In my last post, I talked about how I keep my approach to application performance simple – I use my one semester’s worth of microeconomics knowledge to continuously evaluate the supply and demand sides of my application architecture. What can go wrong, right? :-) One of the points we’ll explore further in this post is that supply shouldn’t be viewed simply as a measure of hardware capacity. Better to view supply as that which is demanded (see what I did there…?). In a complex environment, supply can be measured as the number of connections, available SOA services, process space, and hardware. Here’s a good visualization of what I’m talking about:
There's a real buzz about microservices and containers in the application development and DevOps communities, and of course these are topics we've been talking about a great deal lately here at XebiaLabs too. Microservices and containers offer many attractive features, not least the potential for enhanced flexibility, and a robust architecture based on best-fit services. What we at XebiaLabs are really interested in is how organizations can effectively deliver microservices-based apps to better serve their customers and users. As we break down monolithic applications and move complexity from within to between applications, how do we cater for the new challenges?
More organizations are embracing DevOps to realize compelling business benefits such as more frequent feature releases, increased application stability, and more productive resource utilization. However, security and compliance monitoring tools have not kept up and often represent the single largest remaining hurdle to continuous delivery. In their session at DevOps Summit, Justin Criswell, Senior Sales Engineer at Alert Logic, Ricardo Lupo, a Solution Architect with Chef, will discuss how to successfully integrate security controls in your DevOps program.
The Android Wear app that Hyundai demonstrated at CES several weeks ago is now available on Google Play, letting owners of appropriately-equipped models control their cars from their wrists. The app is basically a scaled-down version of the Blue Link app already available for Android phones — you can start and stop the engine, lock and unlock the doors, find the car if you can't remember where you parked it, and flash the lights, among other things. The app also supports voice controls, so you can just say things like "find my car" instead of tapping through the UI.
Once at a trade show I was challenged by someone who used a low-priced SMB tool to monitor his network of about 50 devices. He insisted it could do everything Entuity could do, for example, it offered event management just like ours. Well…not quite. Lots of vendors offer event management but dig deeper and you’ll likely find that they fall at one of four levels.
Instant API is a true API-as-a-Service which makes it easy and cost-effective to build an API. Instant API has simplified all of the key areas of an API’s lifecycle, covering API creation, hosting, management, discovery, monetization, and documentation. For example, let’s say you have information and services or data and services you want to expose through an API that can be used internally for BYOD initiatives or externally by developers or your business partners. With the API deployed, you still don’t have a mobile app. That’s where the Appery.io platform comes in. Appery.io makes it very easy to build mobile apps with any API. Combine the Instant API exposed APIs with the Appery.io cloud-based development platform, and you get a fast way to build a complete solution and deploy the mobile app.
When it comes to microservices there are myths and uncertainty about the journey ahead. Deploying a “Hello World” app on Docker is a long way from making microservices work in real enterprises with large applications, complex environments and existing organizational structures. February 19, 2015 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET → 45 Minutes Join our four experts: Special host Gene Kim, Gary Gruver, Randy Shoup and XebiaLabs’ Andrew Phillips as they explore the realities of microservices in today’s IT world:
In many organizations governance is still practiced by phase or stage gate peer review, and Agile projects are forced to accommodate, which leads to WaterScrumFall or worse. But governance criteria and policies are often very weak anyway, out of date or non-existent. Consequently governance is frequently a matter of opinion and experience, highly dependent upon the experience of individual reviewers. As we all know, a basic principle of Agile methods is delegation of responsibility, and ideally we need to delegate governance to the Agile practitioners and teams. So the question is how to implement self-governance and ensure quality and consistency of governance?
The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly in the process of breaking from its heretofore relatively obscure enterprise applications (such as plant floor control and supply chain management) and going mainstream into the consumer space. More and more creative folks are interconnecting everyday products such as household items, mobile devices, appliances and cars, and unleashing new and imaginative scenarios. We are seeing a lot of excitement around applications in home automation, personal fitness, and in-car entertainment and this excitement will bleed into other areas. On the commercial side, more manufacturers will embed sensors in their products and connect them to the Internet to monitor their performance and offer pro-active maintenance services. As a result, engineers who know how to incorporate software and networking into their mechanical designs will become more in demand.
Performing this task will resolve a problem that occurs when using NetBeans to configure a JDBC Connection Pool and JDBC Resource for GlassFish. The default installation of NetBeans and GlassFish results in the naming of the JDBC configuration file as sun-resources.xml when it should be named glassfish-resources.xml. This is a Windows only problem. The first step is to install NetBeans if you have not already done so. I recommend the Java EE version. Download and install. All the defaults during install are acceptable. Install GlassFish but it is not necessary to install Tomcat. When GlassFish is installed with NetBeans it is configured as available to NetBeans. You can see this in the Services tab under Servers.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a technology designed to make DevOps easier and allow developers to focus on application development. The PaaS takes care of provisioning, scaling, HA, and other cloud management aspects. Apache Stratos is a PaaS codebase developed in Apache and designed to create a highly productive developer environment while also supporting powerful deployment options. Integration with the Docker platform, CoreOS Linux distribution, and Kubernetes container management system brings more scalability and flexibility to Apache Stratos PaaS. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Lakmal Warusawithana, Director of Cloud Architecture at WSO2 Inc., will discuss installing and deploying sample applications using Docker, CoreOS and Kubernetes, and walkthrough how it can be extended to support new application containers. He will also demonstrate app deployment, provisioning, auto-scaling, and more.
SYS-CON Media announced today that Symantec, a provider of leading security, backup and availability solutions for where vital information is stored, accessed and shared, has launched new ad campaigns on SYS-CON's i-Technology sites, which include Cloud Computing Journal, DevOps Journal, Virtualization Journal, and IoT Journal. Symantec’s campaigns focus on Disaster Recovery and High Availability, the availability of business-critical applications in today’s complex heterogeneous environments, intelligent storage management software, and the Agile Data Center and Agile IT.
In every era of innovation, disruptive technologies have had their disbelievers who resisted adopting new concepts. But in today’s business world, “being disruptive” has really empowered many businesses to make tough decisions, investments, and lead the changes that need to be seen organization-wide. Now, many disruptive technologies are truly the foundation for growth – like cloud. Unfortunately, the same pioneering attitude from the executive team doesn’t always trickle down to the internal IT departments. For example, the companies that manufacture, supply, and service some of the most remarkable high-tech equipment in the world often heavily rely on outdated IT systems to run their own internal processes.
Over on the other side of the fence IT ops are screaming at the various portfolio dev teams for releasing highly risky functionality way too frequently but since the Agile dev adoption production has only had a couple of low priority P4 incidents caused by bad code releases. Things must be looking good with the new dev process but then a few months down the track BAM a P1 incident the Monday morning after a agile delivered release is deployed. Highly important business functionality is broken in one of the downstream systems. It's all hands to the pump and both IT dev and IT Ops team are getting frustrated with each other trying to resolve the incident holding back blame on which side of the fence caused the incident. A few hours later all fixed and the communication goes out to the business that prod incident is resolved.
The results of a global study commissioned by CA Technologies reveal that mobile and desktop applications have become the new battleground for brand loyalty. In today’s software-driven world, where consumers are more discerning about what they expect from applications, the reality is that businesses that fail to deliver a positive application experience risk losing as much as a quarter of their customer base. “Consumers no longer view applications as nice-to-have novelties. They now have a huge impact on customer loyalty,” said Andi Mann, vice president, Strategic Solutions, CA Technologies. “As businesses navigate a new, always-connected reality that produces vast amounts of ambient data, they must react by delivering a personalized, secure and engaging application experience.”
Virtualization is everywhere. Enormous and highly profitable companies have been built on nothing but virtualization. And nowhere has virtualization made more of an impact than in Cloud Computing, the rampant and unprecedented adoption of which has been the direct result of the wide availability of virtualization software and techniques that enabled it. But does the cloud actually require virtualization?
To remain competitive in 2015, midmarket companies must consider the advantages of adding mobile capabilities and analytics to their existing ERP systems. Investing in mobile and analytics technology can lead to improved cost and operational efficiencies, expanded real-time collaboration with customers, vendors and partners, as well as faster and more personalized customer experiences. With technological advances in mobile, analytics, and business intelligence more accessible to the midmarket, now is the time for organizations to update their ERP systems to support the latest technical applications and capabilities.
One of the most exciting parts of this week's Apple Watch launch was the example of the BMW watch app. This app allows you to see the charging status of your BMWi electric car, right from your wrist. You can also check the status of the doors of your car (important information such as if they are locked or not!). Although the star of the show was the watch app, APIs had a cameo appearance, since the information shown on the watch is fetched in real-time from APIs.
A successful recurring revenue business requires a focus on monetization across every aspect of the customer relationship, not just billing or payments. Monetization is an end-to-end process from activation through cancelation. While traditional billing systems are designed to manage one-time sales, modern systems are designed to support recurring revenue management with the functionality and integration capabilities necessary to coordinate and manage business processes and customer touch points.
Even as cloud and managed services grow increasingly central to business strategy and performance, challenges remain. The biggest sticking point for companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud is data security. Keeping data safe is an issue in any computing environment, and it has been a focus since the earliest days of the cloud revolution. Understandably so: a lot can go wrong when you allow valuable information to live outside the firewall. Recent revelations about government snooping, along with a steady stream of well-publicized data breaches, only add to the uncertainty
As organizations shift toward IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection &E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist - Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships, will discuss how to cut costs, scale easily, and unleash insight with CommVault Simpana software, the only singular data and information management solution for cloud data protection and beyond.
When it comes to cybersecurity initiatives, the U.S. government has not taken a back seat. Perhaps owning to the number of high profile breaches and damaging insider attacks that have occurred in the past few years, this White House in particular has been very vocal about the federal government’s role in putting a stop to cyberattacks. Recent examples of this include Obama’s visit to Stanford University to put meet with CEOs and CSOs at major companies and discuss cybersecurity challenges, the establishment of a cybersecurity center to collect cybersecurity intelligence and the signing of an executive order to promote information sharing. In January, Congress also kicked off hearings about a national breach notification law; the law’s tenants would, in most cases, mandate breach notification to consumers within 30 days. Currently, there are 51 differing state and territorial breach notification rules in effect. The proposed federal data breach legislation to regularize responses across the country would replace the patchwork of varied laws on the topic.
JFrog on Thursday announced that it has added Docker support to Bintray, its distribution-as-a-service (DaaS) platform. When combined with JFrog’s Artifactory binary repository management system, organizations can now manage Docker images with an end-to-end solution that supports all technologies. The new version of Bintray allows organizations to create an unlimited number of private Docker repositories, and through the use of fast Akamai content delivery networks (CDNs), it decreases the download time of large Docker repositories, speeding DevOps work significantly. Bintray’s highly available service and download layer also helps Docker users eliminate service disruption and performance degradation issues.
Performance is the intersection of power, agility, control, and choice. If you value performance, and more specifically consistent performance, you need to look beyond simple virtualized compute. Many factors need to be considered to create a truly performant environment. In his General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, discussed how to take advantage of a multitude of compute options and platform features to make cloud the cornerstone of your online presence.
An anatomy of startup ventures for the Internet of Things market. Like GE describes in their white paper Pushing the Boundaries of Mind and Machine, this is basically a process of innovating through more intelligent machines to reinvent workflow models. For a useful overview as to what constitutes an ‘IoT startup’, check out one example for some key characteristics: Hutgrip. Hutgrip is a SaaS solution that replaces VPNs with the Cloud and real time analytics, with the headline points being: Clear description of the business benefit the new technology will bring – Smarter automation of big cost processes will drive huge savings for many firms. Very nicely presented too.