The cable companies and telcos who dominate the U.S. market for Internet access won a victory when they succeeded in having the heart of the FCC’s ruling on net neutrality struck down. Now, for the first time legally, those companies can both block content and offer fast lane services at their discretion. I have mentioned several times in my recent series of blogs that the eventual outcome of this decision may not be as obvious as we first thought: it may be less bad than network neutrality advocates feared, and rather less wonderful than some of the anti-neutrality advocates hoped. In previous blogs, I mentioned that neither the device vendors nor the edge providers will sit by passively and let the carrier’s Internet service providers (ISPs) call all the shots. To really understand this, it is worth reviewing other aspects of the Internet as they are actually evolving, as compared to the somewhat static model apparently envisioned by the courts, the FCC and some of the carriers.
My first experience with an “inverted yield curve” was in 2001 just prior to the tech bubble bursting. I was working on a financial portal for an investment bank and one of the charts was a yield curve. It looked odd all of a sudden, so I looked it up in a book of financial terms. An inverted yield is indicated when interest rates for short-term capital are higher than interest rates for long-term capital. In other words, people are willing to pay a significant price to alleviate short-term concerns because they’re focused on the now and not so concerned about one year, three years, five years, or thirty years from now. Inverted yield curves some believe signal disruption in financial markets. On the surface, Cloud First seems to signal the disruption that is cloud computing. To take this metaphor a little further, this inversion of Cloud First from “Cloud Never” suggests to me an inverted set of concerns. Does Cloud First prioritize an immediate need to say “something” about the cloud and cloud strategy? Does Cloud First prioritize the now while discounting near, mid, and long-term opportunities that far exceed the “costs less, more agile, faster time-to-market” recording I hear played daily throughout the blogosphere? Beyond staying Cloud First what else can enterprise technology teams prioritize that may amplify their ability to execute in the cloud?
I have spent the past few weeks watching this video series. I started watching it on the treadmill in the morning before work. I did that until I hit lesson 5. It is 4 hours and 20 minutes long. I started watching lesson 5 in front of the computer, not because I didn't want to walk for over four hours, but because I wanted to look at the code you can download with these lessons. In lesson 5 covers a ton of patterns. The thing I like most about the way the patterns are introduced is that they are introduced working with other patterns. The way patterns should be used, together.
Recently Famo.us made a big announcement around offering their own PhoneGap alternative using a WebView that could use Chrome instead of the Stock Android Browser. Android 4.4 (KitKat) actually offers this out of the box now but it is actually Chrome 30 which isn't quite up to the same feature set of Chrome 33. That means no WebGL or WebRTC, which is a real loss. There are also no plans to roll ChromeView to older versions of Android and the open source project with this intention has considerable issues at this stage, which is a shame. Famo.us plan therefore to bundle Blink (Chrome 33) with Apps in order to offer WebGL and other improvements to Wrapped Web Apps. The downside is of course the size of Blink which is somewhere between 10M and 30M depending on which tech forum you follow. Famo.us plan to get round this by offering a one-off download of a shared library, of course this would need to be updated when the next version of Chrome is released. They have a neat demo showing Chrome 33 features including WebGL running through a WebView on Android KitKat.
In the ongoing debate over net neutrality, brought to the forefront this past week by the Netflix, Comcast, Verizon deal, there is now increasing dialogue about what could happen if some form of real blocking and favoring starts to happen. For some this is the nightmare scenario: only popular and profitable services get capacity, because they can afford to pay. Rates go up significantly and niche applications are blocked or relegated to the slow lane. When you sign on with an internet service provider (ISP), you will then get access to only the restricted portfolio of services offered by the ISP. It will be just like signing on to a cable company and getting just the programming the cable company has chosen. What else should we expect? This is taming the wild west of the Internet and making it just the same as traditional cable TV. But, we have a right to ask, if service providers can adjust charging for the optimization of the increasingly scarce resource of bandwidth, what incentive is there for them to build more capacity? Why not just keep the network the way it is, and command higher and higher prices for the privilege of using it? Actually, the way things are today, with most households and businesses having no choice of supplier (or a choice of two, each with the same philosophy) the ISPs can do what they like, as long as they maintain transparency.
Convincing the astute executive who is cautious in not making an impetuous decision on an APM investment can prove to be challenging. Consider the amount of due diligence that is brought to bear in the decision making process. The wide array of APM technologies that need to be reviewed can be intimidating. The selection criteria for application monitoring doesn't have to be an arduous one, lending credence to the idea that an APM solution can be simplified, understood, and implemented. I'm suggesting that the critical success factors in the adoption of APM center around the End-User-Experience (EUE) and the integration touch points with existing ITIL/ITSM processes.
Almost everyone sees the potential of Internet of Things but how can businesses truly unlock that potential. The key will be in the ability to discover business insight in the midst of an ocean of Big Data generated from billions of embedded devices via Systems of Discover. Businesses will also need to ensure that they can sustain that insight by leveraging the cloud for global reach, scale and elasticity. Without bringing these three elements together via Systems of Discover you either end up with an Internet of somethings and/or a big mess of data. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mac Devine, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, will focus on how to ensure businesses have the right plans in place for Systems of Discovery for the Internet-of-Things world we are entering.
Today’s blog post is headed back to the basics. I’ve been using and talking about APM tools for so many years sometimes it’s hard to remember that feeling of not knowing the associated terms and concepts. So for anyone who is looking to learn about APM, this blog is for you.
AppDynamics, Inc. (AppDynamics), the next-generation application performance management (APM) solution that simplifies the management of complex applications and infrastructures, today announced that the company's founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal and CFO Walter Berger will be presenting at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference 2014 being held in San Francisco on Tuesday, March 4, 2014. Details are as follows:
Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company delivering a new generation of application performance management (APM), has announced a webcast that will examine best practices and lessons learned optimizing Hadoop and NoSQL deployments. With all of the benefits big data offers, pitfalls still exist including slow Hadoop jobs, problems scaling your cluster efficiently or relying on war rooms to find the root cause of issues.
Cascading is the popular Java-based application development framework for building Big Data applications on Apache Hadoop. This open source framework allows you to leverage existing skillsets such as Java, SQL, R, and more to create enterprise-grade applications without having to think in MapReduce. In his session at 5th Big Data Expo, Alexis Roos, a Senior Solutions Architect focusing on Big Data solutions at Concurrent, Inc., will give an introduction to Cascading, how it works, and then dive into how enterprises can start building applications with Cascading. Come and see how companies like Twitter, eBay, Etsy, and other data-driven companies are taking advantage of Cascading and how Cascading is changing the business of Big Data in the enterprise.
In his session at 5th Big Data Expo, Anthony Bak, Senior Data Scientist and Mathematician at Ayasdi, will discuss how Ayasdi uses Topological Data Analysis to solve complex problems for companies, foundations and academics. He will start with an overview of the core algorithm used in TDA and describe how it forms a unifying framework for many machine learning and data analysis tasks. He will demonstrate how Ayasdi turns this idea into a product with uses cases and a live demonstration of the software.
The history of open source has already been written and rewritten a couple of times, so there’s no need to go back to Genesis chapter one and revisit Linus Torvalds’ “just a hobby, won't be big” comments too often. But open source became more than the sum of its parts and the hobbyists grew successful in domains that traditionally belonged to their proprietary relatives. Historical Note: If you do still want the history of open source, then the YouTube hosted Revolution OS is about 100 minutes of the best open development commentary you will find.
The world’s largest and most successful private cloud operations are revolutionizing their approach to demand management. These organizations have recognized that while self-service portals are a component in the overall cloud architecture, these tools do not enable demand management. In fact, in many cases the portals and end-user interfaces don’t actually capture anything to do with demand, but instead force the user to enter the capacity “supply” requirements that they think will meet their demands. This is very different. Large enterprises have recognized the need to look beyond immediate requests to also model the “pipeline” of new demands that will be coming down the road. It is only by capturing new immediate requirements, an understanding of the pipeline and what is running in environments that organizations can possibly hope to accurately model demand and properly allocate compute, storage and network resources.
The new wonder metal, graphene, is being looked at as a building block for communications and electronic devices on the level of what the transistor was sixty years ago. Graphene is a one-atom thick, mesh-like (think hexagonal honeycomb or chicken wire), semi metal that will add more battery-life into a smartphone among other breakthrough ideas like bendable displays. It is also ten times stronger than diamonds so its resiliency is perfect for use in a smartphone or any other device that requires super-ruggedness.
Factors such as growing complexity, staff turnover rates, poor documentation, changes in responsibilities and business strategy have contributed to a lack of understanding and possession of appropriate skills in key corporate IT systems. The current gap in knowledge and know-how has put tremendous strain on today’s IT department, which is expected to manage and execute all aspects of the business portfolio. Possessing a deep understanding of each and every IT system can be a challenge, especially given that some of the countless enterprise software applications have undergone over 40 years of change and enhancement. However, admitting a lack of understanding and awareness will only further damage IT’s already-precarious reputation. So develops IT’s guilty secret – failing to tackle what it does not know.
While any load testing solution will enable you to do some sort of load testing in your Agile environment, comparatively few enable you to follow recommended best practices and overcome the challenges many teams face with load and performance testing on an Agile project. Agile teams rarely have a dedicated performance engineer who shows up on demand to script up a new test when changes to an application causes errors in the old test. You may have one or two testers on your team, but they’re rarely performance experts. In some cases, you may have developers writing their own tests. In any of these scenarios, these team members are going to be pressed for time, and this is no place for a tool that is difficult to use and configure.
In the final post in this series about bringing DevOps patterns to database change management, we’re going to discuss the Third Way. The Third Way: Culture of Continual Experimentation & Learning – This way emphasizes the benefits that can be realized through embracing experimentation, risk-taking, and learning from failure. By adopting this kind of attitude, experimentation and risk-taking lead to innovation and improvement while embracing failure allows the organization to produce more resilient products and sharpen skills that allow teams to recover more quickly from unexpected failure when it does occur.
CIOs cited reducing enterprise costs; improving IT applications and infrastructure; improving efficiency; and improving business processes among the top 10 business priorities, according to a Gartner Executive Program Survey conducted last year. To address these business priorities, many CIOs are rethinking how they architect their IT infrastructure to better deliver applications and services to end users. A study conducted by IDG Research Services[1] in 2013 surveyed 333 IT directors or higher titles at enterprise companies with more than 500 employees and reported that 77% of IT leaders globally believe data center transformation will play a highly important role in delivering business goals to their organizations.
The cloud ecosystem for information technology today is an interesting mix of companies, products and solutions. Information Communications Technology (ICT) refers to the convergence and expansion of telecommunications with information processing and storage. In short, ICT and the cloud mean a combination of compute, storage and network, running a variety of applications. These resources have been commonly located on premise by businesses, ranging from a few racks of equipment in a room for small businesses to football-field size facilities for large companies. Separately owned data center facilities, called Multi-tenant Data Centers (MTDC) enable organizations to augment on premise resources by placing equipment in a rented MTDC space without owning the facility.
Enterprise Cloud Analytics and Business Intelligence enables organizations to leverage the Cloud and provide end to end data aggregation and analysis capabilities. The objective is to develop Analytics on the Cloud to support Business Intelligence and Analysis capabilities. Effective strategic and operational business decisions can be made based on the search, analysis, drill down and visualization of data in real-time to get actionable information for making effective business decisions. In addition predictive analysis can be very useful to predict trends and patterns. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Ajay Budhraja, CTO at the Department of Justice, will discuss enterprise cloud analytics and business intelligence management, solutions, best practices, challenges, trends and specific examples. He will go over the development of a road map, architecture and a data-driven strategy for cloud analytics and business intelligence at the enterprise level for public, private and hybrid solutions. He will also cover approaches to making data accessible through analytic capabilities and the governance, methodology, architecture, security, privacy aspects.
Everybody's got a plan. Until they get punched in the face. It’s go time. You knew it was coming. Now what? VictorOps opens an incident that puts your customized company and personal escalation policies into play. Push notifications to our native mobile apps, SMS messages to your phone, or (gasp!) an actual phone call. We won’t stop until we find you. Drill down to an insane amount of detail without leaving your life. With a swipe of our native Android or iOS mobile app, you’re up to speed on the situation. Are you the one person that sees a pattern in the data that the others don’t? Simply add a post to the timeline to get everyone else on the same page. Never pay SMS or phone overages.
Responsive design, a relatively new concept, uses the same code while targeting different types of devices. The introduction of mobile devices rocked the e-Commerce world. Instead of knowing that potential customers would use a laptop or desktop, those running web-based stores had to begin to account for users with devices with screens of all sizes; from smartphones, to tablets, to full-size monitors. In addition, many of these devices lack keyboards or accurate cursor devices. As a result, many started creating second sites made for mobile devices. However, new techniques have supplanted this strategy, the most popular of which is responsive design.
Introducing the concept of the Service Factory as a Service (SFaaS ), a ground breaking advance over conventional solution and service delivery practices which can deliver transformation to and realization of an agile business architecture without major up-front investment. The service factory concept has been in vogue for some time. As long ago as July 1989 the Harvard Business Review published a seminal article by Chase and Garvin titled The Service Factory[i]. They argued that "The factory of the future is not a place where computers, robots, and flexible machines do the drudge work . . . the next generation, then, will compete by bundling services with products, anticipating and responding to a truly comprehensive range of customer needs."
Virtualization offers cost-value, performance and security benefits by reducing hardware costs, providing virtualized applications that you can reconfigure easily and meeting all regulatory and compliance guidelines. You don't need to make a prohibitive capital investment, and easy expansion into cloud storage and new technologies means that you have virtually limitless scalability. You can use one physical server to run multiple virtual servers, which drastically reduces equipment costs and operating expenses. Most servers today have more multitasking capabilities than most hosting applications use, and installing a multicore server allows you connect four, six or 12 cores to a single CPU. Choices of virtualization software allow you to run dozens of virtual servers with fewer CPU resources. If you use two or more servers for business, then switching to virtual servers helps you meet the challenges of cooling server rooms, containing costs and upgrading computing capacity as hosting demands increase.