IoT sensors extend our physical senses beyond our physical reach and communicate the results from afar. They also allow us to share experiences remotely, not just mentally, but also tactilely. That is the first time I have ever used the word “tactilely.” It means to tangibly or physically experience something. For example, AMS’s MEMS gas sensor allows people to hear, see and smell inside their home remotely from an iPhone app. The Withings Home camera sends alerts to an iPhone if it detects movement or noise in the house. Its night-vision sensor mode enables the remote viewer to even see in the dark. The viewer can also talk through the camera to ask questions like, “Who are you, and why are you carrying my big screen TV away?”
OmniTI has expanded its services to help customers automate their processes to deliver high quality applications to market faster. Consistent with its focus on IT agility and quality, OmniTI operates under DevOps principles, exploring the flow of value through the IT delivery process, identifying opportunities to eliminate waste, realign misaligned incentives, and open bottlenecks. OmniTI takes a unique, value-centric approach by plotting each opportunity in an effort-payoff quadrant, then working with customers to focus on initiatives with high payoff and low effort – using its deep bench of operational, development and database deployment and management knowledge to keep downward pressure on effort.
It’s terminology specific to the retail industry though just about anyone who shops for consumer goods is familiar with the phrase “Black Friday” or, more recently, its online instantiation “Cyber Monday”. Both terms refer to the anticipated rush of commercial traffic in advance of the holiday season. For the retailers themselves, it’s an odd blend of the Apocalypse and Christmas magic, something to dread and anticipate simultaneously. For e-tailers specifically, this season requires that their web portals are capable of navigating huge spikes in online traffic without compromising the user experience. The threshold is extreme. Industry research has revealed that most consumers expect websites to load in under two seconds and that nearly half of them will abandon the site if loading exceeds a mere three seconds.
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture. A truly stable and robust Analytics platform is able to support both the analysis of external data as well as internal data, or data about its own state. Tableau Software is one such analytics platform and Logentries is the ‘listener' that makes analyzing Tableau's system data easier. As a result, our Pluralsight team is better able to understand the finer points of an analytics infrastructure, or what we call DataOps, and release beautiful and functional dashboards and reports for our customers.
Infonetics analyst Clifford Grossner recently released a SDN enterprise study which found that nearly 80 percent of medium and large size businesses plan to implement SDN technology in the data center by 2017. The survey of 153 businesses also revealed that 65 percent of respondents are currently conducting data center SDN lab trials or plan to do so in 2015. Marcia Savage of NetworkComputing cites the Infonetics data and names SDN as a top networking trend in a piece this week titled “What’s Hot In Networking: 7 Key Trends.” We’re excited to see SDN in the spotlight. Marcia’s piece and the Infonetics study are both worth a read before you kick off your weekend.
Are we just looking, or looking to see what we can improve? It's surprising that programmers are happy to quarrel about performance without trying to improve the programs. As programmers we know that small changes in the way an algorithm is implemented can make a difference, and this is one more opportunity to show our skill.
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture. Open source projects allow us to adopt technology without a lot of hoops. We get to leverage a strong community base, and potentially support the growing group committed to building even better solutions, which can have the added benefit of notoriety. But there is one problem - open source is not as it seems. While it might appear free to begin with, it does come with cost down the road in real dollars, pain, risk, and time.
Web Real Time Communications (WebRTC) is changing the way we have traditionally communicated and collaborated. To be specific, the technology allows developers to embed voice, data, instant messaging, and video into web browsers, thereby providing easier and far efficient ways to communicate than Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services such as Skype, WhatsApp, and WebEx. WebRTC has come a long way since its inception in May 2011. Right from achieving interoperability between Chrome and Firefox browsers in 2013 to rolling out support for Android mobile, WebRTC has continued to garner more attention every year. And the market momentum is expected to continue growing. Infact, a recent Analysts Mason report predicts that with Apple and Microsoft incorporating WebRTC in their browsers, there might be 7 billion devices supporting WebRTC by 2020. With that strong growth rate, it is imperative for testers to have a strategy in place in order to test WebRTC applications efficiently. But before we venture down that path, it is critical to understand what's driving this growth and how testing a WebRTC is different from any other web applications.
Whether the goal is to achieve higher levels or productivity or generate greater customer engagement and revenue the venue today is the same: applications. In any application-focused business strategy, availability must be the keystone. When the business at large is relying on applications to be available, any challenge that might lead to disruption must be accounted for and answered. Those challenges include an increasingly wide array of problems that cost organizations an enormous amount in lost productivity, missed opportunities, and damage to reputation. Today's applications are no longer simply threatened by overwhelming demand. Additional pressures in the form of attacks and business requirements are forcing IT professionals to broaden their views on availability to include security and performance.
ChatOps has been one of the more intriguing subtopics of the DevOps movement for me. Since first learning of the term, I’ve had subsequent conversations with teams heavily invested in ways to automate and share as much as possible. ChatOps continues to fascinate me as I watch it catch on with teams large, small, distributed, and not.
We’ve all heard about the rapid adoption of JavaScript in recent years. To summarize, JavaScript is the #1 most-used language on GitHub and it looks like this trend will continue. In fact, as one article put it, “JavaScript is the number one language in the world; it’s the language of the web, and a starting point for so many new developers . . .” One of the major reasons behind the rapid adoption JavaScript has been the influence of Node.js. Node.js is a software platform used for building fast, scalable network applications. It’s based on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, or the Chrome browser runtime, and has gained immense popularity among major enterprises in recent years.
Internet of Things (IoT) will be a hybrid ecosystem of diverse devices and sensors collaborating with operational and enterprise systems to create the next big application. In their session at @ThingsExpo, Bramh Gupta, founder and CEO of robomq.io, and Fred Yatzeck, principal architect leading product development at robomq.io, will discuss how choosing the right middleware and integration strategy from the get-go will enable IoT solution developers to adapt and grow with the industry, while at the same time reduce Time to Market (TTM) by using plug and play capabilities offered by a robust IoT middleware platform.
SYS-CON Events announced today that O'Reilly Media has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
Recently, we released the results from the cloud edition of our 2015 Insider Threat Report. My colleagues Andy Kicklighter and CJ Radford delved into the results in their blog posts from March 24 and March 26, and I’ve gone into a bit more detail about the findings below. But, the purpose of this blog is to do two things: a) discuss what we hear matters when it comes to successful and safe SaaS consumption and delivery and b) with this feedback in mind, outline the tools and capabilities necessary to make this happen.
As pointed out by Mark, it’s very easy to make the cloud look financially attractive when pricing out a single application versus a portfolio of applications. Indeed, I would have to agree one of the most difficult things is to formulate an apples-to-apples comparison of cloud to data center. Even with the concept of reservations, the cloud cannot come close to the amortization of capital allocations across a portfolio of applications. The cloud is all about sizing and costing one application at a time whereas data centers should be all about economies of scale. For the original blog I chose to use a model where capital allocation was occurring on a project-by-project basis. This is a fair estimating technique given many businesses and government agencies use this technique as a way to procure hardware and software. However, it does skew the results in a particular direction. Additionally, as noted by Brent, the original $25,000 price tag could buy the equivalent of $48,000 worth of IBM BlueMix in GB-hours. Then, finally, Mark noted that even the Hosted PaaS has some operational component to them. He is correct here and that was a clear oversight in the original estimate. IT Operations should be reviewing the logs from the Hosted PaaS instance and monitoring the health of the application and its performance.
Chef has announced Chef Delivery, a new DevOps workflow product that enables the continuous delivery of infrastructure, runtime environments – including containers – and applications. With Chef Delivery, the company has captured success patterns of its most innovative customers and distilled them into a product that brings advanced software development practices to all developers and system administrators who manage changes in enterprise IT environments. Customers can sign up today to try Chef Delivery through an invitation program.
Our recent webinar “Exploring the Uncharted Territory of Microservices” featured a panel of thought leaders who combined brought more than 30 years of collective experience to explore Microservices and their surrounding environments. Almost as informative as the session itself, we featured an insightful audience participation Q&A session at the end which allowed listeners to ask questions directly to the panel. The questions and responses both gave deep insight into Microservices as a practice, not just a philosophy. The following questions were discussed.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Litmus Automation will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Litmus Automation’s vision is to provide a solution for companies that are in a rush to embrace the disruptive Internet of Things technology and leverage it for real business challenges. Litmus Automation simplifies the complexity of connected devices applications with Loop, a secure and scalable cloud platform.
Application Performance Management, or APM, is the monitoring and management of the availability and performance of software applications. Different people can interpret this definition differently so this article attempts to qualify what APM is, what it includes, and why it is important to your business. If you are going to take control of the performance of your applications, then it is important that you understand what you want to measure and how you want to interpret it in the context of your business.
The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) appears to be unquestioned. Advances in wearables and sensors are strategic to tech companies, telecoms and manufacturers across multiple domains. Everyone from millennials to boomers is incorporating IoT technologies into the daily flow of life. Gartner says the IoT market will be $300 million in 2020. With all this projected growth, standards will play an increasing role in IoT adoption.
Learn the top API testing issues that organizations encounter and how automation plus a DevOps team approach can address these top API testing challenges. Ensuring API integrity is difficult in today's complex application cloud, on-premises and hybrid environment scenarios. In this interview with TechTarget, Parasoft solution architect manager Spencer Debrosse shares his experiences about the top API testing issues that organizations encounter and how automation and a DevOps team approach can address them.
Services providers have traditionally organized the management and operation of different technologies into several teams with very specific domain knowledge. These teams have been staffed with specialists looking after routing, network services, servers, virtualization, storage area networks, security and various other technology domains. Over time, these functional teams have had the tendency to develop into loosely tied silos.
Best practices for helping DevOps and Test collaborate in ways that make your SDLC leaner and more scalable. The business demand for "more innovative software, faster" is driving a surge of interest in DevOps, Agile and Lean software development practices. However, today's testing processes are typically bogged down by weighty burdens such as the difficulty of 1) accessing complete Dev/Test environments; 2) acquiring complete, sanitized test data; and 3) configuring the behavior of the environment to enable complete test coverage.
InfoScout in San Francisco gleans new levels of accurate insights into retail buyer behavior by collecting data directly from consumers’ sales receipts. In order to better analyze actual retail behaviors and patterns, InfoScout provides incentives for buyers to share their receipts, but InfoScout is then faced with the daunting task of managing and cleansing that essential data to provide actionable and understandable insights.
Learn about the current state of security breaches and what it is costing businesses. One of my recent conversations with a Cloud security expert at a conference opened up doors to some new information for me personally. Our conversation was around the current status of the Cloud Industry, the Security Challenges and how we can make the Cloud more secure and so on. Did you know that security breaches have huge financial implications such as at an average: