There is a large gap between the understanding of modern processes and technologies, and actually doing something with them. In the DevOps movement, many of the core functions have met wide adoption, such as orchestration, release automation, and analytics. But what have not been as widely adopted are the end-to-end processes of continuous delivery and deployment, which is not a case of understanding — It is dictated by existing organizational elements and practicality. Are you ready for continuous delivery and deployment?
In a recent Big Data Vision Workshop services engagement, our data science team explored a concept that I find very interesting and immensely actionable – uncovering and exploiting customer time period or cyclical purchase and engagement behaviors. Let’s call this “Customer Cyclical Behavioral Analytics.” Let me explain… Customers exhibit certain behaviors and engagement patterns that are highly predictable within certain time periods. For example, customers could have behaviors and engagements related to the following time periods or cycles.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Column Technologies will exhibit at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Established in 1998, Column Technologies is a global technology solutions provider with over 400 employees, headquartered in the United States with offices in Canada, India, and the United Kingdom. Column Technologies provides “Best of Breed” technology solutions that automate the key DevOps principals and help our customers meet today’s DevOps and Digital Transformation challenges.
@DevOpsSummit taking place June 7-9, 2016 at Javits Center, New York City, and Nov 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with the 18th International @CloudExpo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world.
Join us at Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo 2016 – June 7-9 at the Javits Center in New York City and November 1-3 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA – and deliver your unique message in a way that is striking and unforgettable by taking advantage of SYS-CON's unmatched high-impact, result-driven event / media packages.
SYS-CON Events announced today that FalconStor Software® Inc., a 15-year innovator of software-defined storage solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. FalconStor Software®, Inc. (NASDAQ: FALC) is a leading software-defined storage company offering a converged, hardware-agnostic, software-defined storage and data services platform. Its flagship solution FreeStor®, utilizes a horizontal architecture that unlocks a new world of storage opportunities, allowing IT managers, MSPs, and CSPs to maximize efficiencies and lower costs, while taking advantage of public cloud, hybrid cloud, flash storage and software-defined storage.
The evolution of cybersecurity as it relates to healthcare in the United States is by most standards in its infancy, but this situation is changing quickly. The industry is scrambling to shore up defenses as cyberattacks and breaches increase. Very few people, if asked twenty years ago, would have predicted that stolen medical records would be such a massive criminal enterprise. The rapid expansion of EHR/EMR has created an unparalleled opportunity for criminal fraud and abuse. A recent Ponemon study found that the healthcare industry has the highest breach costs of any industry at $363 per stolen record.
There will be new vendors providing applications, middleware, and connected devices to support the thriving IoT ecosystem. This essentially means that electronic device manufacturers will also be in the software business. Many will be new to building embedded software or robust software. This creates an increased importance on software quality, particularly within the Industrial Internet of Things where business-critical applications are becoming dependent on products controlled by software. Quality is the central issue when safety, security or human life is at risk if software fails.
Ask anyone who is working with data “What is your biggest challenge?” The answer most of the time is “the inability to use our data fully.” This and similar statements signify one common thread of pain. With data growing at 44% over the next 10 years, it goes without saying that your business is going to be inundated with data from all sides. With “making a profit” on the minds of over 35% of SMB survey respondents, it goes without saying that the challenge is multi-fold with being able to sustain the business and ensure profitability being prime.
IT departments currently face a constant “need for speed” from within the organization, predominantly driven by an increase in application and business demand. This isn’t going to change any time soon. Indeed, according to Gartner, by the end of 2017 demand for app development services will grow at least five times faster than an internal IT organization's capacity to deliver them. Speed is the competitive differentiator in a SaaS environment, but this can often place undue strain on IT. An effective DevOps strategy can alleviate this. It can also help research and development teams move faster, taking the launch cycle of a product from months to weeks. This is especially crucial at Lithium, given that our product is highly customizable, and those continual iterations help both us and our customers stay ahead of the game.
If you’re looking to predict how things should work in the future, start by looking in the right places in the present. Innovations in technology, management and collaboration that will change the way we work are already up and running in visionary organizations. Ever since reading Robert Charette’s IEEE article titled This Car Runs on Code, I’ve been fascinated by the fact that the 100 million lines of code in cars represents one of the most complex software artifacts that we interact with day-to-day. That falls just above the number of lines of code you will find in Mac OS X, and in the same order of magnitude of complexity as the DNA of a mouse – as artfully illustrated by David McCandless on the Information Is Beautiful blog.
Enterprises are finally realizing that digital transformation must be end-to-end if they want to remain competitive in today’s software-driven, customer-focused world – but virtually every large organization has a massive boat anchor dragging them down – slow IT. Legacy technology woes are bad enough – but what really makes slow IT slow are the people and the processes they follow. Nobody likes to change, yet change is what digital transformation is all about.
I decide to write this blog after reading this post of a frustrated developer (he goes by the nick pistacchio) who couldn’t create a simple single-page application (SPA) in JavaScript in several days. Typically frustration is a result of unmet expectations and this is the case here as well. If pistachio would decide to create a simple app using the JavaScript framework he already knew, he could achieve his goal in 2-3 days allocated for this job. The problem is that he decided to achieve two goals:
I was working at a financial services software company in the early days of User Interface automation frameworks. We decided that automating the GUI was the way to go, and immersed in developing the framework and our own tests. The goal of automating our tests was to speed us up, while still providing broad coverage once the system was in place. We would then be able to perform repetitive or slowly changing operations, like building a very complex document, to see if the application had memory leaks or unexpected crashes. We wanted to be able to repeat the tests and have each run be identical. We learned a lot about what you should do and - most importantly - what you shouldn't do when reusing tests.
We've said it on this blog before, and we'll repeat the same message: Solving a software engineering problem is simple physics. It takes a set amount of energy to move a project from point A to point B, and changing the process or path doesn't change the unavoidable fact that difficult software problems are difficult to solve. DevOps integration is no different. If you have a complex, highly-orchestrated release no amount of automation can change the fact that the large, successful systems found in the Fortune 500 are often full of seemingly intractable complexity: databases that have been around longer than most of your junior engineers, middleware systems maintained by teams that have been outsourced to by the teams they were originally outsourced to, and lot's of risk. In fact, risk is the common attribute in most big business, and while moving your development and operations teams to work more closely together can reduce your overall exposure to user-error by encouraging more automation, it doesn't take the risk out of software releases.
18th Cloud Expo, taking place June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS – software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.
No one comes close to Tesora’s database as a service platform in terms of the combination of features and choice of 13 different databases. Today the company makes available new features in its database as a service – based on OpenStack Trove – which make it easier for administrators to manage disparate database technologies through their life cycle.
The cloud promises new levels of agility and cost-savings for Big Data, data warehousing and analytics. But it’s challenging to understand all the options – from IaaS and PaaS to newer services like HaaS (Hadoop as a Service) and BDaaS (Big Data as a Service). In her session at @BigDataExpo at @ThingsExpo, Hannah Smalltree, a director at Cazena, will provide an educational overview of emerging “as-a-service” options for Big Data in the cloud. This is critical background for IT and data professionals, as experts estimate that “as-a-service” cloud sourcing will increase from today’s 15% to 35% by 2021. Learn more and hear important considerations to help evaluate and rank your options.
More than a decade ago, the choices were few to address the needs of data gathering and recording. Water and wastewater utilities, for example, had to be able to use a ‘fits all’ unit with set parameters and make their systems adaptable to the technology of the day. Since then, many municipal water systems such as those in Southern Utah, have had to broaden the area from which they gather, use and reclaim water. Most growing areas are even facing the dilemma of higher demands on services while trying to stay within shrinking budgets and manpower cutbacks. This is because in the past, many viewed electronic data gathering as a ‘want’ instead of a ‘need’ until now.
One of the bewildering things about DevOps is integrating the massive toolchain including the dozens of new tools that seem to crop up every year. Part of DevOps is Continuous Delivery and having a complex toolchain can add additional integration and setup to your developer environment. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Miko Matsumura, Chief Marketing Officer of Gradle Inc., will discuss which tools to use in a developer stack, how to provision the toolchain to minimize onboarding time for new developers, and how to maximize productivity according to some of the leading companies in Silicon Valley whether in the coding, build, integration, testing or deployment phase.
This week’s top news covers all the necessary tools and practices to successfully adopt DevOps and Continuous Delivery in your organization. As we have been told time and again, changing your team’s culture and organizational structure is key to kick starting a smooth and successful shift towards DevOps. Equally important is having the right tools to implement these practices. Continue reading to learn what tools DevOps and Continuous Delivery experts suggest you use.
Many in the industry are searching for new ways to increase productivity and efficiency with Agile approaches to software development. That’s the theme of a new article on CIO.com by Bruce Harpham, who details the many benefits of Agile methodologies in software development and examines key considerations for implementing the practice. Our very own Scott Rose spoke with Bruce on the topic and discussed the ways organizations can employ Agile practices among a global team, where face-to-face is not feasible.
In the middle of World War II, very basic and primitive computers were designed to improve accuracy for naval gunfire. The first computers ran complex mathematical applications to calculate trajectories and gunfire from large battleships. The size of the computer was huge and was made up of vacuum-tube technology. You could literally walk into the computer. (And needed to, when a tube went bad and you had to replace it.)
The (re?)emergence of Microservices was especially prominent in this week’s news. What are they good for? do they make sense for your application? should you take the plunge? and what do Microservices mean for your DevOps and Continuous Delivery efforts? Continue reading for more on Microservices, containers, DevOps culture, and more top news from the past week. As always, stay tuned to all the news coming from@ElectricCloud on DevOps and Continuous Delivery throughout the week and retweet/favorite to get your favorite pieces featured in our weekly recap.
CIOs and those charged with running IT Operations are challenged to deliver secure, audited, and reliable compute environments for the applications and data for the business. Behind the scenes these tasks are often accomplished by following onerous time-consuming processes and often the management of these environments and processes will be outsourced to multiple IT service providers. In addition, the division of work is often siloed into traditional "towers" that are not well integrated for cross-functional purposes. So, when traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) meets the cloud, and equally, DevOps, there is invariably going to be conflict.