Our guest on the podcast this week is Jason Bloomberg, President at Intellyx. When we build services we want them to be lightweight, stateless and scalable while doing one thing really well. In today's cloud world, we're revisiting what to takes to make a good service in the first place. Listen in to learn why following "the book" doesn't necessarily mean that you're solving key business problems.
Big Data is the revolution the business world has been waiting for. The transformation that has taken place among many companies due to the adoption of Big Data analytics simply can’t be understated. Organizations of all types have looked into the many ways in which big data can help them change how they do things for the better, cultivating more success as businesses look to the future. For all the benefits that big data provides companies, the main goal is, of course, to make money. In fact, with all the capabilities that come from using big data, if a business isn’t utilizing it to make money, it’s almost a waste of time. But there’s no single way to turn a bigger profit from Big Data. The following examples show the various strategies specific businesses are using to get the most out of all the data they collect and analyze.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloud Raxak has been named “Media & Session Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 17th Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Raxak Protect automates security compliance across private and public clouds. Using the SaaS tool or managed service, developers can deploy cloud apps quickly, cost-effectively, and without error.
Docker is hot. However, as Docker container use spreads into more mature production pipelines, there can be issues about control of Docker images to ensure they are production-ready. Is a promotion-based model appropriate to control and track the flow of Docker images from development to production? In his session at DevOps Summit, Fred Simon, Co-founder and Chief Architect of JFrog, will demonstrate how to implement a promotion model for Docker images using a binary repository, and then show how to distribute them to any kind of consumer, being it a customer or a data center.
DevOps is speeding towards the IT world like a freight train and the hype around it is deafening. There is no reason to be afraid of this change as it is the natural reaction to the agile movement that revolutionized development just a few years ago. By definition, DevOps is the natural alignment of IT performance to business profitability. The relevance of this has yet to be quantified but it has been suggested that the route to the CEO’s chair will come from the IT leaders that successfully make the transition to a DevOps model. If this still seems foreign to you, I recommend reading up on DevOps Blog from IT Revolution, the OpsCode Blog, and check out The Phoenix Project. Despite all the talk around simple monitoring tools, breaking through the walls between Dev and Ops still poses a real challenge. This is because of a misunderstanding around Operations real purpose – extracting real value from its resources. According to Kevin Behr the definition of Operations is the act of harvesting value from IT resources. Anything that prevents this from happening is a detriment to the business. This means that firefighting and war room sessions are a hindrance to the DevOps model. The following screenshots are good examples of a war room scenario.
Have we come to the point of guaranteed successful cloud migrations from/to almost anything for less than $1,000? That’s the promise of migration services specialists, WSM, which has successfully completed 250,000 migrations and based on that experience will start offering $849 fixed price server migrations.
SYS-CON Events announced today that xMatters, inc., a leader in communication-enabled business processes, will exhibit at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit Silicon Valley, which will take place on November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. xMatters' cloud-based communications solutions enable any business process or application to trigger two-way communications (push, voice, email, SMS, etc.) throughout the extended enterprise during time-sensitive events. With over a decade of experience in rapid communication, xMatters serves more than 1,000 leading global firms to ensure business operations run smoothly and effectively during incidents such as IT failures, product recalls, natural disasters, dynamic staffing, service outages, medical emergencies and supply-chain disruption. To learn more, please visit https://www.xmatters.com.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudian, Inc., the leading provider of hybrid cloud storage solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cloudian, Inc., is a Foster City, California - based software company specializing in cloud storage software. The main product is Cloudian, an Amazon S3-compliant cloud object storage platform, the bedrock of cloud computing systems, that enables cloud service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable cloud storage solutions. In addition, Cloudian is actively partnering with the leading cloud computing environments including Citrix Cloud Platform and OpenStack, cloud on-ramp providers, and the vast ecosystem of tools and applications that is afforded through true S3 compatibility. Cloudian's customers include Alcatel-Lucent, Vodafone, Nextel, Docomo, NTT, SoftBank, Telecom Italia, Nifty, LunaCloud, Constant Hosting, and Clara Online. The company has additional offices in China and Japan.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Pythian, a global IT services company specializing in helping companies leverage disruptive technologies to optimize revenue-generating systems, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 17th Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. 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.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Solgeniakhela will exhibit at SYS-CON's 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Solgeniakhela is the global market leader in Cloud Collaboration and Cloud Infrastructure software solutions. Designed to “Bridge the Gap” between Personal and Professional Social, Mobile and Cloud user experiences, our solutions help large and medium-sized organizations dramatically improve productivity, reduce collaboration costs, and increase the overall enterprise value by bringing collaboration and infrastructure solutions to the Cloud. Based on innovative patented technologies that support Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud models, all our products offer ease of use, platform neutrality and mobile ubiquity. Solgeniakhela products and solutions are used by 3500 plus companies worldwide.
Large organizations engaged in enterprise release management seldom have a single "enterprise release manager." Instead of a single, "enterprise-wide" responsibility, most large, decentralized organizations assign responsibility for more strategic, release management functions to several existing roles. An enterprise release management practice supports and is supported by the following enterprise release management roles: IT Portfolio Management - An efficient ERM practice provides portfolio managers greater visibility into changes affecting multiple systems to create a consolidated status for change initiatives across an entire portfolio. By assembling data across multiple initiatives, ERM facilitates a process of continuous improvement at the portfolio level giving organizations a central mechanism to track common challenges and lessons learned. With ERM IT Portfolio Managers make strategic adjustments to both staffing and spend across departments as change initiatives evolve continuously.
Through this series I've considered the changes disruptive technology is having on traditional models, the routes businesses are taking to embrace transformation and the skills challenge they are facing as a result. It's clearly a complex and all-encompassing challenge for business leaders, but here I try to boil it down to the five key things we talk to senior leaders in business about when considering their change; from legacy, to next-generation, software-defined businesses:
Buy a cloud, any cloud you like and stick it on whatever application and data storage, management and/or analysis workload you like – that’s all it takes, right? Actually, that’s kind of not how it works. This thing called ‘optimization’ is one of those often used industry buzzwords that unfortunately gets way overused to the point where its initial method and meaning becomes dangerously diluted.
Serving more than 600 hospitals in the U.S., Adreima provides clinically integrated revenue cycle services. Read this case study to learn how partnering with Tiempo Development has proved to be the most productive, cost-effective way to advance a software platform that serves marketing strategy, client service delivery, and information management.
If your primary role within your organization is Operations, you likely realize the importance and significance of monitoring. The DevOps philosophy teaches us that measuring and collecting as much as possible is critical to not only the health of infrastructure, but it also plays a critical role in the architecting efforts of both software and hardware. Jason Dixon of Librato knows this better than many and has made a career of helping others understand and implement the best tools and processes of successful monitoring. Known by many and first introduced to me as the “Graphite Guy”, Jason’s expertise goes far beyond his contributions to this and other open source projects.
You don't have to look far to see evidence of open source software's impact on IT as a whole. It starts with large open source projects like OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and Hadoop and continues to smaller but widely deployed components like OpenSSL and MySQL. I know what you're thinking. But no one is making real money from open source. Red Hat is the big player and they're still tiny. This is something I hear often when talking about the inevitability of open source. Yes, open source software companies make less money than closed source software companies. But that's exactly why it's attractive to customers. Let me explain.
Just as companies now communicate with their consumers and prospects in much different ways -- with higher emphasis on social interactions -- so too the IT industry has abruptly changed.
As a business communications tool, email is the dominant option, and many corporations have policies that allow the use of personal email on corporate computers. In a recent Adobe Systems commissioned online survey of 400 U.S. white-collar, adult workers, more than 90 percent of them admitted checking personal emails at work. The workers questioned in the poll estimated they spend 6.3 hours a day checking emails, with 3.2 hours devoted to work emails and 3.1 hours to personal messages. Nearly half of the respondents also said that their use of emails for work will increase in coming years with 19 percent saying it will go up substantially.
A recent Wall Street Journal article discussed the challenges that online content publishers have in monetizing their content as more and more user traffic shifts to mobile devices from traditional desktop/laptop computers/browsers. Data from Mary Meeker’s 2015 Internet trends report in particular shows that the time adult users in the US spend online per day on mobile is up 51%. And the article cites similar data showing that the time spent on mobile properties of certain publishers jumped 40% in the last 12 months to 52% of the time spent viewing their content.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Luxoft Holding, Inc., a leading provider of software development services and innovative IT solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's @ThingsExpo, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Luxoft’s software development services consist of core and mission-critical custom software development and support, product engineering and testing, and technology consulting.
Since the first release of the Stacki Open Source project, it has seen the type of growth that one would expect of a cutting edge tool that makes operations lives easier. The number of active users continues to increase, as does the breadth of things they’re achieving with the world’s fastest open source Linux install tool. Several very prominent enterprises have joined the list of active users, and have asked for a range of enhancements. Stacki 2 incorporates many of these requests. More enterprise friendly functionality, in more enterprises, enabling enterprise IT to do more.
Today, we are in the middle of a paradigm shift as we move from managing applications on VMs and containers to embracing everything that the cloud and XaaS (Everything as a Service) has to offer. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Kevin Hoffman, Advisory Solutions Architect at Pivotal Cloud Foundry, will provide an overview of 12-factor apps and migrating enterprise apps to the cloud. Kevin Hoffman is an Advisory Solutions Architect for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and has spent the past 20 years building enterprise and mobile software for small businesses, massive enterprises, and everything in between. He has spent his career balancing the beauty of ideal solutions against practical constraints and applying that same mentality to migrating enterprise applications to the cloud.
iRise has launched iRise 10.5, which broadens the ability to integrate iRise’s advanced product definition capabilities into the rest of the application development lifecycle, allowing artifacts to be visible and consumable in tools used later in the software development process. iRise takes you from sketch to realistic prototype-for desktop, mobile or wearable apps-in minutes. The 10.5 release brings more features to the cloud version, and expands integrations with leading ALM tools. (Photo: Business Wire) The Agile and DevOps movements have made strides in streamlining the process of coding software and delivering it into production for large enterprises—but designs and requirements have remained largely disconnected, stifling collaboration, slowing product delivery and undercutting product quality. iRise 10.5, via its recent partnership with ALM integrator Tasktop, addresses this by connecting all elements required in the product lifecycle, including functional and non-functional requirements, designs, diagrams, epics and user stories into a comprehensive view.
So you think you are a DevOps warrior, huh? Put your money (not really, it’s free) where your metrics are and prove it by taking The Ultimate DevOps Geek Quiz Challenge, sponsored by DevOps Summit. Battle through the set of tough questions created by industry thought leaders to earn your bragging rights and win some cool prizes.
In a recent blog article, I discussed the difference between cloud backup and cloud disaster recovery (or “DR”). In a nutshell, with cloud backup, you basically pay a third-party service provider a monthly fee to have them back up your firm’s data and store it in the cloud, so it can be restored on-demand at a later date. With cloud DR, you gain the option to restore your data/server images to an always-on offsite virtual cloud environment capable of running live production servers. Your recovery time dramatically shrinks with this option.