Hang around any IT department (or the AppDynamics offices) and you likely won’t finish a cup of coffee before somebody brings up the cost of downtime or the ascent of DevOps. And that’s a good thing, because these are two topics that are central to the value that IT brings to enterprises today and how that value will increase in the future. IDC recently published research on these two topics in its report, “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified,” by IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot. (See the full report.) AppDynamics was happy to cooperate with the study, along with a select group of other enterprise software companies. The survey was conducted among a cross-section of IT personnel in Fortune 1000 companies.
If your business has any investment in public cloud SaaS applications, then it’s time to invest in a Cloud Access Service Broker (CASB). That’s our takeaway from the recently released Gartner security report, “Emerging Technology Analysis: Cloud Access Security Brokers.” More and more enterprises of all sizes are adopting the public cloud, thanks to the cost savings and flexibility and scalability benefits SaaS providers offer. Ninety percent of enterprises that have adopted public cloud applications plan to put more than half their spending towards enterprise SaaS applications by 2018. But they’re doing so in a time rife with public cloud security and privacy concerns, which have turned other organizations way from the cloud. According to Gartner, security and privacy continue to be the top reasons for businesses to avoid SaaS – a choice that offers some security benefits but ultimately hamstrings cloud-averse organizations.
Cloud Foundry open Platform as a Service makes it easy to operate, scale and deploy application for your dedicated cloud environments. It enables developers and operators to be significantly more agile, writing great applications and deliver them in days instead of months. Cloud Foundry takes care of all the infrastructure and network plumbing that you need to build, run and operate your applications and can do this while patching and updating systems and services without any downtime.
Software-driven innovation is becoming a primary approach to how businesses create and deliver new value to customers. A survey of 400 business and IT executives by the IBM Institute for Business Value showed businesses that are more effective at software delivery are also more profitable than their peers nearly 70 percent of the time (1). DevOps provides a way for businesses to remain competitive, applying lean and agile principles to software development to speed the delivery of software that meets new market requirements. IBM's new DevOps Innovation Services help address the challenge of scaling DevOps, enabling enterprises to transform their software delivery lifecycle. The hybrid cloud services combine IBM's industry expertise from hundreds of organizational change and application development projects with the industry's leading application development portfolio, including Bluemix, IBM's open cloud platform-as-a-service. They also apply the flexibility of IBM's enterprise-grade, hybrid cloud portfolio, which was recently ranked by Synergy Research Group as the leading hybrid and private cloud for the enterprise (2). These services are based upon SoftLayer, IBM's premier cloud infrastructure platform.
New functionality is rolling out in SPM Performance Monitoring! Watch this space for future posts on Transaction Tracing, Global and App-specific Server Views, Kafka 0.8.2 monitoring and other cool stuff. For this post, those of you who use HAProxy are in luck as we just added monitoring support for this popular TCP/HTTP load balancer. See also: Apache monitoring, and Nginx & Nginx Plus monitoring.
The NetBeans New File wizards greatly simplify writing boilerplate code. One specific instance is the creation of JPA Controller Classes from an Entity Classes. The class file, or files, written for you will contain all the basic methods of JPA for CRUD operations on the entity or entities that you have. The only small issue is that this class is written for a standalone environment such as what you would find in an environment that does not support Context Dependency Injection. To use this class in a GlassFish environment or other container we have to make some minor changes. When working with GlassFish the first step is to create the glassfish-resources.xml and then the persistence.xml file. If the database and its tables have not been created yet then this is the time to do this. Now create the Entity Classes from Database, also shown in the New File dialog below.
ITIL (formerly known as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) has been the best management practices framework of choice for world class IT Operations organizations. The 5 stage framework: Service Strategy, Design, Transition, Operation, and Continual Service improvement allows for structured processes that support Enterprise Architecture, Service Delivery, and Security initiatives. Structured and controlled planning and change are the bywords here.
There is no universal global guideline when it comes to how data is managed, secured, and accessed. Privacy laws vary from country to country and are still being defined in the digital age. In the face of trends like consumerization, mobility, and the distributed workplace, data residency is fast-becoming a vital issue that requires more attention. Stop and ask yourself. Do you know where your data is?
Last year, we launched Single Sign-On (SSO) to make it easier and more secure to manage your PagerDuty users. We’re excited to add Google Apps as an SSO partner alongside Okta, OneLogin, Ping Identity, Active Directory, and more. Why Use SSO with PagerDuty? Revoke User Access. Using an SSO provider with PagerDuty makes it easy to revoke access from an employee who leaves your company. No more logging into PagerDuty and every other application your employee has access to, instead handle all their access centrally like you wanted. One-Click Corporate Log In. Can’t remember all of the passwords you use for each of the 468 tools you use? No problem. Let PagerDuty federate with your SSO provider and you’ll have one less password to remember.
SYS-CON Media announced today that Vormetric launched a popular blog feed on Cloud Computing Journal with almost 5,000 story reads. Cloud Computing Journal aims to show how and why Cloud Computing is an opportunity for business to implement low cost, low power and high efficiency systems to deliver scalable infrastructure without heavy investment in hardware, training or software licensing.
DevOps is the hottest moving target when it comes to software development methodologies. Many people fear that this fast-paced, barrier-breaking movement will leave information security best practices in the dust. Analysts provide recommendations to security professionals using bingo-laden terms like "moving security to the left" or "get a seat at the table." What we need are real-world examples and tactics for security practitioners to be part of DevOps. In his session at DevOps Summit, Andrew Storms, a DevOps and Information Security professional, discussed how DevOps done right with the inclusion of Information Security, produces products and processes with the potential to be even more secure.
There's no doubt that the Internet of Things is driving the next wave of innovation. Google has spent billions over the past few months vacuuming up companies that specialize in smart appliances and machine learning. Already, Philips light bulbs, Audi automobiles, and Samsung washers and dryers can communicate with and be controlled from mobile devices. To take advantage of the opportunities the Internet of Things brings to your business, you'll want to start preparing now.
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. In a previous post I described how you can log from your java applications to Logentries using log4j and logback with our open source le_java repository on github. Well now thanks to github user joshuadavis you can now log from log4j2 too! See our product documentation on how to get started with le_java and log4j2, and here is theapache documentation for log4j2. Using log4j2 has some benefits over log4j, and is quite easy to transition to from log4j using the log4j 1.x bridge, which simply involves changing your log4j dependency to log4j2's log4j-1.2-api.jar. There are some limitations on this method which are described in full here on the log4j2 migration documentation.
Utilizing data-driven intelligence across the enterprise requires solutions that enable interactive, self-service ways of working with historical and near real-time data. Core Hadoop platform has already solved many of the fundamental (legacy) Big Data access and availability problems. With the addition of standalone query engine Apache Drill, data analysts finally have the freedom to follow their data queries easily across multiple data sources, on demand.
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. In the age of Big Data we are taught that no pile of data is too large or too complex. This is absolutely true. Most data analysis systems can take any type and volume of data - but ingestion is much different from consumption. The way your data is structured directly impacts its ability to be consumed, understood, and correlated with other data. Here are the top 4 ways to make sure your system and app logs help you to do this effectively.
“Will Jaya is a direct source for server integration and storage solutions. If you are looking for any specific configurations for a project we can help you configure based on your needs and requirements," explained Netty Goya, CEO of Will Jaya, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 15th Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
IT professionals continue to debate the benefits of standardization versus the benefits of innovation, and the potential of standards inhibiting engineer and software developer ability to develop creative solutions to business opportunities and challenges. At the Open Group Conference in San Diego last week (3~5 February) the topic of standards and innovation popped up not only in presentations, but also in sidebar conversations surrounding the conference venue.
I'm super excited to announce RxMule, my latest open source project. RxMule provides reactive extensions for Mule ESB, via a set of specific bindings for RxJava. For several years, I've been mulling over the idea of creating a DSL for configuring Mule. Indeed, there is a treasure trove of pre-existing transports and connectors for Mule, which is very compelling for anyone building connected applications (which, nowadays, is probably everybody). Unfortunately developers can be put off by the XML-based DSL used to configure Mule, and thus may pass the opportunity to leverage all this available goodness.
The explosion in SMAC technologies (social, mobile, analytic, and cloud) in recent years has created unprecedented opportunities for those who can code. Indeed, programmers are the gatekeepers who are on the frontlines of the most momentous technological transformation in our history. Those who can code the mobile apps, the games, or the automation software of our digital world will demand the best jobs and garner the biggest promotions. There are no lack of opportunities in software programming and development, and more and more folks are jumping on the bandwagon – either refreshing previous skills or changing careers and learning code from scratch. There have never been more channels available for learning code than present.
Kony, Inc. burnished its mobile development credentials this week, detailing new updates to its visual tools and platform, expanding its partner ecosystem, and launching a new enterprise mobile app marketplace. The combined efforts are designed to help businesses gain enterprise-grade mobile productivity fast, leveraging central services and automation, embracing all end-points from a common code base, and encouraging users themselves to tweak their apps best.
NodeSource, an enterprise-focused software company created to build a robust product ecosystem around Node.js, has announced a $3M in first round seed funding from Crosslink Capital and Resolute Ventures. This funding exemplifies the pent-up demand for Node.js solutions as enterprises abandon their monolithic applications in favor of modern, scalable service oriented architectures. NodeSource's portfolio of clients includes Uber, PayPal, Fitbit, and Netflix. The company delivers powerful Node.js tooling to enterprise customers. The company will use funding to continue expansion with the release of upcoming products and partnerships with Fortune 500 companies. Early on, NodeSource recognized the massive opportunity for Node.js to transform IT organizations worldwide. With current funding, a new generation of products from NodeSource will roll out to better build, monitor, tune, and deploy Node.js applications effectively.
SYS-CON Events announced today that On the Avenue Marketing Group, a sales and marketing firm that utilizes events to market and sell products to consumers, 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. On the Avenue Marketing Group (OTA) is a sales and marketing firm that utilizes events to market and sell products to consumers. On behalf of our clients, we attend thousands of fairs, festivals, expos, concerts, conferences, and sporting events annually, helping them reach millions of individuals nationwide.
The excitement around the possibilities enabled by Big Data is being tempered by the daunting task of feeding the analytics engines with high quality data on a continuous basis. As the once distinct fields of data integration and data management increasingly converge, cloud-based data solutions providers have emerged that can buffer your organization from the complexities of this continuous data cleansing and management so that you’re free to focus on the end goal: actionable insight.
Are your applications getting in the way of your business strategy? It’s time to rethink your IT approach. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Madhukar Kumar, Vice President, Product Management at Liaison Technologies, will discuss a new data-centric approach to IT that allows your data, not applications, to inform business strategy. By moving away from an application-centric IT model where data integration and analysis are subservient to the constraints of applications, your organization will be better poised to integrate data regardless of source, volume, and variation.
Evolve or Die: What Agile and Continuous Delivery Mean for Change Management Change Management was designed to cater for “big bang” software changes with enormous risk, as a means of preventing disaster by exhaustive review. Modern software development has moved on. Continuous Delivery and Agile aren't just speeding up software delivery, they're also improving the quality of software. The speed of Continuous Delivery (CD) makes it fundamentally incompatible with traditional Change Management (CM).