8221 News, Entwicklungen, Updates, HowTos

The buzz in the computing industry is all about cognitive.
My clients are at various stages of understanding its implications. They want to know what cognitive truly is and how it solves real business challenges.
So what is cognitive? As many observers have noted, it’s not a specific product. Instead, it’s an era that includes multiple vendors and various technologies. The move to this new era is driven by changes in the data landscape. Cognitive computing is vital to turning zettabytes of data into meaningful information. It enables computers to understand, reason and learn without a person programming everything to achieve answers.
For a business, cognitive’s implications are enormous. It is the “disruptive enabler.”
IBM has identified five areas where a business can benefit now if it starts building a cognitive business:

Drive deeper engagement. Help clients behind the scenes for better customer experience.
Scale expertise. Companies spend lots of money training employees. This can be scaled more effectively.
Put learning in every product. Build products that adapt to each customer’s needs.
Change operations. Streamline your supply chain to help margins.
Transform how discovery is done. From pharmaceuticals to financial industries, research will be the foundation of how many companies work in the future.

In our survey of companies on a cognitive journey, the results were profound. For advanced users, the gains in customer engagement and the ability to respond faster to market needs were nearly doubled compared to beginners. Improvements to productivity and efficiency were just as significant.
For example, Mueller, a privately held company that employs 700 people across four manufacturing and distribution centers in the south-central United States, has implemented cognitive systems to assist with revenue forecasting, supply chain management, marketing, employee health and safety, and talent management. Within 12 months, one solution returned 113 percent on investment, creating a net annual benefit of more than $780,000, and reducing scrap metal waste by 20 to 30 percent. Another solution reduced the time spent creating reports by more than 90 percent, while a third solution resulted in a 90 percent improvement in the time to value in data processing.
USAA, a financial services company, provides banking and insurance services to 10.4 million past and present members of the US armed forces and their immediate family members. To better service these customers, USAA has implemented an innovative cognitive computing solution that uses IBM Watson. The solution enables transitioning military members to visit usaa.com or use a mobile browser to ask questions specific to leaving the military, such as “Can I be in the reserve and collect veterans compensation benefits?” or “How do I make the most of the Post-9/11 GI Bill?” As a result, USAA can provide customers comprehensive answers to complex questions in a non-judgmental environment.
WellPoint (now part of Anthem), one of the largest health benefits companies in the United States, delivers numerous health benefit solutions through its networks nationwide. For complex decisions, patients can often wait weeks for the clinical review to occur, and a lack of available evidence or ability to process in a timely fashion can delay treatment or lead to errors. To address this business challenge, WellPoint implemented a cognitive computing solution powered by IBM Watson that provides decision support for the pre-authorization process. Providing these decision support capabilities and reducing paperwork gives clinicians the chance to spend more time with patients.
These are the competitive business advantages an enterprise needs: the capabilities to transform business processes, impact business outcomes and engage customers in the new era ahead.
This fundamental change in computing needs leading-edge providers to drive it. We agree with research analysts at Gartner who said in their latest report that the IBM approach to cognitive computing is “likely to be one of the most attractive platforms in the future.”
If your business hasn’t done so already, now’s the time to start your cognitive journey.
Learn more about cognitive capabilities with IBM Watson.
The post How businesses can get the cognitive edge appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

26. April 201726. April 2017

da Agency

Making cities safer: data collection for Vision Zero

A critical part of enabling cities to implement their Vision Zero policies – the goal of the current National Transportation Data Challenge &8211; is to be able to generate open, multi-modal travel experience data. While existing datasets use police and hospital reports to provide a comprehensive picture of fatalities and life altering injuries, by their nature, they are sparse and resist use for prediction and prioritization. Further, changes to infrastructure to support Vision Zero policies frequently require balancing competing needs from different constituencies &8211; protected bike lanes, dedicated signals and expanded sidewalks all raise concerns that automobile traffic will be severely impacted.
A timeline of the El Monte/Marich intersection in Mountain View, from 2014 to 2017 provides an opportunity to put some of these challenges into context.

since there is no standard way to report near misses, the City didn’t know that the intersection was so dangerous until somebody actually died, and it was not included in the ped and bike plans,
because the number of fatalities is so low, and the number of areas that need to be fixed is so high, past fatalities may not be a good predictors of future ones. But that makes prioritization challenging &8211; should the City play “whack-a-mole” with locations where fatalities occurred, or should it stick with the ped and bike plans?
even if the City does pick an area to fix, it is not clear what the fix should be. Note that the City wanted to improve the visibility of the intersection, but the residents were skeptical that any solution that did not address the speeding would be sufficient.
it is not clear how to balance competing needs &8211; addressing the speeding issue will potentially increase the travel times of (the currently speeding) automobile travellers. Increased travel time is quantifiable, how can we make the increased safety also quantifiable so that we can, as a society, make the appropriate tradeoffs?

The e-mission project in the RISE and BETS labs focuses on building an extensible platform that can instrument the end-to-end multi-modal travel experience at the personal scale, collate it for analysis at the societal scale, and help solve some of the challenges above.
In particular, it combines background data collection of trips, classified by modes, with user-reported incident data, and makes the resulting anonymized heatmaps available via public APIs for further visualization and analysis. The platform also has an integration with the habitica open source platform to enable gamification of data collection.
Click to view slideshow.
This could allow cities to collect crowdsourced stress maps, use them to prioritize the areas that need improvement, and after pilot or final fixes are done, quantify the reduction in stress and mode shifts related to the fix.
Since this is an open source, extensible platform and generates open data, it can easily be extended to come up with some cool projects. Here are five example extensions to give a flavor of what improvements can be done:

enhance the incident reporting to provide more details (why? how serious?)
have the incident prompting be based on phone shake instead of a prompt at the end of every trip
encourage reporting through gamification using the habitica integration
convert the existing heatmaps to aggregate, actionable metrics
automatically identify “top 5” or “top 10” hotspots for cities to prioritize

But these are just examples &8211; the whole point of the challenge is to tap into all the great ideas that are out there. Sign up for the challenge, walk/bike around your cities, hear what planners want, and use your ideas to make the world a better place!
Quelle: Amplab Berkeley

24. April 201724. April 2017

da Agency

OK, I give up. Is Docker now Moby? And what is LinuxKit?

The post OK, I give up. Is Docker now Moby? And what is #LinuxKit? appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
This week at #DockerCon, Docker made several announcements, but one in particular caused massive confusion as users thought that “Docker” was becoming &8220;Moby.&8221; Well… OK, but which Docker? The Register probably put it best, when they said, &8220;Docker (the company) decided to differentiate Docker (the commercial software products Docker CE and Docker EE) from Docker (the open source project).&8221; Tack on a second project about building core operating systems, and there’s a lot to unpack.
Let&8217;s start with Moby.
What is Moby?
Docker, being the foundation of many peoples&8217; understanding of containers, unsurprisingly isn&8217;t a single monolithic application. Instead, it&8217;s made up of components such as runc, containerd, InfraKit, and so on. The community works on those components (along with Docker, of course) and when it&8217;s time for a release, Docker packages them all up and out they go. With all of those pieces, as you might imagine, it&8217;s not a simple task.
And what happens if you want your own custom version of Docker? After all, Docker is built on the philosophy of &8220;batteries included but swappable&8221;. How easy is it to swap something out?
In his blog post introducing the Moby Project, Solomon Hykes explained that the idea is to simplify the process of combining components into something usable. &8220;We needed our teams to collaborate not only on components, but also on assemblies of components, borrowing an idea from the car industry where assemblies of components are reused to build completely different cars.&8221;
Hykes explained that from now on, Docker releases would be built using Moby and its components. At the moment there are 80+ components that can be combined into assemblies. He further explained that:
&8220;Moby is comprised of:

A library of containerized backend components (e.g., a low-level builder, logging facility, volume management, networking, image management, containerd, SwarmKit, …)
A framework for assembling the components into a standalone container platform, and tooling to build, test and deploy artifacts for these assemblies.
A reference assembly, called Moby Origin, which is the open base for the Docker container platform, as well as examples of container systems using various components from the Moby library or from other projects.&8221;

Who needs to know about Moby?
The first group that needs to know about Moby is Docker developers, as in the people building the actual Docker software, and not people building applications using Docker containers, or even people building Docker containers. (Here&8217;s hoping that eventually this nomenclature gets cleared up.) Docker developers should just continue on as usual, and Docker pull requests will be reouted to the Moby project.
So everyone else is off the hook, right?
Well, um, no.
If all you do is pull together containers from pre-existing components and software you write yourself, then you&8217;re good; you don&8217;t need to worry about Moby. Unless, that is, you aren&8217;t happy with your available Linux distributions.
Enter LinuxKit.
What is LinuxKit?
While many think that Docker invented the container, in actuality linux containers had been around for some time, and Docker containers are based on them. Which is really convenient — if you&8217;re using Linux. If, on the other hand, you are using a system that doesn&8217;t include Linux, such as a Mac, a Windows PC, or that Raspberry Pi you want to turn into an automatic goat feeder, you&8217;ve got a problem.
Docker requires linuxcontainers. Which is a problem if you have no linux.
Enter LinuxKit.
The idea behind LinuxKit is that you start with a minimal Linux kernal &8212; the base distro is only 35MB &8212; and add literally only what you need. Once you have that, you can build your application on it, and run it wherever you need to. Stephen Foskitt tweeted a picture of an example from the announcement:

More about LinuxKit DockerCon pic.twitter.com/TfRJ47yBdB
— Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) April 18, 2017

The end result is that you can build containers that run on desktops, mainframes, bare metal, IoT, and VMs.
The project will be managed by the Linux Foundation, which is only fitting.
So what about Alpine, the minimal Linux that&8217;s at the heart of Docker? Docker&8217;s security director, Nathan McCauley said that &8220;LinuxKit&8217;s roots are in Alpine.&8221; The company will continue to use it for Docker.

Today we launch LinuxKit &8212; a Linux subsystem focussed on security. pic.twitter.com/Q0YJsX67ZT
— Nathan McCauley (@nathanmccauley) April 18, 2017

So what does this have to do with Moby?
Where LinuxKit has to do with Moby
If you&8217;re salivating at the idea of building your own Linux distribution, take a deep breath. LinuxKit is an assembly within Moby.
So if you want to use LinuxKit, you need to download and install Moby, then use it to build your LinuxKit pieces.
So there you have it. You now have the ability to build your own Linux system, and your own containerization system. But it&8217;s definitely not for the faint of heart.
Resources

Wait – we can explain, says Moby, er, Docker amid rebrand meltdown • The Register
Moby, LinuxKit Kick Off New Docker Collaboration Phase | Software | LinuxInsider
Why Docker created the Moby Project | CIO
GitHub – linuxkit/linuxkit: A toolkit for building secure, portable and lean operating systems for containers
Docker LinuxKit: Secure Linux containers for Windows, macOS, and clouds | ZDNet
Announcing LinuxKit: A Toolkit for building Secure, Lean and Portable Linux Subsystems &8211; Docker Blog
Stephen Foskett on Twitter: &8220;More about LinuxKit DockerCon https://t.co/TfRJ47yBdB&8221;
Introducing Moby Project: a new open-source project to advance the software containerization movement &8211; Docker Blog
DockerCon 2017: Moby’s Cool Hack sessions &8211; Docker Blog

The post OK, I give up. Is Docker now Moby? And what is LinuxKit? appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
Quelle: Mirantis

20. April 201720. April 2017

da Agency

More than 60 Red Hat-led sessions confirmed for OpenStack Summit Boston

This Spring’s 2017 OpenStack Summit in Boston should be another great and educational event. The OpenStack Foundation has posted the final session agenda detailing the entire week&8217;s schedule of events. And once again Red Hat will be very busy during the four-day event, including delivering more than 60 sessions, from technology overviews to deep dive&8217;s around the OpenStack services for containers, storage, networking, compute, network functions virtualization (NFV), and much, much more.

As a Headline sponsor this Fall, we also have a full day breakout room on Monday, where we plan to present additional product and strategy sessions. And we will have two keynote presenters on stage: President and CEO, Jim Whitehurst, and Vice President and Chief Technologist, Chris Wright.
To learn more about Red Hat&8217;s general sessions, look at the details below. We&8217;ll add the agenda details of our breakout soon. Also, be sure to visit us at our booth in the center of the Marketplace to meet the team and check out our live demonstrations. Finally, we&8217;ll have Red Hat engineers, product managers, consultants, and executives in attendance, so be sure to talk to your Red Hat representative to schedule an in-person meeting while there.
And in case you haven&8217;t registered yet, visit our OpenStack Summit page for a discounted registration code to help get you to the event. We look forward to seeing you in Boston this April.
For more details on each session, click on the title below:
Monday sessions

Kuryr & Fuxi: delivering OpenStack networking and storage to Docker swarm containers
Antoni Segura Puimedon, Vikas Choudhary, and Hongbin Lu (Huawei)

Multi-cloud demo
Monty Taylor

Configure your cloud for recovery
Walter Bentley

Kubernetes and OpenStack at scale
Stephen Gordon

No longer considered an epic spell of transformation: in-place upgrade!
Krzysztof Janiszewski and Ken Holden

Fifty shades for enrollment: how to use Certmonger to win OpenStack
Ade Lee and Rob Crittenden

OpenStack and OVN – what&8217;s new with OVS 2.7
Russell Bryant, Ben Pfaff (VMware), and Justin Pettit (VMware)

Federation with Keycloak and FreeIPA
Martin Lopes, Rodrigo Duarte Sousa, and John Dennis

7 “must haves” for highly effective Telco NFV deployments
Anita Tragler and Greg Smith (Juniper Networks, Inc.)

Containerizing OpenStack deployments: lessons learned from TripleO
Flavio Percoco

Project update &8211; Heat
Rabi Mishra, Zane Bitter, and Rico Lin (EasyStack)

Tuesday sessions

OpenStack Telemetry and the 10,000 instances
Julien Danjou and Alex Krzos

Mastering and troubleshooting NFV issues
Sadique Puthen and Jaison Raju

The Ceph power show &8211; hands-on with Ceph: Episode 2 &8211; ‘The Jewel Story&8217;
Karan Singh, Daniel Messer, and Brent Compton

SmartNICs &8211; paving the way for 25G/40G/100G speed NFV deployments in OpenStack
Anita Tragler and Edwin Peer (Netronome)

Scaling NFV &8211; are containers the answer?
Azhar Sayeed

Free my organization to pursue cloud native infrastructure!
Dave Cain and Steve Black (East Carolina University)

Container networking using Kuryr &8211; a hands-on lab
Sudhir Kethamakka and Amol Chobe (Ericsson)

Using software-defined WAN implementation to turn on advanced connectivity services in OpenStack
Ali Kafel and Pratik Roychowdhury (OpenContrail)

Don&8217;t fail at scale: how to plan for, build, and operate a successful OpenStack cloud
David Costakos and Julio Villarreal Pelegrino

Red Hat OpenStack Certification Program
Allessandro Silva

OpenStack and OpenDaylight: an integrated IaaS for SDN and NFV
Nir Yechiel and Andre Fredette

Project update &8211; Kuryr
Antoni Segura Puimedon and Irena Berezovsky (Huawei)

Barbican workshop &8211; securing the cloud
Ade Lee, Fernando Diaz (IBM), Dave McCowan (Cisco Systems), Douglas Mendizabal (Rackspace), Kaitlin Farr (Johns Hopkins University)

Bridging the gap between deploying OpenStack as a cloud application and as a traditional application
James Slagle

Real time KVM and how it works
Eric Lajoie

Wednesday sessions

Projects Update &8211; Sahara
Telles Nobrega and Elise Gafford

Project update &8211; Mistral
Ryan Brady

Bite off more than you can chew, then chew it: OpenStack consumption models
Tyler Britten, Walter Bentley, and Jonathan Kelly (MetacloudCisco)

Hybrid messaging solutions for large scale OpenStack deployments
Kenneth Giusti and Andrew Smith

Project update &8211; Nova
Dan Smith, Jay Pipes (Mirantis), and Matt Riedermann (Huawei)

Hands-on to configure your cloud to be able to charge your users using official OpenStack components
Julien Danjou, Christophe Sautheir (Objectif Libre), and Maxime Cottret (Objectif Libre)

To OpenStack or not OpenStack; that is the question
Frank Wu

Distributed monitoring and analysis for telecom requirements
Tomofumi Hayashi, Yuki Kasuya (KDDI Research), and Ryota Mibu (NEC)

OVN support for multiple gateways and IPv6
Russell Bryant and Numan Siddique

Kuryr-Kubernetes: the seamless path to adding pods to your datacenter networking
Antoni Segura Puimedon, Irena Berezovsky (Huawei), and Ilya Chukhnakov (Mirantis)

Unlocking the performance secrets of Ceph object storage
Karan Singh, Kyle Bader, and Brent Compton

OVN hands-on tutorial part 1: introduction
Russell Bryant, Ben Pfaff (VMware), and Justin Pettit (VMware)

Kuberneterize your baremetal nodes in OpenStack!
Ken Savich and Darin Sorrentino

OVN hands-on tutorial part 2: advanced
Russell Bryant, Ben Pfaff (VMware), and Justin Pettit (VMware)

The Amazon effect on open source cloud business models
Flavio Percoco, Monty Taylor, Nati Shalom (GigaSpaces), and Yaron Haviv (Iguazio)

Neutron port binding and impact of unbound ports on DVR routers with floatingIP
Brian Haley and Swaminathan Vasudevan (HPE)

Upstream contribution &8211; give up or double down?
Assaf Muller

Hyper cool infrastructure
Randy Robbins

Strategic distributed and multisite OpenStack for business continuity and scalability use cases
Rob Young

Per API role-based access control
Adam Young and Kristi Nikolla (Massachusetts Open Cloud)

Logging work group BoF
Erno Kuvaja, Rochelle Grober, Hector Gonzalez Mendoza (Intel), Hieu LE (Fujistu) and Andrew Ukasick (AT&T)

Performance and scale analysis of OpenStack using Browbeat
Alex Krzos, Sai Sindhur Malleni, and Joe Talerico

Scaling Nova: how CellsV2 affects your deployment
Dan Smith

Ambassador community report
Erwan Gallen, Lisa-Marie Namphy (OpenStack Ambassador), Akihiro Hasegawa (Equinix), Marton Kiss (Aptira), and Akira Yoshiyama (NEC)

Thursday sessions

Examining different ways to get involved: a look at open source
Rob Wilmoth

CephFS backed NFS share service for multi-tenant clouds
Victoria Martinez de la Cruz, Ramana Raja, and Tom Barron

Create your VM in a (almost) deterministic way &8211; a hands-on lab
Sudhir Kethamakka and Geetika Batra

RDO&8217;s continuous packaging platform
Matthieu Huin, Fabien Boucher, and Haikel Guemar (CentOS)

OpenDaylight Network Virtualization solution (NetVirt) with FD.io VPP data plane
Andre Fredette, Srikanth Vavilapalli (Ericsson), and Prem Sankar Gopanna (Ericsson)

Ceph snapshots for fun & profit
Gregory Farnum

Gnocchi and collectd for faster fault detection and maintenance
Julien Danjou and Emma Foley

Project update &8211; TripleO
Emillien Macchi, Flavio Percoco, and Steven Hardy

Project update &8211; Telemetry
Julien Danjou, Mehdi Abaakouk, and Gordon Chung (Huawei)

Turned up to 11: low latency Ceph block storage
Jason Dillaman, Yuan Zhou (INTC), and Tushar Gohad (Intel)

Who reads books anymore? Or writes them?
Michael Solberg and Ben Silverman (OnX Enterprise Solutions)

Pushing the boundaries of OpenStack &8211; wait, what are they again?
Walter Bentley

Multi-site OpenStack &8211; deployment option and challenges for a telco
Azhar Sayeed

Ceph project update
Sage Weil

Quelle: RedHat Stack