations. No more logging tickets for resources and waiting for manual procurement and provisioning. Once developers are using a PaaS in production, the day-to-day management and scaling of the app is highly automated.

Fedr8 Takes PaaS Adoption One Step Further

This is why the Fedr8 model on AppFog struck such a unique chord. True their service depends on PaaS for all the typical operational efficiencies in the web front-end, release management, and...

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A couple of months ago, we announced general availability of public boxes, a knowledge repository of sample deployments for popular application stacks.

But, we couldn’t just leave it there because we know that customers want more. How about simplifying your application deployment processes? Cloud Application Manager is now enabling customers to deploy complete application stacks with Application Boxes which include all of the dependent components and infrastructure that can be deployed in a predictable manner.

Application boxes are inspired by the need to reduce and simplify the deployment of complex applications with multiple tiers and multiple instances. To deploy most applications, you need several instances cooperating together in a logical way. Application boxes are a way to define and reuse several boxes that work together to run an application.

Application boxes are smart boxes that allow you to define your topology, add boxes and bindings, and choose the variables for each one: name, version, tags, policy, etc in only a few minutes. Modeling your applications in these easy-to-deploy boxes prevents errors and saves time. Isn’t it magical?

Get a step closer to democratizing software automation configuration and infrastructure. Learn more about Application Boxes and how they work. Create one of your own here.

Want

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