Our guest on the podcast this week is JP Morgenthal, Global Solutions Executive at CSC. We discuss the architecture of microservices and how to overcome the challenge of making different tools work together. We learn about the importance of hiring engineers who can compose services into an integrated system.
APIs have taken the world by storm in recent years. The use of APIs has gone beyond just traditional "software" companies, to companies and organizations across industries using APIs to share information and power their applications. For some organizations, APIs are the biggest revenue drivers. For example, Salesforce generates nearly 50% of annual revenue through APIs. In other cases, APIs can increase a business's footprint and initiate collaboration. Netflix, for example, reported over 5 billion calls per day to its API in 2014.
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.
*This is part of a series of blogs examining Sensor-2-Server (S2S) communications, development, security and implementation. For the past two weeks, we’ve taken an in-depth look at what Sensor-2-Server communications are, how to implement these systems, and some of the specific aspects of communication that these systems facilitate. This week, for our final installment, we’ll examine some of the benefits, as well as security considerations, for S2S communications.
Manufacturing is in the midst reinventing itself on the heels of the latest IoT innovations. The industrial automation paradigm, which some say also gave rise to the lean manufacturing management philosophy, continues to influence organizations that wish to find new ways to capitalize on business opportunities in the digital age. Through that lens we gathered the top articles from the week and found some interesting perspectives. Some reports started suggesting manufacturing is in a time of trouble, both in the U.S. and around the globe, namely in places like China. But upon further investigation, we also find exciting trends that are shaping the evolution of manufacturing.
Modern threat defense presents many new challenges to enterprises, resulting from the sophisticated threat techniques, new threat actors like organized cybercrime groups and nation states, and the ever-evolving IT infrastructure. Advanced malware threats are fundamentally different from the threats of yesterday.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, Inc., the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Alert Logic has announced that it received a grant by Invest Northern Ireland in support of its security research and technology development center located in Belfast. The £572,000 grant will enable the continued growth of its Belfast office in Northern Ireland by supporting approximately 90 jobs.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Avere Systems, a leading provider of enterprise storage for the hybrid cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Avere Systems has announced that NASA has selected Avere to help consolidate legacy storage and move many of its datasets to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Avere will be supporting the Ames Research Center, NASA’s Silicon-Valley field center, which has led NASA in conducting world-class research and development. Breakthrough research conducted at the Ames Research Center includes advancements in supercomputing, NexGen air transportation, missions for low-Earth orbit and the moon, lunar science and advancing human-technology interaction.
Internet of Things (IoT) platforms have evolved. Advances in technology make it possible for facilities to become more data-driven by connecting to energy assets, thereby improving building resiliency and reducing energy costs. By creating an Energy Network of Things, facilities can manage energy assets in real-time, institute system-wide operational oversight and compliance, execute energy efficiency programs, utilize real-time data, and support budgeting and asset planning across local and geographically-dispersed sites.
What is the cloud? Does my data really sit on fluffy white clouds and float above the world? What happens when an airplane drives through my spreadsheet, or a bird gets stuck in my document? The scope of cloud technology and cloud computing is growing, as is its adoption. Your prospects and clients could be using it right now and not even know it. When working with the right IT services provider, cloud technology helps small-to-medium-sized businesses scale up the IT needs of their companies much faster than setting up new hardware.
WebRTC: together these advances have created a perfect storm of technologies that are disrupting and transforming classic communications models and ecosystems. In his session at WebRTC Summit, Cary Bran, VP of Innovation and New Ventures at Plantronics and PLT Labs, provided an overview of this technological shift, including associated business and consumer communications impacts, and opportunities it may enable, complement or entirely transform.
DevOps bridges the gap between Development and Operations to accelerate software delivery and increase business agility and time-to-market. With its roots in the Agile movement, DevOps fosters collaboration between teams and streamlines processes, with the goal of breaking silos in order to “go fast.” Information Security (InfoSec) and compliance are critical to businesses across the globe, especially given past examples of data breaches and looming cybersecurity threats. InfoSec has long been thought of as the group that "slows things down" - the wet towel to your DevOps efforts - often requiring a more conservative approach as a means of mitigating risk. Traditionally, DevOps was viewed as a risk to InfoSec, with the increased velocity of software releases seen as a threat to governance and security/regulatory controls (these, by the way, often require the separation of duties, rather than the breaking of silos.)
transform operational efficiency and safety for businesses and communities, especially during critical situations. During these critical events, man-made incidents or natural disasters, identifying and reaching employees with reliable and automated communications can not only protect business assets, but can be the difference between life and death. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Imad Mouline, chief technology officer for Everbridge, will highlight incident communications best practices and use cases that harness IoT – whether it be leveraging access control data to identify and communicate to dynamic employee locations, or automating downstream communications directly from public infrastructure.
Lots of things are happening there. As of today it’s the liveliest software ecosystem. The last time I’ve seen such an interesting gathering was 15 years ago in Java. Fifteen years ago Java developers were looking down on the JavaScript folks. It was assumed that JavaScript was only good for highlighting menus and making an impression that the Web site is current by displaying a running clock on the page. Mobile phones still had buttons with one digits and three letters. There were no App stores. Java was promising “Write once run everywhere”, but now we can see that JavaScript actually delivered on this promise.
How well do you know your code? It sounds like a strange question, but please indulge me. Maybe you're a manager or business analyst. If this is the case, you ‘know' the code through a translation layer in which the developers in your organization explain what it does. Sometimes you can see what it does by interacting with it as a user or by reading incident reports. But to really know and understand what it would do - to have a grasp on how it will behave in an arbitrary situation - you need one or more developers to give you an explanation.
Advances in technology are redefining how energy assets are managed. Buildings that use energy IoT technology can connect to and manage their energy assets in real-time. They can institute system-wide operational oversight and compliance, execute energy efficiency programs, utilize real-time data, and support budgeting and asset planning across local and geographically-dispersed sites with first-of-its-kind connectivity.
I was a guest on Scriptrock's podcast series. We discussed cloud security and DevOps. We even talked about my all time favorite album.
As enterprises today undergo digital transformation, they become software-driven organizations. But software-driven is somewhat of a misnomer, because software alone is only an enabler – just as software-based tools are not the core of DevOps, but merely DevOps enablers. In reality, to become software-driven, companies must transform organizationally – and the key to such transformation is self-organization. What we’re missing, however, is a self-organization playbook. That’s where DevOps can help. Getting DevOps to work means getting self-organization to work. The challenge then becomes spreading the approach beyond the software organization.
WebRTC defines no default signaling protocol, causing fragmentation between WebRTC silos. SIP and XMPP provide possibilities, but come with considerable complexity and are not designed for use in a web environment. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of the Matrix.org, discussed how Matrix is a new non-profit Open Source Project that defines both a new HTTP-based standard for VoIP & IM signaling and provides reference implementations.
The evolution of JavaScript and HTML 5 to support a genuine component based framework (Web Components) with the necessary tools to deliver something close to a native experience including genuine realtime networking (UDP using WebRTC). HTML5 is evolving to offer built in templating support, the ability to watch objects (which will speed up Angular) and Web Components (which offer Angular Directives). The native level support will offer a massive performance boost to frameworks having to fake all these features like Polymer and Angular. It will also encourage people who are not familiar with these next generational frameworks to get in on the action. As I am from a gaming background then I always complain that TCP (Web Sockets) is not genuinely real-time, so I look forward to seeing UDP (WebRTC) solutions being delivered like Desktop Sharing in Chrome 34.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Noah Harlan, Founder of Two Bulls and President of AllSeen Alliance, will discuss why open source frameworks are vital for the future of IoT. Noah Harlan is President of AllSeen Alliance and a Founder of Two Bulls, a leading mobile software development company with offices in New York, Berlin, and Melbourne. He is also Managing Director of Digital Strategy for Sullivan NYC, a brand engagement firm based in New York. He has served as an advisor for the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy on gaming and the outdoors, has appeared as a commentator on Bloomberg TV discussing mobile technology, and has an Emmy Award for Advanced Media Interactivity.
A year ago, I wrote a two-part series on how lower cost, higher performance on-premise storage and nearly free cloud based storage were driving both innovation and disruption in the storage industry. Applying Clayton Christensen's theory of innovation and disruption to the storage industry, my premise was that flashy startups, (e.g. Pure, Nimble, VMem, Tegile and Tintri) that were first to introduce credible data reduction to flash arrays were innovators but not disruptors in the space and would therefore disappoint investors; storage incumbents (e.g. HDS, EMC and IBM) who added data reduction would continue to survive; but the real disruptors would be the cloud players (e.g., Amazon, Google and Microsoft). The combination of struggling share prices, weak earnings reports, recent acquisitions, and raging cloud revenue witnessed throughout 2015 and into 2016 continue to point to Christensen's theory as the explanation for an ongoing economic transformation that will forever change the storage industry as we know it.
Alexandre Dumas’s classic portrayal of a young man seeking to join the elite guard of his day seems an unlikely source of inspiration for a blog post about digital performance management, but there’s something about groups of three — each balancing the others’ strengths and weaknesses — that makes a great team. And, while most operators today might view digital systems monitoring in terms of two players — synthetic and real users — there is a third member of the team that turns performance monitoring into performance management: the virtual user.
As the Cloud becomes more of a norm as part of enterprise computing, enterprises now have to deal with the issue of how to ensure that the applications effectively use the attributes of cloud. There are monolithic applications of the previous era that are continuing to be migrated to the cloud using a lift and shift approach or with minimal changes, they do get benefitted with certain attributes of cloud like availability and management, but there is also emerging a new set of application architecture namely the ‘cloud native applications.'
While DevOps has moved into the mainstream and is no longer a novel idea, taking the plunge towards DevOps still make some enterprise organizations and IT leaders weary. This week’s Top 10 news should quell some fears, as there was no shortage of best practices and tips for a smooth transition to DevOps in the enterprise and how to sell the practice to any team. Continue reading for more on cultural transformations, tips for microservices and the emerging trend – DevSecOps.