The free version of KEMP Technologies' LoadMaster™ application load balancer is now available for unlimited use, making it easy for IT developers and open source technology users to benefit from all the features of a full commercial-grade product at no cost. It can be downloaded at FreeLoadBalancer.com. Load balancing, security and traffic optimization are all key enablers for application performance and functionality. Without these, application services will not perform as expected or have the required resilience. During testing and development, open source and free components, including load balancers, are often used for a frictionless experience free of sales and procurement processes or the red tape that comes along with support and services contracts. However, many of these solutions have limitations that make it impossible to truly replicate the interactions that will happen in a full production infrastructure once the development team creates the iterative link for the service or application to operations in the typical DevOps model.
Trust is the fundamental building block of any relationship. Whether it's personal or business, trust is something that cannot be replaced with anything. There are hundreds of books available on how to cultivate business relationships, how to maintain them, and how to leverage the best from them and so on. What forms the basis of a business relationship and what are the fundamental blocks of building trust? Here are three things that will get you started when thinking about using trust building trust and maintaining trust.
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. Logstash is an open source tool for managing events and logs. It is used to collect, search and store logs for later use. If you are using Logstash to collect logs from across your infrastructure already, and you are looking for more sophisticated log analytics tool, you are in the right place.
In September, Macy’s announced that they will invest $1 Billion into their omni-channel strategy. When spending so much money the question that immediately comes up is how to measure the success? Key questions such as “Are conversion rates increasing as planned?” and “How good is the User Experience for each channel?” need answers. Since my first blog about omni-channel monitoring, I came across a variety of customer implementations. Today, I want to share with you how Solocal Group, provider of the French Yellow Pages (PagesJaunes), brings all key metrics together on a single dashboard.
Do you like the idea of Agile software development, but you don’t think it’s a fit at your organization? Perhaps your enterprise is too rigidly hierarchical, or maybe your projects are too large and complex for Agile? Think again. Agile is well on its way to becoming the standard approach for developing software, even for immense, complex applications for enterprise use. Just ask the United States federal government. That’s the news from this week’s Agile in Government: Mutual Adaptation conference, put on by The Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI), a government IT-focused nonprofit organization. This conference focused in particular on adapting Agile to the government’s labyrinthine acquisition policies and procedures, and vice versa.
In my first blog I wrote about SharePoint System Performance Health Checks beyond looking at CPU and Memory Metrics. In this blog, I cover deployment related performance health problems that I always check when looking at a SharePoint Installation. Especially after deploying new hardware, new sites, pages, views, custom or third-party Web Parts (e.g., from AvePoint, K2, Nintex, Metalogix, etc.) it’s important to perform certain deployment sanity checks. While you may have nobody reporting issues in the moment there are several areas that you constantly need to check before they become a real problem.
There is more to being on-call than just knowing how to type in the latest ChatOps commands, reboot AMIs and print out java stack traces. There are life skills that come from being on-call for a while and fortunately, those are lessons that can be taught. Here at VictorOps we’re currently adding six new engineers to our on-call roster, so I’ve been thinking about the experience of being on-call and how to make the best of it. The first day you go on-call can be frightening. The most important thing to remember is that you’ve already passed the first test. You have the trust and respect of your teammates and are providing them with a valuable commodity: peace of mind. No one wants to be on-call, so stepping up to the plate and taking shifts helps to improve the lives of everyone on your team.
Sensor-enabled things are becoming more commonplace, precursors to a larger and more complex framework that most consider the ultimate promise of the IoT: things connecting, interacting, sharing, storing, and over time perhaps learning and predicting based on habits, behaviors, location, preferences, purchases and more. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Tom Wesselman, Director of Communications Ecosystem Architecture at Plantronics, will examine the still nascent IoT as it is coalescing, including what it is today, what it might ultimately be, the role of wearable tech, and technology gaps still in play, as the industry strives to create a cohesive, secure, scalable, and beneficial network of ‘things.’
The Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS) market will grow to $6.4B by 2018. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, will begin by walking the audience through the evolution of Workspace as-a-Service, where it is now vs. where it going. To look beyond the desktop we must understand exactly what WaaS is, who the users are, and where it is going in the future. IT departments, ISVs and service providers must look to workflow and automation capabilities to adapt to growing demand and the rapidly changing workspace model.
One important differentiator between what passed for digital back in the dot-com days and today’s notion of digital is the role mobile plays. Yes, this company had a mobile site, and they had what the AVP claimed was a “mobile first” plan for their web content, but as yet they had yet to roll out any responsive design. In the final analysis, their digital effort up to this point boiled down to little more than better brochureware, a la 1990s web redesigns. But more significantly, what was entirely missing from their digital achievements (although the AVP did indicate that it was a roadmap item) was pulling together their real-time platform or any of their other software-based products and combining them with the marketing effort that to date is the sum total of their digital effort.
The cloud has transformed how we think about software quality. Instead of preventing failures, we must focus on automatic recovery from failure. In other words, resilience trumps traditional quality measures. Continuous delivery models further squeeze traditional notions of quality. Remember the venerable project management Iron Triangle? Among time, scope, and cost, you can only fix two or quality will suffer. Only in today’s DevOps world, continuous testing, integration, and deployment upend the time metric, the DevOps cadence reinvents project scope, and cost metrics expand past software development to the total cost of ownership of the end-to-end digital initiative.
HP and Aruba Networks on Monday announced a definitive agreement for HP to acquire Aruba, a provider of next-generation network access solutions for the mobile enterprise, for $24.67 per share in cash. The equity value of the transaction is approximately $3.0 billion, and net of cash and debt approximately $2.7 billion. Both companies' boards of directors have approved the deal. "Enterprises are facing a mobile-first world and are looking for solutions that help them transition legacy investments to the new style of IT," said Meg Whitman, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of HP. "By combining Aruba's world-class wireless mobility solutions with HP's leading switching portfolio, HP will offer the simplest, most secure networking solutions to help enterprises easily deploy next-generation mobile networks."
Although programmers for decades have been starting their careers by writing a “Hello World” program, the phenomenon has remained as unknown to the general public as the song of the same name by Lady Antebellum. But the former is now about to change. Programming is in fact the real “new way of working”. For years education for the general public was largely confined to learning how to use computers. Thus we created operators rather than programmers. And today operators of all kinds are rapidly being replaced by automation. Just look at the big banks where people who “worked with computers” – in positions varying from cashier and teller to IT operator – are massively escorted off the property, while those same banks are currently struggling to find enough people who can make “computers work for them”(a.k.a. programmers).
When it comes to finding useful articles, news and general information in the DevOps, CD or Agile industry, LinkedIn is usually the ticket. We all know LinkedIn is a great tool for networking and connecting with friends, but it has also turned out to be a tool used to start meaningful and productive conversations about whatever the latest innovation or industry partnership may be. Many of these conversations are had in specific groups on LinkedIn and if you aren’t a member, you are definitely missing out.
Then I’ve received an LinkedIn email from this woman stating that she had a business proposition for me, and if I was interested, she was ready to explain. She also provided her email that ended in outlook.com. I checked her LinkedIn profile again. Looked legit. She even had a Twitter account with recent tweets in two languages. I responded that I was ready to hear about this business proposition. Next day I’ve received a long email from her explaining how she had a private client named Lewis Fain who initially deposited €19M in their bank and she helped him to grow the wealth to €22M, but unfortunately he died in a car crash. She’s ready to wire transfer me the money, in one condition: we’d split the amount in half so she could improve the wellbeing of her family. She also asked me not to ruin her career in the bank if I was not interested.
In the consumer IoT, everything is new, and the IT world of bits and bytes holds sway. But industrial and commercial realms encompass operational technology (OT) that has been around for 25 or 50 years. This grittier, pre-IP, more hands-on world has much to gain from Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications and principles. But adding sensors and wireless connectivity won’t work in environments that demand unwavering reliability and performance. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ron Sege, CEO of Echelon, will discuss how as enterprise IT embraces other IoT-related technology trends, enterprises with industrial or commercial facets must also find ways for the disparate worlds of OT and IT to work together harmoniously.
When people talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) they tend to think about big data technologies like Hadoop where petabyte size datasets are store and analyzed for both known and unknown patterns. What many people don’t realize is that many IoT use cases only require small datasets.
One of the biggest impacts of the Internet of Things is and will continue to be on data; specifically data volume, management and usage. Companies are scrambling to adapt to this new and unpredictable data reality with legacy infrastructure that cannot handle the speed and volume of data. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Don DeLoach, CEO and president of Infobright, will discuss how companies need to rethink their data infrastructure to participate in the IoT, including: Data storage: Understanding the kinds of data: structured, unstructured, big/small? Analytics: What kinds and how responsive do you need to be? Reporting: What kinds of reports are needed beyond the standard statutory reports?
The true value of the Internet of Things (IoT) lies not just in the data, but through the services that protect the data, perform the analysis and present findings in a usable way. With many IoT elements rooted in traditional IT components, Big Data and IoT isn’t just a play for enterprise. In fact, the IoT presents SMBs with the prospect of launching entirely new activities and exploring innovative areas. CompTIA research identifies several areas where IoT is expected to have the greatest impact.
It’s become easy to monitor applications that are deployed on hundreds of servers – thanks to the advances in application performance management tools. But the more data you collect the harder it is to visualize the health state in a way that a single dashboard tells you both the overall status as well as the problematic component. Eugene Turetsky (Dynatrace) and Stephan Levesque (SSQ Financial Group) shared their solution for monitoring large IT infrastructures that contain several hundred components that support SSQ’s most-critical applications running on a variety of technology stacks including WebLogic, Oracle Databases, Ingres Databases, and WebSphere MQs. When Stephan showed me his SSQ dashboards, I knew I had to write a blog about this.
Over the last couple of years I have talked to numerous enterprise customers, analysts, industry pundits, and others interested in cloud technologies, and one thing is abundantly clear – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) seems to mean different things to different people. But the term PaaS is irrelevant – it's just noise. What is relevant, and what is important, is what PaaS does: enable applications. That's what enterprises care about. They want to accelerate application development to get products to market faster and into users' hands sooner.
Without question, the rise in cyberleaks, nation-state cyber terrorism and the beach of consumer data across multiple industry domains has led to a heightened awareness of the enterprise and personal responsibilities associated with cybersecurity. The consumerization of IT and the adoption of cloud, mobile and social media by enterprise organizations is opening a new threat landscape and new threat vectors. Everyone is affected and everyone is talking about it, from senior executives to teenagers.
I work in the Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant. We conduct original research, analyze the results and share it with the world. We also study trends from all sources and ponder their implications across many industries. My focus is most often on mobile computing technologies and systems, and IoT (Internet of Things). When we meet with large multinational companies, the most valuable thing they seek from us are ideas. Although we fancy ourselves to be analyst, writers and lecturers, we are in fact - merchants of ideas.
Application experience aficionados take note: you have choices now. No longer are you constrained to just HTTP/1 with a side option of WebSockets or SPDY. HTTP/2 is also an option, one that like its SPDY predecessor brings with it several enticing benefits but is not without obstacles.
In fact, it is those obstacles that may hold back adoption according to IDG research, "Making the Journey to HTTP/2". In the research, respondents indicated several potential barriers to adoption including backward compatibility with HTTP/1 and the "low availability" of HTTP/2 services.
In what's sure to noticed as a circular dependency, the "low availability" is likely due to the "lack of backward compatibility" barrier. Conversely, the lack of backward compatibility with HTTP/1 is likely to prevent the deployment of HTTP/2 services and cause low availability of HTTP/2 services. Which in turn, well, you get the picture.
This is not a phantom barrier. The web was built on HTTP/1 and incompatibility is harder to justify today than it was when we routinely browsed the web and were shut out of cool apps because we were using the "wrong" browser. The level of integration between apps and reliance on many other APIs for functionality pose a difficult problem for would-be adopters of HTTP/2 looking for the improved performance and efficacy of resource utilization it brings.
But it doesn't have to.
You can have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.
What you want is some thing that sits in between all those users and your apps and speaks their language (protocol) whether it's version 1 or version 2. You want an intermediary that's smart enough to translate SPDY or HTTP/2 to HTTP/1 so you don't have to change your applications to gain the performance and security benefits without investing hundreds of hours in upgrading web infrastructure. What you want is an HTTP Gateway.
At this point in the post, you will be unsurprised to learn that F5 provides just such a thing. Try to act surprised, though, it'll make my day.
One of the benefits of growing up from a load balancing to an application delivery platform is that you have to be fluent in the languages (protocols) of applications. One of those languages is HTTP, and so it's no surprise that at the heart of F5 services is the ability to support all the various flavors of HTTP available today: HTTP/1, SPDY, HTTP/2 and HTTP/S (whether over TLS or SSL). 
But more than just speaking the right language is the ability to proxy for the application with the user. Which means that F5 services (like SDAS) sit in between users and apps and can translate across flavors of HTTP. Is your mobile app speaking HTTP/2 or SPDY but your app infrastructure only knows HTTP/1? No problem. F5 can make that connection happen. That's because we're a full proxy, with absolute control over a dual-communication stack that lets us do one thing on the client side while doing another on the server side. We can secure the outside and speak plain-text on the inside. We can transition security protocols, web protocols, and network protocols (think IPv4 - IPv6).
That means you can get those performance and resource-utilization benefits without ripping and replacing your entire web application infrastructure. You don't have to reject users because they're not using the right browser protocol and you don't have to worry about losing visibility because of an SSL/TLS requirement.
You can learn more about F5's HTTP/2 and SDPY Gateway capabilities by checking out these blogs:
Sensor-enabled things are becoming more commonplace, precursors to a larger and more complex framework that most consider the ultimate promise of the IoT: things connecting, interacting, sharing, storing, and over time perhaps learning and predicting based on habits, behaviors, location, preferences, purchases and more. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Tom Wesselman, Director of Communications Ecosystem Architecture at Plantronics, will examine the still nascent IoT as it is coalescing, including what it is today, what it might ultimately be, the role of wearable tech, and technology gaps still in play, as the industry strives to create a cohesive, secure, scalable, and beneficial network of ‘things.’