IDG Contributor Network: Attack and response: Cloud-native cybersecurity vs. virtual machine security

Which is more secure: virtual machines (VMs) or containers? The truth is that securing containers and cloud-native workloads is different than securing VMs, and it all starts with understanding attack and response and the ever-evolving nature of threats. For years, the security ecosystem has been in response mode. When an attack happens, the immediate reaction…

Amazon Alexa is so smart it’s stupid

The Amazon Alexa platform is on a roll, now crammed with more than 15,000 “skills,” up from 10,000 in February, as reported by Voicebot. While this sounds amazing, the reality is that the vast majority of Amazon Echo customers don’t know 99.999 percent of those skills exist. Worse, there seems to be no viable way…

Think twice before using bare-metal clouds

A bare-metal cloud allows you to rent hardware resources from a public cloud service provider, or sometimes a managed service provider. With a bare-metal cloud, you get direct access to the hardware platform without having to go through tenant management systems. Therefore, one of the benefits of bare-metal cloud, as it is sold to the…

Which Spark machine learning API should you use?

You’re not a data scientist. Supposedly according to the tech and business press, machine learning will stop global warming, except that’s apparently fake news created by China. Maybe machine learning can find fake news (a classification problem)? In fact, maybe it can. But what can machine learning do for you? And how will you find…

Cloud portability is still science fiction

Enterprises want cloud portability. Why? Well, they want to hedge bets in case a public cloud provider “breaks bad” in terms of consistently poor service, or performance issues, or, more likely, jacking up the subscription fees to obnoxious levels. As many CIOs I have talked to put it: “We need to have choices. Choices mean leverage.”…

Apache Spark 2.2 gets streaming, R language boosts

With version 2.2 of Apache Spark, a long-awaited feature for the multipurpose in-memory data processing framework is now available for production use. Structured Streaming, as that feature is called, allows Spark to process streams of data in ways that are native to Spark’s batch-based data-handling metaphors. It’s part of Spark’s long-term push to become, if not all things…

How to get started with Kubernetes

With every innovation comes new complications. Containers made it possible to package and run applications in a convenient, portable form factor, but managing containers at scale is challenging to say the least. Kubernetes, the product of work done internally at Google to solve that problem, provides a single framework for managing how containers are run…

8 keys to DynamoDB success

DynamoDB, a fully-managed NoSQL database, is an impressive piece of technology, and it’s amazing that AWS has opened it for the entire world to use. What took millions of dollars in R&D to build – a product that services millions of queries per second with low latency – can be effectively rented for dollars per…

Will your cloud smarts be rewarded?

Back on the topic of organizational impact around the implementation of cloud computing, I’ve had many questions about who’s going to be impacted. Better put, are IT organizations going to promote the better people to the top around the use of cloud computing?  As I tell those who will listen, this is an opportunity for…

A cloud in your datacenter? Azure Stack arrives

At last it’s here: After a prolonged gestation with three public previews, Microsoft has announced the release of Azure Stack. You can download the free Azure Stack Development Kit now. Complete hardware and software solutions will ship in the next couple of months, when Microsoft completes certification. Bringing the public cloud to on-premises data centers…