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The most significant improvements in a CIO’s businesses effectiveness come not from technical tips at all, rather consist of improving habits. Here are my top three: - Recognize that “networking” is about relationships: relationships between IT services that span organizational boundaries. The best way to improve relationships among IT services is to improve the human relationships that underlie them. Demonstrate the importance of, and train your staff in, establishing and maintaining productive relationships with stakeholders. ...

Drawing on my work with dozens of leading technology organizations for inspiration, I have synthesized three keys to encouraging innovation and growth. I call these Shlomo’s Keys to Technology Innovation. They are meaning, creativity, and habits. Meaning Connect the work people do with the values they personally identify with. People change only when they see meaning in their efforts to do so. Jody Mulkey, CTO of Ticketmaster, exemplifies this. In the introduction to his talk at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015, Jody shows how he personally identifies with Ticketmaster’s mission—to connect fans to live experiences—and how this fuels his passion for improving Ticketmaster’s technology. As Jody demonstrates, driving change doesn’t begin with providing a reason, but by connecting to the values that the person holds dear. That is, meaning. ...

Alan Weiss presents the induction certificate to Shlomo February 11, 2016 For Immediate Release Shlomo Swidler Inducted Into Million Dollar Consultant® Hall of Fame Shlomo Swidler, CEO of Orchestratus, is the newest inductee into the Million Dollar Consultant® Hall of Fame, the first Israel-based member of the 70 people in the world so honored. Criteria for membership in this elite group include: Serving as an exemplar to others in the profession. Manifesting the highest levels of integrity, ethics, and accountability. Achieving significant annual revenue and profit improvement. Contributing intellectual capital to the consulting profession. Engaging in continuing, challenging, personal and professional development. Taking prudent risk and demonstrating resilience. The citation on the award includes: ...

Your organization delivers software, so it should be obvious that improving your software delivery means improving your organization. But how to improve your software delivery organization? I’m going to tell you how, and you’ll be amazed at its simplicity: To improve an organization’s performance you need to improve all the components of the organization. And, you need to know how to improve each component. An organization is made of… An organization is composed of people, process, and artifacts. ...

Or, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective DevOps. You may have heard that the goal of DevOps is to rapidly deliver and reliably operate high quality software-based services. But that is only partially true. True, that is the desired result. But fostering the habits that produce that result consistently is integral to the goal. Habits foster results. The goal is both. In my work with clients I have found several cornerstone habits essential to creating DevOps results, and I have helped software organizations embrace these habits and earn the payoffs. Let’s explore the cornerstone DevOps habits and why these habits are as much a goal as the results they promote. ...

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel. In this episode I speak with Mårten Mickos, Head of Cloud Business at HP, formerly CEO of Eucalyptus and of MySQL AB. Some highlights of our discussion: HP has made loud public commitments to OpenStack. What does HP’s acquisition of Eucalyptus in September 2014 mean for both OpenStack and for Eucalyptus? HP’s commitment to OpenStack is unwavering. Eucalyptus has always been focused on the very specific use case of Amazon-compatible clouds, and in 2013 Eucalyptus decided to integrate with OpenStack because OpenStack solves a more general use case than Eucalyptus, in a complementary manner. On a technical level, there is still a lot to do to integrate. OpenStack’s “more general use case” is to be an all-encompassing platform for private, hybrid, and managed clouds, and is therefore open to lots of variation and customization. One technology cannot support both that general OpenStack use case and the specific, out-of-the-box Amazon-compatible use case that Eucalyptus supports. Both can use the same underlying components—the same object store, for example. Eucalyptus is to OpenStack as InnoDB is to MySQL. OpenStack should have spent a lot more time in the design phase early on. They jumped in and started coding, and are now spending a lot of effort to address those design shortcomings. No project is ideal on the first try, but the design phase is supremely important for OpenStack because it is a distributed system, which is incredibly complex and difficult to diagnose and reason about issues once it’s live. What will you do in order to help your developers tackle the complexity inherent in building these distributed systems? The easier a product is to use the more difficult it was to design. The HP Helion group has hired experienced distributed systems experts from the major cloud providers and also newer developers who live and breathe DevOps and agile development, and this combination is the right ingredients for solving the problems. Will Eucalyptus end up being a set of microservices that can be deployed alongside an OpenStack deployment, providing heightened AWS compatibility? Quite possibly. There are many different tactics we can take toward technical integration, and in fact we already have run Eucalyptus inside OpenStack. Certainly, Eucalyptus will not become a wrapper around OpenStack. As eager as everyone is to hear about the technical direction Eucalyptus will take to integrate with OpenStack, we must move slowly in this design phase and ensure we’re doing it right. It will be 2015 before any design commitment is made. If you are involved in OpenStack and Eucalyptus, please reach out to Mårten and his folks at HP with any opinions about what you want to see from Eucalyptus’s integration with OpenStack. What is the relationship between Eucalyptus and the new use cases that OpenStack is being pulled to address, such as telecom carriers’ Network Function Virtualization? There is any relationship you want. AWS compatibility and NFV can be used together or not, independently. HP can provide both. In 2009 when Eucalyptus came out, we mistook people’s initial interest and learning as an indication of the existence of a market. It wasn’t a market. The market hasn’t taken off yet. It’s only now beginning to do so. So we have refocused on the use case of dev/test and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, and seen heightened interest in our offering as a result. Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 15: Mårten Mickos of HP Subscribe to this podcast series

I am often asked by CEOs and CIOs to explain the ROI of cloud computing. My answer goes something like this. How well do you see? The main consideration in evaluating the ROI of cloud computing is your eyesight. What is the scope of your vision? What do you believe about the future? Ask yourself, as we create the ideal future for our customers, what kinds of changes will my organization need to accommodate? Think about how these changes will impact your use of computing - and indeed your entire operation. Consider the four major dimensions that change will include: technological, economic, organizational, and risk. ...

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel. In this episode I speak with Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical. Some highlights of our discussion: The role Ubuntu and Canonical will play in OpenStack’s future. OpenStack is the next phase of Linux: Linux at large scale. The majority of OpenStack deployments are on top of Ubuntu. The mission is to bring regular, seamless releases of OpenStack to Ubuntu users. To do what Ubuntu did in the public cloud space - making it easy to operate at large scale - in the private cloud. Looking back at Ubuntu, here is what we did that resulted in Ubuntu becoming ubiquitous in the cloud. Took the cloud seriously from very early on. Noticed that many interesting, smart people were doing stuff with it. Evaluated what people were doing and the difficulties. Noticed that classic OSes were built to assume the machine would be long-lived. Changed Ubuntu to work very well in the cloud environment, beginning back in 2007. The next frontier is in getting applications to be more widely operable, allowing organizations to share and reuse tooling to deploy and scale applications. That’s what Juju is all about, and it’s not Ubuntu-specific. Developers use Chef and Puppet, and Juju is a distant third in the orchestration automation space. Juju is a one of a newer generation of tools, so adoption is naturally lagging behind the older technologies. The growth rate of the Juju community indicates it is strong and healthy. Juju “charms” can be used to wrap Chef or Puppet configuration management and turn it into automated orchestration. Canonical uses Juju to glue together OpenStack and orchestrate it. Juju began as orchestration automation for EC2 and then it was ported to other clouds. Containers are very interesting. They are poised to become the unit of deployment for PaaS systems. They are also being used like hypervisors, providing multitenancy in environments where the priority is performance over isolation. Ubuntu looked at OpenStack seriously from the very beginning, and threw its own weight behind the project when it moved away from another cloud infrastructure platform. Ubuntu contributed leadership around governance of large scale distributed open source projects. Much of the mystique around OpenStack will disappear over the next two years as it becomes more well-understood and proven to be easy to deploy. Now Ubuntu’s focus is to get OpenStack to be an economically viable alternative to public clouds. Does OpenStack need a Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life? Moving some of the technical leadership positions into the OpenStack Foundation would help resolve some of the deadlock we see in the area - but this is not a demand, nor a necessity. OpenStack will thrive nonetheless. And the project should encourage a healthy dialog about how its governance can be improved. The Foundation has been wise to limit its staff, stay small, and stay focused during this period of incredible hype and willingness on the part of vendors to buy a role and ride the hype with fat checks. As vendors understand OpenStack and how they can contribute to it, those pressures will lessen. It would be wise to take a narrow view on what OpenStack really is: Nova, Neutron, and Cinder – a very tight collection of resource management capabilities, with some additional glue around them for identity, security, and other bits and pieces. If the technical leadership were brought into the Foundation, the pace of progress on this core of OpenStack would improve. The Foundation has excellent governance, and in fact is long on governance but short on leadership. We need a Compute “Moses”, a Storage “Moses”, and a Networking “Moses”. Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 14: Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical Subscribe to this podcast series ...

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel. In this episode I speak with Benny Schnaider, Chairman and co-Founder of Ravello Systems. Some highlights from the episode: The history of virtualization in two minutes, and why it is still important today. Virtualization provides separation, deployability, and mobility. What virtualization has done for VMs, Ravello is doing for collections of VMs - that is, entire applications. How is this different from a platform-as-a-service? IT is currently interested in infrastructure, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. The cloud provider will always be interested in using VMs as the isolation unit between tenants, and a PaaS environment will not be uniform across providers, so IaaS will continue to be attractive from both sides of the market. OpenStack is interesting for Ravello because the more standardized the IaaS features are, the easier it is for us to expand our support for more cloud providers. And, we allow OpenStack developers and operators to create OpenStack deployments within the public cloud, speeding up development and testing. How do you keep up with what’s going on in the OpenStack ecosystem? Blogs, reading, attending events, and attending the summits, where it is important to go to meet the people. Docker is gaining attention - what do you think of it and similar container technologies? If you can live with the limitations of a container, then that’s great. But Ravello can run Windows VMs and other OSes, which containers cannot do. Ravello is used to host OpenStack and deploy it on top of a public IaaS cloud, and provides full Layer 2 networking capabilities, which containers can’t support. OpenStack won’t be the only IaaS solution in the future. The origin of the company name “Ravello.” Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 13: Benny Schnaider of Ravello Systems Subscribe to this podcast series

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel. In this episode I speak with Dagan Gilat, Senior Manager of Cloud Platforms at IBM Haifa Research Lab. Highlights from the podcast: The major areas of focus of the IBM Haifa Research Center. How cloud computing workloads have changed over the years. As workloads need to bridge the gap across from traditional style to cloud style architectures, OpenStack becomes more interesting…. ...