Europe: NCTA CloudMASTER® Hotspot

The ongoing digital transformation continues to generate a steady demand for workers with increasingly sophisticated digital skills. This process is multi-dimensional and workers with these highly specialized skills are very much sought after. The European Union Commission estimates that there could be a shortage of around 800,000 information and communications technology (ICT) specialists in the EU by 2020. A third dimension is the fact that there is a growing need to reskill the existing workforce, especially in light of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the incorporation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems into the industrial production process. The “smart factory” also opens up new possibilities of individualized and efficient customer care and smoother communication with suppliers in the supply chain logistics. This is based on cloud-based platforms and artificial intelligence.

According to the Jacques Delors Institue in Berlin, digital skills in general are now needed in almost all types of work. In this recent contribution to the debate on the European Union the Institute has targeted the societal changes being driven these broad changes. To address the European continent-wide impact of digital transformation, this think thank is proposing a Europe-wide strategy to reskill workers for the requirements of connected production.

The core mission of the Jacques Delors Institute is to produce analyses and policy proposals targeting European decision-makers and the wider public. The work of the Jacques Delors Institute is inspired by the action and ideas of Jacques Delors, and organized around three axes:

• "European Union and citizens", which covers questions of policy, institutions and civil society, focusing in particular on the themes of participatory democracy, European institutions, European political parties and European identity.
• "Competition, cooperation, solidarity", covering economic, social and regional issues with a specific focus on the European budget, intra-EU solidarity, agriculture, cohesion policy, economic governance, and energy policy.
• "European external action", bringing together work with an international dimension, including EU-US relations, EU relations with neighbors, and extra-EU regional integration.

These changes are, in essence, combining platform-based communication with cloud computing, improved sensor technology and the application of sophisticated algorithms to large and unstructured pools of data generated by these sensors. This combination makes it possible to link up an almost infinite number of interconnected physical objects. One of the main economic impacts of this is seen

Smart Manufacturing Is Cloud Computing

As cloud computing simultaneously transforms multiple industries many have wondered about how this trend will affect manufacturing. Often characterized as “staid”, this vertical is not often cited when leading edge technological change is the topic. This view, however, fails to address the revolutionary nexus of cloud computing and the manufacturing industry. Referred to as Digital Thread and Digital Twin; these cloud driven concepts are now driving this vertical’s future.

Digital Thread is a communication framework that connects traditionally siloed elements in manufacturing processes in order to provide an integrated view of an asset throughout the manufacturing lifecycle. Digital thread implementation also requires business processes that help weave data-driven decision management into the manufacturing culture.

A Digital Twin is a virtual representation of a manufacturer’s product used in product design, simulation, monitoring, optimization and servicing. They are created in the same computer-aided design (CAD) and modeling software that designers and engineers use in the early stages of product development. A digital twin is, however, retained for later stages of the product's lifecycle, such as inspection and maintenance.

Figure 1- The smart manufacturing landscape http://www.industryweek.com/systems-integration/journey-smart-manufacturing-revolutio

When successfully combined these processes can deliver on the promise of Smart Manufacturing, which include:

·         Ability to receive published data from equipment using secure open standards, analyze and aggregate the data, and trigger process controls back to equipment, systems of record and process workflows across the enterprise and value chain connected via A2A and B2B open standards.

·         Autonomous and distributed decision support at the device, machine and factory level.

·         Ubiquitous use of mined information throughout the product value chain including end-to-end value chain visibility for each product line connecting manufacturer to customers and supplier network.

George Youmans, Jr.: The CloudMASTER Fashionista!

So how could a NCTA Certified CloudMASTER accelerate his career in the fashion industry?

To answer that question, you would need to catch up with George Youmans, Jr. He has been with fashion giant Ralph Lauren since October 2012. That was around the time he decided to complete the NCTA CloudMASTER curriculum. After graduation George was first promoted to Senior IT Technician and then to Senior Technologist.

So why would a company like Ralph Lauren even need a cloud computing specialist? 

Ralph Lauren installed interactive window displays at London’s most up-market department store, Harrods. Shoppers can use their smartphone to activate an interactive map which led them directly to the Fashion Lab where they could buy all of the items they saw on display. If the store was closed then users could still access information about the Ralph Lauren collection from the Harrods website.

Ralph Lauren conducted a technology trial where they embedded RFID tags in clothing that can be detected by the dressing-room mirror. Details about clothing items are displayed on the mirror (several languages are supported), and the system also synchronizes with inventory and point-of-sale systems. The mirror can also mimic the lighting of various environments. Some of its lighting options are white, dusk, club and aquarium. Other lighting options are tailored to the Ralph Lauren brand like "Fifth Avenue Daylight," "East Hampton Sunset" and "Evening at the Polo Bar".

The Oak Interactive Fitting Room from Oak Labs, Inc. on Vimeo.

The luxury fashion brand has also joined the race to produce fashionable products for the wearable-technology market. Its men only PoloTech Shirt was designed to read vital signs like heart rate and variability, breathing depth and recovery, intensity of movement, energy output and stress levels,

Is Cloud Interoperability a Myth?

Photo credit: Shutterstock

As the industry matures, cloud computing will increasingly rely on interoperability in order to grow and deliver more value to industry. Assuming this is a fact, what does it mean when eighteen major OpenStack vendors come together to work through the challenges involved with achieving enterprise interoperability? Events at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona helped provide a window into the promise of tomorrow's interoperable environment.

In cloud computing, interoperability generally refers to the ability of service models from different cloud service providers to work together. Specifically:

·         Infrastructure-as-a-service

o   Access Mechanism - defines how a service in cloud may be accessed by users and/or software developers,

o   Virtual Resources - service delivery as a complete software stack of installing a virtual machine,

o   Network - addressing and API,

o   Storage - management and organization of storage,

o   Security - authentication, authorization, user accounts and encryption,

o   Service-Level Agreement - architecture format, monitoring,

·         Platform-as-a-Service

o   The exchange of data and services among different platforms hosted on different infrastructures on cloud;

o   Data compatibility among different platforms,

o   Portability between platforms

o   Data transfer procedures (i.e. packing, copying, instantiating, installing, deployment and customization)

·         Software-as-a-Service

o   Interoperability among applications in the same cloud,

o   Data exchange and operation calls in applications on different cloud-computing environments

o   Software programs that are distributed in different cloud environments and integrate data and applications in cloud in a unified way, and

o   Migration of applications from one cloud environment to another

If this isn’t enough of a challenge, one would also need to specifically address the many embedded and overriding interoperability aspects, including:

·         Technical interoperability - development of standards of communication, transport and representation;

·         Semantic interoperability - the use of various different terms to describe similar concepts may cause problems in communication, execution of programs and data transfers;

·         Political/Human interoperability - the decision to make resources widely available has implications for organizations, their employees and end-users;

·         Interoperability of communities or societies - there is an increasing need to require access to information from a wide range of sources and communities; and

·         International interoperability - in international matters, there are variations in standard, communication problems, language barriers, differences in communication styles, and a lack of common basis.

 As one may imagine, the rapid growth of cloud computing and the global proliferation of service providers has created an intractable many-to-many interoperability quagmire that can never be tamed. Knowing this, the Openstack Interop Challenge looks toward cultivating success by leveraging the open source cloud technology as a common integration layer.  Participants include AT&T, Canonical, Cisco, DreamHost, Deutsche Telekom, Fujitsu, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Linaro, Mirantis, OSIC, OVH, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and VMware. The goal was to publicly demonstrate how OpenStack delivers on the promise of interoperability across on-premises, public and hybrid cloud deployments.

Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, argues that 

interoperability doesn't start at the infrastructure layer. 

Although you would expect this strategy would greatly simplify the integration challenge, contrarian views are out there.  One of the most vocal is Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis and member of the OpenStack board of directors. He believes interoperability does not necessarily start at the IaaS layer. He believes that applications can be built to be interoperable across different infrastructure platform. Quoting his OpenStack Summit keynote:

"Even across Mirantis-powered OpenStack clouds like AT&T and the Volkswagen cloud, they are both based on the same distribution, but the underlying reference architectures are dramatically different…Volkswagen can't throw something at AT&T and it will just work."

In this post I’m happy to report though that the participating OpenStack cloud vendors were able to announce a successful completion of the interoperability challenge. While this success is clearly a baby step on the long and treacherous road to cloud interoperability, it is worth noting because this modest achievement also led to the creation of automated tools for the deployment of applications across a variety of OpenStack environments.The effort also generated significant collateral on cloud computing interoperability best practices and is expected to drive even further interoperability collaboration across the Openstack community.

This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit Point B and Beyond.

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Should Data Centers Think?

As cloud computing becomes the information technology mainstream, data center technology is accelerating at a breakneck speed. Concepts like software define infrastructure, data center analytics and Nonvolatile Memory Express (NVMe) over Fabrics are changing the very nature of data center management.  According to industry research firm IDC, organizations will spend an additional $142.8 billion oninfrastructure for both public and private cloud environments in the next three years (2016-2018) to boost efficiency and business agility.

To support this rapid evolving space, Intel announced a “Cloud for All” initiative last year in order to help businesses get the most out of their cloud infrastructure. Specific goals for this initiative include:

• Investing in the ecosystem to accelerate enterprise-ready, easy-to-deploy software defined infrastructure (SDI) solutions;
• Optimizing SDI solutions to deliver highly efficient clouds across a range of workloads by taking full advantage of Intel platform capabilities; and
• Aligning the industry and engaging the community through open industry standards, solutions and routes to market to accelerate cloud deployment.

As cloud infrastructure management is moving towards these new management paradigms, those at the leading edge are exploring how to make data center’s think for themselves. Industry leaders like Dr. Brian Womack, Director of Distributed Analytics Solutions in Intel’s Data Center Solutions Group, and Das Kamhout, Senior Principal Engineer at Intel are learning how to use data, artificial intelligence frameworks and machine learning to create data centers that think for themselves. Two key components of their vision are SNAP and TAP.

SNAP is a powerful open data center telemetry framework. It can be used to easily collect, process, and publish telemetry data at scale. It enables better data center scheduling and workload management through access to underlying telemetry data and platform metrics. The framework greatly improves system administrator control of the intelligent use of data center infrastructure in cloud environments by:

• Empowering systems to expose a consistent set of telemetry data;
• Simplifying telemetry ingestion across ubiquitous storage system;
•  Improving the deployment model, packaging and flexibility for collecting telemetry;
• Allowing flexible processing of telemetry data on agent (e.g. machine learning); and
• Providing powerful clustered control of telemetry workflows across small or large clusters.

Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP) makes the SNAP telemetry usable by providing the tools, components and services necessary in the creation of advanced analytics and machine learning solutions. TAP makes these resources accessible in one place for data scientists, application developers and system operators. An open-source software platform optimized for performance and security, TAP simplifies solution development through the delivery of a collaborative and flexible integrated environment.

With TAP, Interactive analysis, modeling and algorithmic process flows on any type of raw data, streaming in real-time or batch data, is possible using either a GUI or a text-based shell. These models and flows can be used for batch processing or be integrated into applications. TAP includes REST APIs usable by any web-capable language (e.g., Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, Javascript) over HTTP, as well as a Python API, for server-local access. It operates on most data stores and file systems, including cluster federations that can enable data sharing (with security). The integrated operations management tools in TAP allow monitoring and control from top to bottom. In support of trust, TAP Security follows layered security and deep defense principles to provide transparent encryption and decryption, as well as fine-grained access authorization, based on a variety of authentication mechanisms and assurance levels.

Used in combination, SNAP and TAP could be used to make sentient data centers a reality.

Visit Chip Chat to hear more more about creating a data center that thinks for itself!

This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.

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