The annual holiday shopping season, which started on Thanksgiving weekend and runs through the end of December, is undoubtedly the most crucial time of the year for many eCommerce websites, with sales from this period having a dramatic effect on the year-end bottom line. Web performance – or, the overall speed and availability of a website or mobile site – is an issue year-round, but it takes on increased importance during the holidays. Ironically, it is at this time of year that networks and infrastructure come under the most strain from traffic and are more vulnerable than ever to performance degradations. Yet busy, hurried holiday shoppers expect better performance than ever, and the stakes for lost conversions are frighteningly high. When customers encounter long load times, they’re likely to abandon their current shopping destination and move on to a competitor’s site that is performing better, sending potential revenue out the door. What’s worse, studies have shown that if a site freezes or crashes, is too slow, or involves an overly complicated checkout process, 75 percent of shoppers will no longer buy from that site.
17th International Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo | @DevOpsSummit held on November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, featured three content-packed days with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of cloud computing, Internet of Things, Big Data, and DevOps led by exceptional speakers from every sector of the IT ecosystem. The Cloud Expo series is the fastest-growing Enterprise IT event in the past 10 years, devoted to every aspect of delivering massively scalable enterprise IT as a service.
ThoughtWorks has issued the latest Technology Radar, an assessment of trends significantly impacting software development and business strategy. The Technology Radar sets out the current changes in software development - things in motion to pay attention to based upon ThoughtWorks' day-to-day work and experience solving their clients' toughest challenges. "With the threat landscape still evolving, our latest edition of Technology Radar continues to focus on security and innovative approaches," said Dr. Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks. "In addition, we are seeing exciting growth and investment around microservices, opening up new opportunities for developers to create more maneuverable architectures. And the explosion in container ecosystems is helping reduce the friction of reliably building and deploying applications to the cloud."
So-called ‘paradigm shifts’ happen across the information technology landscape roughly every five years. We can make this statement with enough approximate ambiguity for it still to be of some value in terms of the way an average CIO might look to plan for major infrastructural changes. As we stand today, Big Data has been around for roughly five years. In the year 2000, famed economist Francis X. Diebold is said to have published the first version of a paper titled “Big Data Dynamic Factor Models for Macroeconomic Measurement and Forecasting” – and the rest we know is modern history.
When you look at the evolution of IT in the enterprise, innovation has really taken hold within the last few years. In the systems and infrastructure part of the stack, virtual machines and the public cloud have greatly reduced the need for server floorspace, cooling and other investments that are overhead-intensive. That’s very tangible evidence of innovation. On the application layer of the stack, developer teams have been boosted by DevOps tools and Agile methodologies. The evidence of that innovation manifests itself in dev teams’ ability to go faster than ever and constantly stage applications for release. But guess where the industry has forgotten to employ innovation? The database.
What is DevOps? It is one of the hottest buzzwords in IT, but many have difficulty finding a specific definition. The truth is that DevOps means different things to different people. DEVOPSdigest asked experts from across the industry to define what DevOps means to them. The purpose of this list is not to come up with a one-sentence definition of DevOps to appeal to all. The goal is to show just how many varied ideas are connected with the concept of DevOps, and in the process learn a little more what DevOps is all about.
"What is the next step in the evolution of IoT systems? The answer is data, information, which is a radical shift from assets, from things to input for decision making," stated Michael Minkevich, VP of Technology Services at Luxoft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The best way to leverage your Cloud Expo presence as a sponsor and exhibitor is to plan your news announcements around our events. The press covering Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo will have access to these releases and will amplify your news announcements. More than two dozen Cloud companies either set deals at our shows or have announced their mergers and acquisitions at Cloud Expo. Product announcements during our show provide your company with the most reach through our targeted audiences.
"The problem with IoT today is that people aren't looking to buy IoT, what they're really trying to do is buy a business outcome or trying to figure out ways to improve the business outcome. It just so happens that IoT may be the technology that can help do that," stated Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
We thought it would be fun to look through the lens of this movie at one relationship in particular: the one between developers and testers. When looking at how developers and testers get along, you often find conflict and differences of opinion. But in the end, we all have to work together. A good, trusting relationship is probably the most important thing in making a great product. As a benefit, getting along means the job is more fun as well.
DevOps is an organizational and cultural rethink of how software-driven organizations can become organizations at velocity – agile enough to innovate and fast enough to deal with any change that comes their way. Information technology is a central enabler of DevOps, but today’s better-faster-cheaper technology is not the whole story, as tools are only as good as the people wielding them. The more fundamental story here is the organizational and cultural transformation necessary to take full advantage of modern tech. Business at velocity depends upon such transformation.
Most of the IoT Gateway scenarios involve collecting data from machines/processing and pushing data upstream to cloud for further analytics. The gateway hardware varies from Raspberry Pi to Industrial PCs. The document states the process of allowing deploying polyglot data pipelining software with the clear notion of supporting immutability. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Shashank Jain, a development architect for SAP Labs, discussed the objective, which is to automate the IoT deployment process from development to production scenarios using Docker containers.
I didn’t want to be so dramatic, but I couldn’t help but be completely honest as well. The end possibility is that your entire organization may suffer the fate as Sony Pictures, Target, Anthem and others that have been shaken by hacks and vulnerabilities in their networks. In some cases it has been analyzed that hackers sat in for months stealing data, until they chose to tell everyone about their presence. That’s probably one of the reasons that websites like WikiLeaks are constantly able to churn document after document, exposing one thing or the other. Without supporting any of these and staying neutral, enterprise IT does face a daunting task of protecting the fort from everything out there. It’s not that enterprise IT is not doing their job. The fact remains that end users within organizations are causing a huge disruption by adding consumer-level apps to their work life. The advent of BYOD and a harmless Wi-Fi connection to your work Internet is all that is needed for the hacks to start happening.
Cybersecurity and the security of the data in the cloud is a hot topic. The number of companies hacked and the magnitude of losses have been growing at an alarming rate. Earlier this year, an international hacking ring stole as much as $1 billion from over 100 banks in 30 countries in what may be the biggest banking breach ever, and personal information for four million current and former federal employees was stolen when hackers breached the U.S. government’s computer networks. What about your company’s trade secrets? Are they next? In the “old days” the protection of trade secrets was a simple as locking up your company’s code or formula in a safe or a secure, access-restricted area. But in today’s connected world, where data is often stored on networks designed to be accessed remotely and shared by many employees, “locking up” confidential information while allowing access to those with need-to-know is not as simple.
The buzz continues for cloud, data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) and their collective impact across all industries. But a new conversation is emerging - how do companies use industry disruption and technology enablers to lead in markets undergoing change, uncertainty and ambiguity? Organizations of all sizes need to evolve and transform, often under massive pressure, as industry lines blur and merge and traditional business models are assaulted and turned upside down. In this new data-driven world, marketplaces reign supreme while interoperability, APIs and applications deliver unique customer value for new go-to-market models based on a cloud and IoT way of working. Analytics, IoT service mashups, fail fast business models and contextual data streams enable data to become the new currency for digital citizens and businesses and will determine business success or failure.
A lot has been written recently about DevOps and outsourcing. Some say it will kill outsourcing, others are not so sure. Our view at DevOpsGuys is that the truth is somewhere in the middle but that 2016 will definitely usher in a wave of strategic insourcing rooted in re-drawing the lines between what’s “inside” and “outside” the organisation.
Hiring the wrong candidate can cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars, and result in lost profit and productivity during the search for a replacement. In fact, the Harvard Business Review has found that as much as 80 percent of turnover is caused by bad hiring decisions. But when your organization has implemented DevOps, the job is about more than just technical chops. It’s also about core behaviors: how they work with others, how they make decisions, and how those decisions translate to tangible results.
Using any programming framework to the fullest extent possible first requires an understanding of advanced software architecture concepts. While writing a little client-side JavaScript does not necessarily require as much consideration when designing a scalable software architecture, the evolution of tools like Node.js means that you could be facing large code bases that must be easy to maintain.
So you want to centralize your enterprise? Smart choice – but it’s important to take some factors into consideration if you want to have success. Developers need to ensure representation from each geographic location; understand current development processes and tools; and comprehend the biggest challenges. Furthermore, you need to be aware of, and sensitive to, your project teams' preferences for existing tools and aversion to change.
Unicorn is a term in the investment industry, and in particular the venture capital industry, which denotes a start-up company whose valuation has exceeded (the somewhat arbitrary) $1 billion. The term has been popularized by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures. Fortune magazine counted over 80 unicorns as of January 2015. Now its most likely past 100. But their journey lately has been bumpy. There are signs of cooling the "lofty valuations" of these unicorns. Fidelity wrote down Dropbox by 20%; Snapchat by 25%; and Zenefits and MongoDB by around 50% each. Zenefits had raised money at a $4.5B valuation in May. The reason for the markdown is the slow growth in meeting their targets. Square which had its IPO earlier in November, was valued at $4 billion, about a third less than in its most recent private round. Several others besides Square have faced "markdowns": Pure Storage, Box, GoPro, News Relic, Hottonworks, etc.
Wi-Fi has become a necessity of the digital age, and like everything, everyone loves it even more when it is free. Whether it’s used to access a presentation at a new client meeting, to host a video conference call, or edit and email important documents, public Wi-Fi means nearly anywhere can become an office. Couple this with the fact that there are as many mobile devices on the planet as there are people, and businesses now have the most flexible and tech-saturated workforce in history. However, public Wi-Fi networks, by their very nature, are a hotbed for silent cyber attacks, as a business’s sophisticated security systems won’t have any affect on them to protect users.
In his General Session at DevOps Summit, Asaf Yigal, Co-Founder & VP of Product at Logz.io, explored the value of Kibana 4 for log analysis and provided a hands-on tutorial on how to set up Kibana 4 and get the most out of Apache log files. He examined three use cases: IT operations, business intelligence, and security and compliance. Asaf Yigal is co-founder and VP of Product at log analytics software company Logz.io. In the past, he was co-founder of social-trading platform Currensee, which was later acquired by OANDA. He was also an early employee of server performance-monitoring company Akorri and storage resource-management startup Onaro, both of which were acquired by NetApp (NTAP). He graduated from the Techion - the Israeli version of MIT - and he later created an AI algorithm on naval warfare for the Israeli military.
Today, organizations have so much data at their disposal. This data includes company, customer, product, employee, and more… much more. The problem is that without the proper tools, mid-market companies often struggle with turning this information into meaningful and actionable insights. In a time where information is power, how can companies exploit their information assets to achieve a strategic advantage over the competition? Queue analytics.
People want to get going with DevOps or Continuous Delivery, but need a place to start. Others are already on their way, but need some validation of their choices. A few months ago, I published the first volume of DevOps and Continuous Delivery reference architectures which has now been viewed over 50,000 times on SlideShare (it's free to download...no registration required). Three things helped people in the deck: (1) the reference architectures, (2) links to the sources for each architecture attached to each slide, and (3) no marketing fluff.
Intuit uses deep-data analytics to gain a 360-degree view of its TurboTax application's users’ behavior and preferences for rapid applications improvements. The next BriefingsDirect big-data innovation case study highlights how Intuit uses deep-data analytics to gain a 360-degree view of its TurboTax application's users’ behavior and preferences. Such visibility allows for rapid applications improvements and enables the TurboTax user experience to be tailored to a highly detailed degree.