Hostway is announcing its hybrid cloud service based on Azure – all backed by managed support for configuration and provisioning, monitoring resource utilization, virtual networks, backup, storage and much more. Now, organizations can choose the best technology infrastructure to run their business whether it’s public or private cloud or a combination.
To achieve "quality @ speed", it's essential to have unrestrained access to a trustworthy and realistic test environment. It is important to recognize that a complete test environment includes the application under test (AUT) and all of its dependent components (e.g., APIs, 3rd-party services, databases, applications, and other endpoints). Service virtualization is an emerging technology that provides DevTest teams access to a complete test environment by simulating the dependent components that are beyond your control, still evolving, or too complex to configure in a test lab.
This blog will be a series of posts that will discuss some of the most important performance metrics. We will analyze real-time data and compare the top performing websites with those at the lower end of the spectrum. Best practices will be discussed in detail to help those who want to build websites that are optimized, without having to compromise on the design or content. Website development has come a long way – from a few simple lines of static HTML and drab layouts to dynamic pages with fluid and interactive designs. Websites are now a complex web of advanced HTML, intuitive code, heavy media content, images, and third-party plugins.
Most enterprises are struggling to innovate and are not investing enough into new technologies to counter disruptive measures. As a result, in a few years, their products are becoming irrelevant in the market. Examples of Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, Blockbuster have been quoted numerous times. Technology has lowered the entry barrier to innovation, and new entrants can easily disrupt the entire business models in a matter of months. Geographical borders do not guarantee any competitive advantages anymore. Any breakthrough or new idea travels around the world in a matter of minutes.
“Infrastructure exists only to meet the demands of applications,” said Ajay Singh, vice president of product management, Nimble Storage. “We recognize the need to bridge the gap between the application and storage owner. By taking an app-centric approach, IT teams are better positioned to meet the service level demands of the business.” Nimble Storage has announced a comprehensive suite of features that are optimized around fast and predictable application delivery. The Nimble Predictive Flash platform allows IT to deliver applications confidently with Quality of Service (QoS) and secure multi-tenancy across VMware, OpenStack, KVM and now Docker Containers. With app-centric management within InfoSight Predictive Analytics businesses now have more visibility and control of application performance. App-based Storage on Demand provides a cloud-like pricing model where enterprises only pay for the storage consumed by each application. This app-centric approach provides greater predictability and ease of management for applications across the enterprise.
Organizations have key business processes that they are constantly trying to re-engineer. These key business processes – loan approvals, college applications, mortgage underwriting, product and component testing, credit applications, medical reviews, employee hiring, environmental testing, requests for proposals, contract bidding, etc. – go through multiple steps, usually involving multiple people with different skill sets, with a business outcome at the end (accept/reject, bid/no bid, pass/fail, retest, reapply, etc.). And while these processes typically include “analytics” that report on how well the processes worked (process effectiveness), the analytics only provide an “after the fact” view on what happened.
Some mainstream IT buyers might think that most cloud infrastructure vendors and service providers are essentially alike. But there are key differences. Besides, given the body of market research to the contrary, there’s clearly no such thing as a "one-size-fits-all" cloud solution. Furthermore, if you believe that a hybrid cloud should support an IT agenda to transform a business, then a viable solution must consider the preexisting systems of record within the enterprise. That’s why forward-thinking CIOs often seek information and guidance on two fronts. First, they want to know how to extract costs from their legacy IT investments. Second, they desire to use that assessment exercise to free-up budget and fund innovation via a DevOps model that would streamline new cloud-native technology deployments.
New forces are impacting the entire value chain of an enterprise. Availability of large amounts of digital data, automation of the production processes, inter-connectivity of the supply chains, and digitization of the customer experience is re-organizing entire industries leading to the transformation of business models. Let’s look at the some of the critical pieces of the value chain and see the impact of the new technologies.
It was a Monday. I was reading the Internet. Okay, I was skimming feeds. Anyway, I happened across a title that intrigued me, “Stateful Apps and Containers: Squaring the Circle.” It had all the right buzzwords (containers) and mentioned state, a topic near and dear to this application networking-oriented gal, so I happily clicked on through. Turns out that Stateful Apps are not Stateful Apps. Seriously.
While Gartner seem to be the primary advocates of software defined everything (SDx), it’s rather obvious that SDx is primarily focused on service delivery, infrastructure and networks. I give full credit to Jason Bloomberg for exploring software defined development and DevOps in his recent blog. [1] He merges SDx and Shift Left ideas saying, “If we combine no-code with DevOps properly, we now have a way of abstractly representing working production software, including its functionality. Not just the limited-scope apps that some no-code platforms are best known for, but full-blown, enterprise-class applications – created from nothing but their abstract representations with the push of a button.”
An Azure platform is running on a virtualized server and hence the above container hosts may not give the same performance as an equivalent container host on a bare metal server. However, this thought process will help organizations to come up with new use cases of utilizing Windows 2016 containers as part of their Infrastructure equations. Again as the industry as seen both SMP and MPP architectures, the usage of SMP should be viewed with respect to specific workloads.
Regulatory requirements exist to promote the controlled sharing of information, while protecting the privacy and/or security of the information. Regulations for each type of information have their own set of rules, policies, and guidelines. Cloud Service Providers (CSP) are faced with increasing demand for services at decreasing prices. Demonstrating and maintaining compliance with regulations is a nontrivial task and doing so against numerous sets of regulatory requirements can be daunting task. CSPs need a foundation that provides a uniform, non-repetitive view across all the requirements.
Keeping pace with advancements in software delivery processes and tooling is taxing even for the most proficient organizations. Point tools, platforms, open source and the increasing adoption of private and public cloud services requires strong engineering rigor - all in the face of developer demands to use the tools of choice. As Agile has settled in as a mainstream practice, now DevOps has emerged as the next wave to improve software delivery speed and output. To make DevOps work, organizations must focus on what is most relevant to deliver value, reduce IT complexity, create more repeatable agile-based processes and leverage increasingly secure and stable, cloud-based infrastructure platforms. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Flint Brenton, CEO of CollabNet, will outline strategies for unifying a continuously changing, fragmented and disparate set of technologies and processes within common community architecture.
As modern operations gain momentum, it is quickly becoming the new norm for business. Infrastructure has become malleable and self-service is in demand. As a result, traditional IT operations need to evolve from legacy models with outdated tools and methodologies — a thought that’s often met with opposition since it’s these very legacy tools that have kept systems up and business running. Yet it is more imperative than ever that ITOps build a framework for managing a more hybrid and agile infrastructure because it is this very agility that keeps organizations competitive in response to the ever-increasing demands of customers and partners.
Adopting storage innovation protects the Nebraska Medical Center from data disruption and adds operational simplicity to complex data lifecycle management. To describe how more than 150 terabytes of data remain safe and sound, we're joined by Jeff Bergholz, Manager of Technical Systems at The Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
I’ve been reading up on APIs cause, coolness. And in particular I really enjoyed reading Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API because it had a lot of really good information and advice. And then I got to the part about compressing your APIs. Before we go too far let me first say I’m not saying you shouldn’t compress your API or app responses. You probably should. What I am saying is that where you compress data and when are important considerations.
Fact is, enterprises have significant legacy voice infrastructure that’s costly to replace with pure IP solutions. How can we bring this analog infrastructure into our shiny new cloud applications? There are proven methods to bind both legacy voice applications and traditional PSTN audio into cloud-based applications and services at a carrier scale. Some of the most successful implementations leverage WebRTC, WebSockets, SIP and other open source technologies. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dan Cunningham, CTO of ReadyTalk, will cover real world examples of how enterprises and vendors alike can modernize infrastructure without ditching existing investments.
IoT is fundamentally transforming the auto industry, turning the vehicle into a hub for connected services, including safety, infotainment and usage-based insurance. Auto manufacturers – and businesses across all verticals – have built an entire ecosystem around the Connected Car, creating new customer touch points and revenue streams. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Macario Namie, Head of IoT Strategy at Cisco Jasper, will share real-world examples of how IoT transforms the car from a static product into a dynamic hub, drawing from experience at Cisco Jasper working with the world’s top 23 automakers. He will discuss how enterprises can leverage IoT to cultivate meaningful customer relationships and lucrative business opportunities.
With online viewership and sales growing rapidly, enterprises are interested in understanding how they analyze performance to positively impact business metrics. Deeper insight into the user experience is needed to understand why conversions are dropping and/or bounce rates are increasing or, preferably, to understand what has been helping these metrics improve. The digital performance management industry has evolved as application performance management companies have broadened their scope beyond synthetic testing that simulates users loading specific pages at regular intervals to include web and mobile testing, and real user monitoring (RUM). As synthetic monitoring gained popularity, performance engineers realized the variations that exist from real end users were not being captured. This led to the introduction of RUM - the process of capturing, analyzing and reporting data from a real end user's interaction with a website. RUM has been around for more than a decade, but the technology is still in its infancy. The digital performance management industry has evolved as application performance management companies have broadened their scope beyond synthetic testing that simulates users loading specific pages at regular intervals to include web and mobile testing, and real user monitoring (RUM). As synthetic monitoring gained popularity, performance engineers realized the variations that exist from real end users were not being captured. This led to the introduction of RUM – the process of capturing, analyzing and reporting data from a real end user’s interaction with a website. RUM has been around for more than a decade, but the technology is still in its infancy.
Gartner’s concept of Bimodal IT argues that for successful digital transformation, IT needs to split into two parts: mode 1 for maintaining and modernizing traditional back-end IT services and mode 2 for agility in building front-end, digital apps. This allows IT to respond to the digital divide emerging in their organizations by operating in two coherent but deeply different modes.
Web Real-Time Communication APIs have quickly revolutionized what browsers are capable of. In addition to video and audio streams, we can now bi-directionally send arbitrary data over WebRTC's PeerConnection Data Channels. With the advent of Progressive Web Apps and new hardware APIs such as WebBluetooh and WebUSB, we can finally enable users to stitch together the Internet of Things directly from their browsers while communicating privately and securely in a decentralized way.
DevOps and microservices are permeating software engineering teams broadly, whether these teams are in pure software shops but happen to run a business, such Uber and Airbnb, or in companies that rely heavily on software to run more traditional business, such as financial firms or high-end manufacturers. Microservices and DevOps have created software development and therefore business speed and agility benefits, but they have also created problems; specifically, they have created software security issues.
With emerging ideas, innovation, and talents, the lines between DevOps, release engineering, and even security are rapidly blurring. I invite you to sit down for a moment with Principle Consultant, J. Paul Reed, and listen to his take on what the intersection between these once individualized fields entails, and may even foreshadow.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Kausik Sridharabalan, founder and CTO of Pulzze Systems, Inc., will focus on key challenges in building an Internet of Things solution infrastructure. He will shed light on efficient ways of defining interactions within IoT solutions, leading to cost and time reduction. He will also introduce ways to handle data and how one can develop IoT solutions that are lean, flexible and configurable, thus making IoT infrastructure agile and scalable.
Today is another exciting day as an Evangelist to a Big Data company, because I love me some data and I love making it accessible to everyone. I got it in my head that I wanted to take my other “how to”, start to finish, make it easy for everyone approach to analytics, and build something that would do the same for people interested in IoT. So I went ahead and started on my IoT journey today in the way I figured it was best. I bought a bunch of sensors and components and a Raspberry Pi (R-Pi) 3, yes I am turning into a hipster nerd. I had asked around to some folks I knew were doing cool R-Pi projects and they all said that it was relatively easy to get into and get going.