This is Boss's blog , by day I am the Managing Director of Black Marble , by night I am an MVP for BizTalk and spend my life evangalising development to all.
With DevOps best practices and Microsoft’s DevOps tooling, Black Marble can deliver agile planning, source code control, package management, build, testing and release automation to continuously integrate, test, deliver and monitor your application.
It is crucial to not only have the right people in place for your cloud adoption journey, but also to use the right processes and the right tools. A typical DevOps approach consists of cross-functional teams provisioning their own infrastructure, with high degrees of automation using templates, codified rules for security controls and cloud-native architecture.
This is where the core aspects of continuous value delivery meet the demands currently driving companies; an integrated team approach including enterprise agile and cloud computing.
There have been some major paradigm shifts in the history of computing with some of the most notable being marked, not only by changes in technology, but by changes in staffing that technology. When the computing standard for mainframe shifted to client/server, the staff model moved from computer operator to system administrator.
The same is true with a move to the cloud.
The cloud fundamentally changes how businesses procure and use technology resources. Traditionally, having had ownership and responsibility of all aspects of technology from infrastructure to software with the cloud, this allows businesses to provision and to consume resources only as needed. Moving to the cloud can bring increased business, agility, and significant costs benefits.
However, the journey to the cloud needs to be managed carefully at each stage; not just for delivery but for expectations and ROI. Even more significantly, the cloud opens up access to a range of on-demand cloud services, unavailable just 10 years previously. These include hyper-scaling, AI services and computing power; short-term consumption providing significant benefits.
All these services combined, provide business realisations that only the cloud can offer.
Transforming your business into a cloud-business is more than simply moving your systems and infrastructure into the cloud – your organisation needs a Cloud Operating Model (COM) to adopt a cloud-first mentality. It is important to guide your people away from traditional IT thinking, to ensure they realise business benefits and harness the true potential of the cloud, where adoption drives innovation. This white paper will cover how this can be achieved with the assistance of Black Marble.
For more information on Delivering an Enterprise Cloud Operating Model, get in touch for a copy of the white paper I put together with our CCO, Rik Hepworth.
Delivering an Enterprise Cloud Operating Model White Paper, 2nd Edition.
It is that time of year, our Annual Tech Update is upon us.
if you are an IT manager or IT pro come to the morning and find out what happened in 2013 and see a roadmap for all Microsoft Technologies for 2014 from Windows to SharePoint, from SQL Server to Azure
Just before Christmas a number of enhancements were released, the continual growth combined with the short release cadence is showing Azure to be an amazing platform for development and delivery.
Included in the update:
Mobile Services
CRON – a well built job scheduler for routine maintenance (tutorial here)
CLI Support – The azure command line tool now has mobile service support
European Locations – now Europe is a Service location
Web Sites
can be run across 6 Shared or 10 Reserved Instances
Publish from Source Control (TFS/Git)
Portal Enhancements for
SQL Data Sync
ACS Management
Media Services
Job and Task management
Adding content from a Windows Azure storage account
Scaling to increase encoding concurrency
Virtual Network enhancements (thank goodness)
to learn more come to a BM Azure event check out www.blackmarble.com/events
Spelunking through the internet I came across a project at Microsoft to engage people with various Microsoft Technologies using comic form. Black Marble have been producing Xmas comics over the last few years and the results have been great.
The series of comics follows “Squishy” the stress ball, Leah and Zach in a Manga inspired view of IT and development
In "Climbing Mt. PowerShell" the heroes learn PowerShell and the power of scripting to save the day, get it here
"Conquering Virtual Sprawl" Leah and Zach fights the chaos of large numbers of servers and harnesses virtual servers to save the day get it here
finally the heroes go where no heroes have gone before “Into the Cloud” get it here
the guys over at the Microsoft Born to Learn site really should be applauded at their efforts of tackling these subjects in such a great way
SQL Azure Labs have released Project Houston a lightweight web based Database management tool for SQL Azure. Houston allows you to develop, deploy, and manage SQL Azure and includes support for basic database management tasks like authoring and executing queries, designing and editing a database schema, and editing table data.
The usual suspects of Black Marble speakers presented on the Microsoft technologies from 2008 and the forthcoming developments for 2009. A rapid fire run through covered everything from Oslo to Windows 7 through Azure and Performance Point to System Centre. All the news, and milestones for Microsoft releases in 2009 and beyond.
The Developer & Platform Group at Microsoft are pleased to announce a series of technical briefings, targeted at ISVs and Start-ups, focused on the cloud based Azure Services Platform (first announced at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in October 2008). Black Marble are delighted to host the Bradford leg of this event on 13 February.
This event will cover:
· Windows Azure – The operating system for the Cloud
· .Net and Live Services – Mesh, Service Bus, Access Control and Workflow.
· SQL Data Services and data access
· Next Steps
The briefings will consist of technical discussion, demos and interactive discussion and will focus on what Azure is and how it can be used as a platform for cloud-based development. The sessions will be small, typically less than 30, to keep the flow of conversation going, and are suitable for Technical Decision Makers, Application Architects, Senior Developers and CTOs. There will be time after the event for more detailed ‘one to one’ discussions on any topics related to this session.
(TFS/Git) 