While the benefits are many, the DevOps journey for an established organization can be a long one filled with surprises and challenges. To avoid as many of both as possible, learning from those who have gone before you can help you apply best practices to ensure a smoother path to success. As a result, in this article, I will outline the seven steps to a DevOps transformation as learned through working hands-on with more than 100 leading enterprise organizations to establish and sustain successful DevOps and IT modernization.
Most of us have moved our web and e-commerce operations to the cloud, but we are still getting sales reports and other information we need to run our business long after the fact. We sell a hamburger on Tuesday, you might say, but don't know if we made money selling it until Friday. That's because we still rely on Batch processing, where we generate orders, reports, and other management-useful pieces of data when it's most convenient for the IT department to process them, rather than in real time. That was fine when horse-drawn wagons made our deliveries, but it is far too slow for today's world, where stock prices and other bits of information circle the world (literally) at the speed of light. It's time to move to In-Stream Processing. You can't - and shouldn't - keep putting it off.
NHK, Japan Broadcasting, will feature the upcoming @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley in a special 'Internet of Things' and smart technology documentary that will be filmed on the expo floor between November 3 to 5, 2015, in Santa Clara. NHK is the sole public TV network in Japan equivalent to the BBC in the UK and the largest in Asia with many award-winning science and technology programs. Japanese TV is producing a documentary about IoT and Smart technology and will be covering @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley. The program, to be aired during the peak viewership season of the year, will have a major impact on the industry in Japan. The film's director is writing a scenario to fit in the story in the next few days will be turned in to the network.
I am so blessed with smart friends, and I am fortunate to count John Morley among that group. John recently introduced me to Stanford’s Design School (d.school). To say I was blown away would be an understatement. I was so jazzed by the one-hour tour that I have signed up for a 3-hour class (very expensive…costs like $12…my Starbucks coffee that will get me fired up for the class costs almost that much).
Worried about robots taking your job? You have a weapon and one last chance: automate, or die! If your job is process oriented, for example, calculating make-goods for improperly filled orders, your whole department will be automated soon. Don’t let the pink slip surprise you. If you analyze numbers in Excel, craft a narrative about them, and move them around spreadsheets, your employable days are numbered. Any white-collar job you can learn to do in a few days is threatened – even if it takes a lifetime to master. (Poker takes minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. So professional pokers players are at risk. Please read “Can Alexa Lie?” for details.)
Containers have changed the mind of IT in DevOps. They enable developers to work with dev, test, stage and production environments identically. Containers provide the right abstraction for microservices and many cloud platforms have integrated them into deployment pipelines. DevOps and containers together help companies achieve their business goals faster and more effectively. In his session at DevOps Summit, Ruslan Synytsky, CEO and Co-founder of Jelastic, reviewed the current landscape of DevOps with containers and the benefits. In addition, he discussed known issues and solutions for enterprise applications in containers.
With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @CloudExpo | @ThingsExpo, June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY and October 31 - November 2, 2017, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. Learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is on the right path to Digital Transformation.
The Big Bang Theory is the pre-eminent explanation for the origins of the universe. It proposes, from an explosion of atoms, the universe rapidly expanded and in doing so created everything we know. But it did so in an erratic, haphazard and unstructured way. For every life form, an infinite amount of inhospitable desolate galaxies, planets and black holes were also created. Big Data is often associated with the birth of what is known as the Third Generation of IT and many are now at a crossroads: Do they continue down the current path, hoping to stumble upon a planet Earth as they navigate a sprawling universe of information and data that continually expands in a totally unstructured fashion? Or do they apply longer term strategy, investing now to refine their technology and capitalize on the explosion of information available.
Join IBM November 2 at 19th Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, and learn how to go beyond multi-speed it to bring agility to traditional enterprise applications. Technology innovation is the driving force behind modern business and enterprises must respond by increasing the speed and efficiency of software delivery. The challenge is that existing enterprise applications are expensive to develop and difficult to modernize. This often results in what Gartner calls "Bimodal IT," where business struggle to apply modern tools and practices to traditional monolithic applications. But these existing assets can be modernized and made more efficient without having to be completely overhauled. By leveraging methodologies like DevOps and agile, alongside emerging technologies like cloud-native services and containerization, traditional applications and teams can be more easily modernized without risking everything that depends on them. This session will describe how to apply lessons learned from modern app development, including the starting point to modernization that many enterprises are using to quickly improve speed, efficiency, and software quality.
In his keynote at @ThingsExpo, Chris Matthieu, Director of IoT Engineering at Citrix and co-founder and CTO of Octoblu, focused on building an IoT platform and company. He provided a behind-the-scenes look at Octoblu’s platform, business, and pivots along the way (including the Citrix acquisition of Octoblu).
DevOps is often described as a combination of technology and culture. Without both, DevOps isn't complete. However, applying the culture to outdated technology is a recipe for disaster; as response times grow and connections between teams are delayed by technology, the culture will die. A Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has many benefits that provide the needed base for a true DevOps paradigm.
All organizations that did not originate this moment have a pre-existing culture as well as legacy technology and processes that can be more or less amenable to DevOps implementation. That organizational culture is influenced by the personalities and management styles of Executive Management, the wider culture in which the organization is situated, and the personalities of key team members at all levels of the organization. This culture and entrenched interests usually throw a wrench in the works because of misaligned incentives.
Since the term "DevOps" was coined in Belgium back in 2009, it has been impossible to avoid the debate raging around it. While we have watched it gain hype and momentum, many articles have been written to describe what elements of a DevOps strategy are required for it to be successful. In spite of this, not many organizations feel there is a need for DevOps. In a Gartner report entitled DevOps Adoption Survey Results (published in September 2015), 40% of respondents said they had no plans to implement DevOps and 31% of respondents said they hadn't implemented it but planned to start in the 12 months after the survey was conducted.
In his keynote at 19th Cloud Expo, Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs, discussed the technological advances and new business opportunities created by the rapid adoption of containers. With the success of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and various open source technologies used to build private clouds, cloud computing has become an essential component of IT strategy. However, users continue to face challenges in implementing clouds, as older technologies evolve and newer ones like Docker containers gain prominence. He explored these challenges and how to address them, while considering how containers will influence the direction of cloud computing.
Building a cross-cloud operational model can be a daunting task. Per-cloud silos are not the answer, but neither is a fully generic abstraction plane that strips out capabilities unique to a particular provider. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Chris Wolf, VP & Chief Technology Officer, Global Field & Industry at VMware, will discuss how successful organizations approach cloud operations and management, with insights into where operations should be centralized and when it’s best to decentralize.
Five years ago development was seen as a dead-end career, now it’s anything but – with an explosion in mobile and IoT initiatives increasing the demand for skilled engineers. But apart from having a ready supply of great coders, what constitutes true ‘DevOps Royalty’? It’ll be the ability to craft resilient architectures, supportability, security everywhere across the software lifecycle. In his keynote at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Jeffrey Scheaffer, GM and SVP, Continuous Delivery Business Unit at CA Technologies, will share his vision about the true ‘DevOps Royalty’ and how it will take a new breed of digital cloud craftsman, architecting new platforms with a new set of tools to achieve it. He will also present a number of important insights and findings from a recent cloud and DevOps study – outlining the synergies high performance teams are exploiting to gain significant business advantage.
When it comes to measuring the success of your DevOps rollout, it can be challenging to identify the right metrics that will provide intelligence while avoiding the trap of vanity metrics that indicate action—but not necessarily progress—towards the outcome you’re looking for. In my experience, the most valuable metric of all is the lead time between when you make a commit in source control and when that change makes it to your consumers. Some very mature organizations have even been able to link this metric to validated learning or planned outcomes in production (i.e., user engagement, revenue, or even a pivot decision). This sort of full-cycle measurement closes the DevOps build-measure-learn loop and gives you unparalleled insight into the performance of your overall delivery metrics.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is starting to become very popular in the lives of people, and in enterprises globally. While it began as a novelty, more innovative and mission-critical use cases have been popping up lately. With the sheer variety of IoT devices available, the large amount of data that’s generated, and the various security vulnerabilities, companies that make IoT devices face a host of challenges that an incident resolution platform can help with. If you’re building an IoT system today, or have plans to build one in the future, it’s crucial to make your IoT system resilient and safe by investing in a solution for best practice incident resolution.
As DevOps methodologies expand their reach across the enterprise, organizations face the daunting challenge of adapting related cloud strategies to ensure optimal alignment, from managing complexity to ensuring proper governance. How can culture, automation, legacy apps and even budget be reexamined to enable this ongoing shift within the modern software factory?
With billions of sensors deployed worldwide, the amount of machine-generated data will soon exceed what our networks can handle. But consumers and businesses will expect seamless experiences and real-time responsiveness. What does this mean for IoT devices and the infrastructure that supports them? More of the data will need to be handled at - or closer to - the devices themselves.
The age of Digital Disruption is evolving into the next era – Digital Cohesion, an age in which applications securely self-assemble and deliver predictive services that continuously adapt to user behavior. Information from devices, sensors and applications around us will drive services seamlessly across mobile and fixed devices/infrastructure. This evolution is happening now in software defined services and secure networking. Four key drivers – Performance, Economics, Interoperability and Trust - will shape the way users, service providers and the industry creates the foundation for the next networking era.
Try to remember something that happened on your last vacation. How long did it take you to recall? Now, try to remember it again. You were probably able to recall it faster the second time— but, why? This is because as soon as you recalled the event the first time, your brain saved the information to your recent memory. The same concept applies to caching. Caching is a way of temporarily storing the contents of a webpage in locations near the user, similar to the way our memory works. There are several types of caching options available like database caching, application caching, distributed caching, etc. In this article, we’ll talk about web caching and how it affects user experience.
DevOps is often described as a combination of technology and culture. Without both, DevOps isn't complete. However, applying the culture to outdated technology is a recipe for disaster; as response times grow and connections between teams are delayed by technology, the culture will die. A Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has many benefits that provide the needed base for a true DevOps paradigm. In his Day 3 Keynote at 20th Cloud Expo, Chris Brown, a Solutions Marketing Manager at Nutanix, will explore the ways that Nutanix technologies empower teams to react faster than ever before and connect teams in ways that were either too complex or simply impossible with traditional infrastructures.
A Man in the Middle attack, or MITM, is a situation wherein a malicious entity can read/write data that is being transmitted between two or more systems (in most cases, between you and the website that you are surfing). MITMs are common in China, thanks to the “Great Cannon.” The “Great Cannon” is slightly different from the “The Great Firewall.” The firewall monitors web traffic moving in and out of China and blocks prohibited content. The Great Cannon, on the other hand, acts as a man in the middle and is not just able to eavesdrop on the conversation taking place between two or more systems, but is also capable of altering the content or redirecting the users to a different property on the Internet without the user even realizing that he/she is not communicating with the intended machine.
When you decide to launch a startup company, business advisors, counselors, bankers and armchair know-it-alls will tell you that the first thing you need to do is get funding. While there is some validity to that boilerplate piece of wisdom, the availability of and need for startup funding has gone through a dramatic transformation over the past decade, and the next few years will see even more of a shift. A perfect storm of events is causing this seismic shift. On the macroeconomic side this storm includes the still-persistent repercussions of the Great Recession, historically low interest rates, and uncertainty about global commerce and trade. On the technology side, still more realities add to the perfect storm, including the increasing popularity of as-a-service options, which make it easier for startups to launch with no on-premise equipment requirements and possibly no physical office at all, and development platforms that streamline the need for original development work.