Hortonworks went through an IPO last Friday, December 12, 2014. It’s initial price of $16 soared by 60% immediately after. Today the stock price is $24.70 with a market cap of $1.02B. Another billion dollar club member. They compete with Cloudera and MapR in packaging the open source Hadoop platform for customers. How do they make money when the basic Apache Hadoop is free? – by offering added services like training and consulting. They can also add auxiliary products (not open source) that customers must pay for. The interesting fact is that Hortonworks’s CEO had claimed a $100m revenue this year, but looks like he is way short of that – $33m during first nine months. The future is quite uncertain!
Cloud-based document storage has become surprisingly inexpensive over the years, with some providers offering storage for less than one cent per terrabyte, and in many cases free accounts with 10 or 20 Gigs of storage space on the cloud. I would agree that free storage is actually convenient when it comes to being able to upload documents, data, files photos and a bunch of other stuff to the cloud and downloading it where you want, when you want. Things are looking pretty positive for the consumer. Life is good!
At Graphflow, our mission is to empower online stores of all sizes to grow their businesses by providing them access to the same machine learning and Big Data tools used by the largest and most sophisticated tech players in the market. To deliver on this mission, we decided from the very beginning to go ‘all in’ on Spark for our scalable analytics and machine learning applications. When Graphflow started using Spark, it was on version 0.7.0, and it was relatively immature. A lot has changed over the past year and a half: Spark has become a top-level Apache project, version 1.2.0 was released, and Spark has matured significantly in terms of functionality, deployment, stability, and operations.
In Part I of this blog I explained which metrics on the Web Server, App Server and Host allow me to figure out how healthy the system and application environment is: Busy vs. Idle Threads, Throughput, CPU, Memory, etc. In Part 2, I focus on the set of metrics captured from within the application server (#Exceptions, Errors, etc.) as well as the interaction with the database (connection pools, roundtrips to database, amount of data loaded, etc.). Most of the screenshots shown in this blog comes from real performance data shared from our Dynatrace Free Trial users that leveraged my Share Your PurePath program where I helped them analyze the data they captured. I also hope you comment on this blog and share your metrics with the larger performance testing community.
You use an agile process; your goal is to make your organization more agile. But what about your data infrastructure? The truth is, today's databases are anything but agile - they are effectively static repositories that are cumbersome to work with, difficult to change, and cannot keep pace with application demands. Performance suffers as a result, and it takes far longer than it should to deliver new features and capabilities needed to make your organization competitive. As your application and business needs change, data repositories and structures get outmoded rapidly, resulting in increased work for application developers and slow performance for end users. Further, as data sizes grow into the "Big Data" realm, this problem is exacerbated and becomes even more difficult to address. A seemingly simple schema change can take hours (or more) to perform, and as requirements evolve, the disconnect between existing data structures and actual needs diverge.
You use an agile process; your goal is to make your organization more agile. But what about your data infrastructure? The truth is, today's databases are anything but agile - they are effectively static repositories that are cumbersome to work with, difficult to change, and cannot keep pace with application demands. Performance suffers as a result, and it takes far longer than it should to deliver new features and capabilities needed to make your organization competitive. As your application and business needs change, data repositories and structures get outmoded rapidly, resulting in increased work for application developers and slow performance for end users. Further, as data sizes grow into the "Big Data" realm, this problem is exacerbated and becomes even more difficult to address. A seemingly simple schema change can take hours (or more) to perform, and as requirements evolve, the disconnect between existing data structures and actual needs diverge.
IBM has announced software that allows people to hide or anonymize their personal information on the Web, ensuring protection from identity theft and other misuse. Developed by researchers at IBM's laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, the software – called Identity Mixer – will enable consumers to purchase goods and services on the Internet without disclosing personal information. As consumers hand over personal details in exchange for downloading music or subscribing to online newsletters, they leave a data trail behind that reveals pieces of information about the size, frequency and source of their online purchases that can be traced back to the user. IBM's Identity Mixer software eliminates the trail by using artificial identity information, known as pseudonyms, to make online transactions anonymous. For example, the software allows people to purchase books or clothing without revealing their credit card number. It can confirm someone's spending limit without sharing their bank balance, or provide proof of age without disclosing their date of birth.
"Desktop as a Service is emerging as a very big trend. One of the big influencers of this – for Esri – is that we have a large user base that uses virtualization and they are looking at Desktop as a Service right now," explained John Meza, Product Engineer at Esri, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
IBM has announced software that allows people to hide or anonymize their personal information on the Web, ensuring protection from identity theft and other misuse. Developed by researchers at IBM's laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, the software – called Identity Mixer – will enable consumers to purchase goods and services on the Internet without disclosing personal information. As consumers hand over personal details in exchange for downloading music or subscribing to online newsletters, they leave a data trail behind that reveals pieces of information about the size, frequency and source of their online purchases that can be traced back to the user. IBM's Identity Mixer software eliminates the trail by using artificial identity information, known as pseudonyms, to make online transactions anonymous. For example, the software allows people to purchase books or clothing without revealing their credit card number. It can confirm someone's spending limit without sharing their bank balance, or provide proof of age without disclosing their date of birth.
"Desktop as a Service is emerging as a very big trend. One of the big influencers of this – for Esri – is that we have a large user base that uses virtualization and they are looking at Desktop as a Service right now," explained John Meza, Product Engineer at Esri, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The Internet of Things will greatly expand the opportunities for data collection and new business models driven off of that data. In her session at @ThingsExpo, Esmeralda Swartz, CMO of MetraTech, discussed how for this to be effective you not only need to have infrastructure and operational models capable of utilizing this new phenomenon, but increasingly service providers will need to convince a skeptical public to participate. Get ready to show them the money!
Not only will the Patriots take on the Seattle Seahawks in the big game, but many web based companies will be taking on large-scale traffic challenges after airing their prime time commercials that day. After hearing this, you should ignore the pregame hype, put down the nachos and get your servers ready for maxxed out user load.
"People are a lot more knowledgeable about APIs now. There are two types of people who work with APIs - IT people who want to use APIs for something internal and the product managers who want to do something outside APIs for people to connect to them," explained Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"ElasticBox is an enterprise company that makes it very easy for developers and IT ops to collaborate to develop, build and deploy applications on any cloud - private, public or hybrid," stated Monish Sharma, VP of Customer Success at ElasticBox, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The Internet of Things is not new. Historically, smart businesses have used its basic concept of leveraging data to drive better decision making and have capitalized on those insights to realize additional revenue opportunities. So, what has changed to make the Internet of Things one of the hottest topics in tech? In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Gray, Director, Embedded and Internet of Things, discussed the underlying factors that are driving the economics of intelligent systems. Discover how hardware commoditization, the ubiquitous nature of connectivity, and the emergence of Big Data and analysis are providing the pull to meet customer expectations of a widely connected, multi-dimensional universe of people, things, and information.
AWS was in the premier position having had a head start of more than 4 years in the cloud related business. The lowering of prices by Microsoft; a new CEO; an emphasized bet on the cloud have all contributed to Microsoft Azure's adoption by the enterprises. One of the reasons for this being the better tooling; the variety of applications and services; and not-for-Windows only shift have all contributed. Microsoft brought in a lot of enhancements that should prove this advantage Microsoft has gained further. The storage options with SSDs and the rapid, multifaceted updates to its Azure cloud computing platform are all very attractive for enterprises.
Recently, Forrester analyst Rick Holland brought up the point of quality vs. quantity when it comes to threat indicators. We agree, the focus should never be on the quantity of data, it should be on the quality of data. So the question becomes, where and how can you gather or make sense of this quality threat intelligence?
After reading Sean Michael Kerner’s article in Enterprise Networking Planet earlier this month, I thought I’d add a few thoughts of my own to what he wrote. He discusses SDN and IPv6. Here’s my take on Software Defined Networking (SDN) in 2015: Given the ongoing hype and the range of benefits its proponents extol, I expect to see a continued increase in interest and evaluation of SDN. However with the ongoing battle between the major SDN vendors (OpenFlow, Cisco ACI, VMware NSX, Contrail, etc.) and the fear of ‘backing the wrong horse’, the lack of proven, mature enterprise deployments and the management and monitoring difficulties associated with SDN (most NMS do not yet adequately support SDN) it is unlikely that wide-scale enterprise deployments of SDN will occur in 2015. Whilst the perceived benefit of easing the management and implementation of distributed security policies, access-control and QoS by deploying SDN is undeniably appealing, lack of maturity will hold back wide-scale deployment for some time to come.
15th Cloud Expo, which took place Nov. 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, expanded the conference content of @ThingsExpo, Big Data Expo, and DevOps Summit to include two developer events. IBM held a Bluemix Developer Playground on November 5 and ElasticBox held a Hackathon on November 6. Both events took place on the expo floor. The Bluemix Developer Playground, for developers of all levels, highlighted the ease of use of Bluemix, its services and functionality and provide short-term introductory projects that developers can complete between sessions.
Things are being built upon cloud foundations to transform organizations. This CEO Power Panel at 15th Cloud Expo, moderated by Roger Strukhoff, Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo conference chair, addressed the big issues involving these technologies and, more important, the results they will achieve. Rodney Rogers, chairman and CEO of Virtustream; Brendan O'Brien, co-founder of Aria Systems, Bart Copeland, president and CEO of ActiveState Software; Jim Cowie, chief scientist at Dyn; Dave Wagstaff, VP and chief architect at BSQUARE Corporation; Seth Proctor, CTO of NuoDB, Inc.; and Andris Gailitis, CIO of DEAC, discussed how important public, private, and hybrid cloud are to the enterprise. How does one define Big Data? And how is the IoT tying all this together?
OneCloud Software has launched the OneCloud Partner Program. Responding to demand from prospective partners, the Program offers managed service providers (MSPs) and resellers the resources they need to grow their business with the OneCloud Recovery solution. OneCloud Recovery is an automated solution for disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC), which leverages Amazon Web Services as the disaster recovery site. “This is a tremendous opportunity with an innovative hybrid cloud-based DR product and a partner committed to providing the tools and support that will enable a competitive advantage,” said Marc Crespi, CEO at OneCloud Software. "MSPs will have a superior software solution they can leverage to bring highly differentiated and strong margin offerings to customers, while resellers will have easy to sell and install solution capabilities that will extend their business.”
Smart watches, which pioneered the wearable technology sector, earned collective revenue of US$700 million in 2013 with the sale of 3.1 million units. The sheer magnanimity of these watches can be inferred from quick sale they made and acceptance they received. Smart watches are nothing but wearable computing devices that a user wears for its functional capabilities supported by a matching smartphone.
An operations group tasked with accepting and supporting a software release. This group wants a predictable process, they view releases as incidents to be managed, and they answer to a business that wants predictability and accountability. One or more development groups tasked with creating software to be released. These groups tend to be more diverse. You might have one development group that is using bleeding-edge technology to create a next-generation website that is more research than development, and another group developing applications against Oracle that is more predictable.
In today’s highly connected world, the benefits and widespread adoption of cloud computing are not just limited to enterprises and government agencies; its transformative impact has prompted changes to a variety of businesses across several verticals – both big and small. In fact, a recent study by Emergent Research, ‘Small Business Success in the Cloud,’ found that the percentage of U.S. small businesses using cloud computing is expected to grow by more than half, from 37 percent to nearly 80 percent, by the year 2020.
Amazon, Google and Facebook are household names in part because of their mastery of Big Data. But what about organizations without billions of dollars to spend on Big Data tools - how can they extract value from their data? In his session at 6th Big Data Expo®, Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Databricks, discussed how the zero management cost and scalability of the cloud is addressing the challenges and pain points that data engineers face when working with Big Data. He also shared how the growing demand for cloud-based Big Data workloads and frameworks is shaping the future of Big Data analysis.