Category Archives: DevOps

24
Mar

Does it Make Sense for Enterprise IT to Serve Their IDE Needs from SaaS in the Cloud?

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On February 28, 2014, the CloudShare Community Blog published Chris Riley’s interview with Ken Walker of IBM®. The topic of the discussion was the recent increase in enterprise business interest in serving their needs for Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) from the cloud, and the rationale behind it.

Walker voiced his opinion on the rationale as follows: “The capabilities of SaaS and PaaS platforms and the power of the underlying JavaScript runtimes in every browser are at the tipping point where there’s no point in Developers maintaining private tool chains on their own machines.” (quoted from a February 28, 2014 interview of Ken Walker of IBM by Chris Riley of Cloudshare. A link to the full interview is published above).

Add to Walker’s opinion a recent substantial change in direction for the Microsoft® development model for its Office products, and enterprise business will likely find a lot of reasons to seriously consider cloud SaaS offers, as they grapple with just how best to provision IDEs for organization-specific requirements for custom software.

If these same enterprise IT organizations have already decided to reduce their expense for new desktop software by implementing Desktop as a Service solutions like VMware’s “Desktops in the Cloud” notion, then developers may find lots of reasons to abandon desktop computers with lots of RAM, very fast solid state drives, and numerous Virtual Machines (VMs) for thin clients persistently connected to the Cloud IDEs Walker and Riley discuss in their interview.

Anyone with an interest in following this trend will want to closely review sales reports from leading, publicly traded PC OEMs. Any substantial drop in high end PCs may indicate increased use of Cloud IDEs by enterprise-class businesses.

Just a note on the changes Microsoft introduced with its new 2013 development model: the development emphasis for the Office 2013 components, including SharePoint on premises and in the cloud via Office 365, is squarely on JavaScript (and the Open Source jQuery project) and HTML. I think this change is, potentially, very good news for business customers looking to bolster server defenses against online security threats.

In theory, when processes are written for browsers, the need for trusted solutions dependent on server cycles diminishes. Of course, every custom trusted solution brings its own security risks, which can then become threats to the server, itself.

Ira Michael Blonder

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2014 All Rights Reserved

8
Nov

Businesses Looking to Improve DevOps Teamwork Should Implement Elastic Resources Like CloudShare

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One unfortunate result of the shift in business computing from PCs to small, smart, mobile devices (SSMDs) is an unproductive relationship between computing operations (the IT department) and Line of Business (LoB) units. Usually it’s the LoBs who develop a burning need for new applications for SSMDs. Operations rarely has the time to satisfy these needs. Even worse, the IT department may have serious concerns about the security of these applications. Limited on premises computing infrastructure, or at least a policy calling for reduction in this hardware, also constrains LoBs, who may have perfectly legitimate reasons for their urgency.

If you can relate with the business computing scenario I’ve just sketched, you should consider a service like CloudShare. A service like CloudShare presents three powerful features businesses needing to make greater use of SSMDs, and the new applications required to communicate with them, require to restore a lot of lost productivity:

  1. Development environments can be rapidly built, and as rapidly torn down, once application development has been successfully completed, with no need whatsoever to add internal infrastructure
  2. Development can be handled off of the internal network, thereby insulating on premises computing systems from potentially risky application development for SSMDs
  3. IT organizations aren’t burdened with systems administration requirements when the systems needed are running in the cloud with CloudShare

It certainly makes a lot of business sense for organizations to empower LoBs to develop their own applications. The effectiveness of these applications is a critical factor impacting on return on investment (ROI). LoBs have a much clearer understanding of what applications need to deliver, so they are best positioned to deliver truly effective applications for their own needs. If policy permits these groups to secure the competencies they require for these applications through a temporary services operation, then the best computing environment for these consulting resources is a service like CloudShare.

Ira Michael Blonder

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2013 All Rights Reserved