Eric Troup's Blog

The Cloud IS the Commodity with NFV

EGT75 — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 04:25:44 GMT

Have always thought the industry published a decent NFV white paper in October of 2012 and then failed to follow its own plan. The white paper talked about leveraging the capabilities of the hyper-scale IT cloud platform operators but then the industry decided to reinvent the cloud platform. The industry lost track of the distinct separation that needs to be maintained between Tenant VNF / Service Orchestration Layer and Platform Resource Management / Orchestration Layer. As a result, Network Function vendors focused on solutions that encompassed both their version of a cloud platform and their version of Software. This was exacerbated by the absence of standards. The resulting VNF software was not truly cloud aware and not portable across even more mature commodity cloud platforms. This becomes a huge problem in a digital era when virtually all content delivery is a multi-cloud, multi-service provider endeavor. All Network Functions are not the same. They do not impose the same low-latency and networking requirements. The industry could have chosen to start with those network functions most easily re-architected to be cloud aware so as to run optimally as SaaS on a multi-tenant "commodity cloud". The more difficult, low-latency, Control Plane VNFs could have been addressed in a second or third wave. Not too late to make this course correction. As for Cloud Platforms, the closed loop, AI enhanced, data analytics driven, software defined, resource graph/state management capabilities of a globally distributed cloud platform like Microsoft Azure significantly exceed the vision of ETSI MANO or Open MANO. The TM Forum has attempted to fill gaps with the ZOOM initiative and OSS Future Mode of Operations work but even that has difficulty keeping up with the accelerating advancement of hyper-scale cloud platforms and the latest software architecture and DevOps trends. The telecom NFV ecosystem focus on commodity x86 hardware and combining it with Open Source software got everyone off track. It was fully engineered and commercially stable Cloud Platforms that were becoming the actual commodity. The hyper-scale cloud developers and operators were far more advanced with VIM and NFVI than the telecom industry realized. They had already abstracted hardware lifecycle management from software lifecycle management to create apparent unlimited scalability. This may have been difficult to recognize in 2012 but it is becoming very clear in 2017.

Growing Role of Platforms in Cybersecurity

EGT75 — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 13:00:45 GMT

Article originally published in "The Cyber Defense Review", Winter 2017 by U.S. Army Cyber Institute, West Point, NY. https://cyberdefensereview.army.mil/

Summary

Platforms are becoming a dominant force in business and software architecture. Regardless of where you look across commercial, government, health or military/defense sectors, platforms are increasingly becoming core features of the digital world. They are at the center of digital ecosystems. When we think platforms today, it is important to realize that there is a business view, a technology view, and an ecosystem view. Evolving from highly specialized and expensive Service Delivery Platforms, today these multi-tenant multi-role platforms provide reusable sets of building block capabilities designed to accelerate the growth and to sustain multiple digital ecosystems. Increasingly today, the technology platform implementation is cloud based and software defined. Furthermore, highly optimized (software plus hardware) cloud infrastructure itself is becoming a commodity. Highly virtualized cloud platforms are dominating because of their huge advantages in automated hyper-scale resource utilization efficiency. The economies of scale are overwhelming. Platforms enable many important software tasks, that would formerly have had to be custom built into each system or application, to be accomplished much more effectively by the reusable capabilities provided by the platform. For example, an identity management system provided by a cloud platform can meet the individual needs of hundreds of different services and systems hosted on or accessible via that platform. Thus, by their very nature, platforms are subsuming many of the cybersecurity roles that were formerly performed by individual systems or applications. The increasing role of platforms requires adjustments to system architecture but, properly approached, offers significant enhancements to cybersecurity. The marketplace recognizes this: CIO Insight reported, "52% of (survey) respondents believe cloud apps are as secure, or more secure, than on premise applications, up from 40% last year."[i]

Platforms and the Digital World

In Platform Revolution, the authors define a platform as a business based on enabling value-creating interactions between external producers and consumers.[ii] In the continually evolving digital era, platforms are causing some important shifts in focus. We are evolving from monetizing by selling a right-to-use license of a hard-to-make competitive service or capability towards extracting smaller pieces of the recurring value from each of the massive numbers of interactions between producers and consumers in digital ecosystems. As explained in Platform Revolution, the model for valuation of platforms becomes a function of the number of producers and consumers across a network provided the platform itself retains an ability to curate content and moderate network interactions. The focus thus shifts outwardly towards these interactions in a network effect between producers and consumers rather than inwardly on something being produced or licensed by the platform owner. In some cases, items being produced are provided free of charge to not impede growth of the new monetization process. These shifts fundamentally alter the cybersecurity threat surface.

Digital Platform Reference Architecture

Industry groups have been working on standards and best practices for implementing and operating digital platforms and for joining digital ecosystems. The TM Forum[iii], in liaison with NIST, ETSI, ITU and Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has been evolving its Frameworx[iv] to address the needs of digital platforms and digital ecosystems. As part of this effort, the TM Forum is evolving a Digital Platform Reference Architecture (DPRA). As shown in Figure 1, a Digital Platform has to be understood from both a business and a technology viewpoint. This separation of concerns makes it much easier to understand how to deal with fundamental requirements such as cybersecurity. [caption id="attachment_655" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Figure 1 - TM Forum Digital Platform Reference Architecture (DPRA) Platform Capabilities.[/caption] Figure 2 contains an expanded and modified view of the current work-in-progress TM Forum DPRA based upon a recent Microsoft contribution. Microsoft Azure is a commercial example of a platform supporting multiple ecosystems across commercial, public/government, health and defense sectors. The platform provides sets of reusable building block capabilities or services that can be used to create higher-level services. Some of these building blocks can come from the platform maker (First Party services) while others could have been developed by others and exposed via the platform to a community (Third Party services). The Technical Capabilities depicted are an illustrative list and constantly evolving. [caption id="attachment_675" align="alignnone" width="800"] Figure 2 - Expanded view of TM Forum DPRA[/caption] In this context, Uber is a Business Platform with car owners / drivers as providers and travelers being the consumers. It is deployed onto an Actualization Platform. Microsoft Azure is primarily an Actualization Platform that hosts many Business Platforms; it is multi-tenant yet secure. It is always important to understand which point of view of the platform is being discussed. The Actualization Platform View makes it easier to visualize the cyber-security issues across the physical datacenter/network layer, virtualized infrastructure layer, the platform services layer, and business application layer. Each have specific functions to perform as a part of a layered cybersecurity defense.

Distributed Computing / Mobile Edge Computing

Another characteristic of digital platforms is that the services and supporting cloud/network infrastructures are increasingly geographically dispersed. As shown in Figure 3, digital platforms invariable involve chaining together resources hosted across multiple datacenters and devices. Instead of mostly static linear value chains, we have an overlapping value mesh designed to be agile in construction and provide low-latency at the edge. In this context, devices become a part of the platform and thus an integral part of nearly any cybersecurity strategy. Workload placement across the fabric becomes part of the optimization process of highly-automated, close-looped management systems. [caption id="attachment_685" align="aligncenter" width="800"] Figure 3 - Cloud Platforms are geographically distributed for performance and regulatory reasons. This means that platforms must have built-in native capabilities for distributed cloud platform and ecosystem management including cyber-security. They also must be able to gracefully accommodate different security and privacy requirements that may vary by context, country, industry, and tenant.[/caption]

Platform Workload Types

Digital platforms can also be represented as falling under three fundamental business scenarios for cloud platforms:

Internal IT Workloads such as Line of Business Applications, Business Support Systems, Operations Support Systems supporting an organization's internal requirements.
External IT Workloads such as hosting the workloads of external organizations and to implement B2B and/or B2B2C use cases.
Internal Network Workloads such as those associated with Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN).

The third category is the newest use case. The telecom and data communications industry is in the midst of a massive $150+ Billion worldwide transformation to build a network of cloud based platforms to dynamically host the virtualized network functions that implement and manage the connectivity of people, devices, applications and data leveraging 5G Wireless and IP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) technologies. Eventually, all datacenters and networks will not simply employ virtualization but become cloud platforms differentiated only by the nature of the workloads primarily hosted. As a result, there will be virtually no business scenarios where mission critical data is not flowing across software defined datacenters (clouds) and software defined networks (clouds) invoking allocated resources many of which may not be entirely under the control of any one party. Having set the stage let us now look at some cybersecurity principles for digital cloud platforms.

Cybersecurity as a Core Platform Feature

Within the TM Forum, the discussion has begun to shift to Ecosystem Risk Management addressing the collaborative risks resulting from virtualization and cloudification across an Open Digital Ecosystem. The word "Open" here means easy to find and consume, not vulnerable or free. While organizations like to believe they have a handle on their own risks - those they own and physically control - increasingly the delivery of a service/product is reliant on a web/fabric of partners over whom they have less control but have to trust if they are to operate and deliver in this agile new world. A risk approach was adopted at the TM Forum primarily because members believe there is never a 100% solution to security and any investment in security needs to be appropriate for the value of that being protected. The correct level of cybersecurity will always be a judgement call but one needs to understand the risks/impacts involved.[v] On the other hand, for hyper-scale Azure, Microsoft is finding that the costs of providing extensively differentiated levels of cybersecurity is not cost effective and in fact introduces other risks. It is safer to simply provide many of the essential cybersecurity features consistently across the entire Azure ecosystem. To play in a specific industry environment may require adherence to certain specific security criteria/standards. When a platform achieves certifications such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and SOC 2, as well as country-specific standards like Australia IRAP, UK G-Cloud, and Singapore MTCS, specific cybersecurity capabilities must be met by that platform.

Security and privacy must be embedded into all aspects of the Platform

For a cloud platform provider like Microsoft, security and privacy is a priority at every step. For this reason, Microsoft designs its platform and tenant software for security from the ground up. A specific approach known as the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL)[vi] is followed. This company-wide, mandatory development process embeds security requirements into the entire software lifecycle, from planning through deployment. To help ensure that operational activities follow the same security priorities, Microsoft has developed rigorous security guidelines laid out in an Operational Security Assurance (OSA) process[vii]. When issues arise, a feedback loop helps ensure that future revisions of OSA address them. Security must be able to first protect from and then detect threats. Platforms are increasingly able to provide very robust security protection perimeters but they can never be totally impenetrable. Platforms need to supplement protection with efficient and fast reacting detection mechanisms. Passive and active countermeasures can then mitigate and defeat threats. In some cases, intruders can be sent to honey pots (false data) while then activating cyber-crime law enforcement or cyber-warfare counter measures.[viii] Consumer Privacy is another aspect to the cybersecurity regulatory challenge. Over the past year, the TM Forum has focused on privacy as driven primarily by EU legislation (general data protection legislation GDPR) which focusses on giving citizens control over their data and places requirements on organizations collecting data to handle it appropriately (protection, access, etc.). Some of the privacy requirements can be very onerous and their implementation can conflict with certain other certification requirements. Nonetheless, data protection across its lifecycle is critical.

Keeping Customer Data Safe

Hyper-scale cloud-based platforms utilize a robust set of security technologies and best practices including multi-tenant cloud virtualization. These are essential to ensure the cloud platform infrastructure is resilient to attack, safeguards user access to the environment, and helps keep customer data secure. Some specific cyber-security capabilities present on mature, cybersecurity enabled platforms like Microsoft Azure include: Managing and controlling identity and user access to environments, data, and applications by federating user identities and enabling multi-factor authentication for more secure sign-in. Biometric capabilities on devices such as fingerprints or artificial intelligence enhanced facial recognition enable stronger identity and role-based security. Encrypting communications and operation processes. For data in transit use of industry-standard transport protocols between user devices and datacenters and within datacenters themselves. For data at rest, a wide range of encryption capabilities up to AES-256, giving the flexibility to choose the solution that best meets each need. Securing networks. Infrastructure necessary to isolate tenants and to securely connect virtual machines to one another both with within one datacenter (such as with Clos[ix] VL2) and between multiple networked datacenters as in hybrid cloud use cases. Capability to block unauthorized traffic to and within datacenters, using a variety of technologies. Software Defined Virtual Networking to extend on-premises networks to the cloud through site-to-site VPN. Managing threats. To protect against online threats, offers such as Microsoft Antimalware for cloud services and virtual machines. Robust intrusion detection, denial-of-service (DDoS) attack prevention, regular penetration testing, and data analytics and machine learning tools to help mitigate threats to the platform.[x] Protecting the privacy of Customers. Time-tested approaches to privacy and data protection including maintaining organizations ownership of and control over the collection, use, and distribution of their information. Owning your own data. Customers own customer data; that is, all data, including text, sound, video, or image files and software. Owners should be able to access their customer data at any time and for any reason without assistance. Customer data or derive information from it should not be used for advertising or external data mining without consent. Trust in the Rule of Law for responses to government and law enforcement requests to access data. When a government wants customer data including for national security purposes it must follow the applicable legal processes in the applicable jurisdiction when serving a court order for content or a subpoena for account information.

Platforms are Strengthening Cybersecurity and Privacy

There are fundamental economic and technical reasons platforms represent such an important force in information technology evolution today. Most people think of the massive network scale required by digital systems today in order to achieve meaningful impact or economic success. To avoid high up-front capital costs, cloud computing platforms are a key enabler to failing fast, adjusting and then achieving successful business growth. It takes enormous investment to achieve rigorous adherence to standards for certification or best practices in such mundane areas like cybersecurity. However, cyber breaches represent a very serious and growing threat. As many businesses and government agencies have discovered over the past few years in a series of embarrassing and costly breaches, the threat is very high and growing. The cost of preventing and mitigating has become so significant that most organizations are simply not able to deal effectively with the challenges of a constantly evolving worldwide theat. Having a data center on premise has little to do with securing against cybersecurity threats. Platforms, particularly those of hyper-scale, are increasingly in the best position to be able to innovate in cybersecurity and maintain on a continuous basis, the necessary large investments. With their huge scale, the larger platforms are much better able to maintain state of art capabilities and invest in costly cyber-security operations centers equipped with high end, real-time data analytics capabilities and automated artificial intelligence enhanced mitigation capabilities. These costs can be distributed across an increasingly larger customer base. For essentially the same reasons platforms dominate economically, platforms also enhance cybersecurity. All platform tenants benefit from a much higher level of protection than they could likely secure on their own allowing tenant owners to safely focus more on core businesses. Platforms and the networking of platforms will likely continue to be important to the cybersecurity conversation. NOTES [i] CIO Insight, https://www.cioinsight.com/it-strategy/cloud-virtualization/slideshows/cloud-apps-rise-despite-cloud-security-concerns.html. [ii] Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Alstyne, Sangeet Choudary, Platform Revolution, New York: WW Norton, 2016. [iii] TM Forum, www.tmforum.org. [iv] TM Forum Frameworx https://www.tmforum.org/tm-forum-frameworx a suite of best practices and standards that provides the blueprint for effective, efficient business operations leveraging proven service-oriented approaches for flexible and agile end-to-end management of services across complex, multi-partner environments. [v] Content in these two paragraphs contributed by Chris Stock, Director Security & Privacy Programs, TM Forum. [vi] Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL); https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sdl/default.aspx . [vii] Microsoft Operational Security Assurance (OSA); https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/SDL/OperationalSecurityAssurance/ [viii] Content in this paragraph contributed by Michael Lawrey, Director TM Forum, previously Executive Director at Telstra. [ix] Clos network is a kind of multistage circuit switching network, first formalized by Charles Clos in 1952 [x] For additional insights into the level of sustained cyber security investment required see; https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cybersecurity/ Microsoft Announces new Cyber Defense Operations Center, Enterprise Cybersecurity Group; https://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2015/11/17/microsoft-announces-new-cyber-defense-operations-center-enterprise-cybersecurity-group/#sm.0001o8vmmz1cold49ym514udg8bnw and https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/11/17/enterprise-security-for-our-mobile-first-cloud-first-world/#sm.000001annxgeojffrx8nvbknohw9x.

Software Defined Cloud - Platforms and Tenants

EGT75 — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 08:37:00 GMT

Microsoft has contributed to the TM Forum Digital Ecosystem Reference Architecture (DERA) project some proven approaches to cloud architecture and management developed and battle tested during the evolution of Azure to a global, hyper-scale, software defined cloud.

The TM Forum defines a Digital Ecosystem Platform (DEP) as a platform that provides the necessary common reusable services to support one or more digital ecosystems. Microsoft Azure is a reference implementation. Azure Media Services is an example Digital Ecosystem.

A Digital Ecosystem Platform, like Azure, consists of several distinct layers in two distinct domains: Tenants and Platforms. The Platform Domain consists of up to three layers but not all implementations have all three. For instance, Microsoft Azure started with Platform Services over Physical Infrastructure adding Infrastructure Services later. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been more focused on Infrastructures Services. If one considers a "Cloud MVNO" model or a syndication model, it is possible to conceive of a platform that has only management functions without actually owning any of the other cloud platform layers.

An important concept is the separation of Tenant Lifecycle Management from Platform Lifecycle Management. This abstraction is emphasized by the dotted blue line in the figure below. APIs crossing the blue line allow tenants to communicate to the platform their performance envelope requirements. The Platform, in turn, can gather and publish configuration state, service assurance metrics, usage and billing information via other APIs. This approach is different than the original concepts put forward by ETSI NFV MANO initiative but is core to leveraging the lessons learned by the hyper-scale cloud service providers. Microsoft has proven this approach scales.

Tenant Domain - Tenants are applications hosted　on Platforms. Unlike an application on a dedicated hardware stack, cloud tenants follow software architecture best practices designed to optimize operations on multi-tenant cloud platforms. IT Workloads, Digital Services and 5G EPC Virtual Network Functions are all examples of tenants in this architecture. Key features of the　Tenant Domain include:

Applications and SaaS - Tenants are First Party and Third Party Applications that by definition are created and managed independently of the platform itself. Tenant applications should be architected to take optimal advantage of multi-tenant cloud platforms. Tenants that require only Infrastructure Services present different requirements than Tenants consuming　Platform Services.　Tenants define the runtime environment required and associated SLAs requested from the platform domain but do not actually managed platform resources in any sense. Tenants could be traditional IT Workloads - essentially any type of IT application including BSS and OSS applications. Tenants could also be newer Network Workloads including Virtual Network Functions (VNFs).
Tenants as Platforms - There can be a recursive nature to the concept of Tenants and Platforms. It is extremely useful to be able to architect software independently of platform and infrastructure management requirements. However, once some tenant applications become deployed they often function in the role of platform services or platforms themselves.　　For instance, the platform may offer a native 1st party codec plus access to a 3rd party partner codec. The 3rd party codec starts off as a tenant application but is consumed as if it were part of a Media Platform. A complex application might be deployed on a cloud platform. To the platform the application is a tenant. However, to users the application being hosted becomes the platform.

It is thus important to maintain the correct Point of View:

Application Architecture - Focused on building software that operates efficiently on a multi-tenant cloud without having to explicitly manage the cloud services or infrastructure layers of the platform.
Platform Management - Focused on the management of platform and infrastructure services　associated with the Digital Ecosystem Platform supporting a range of tenants or ecosystems.　
Platform Domain - Platforms are the core enabler of a Digital Ecosystem. The platform domain provides all the of the common reusable services and functions that applications associated with an ecosystem would need to function.

As depicted in the added box in the figure below, most of the supporting services as defined by the TM Forum Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA) are located in the Management and Supporting Services box. At Microsoft this includes all of the capabilities provided by the internal Microsoft Commerce Platform.

The cloud platform also provides its own automated resource management capabilities. Hardware is assimilated into inventory becoming managed by Automatic Resource Providers for Compute, Storage and Networking resources. Underlay management becomes mainly one of maintaining state.

Everything else becomes software defined primarily at Layer 3 into Software Defined Tenant Overlays. Resources are then assigned in accordance with configured policies, rules and SLAs that enable the platform to manage itself with speed, agility and efficiency. Virtual Infrastructure Management (VIM) is the responsibility of the Platform not the Tenant.

Having implemented this approach, Azure is able to automate the deployment, operation and retrieval of more than 100,000 Virtual Network Functions every day. Operating at hyper-scale, Azure automates the load balancing of the load balancers.

Tenant software must be architected to run in an optimal fashion on multi-tenant clouds. Container technology provides a mechanism to gracefully mitigate this requirement. Tenants must be able to communicate their requirements to platforms. Ultimately, any tenant should be able to run on any cloud platform and any cloud platform should be able to support any tenant.

The cloud platform is thus like a "fly-by-wire" high performance fighter plane. The pilot (Tenant) makes inputs to the stick (API) while a flight control computer (Cloud Fabric Manager / Resource Providers) make thousands of adjustments to flight control systems each sec far beyond the capacity of the pilot to even understand.

Key features of the Platform Domain include:

Platform Services including PaaS - This layer contains several sub-categories of services.

First Party Services (provided by the platform service provider) are Tenant Services that behave as platform services　and are offered　natively by the Platform Domain service provider.　 Examples　are Codec,　Data Analytics Service, Messaging　handling / routing services etc.　
Third　Party　Services (provided by partners and incorporated into the Platform Services layer) are Tenant Services that behave as platform services　but　are provided by third party partners of the platform provider.　These can be alternatives to the 1st party services or supplemental additional service offerings.　
Ecosystem Support Services - This layer hosts and exposes most of the services previously described in the TM Forum Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA).　 Similar to the concept of BSS and OSS, these include services that enable the platform to function as a core enabling element to digital ecosystems such as Identity Management, Profile Management plus other　essential services associated with commerce such as Customer/Partner on-boarding, Catalog Services, Provisioning / Configuration Services and Usage / Billing Services.

Infrastructure Services including IaaS - This layer consists of services that provide compute, storage and networking infrastructure. Examples include providing VMs in various standard configurations, VPN or MPLS infrastructures and storage infrastructures.
Physical (Bare Metal) - Any physical datacenter offering platform and/or infrastructure cloud services would have physical hardware. Physical hardware Lifecycle Management is a task normally found in the Platform Domain and is not typically associated with the Tenant Domain.

The platform is not synonymous with the datacenter. With a Software Defined Cloud approach, the Digital Ecosystem Platform can live in one datacenter or can span multiple datacenters. The Software Defined Cloud enables the rapid assembly of cloud resources into Tenant Overlays and Service Chains.

Some new IOT scenarios require very low latency and high bandwidth right out to IOT devices at the edge of the network. In these cases, small micro-datacenters will be needed to host certain 5G EPC functions as part of a Network Function Virtualization architecture. These micro-datacenters may need to be within 50-100kms of the edge IOT devices in order to support required latencies of 1-2 milliseconds.

The proposed approach facilitates this by enabling software defined tenant overlays that leverage the hyper-scale cloud datacenters for their strengths and mobile edge micro-datacenters for their low latency.

Digital Services and Virtual Network Functions are treated in exactly the same way extending from the backend hyper-scale cloud all the way out to the Mobile Edge Micro-datacenters. This permits a true convergence of IT Workloads and Network Loads to deliver the best possible user experience in the most efficient manner.

Microsoft Azure IOT Services and TM Forum Open Digital Framework

EGT75 — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 10:15:00 GMT

IOT can have lots of different meanings. One way to look at nearly any IOT scenario is as a digital ecosystem. The question then becomes: What does it take to setup an IOT related digital ecosystem and what does it take to join one?

For service providers interested in establishing a digital ecosystem, the TM Forum has published the Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA) and has recently expanded that work to define the characteristics of a Digital Ecosystem Platform (DEP). In this body of work, several proof of concepts are being used to validate the required services a Digital Ecosystem Platform needs to provide. Use cases include Connected Car, Connected Healthcare and SDN/NFV (ZOOM) Connected Network Functions scenarios.

Microsoft Azure serves as a strong working example of a Digital Ecosystem Platform from Microsoft providing the necessary services for multiple digital ecosystems to thrive. In fact, many of the features of Azure and its associated Microsoft Commerce Platform have been used as commercial best practice examples contributed to describe the Digital Services Reference Architecture and Digital Ecosystem Platform(s).

A digital ecosystem platform must provide a number of supporting reusable services. These services can either be provided by the platform itself or the platform can act as a broker providing easy access to other 3rd party services supplying the desired functionality. This is a very important concept. Microsoft Azure can either provide the base platform supplemented by additional supporting 3rd party services or it can reinforce another service provider's IOT platform by supplementing it with various supporting services.

Some of the more commonly mentioned DEP supporting services include:

Commerce Functions – all of the B2B3X, Catalog, Stores, Offer, Order, Bundling, Charging, Billing and Settlement functions. Microsoft offers these today via the Microsoft Commerce Platform.
Identity Management – mechanisms such as provided by Active Directory and ADFS including the ability to federate with other ID Management Systems including OpenID.
Profile Management – The basis for policy based rules impacting many different transactions. Microsoft provides this on multiple levels including the ability to maintain different personas with different security rules across common devices and services.
API Management – Services that provide lifecycle management of APIs used to expose and consume services or functions via catalogs.
Data Analytics – A set of services designed to provide the various types of data analytics services needed by typical IOT Scenarios.
Event Notification and Messaging – Services designed to raise and track events, invoke rules via policies, and route messages between service end points.
Service Composition and Orchestration – Services that facilitate service mashups or service chaining in the case of SDN/NFV.
Brokerage of Services and APIs – Services that help locate and select services especially in conjunction with automated virtual resource management.
Service and Platform Management – Services that enabled management of hosted digital services/functions plus supporting virtualized cloud resources including KPIs and the APIs to expose them. Many of these are provide via the Microsoft Azure Management Portal and APIs.

At the www.azure.com site under Features one can see how Microsoft has enabled many different services to support various digital ecosystems. In addition, there are other sets of services specifically designed to help support context specific digital ecosystems. Two significant examples are Azure Media & CDN and Azure IOT Services.

As mentioned in a MS Open Technology Inc Blog: "When it comes to trying Azure IoT services, the open source project ConnectTheDots.io is a great starting point. Last week...many updates to the project to allow for even more sensors data types to be sent and displayed in the ConnectTheDots example web site. ...Added were new sensors and devices examples to the project including sound data and data from the Microsoft Band sensors to Azure."

While these services do not provide a turnkey solution for setting up and maintaining digital ecosystems, the Microsoft Azure services shown under Features in the graphic do provide all the essential elements to accelerating a CSP's efforts to setup and maintain digital ecosystems with all the agility needed for today digital marketplace.

For additional resources please visit:

Azure Digital Services Platform:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-azure/

TM Forum Open Digital Program:

https://www.tmforum.org/opendigitalprogram/15845/home.html

Transforming to a Digital Service Provider

EGT75 — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 20:34:00 GMT

“Digital Transformation” is a term often applied to the telecommunications industry today. Traditional telecom lines of business have been experiencing declining margins in the face of fierce competition, market saturation and commoditization. At the same time, disruptive ‘over the top’ alternatives have held global telecom revenues flat in 2013 at about $1.7 Trillion worldwide.

In response, the telecom industry is making fundamental changes to their business. These changes often include efforts to improve business agility, collaboration and operational efficiency; more reliance on business partnerships; enhanced multi-channel customer experience management and supporting advanced business analytics. There is also continued heavy investment in IT and network technologies.

However, there is something new in these technology investments; IT and network investments are beginning to become aligned in how they are both driving towards supporting New Digital Services enabled by common supporting ecosystems.

Historically, there was a significant separation maintained between computer applications and voice and data networks. Today computer applications such as Telco BSS/OSS or financial, manufacturing and retail LOB applications are being decomposed into their sub-functions expressed as APIs to enhance agility and reusability. The IT infrastructure is being moved to a Cloud model enabling “IT as a Service”. At the same time, the networks are shifting to all IP based converged system for voice and data enabling “Network as a Service”. The systems that manage both IP data transport and wireless networks increasingly are moving to common virtualized x86 platforms.

We are transitioning to a world where both IT workloads and network workloads can be hosted on common x86 cloud computing architectures. These workloads consume IT Functions and Network Functions hosted on either on-premises “private clouds”, such as the Microsoft Cloud OS, or off-premises “public clouds” such as Azure. Regardless of where they are hosted, they are interconnected via network clouds, such as MPLS, to form a fabric of “hybrid clouds”.

The resulting Digital Value-Mesh provides the agility, performance, and reliability needed to meet the ever increasing demands of the digital economy in a highly mobile world.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Virtual Switch

EGT75 — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 18:05:05 GMT

Software Defined Networking is becoming harder to define. SDN used to be primarily associated with network communications service providers. However, with the advent of Multi-Cloud Service Delivery and the need to optimize service performance across multiple service domains, the need for SDN optimization extends into both the intra-cloud and inter-cloud network fabric.

Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V bring strong enhancements in network virtualization. The Hyper-V Virtual Switch is a software-based layer-2 network switch that is available in Hyper-V Manager when installed in the Hyper-V server role. The switch includes programmatically managed and extensible capabilities to connect virtual machines to both virtual networks and the physical network. In addition, Hyper-V Virtual Switch provides policy enforcement for security, isolation, and service levels. The Hyper-V Virtual Switch in Windows Server® 2012 introduces several new features and enhanced capabilities for tenant isolation, traffic shaping, protection against malicious virtual machines, and simplified troubleshooting.

For a good overview of the Hyper-V Virtual Switch see this recently updated article:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831823.aspx

For analysis and a video about how network virtualization using the extension provided by Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and NECs ProgrammableFlow and OpenFlow Enabled Software Defined Network will dramatically benefit cloud enterprises see the following links:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/video/nec-programmable-flow-sdn-and-hyper-v-transform-private-clouds.aspx

https://www.sdncentral.com/sdn-blog/game-changer-openflow-on-hyper-v-finally-arrives-with-necs-new-pf1000/2013/01/

M2M - Ford And Microsoft Deliver 5 Millionth SYNC-Enabled Vehicle

EGT75 — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:50:48 GMT

https://seekingalpha.com/article/979151-ford-and-microsoft-deliver-5-millionth-sync-enabled-vehicle-plan-to-bring-cloud-and-car-closer-together?source=cnbc

“Today at GigaOm Roadmap, Windows Embedded General Manager Kevin Dallas joined Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas on stage to mark the fifth anniversary of SYNC and major milestone: the 5 millionth SYNC-enabled vehicle sold. With this year’s expansion to the EU and Asia, Ford expects that number to reach 13 million by 2015.”

Forester Says “running out of excuses to not try Microsoft Windows Azure”

EGT75 — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 07:10:55 GMT

According to a recent post by James Staten Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research

“With the latest release of Windows Azure here at Build, Microsoft’s premier developer shindig, this cloud service has become a serious contender for the top spot in cloud platforms.”

…

“If you have been waiting for your peers to use Windows Azure, that excuse is going away too. Microsoft said it now has over 100,000 separate named accounts using Azure, is adding thousands per month, and compute use is doubling every six months. If you are a government agency, an airline, a pharmaceutical maker, media company, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, an oil company, or a financial services firm, your peers are already using Windows Azure. And our surveys of developers, development managers, and even I&O pros show Microsoft as a top-five most used cloud platform.”

https://www.zdnet.com/youre-running-out-of-excuses-to-not-try-microsoft-windows-azure-7000006776/

Running Windows 8 on a Lenovo X220 Laptop for Real Work

EGT75 — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:33:00 GMT

I have been running Windows 8 Consumer Preview on my Lenovo X220 Laptop. It installed quickly without any problems. All devices installed without any manual intervention.

On the road, it works as a conventional Laptop without a touch screen. In the office, I drop it onto a Lenovo cradle and drive two 32 inch HD monitors. One monitor is driven from the Display Port interface on the Laptop and one display is driven from the VGA port on the Lenovo X220 Base. Using utilities built into Windows, I configured the two monitors to come up as shown in the picture below with the Metro screen (Primary) on the left side and the second screen on the right.

The Start function is different with Windows 8 since it is oriented around the new Metro interface. However, once you get used to the change, it is actually just as efficient on a desktop using a keyboard and mouse and without a touchscreen as the Start Orb is on Windows 7. Typing any keys anywhere on the Metro desktop instantly launches an application search and brings up a list of results that narrow with each additional keystroke. Hit Enter and the application launches. Alternatively, Windows Key + “Q” brings up a list of applications to pick from. If the application selected is a conventional Windows application like Office Word or Outlook, the screens change to the configuration below.

On Windows 7 I had been running UltraMon for its additional capability to manage multiple monitors, task bar functionality, and ability to save different configurations. When first installed on Windows 8, I ran into one problem. I took the problem to the vendor, Realtime Software (https://www.realtimesoft.com). They immediately responded with a fix.

“The window buttons won't work on Windows 8, support for this is planned for the next release, which should be ready around end of March. As a workaround, you can disable the window buttons in the registry. To do this, run regedit.exe, then go to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Realtime Soft\UltraMon\\Window Buttons and set 'Maximize to Desktop Button' and 'Move Window Button' to zero.”

UltraMon now works with a few features missing. I expect they may reappear with the pending update. I am also running Office Professional Plus 2010. Lync and Skype work perfectly. Visual Studio and Expression Blend seem fine although some SDKs are not available yet on this version. Other programs being used include MindManager and SnagIt.

So…. I am running all my normal day to day apps on Windows 8. I have encountered no irregular behaviors and I have no reason to go back.

Final Release of Hyper-V Drivers for OpenNebula

EGT75 — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:01:54 GMT

OpenNebula has just announced the release of the final version of the Hyper-V drivers for OpenNebula 3.2. As far as is known, this constitutes the most feature-rich, scalable and efficient integration of an open-source cloud stack with Microsoft Hyper-V, being an excellent example of collaboration in cloud innovation and interoperability. Now Microsoft Hyper-V clouds can be accessed by using standard and common cloud APIs like OGF OCCI or AWS EC2.

See https://blog.opennebula.org/?p=2661 for additional information.