You are standing in the wings of the stage, it’s opening night, the curtain has just been raised, you hear the “James: Knocks on door” sound effects, and all of your hard work merges into a single step as you open the fake stage door. This is how most companies feel before they endeavor to take on Continuous Delivery. It can be a scary thing. All of the white papers, webinars and case studies in the world can only take you as far as that fake stage door. You have to open it and take the leap. But it’s exciting, it’s new, it’s the reason many of us got into the technology industry in the first place: it’s change. Today I want to talk about what you are already doing right now that will make your leap into Continuous Delivery more exciting than it is scary.
Python began life in the late 1980s. It was developed by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, a math and computer science research center in Amsterdam Science Park in the Netherlands. Van Rossum continues to be an influential figure in the development and guidance of Python. In fact, members of the Python community have bestowed upon him the regal title of Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL). From those humble beginnings, Python has grown to become one of the most popular server-side languages on the Internet. According to W3Techs, it is used by more high-traffic sites than ColdFusion, PHP, and ASP.NET. More than 98 percent of those sites are running Python 2.0, and just over one percent are using 3.0.
At the heart of the Cloud Native model is a microservices application architecture, and applying this to a telco SDN scenario offers enormous opportunity for product innovation and competitive advantage. For example in the ETSI NFV Ecosystem white paper they describe one of the product markets that SDN might address to be the Home sector. Vendors like Alcatel market SDN-based solutions for the home market, offering Home Gateways – A virtual residential gateway (vRGW) where service providers can streamline service delivery, turn up new and innovative services more efficiently, increase revenue, and lower CAPEX and OPEX for existing and new services, such as per device quality of service (QoS), parental controls, firewall and security/threat protection.
You can view software development as being very similar to any other highly mechanized process designed to build things. Rather like a factory with all of the interrelated processes that go into making the final product. Like any manufacturing process, the software development life cycle starts with analysis and requirements and then moves on to development and testing. A unit test validates that the code is working; then it's on to Quality Assurance for a series of standard tests that validate the whole package, including new features. Next step is a go-live scenario where inevitably something goes wrong. The developers are then called in to fix the bugs and, after further testing, the software is ready for release. By all accounts, this is a relatively simple and well-ordered workflow.
The start of a new year is always a good time for many businesses to get their IT strategies in place. However, there has been one issue in the past couple of months that may potentially cause a lot of complications in IT departments across the US and EU; the implications for cloud compliance of the recent nullification of the EU Safe Harbour Ruling. Safe Harbour, used by over 4,000 firms to move EU data to the US for the past 15 years, was declared invalid by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) back in October 2015.
In attending the 2015 DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES15) in October, I expected to catch glimpses of key insight from today's top technology organizations in regards to their implementations of DevOps practices. I expected a lot of talk to center around tools, around automation strategies and around tactical and clever use of software. These topics were definitely discussed, but what I found to be arguably the top theme of the entire summit was something different, though not entirely unexpected: Culture. Every speaker whose session I attended-whether the speaker represented a ‘unicorn' company, a ‘horse', or one at the beginning stages of its DevOps evolution-emphasized the cultural aspect of DevOps, and many sessions focused mostly on this aspect. It was interesting to hear even today's most successful companies discuss culture and their unique approaches toward improving it.
Ah, the plight of software testers – destined to crank away behind the scenes ensuring all runs smoothly. Unlike musical conductors who command the spotlight while overseeing the performance of a piece, testers only seem to attract attention when things go terribly wrong. Okay, so life isn’t fair and software testers seem to have drawn the short stick, at least in regards to the blame game. When users notice application performance issues, the fallout may prove detrimental to the success of not only the application, but also the organization as a whole. To prevent reoccurring performance problems, understanding what went wrong and why is critical. Failing to adjust testing strategies accordingly will only lead to unhappy users, unhappy managers, and ultimately an unhappy you.
We live in an era of apps. More and more of our personal, social and work life is governed by apps. Communicating with one another through social apps, booking cinema tickets through your mobile device, or scheduling a business trip through the airline app. This digitization of services has arrived. Organizations that understand this sea-change have a unique opportunity to jump ahead of their competitors, acquire customers more quickly and grow revenues.
Skyscanner is a global search engine that enables people to find comparisons for flights, hotels and car hire. Headquartered in the UK, Skyscanner has been an excellent customer of ours, providing feedback on new features and helping us with testing. When Lance Gobaira, a web operation engineer at Skyscanner, offered to share with us how they’re using VictorOps to alert on key business metrics, we jumped. Read on to see what he had to say…
Most of us can relate to the frustration of when the Wi-Fi is down, or running slowly, or if we travel away from an established network and aren't able to connect to another one nearby. The lack of Wi-Fi makes it impossible to check our emails, look up something on the internet, connect with others, or get our work done efficiently. In short, it makes us feel a little helpless and a whole lot of cranky because we've become way too accustomed to getting the information we want - when we want it - and staying in 24/7 connection with our world.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Catchpoint Systems, Inc., a provider of innovative web and infrastructure monitoring solutions, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's DevOps Summit at 18th Cloud Expo New York, which will take place June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Catchpoint is a leading Digital Performance Analytics company that provides unparalleled insight into customer-critical services to help consistently deliver an amazing customer experience. Designed for digital business, Catchpoint is the only end-user experience monitoring (EUM) platform that can simultaneously capture, index and analyze object level performance data inline across the most extensive monitor types and node coverage, enabling a smarter, faster way to preempt issues and optimize service delivery. More than 350 customers in over 30 countries trust Catchpoint to strengthen their brands and grow their businesses. Founded in September 2008 by former DoubleClick/Google veterans and backed by Battery Ventures, Catchpoint Systems is headquartered in New York City.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, Inc., the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the 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. Alert Logic, Inc., provides Security-as-a-Service for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, delivering deep security insight and continuous protection for customers at a lower cost than traditional security solutions. Fully managed by a team of experts, the Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service solution provides network, system and web application protection immediately, wherever your IT infrastructure resides.
SYS-CON Events announced today that AppNeta, the leader in performance insight for business-critical web applications, will exhibit and present at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. AppNeta is the only application performance monitoring (APM) company to provide solutions for all applications – applications you develop internally, business-critical SaaS applications you use and the networks that deliver them.
Whether you are new to Continuous Delivery or just need a quick refresher, The IT Manager’s Guide to Continuous Delivery is the perfect addition to your DevOps library. Having recently picked up the book myself, I can see how it has become an absolute essential addition in understanding the intricate world of Continuous Delivery. Below you will find a list of why The IT Manager’s Guide to Continuous Delivery is the perfect guide for beginners and experts alike.
From scaling Agile to creating a DevOps culture, there was plenty to take in as the software innovation community continues to band together to push industries forward. In fact, we are seeing the rise of FinTech and FinServ in this week’s posts – a vertical market that has been gaining a larger share of DevOps and IT news coverage in recent months. Read on to learn how software continues to impact the financial world and more on IoT, the Cloud and Continuous Delivery.
The founders of RedMonk unpack the often tricky path to DevOps and to explore how enterprises can find ways to make pan-IT collaboration a rule, not an exception. Gentleman, let’s look at DevOps through a little bit of a different lens. Often, it’s thought of as a philosophy. It’s talked about as a way of improving speed and performance of applications and quality, but ultimately, this is a behavior and a culture discussion -- and the behavior and culture of developers is an important part of making DevOps successful.
The principles, processes and tools that are core to the existing DevOps movement will expand beyond traditional development and operations teams. Non-technical teams are often in silos too, so can also get value from the benefits DevOps provides to software teams, including a high-trust open culture, creating and validating hypotheses, measurement, shortened feedback loops and enhanced collaboration; all of these lead to high velocity organizations regardless of type. Approaches and tools like pull-requests and ChatOps are no longer just for technical teams anymore – any modern organization can reap benefits from DevOps approaches.
During the last several years Oracle was working on their cloud solution, and several internal teams were creating JavaScript-based Web interfaces for the cloud. At some point Oracle decided to standardize on the set of JavaScript libraries used internally, and they also developed a set of reusable Web UI components both simple (e.g. buttons and forms) as well as complex (data grids, charts, accordion, and fancy gauges). All these components are based on jQuery UI and are responsive, so they can be used on mobile devices.
Azul Systems has announced the general availability of Zing runtime for Java release 16.01. This new release of Zing® is a highly scalable Java Virtual Machine (JVM) designed for enterprise applications and systems that require any combination of consistent low latency, high transaction rates, high scalability or large in-memory data structures.
Eighty percent of a data scientist’s time is spent gathering and cleaning up data, and 80% of all data is unstructured and almost never analyzed. Cognitive computing, in combination with Big Data, is changing the equation by creating data reservoirs and using natural language processing to enable analysis of unstructured data sources. This is impacting every aspect of the analytics profession from how data is mined (and by whom) to how it is delivered. This is not some futuristic vision: it's happening right now in industries across the globe.
Data-as-a-Service is the complete package for the transformation of raw data into meaningful data assets and the delivery of those data assets. In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Lakshmi Randall, an industry expert, analyst and strategist, will address: What is DaaS (Data-as-a-Service)? Challenges addressed by DaaS Vendors that are enabling DaaS Architecture options for DaaS
The following are a few Big Data companies that I was keeping an eye on starting back in January of 2015 (yeah, this is NOT a statistically significant sample)….some for “old times sake” because I knew the founding team and was curious how things were progressing, some because I trust their venture capital partners, and some because they inspire me with an application of the technology that is meaningful (I’m tired of hearing about yet another “Big Data Platform”).
Digital transformation has increased the speed at which organizations must adapt. As they do so, it’s more important than ever to be able to choose solutions that will give them a comprehensive, real-time view of the network. Several factors contribute to this new priority: Root causes and threats must be quickly identified, so network and security ops personnel must have the ability to view and share real-time data from multiple network environments.
Many types of web applications are running on the Internet today. There are also as many ways to manage and maintain the infrastructure that powers those applications. IBM® Bluemix™ delivers quick and easy cloud capabilities to deploy and maintain your web application, with minimal hassle and overhead. As you follow along with two lab-style scenarios, this IBM Redpaper™ publication demonstrates how to create and deploy a web-based collaboration application on IBM Bluemix
Although MIT makes the specific point that the Platform Business Model is exactly that, a business model not a technology, there is naturally a clear and powerful link with the Cloud model ‘PaaS’ – Platform as a Service. This offers literally that, a Platform as a service, and so it can play a central component part in enabling the Platform Business Model.