I was experimenting with Java HashSet, which is a pretty expensive collection to create, but it has a benefit of the O(1) performance on the retrieval of elements from this collection. Based on my experiments performance of HashSet is improved over the last year. I’ve written a small benchmark comparing the performance of the one year old JRE 1.8.0_05 with the latest 1.8.0_51. In my tests I’m creating a HashSet containing 100000 objects.
In the early 1990s major retailers began investing in data analytics to better manage their stores and warehouses by analyzing individual store sales. This insight gave them a perspective on the needs of the local market. Retailers soon advanced in their use of analytics and added external factors for consideration and planning like demographics, weather, geography, local events and competitor's promotions and campaigns.
IBM’s Blue Box Cloud, powered by OpenStack, is now available in any of IBM’s globally integrated cloud data centers running SoftLayer infrastructure. Less than 90 days after its acquisition of Blue Box, IBM has integrated its Blue Box Cloud Dedicated private-cloud-as-a-service into its broader portfolio of OpenStack® based solutions. The announcement, made today at the OpenStack Silicon Valley event, further highlights IBM’s continued support to deliver OpenStack solutions across all cloud deployment models—public, private and hybrid.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Micron Technology, Inc., a global leader in advanced semiconductor systems, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Micron’s broad portfolio of high-performance memory technologies – including DRAM, NAND and NOR Flash – is the basis for solid state drives, modules, multichip packages and other system solutions. Backed by more than 35 years of technology leadership, Micron's memory solutions enable the world's most innovative computing, consumer, enterprise storage, networking, mobile, embedded and automotive applications. Micron's common stock is traded on the NASDAQ under the MU symbol.
Disaster Recovery isn’t a new concept for IT folks. We’ve been backing up data for years to offsite locations, and used in-house data duplication in order to prevent the risks of losing data stores. But now that cloud adoption has increased, there have been some shifts in how traditional Disaster Recovery is being handled. First, we’re seeing increased adoption of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery. Gartner stated that between 2012 and 2016, one third of organizations are going to be looking at new solutions to replace current ones particularly because of cost, complexity or capability. These new solutions not just address data, but the applications themselves, and are paving way for Disaster Recovery as a Services (DRaaS). Unfortunately, there is still some confusion as to when cloud services may suffice for disaster recovery, or if looking at full-fledged DRaaS makes more sense for organizations. Let’s explore four of the key considerations when it comes to DRaaS and cloud backup services.
Consumer IoT applications provide data about the user that just doesn’t exist in traditional PC or mobile web applications. This rich data, or “context,” enables the highly personalized consumer experiences that characterize many consumer IoT apps. This same data is also providing brands with unprecedented insight into how their connected products are being used, while, at the same time, powering highly targeted engagement and marketing opportunities. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Nathan Treloar, President and COO of Bebaio, will explore examples of brands transforming their businesses by tapping into this powerful aspect of the IoT. He will also review some emerging techniques being used for hyper-contextual engagement in consumer IoT apps.
Everyone loves to talk about DevOps, but when it comes to real life enterprise implementation, things start to get a little shaky. Having gone through the process with hundreds of organizations, the XebiaLabs Sale Engineering Team relayed to me the 6 most common mistakes they see when enterprises implement DevOps for the first time. Change is never easy, but if you can dodge these top 6 mistakes, your transition to DevOps can be relatively painless.
A few weeks back, I wrote a post about getting ready to address a coworker's bad code. This sparked some conversation across various media, including the following interesting question: ...seems that there is a breakdown in managing the development process. Why is Bob allowed [to keep] writing bad code? This feedback is interesting enough to merit a blog post in and of itself. I recognize a question that cuts to the heart of a software development conundrum when I see it. The structure of most organizations that employ software developers is this: the developers responsible for code report up through a structure of people that don't. To put it another way, the people responsible for personnel management usually don't understand how to evaluate the work of those reporting to them - at least not directly.
I am not sure how many people remember Cisco SANTap. About ten years ago, Cisco introduced a data tapping mechanism in the MDS 9000 fibre channel switches. The idea was to allow the data path to be “tapped” at-will. Tapping in this case meant using a mechanism in the switch to split the data being written from client hosts to the storage, allowing the identical “split” data to be routed through a second, separate path. SANTap therefore allowed a copy of the data to be seamlessly “mirrored” through the switch and subsequently used by other applications for multiple purposes (especially for backup). It facilitated real-time protection of critical data, and allowed advanced functions such as migration, snapshots, etc.
Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) is credited as the first person to classify our five sense organs: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing and Immanuel Kant, a famous philosopher from the 1700s said that our knowledge of the outside world depends on our modes of perception. Our highly developed organs of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and the skin on your hand provide the sensing equipment necessary to send that information to the brain. In some cases, one of the sensors might not work properly in the case of the blind or deaf, yet the four other senses are heightened and exceed normal operation to make up for the missing information. Daniel Kish, for example, uses echolocation like a bat to see the imprint of the sound waves as they bounce back. Pretty cool, eh?
SYS-CON Events announced today that DataClear Inc. will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The DataClear ‘BlackBox’ is the only solution that moves your PC, browsing and data out of the United States and away from prying (and spying) eyes. Its solution automatically builds you a clean, on-demand, virus free, new virtual cloud based PC outside of the United States, and wipes it clean, destroying it completely when you log out. If you wish to store your data, the solution will include a custom data encryption system with multiple factor authentication. DataClear also provides a corporate solution for multiple networked users and secure cloud based servers.
What does “big enough” mean? It’s sometimes useful to argue by reductio ad absurdum. Hello, world doesn’t need to be broken down into smaller services. At the other extreme, building a monolithic enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is just asking for trouble: it’s too big, and it needs to be decomposed.
One of the perennial cloud predictions has been that 200x would be the year of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud. The logic goes that if an automated data center in the sky is good, an automated development platform in the sky must be even better. “Normal” clouds like Amazon AWS give the developer a virtual computer to load their OS and App onto. PaaS gives the developer a virtual computer with the OS, database and middleware “pre-loaded,” thereby simplifying the deployment. Yet so far, PaaS adoption has been anemic and Gartner puts PaaS at 1% of the overall cloud market. At the same time, new technologies like Docker and containers have attracted far more attention from the developer community.
The evolution of IT operations is upon us. There has been a lot of change in both direction and momentum over the last several years, and at this point, it is not hard to see the future of Ops. Perhaps, having worked for a networking firm and a server automation firm, it is easier to see than for the average operations person, so let’s just take a look at the burgeoning ops trends and technologies and see where they ultimately lead us…
Over the last few years we’ve seen just about every part of the data centre move towards virtualization and software. First we virtualized desktops, then storage, then even our security tools. So when the idea of Software Defined Networking (SDN) started being floated around, it wasn’t a big surprise. But what exactly is it?
DevOps has traditionally played important roles in development and IT operations, but the practice is quickly becoming core to other business functions such as customer success, business intelligence, and marketing analytics. Modern marketers today are driven by data and rely on many different analytics tools. They need DevOps engineers in general and server log data specifically to do their jobs well. Here’s why: Server log files contain the only data that is completely full and accurate in the context of how search engines such as Google are crawling websites. If a search engine spider encounters an error and does not load a page, the webmaster does not know because traditional traffic analytics tools such as Google Analytics do not track those issues. Log file data, on the other hand, does reveals what problems bots are encountering on a website – and many of those issues can hurt a site’s appearance and rankings in Google.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is about the digitization of physical assets including sensors, devices, machines, gateways, and the network. It creates possibilities for significant value creation and new revenue generating business models via data democratization and ubiquitous analytics across IoT networks. The explosion of data in all forms in IoT requires a more robust and broader lens in order to enable smarter timely actions and better outcomes. Business operations become the key driver of IoT applications and projects. Business operations, IT, and data scientists need advanced analytics tools incorporating predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, and machine learning for rapid development and innovation to divine timely value out of IoT networks.
GoodData is exploring new technologies to make BI as a service more seamless across more data types for more types of users -- all in the cloud. To learn the ups and downs of BIaaS, we welcome Jeff Morris, Vice President of Marketing at GoodData in San Francisco, and Chris Selland, Vice President for Business Development at HP Vertica. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Any Ops team trying to support a company in today’s cloud-connected world knows that a new way of thinking is required – one just as dramatic than the shift from Ops to DevOps. The diversity of modern operations requires teams to focus their impact on breadth vs. depth. In his session at DevOps Summit, Adam Serediuk, Director of Operations at xMatters, Inc., will discuss the strategic requirements of evolving from Ops to DevOps, and why modern Operations has begun leveraging the “NoOps” approach. NoOps enables developers to deploy, manage, and scale their own code, creating an infrastructure that minimizes bottlenecks in key processes.
It’s a funny thing isn’t it? Vendors like to talk about so-called IT transformation in the context of the general move toward new mobile, digital, virtualized, cloud-centric initiatives that take us to the new style of IT we can achieve in the promised land. The trouble with media commentary in this space is… we are too often guilty of being superficial. We look at the big picture without talking about the granular components of transformation.
When I started exploring virtualization, like many folks, I was in awe of how much efficiency came with moving physical servers into VMs. To this day, the number of success stories about improved usage, reduced overhead costs and increased functionality makes virtualization a solid business model for IT folks. Then I learned about Containerization and well, it takes efficiency to another level.
In case you missed it, the first phase of cloud computing has left the building. Thousands of companies are in the cloud. Practically all organizations regardless of size already have production applications in a public, off-premises cloud or a private cloud. Yep. Been there, done that. And the vast majority of these applications use the classic “SaaS-style” public cloud model. Someone develops a useful service and hosts it on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud Marketplace, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or one of several other cloud vendors. Accessing this external service is typically performed via a well-defined API. Typically this API invocation is made using a simple REST call (or a convenient library wrapper around a REST call). This request originates from a web browser, native app on a mobile device or some server-side application and traverses the web. Using only port 443 or 80, it connects through a series of firewalls to the actual service running in the external cloud environment. The request is serviced by a process running in a service provider’s computing environment and returns a result to the client application.
The Microservices architectural pattern promises increased DevOps agility and can help enable continuous delivery of software. This session is for developers who are transforming existing applications to cloud-native applications, or creating new microservices style applications. In his session at DevOps Summit, Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata, will introduce best practices, patterns, challenges, and solutions for the development and operations of microservices style applications. He will discuss how application container solutions can be used to efficiently deploy and operate these applications in a highly scalable and flexible manner. He will also include a live demonstration of how microservices applications, packaged in Docker containers, can be deployed and managed across public and private clouds in a fully automated manner.
Too often with compelling new technologies market participants become overly enamored with that attractiveness of the technology and neglect underlying business drivers. This tendency, what some call the “newest shiny object syndrome,” is understandable given that virtually all of us are heavily engaged in technology. But it is also mistaken. Without concrete business cases driving its deployment, IoT, like many other technologies before it, will fade into obscurity.
Summary: As a Developer, you cannot attach the debugger to your application in Production, but you can use logging in a way that helps you easily diagnose problems in both development AND Production. You also get to make friends with Operations people – win! The applications we're developing and running are becoming increasingly distributed, with requests crossing several service or container boundaries. The traditional debugger is of limited use in these scenarios, but with a solid, easy-to-use log aggregation capability in place, we can begin to explore ways of using logging to improve our understanding of how the software behaves in Production and enhance our ability to diagnose problems rapidly. Logging becomes not just a ‘dump' of exception or error details, but a rich trace of application execution.