There are some interesting things going on with Airship, an AT&T-promoted open-source project to deploy a virtualized hosting layer on top of bare metal. For one thing, it’s getting support from a major server vendor, Dell. For another, it’s closing a loophole in the overall vision of cloud hosting, and it’s addressing some issues that…
Could Open Source Break the Negative IT Cycle?
Are we in for tech trouble? Cisco’s quarter ended last week, and while their numbers were decent, their guidance disappointed. Enterprise orders fell, and the service provider space continues to be weak. Generally, Cisco has been a bright spot in the network and tech space, so we have to ask whether those spaces are at…
Cloud ROUTING versus Hosted Router Instances
I mentioned data plane feature hosting in my last blog, noting that we needed to spend some time looking at the connection-service elements and how we’d propose to make them candidates for hosted and cloud-native implementation. I propose to start the ball rolling with this blog, and to do that we have to look at…
Where is Cloud-Native NOT a Good Idea?
Cloud-native technology is important to everyone, and critical to many, but there’s already a trend toward seeing cloud-native as sweeping everything else from the tech world. I think it’s certain that every enterprise will end up adopting cloud-native applications or application components, and that at least three quarters of all applications will have cloud-native elements,…
VMware’s Plan to Own the Telco Cloud: Workable?
Does VMware have a plan to transform the carrier cloud? It’s far from an idle question, especially now that IBM has acquired Red Hat. Cloud computing is transforming under the stimulus of “cloud-native” thinking and planning, and there’s no vertical market where that’s needed more than the carrier cloud space. Network operators have been locked…
Do We Have a Problem Just Describing an Event-Driven System?
Could one of our problems with a software-defined future be as simple as terminology? When I noted in my blog that terms like “network management system” or “operations support system” were implicitly monolithic, implying a traditional single-structure application, I had a lot of operators contact me to agree. Certainly, we have a long history of…
Is Cloud Spending Hitting a Plateau, or on the Verge of Breakout?
What’s happening in the cloud market? It seems (from stories in both the technology and financial press) like growth in public cloud service revenues is slowing, and some have suggested the market is nearing a plateau. The truth is more complex (as usual), because there are a number of forces acting on the same market…
Software-Defined Telecom and Success by Subtraction
Recently I had a friend ask me why some things I’d declared as failures were considered successful by the media. The obvious reason is that something that’s good for publicity is good to the media; their standard of success is different. The less obvious reason, and one just as pervasive, is what I’ll call “success…
Is Contextualization a Natural Application for AI?
If calling a personal agent a “ghost companion” is fair, then it’s fair to say that adding artificial intelligence to our artificial companion could be a good idea. It’s also very likely that the concept of information fields could be enhanced through the application of AI. How much we could expect and how complicated these…
The Trusted Agent in Contextual Services
Contextualization has a lot of pieces, but the most obvious is the “contextualizer”, the trusted personal agent process that actually interacts with the information fields that contribute to context, and from them generates contextual results. This is the third blog in the series; the FIRST and SECOND should be read before you dive in here….