devops

This week, Rackspace embarks on a global journey across the globe called Unlocked: The Hybrid Cloud. Unlocked is a free one-day cloud workshop sponsored and hosted by Rackspace that we’ll hold in several major cities across the globe to help you determine which cloud environment – public, private or hybrid cloud – is the best fit for your application.

I was in a customer briefing recently discussing OpenStack and Rackspace Private Cloud. This particular customer was incredibly keen on cloud and had been keeping an eye on OpenStack since its inception in 2010. The customer was also very transparent, which made for a good bi-directional exchange of useful information that will undoubtedly help us to prioritize features for Rackspace Private Cloud.

Roughly 30 Rackers attended DevOpsDays Austin last week (April 30 and May 1), an event that has become the conference that brings development and operations together. This year’s was the largest yet with almost 400 attendees – it was twice the size of last year. The energy there was contagious, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

It once made sense to run data center consolidation programs that were widely focused on virtualization, but the cloud has since become one of the most flexible computing infrastructures for enterprises. As a Senior IT Strategist, I frequently interact with customers who are trying to shape a cloud strategy. This adoption process can be challenging, but the proper deployment of a cloud platform is likely to produce long-term savings in time, money and human resources – who can ultimately be repurposed for true value driving business initiatives. Cloud also affords scalability and elasticity that traditional IT models are unable to accommodate.

What? You missed the latest installment of the Enterprise Cloud Forum where Rackspace Vice President of Software Application Development Krishna Prasad and I, along with guest host Mark Majewski, Cloud Solution Architect, discussed how enterprises need to approach DevOps to ensure cloud adoption success?

Late last year, we launched the Rackspace Service Registry into preview. The tool helps developers make their applications highly available through exposing the building blocks for automation and centralized configuration storage. It is one of the first Rackspace services focused on helping our customers run and automate their application versus their infrastructure.

DevOps is the tech term du jour, but it is much more than a hot buzzword. DevOps is a key component to successful cloud adoption and the future of enterprise IT. Applications and app development fuel IT and it is imperative for both developers and IT operators to understand cloud integration and the complexities that come with it.

Last year, in my cloud predictions for 2012, I focused heavily on how open source code will become the standard and how the future will be mobile. In 2012, we at Rackspace officially launched our open cloud effort built on OpenStack; and mobility now dominates day-to-day work and life.

Cloud Tech III, an ops conference for ops people, takes place this Saturday, October 6, 2012, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., in Mountain View, Calif. Cloud evangelists from around the globe will assemble to talk about a variety of cloud operations topics including enterprise clouds, scientific cloud applications, production cloud environments, cloud necessities for startups and more. The venue for Cloud Tech III is the Computer History Museum, the world’s largest history museum for the preservation and presentation of artifacts and stories of the Information Age.

Rackspace recently launched a brand-new DevOps blog that aims to deliver meaty technical content for developers. It’s seriously all tech, all the time: code snippets, sample code, best practices, infrastructure automation, software development kits (SDKs) and technical guidance from industry experts. Here are some recent posts: