Of the many additions to Java 8 such as the Stream API and lambdas, I noticed one of the lesser talked about ones was CompletableFutures. So I decided to have a play around with them on the last Java component I wrote. My use case in a nutshell was piping large volumes of data from a distributed file system, compressing it and uploading to individual destinations on Amazon S3.
In the midst of Docker’s meteoric rise and the explosion of talk around containers, it can be easy to lose oneself in all of the new terminology and jargon. While we think about the challenges presented by using containers in production, we also continue to hear the metaphor of Pets vs. Cattle and why it’s important to maintain an infrastructure that acts like a herd of cows.
“Threats are always evolving and the days of ‘set it and forget it’ malware and virus scanners are over if you want to keep your business information secure,” explained Abel Sussman, Director of Federal Services at Coalfire, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff. Cloud Computing Journal: Security threats seem so widespread and diverse that it seems companies need a framework before they tackle individual issues. To what degree do you take this point of view?
DevOps has often been described in terms of CAMS: Culture, Automation, Measuring, Sharing. While we’ve seen a lot of focus on the “A” and even on the “M”, there are very few examples of why the “C" is equally important in the DevOps equation. In her session at @DevOps Summit, Lori MacVittie, of F5 Networks, will explore HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 along with Microservices to illustrate why a collaborative culture between Dev, Ops, and the Network is critical to ensuring success.
Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, a growing collection of integrated services—analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web. In the 12 months since Build 2014, Microsoft has delivered over 500 new Azure services and features, and greatly expanded the footprint and capabilities of what Azure delivers. Here’s a snapshot of Azure Allure, articulated by Microsoft exec Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise, at the Microsoft Build 2015 conference in San Francisco.
Change is hard, especially when it impacts organizational structure, legacy systems and processes. Our third annual software delivery survey reveals that the management of change is a long road as the majority of our respondents continue their implementation of Continuous Integration in 2015.
Thanks to Docker, it becomes very easy to leverage containers to build, ship, and run any Linux application on any kind of infrastructure. Docker is particularly helpful for microservice architectures because their successful implementation relies on a fast, efficient deployment mechanism – which is precisely one of the features of Docker. Microservice architectures are therefore becoming more popular, and are increasingly seen as an interesting option even for smaller projects, instead of being reserved to the largest, most complex application stacks.
August 10, 2015, saw the dawn of a new era at Google. It announced a huge restructuring of the company. An umbrella holding-company called Alphabet was created to manage a portfolio of separate companies each with its own CEO. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin elevated themselves to be the CEO and President of Alphabet with Eric Schmidt as chairman. The board will remain the same as before. For the biggest company Google, the new CEO is Sundar Pichai, 43 years old, who has seen fast rise in the ranks over his 11 year career. The other portfolio companies will be Nest, Fiber, GoogleX, Calico, Google Capital, Sidewalk, etc.
The amount of data processed in the world doubles every three years and a global commitment to open source technology is the way to handle this growth. An open technology approach fosters innovation through massive community involvement and impedes expensive vendor lock-in. This benefits buyers as markets remain more competitive. In doing so, open standards and technologies also allow for market hypergrowth, and this is the key to handling the growth of data. A doubling every three years means we'll be grappling with a full Yottabyte of data in the year 2040. That's one billion petabytes, an amount of data that, similar to pondering geologic time, I can understand in the abstract but not truly grasp. Meanwhile, the nature of this data—which can truly be called Big Data in today's age of the Zettabyte—is transforming from a jet plane model to a chewing gum model. By this I mean Big Data in its original conception 20 years ago referred to a small number of massive files, the type found in meteorology and nuclear-bomb building. Tomorrow's Big Data will largely be a product of billions of sensors, transmitting less than 10K at a time. Rather than thinking about a few 747s, we'll be thinking about billions of pieces of chewing gum. Already There We're already in such a Little Big Data era, with stuff like Hadoop and NoSQL databases equipped to handle the onslaught of data volume, variety, and--because of much this data's real-time nature—velocity. But we've only just begun. Innovation must continue apace, in hardware even more so than software. Today's technology already requires more almost 3% of the world's electricity grid to power its data centers—exponential increases in data processing simply will not be met by the global electricity grid in the absence of vast new hardware efficiencies. The OPG Thus I'm involved with something called the Open Performance Grid, or OPG. Announced in San Francisco in August 2015, the Open Performance Grid measures openness, performance, and leadership of hardware, software, and designs for modern data centers. The OPG is a community effort with input from technology users and buyers, analysts and researchers, and vendors who wish to compare their own self-assessments with what the community is saying. Sample measures of openness, beyond simple open-source availability, include the presence, size, and activity of a community and foundation for a particular technology. Market share, benchmark performance, and what we call the Innovation Curve are also part of the mix. Software categories include operating systems, virtualization, containers, PaaS, IaaS services and stacks, monitoring/analytics, management consoles, software-defined storage, SDN, SDDC. For hardware, we're looking at chips, boards, subsystems, and even overall data center designs. The challenge of meeting the astounding growth in data is enormous. The Open Performance Grid is a way to encourage and enable the technology provider, development, and user communities to meet the challenge. Contact me on Twitter to learn more.
We chat again with Jason Bloomberg, a leading industry analyst and expert on achieving digital transformation by architecting business agility in the enterprise. He writes for Forbes, Wired, TechBeacon, and his biweekly newsletter, the Cortex. As president of Intellyx, he advises business executives on their digital transformation initiatives and delivers training on Agile Architecture. His latest book is The Agile Architecture Revolution. Check out his first interview on Agile trends here.
There are many parallels to Google’s move to set up Alphabet as a holding company to remain at the forefront of innovation and what is required by all companies to foster innovation in the age of the Cloud and IoT. No one will argue that Alphabet was a change Google needed to make to remain relevant, fresh and innovative across a number of product initiatives. Under the Alphabet structure, Google provides operating divisions with the freedom and accountability for making decisions all while being nimble and quick on their feet. And perhaps most importantly, keeping their most creative people engaged and well…creative and not stifled by red tape and bureaucracy.
We really are moving in the direction of truly commoditized hardware. Some uses will always have specific requirements that are not mainstream and thus will require specialized builds, this is true in every industry. But increasingly, who made your hardware and where they got their parts from is a secondary issue. Which makes one consider what really sells hardware these days. Years ago when I was working for Network Computing, I reviewed a low-end blade server company capable of cranking up blades at a fraction of the cost of most vendors. They (like far too many good companies) ran out of money before they could grab market traction, but they did show that it could be done at a price even small enterprises could afford.
USB GPS dongles have come down significantly in price in recent years and I picked one up to play with recently. Apart from using a GPS module to report your latitude, longitude, altitude and time for mapping applications, it’s also possible to feed the time information to ntpd as a back-up time source or as a highly accurate time source depending on the GPS module you end up getting.
During the last two #IoTuesday Twitter sessions, our chats have centered on what it will take to capitalize on the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunity and what the industry’s collective responsibility is to break down barriers to adoption. Topics ranged from the evolution of the Industrial Internet to consumer IoT applications to the role of APIs and API management. And underlying all of this, how we move from today’s connected devices and vertical siloes to a horizontal IoT marketplace with interconnectivity at its core. In this month’s IoT chat we will be joined by Alex Bakker and Ron Exler, from analyst firm Saugatuck Technology, to continue the discussion on the evolution of IoT, blockers and opportunities.
It’s been proven time and time again that in tech, diversity drives greater innovation, better team productivity and greater profits and market share. So what can we do in our DevOps teams to embrace diversity and help transform the culture of development and operations into a true “DevOps” team? In her session at DevOps Summit, Stefana Muller, Director, Product Management – Continuous Delivery at CA Technologies, answered that question citing examples, showing how to create opportunities for diverse candidates and taking feedback from the audience on their experiences with encouraging diversity in technology roles.
I can guarantee that if you are involved in recruiting new IT employees for your organization this year, then DevOps skills will be on your priority list. The problem is that I can also guarantee that many resumes and LinkedIn profiles will be awash with the word DevOps. After all, according to Puppet Labs, a DevOps engineer today can earn upwards of $100,000 – so if you are a job seeker in IT, then it makes sense to ensure that your resume includes DevOps skills. This means that recruiting the right IT professionals for your business is a difficult task. There are lots of articles and blog posts which state that DevOps is about culture (even I state that culture is critical), but how do you recruit someone with ‘the right culture’? From my experience, talking to AppDynamics customers and from my time at Forrester Research, here are 5 essential character traits to identify and avoid during the interview process.
It seems like every time I write a blog, a new breach has occurred (for an up-to-date look at local, state and federal breaches I suggest you periodically review the Identity Theft Resource Center’s running list). Since I last penned a post, we’ve seen breaches of the Mayo Clinic, Citizen’s Bank, CVS and Arkansas BlueCross/BlueShield. To the average person, most breaches probably bleed together. If you’ve seen one breach, you’ve seen them all, right? If we’re going off of that logic, then one might assume all industries can take the same data security approach.
Ski helmets, seat belts, and encryption. What comes to your mind when you read these words? You may immediately think “safety,” and you’d be right, but how about “speed enablers”? At first blush, that may not be the first concept that comes to mind, but there’s a pretty compelling case to be made for this as another common theme. Let me give you a couple fun examples, starting with ski helmets. During the winter of 2002/2003 researchers studied different factors, and how they affect skier and snow boarder speed. One of the variables examined was “use or not of helmet”. The authors measured the speed of 650 individuals at three different US ski resorts and found the average speed for helmet users (28.4 MPH) was significantly higher than those not using a helmet (25.4 MPH).
SYS-CON Events announced today that Key Information Systems, Inc. (KeyInfo), a leading cloud and infrastructure provider offering integrated solutions to enterprises, 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. Key Information Systems is a leading regional systems integrator with world-class compute, storage and networking solutions and professional services for the most advanced software-defined data centers. These competencies are tightly complemented by a full suite of data center capabilities, including private and hybrid cloud offerings, connectivity services, colocation facilities and managed services.
As a class of business, IT providers may be hip to risk as a matter of course, but they aren’t exempt from the rules of the game and, given their special position in the information security ecosystem, attacks directed their way can be enormously consequential. Hacking doesn't happen only to other people. While last spring's notorious Sony hack may have implied that the biggest targets are the most vulnerable, any organization can be a victim - and, perhaps surprisingly, an unwitting perpetrator.
DevOps is about increasing efficiency, but nothing is more inefficient than building the same application twice. However, this is a routine occurrence with enterprise applications that need both a rich desktop web interface and strong mobile support. With recent technological advances from Isomorphic Software and others, rich desktop and tuned mobile experiences can now be created with a single codebase – without compromising functionality, performance or usability. In his session at DevOps Summit, Charles Kendrick, CTO and Chief Architect at Isomorphic Software, will demonstrate examples of complex UI widgets that behave differently in desktop vs. mobile context, and describe the API and code structures that enable these capabilities.
“Today due to the nature of cloud services, solutions and integrations, APIs are the way to go because of so many reasons,” stated Ian Khan, Head of Innovation at Solgenia, in this exclusive Q&A with Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff. “I strongly believe that any company today that builds any kind of a solution need to take the containers approach.” Cloud Computing Journal: It seems we're now in the era of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. To what degree does this hold true for your customers?
Localytics uses data and associated analytics to help providers of mobile applications improve their applications - and also allow them to better understand the uses for their apps and dynamic customer demands. To learn more about how big data helps mobile application developers better their products and services, please join Andrew Rollins, Founder and Chief Software Architect at Localytics, based in Boston.
For it to be SOA – let alone SOA done right – we need to pin down just what "SOA done wrong" might be. First-generation SOA with Web Services and ESBs, perhaps? But then there's second-generation, REST-based SOA. More lightweight and cloud-friendly, but many REST-based SOA practices predate the microservices wave. Today, microservices and containers go hand in hand – only the details of "container-oriented architecture" are largely on the drawing board – and are not likely to look much like SOA in any case. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Jason Bloomberg, President of Intellyx, will provide an insightful look into the nature of microservices architecture.
Once enterprises decide on proceeding with developing applications on Hadoop, they have to standardize on a specific application development framework. With this, enterprises can promote the reuse of code, set development best practices, comply with regulations, enable consistent quality, etc. I’ve seen all kinds of projects across different of industries. I’ve seen smart people go with the newest technology, even if it’s unproven, and have paid the price when they find it’s not enterprise ready. I’ve also seen projects fail because they overemphasized the niche capabilities of the platform instead of the basics, such as ease of integration to existing systems.