Matching IT Resources to Application Requirements

Kubernetes security tool gives IT a leg up on DevSecOps

An emerging real estate firm tasked with DevSecOps sought an assist from startup Alcide, which bakes Kubernetes security best practices into its software. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Elastic SIEM woos enterprises with cost savings

Elastic SIEM gains interest from former Splunk users, with the promise of cost savings and the prospect of centralized security analytics and IT monitoring data repositories. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

AI help desk software frees IT ops to take on SRE skills

A financial services company will retrain its help desk staff to be app developers and SREs, while AI handles the grunt work for the company's call center employees. Continue Reading

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• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

IT pros brace for wave of M&A in microservices security

Microservices and DevOps have made IT security a shared responsibility among enterprise stakeholders, and experts expect this shift to prompt mass consolidation among vendors. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Alaska Airlines charts course for DevOps security

As Alaska Airlines plots a flight path to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, it will navigate with an automated DevOps security tool that spans multiple IT environments. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

AIOps monitoring arms IT staff with broader, deeper insights

Conventional monitoring gives ops teams critical visibility into the health of their IT systems, but with limited scope. Through an AIOps tool, they can significantly broaden their view. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

UPS delivers Agile plan for legacy application modernization

As UPS moved its package-tracking system from mainframe to open systems, it drew on the old adage about how to eat an elephant: one small bite at a time. Continue Reading

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• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Palo Alto Networks buys Twistlock, PureSec for container security

Palo Alto Networks snaps up Twistlock and PureSec to broaden its cloud security portfolio and give enterprise IT shops more options for container and serverless security. Continue Reading

By

• James Montgomery, Senior Features Editor

Mainframe DevOps gets fresh integration option in LzLabs

Most mainframe DevOps tools make open source app delivery pipelines speak mainframe's language, but LzLabs brings mainframe apps to a Linux-based platform without recompilation. Continue Reading

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• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Application dependency mapping expands in New Relic One

DevOps monitoring vendors rev their engines as enterprises take on more sophisticated IT monitoring practices to reach the next major phase of app modernization. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

OpenShift architecture bakes in CoreOS Operator automation

OpenShift 4.1 promises easier container management for IT ops pros, but getting there from OpenShift 3 could be tricky for enterprises with large deployments. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

OpenShift-Azure ties deepen as IT sets sights on multi-cloud

Enterprises will consider an OpenShift managed service on Azure as part of a multi-cloud strategy, but Kubernetes won't necessarily make workloads cloud-agnostic. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Test your Kubernetes terminology expertise with this quiz

Can you ace this quiz on Kubernetes architecture and component terminology? Assess your knowledge of these terms and whether you need to hit the books -- or online documentation. Continue Reading

By

• Alyssa Fallon, Former Associate Site Editor

Opsgenie integrations expand under Atlassian

Opsgenie's induction into the Atlassian fold reflects a trend of incident management tools' absorption into broader DevOps platforms, but not every user prefers a one-stop shop. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Cloud Foundry PaaS undergoes seismic shifts as IT evolves

Cloud Foundry undergoes drastic changes as infrastructure automation technology develops, to the point where some industry experts see more erosion than evolution. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Users forge ahead with Cloud Foundry-Kubernetes integration

Complementary roles for Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes are clear to IT pros, and the community plans to knit the two more closely together with the Eirini project. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Implement these 5 ALM best practices from dev to deployment

Enterprise applications are anything but simple. To wrangle the software, resources and code of these critical apps, be smart with IT tooling, management and other aspects of support. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

Chef licensing changes prompt debate among IT pros

IT pros who use Chef automation software have mixed reactions to the company's plan to revamp its software licensing strategy. Continue Reading

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• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Google SREs test the limits of infrastructure automation

Google SRE veterans spoke publicly about infrastructure automation work, its future and its limitations. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Site reliability engineer shift creates IT ops dilemma

Aspiring SREs find it hard to move away from tactical tasks to focus on strategic projects. Veteran SREs say the path to less toil begins with prioritization and automation. Continue Reading

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• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Kubernetes for Windows hits GA, with limitations

Kubernetes support for Windows nodes was declared stable in Kubernetes 1.14, but extensive fine print remains. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

SRE software refines DevOps incident response for enterprise

SRE workflows often emerge organically within enterprise IT teams, but software tools add measurability and automation for incident response and review in one DevOps shop. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Kubernetes management for 'Minecraft' has enterprise IT traits

What do 'Minecraft' servers and enterprise databases have in common? In the realm of Kubernetes management, more than you might think. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Can you accurately measure SLA expectations and results?

Realistic SLA expectations rely on accurately defined criteria, properly set. Test your knowledge of SLA measurements and learn to tailor contracts that avoid costly consequences with this quiz. Continue Reading

By

• Meredith Courtemanche, Director of Editorial Training

IT security monitoring at golf club lets IT ops play through

ClubCorp took stock of its IT security strategy last year, which led to freedom from grunt work and renewed focus for the IT ops team. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

F5-Nginx deal reflects mainstream trend toward microservices

F5 snaps up Nginx for cloud-native app support, and analysts predict a microservices gold rush as modern application architectures catch on in enterprise IT shops. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Container security tools turn heads with expansion to hosts

Vendors that sell container security tools now face off against traditional security tool providers, as both vie for the attention of IT pros who look to fortify their cloud-native infrastructure. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Sensu architecture smoothes monitoring data workflow for NCR

Sensu Go's architecture and monitoring as code prompted NCR to switch away from Zabbix and pass on SolarWinds, as it sought to collect data from 80,000 restaurant customers. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Istio security drives Auto Trader UK move to GKE

The U.K.'s largest online automotive marketplace put Istio security features in place before it adopted containers and GKE, rather than the other way around. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

VMware PKS adds Heptio IP, boosts container street cred

VMware adds bare-metal Kubernetes and an elite support squad from Heptio, but it's unlikely to get widespread interest with bespoke container orchestration on premises. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Mainframe DevOps forces platform reckoning for enterprises

DevOps has reached the mainframe world, where a few enterprise 'unicorns' have blazed a trail with new tools for the rest of the IT industry. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Uncertain future of open core software puts companies at risk

Many enterprises rely on commercial vendors for open source software support, but the open core business model isn't always a solid bet for longevity. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

VMware-Heptio roadmap to refine enterprise Kubernetes

Heptio founder Craig McLuckie, now VP of R&D at VMware following a 2018 merger, anticipates hard work ahead to get enterprises to adopt Kubernetes in their production environments. Continue Reading

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• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Database DevOps tools ease app deployment at insurance firm

Colonial Life brought its SQL-based enrollment app into the DevOps fold with a tool from Datical to replace its faulty manual update process. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Explore the new year's emerging IT trends

Small data centers, intelligent IT management tools -- digital diversity? Catch up on the 10 trends driving IT operations forward in 2019, and how they'll shape your organization. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

DevOps security model hits organizational snags

DevOps security tools are on the market, and IT pros are acutely aware of the need to update their practices. But alignment with business teams hasn't gotten any easier. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

10 tips to approach IT operations processes with confidence

Stuck in the NOC over the holidays? To pass the time, improve your ability to plan projects and quash production infrastructure incidents with confidence. Continue Reading

By

• Meredith Courtemanche, Director of Editorial Training

Enterprise SREs guide devs through Kubernetes in production

Behind most enterprise developers that own and operate the services they create stands a platform engineering team that's teed up Kubernetes in its most manageable form. Continue Reading

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• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Kubernetes 1.13 stabilizes storage, but Windows GA delayed

IT pros with Kubernetes in production welcomed stable releases of cluster install and container storage utilities in version 1.13, but they'll have to wait for some key features. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Align KPIs for IT with corresponding business goals

It's easy for IT KPIs to take a back seat to those of the business or vice versa. Instead, explore these ways to maintain a working balance. Continue Reading

By

• Alan R. Earls

What's next for VMs vs. containers as isolation, performance evolve?

With advances from Docker, Kubernetes and other container technologies, an ecosystem is emerging that threatens the existence -- or at least importance -- of VMs in enterprise IT orgs. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

AWS Lambda monitoring goes mainstream with New Relic beta

New Relic users and prospects will investigate AWS Lambda monitoring features released in private beta, as serverless usage filters in to enterprise IT shops. Continue Reading

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• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Use Active Directory for testing environments in DevOps shops

AD enables admins to create testing environments almost identical to production environments through duplicated trees, interconnected forests and authentication best practices. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

6 emerging technologies that belong in an IT operations plan

A penny saved is a penny earned. But when it comes to AI, specialized compute engines and these other key emerging IT operations areas, a penny saved today is a dollar wasted -- or worse -- in the future. Continue Reading

By

• Clive Longbottom

Docker on Windows Server helps legacy apps, with caveats

Windows-only Docker Enterprise Edition prospects struggle with Linux requirements and a shift to a container-first mindset as they plan to modernize legacy Microsoft applications. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Compliance automation prevents regulation audit snafus

Many IT organizations address compliance issues manually, even though Puppet, Fugue and other tools can enforce configurations that comply with regulations and even provide an audit trail. Continue Reading

By

• Kurt Marko, MarkoInsights

HashiCorp Vault maturity prompts strategy speculation

HashiCorp is valued at $1.9 billion for its IT management software, such as Vault 1.0, and the IBM-Red Hat merger has set off speculation about the firm's future. Continue Reading

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• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Invest in an IT infrastructure upgrade -- or keep fixing it

Because upgrades to infrastructure equipment can be expensive and difficult, the easier decision is to renew a support contract. But delay comes at a cost, too. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

IT pros shore up Prometheus monitoring via third-party tools

Upstream Prometheus monitoring isn't ready for prime time in enterprise environments, but it gets by with a little help from its friends, such as Sysdig and Rancher Labs. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Jira update flexes cloud collaboration features

Atlassian's Jira rework adds collaborative UI updates on the front end and ports Jira Software Cloud to AWS-based microservices on the back end. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

SRE model requires technical, organizational optimization skills

Practitioners categorize SRE job descriptions two ways -- by distributed systems architecture design that evolves rapidly, and also by the ability to optimize human workflows. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Bevy of Microsoft containers range from cloud to captive workloads

Windows wasn't always an ideal environment for containers, but recent changes offer a wealth of options, including those for Windows Server and the Azure public cloud. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

Embrace DevOps innovation to modernize legacy applications

To bring legacy applications into the DevOps fold, IT teams must be creative and collaborate in ways that may differ sharply from approaches to greenfield projects. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Third-party Kubernetes tools hone performance for database containerization

Kubernetes tools look to carve out a market niche in database containerization with performance monitoring and quality-of-service management features. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Big data processing could be the way all data is processed

Some organizations take their time with new technologies to let first adopters suffer the growing pains. But there's no treading water in the big data stream; the current won't wait. Continue Reading

By

• Mike Matchett, Small World Big Data

Big data processing could be the way all data is processed

 Continue Reading

Network capacity planning in the age of unpredictable workloads

When you manage network spaces carefully and make informed choices, the flexible, easily scaled workloads of distributed public and hybrid cloud applications become manageable. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

Application performance tuning tips and tricks

Tune hardware, resource allocations and prioritizations to make applications perform their best. Just don't do it without tracking the results. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Enterprise IT struggles with DevOps for mainframe

Mainframe automation tools are nascent, and many mainframe experts are reluctant to embrace DevOps. But large enterprises must address legacy platforms to realize app delivery goals. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Insurer accelerates DevOps test data refreshes with Actifio

Data-intensive applications can hobble DevOps velocity, but one IT team makes fresh test data available to its developers with a tool that makes rapid copies of large data stores. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Troubleshooting application performance: Issues and answers

Workflow congestion, sluggish switches, pointless parameter settings -- application flaws don't come from a single source, but they're easier to solve when you know where to look first. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

Use HashiCorp's Terraform tool and companions for production IaC

Developers want isolated systems for prototyping. Testers want mimicry of production. And IT operations wants to configure this infrastructure for them without reinventing the wheel. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Database DevOps tools bring stateful apps up to modern speed

Database DevOps is no longer a contradiction in terms, as enterprises roll out database management and persistent storage software that makes stateful apps more flexible. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Cloud applications demand a new IT operations strategy

Business and software development trends are putting more pressure on IT operations staff and changing the way teams deploy applications. Continue Reading

By

• Nick Martin, Senior Director of Content Strategy and Member Engagement

Cloud applications demand a new IT operations strategy

 Continue Reading

Cisco roadmap plots course through clouds to DevOps future

From a Google Cloud partnership to API-based network data integration, Cisco showcased application hosting flexibility and DevOps process flows in its product plans at its annual conference. Continue Reading

By

• Torsten Volk, Principal Analyst

Use load tests to balance IT capacity management and QoE

Simply throwing more resources at an application won't solve scaling issues. IT ops pros must take the time to chart the relationship between IT capacity and software performance. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

Serverless infrastructure calls for updated IT ops expertise

IT ops participation is necessary for successful serverless infrastructure management, but operations pros will need to sharpen their skills in systems engineering and infrastructure as code. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

APM strikes back in Kubernetes monitoring wars

New Relic and AppDynamics up the ante on Prometheus with dashboards that display Kubernetes time-series data, and monitoring alerts that sync with IT automation tools. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

A proper DevOps feedback loop includes business leaders

What the modern IT organization needs isn't DevOps -- it's BizDevOps. IT exists to serve the business, but that relationship must be fully reciprocal. Continue Reading

By

• Clive Longbottom

Master application scalability in cloud computing alongside devs

Just because cloud scales endlessly doesn't mean every component in an application should, too. Teams throw money away and degrade app performance when ops isn't involved in design and test. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

Resolve issues between Python and Linux with virtualenv

While Linux OSes favor Python 2, Python 3 is the widely preferred version. Install virtualenv to isolate Python 2 and 3 and prevent IT issues. Continue Reading

By

• Walker Rowe

Three steps to plan a self-service IT portal that actually works

There's no point to a self-service IT portal if the offerings are out of touch with how its users conduct business or the instant builds are on hold while additional capacity spins up. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

SaaS support challenges IT ops admins to shift gears

SaaS means no more app support, right? In practice, IT ops teams enter a new realm of upgrade management and capacity planning when their user base migrates to a SaaS offering. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Cloud ops doesn't solve your problems, it creates new ones

There are many reasons to consider a cloud migration, but if you expect to cut costs or dramatically ease management, you'll be disappointed. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

IT ops pros predict routes to DevOps efficiency in 2018

Operations admins have a lot on their plates already, and they'll pile on more in 2018. These IT pros and analysts share what's coming and how to handle it. Continue Reading

By

• Emily Mell, Former Site Editor

Application support best practices involve all teams

There's more to app support than making sure the bits and bytes are in order; the user's experience is vital to uphold. Creating a smooth process takes more than just operations. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Know when to implement serverless vs. containers

Containers save resources and reduce deploy times. So does serverless. Containers are a great host for microservices. So is serverless. But the deployment options are more different than they are alike. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

IT capacity planning takes new shape in the cloud

Migrating applications off premises to the cloud requires a new capacity planning approach: Develop a detailed cloud strategy, and carefully track upgrade schedules. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

The application runtime environment is as important as the app

To avoid cascading failures and never-ending troubleshooting, take the time to understand the software and hardware -- the runtime environment -- that keeps an app ticking. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

Know how container host machine resources get used?

What's a container's resource limit? How do they scale? What OS does a host machine need? Answer 10 questions to prove your container deployment knowledge. Continue Reading

By

• Meredith Courtemanche, Director of Editorial Training

IT asset tracking informs better capacity, management decisions

Detailed IT asset inventories are a result of granular asset tracking and lead to better server and storage management -- among other benefits. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

Lessons fall from the cloud, changing data center strategies

The transformative power of cloud computing is long past the point of being news. The cloud model, after all, has irrevocably changed how IT functions. What's interesting to consider is how cloud technologies and methodologies are changing even how on-premises data centers operate. Lessons learned in the cloud are now being applied on site, adjusting data center strategies in surprising ways.

When it comes to resource efficiency, the things that hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform accomplish might seem like heroic feats. For sure, server utilization rates in an on-premises environment won't reach the 50%, or better, marks that hyperscale providers hit. Still, rates can be improved by emulating those cloud operators.

So how has cloud computing altered data center strategies?

New classes of products, most notably hyper-converged infrastructure and software-defined networking, now exist primarily because large cloud providers built environments that showed the value of these technologies.

Redundancy architectures, too, are not nearly as rigid as they were. The traditional 2N scheme, in which an organization maintains double the number of infrastructure components needed to run critical operations, is no longer considered the mandatory standard.

Further efficiency is found in rethinking high availability expectations. With more resilient applications, experts argue, a hardware failure shouldn't be the disruptive event it was in an earlier age.

These are lessons brought down from the cloud, ones that noticeably alter data center strategies. They show again how the quest for efficient and effective data centers is never quite complete.

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When the big cloud infrastructure providers aren't the right fit

When a business chooses one of the major providers for its cloud services, there shouldn't be a lot of surprises. You do your homework, consider the available services, select instance types, compare costs and then make a decision. At that point, you should know what you are getting. But what if you don't want what you're getting?

There are scenarios where a business seeks out the services of one of the specialty cloud infrastructure providers. These niche providers compete against behemoths such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, but not by trying to match them service for service. Nor can they keep pace on price. Instead, these smaller providers focus on particular niches, trying to offer specialized services, customer care and flexibility that the hyperscale providers may struggle to furnish.

The cover story for this issue of Modern Infrastructure delves into the reasons a business might choose a niche player instead of one of the major cloud infrastructure providers. TechTarget's Kristin Knapp reports on how these situations arise and how businesses respond. The right fit, she finds, might not always be found in one of the expected places.

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Let's talk about IT infrastructure and emerging technologies

Work closely with hardware specialists and engineers in the data center, as emerging compute, network and storage technologies have ramifications beyond the racks. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Not playing games: The GPU vs. CPU question gets more interesting

Putting thousands of cores to work makes perfect sense when you're powering a video game. But graphics processing units, or GPUs, can't serve much practical purpose in a corporate data center, can they?

The GPU vs. CPU discussion isn't as odd as it sounds. In fact, a more broad application of GPUs in the data center can provide the processing punch that CPUs simply cannot. With tasks where data can be processed in parallel rather than in sequence, GPUs might be a particularly valuable tool. The cover story in this issue of Modern Infrastructure looks at scenarios where simultaneous processing can be just what's needed, such as with machine learning and artificial intelligence.

This month's Modern Infrastructure also looks at how data can be protected while in the data center. Full encryption is seemingly a perfect defense for data theft. But that's a difficult -- and, to some, an unrealistic-- road to travel. We look at how an IT team can better safeguard its data, factoring in costs, the tools available and the tradeoffs involved in hack-proofing an organization's data.

And what about the vulnerabilities that arise from within your business? We examine the risk of data loss posed by the shadow IT phenomenon, an ongoing and ever-changing challenge.

It's clear that data is an increasingly valuable resource. Processing it and keeping it safe -- whether that entails taking up the question of GPU vs. CPU for certain workloads or upgrading encryption -- need to be priorities for IT professionals in organizations of all sizes and types.

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Optimize PHP with finely tuned IT resources and settings

Application ops should address the elephant in the room -- poorly optimized PHP -- to speed load and processing times. Continue Reading

By

• Hayden James

IT service delivery model uses BPM to translate ops to biz

A business process management structure for IT service delivery can bridge the gap between IT and the rest of the business, allowing IT leaders to sit at the table for important decisions. Continue Reading

By

• Kurt Marko, MarkoInsights

How application scalability works in event-driven vs. IaaS computing

Event-driven computing saves IT admins' time and helps application scalability, compared to managing traditional cloud infrastructure. But IaaS and event-driven computing aren't exclusive. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

Hadoop workflow automation lets IT pros go with the flow

Hadoop workflow managers are not just resource schedulers. They handle intricate tasks and service handoffs that are essential for managing big data services. Continue Reading

By

• Kurt Marko, MarkoInsights

DevOps automation boosts Rosetta Stone's app delivery

The language learning company uses multiple tools to make its DevOps environment run smoothly, but Docker has been the key to streamlining application releases. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Container trends fuel storage needs

In life as in technology, there is no free lunch. We've seen this time and again. Every time a technology seems to be too good to be true, we do a little digging, and it turns out we were right.

Containers are just the latest example of a technology that IT must scrutinize. Sure, containers offer a ton of benefits -- density, portability and low-cost -- but what's the catch? Storage may very well be it.

And now that more IT organizations are "doing" DevOps, it's become clear that DevOps isn't some magic pixie dust whose mere mention makes everything right with the world. Meanwhile, over in the cloud, enterprises have learned that it's not all sunshine and roses. Notably, it's dawned on them that migrating legacy applications to an infrastructure as a service provider like AWS or Google Cloud Platform can be more trouble than it's worth.

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Mad about microsegmentation

The tech industry seems fixated breaking things apart into ever-smaller units for greater levels of "granularity." Traditional standalone applications are maligned as "monoliths" that must be broken apart in to their component pieces, or "microservices." Broad brush security that covers an entire network is deemed insufficient, to be replaced by "microsegementation" -- applying security policies on a per-workload basis.

But breaking up is hard to do. In his story, "Mad About Microsegmentation," senior technology editor Stephen Bigelow lays out the pitfalls that will befall operators as they go down this road.

Breaking with tradition is hard too. For decades, one of IT's primary responsibilities has been to protect its systems from catastrophic failure by performing regular point-in-time backups that can get back to a known good state.

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Windows workloads leap to cloud

Regardless of hype, there are quite a few areas where cloud remains very much a work in progress. Take cloud bursting. This has long been IT's holy grail for cloud -- the ability to seamlessly expand capacity constrained workloads to outside of your data center to meet unexpected demand. But while it sounds good on paper, it's not as easy as it sounds.

Running Windows rather than Linux in the cloud also hasn't been easy, but things are getting better. Technically, any infrastructure-as-a-service provider whose hypervisor exposes x86-based VMs should be able to run Windows.

Speaking of Windows, you'd think that Microsoft Azure would be a shoe-in with developers looking for an easy-to-use cloud platform. Based off our recent #Hashtag feature, however, it seems Azure has its fair share of discontented developers.

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The 2016 MI Impact Awards

It's January, people, and you know what that means -- awards season! Not one to be left out of the party, Modern Infrastructure is happy to announce the winners of its third annual Impact Awards, where readers, industry experts and editors weigh in on the products and technologies that will have the biggest impact on IT operations in the coming year. Congratulations to all the winners.

Part of the fun of holding an awards program is watching the returns roll in (over 800 readers participated in this year's voting). But for me, the fun comes much earlier -- back in the summer when we're thinking about which categories to keep, which categories to add, which categories to tweak, and which to retire. We don't want to boil the ocean and recognize every conceivable product category on which IT spends time and money. The idea is to highlight the technologies that are effecting the most change in the data center -- and the areas where infrastructure and operations folks can use a little help from their friends. And now, the winners are!

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The merits of white box switching

Modern infrastructures are based on commodity, non-proprietary hardware. People have used commodity servers for a long time, but now we are seeing commodity switching gear too, on which we layer open network operating systems. This is a promising area, writes Ethan Banks in "Why White Box Switching?" An offshoot of software defined networking, "white box switching might survive on its own merits -- even if SDN falls by the wayside."

Modern infrastructures run on open source software, finds Ed Scannell in "Opening Up to Open Source." The reasons for today's surge of open source projects aren't the same as yesterday's -- whereas open source used to be about saving money, now it's about exploiting "the latest Web-based technologies for mobile, cloud and analytics platforms."

What makes one infrastructure "modern" and another not so much? That is continually up for debate, but there are definitely some common themes. Read on to learn more.

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Collaboration moves beyond email

We have some nice examples of thinking out, not up, in this issue of Modern Infrastructure. Take data-aware storage -- a topic explored by contributing writer Alan R. Earls in "Not Your Average Disk Array." Conversations about data storage can be fairly predictable, centering on performance and capacity. Some storage vendors are stretching the bounds of traditional storage by leaning heavily on metadata and analytics, so as to give operators much more advanced management capabilities.

Then there's email. Given its shortcomings, a lot of people like to think, let's get rid of email altogether and just rely on new and exciting social messaging and collaboration tools. But that's impractical. In "Beyond Email," I talk to organizations augmenting existing email systems with complimentary tools that reduce our reliance on email, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Read all these stories and much more in the October issue of Modern Infrastructure (we promise -- no corny Halloween jokes!).

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Lift and shift vs. re-platforming cloud apps

When evaluating a new technology, some people like to go all in, with gusto, and adopt it hook line and sinker. Then there are folks whose MO is to take baby steps: Dip a toe in the water and do a lengthy proof of concept. What's right for any given organization depends on its temperament, needs, budget, skills -- any number of factors. One thing's for certain, there's no right answer.

This cover story in this issue of Modern Infrastructure delves into the different ways organizations implement cloud applications, whether replatforming or "lift and shift."

Sometimes, the question isn't how to implement this new technology, but whether to bother implementing it at all. "I'm a big believer in the natural balance that forms based on how people actually use things versus planning for how people might use things," Brian Madden said. So sit tight. What you need to do will become clear soon enough.

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Can hyperconverged systems transform the enterprise?

It's hard to predict which novelties will become mainstays, and which will be has-beens. One current hot technology is hyperconvergence, the subject of Alex Barrett's article in our May issue, "The Hyperconvergence Effect." Is hyperconvergence a transformative approach to delivering IT, or just a nifty way of packaging compute and storage?

There are also many operational implications to a microservices route, says George Lawton: service discovery, network provisioning and release automation. Microservices has its challenges, but some say doing so can deliver significant ROI.

And virtualization has been transformative over the years, even as it's evolved. We've seen a shift away from hypervisor-based server virtualization to containers popularized by Docker. But it's hard to imagine a world without virtualization -- if only for the management and automation opportunities it brings to the table.

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Container technology thrives for IT

Just when you thought you had driven the last nail in the coffin of old-school IT, you find out it's back -- albeit with a twist.

Remember operating system-level virtualization? This method of server virtualization is back with a vengeance as containers, with Docker leading the charge. But whereas the old-school containers were used largely by service providers to eke out every last drop of capacity from their server farm, today's containers are an application-portability play.

As for data center infrastructure, not only has the entire world not moved to public cloud, but many organizations use that consummate old-school IT model: the data center co-location facility.

Ethernet, meanwhile, never left the data center. Still, tomorrow's Ethernet doesn't look much like the Ethernet you know and love.

Read all about this and more in the May issue of Modern Infrastructure.

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