The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing at a rapid pace with millions of new devices getting connected every day. Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use in 2016 and by 2020, the number will reach 20.8 billion. Billions of devices including smartphones, laptops, cars, watches, refrigerators, and even thermostats are all getting connected thanks to APIs. Many of these devices are part of a larger application ecosystem, connected to the cloud and each other using the same APIs.
Cloud computing is being adopted in one form or another by 94% of enterprises today. Tens of billions of new devices are being connected to The Internet of Things. And Big Data is driving this bus. An exponential increase is expected in the amount of information being processed, managed, analyzed, and acted upon by enterprise IT. This amazing is not part of some distant future - it is happening today. One report shows a 650% increase in enterprise data by 2020. Other estimates are even higher. Big Data at Cloud Expo New york is the place where you can see the technologies and use cases that are delivering Big Data to enterprise IT.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Avere Systems, a leading provider of enterprise storage for the hybrid cloud, 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. Avere delivers a more modern architectural approach to storage that doesn’t require the overprovisioning of storage capacity to achieve performance, overspending on expensive storage media for inactive data or the overbuilding of data centers to house increasing amounts of storage infrastructure.
While the Internet of Things (IoT) being condemned by Gartner in August as one of the world’s most overhyped technology trends of 2015 makes a good headline, this assertion is itself misleading by failing to acknowledge the rapid progress now being made as IoT emerges in clusters to deliver real benefits to users, even if these are still early days. However, Gartner was correct that the full promise of IoT as a joined up ecosystem of interoperable components is indeed five to ten years away.
Agile software development is slowly but surely becoming the norm for a significant contingency of software developers. What used to be rigid, step-by-step processes that were siloed between specific teams have transformed into a collaborative, adaptive methodology that ultimately leads to the creation of superior solutions. As an integral component of software development, agile test management has also been evolving to be more accommodating to agile processes. Testing automation in particular is still coming into its role as an agile tool and, for some teams, this may create unique challenges. Still, by taking the following into consideration, testing teams can reap all the benefits of testing automation in an agile environment.
As I read through the various 2016 technology predictions lists, I started discovering a common theme: the inclusion of real-time data initiatives as a main priority for IT. Real-time streaming data and analytics is rapidly becoming the lifeblood of today’s data-driven economy. Why? Because your customers live in an age of information immediacy.
Silver Spring Networks, Inc. (NYSE: SSNI) extended its Internet of Things technology platform with performance enhancements to Gen5 – its fifth generation critical infrastructure networking platform. Already delivering nearly 23 million devices on five continents as one of the leading networking providers in the market, Silver Spring announced it is doubling the maximum speed of its Gen5 network to up to 2.4 Mbps, increasing computational performance by 10x, supporting simultaneous mesh communication on both 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz frequencies, integrating 4G LTE communications, and delivering simplified modularity for easier device integration. These Gen5 platform enhancements, coupled with Silver Spring’s existing multi-application, range, latency, scale, distributed intelligence, and power optimization capabilities, further enable utilities, cities and other Internet of Things (IOT) device and application providers to deliver multiple applications on a single, unified network without compromising reliability, speed, security, or cost.
Electric Cloud CEO, Steve Brodie, recently had the honor of speaking at an internal symposium at one of the largest banks in the United States about the benefits of DevOps for Financial Services (Finserv). Today, applications are the lifeblood of the business, and nowhere is that more true than in Financial Services, who rely on software to create economic value. Advances in virtualization, data integration, and consumer demand for new functionality have increased the pressure of these organizations to release software faster than ever before. This has led many to explore Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices as means to accelerate time to market and improve product quality.
If we look at slow, traditional IT and jump to the conclusion that just because we found its issues intractable before, that necessarily means we will again, then it’s time for a rethink. As a matter of fact, the world of IT has changed over the last ten years or so. We’ve been experiencing unprecedented innovation across the board – innovation in technology as well as in how people organize and accomplish tasks. Let’s take a look at three differences between today’s modern, digital context for enterprise IT as compared to conventional wisdom – wisdom that may have applied only a handful of years ago.
I sat down with Michael Rösch, COO of POOL4TOOL, to chat about cloud computing. With a lot of buzz about the impact of the cloud on business, it was a chance to get a perspective, as well as a few hints and tips, from someone who has been at the coalface of procurement cloud services for the past 15 years. Michael has been at POOL4TOOL since 2000, becoming COO in 2012, and has worked on projects with German giants like Behr, Hansgrohe, Heidelberger Printing Presses, Carl Zeiss and ThyssenKrupp Presta in that time.
WebSocket is effectively a persistent and fat pipe that is compatible with a standard web infrastructure; a "TCP for the Web." If you think of WebSocket in this light, there are other more hugely interesting applications of WebSocket than just simply sending data to a browser. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Frank Greco, Director of Technology for Kaazing Corporation, will compare other modern web connectivity methods such as HTTP/2, HTTP Streaming, Server-Sent Events and new W3C event APIs with WebSocket. He will also look at how WebSocket provides innovative enhancements for dynamic hybrid cloud computing connectivity. By providing proprietary TCP-based IoT with a common connectable substrate (Web of Things), we can obtain advantages for connected devices such as global reach, ease of deployment, economies of scale, and ease of development.
Sensors and effectors of IoT are solving problems in new ways, but small businesses have been slow to join the quantified world. They’ll need information from IoT using applications as varied as the businesses themselves. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Roger Meike, Distinguished Engineer, Director of Technology Innovation at Intuit, showed how IoT manufacturers can use open standards, public APIs and custom apps to enable the Quantified Small Business. He used a Raspberry Pi to connect sensors to web services, and cloud integration to connect accounting and data, providing a Bluetooth LE workflow, iBeacon-based time tracking, and sensor-driven invoices. The quantified small business will not only be possible; it will be the norm.
With the Apple Watch making its way onto wrists all over the world, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a staple in the workplace. In fact, Forrester reported that 68 percent of technology and business decision-makers characterize wearables as a top priority for 2015. Recognizing their business value early on, FinancialForce.com was the first to bring ERP to wearables, helping streamline communication across front and back office functions. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Kevin Roberts, GM of Platform at FinancialForce.com, discussed the value of business applications on wearable devices, use cases and predictions for the evolution of wearables in the workplace.
In a previous article, I demonstrated how to effectively and efficiently install the Dynatrace Application Monitoring solution using Ansible. In this post, I am going to explain how to achieve the same results using Chef with our official dynatrace cookbook available on GitHub and on the Chef Supermarket. In the following hands-on tutorial, we’ll also apply what we see as good practice on working with and extending our deployment automation blueprints to suit your needs.
A few weeks ago my colleague PJ Hagerty wrote about driving your existing monolithic application toward a more modular design. This time around I'll dive a little bit deeper into its importance and the benefits of application modularization. One of the most important best practices in application development is testing, and more specifically automated and continuous testing. When your application is a monolith with multiple functionalities and responsibilities, automated testing becomes massively unwieldy. To illustrate this issue let's use the following illustration of conceptual (and, admittedly trivial) photo gallery web application.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Pythian, a global IT services company specializing in helping companies adopt disruptive technologies to optimize revenue-generating systems, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2015 at the Javits Center in New York, New York. Founded in 1997, Pythian is a global IT services company that helps companies compete by adopting disruptive technologies such as cloud, Big Data, advanced analytics, and DevOps to advance innovation and increase agility. Specializing in designing, implementing, and managing systems that directly contribute to revenue growth and business success, Pythian's highly skilled technical teams work as an integrated extension of our clients' organizations to deliver continuous transformation and uninterrupted operational excellence.
With some of the busiest shopping days of the year behind us, now is the time for retailers to pause for a moment to evaluate what worked, and to consider new online strategies and technologies for the 2016 shopping season. We don’t yet have numbers for 2015, but in 2014, holiday season retail e-commerce spending in the United States amounted to 53.3 billion U.S. dollars with the most money being spent online on Cyber Monday. Fujitsu is working with Grid Dynamics to deliver an Oracle Commerce Platform as a fully-managed cloud service. I had a chance to sit down with Victoria Livschitz, Executive Vice President of Grid Dynamics, and ask her a few questions during our preparations for the upcoming National Retail Federation (#nrf16) show in New York City, January 17-19, 2016.
At first adopted by enterprises to consolidate physical servers, virtualization is now widely used in cloud computing to offer elasticity and scalability. On the other hand, Docker has developed a new way to handle Linux containers, inspired by version control software such as Git, which allows you to keep all development versions. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Dominique Rodrigues, the co-founder and CTO of Nanocloud Software, discussed how in order to also handle QEMU / KVM virtual machines versions, they have developed a new tool, called Vm_commit, which can create commits, backup any commit, rollback to a previous commit or rebase all the commits up to a given one for any running virtual machine, on the fly.
More and more companies are looking to microservices as an architectural pattern for breaking apart applications into more manageable pieces so that agile teams can deliver new features quicker and more effectively. What this pattern has done more than anything to date is spark organizational transformations, setting the foundation for future application development. In practice, however, there are a number of considerations to make that go beyond simply “build, ship, and run,” which changes how developers and operators work together to streamline cohesive systems.
Companies can harness IoT and predictive analytics to sustain business continuity; predict and manage site performance during emergencies; minimize expensive reactive maintenance; and forecast equipment and maintenance budgets and expenditures. Providing cost-effective, uninterrupted service is challenging, particularly for organizations with geographically dispersed operations.
Advances in technology and ubiquitous connectivity have made the utilization of a dispersed workforce more common. Whether that remote team is located across the street or country, management styles/ approaches will have to be adjusted to accommodate this new dynamic. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Sagi Brody, Chief Technology Officer at Webair Internet Development Inc., focused on the challenges of managing remote teams, providing real-world examples that demonstrate what works and what doesn’t. He covered proper training and integration of these teams into the corporate structure, and the most effective ways to introduce them to customers. He also discussed proper vetting of third-party teams should these functions be outsourced.
Network communications are a top priority for DevOps teams working in support of modern globally-distributed systems and microservices. But basic network interface statistics like received and sent traffic aren’t as useful as they once were because multiple microservices may share the same network interface. For meaningful analysis, you need to dig deeper and correlate network-traffic metrics with individual processes. This is however just the beginning … In this article, I’ll show you how deep the network monitoring rabbit hole goes. The types of meaningful analysis that DevOps engineers have been waiting for are finally available.
Recognizing the need to identify and validate information security professionals’ competency in securing cloud services, the two leading membership organizations focused on cloud and information security, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and (ISC)^2, joined together to develop an international cloud security credential that reflects the most current and comprehensive best practices for securing and optimizing cloud computing environments.
Microservices are a type of software architecture where large applications are made up of small, self-contained units working together through APIs that are not dependent on a specific language. Each service has a limited scope, concentrates on a specific task and is highly independent. This setup allows IT managers and developers to build systems in a modular way. In his book, “Building Microservices,” Sam Newman said microservices are small, focused components built to do a single thing very well.
Father business cycles and digital consumers are forcing enterprises to respond faster to customer needs and competitive demands. Successful integration of DevOps and Agile development will be key for business success in today’s digital economy. In his session at DevOps Summit, Pradeep Prabhu, Co-Founder & CEO of Cloudmunch, covered the critical practices that enterprises should consider to seamlessly integrate Agile and DevOps processes, barriers to implementing this in the enterprise, and provided examples on how an integrated approach has helped major companies embrace a cloud first, DevOps at scale approach to optimize speed and delivery across the enterprise that is required in today’s hyper competitive marketplace.