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Docker’s No Flash in the Pan

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Docker -- the open source application container technology that has drawn broad interest from the enterprise IT industry -- recently marked its second birthday since being written and launched in March 2013 by developer Solomon Hykes and his company, dotCloud, which was renamed for the technology to Docker, Inc. in October, 2013.

Judging by its growth and traction thus far, and the example set by such open source projects as Linux, Hadoop, Android, OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, expect big things from this young open source software project and community.

The Docker technology is being embraced by developers, prioritized by large enterprises, and questioned by central IT teams. But all hype aside, there are real signs of disruption as a result of Docker's growth and outlook. Docker recently broke into 'exciting vendor' category in IT buyer surveys by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research. Docker is playing a critical role in new, modernized and migrated cloud applications, which are among top priorities for IT pros, according to the most recent quarterly Voice of the Enterprise survey research, which taps a network of 12,500 senior IT professionals.

A survey of more than 700 of these industry pros on their organization's most common type of application deployment for cloud computing indicated 34 percent was for deploying new applications that they did not have before the cloud. Respondents also identified modernizing existing applications by moving to hosted software or SaaS (35 percent) and migrating existing applications to the cloud (31 percent) as most common. Docker and containers will play a prominent role in these applications and efforts.

There are a few key drivers of Docker's traction with developers, IT operations professionals, providers, investors and end users.

First and foremost is Docker's role as a standard amid a lack of standards for developing, packaging and deploying applications in today's polyglot programming market of more application-layer components, such as languages, frameworks and databases, as well as infrastructures that range from bare-metal servers and traditional data centers, to virtual and cloud computing environments. This is why Docker is sometimes, albeit dramatically perhaps, described as 'next-generation virtualization'.

A second key driver of Docker's success is its simplicity. The open source software provides an open source runtime environment, containerization technology and integrated user interface, which is a differentiator from traditional virtual containers. Though it is based on Linux containers, another advantage is Docker's standalone status from the operating system, which helps the technology live up to the shipping container analogy for which it was named. What's inside the container can be a variety of things, but the method and unit to package it is consistently the same. A Docker container typically consists of an application and its binaries, libraries, packages and dependencies, and the container technology makes it easier to copy differences among versions, meaning simplified and fewer configuration scripts for different servers or infrastructures.

A third key driver of Docker is its ability to help delegate responsibility for applications and workloads in faster, more agile DevOps implementations that are also a growing priority for enterprise IT managers and leaders. While the whole concept of DevOps is about bringing development and IT operations pros together for a more rapid, iterative, efficient and responsive process, our research indicates Docker and containers help organizations to effectively delineate who does what. If an issue is inside of the container, it is primarily a matter for developers. If it is outside of the container, it is primarily for IT operations. While organizations do not want to continue working with silos, this type of separation of responsibility can actually help drive effective DevOps deployments.

Though Docker has the above drivers and advantages working in its favor, there are still plenty of challenges. One of the main hurdles for Docker, both the technology and the company, is its immaturity. After all, Docker has just attained two years, and even though the market is moving faster than ever, this is fairly embryonic in terms of open source projects, considering Linux is 25 years old. Docker and containers also show their immaturity when compared to today's enterprise virtual machines. For example, multi-tenant security for VMs is well established. The same cannot be said for Docker and containers, though there is no shortage of developers, projects and vendors seeking to address such matters.

Docker and containers other challenges center on enterprise concerns around data management, analytics, storage and similar issues that go along with deployment by large enterprises. Much of the use of Docker and containers today is for development and test purposes. While the distance between test-and-dev to production has diminished, there are still concerns and apprehensions about Docker and containers at large enterprises, particularly among central IT teams.

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Docker's No Flash in the Pan

Extreme cryptography paves way to personalized medicine

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David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty

Cloud processing of DNA sequence data promises to speed up discovery of disease-linked gene variants.

The dream for tomorrows medicine is to understand the links between DNA and disease and to tailor therapies accordingly. But scientists working to realize such personalized or precision medicine have a problem: how to keep genetic data and medical records secure while still enabling the massive, cloud-based analyses needed to make meaningful associations. Now, tests of an emerging form of data encryption suggest that the dilemma can be solved.

At a workshop on 16 March hosted by the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), cryptographers analysed test genetic data. Working with small data sets, and using a method known as homomorphic encryption, they could find disease-associated gene variants in about ten minutes. Despite the fact that computers were still kept bogged down for hours by more-realistic tasks such as finding a disease-linked variant in a stretch of DNA a few hundred-thousandths the size of the whole genome experts in cryptography were encouraged.

This is a promising result, says Xiaoqian Jiang, a computer scientist at UCSD who helped to set up the workshop. But challenges still exist in scaling it up.

Physicians and researchers think that understanding how genes influence disease will require genetic and health data to be collected from millions of people. They have already started planning projects, such as US President Barack Obamas Precision Medicine Initiative and Britains 100,000 Genomes Project. Such a massive task will probably require harnessing the processing power of networked cloud computers, but online security breaches in the past few years illustrate the dangers of entrusting huge, sensitive data sets to the cloud. Administrators at the US National Institutes of Healths database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), a catalogue of genetic and medical data, are so concerned about security that they forbid users of the data from storing it on computers that are directly connected to the Internet.

Homomorphic encryption could address those fears by allowing researchers to deposit only a mathematically scrambled, or encrypted, form of data in the cloud. It involves encrypting data on a local computer, then uploading that scrambled data to the cloud. Computations on the encrypted data are performed in the cloud and an encrypted result is then sent back to a local computer, which decrypts the answer. If would-be thieves were to intercept the encrypted data at any point along the way, the underlying data would remain safe.

If we can show that these techniques work, then it will give increased reassurance that this high-volume data will be computed on and stored in a way that protects individual privacy, says Lucila Ohno-Machado, a computer scientist at UCSD and a workshop organizer.

Homomorphic data encryption, first proposed in 1978, differs from other types of encryption in that it would allow the cloud to manipulate scrambled data in essence, the cloud would never actually see the numbers it was working with. And, unlike other encryption schemes, it would give the same result as calculations on unencrypted data.

But it remained largely a theoretical concept until 2009, when cryptographer Craig Gentry at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, proved that it was possible to carry out almost any type of computation on homomorphically encrypted data. This was done by transforming each data point into a piece of encrypted information, or ciphertext, that was larger and more complex than the original bit of data. A single bit of unencrypted data would become encrypted into a ciphertext of a few megabytes the size of a digital photograph. It was a breakthrough, but calculations could take 14 orders of magnitude as long as working on unencrypted data. Gentry had rendered the approach possible, but it remained impractical.

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Extreme cryptography paves way to personalized medicine

Ecuador: Why Did It Take Sweden 1,000 Days to Agree to Question Julian Assange in Our U.K. Embassy? – Video

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Ecuador: Why Did It Take Sweden 1,000 Days to Agree to Question Julian Assange in Our U.K. Embassy?
http://democracynow.org - Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patio responds to recent reports Swedish prosecutors will seek to question WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean...

By: democracynow

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Ecuador: Why Did It Take Sweden 1,000 Days to Agree to Question Julian Assange in Our U.K. Embassy? - Video

Julian Assange Demands Rape Case Files Before Sweden …

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Geneva: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will agree to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors in London over rape allegations, but only if he is given access to the investigation files, his defence said Monday.

"We need to be provided access to the entirety of the proceedings, which for four and half years has been in the hands of the Swedish prosecution and not in the hands of the defence," said Baltasar Garzon, a former Spanish judge who is Assange's lawyer.

Swedish prosecutors offered earlier this month to drop their previous demand that Assange come to Sweden for questioning about the 2010 allegations, marking a significant U-turn in the case that has been deadlocked for nearly five years.

The Australian former hacker, who has always vehemently denied the allegations and insisted the sexual encounters were consensual, has been ensconced in Ecuador's embassy in London since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden.

He has long offered to be interviewed by prosecutors at the embassy or by video link.

"That offer has always been on the table. It has been repeated again, and again and again, and I am very pleased that the prosecution has finally accepted that offer," Assange said via video feed to a diplomatic conference on how to protect whistleblowers from prosecution.

He added though that "there are details to work through" since three countries were involved and it remained unclear which jurisdiction would apply.

1,000 days in embassy

Garzon told AFP on the sidelines of the conference in Geneva that the defence team had yet to respond to the Swedish authorities' request for an interrogation to take place at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

"Of course we will agree to the interrogation, but they have to guarantee minimum prerequisites," he said, stressing that giving the defence access to the investigation files was "simply the minimum rights of any person subjected to a judicial process."

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Julian Assange Demands Rape Case Files Before Sweden ...

Assange wants access to Swedish rape case files

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Julian Assange adresses a conference in Geneva via video link. Photo: AP Photo/Keystone, Sandro Campardo

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will agree to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors in London over rape allegations, but only if he is given access to the investigation files, his defence has said.

"We need to be provided access to the entirety of the proceedings, which for four and half years has been in the hands of the Swedish prosecution and not in the hands of the defence," said Baltasar Garzon, a former Spanish judge who is Assange's lawyer.

Swedish prosecutors offered earlier this month to drop their previous demand that Assange come to Sweden for questioning about the 2010 allegations, making a significant U-turn in the case that has been deadlocked for nearly five years.

Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Assange, 43, in 2010 following allegations from two women in Sweden, one who claimed rape and another who alleged sexual assault.

The Australian former hacker, who has vehemently denied the accusations and insisted the sexual encounters were consensual, has been ensconced in Ecuador's embassy in London since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden.

He has long offered to be interviewed by prosecutors at the embassy or by video link.

"That offer has always been on the table. It has been repeated again, and again and again, and I am very pleased that the prosecution has finally accepted that offer," Assange said via video feed to a diplomatic conference on how to protect whistleblowers from prosecution.

He added however that "there are details to work through" since three countries were involved and in remained unclear which jurisdiction would apply.

TIMELINE: Julian Assange sex allegations

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Assange wants access to Swedish rape case files


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