The principles behind DevOps are not new - for decades people have been automating system administration and decreasing the time to deploy apps and perform other management tasks. However, only recently did we see the tools and the will necessary to share the benefits and power of automation with a wider circle of people. In his session at DevOps Summit, Bernard Sanders, Chief Technology Officer at CloudBolt Software, explored the latest tools including Puppet, Chef, Docker, and CMPs needed to move from an insulated culture where automation is absent or hoarded to one where the power of DevOps is shared.
In a recent market study offering by Transparency Market Research (TMR), the global cloud security market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 12.80% from 2015 to 2022. The report, titled "Cloud Security Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2014 - 2022", states that the global cloud security market will reach a valuation of US$11.8 bn by 2022 increasing from its 2014 valuation of US$4.5 bn.According to the report, factors such as the rapid proliferation of handheld devices, the increasing trend of CYOD and BYOD policies in corporate organizations, increasing use of cloud-based computing by small and medium scale businesses, and ease of use of cloud security services are driving the cloud security market.
Over the past year, Microsoft has been introducing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) as the preferred way to provision and manage resources in its Azure cloud. ARM is the successor to the original Service Management model, also known as “Classic.”[1] While Classic will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future, ARM is the preferred deployment model and all new Azure features are being released on ARM only. Here is an overview ARM and the new features it provides.
As enterprises work to take advantage of Big Data technologies, they frequently become distracted by product-level decisions. In most new Big Data builds this approach is completely counter-productive: it presupposes tools that may not be a fit for development teams, forces IT to take on the burden of evaluating and maintaining unfamiliar technology, and represents a major up-front expense. In his session at @BigDataExpo at @ThingsExpo, Andrew Warfield, CTO and Co-Founder of Coho Data, will discuss how enterprises can bring Big Data tools to a point of customer value. He'll cover core lessons about how to approach Big Data and how to be successful at winning from Big Data in your environment.
Super Bowl 50 is upon us and while millions tune in for the faceoff between the Broncos and Panthers this Sunday, software testers will hold their breaths as these same fans flock to promoted web and mobile applications in droves. To the players, Super Bowl Sunday presents two paths: one to glory and one to crushing disappointment. Obviously, vying for victory is a team effort. But sometimes, just sometimes, the difference between winning and losing falls to one individual. With the biggest game of the year on the line and everyone watching, the final play commences.
As utility companies continue to track usage, consumers are growing equally cognizant of individual energy use as well, especially with the growth of private alternative energy practices such as home solar panels or wind power. That's why this week's IIoT top news is focused on the utility technology of tomorrow. This practice of selling privately generated energy back to the smart grid is in its infancy, but consumers now expect device connectivity to track, say, the amount of energy used by lights or the refrigerator during nighttime, off-peak hours. Because of that, the onus lies on utility companies to gather data and deploy advanced analytics that can be translated into relevant information for the average user.
Earlier this week it was reported that researchers at Boston-based security company, Rapid7, identified several security flaws in an app connected to a new toy from Mattel's Fisher-Price brand. The news of the security vulnerability caught our attention for a few reasons: The name of the toy - Smart Toy Bear - is strangely close to the name of our company SmartBear Software. More importantly, the story caught our attention because the security vulnerability brought up an important reminder about the important issue of security in today's connected world
I attended a HIVE-sponsored Meetup yesterday evening titled, “Rocking the database world with RocksDB”. Since I had never heard of RocksDB, I was curious to learn how it is rocking the database world. Facebook built this key value store storage layer originally to use for MySQL (instead of InnoDB), as MySQL is used heavily at Facebook. They claim that was not the only motivation. Then in 2013, they decided to open source RocksDB. Last evening’s speaker in an earlier post on November, 2013 had said, “Storing and accessing hundreds of petabytes of data is a huge challenge, and we’re constantly improving and overhauling our tools to make this as fast and efficient as possible. Today, we are open-sourcing RocksDB, an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage that we built and use here at Facebook.”
The Net Neutrality fight has been all over the news this year with the latest installment on Net Neutrality coming in from T-Mobile. Private and public companies alike are tuned into to this continual saga to see how the eventual outcome will affect business and ultimately their online lives. But whether the FCC’s recent ruling on Net Neutrality stands the test of time or not, there is a new technology that will provide customers fast, reliable Internet services at much lower costs than private business lines.
Fortunately, meaningful and tangible business cases for IoT are plentiful in a broad array of industries and vertical markets. These range from simple warranty cost reduction for capital intensive assets, to minimizing downtime for vital business tools, to creating feedback loops improving product design, to improving and enhancing enterprise customer experiences. All of these business cases, which will be briefly explored in this session, hinge on cost effectively extracting relevant data from disparate devices and applying data analytics ultimately, business logic to that data. Properly implemented, IoT can effectively deliver these business outcomes.
Performance is the elusive butterfly of API development. Everybody is intrigued with its beauty, yet few know how to capture it. In the old days, the approach of many shops to ensure a performant API was to create some code and then pass it over to the wall to QA to do load testing. Later some integration testing took place. As long as the API worked and it was met some marginal performance benchmarks, things were good. This worked well when a public, HTTP based API, consumed by a wide variety of distributed devices was more the exception than the rule. However, today APIs are a big deal and they are everywhere, so much so that companies are posting very big infographics prominently in the front page of the New York Times to create even more awareness about the technology to the general public.
Once again, the boardroom is in a bitter battle over what edict its members will now levy on their hapless IT organization. On one hand, hybrid cloud is all the rage. Adopting this option promises all the cost savings of public cloud with the security and comfort of private cloud. This environment would not only check the box for meeting the cloud computing mandate, but also position the organization as innovative and industry-leading. Why wouldn’t a forward-leaning management team go all in with cloud?
SYS-CON Events announced today that Men & Mice, the leading global provider of DNS, DHCP and IP address management overlay 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. The Men & Mice Suite overlay solution is already known for its powerful application in heterogeneous operating environments, enabling enterprises to scale without fuss. Building on a solid range of diverse platform support, the Men & Mice Suite is taking overlay dexterity one step further into the cloud through full support for Microsoft Azure DNS (January 2016) and AWS Amazon Route 53 (from 2014). Major cloud platform support allows Men & Mice Suite users free rein to extend their infrastructure into the cloud if, and when, they need it.
This post is the second in a series based on a discussion with Marc Andreessen. The first was on: AI, Robotics, Jobs and Accelerating The Future Gourley: Can you provide more context on what kind of education and training? Andreessen: It is fair to say I am biased on that subject but my view is that the quantitative skills will be in greater demand: Math, Economics, Science, Engineering, Computer Science. The requirements for these are rising at much higher rates so their premium is rising. All of us should seek to self educate on these when we can and this is what we should encourage our youth to pursue. We should of course value other more qualitative skills like history, politics, arts and culture, but understand that this is an increasingly technical world and even those people will need more understanding about how the world really works. If you want to be as relevant as possible, get as many quantitative skills as you can and keep learning.
The arrival of the Microsoft Azure Stack Technical Preview marks a turning point in the cloud-computing market and forms a leading indicator of how dramatically Microsoft has changed in the past two years. The cloud turning point comes because the path to hybrid-cloud capabilities and benefits has a powerful new usher, one with the enterprise, developer, and service-provider presence, R and D budget, and competitive imperative to succeed in a market still underserved and nebulous.
With the proliferation of both SQL and NoSQL databases, organizations can now target specific fit-for-purpose database tools for their different application needs regarding scalability, ease of use, ACID support, etc. Platform as a Service offerings make this even easier now, enabling developers to roll out their own database infrastructure in minutes with minimal management overhead. However, this same amount of flexibility also comes with the challenges of picking the right tool, on the right provider and with the proper expectations. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Warner Chaves, Principal Consultant at Pythian, will compare the NoSQL and SQL offerings from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, their similarities, differences and use cases for each one based on our own client projects.
In most cases, it is convenient to have some human interaction with a web (micro-)service, no matter how small it is. A traditional approach would be to create an HTTP interface, where user requests will be dispatched and HTML/CSS pages must be served. This approach is indeed very traditional for a web site, but not really convenient for a web service, which is not intended to be good looking, 24x7 up and running and UX-optimized. Instead, talking to a web service in a chat-bot mode would be much more convenient, both for a user and web service developer.
Microsoft pulls a fast one! Good showing Microsoft. Project Natick is Microsoft's R&D feasibility project to explore, manufacture and operate a underwater. Hey, you don't look for cooling water, if you can take the salt out. How is latency improved? drop the datacenter at the nearest ocean or lake. Energy efficiency is no brainer considering the environment the datacenter is in. Bring in 3D manufacturing and you can have a datacenter manufactured and deployed in no time at all, no need for expensive land acquisition, licenses, certificates etc.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Interoute, owner-operator of one of Europe's largest networks and a global cloud services platform, 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. Interoute is the owner-operator of one of Europe's largest networks and a global cloud services platform which encompasses 12 data centers, 14 virtual data centers and 31 colocation centers, with connections to 195 additional third-party data centers across Europe. Its full-service Unified ICT platform serves international enterprises and many of the world’s leading service providers, as well as governments and universities.
In the Bimodal model we find two areas of IT - the traditional kind where the main concern is keeping the lights on and the IT focusing on agility and speed, where everything needs to be faster. Today companies are investing in new technologies and processes to emulate their most agile competitors. Gone are the days of waterfall development and releases only every few months. Today's IT and the business it powers demands performance akin to a supercar - everything needs to be faster, every screw is tuned over and over again to gain maximum speed and agility; to edge out competitors. With new technologies and approaches come new software packages, technologies and processes.
Providing a full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP connection, WebSocket is the most efficient protocol for real-time responses over the web. If you’re utilizing WebSocket technology, performance testing will boil down to simulating the bi-directional nature of your application. Introduced with HTML5, the WebSocket protocol allows for more interaction between a browser and website, facilitating real-time applications and live content. WebSocket technology creates a persistent connection between the client and server, circumventing the requirement for a client-initiated HTTP request to trigger a server response. Providing a full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP connection, WebSocket is the most efficient protocol for real-time responses over the web.
It's easy to assume that your app will run on a fast and reliable network. The reality for your app's users, though, is often a slow, unreliable network with spotty coverage. What happens when the network doesn't work, or when the device is in airplane mode? You get unhappy, frustrated users. An offline-first app is an app that works, without error, when there is no network connection.
The Federal Government’s “Cloud First” policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a mandatory government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Advantages for business include being able to market to many federal agencies after a single FedRAMP review following the government’s “approve once, and use often” approach.
Many of us are grappling with the modern demands of digital business: developing new mobile apps, evaluating security in the face of IoT, moving to hybrid clouds, testing approaches to defining networks through software. It’s all part of the hard trend toward service-oriented IT, with a primary goal of delivering a premium end user experience (EUE) to all your users – internal, partners, and customers – with the speed, quality and agility the business demands. How do you meet these elevated expectations? As modern data centers evolve rapidly to meet these agility demands, network and application architectures are becoming increasingly complex, complicating efforts to understand service quality from infrastructure and application monitoring alone. Virtualization can obscure critical performance visibility at the same time complex service dependencies challenge even the best performance analysts and the most effective war rooms. While this may read like a recipe for disaster, within are secrets to success.
Network architectures are in the midst of a massive transformation. Not too long ago, traditional network designs began to strain under increased demand for compute and storage. This saw the advent of server and storage virtualization, giving organizations on-demand access to the resources required for supporting service-oriented architectures and machine-to-machine communications. The increased agility and provisioning of virtualization showed the immense flexibility of decoupling key network components from the underlying hardware and catalyzed what is now a movement toward software defined networking or SDN.