All eyes appeared to be on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016 in Las Vegas since last week, as more than 3,600 companies unveiled the IoT and IIoT innovations we can all expect to see in the coming year. This year's CES showcased plans to make the car a complete mobile office-with technology in place to allow Skype calls and the use of Microsoft 365 from the car. The other hot theme at CES was drones - not a surprise since these unmanned crafts have pulled us in like a tracker-beam to the mother ship. The autonomous ‘copter drone was one of the most impressive releases with the reality that the businessman of tomorrow doesn't need a private jet, just a ‘copter drone and a smart phone.
IoT depends to a large part on the availability of custom hardware of sensors that can be efficiently manufactured with exacting tolerances in its specifications. Smart Parts manufacturing will be one of the key technologies required to address the IoT 3D Sensors and 3D Antennae. Optomec which manfuactures production grade 3D printers can manufacture parts both in plastics and metals.
The WebRTC Summit 2016 New York, to be held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, announces that its Call for Papers is now open. Topics include all aspects of improving IT delivery by eliminating waste through automated business models leveraging cloud technologies. WebRTC Summit is co-located with 18th International Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo. WebRTC is the future of browser-to-browser communications, and continues to make inroads into the traditional, difficult, plug-in web communications world.
I recently spotted a five-year-old blog post by Mike Gualtieri of Forrester, where he suggests firing your quality assurance (QA) team to improve your quality. He got the idea from a client who actually tried and succeeded with this counterintuitive move. The thinking goes that without a QA team to cover for them, developers are more likely to take care of quality properly – or risk getting the dreaded Sunday morning wakeup call to fix something. Gualtieri’s post generated modest buzz at the time, but since 2011 the world has changed. DevOps has turned a corner, representing an end-to-end rethink of how organizations handle the entire software development lifecycle. Now that 2016 has finally arrived, it’s time to take a fresh look at the question. But why stop with QA? Now that we have DevOps – and digital transformation more broadly – whom else can we fire?
It seems that all we hear about these days is the move to the cloud. Certainly, it’s a top-trending technology topic for enterprise-sized organizations. But don’t let the hype mislead you into believing cloud deployment is just for large businesses. Small- to medium-sized organizations can absolutely reap the benefits of cloud. In fact if you’re an SMB, you have even more to gain from cloud deployment – and you run a real risk of missing out by not going to the cloud. According to a September 2014 study by Deloitte, SMBs using an above-average number of cloud services grow 26 percent faster on average than those that don’t use cloud tools, and are more profitable by 21 percent on average.
Are you someone who knows that the number one rule in DevOps is “Don’t Panic”? Especially when it comes to making Continuous Delivery changes inside your organization? Are you someone that theorizes that if anyone implements real automation changes, the solution will instantly become antiquated and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable?
When it comes to protecting their brand, there is little that any successful company would not do. But what if the brand is being damaged just by people being unable to find the store? If you think of the internet as a virtual network, then DNS lookup and resolution is like the 411 service. Websites are not located at text addresses, but rather IP addresses – that series of numbers and decimals that may not make any sense to you, but actually identifies the actual server that you’re trying to contact. So when you type www.catchpoint.com into your web browser or click on a link to it from a Google search page, the first thing that your browser must do is find out where exactly that is.
Fujitsu and Grid Dynamics have teamed up to create the Cloud Commerce Platform to empower retailers with best-of-breed hardware, software and services for faster digital innovation. Retailers are under immense pressure to innovate faster. Working with them over the years, we have come to intimately understand their challenges. With the explosion of digital touch points and the expectation of a unified experience throughout a shopper's journey across the channels, retailers must innovate at an unprecedented pace while performing flawlessly even as traffic peaks.
The web community is constantly churning out new technologies that make it easier to develop the applications that savvy users are demanding. It may be obvious, but new technologies often require new ways of thinking about testing – sometimes new tools, other times entirely new testing methods. You just can’t rely on the same old same old when things change as much as the web does.
Welcome to the first top DevOps news roundup of 2016! At the end of last year, we saw some great predictions for 2016. While we’re excited to kick off the new year, this week’s top posts reminded us to take a second to slow down and really understand the current state of affairs. For example, do you actually know what microservices are – or aren’t? What about DevOps? Does the emphasis still fall mostly on the development side? This week’s top news definitely got the wheels turning and just might get you thinking differently about the hot topics of 2016 as well. Read on for more insights, predictions, and tips from our fellow industry influencers. 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!
Today on #c9d9 we talked about best practices for orchestrating enterprise software testing. Delivering software faster, but with lower quality, doesn’t help you win in the market. What are some of the challenges and proven tips and patterns used to test critical software – across all the different supported platforms – quickly and efficiently?
In the late 1990's Tom Standage released the first edition of a book that would sweep across the tech community because of its incredible analogies to the rise of the Internet hitting the world at that time. The "Victorian Internet", first released in 1998, was updated and re-released again in 2013. It provided a well written history and meaningful assessment of the rise of the Telegraph, and made very interesting observations about how the remarkable impact of the Telegraph could help us all think through what may happen as the Internet progressed.
Actifio has announced its partnership with Camouflage Software Inc., a leading provider of solutions for data masking in Test Data Management. The partnership brings a best-in-class solution to address the challenges of data access, control, security, and storage costs in the test and development space. "Software is eating the world," as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011. Since then, more and more industries have been transformed by software, to the point where the largest distributor of films has no theaters (Netflix,) the largest provider of delivery services has no cars (Uber,) the largest renter of rooms owns no hotels (Airbnb). Software - especially the development of company-specific applications and platforms with the power to create sustainable advantage and even transform entire industries - has become a critical lever of business strategy in even the most unlikely business segments. Meanwhile, physical and technical infrastructure, the source of differentiated capability for decades, if not centuries, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be accessed at the lowest possible cost. "Software is eating the world," as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011. Since then, more and more industries have been transformed by software, to the point where the largest distributor of films has no theaters (Netflix,) the largest provider of delivery services has no cars (Uber,) the largest renter of rooms owns no hotels (Airbnb). Software - especially the development of company-specific applications and platforms with the power to create sustainable advantage and even transform entire industries - has become a critical lever of business strategy in even the most unlikely business segments. Meanwhile, physical and technical infrastructure, the source of differentiated capability for decades, if not centuries, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be accessed at the lowest possible cost.
As 2016 has arrived, we reflect upon one of the most debated issues around DevOps in 2015 – Information Security (InfoSec) and compliance. Needless to say, both are critical to an enterprise (especially given past examples of data breaches and looming cybersecurity threats). As a result, the combination of InfoSec and DevOps practices can be viewed as counter-intuitive, since the ability to “go faster” can be seen as a potential risk to security mechanisms in place, and thus harder to ensure compliance and enable auditability.
We started our Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) video podcast in late 2014 as a way for the DevOps community to connect with each others – sharing experiences, lessons learned and tips – to accelerate our mutual success.Each #c9d9 episode focuses on a different topic relating to your software delivery process, and features different speakers from around the development and IT community. Every two weeks, we get together for a casual video chat (over Hangout) to share best practices – and war stories – relating to real-world examples of implementing Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery.
SDN / NFV may not be new with next gen telcos and data centers but by 2016 it is certainly going to be the new beast in DevOps space. It's a multi-million dollar virgin market, so it's not only those traditional OEMs are in the fray even the DB companies will be entering this new market. Telcos and Data center wants a vendor agnostic network devices and are expected to replace all physical devices including those routers and switches with software devices. This not only drastically brings down the PCB replacement costs and other maintenance charges but the latest release automation tools and technology of DevOps will do radical changes by reducing the overall current service provisioning time from 4-5 months to few hours. In the near future the network administration may not require to have niche skill sets to manage large networks because the latest zero touch release automation technology with GUI based orchestration dashboard will do the network configuration.
Ten years ago, when I drove on Winchester Avenue in Los Gatos, I saw this new company called Netflix that was renting DVDs of movies. You didn't have to go to a store, but could sign up for home delivery service of DVDs. Now Netflix is building a much bigger headquarters near its old site. It is a huge success story – a disruption to the home entertainment business. When it decided to switch to “streaming only” a few years back, there were lot of doubters. But that’s all in the past. It is a global company now with huge success as a business.
Docker Swarm is a cluster manager for Docker. When accessed via the Docker API by Docker API Clients or Docker command line tools, a Docker Swarm cluster looks just like a single Docker Host. Docker Swarm distributes containers to multiple nodes using various deployment strategies in the cluster scheduler. Having in mind that a Swarm cluster looks like a single Docker Host from the API point of view, it should be very easy to monitor Docker Swarm with existing Docker monitoring tools! Connecting a monitoring agent to the Swarm Master API endpoint should do the job, right? The Sematext Docker Agent could simply collect all container metrics, events and all logs from the Swarm Master – should be a piece of cake. Hmm, but could there a gotcha? It turns out there is more than one:
For manufacturers, the Internet of Things (IoT) represents a jumping-off point for innovation, jobs, and revenue creation. But to adequately seize the opportunity, manufacturers must design devices that are interconnected, can continually sense their environment and process huge amounts of data. As a first step, manufacturers must embrace a new product development ecosystem in order to support these products.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Robert Doyle, Chief Technology Architect at eCube Systems, will examine the issues and need for an agile infrastructure and show the advantages of capturing developer knowledge in an exportable file for migration into production. He will introduce the use of NXTmonitor, a next generation DevOps tool that captures application environments, dependencies and start/stop procedures in a portable configuration file with an easy-to-use GUI. In addition to capturing configuration information between Development, Test and Production, the case study shows how NXTmonitor can create dependencies, automate health scripts and scalable performance groups to handle peak production loads.
The IoT's basic concept of collecting data from as many sources possible to drive better decision making, create process innovation and realize additional revenue has been in use at large enterprises with deep pockets for decades. So what has changed? In his session at @ThingsExpo, Prasanna Sivaramakrishnan, Solutions Architect at Red Hat, discussed the impact commodity hardware, ubiquitous connectivity, and innovations in open source software are having on the connected universe of people, things and information in the IoT.
Shot this late last year for Information Security Buzz. What are five information security new year’s resolutions for improving cyber security in 2016 and why?
Instead of writing yet another “Big Data Predictions for the Next Year” blog, I thought I’d do something a bit different. Instead of predicting – like everyone else – what’s going to happen in 2016, let’s instead look out a few years and see how data and analytics might transform our lives and the lives of those around us. Probably a silly exercise, but a fun way to wrap up 2015 nonetheless. My wellness band actually woke me up about 15 minutes before my alarm because it had used data about my sleep patterns to determine that I was ready to get up (it automatically turns off my alarm so that it doesn’t bother my wife). I slept well last night. I get a gold star. Yippee…
Mobile testing is getting harder: more devices, multiple operating systems, higher quality expectations and shorter development cycles. In his session at DevOps Summit, Tom Chavez, Senior Evangelist at SOASTA, discussed the seven steps to improving your mobile testing process. Tom Chavez, with 20+ years of experience as a product manager in software development tools, works in product management at SOASTA, the leader in performance analytics. He has worked across the Silicon Valley at industry leaders including Apple, Sun, PalmSource, and Intuit delivering tools for Mac, Java, PalmOS, and Android development and testing.
If you were too busy with things and unable to give the desired attention to planning the right steps for your business in 2016, fear not. You’re not alone, and yes welcome to the party! With too many things going on, I could completely believe if you said you don’t have time to breathe. The boss wants the reports, the customer wants the installation while the sales teams have been asking for help on some technical stuff. You can only do as much as you do. With so much going around us, it’s also sometimes hard to keep up with what really matters. Here is how to achieve planned success in this New Year and with no room for excuses.