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Kenneth Owens

Chief Technical Officer, Cloud Infrastructure Services

Ken Owens is Chief Technical Officer, Cloud Infrastructure Services at Cisco Systems. Ken is responsible for creating and communicating technical/scientific vision and strategy for Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) technical vision/strategy. He brings a compelling view of technology trends in enterprise IT (e.g., infrastructure, computing, SaaS, virtualization, and cloud) and evangelize the technology roadmap for the business.

Before joining Cisco in 2014, Ken spent over 7 years at Savvis as the Chief Scientist, CTO, and VP Security and Virtualization Technologies. Prior assignments include 5 years as a network security architect at A.G. Edwards & Sons, Inc., and Edward Jones brokerage firms in St. Louis, Mo, and 10 years in the design and architecture of communications systems and components for Erlang Technologies, Tellabs, and Wiltel.

Ken holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Articles

March 18, 2016

CLOUD

minimesos – An experimentation and testing tool for Apache Mesos

2 min read

Apache Mesos, it’s fair to say, is a battle-hardened system for treating your whole data center as one pool of resources. Through the use of frameworks and their APIs, it’s possible to manage and schedule resources across both data centers and different cloud environments. It is for these reasons that Mantl, our microservices framework, was […]

March 10, 2016

CLOUD

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Accepts Kubernetes as First Project

1 min read

Today, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced that their first project accepted is Kubernetes. This is an important initial milestone as this represents the first core functional component of a CNCF solution.  There will me more core functional components to come as the TOC is busy already investigating projects.  This is not validation that CNCF […]

February 12, 2016

CLOUD

Cisco Live Berlin: Developer Hackathon and Cloud/OpenStack Sessions

10 min read

Next week is Cisco Live Europe (CiscoLiveEurope) in Berlin, Germany. I wanted to get a quick blog post our before the week to highlight some of the pre-events, workshops, and sessions. For the second year, Cisco’s Developer Network (CiscoDevNet) is hosting a hackathon the weekend before and is sold out. You can keep up to […]

February 16, 2016

CLOUD

Programmable Microservices Infrastructure with Mantl Release 1

7 min read

Introduction The proliferation of a containers, public and private clouds and orchestration applications like Kubernetes and Apache Mesos have helped to ratify the use of microservices in production environments. Pini Reznik wrote a great blog summarizing the history here. However, experience shows that more time is being spent deploying, managing and debugging the infrastructure than […]

February 18, 2016

CLOUD

Stateful Applications on Mantl Using the Mesos ELK Framework

8 min read

Introduction Throughout this week the discussion has been focused on the necessity of a programmable infrastructure and the Mantl project. Mantl was formulated to deliver application level flexibility by providing a set of pluggable components. One of the main use cases for enterprises is data management and analytics. This post discusses a subset of these […]

January 25, 2016

CLOUD

2016 Prediction #1 – Production Application Development and Deployment Rapidly Transforming to Microservices Architect …

4 min read

As I look back on 2015 and the great effort of the Mantl.io and CiscoShipped.io teams, I am reminded of the efforts I had in the initial cloud computing efforts 8 years ago. The buzz and market interest in cloud computing then was not accepted by traditional hosting and telecommunications companies. A retail company understood […]

November 12, 2015

CLOUD

Why Containerize?

3 min read

We are really looking forward to next week in Barcelona @dockercon Europe. As a sponsor and exhibitor we are really excited to be showing what Cisco is innovating with @docker and how we are enabling and delivering the platform for the digital disruption era. We extend a warm invitation to anyone who is interested to see how […]

November 10, 2015

CLOUD

Ceilometer + Monasca = Ceilosca

5 min read

Integrating Monasca and Ceilometer seemed like a very good idea from the start. It would integrate all the OpenStack resources notifications and metrics as well as provide a unified storage layer for Monitoring and Metering, simplifying deployment at scale as well as opening the door for new solutions that weren’t possible before. So the team […]

November 5, 2015

CLOUD

Microservices Infrastructure – Mantl – Release 0.4

7 min read

During the OpenStack Summit last week, we released Mantl 0.4. In this blog I would like to go into more details about the release. But first I’d like to start by explaining what Mantl is – and what it is not. System Integration as Open Source Mantl is a layered stack that takes care of […]

September 17, 2015

CLOUD

Building Cisco’s IoE PaaS with Mantl

5 min read

We blogged about the alpha launch of Shipped back in June, but today I want to talk about the service it relies on: Mantl. Mantl’s goal is to provide a fully functional, instrumented, and portable container based PaaS for your business at the push of a button. It’s an opinionated set of services, configurations and […]

August 20, 2015

CLOUD

Zoomdata Brings Data Fusion to the Cisco Intercloud to Solve Business Problems

1 min read

Cisco’s vision for the Intercloud is to create and manage workloads across multiple clouds and to provide a single point of consumption. Nowhere is that single point of consumption stronger than at the data layer, where the diversity of datastores and the rapid progress towards real-time streaming architectures is putting huge demands on enterprises to […]

June 30, 2015

CLOUD

Intercloud Microservices with Docker and Nirmata

2 min read

At Cisco Intercloud CTO Innovation Center, innovative vendors are selected to integrate and build cloud services for customer and market trials. We combine the world’s best ISVs with Cisco’s best...

June 9, 2015

CLOUD

Microservices Infrastructure Release 0.3

3 min read

On behalf of the development team. I’m pleased to announce the 0.3.0 release of Microservices Infrastructure. In the weeks since 0.2, we’ve added a number of features and improvements. The software can be downloaded at: https://github.com/CiscoCloud/microservices-infrastructure Documentation is located at: https://microservices-infrastructure.readthedocs.org/en/latest What is it? Microservices Infrastructure is software that launches servers and then configures them […]

June 1, 2015

CLOUD

On-Demand Private Cloud: How to Cut CapEx, Free Up Resources, and Boost Business Agility

2 min read

Today, enterprises need greater business agility and faster time-to-market for applications. That’s why, in many instances, they are building their own private clouds or adopting on-demand private cloud. Companies that are most suited to building their own private clouds are those that have deep engineering and IT leadership and need strong security and governance around […]

May 13, 2015

CLOUD

Hybrid Devops – Software Defined Disruption

5 min read

Businesses have been and will continue to be disrupted by software agility and innovation. If you have any questions, just ask, if they are still in business, Movie Rental Companies (Netflix), Taxi Companies (Uber), and Retail Companies (Amazon) to just name a few areas (companies that disrupted an industry with Software). Software defined disruption has […]

April 10, 2015

CLOUD

Cisco Cloud microservices-infrastructure 0.2 released!

1 min read

Cisco Cloud Services is proud to announce the 0.2 release of microservices-infrastructure, a modern platform for rapidly deploying globally distributed services based on Mesos, Marathon, and Consul. What's...

March 10, 2015

CLOUD

An Open Framework for Hosting Multi Data Center Distributed Applications on the Cisco Cloud

3 min read

Authors Ken Owens (@kenowens12), Keith Chambers (@keithchambers), and Jason Plank (@_japlank_) Over the last few years, we’ve heard a lot about ways of designing new software applications. Out of this, we’ve heard a lot about “Microservice Architecture” as a way to design these applications as individual components to make up an actual application. Refer back […]

February 25, 2015

DATA CENTER

Our Ecosystem Begins Here @Ciscocloud

4 min read

As Cisco prepares for Cisco Live Melbourne #clmel, I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight our @Ciscocloud Intercloud partnership with Telstra The following Q&A session between executives of our partnered companies identifies the unique challenges of our current business environment and the rapidly changing needs of our customers. Interviewed by Stuart Robbins, the participants […]

August 29, 2014

DATA CENTER

Application Enablement and Innovation Leveraging Linux Containers

2 min read

Linux containers and Docker are poised to radically change the way applications are built, shipped, deployed, and instantiated. They accelerate application delivery by making it easy to package the dependencies along with the application. That means that a single containerized application can operate in different development, test and production environments and platforms (physical and virtual). […]

April 10, 2014

DATA CENTER

Cisco Intercloud Provides a Platform for Application Enablement and Innovation

3 min read

  Over the past weeks, Cisco Cloud Services  introduce a global Intercloud .  Today I'd like to explain how Cisco Intercloud provides a platform for Cisco, ISVs, and partners application...

April 3, 2014

DATA CENTER

Cisco Global Intercloud : Open and Interoperable

2 min read

Enterprises have taken on many cloud computing opportunities but for the most part the adoption of applications on the cloud is very early and mostly for new applications and for...

April 1, 2014

DATA CENTER

Cloud Services : Security and Compliance with Data Sovereignty Law

3 min read

Cloud computing has rapidly matured in the market.  Many businesses have adopted private and public cloud strategies and have deployed on to cloud infrastructure and integrated with corporate support      systems.  As this cloud adoption occurred, security, privacy, and data governance have frequently been overlooked by the users of cloud computing, especially when demand comes from […]

March 27, 2014

DATA CENTER

What makes Cisco Cloud Services Application Centric ?

2 min read

Cisco’s announcement on Cisco Cloud Services "Introducing Cisco's Global Intercloud"  is the next step in our transformation towards being an end-to-end cloud platform and software function solutions vendor. This...