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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

June 30, 2016

CLOUD

Developing Cloud Native Applications Using the Cisco’s Open Source Shipped and Mantl Platforms

4 min read

Software engineering and developer communities are driving the market for cloud consumption and leading each industry into a new era of software-defined disruption. There are no longer questions about elastic and flexible agile development as the way to innovate and reduce time to market for businesses. Open source software plays a key role in the […]

June 16, 2016

CLOUD

How Cloud Native and Container Platforms Change the Way We Think about Networking

4 min read

Networking has been a foundational component of our economy since the Internet days. In the early days, defining protocols and standards for how to connect, route, and interoperate local, metro,...

May 10, 2016

CLOUD

Open Source All the Way Up the Stack

4 min read

Software engineering and developer communities are driving the market for cloud consumption and leading each industry into a new era of software-defined disruption. There are no longer questions about elastic and flexible agile development as the way to innovate and reduce time to market for businesses. Open source software plays a key role in the […]

May 2, 2016

CLOUD

Mantl Knows Secrets

7 min read

You have secrets in your cluster. Everybody does, it’s a fact of life. Database passwords, API keys, deployment tokens, just to name a few. Secrets are hard to manage, even before you throw in the fact that most of us now are operating in a cloud environment. In software development, the common advice to “never roll […]

April 19, 2016

CLOUD

Batteries Included, not Crippleware

2 min read

At Cisco, we are continuously working with our Enterprise and Service Provider customers on the  many issues they are facing with the transition to Cloud Native and Hyperscale in the datacenter. What we have discovered is that with  this transition, administrators are struggling with the the increasing complexity in the data center, policy, and data […]

April 13, 2016

CLOUD

Innovate Beyond the Stack – Innovation begins with Software Disruption

4 min read

Software engineering and developer communities are driving the market for cloud consumption and leading each industry into a new era of software-defined disruption. There are no longer questions about elastic and flexible agile development as the way to innovate and reduce time to market for businesses. Open source software plays a key role in the […]

April 26, 2016

CLOUD

What is Mantl API?

4 min read

When developing applications, one to the first obstacles we encountered was around installing applications and frameworks. To address this complicated ecosystem, we developed a service framework and API. The Mantl API is a feature built in to Mantl that helps you find and install applications and Mesos frameworks. Think of the effort involved to build a […]

April 21, 2016

CLOUD

Synthetic Monitor for Cisco Shipped

2 min read

When developing applications in a microservices architecture, one of the first obstacles a developer faces is determining the state of the underlying orchestration and container services. The developer has no real insight into how the underlying services and orchestration system(s) are performing. As part of the developer experience we built for this new application development […]

March 24, 2016

CLOUD

Visualizing a minimesos Cluster with Weave’s Scope

3 min read

This week we are very pleased to release version 0.8.0 of minimesos. This new release contains many improvements, bug fixes and new features. The two most important features are that minimesos now ships with Weave Scope and HashiCorp’s Consul. In this blog, I am going to focus on how important we think the integration with […]

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 […]