The results for Apache Kafka version distribution poll are in. Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote! The distribution pie chart is below, but we could summarize it as follows: It’s great to see Kafka users being so quick to migrate to the latest version of Kafka! We’re extra happy to see such quick 0.8.2 adoption because we put a lot of effort into improving Kafka metric, as well as making all 100+ Kafka metrics available via SPM Kafka 0.8.2 monitoring a few weeks ago, right after Kafka 0.8.2 was released.
So, I've been at my new role for about a month now and I'd like to share with you some observations that I've made with respect to the APM marketplace. In my conversations with many of the leading APM providers, I've seen some improvements in product integration, scale and in some cases, usability, since my earlier foray into this market several years ago. There is some new thinking about the need to support a broader range of users and environments. And in a few cases, some new pricing approaches are being introduced that no longer incorporate disincentives for wanting to use more of the product.
It is not an unusual situation for an Analyst to move into a end user or a vendor role, especially if the analyst came from an operational background originally. I and John Rakowski (Forrester) come from end user practitioner roles before an analyst firm, if anything we are rounding out our experiences and knowledge. We’ve seen several analysts move from Gartner, several I knew well Chris Wolf and Mark Margevicius who are at VMware and Aneel Lakhani at SignalFuse. Several have recently left Forrester as indicated in this article. Everyone knows the APM industry and IT software in general is incestuious, we’re all going to work together again. There are loads of great technology companies out there, and many more ideas to be explored and created.
Software Defined Storage provides many benefits for customers including agility, flexibility, faster adoption of new technology and cost effectiveness. However, for IT organizations it can be challenging and complex to build your Enterprise Grade Storage from software. In his session at Cloud Expo, Paul Turner, CMO at Cloudian, looked at the new Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) market and how it is changing the storage world. Now Software Defined Storage companies can build Enterprise grade rack-ready appliances using commodity servers and still provide all the benefits of Software Defined Storage. You too can have Enterprise Grade at 1C per GB per month.
Red Hat has launched the Red Hat Cloud Innovation Practice, a new global team of experts that will assist companies with more quickly on-ramping to the cloud. They will do this by providing solutions and services such as validated designs with reference architectures and agile methodology consulting, training, and support. The Red Hat Cloud Innovation Practice is born out of the integration of technology and engineering expertise gained through the company’s 2014 acquisitions of leading Ceph storage system provider, Inktank, and cloud computing services provider, eNovance. Both companies provided the highly specialized skills, solution sets, methodologies and product expertise required to launch a truly forward-looking cloud practice capable of helping companies manage the complexities associated with the cloud.
You have to plan your Continuous Delivery pipeline with quality in mind from the outset. The only way to effectively do that is to design tests before development really begins, to continually collect metrics, and to build a test automation architecture integrated into your Continuous Delivery pipeline. The test automation architecture defines the setup of test tools and tests throughout the pipeline and should support flexibility and adaptability to help you meet your business objectives. This test automation architecture should facilitate easy selection of just the right tests to be performed to match the flow of your software through your pipeline as it gets closer to release. From unit tests and code level security, through functional and component testing, to integration and performance testing. The further the software progresses along the pipeline, the greater the number of dependencies on other systems, data, and infrastructure components – and, the more difficult it is to harmonize these variables. Making sane selections of tests to run at each moment in the pipeline becomes more and more important in order to focus on the area of interest.
In my last article, Top DevOps Tools We Love, I proclaimed the availability of deployment automation scripts for our Dynatrace products. Today, you will learn about the basic concepts behind Ansible, which will enable you to roll your own playbook for integrating insightful end-to-end monitoring with Dynatrace into every part of your enterprise application in under 60 seconds. Enterprise applications are typically segregated into multiple, physically and logically independent, functional areas called tiers. As opposed to single-tiered monoliths, the multi-tier pattern enforces a distributed architecture that allows for enhanced maintainability and greater scalability, resulting in increased availability, resilience and performance.
Life may be like a box of chocolates , but Database as a Service is like a stack of pancakes. Let us count the ways… Variety is the spice of life - The last time I looked at the International House of Pancakes (IHOP) menu, there were 16 different kinds of pancakes to choose from. OpenStack Trove doesn't yet support quite that many databases, but between NoSQL and traditional relational databases, it already supports nine different database engines with more coming all the time.
Many of the well-known examples of DevOps success we read in blogs on the Internet paint an idyllic picture of DevOps productivity. A team was facing a stodgy, slow-moving operations department, teams weren’t delivering software on time. Those teams moved to DevOps, became proactive about infrastructure and deployment automation, and an overnight transition to productivity ensues. People are promoted, projects are successful, and developers and system administrators dance hand-in-hand in a finale that has everyone applauding. DevOps is magic, and sometimes this is the reality for smaller projects and startups.
These are some the Key Release Management Metrics our clients use to continually tune their release management process. 1. Number of Changes pending future system releases (Backlog) 2. Number of Successful Changes within a Release 3. Number of Failed Changes in a Release (Percentage of Failed Changes) 4. Number of Outages Caused by a Release 5. Number of Incidents Caused by a Release
As a life-long gamer, I spend an inordinate amount of my time thinking about the vast sums of wealth the gaming industry has squeezed out of me over the last 25+ years. There are two main ways that game companies squeeze some extra profit from their customers in addition to selling games at retail. The first model, the “freemium” model, is well understood by anyone who likes cell phone games. Candy Crush has made millions, $2 at a time.
Application troubleshooting survey reveals integrated tools lead to significant response time improvements Thirty-seven percent of developers rely on user notifications to identify issues, yet integrated tools reduce customer impact by 62%. See the Infographic below or download the complete report here.
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. When we build a JS application, we usually start thinking about optimizing the http request, compression and, sometimes, "uglifying" the JS files.
Over the last several weeks, we’ve examined the risks of using the public cloud in the enterprise workplace. From unauthorized file access to regulatory noncompliance, the potential scenarios vary from dire to more dire – and it’s up to decision makers to take control of their organization’s enterprise file sync-and-share (EFSS) procedures. But what does it feel like to have that control? If you’re currently trying to figure out how and where users are keeping their files, regaining control may sound like a faraway fantasy.
Hello, from a new member of AppDynamics team. I recently joined the team to lead application performance management (APM) product marketing. Last month, when I was talking with Jyoti Bansal, CEO of AppDynamics, he shared his vision for the company. Where the market is heading and how application performance and end-user experience insights can influence business outcome. This conversation not only cemented my decision to join the company, but also I came back with a quest to learn more about a term he used – BizDevOps
This morning I got the following email from a Java developer: “It seems you are doing less Java and more web development every year.” This got me thinking, and I decided to write this blog. Am I still a Java developer after 17 years of using this language? I certainly am. But in today’s world using just one programming language is almost impossible unless you’re willing to limit yourself to the server-side development. I’m not saying this is bad – it’s a huge field for never ending self-education and research. Even from the career perspective becoming an expert in a specific Java field can put bread and butter on your table for years to come. For example, Java experts specializing in performance tuning can charge several times more than a typical Java developer. Some people become experts in security or concurrent programming, which allows them to eat an omelet with truffles for breakfast daily.
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to evolve the way the world does business; however, understanding how to apply it to your company can be a mystery. Most people struggle with understanding the potential business uses or tend to get caught up in the technology, resulting in solutions that fail to meet even minimum business goals. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jesse Shiah, CEO / President / Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., showed what is needed to leverage the IoT to transform your business. He discussed opportunities and challenges ahead for the IoT from a market and technical point of view, including the various connectivity technologies, microcontrollers and processors available with a strong focus on applications. He also showed how to get started from a business and technology perspective so you can quickly bring to market connected solutions that expand business revenue, optimize operations and delight customers and users.
IBM has announced that SoftLayer will offer OpenPOWER-based servers as part of its portfolio of cloud-based services. With the new offering, clients will be able to select OpenPOWER-based “bare metal” servers when configuring their cloud-based IT infrastructure from SoftLayer, an IBM company. Leveraging the OpenPOWER Foundation design concept, the servers were developed to help clients better manage data-intensive workloads on public and private clouds. Increasingly cloud technologies, both private and public, are enabling organizations to extend existing infrastructure, inexpensively and quickly. Servers built on the OpenPOWER architecture are designed to facilitate that transformation.
Where were you on February 3, 2015 at 3:40 p.m. PST? Snowed in? Desperately trying to refresh Netflix? If so, you weren’t alone. It turns out even best and biggest companies experience failure from time to time. Despite the success of their Chaos Monkey approach to operations, the Internet streaming media provider experienced an outage for a little over an hour. Responses from users ranged from outrage to well, hysteria.
SYS-CON Media announced that IBM, which offers the world’s deepest portfolio of technologies and expertise that are transforming the future of work, has launched ad campaigns on SYS-CON’s numerous online magazines such as Cloud Computing Journal, Virtualization Journal, SOA World Magazine, and IoT Journal. IBM’s campaigns focus on vendors in the technology marketplace, the future of testing, Big Data and analytics, and mobile platforms.
Network visibility and access to real-time data surrounding your infrastructure is pretty important, don’t you think? With Boundary, users can identify problems quickly, and ensure their applications and supporting infrastructure are running smoothly and at peak efficiency. We are happy to announce that our integration with Boundary, providers of IT monitoring for DevOps teams, is now available. Getting the Boundary integration up and running is as easy as copying and pasting an API key, which can be found in your VictorOps admin interface. Just click on the Integrations tab and choose ‘Boundary’. You will then see an API token to provide to the Boundary UI. Piece of cake.
A large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make enterprise mobility a must-have business strength. This five-part series of penetrating discussions on the latest in enterprise mobility explores advancements in applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments. Our next innovation interview focuses on how a large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make enterprise mobility a must-have business strength.
I guess most readers of this blog know that Ireland went through a massive bust in 2008/9. The primary cause was a massive building bubble. And because the economy was dependent upon building related taxes, the crash was brutal. One of the side effects of the bubble was that building standards suffered. In one extreme case a block of apartments was constructed with no fire safety protection! There were many, many more prosaic examples. In my own case I had building works completed that had to be completely reworked within a couple of years! The reasons for the low quality were complete lack of governance. In the boom times many people set-up without adequate skills and many developers over-committed to deliver more work than they could manage competently. In Ireland, unlike say the UK, there was no independent building inspection regime. Architects merely had to give approval for work to proceed at the major stages. There was no independent oversight.
Operational Hadoop and the Lambda Architecture for Streaming Data Apache Hadoop is emerging as a distributed platform for handling large and fast incoming streams of data. Predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and Internet-of-Things analysis are examples where Hadoop provides the scalable storage, processing, and analytics platform to gain meaningful insights from granular data that is typically only valuable from a large-scale, aggregate view. One architecture useful for capturing and analyzing streaming data is the Lambda Architecture, representing a model of how to analyze real-time and historical data together.
The challenge facing today’s project management professionals is supporting a more agile approach to software releases while managing orderly governance and production controls that are necessary. Project managers have become air traffic controllers landing more projects more frequently on more runways, and as the skies become more crowded it’s important to understand both the trends and some strategies for managing the increasingly agile enterprise.