HCBoos on Automation - Latest Comments

Re: Types of Automation

Ayehu — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:36:19 -0000

IT process automation (ITPA), also known as run book automation (RBA), is the ability to orchestrate and integrate tools, people and processes through workflow.

Benefits of ITPA include: reduced human errors, faster response to mission-critical system problems and more efficient allocation of resources. However, achieving these benefits isn't always trivial. In complex IT environments - particularly when systems are virtualized or cloud-based - implementing IT process automation can be challenging.

> Ayehu.com explains IT process automation.

Re: contact

Veronika Kustrova — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:20:42 -0000

Hi,

We are currently running a campaign in combination with one of our major UK clients, and were wondering if you would be interested in hosting content on URL HERE

One of our major clients is currently focusing on increasing the visibility of their pages on the web, and it would be great if you could play a part.
I have several flexible possibilities in mind including bespoke guest posts, articles and homepage banners.

Our writers are flexible and are willing to write the articles based on your focus (also being happy to take topic suggestions should you have any particular topics in mind). The content is bespoke and based on your site so will certainly be in regards to your site’s subject – once it is written you are, of course, free to review the content before placing it on your site and any changes you wish can be made for you to ensure you are comfortable with the content. Our banners are made up of simple image and text and come in a variety of sizes and codes so you are free to select the most appropriate for your website.

In exchange we would offer you payment dependent on the visibility of the content.
If you would like further information or if this has sparked your enthusiasm then please feel free to contact me via email Veronika.Kustrova@greenlightdigital.com or call me directly at xxxxx

I look forward to hearing from you!
Kind Regards,

Re: We Rate – first talk at HackFwd Build 08

Michael Jackson — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 06:08:52 -0000

happy to sign up.

Re: We Rate – first talk at HackFwd Build 08

Alex Seifert — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 02:48:48 -0000

It's been Tuesday already =)

Re: Arriving at “How to Web”

Balazs Benedek — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 06:09:21 -0000

Hello,

Congratulation! your presentation was great! could you please post the URL to the slides?

Cheers,

Balazs

Re: Open or De Facto Standards – the Battle of the Giants

Tom Insam — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 05:54:32 -0000

Oracle believe that companies _can't_ reverse-engineer APIs, though.

http://fosspatents.blogspot.co...

if true, this is rather going to undermine your entire argument, no?

Re: Open or De Facto Standards – the Battle of the Giants

swardley — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 06:37:00 -0000

Interesting post.

Just to clarify my view - as it currently stands any company can reverse engineer an API for reasons of interoperability. Hence when trying to make a market of providers in the IaaS space with semantic interoperability between providers, I strongly support adoption where there is clearly a dominant API.

It should be noted that such a market can have multiple open source and proprietary implementations around the API. However, running code through an open source effort is necessary to form a market place without a single (or consortium of) vendor(s) being able to force a tax on that market. In other words, providers need to have an operational means of implementing the service and compete in the market without a necessity to purchase software licenses (a tax on competition). They may choose to buy software to do so but a free market is one unencumbered by such forced taxation.

This is why I do no support MSFT Azure's effort, despite the provision of open standards because there exist no open source implementation.

This is why I did not support Google's AppEngine, despite the provision of an SDK as there existed no fully operational open source means of implementing the service.

This is why I strongly support open source efforts which reverse engineer the dominant API for reasons of interoperability e.g. open stack, eucalyptus etc.

It is also why I strongly support open source efforts which attempt to create the dominant standard in a fledgling market, such as CloudFoundry in the PaaS arena.

Once the marketplace of alternative providers is large enough and it has the dominant ecosystem then the open source effort in effect becomes the defacto standard for implementation and the API in that market. If necessary, due to abuse of position by the original provider, then the API can be differentiated away from the original provider including providing an entirely new API where applicable.

I don't find attempts to differentiate on API in a utility world where one API is clearly dominant meaningful. Of course if an open source effort (such as openstack) creates a large enough ecosystem then it is in effect the dominant and can do as it pleases.

I find re-inventing the wheel by creating an API by committee and attempting to get the market to adopt as a wasted effort when a market has in principle chosen.

I do find the way to standardise is through creating the largest ecosystem and in such cases both reverse engineering the dominant API for reasons of interoperability combined with provision of open source running code is necessary.

Co-opt rather than compete is the order of the day in this world.

A final point, you'll find that @samj and I are in absolute agreement on the importance of open source and efforts like OpenStack in this world.

Any difference between us is on the necessity of reverse engineering APIs and co-opting as the main short term tactical play. The long term we're both totally in agreement on - open standards, open formats and open source are critical.

Our difference in views on short term tactical plays however hardly constitutes a battle or war but is merely debate.

As for being a "giant", whilst that is very flattering it doesn't coincide with my view of the world. Nevertheless, it is an excellent post and much appreciated.

Re: The 5 Reasons Why I Spend My Time @ IBM Pulse 2010

TiffanyWinman — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:54:59 -0000

Chris, what a great blog post. You're dead on. The best value for a community is when you get multiple perspectives like this. Thanks for taking the time to write such a thoughtful post. I'll make sure IBM sees your recommendations for improvement. We always cherish this feedback.

Make sure to spend time at Meet the experts. It comes the closest in replacing the Guru Galaxy, but I still miss those huge glowing spheres they used to have. ;)

Also, Pulse offers the option of having one on ones with our executives and management. We probably could do a better job of servicing this information. If you or anyone you know is interested in this, please let me know.

Re: Cloud Impressions from EMCWorld 2009 – Clouds, Virtualization and Things Already Possible

roland — Thu, 21 May 2009 07:10:35 -0000

Chris, great articles about your takeaways from EMCWorld 2009. The recent days showed us some major changes on the clouds battlefield and I guess that EMC is in a good position and has partnered with some other interesting player. One thing I want to comment is about evolving standards for Cloud images and templates:
For quite some time there are at least two interesting developments in this area. One is the VMWare/XEN Source OVF (Open Virtualization Format), an open and extensible specification for packaging of Virtual Machines, which allows interoperatbility. The other developement, the deserves attention are the ‘Elastic Computing Markup Language‘ (ECML) and the ‘Elastic Deployment Markup Language‘ (EDML) from a company named Elastra, who is claiming to be the 'Enterprise Cloud Company'. I will dig into this with blogpost on this subject soon.

Re: Phorm fakes function

mickeyc — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:23:29 -0000

Phorm likes to compare its self with Google. The main difference between the two is that Phorm intercepts *all* traffic. There is a lot of stuff that Google simply can't see. For example, all your private Facebook account information that is protected by a login. Any ISP that uses Phorm is in effect reselling your browsing data to a third party company that resells it again to advertisers. Totally unacceptable. If you're a website owner, see here for information on how to opt out your domain names: https://secure.grepular.com/bl...

Re: Clouds are Bad, NOT!

roland — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:55:28 -0000

Another good piece of work fitting into this discussion is the article "The Enterprise Cloud" by Mark Masterson (Warning: long and complicated).
It starts with a great introduction about Enterprise cloud and discusses then possible scenarios to connect the different clouds and shows how to avoid possible "lock-in"s. Recommended reading, though it focusses on a particular product (VPN-Cubed by CohesiveFT).

Re: An Administrator´s First Contact with Automation

chris — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:30:10 -0000

Ok… If we start commenting on the fun stuff….
This picture was taken a while back by one of our team managers. He thought "Thommy" was looking so dreadful one morning he came in, so he took a picture. After showing this around in the happy admin crown, everyone agreed that he would be a good motive for a donation campaign.
So the guy who took the picture inserted the “Brot für die Welt” Logo and actually the correct bank information for donating to this organization (btw. An organization linked to the protestant church).
This is the only picture of himself “Thommy” has ever put up on the wall.

Re: An Administrator´s First Contact with Automation

roland — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:17:51 -0000

Just a short note for the english speaking audience "Brot für die Welt" translates to "Bread for the world", which is a NPO like Food for Life.

Re: A Simplistic Approach to IT Dependency Modeling: M—A-R-S

vambenepe — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:54:28 -0000

Sounds interesting, but what do you actually DO with that model? I can't tell how well it really works until I understand your automation scenarios.

Re: Can Automation be Trusted – Or How to Build Trust on Laziness

berkay — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:24:20 -0000

Hi Roland,

I didn't even realize that my post was cut off. I guess I talked(wrote) too much :)
What you describe does sound quite interesting and useful. As in many things, the terminology is polluted and everyone understand something else when we say "automation". As you point out, you can automate intelligently but most people see automations that are not so sophisticated, which may be the cause of skepticism you see. almost every product suite claims "automation", many nothing more than ability to write a script, etc.
How to differentiate what's good from what's bad or insufficient? Examples certainly help. I think one solid use case would go a long way. Looking forward to reading more about your thoughts and solutions!

Re: Can Automation be Trusted – Or How to Build Trust on Laziness

Roland Judas — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:54:26 -0000

Hi Berkay,

it's a pity that you post was not complete, because you were mentioning the big point: Most so called automation systems are performing as you described it. This is a key differentiator of our Automation Engine, which is fed by a model of the IT infrastructure and is aware about the dependencies between Machines, Applications, Resources and Services. Depending of the depth of the model our engine can travel through that model and to encircle problems and execute actions defined by the rule set. If required also manual intervention could be defined within the rules, so in really critical situations the admin could be asked. A big plus for automation is, that every single step is documented, so improvements in the rule base are straightforward - this is not guaranteed by a human admin performing under heavy load.

I'm convinced that if one is really honest, some/many admins or even doctors are overwhelmed by huge number factors and decisions leave often room for improvements.

Regards
Roland

Disclaimer: Some years ago I was resonsible for a team administering about 250 servers at 70 hospital-sites, so I claim to know what I'm talking about...

Re: What is a cloud?

roland — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:45:26 -0000

As I learned since, Automation may not be part of the basic cloud package, so one might want to add on some management software/service like Elastra or Mosso. Read the post about Elastra on my personal blog, if you want learn something about the Clouds taken to the next level.
Roland

Re: Can Automation be Trusted – Or How to Build Trust on Laziness

berkay — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:51:41 -0000

"Well why should the machine not do that? After all the only action a system administrator would have taken is to restart the whole machine instead of just the service?"

The action the sys admin would have taken can be many different things and may depend on number of factors. Why the service stopped in the first place? does he need to collect data to investigate the root cause of failure later? is it the right time of the day/week/month/year? are there other services hosted on the same server? was there a failover/redundancy server? may restarting it cause other problems?

Of course, automation can have all this information as well and make the right decision to whether or nor restart the service, at least in theory. The problem is that this type of information is often tacit and not captured in computer consumable form.

IMHO, straight forward actions can and should be automated but we still seem to be more comfortable to have human intelligence in the process, in case not all information is captured and hard logic is not suitable for the case. So the lack of "trust" is often not to the computer software but whether we manage to implement sophisticated automation AND provide all the decision making data to allow the automation make the right choice for us.
Restarting a failed service is the most common example given for automation, but as mentioned in the beginning of the command, event that simple task is not always simple.

A typical example of automation going nuts is opening a ticket for critical alarms from monitoring systems. Most of the time this is a great notification, but when something goes wrong and 10,000 alarms are created instead of usual 100, automation proceeds to take down the ticketing system, etc.

If the

Re: Can Automation be Trusted – Or How to Build Trust on Laziness

roland — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:43:02 -0000

Chris,
sorry to come back to the healthcare sector, but I can't deny the fact, that I worked half of my life with clinical information systems, providing information to humans (indeed even god-like doctors have a human core) deciding everyday about life and death based on facts they see and have on their mind and in their computers.

In the healthcare industry we have similar discussions, if it would some day be possible that a computer decides, if a certain examination makes sense or not.

My point of view is that a computer, programmed in the right way, has much more computing power and could use much more information for a 'right' decision than a human could ever have.
The big question is, at which point of time the computer is allowed to decide on his own and who is reponsible for Dr. computers actions.
This is a very emotional point, though not many people know about and/or fear singularity.

Re: What is a cloud?

chris — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:32:29 -0000

Good "morning" Roland,
as we have discussed previously, I think there should actually be two "types" of clouds. First the pure clouds like Google - and to mention it right away, these are grids as well - and second the "compromise" clouds. So what is it I am trying to say? A pure cloud is an architecture, where the cloud management software is also the "operating system" that any applications of the cloud are executed on. Such a system can access resources very dynamically and perform parallel computing without application designers caring about it - sounds like a grid, doesn’t it? - but the cloud adds all the features on the pure technology you have described. a "compromise" cloud is a construct that allows "legacy" systems and applications to run on a "cloud concept architecture". The compromise in this case is, that the cloud manager is only responsible for resource management, not for managing the application execution and instruction distribution on a program level.
Where a pure cloud only works in "closed shops" - people develop for the cloud - a "compromise" cloud works for most things we see today and therefore this compromise cloud also includes different OSs (virtual or just managed by the cloud manager). Maybe we should discuss this with John Willis, I would really be interested in the opinion of the guys from the "IT Management and Cloud Blog".

Re: Is automation black magic?

roland — Tue, 20 May 2008 06:17:20 -0000

I wish that automation was black magic, because it would be much easier for me to market our solutions and products. There would be no need for technical discussions with more or less technically involved people. The customers just would believe us, that we can make their pain disappear with a finger snap.
Just my two cents.

Re: Introducing the Social Challenge to the IT Crowd

roland — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:36:26 -0000

Hi Chris, in the middle sector, when were writing about god's in other industries, I heard background voices singing "doctor doctor". I'm sure, that the healthcare 'industry' with their 'head of band', the doctors is facing similiar problem, but only few people dare to compare the human body with a computer. I'll come back to this point later.
Regards
Roland