One of the bewildering things about DevOps is integrating the massive toolchain including the dozens of new tools that seem to crop up every year. Part of DevOps is Continuous Delivery and having a complex toolchain can add additional integration and setup to your developer environment. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Miko Matsumura, Chief Marketing Officer of Gradle Inc., will discuss which tools to use in a developer stack, how to provision the toolchain to minimize onboarding time for new developers, and how to maximize productivity according to some of the leading companies in Silicon Valley whether in the coding, build, integration, testing or deployment phase.
More than a decade ago, the choices were few to address the needs of data gathering and recording. Water and wastewater utilities, for example, had to be able to use a ‘fits all’ unit with set parameters and make their systems adaptable to the technology of the day. Since then, many municipal water systems such as those in Southern Utah, have had to broaden the area from which they gather, use and reclaim water. Most growing areas are even facing the dilemma of higher demands on services while trying to stay within shrinking budgets and manpower cutbacks. This is because in the past, many viewed electronic data gathering as a ‘want’ instead of a ‘need’ until now.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Pythian, a global IT services company specializing in helping companies adopt disruptive technologies to optimize revenue-generating systems, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York, New York. Founded in 1997, Pythian is a global IT services company that helps companies compete by adopting disruptive technologies such as cloud, Big Data, advanced analytics, and DevOps to advance innovation and increase agility. Specializing in designing, implementing, and managing systems that directly contribute to revenue growth and business success, Pythian's highly skilled technical teams work as an integrated extension of our clients' organizations to deliver continuous transformation and uninterrupted operational excellence.
Advances in technology and ubiquitous connectivity have made the utilization of a dispersed workforce more common. Whether that remote team is located across the street or country, management styles/ approaches will have to be adjusted to accommodate this new dynamic. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Sagi Brody, Chief Technology Officer at Webair Internet Development Inc., focused on the challenges of managing remote teams, providing real-world examples that demonstrate what works and what doesn’t. He covered proper training and integration of these teams into the corporate structure, and the most effective ways to introduce them to customers. He also discussed proper vetting of third-party teams should these functions be outsourced.
A few weeks ago my colleague PJ Hagerty wrote about driving your existing monolithic application toward a more modular design. This time around I'll dive a little bit deeper into its importance and the benefits of application modularization. One of the most important best practices in application development is testing, and more specifically automated and continuous testing. When your application is a monolith with multiple functionalities and responsibilities, automated testing becomes massively unwieldy. To illustrate this issue let's use the following illustration of conceptual (and, admittedly trivial) photo gallery web application.
Microsoft pulls a fast one! Good showing Microsoft. Project Natick is Microsoft's R&D feasibility project to explore, manufacture and operate a underwater. Hey, you don't look for cooling water, if you can take the salt out. How is latency improved? drop the datacenter at the nearest ocean or lake. Energy efficiency is no brainer considering the environment the datacenter is in. Bring in 3D manufacturing and you can have a datacenter manufactured and deployed in no time at all, no need for expensive land acquisition, licenses, certificates etc.
This post is the second in a series based on a discussion with Marc Andreessen. The first was on: AI, Robotics, Jobs and Accelerating The Future Gourley: Can you provide more context on what kind of education and training? Andreessen: It is fair to say I am biased on that subject but my view is that the quantitative skills will be in greater demand: Math, Economics, Science, Engineering, Computer Science. The requirements for these are rising at much higher rates so their premium is rising. All of us should seek to self educate on these when we can and this is what we should encourage our youth to pursue. We should of course value other more qualitative skills like history, politics, arts and culture, but understand that this is an increasingly technical world and even those people will need more understanding about how the world really works. If you want to be as relevant as possible, get as many quantitative skills as you can and keep learning.
In most cases, it is convenient to have some human interaction with a web (micro-)service, no matter how small it is. A traditional approach would be to create an HTTP interface, where user requests will be dispatched and HTML/CSS pages must be served. This approach is indeed very traditional for a web site, but not really convenient for a web service, which is not intended to be good looking, 24x7 up and running and UX-optimized. Instead, talking to a web service in a chat-bot mode would be much more convenient, both for a user and web service developer.
In a previous post on theoretical Appsec vulnerabilities, I covered how "it's theoretical" is misused by those who are trying to avoid fixing a security vulnerability or taking responsibility for it-for example, the Lenovo Superfish breach, Heartbleed, and airline wifi attacks. The idea that a vulnerability is merely theoretical is not only ignorant but dangerous. Software exploits occur because bad actors operate by finding unexpected loopholes in a software system. Think of it this way - if you left your door unlocked is it a security issue? Or perhaps "If an unlocked door is never entered, is it really unlocked" if you're a philosopher. One could contend that the risk is theoretical, but most of us would say that such a statement is ridiculous. (Props to those who live in an area where door security isn't required.)
Time for a blog about personal privacy, before we all have forgotten about the concept. The Circle is both the title of an 2009 album by Bon Jovi as a 2013 novel by Dave Eggers. A novel relevant for a cloud blog because it describes a future in which one company (the Circle) largely controls the nexus of information, social, mobile and cloud. The use of a novel as medium for the communication of ideas regarding business or politics is not new. Think of examples as “The Goal” (about manufacturing management), “The Phoenix Project” (about IT Management), “Animal Farm” (about politics) and of course “1984” (about society). The Circle remind us of 1984, although in The Circle citizens opt-in voluntarily to life under an all seeing and omnipresent authority. An authority which, incidentally, is not a government, but a commercial social media and cloud services outfit.
In today’s modern computing age, constant enhancements in software innovations are driving us closer to an era of software revolution. Perhaps in the distant future, that may be how the 21st century is remembered best. Among the popular software languages out there, however, Java continues to have the largest industry footprint, running applications around the globe producing combined annual revenue in trillions. That’s why keeping up on the JDK is a high priority. Despite having a massive API to improve programming productivity, Java has also grown due to its high performance yet scalable JVM runtime, building among the fastest computing modern applications. As Java’s footprint expands, JDK innovations continue to impact billions of lines of code. As AppDynamics continues to grow, our focus towards supporting Java is only furthered by our customer use & industry adoption of the JVM.
If we look at slow, traditional IT and jump to the conclusion that just because we found its issues intractable before, that necessarily means we will again, then it’s time for a rethink. As a matter of fact, the world of IT has changed over the last ten years or so. We’ve been experiencing unprecedented innovation across the board – innovation in technology as well as in how people organize and accomplish tasks. Let’s take a look at three differences between today’s modern, digital context for enterprise IT as compared to conventional wisdom – wisdom that may have applied only a handful of years ago.
Cognitive Computing is becoming the foundation for a new generation of solutions that have the potential to transform business. Unlike traditional approaches to building solutions, a cognitive computing approach allows the data to help determine the way applications are designed. This contrasts with conventional software development that begins with defining logic based on the current way a business operates. In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Judith S. Hurwitz, President and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, Inc., will put cognitive computing into perspective with its value to the business. The session will detail what it takes to build a cognitive application and the types of solutions that are the best fit for this data-driven approach.
As organizations try to increase their velocity and agility, there’s a widening gap between the IT department and the provisioning of new services. This can lead to serious security risks and operational inefficiency. But if we really want to tackle shadow IT, we have to get to the root of the problem. Why are people bypassing the IT department or failing to ask management for permission? What can we do about it?
Over the years, one of my favorite pastimes has been working on the family genealogy. I first started work on it in the early 1990s. At that time, records were not digitized and research involved going to libraries, newspapers, and various local, state, and federal archives. There one would have to sift through reams of old records, documents and microfiche. If you were lucky, someone had created printed indices of the information contained in those documents. These indices, when they existed, were based on manual transcription of the data, and prone to the data quality. This is inherent in transcribing information from what frequently were old handwritten documents. The challenge was then trying to find those nuggets of information that would relate and connect to individuals you were trying to locate in your research.
You are standing in the wings of the stage, it’s opening night, the curtain has just been raised, you hear the “James: Knocks on door” sound effects, and all of your hard work merges into a single step as you open the fake stage door. This is how most companies feel before they endeavor to take on Continuous Delivery. It can be a scary thing. All of the white papers, webinars and case studies in the world can only take you as far as that fake stage door. You have to open it and take the leap. But it’s exciting, it’s new, it’s the reason many of us got into the technology industry in the first place: it’s change. Today I want to talk about what you are already doing right now that will make your leap into Continuous Delivery more exciting than it is scary.
Many of us are grappling with the modern demands of digital business: developing new mobile apps, evaluating security in the face of IoT, moving to hybrid clouds, testing approaches to defining networks through software. It’s all part of the hard trend toward service-oriented IT, with a primary goal of delivering a premium end user experience (EUE) to all your users – internal, partners, and customers – with the speed, quality and agility the business demands. How do you meet these elevated expectations? As modern data centers evolve rapidly to meet these agility demands, network and application architectures are becoming increasingly complex, complicating efforts to understand service quality from infrastructure and application monitoring alone. Virtualization can obscure critical performance visibility at the same time complex service dependencies challenge even the best performance analysts and the most effective war rooms. While this may read like a recipe for disaster, within are secrets to success.
Network architectures are in the midst of a massive transformation. Not too long ago, traditional network designs began to strain under increased demand for compute and storage. This saw the advent of server and storage virtualization, giving organizations on-demand access to the resources required for supporting service-oriented architectures and machine-to-machine communications. The increased agility and provisioning of virtualization showed the immense flexibility of decoupling key network components from the underlying hardware and catalyzed what is now a movement toward software defined networking or SDN.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Interoute, owner-operator of one of Europe's largest networks and a global cloud services platform, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2015 at the Javits Center in New York, New York. Interoute is the owner-operator of one of Europe's largest networks and a global cloud services platform which encompasses 12 data centers, 14 virtual data centers and 31 colocation centers, with connections to 195 additional third-party data centers across Europe. Its full-service Unified ICT platform serves international enterprises and many of the world’s leading service providers, as well as governments and universities.
Python began life in the late 1980s. It was developed by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, a math and computer science research center in Amsterdam Science Park in the Netherlands. Van Rossum continues to be an influential figure in the development and guidance of Python. In fact, members of the Python community have bestowed upon him the regal title of Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL). From those humble beginnings, Python has grown to become one of the most popular server-side languages on the Internet. According to W3Techs, it is used by more high-traffic sites than ColdFusion, PHP, and ASP.NET. More than 98 percent of those sites are running Python 2.0, and just over one percent are using 3.0.
The Federal Government’s “Cloud First” policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a mandatory government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Advantages for business include being able to market to many federal agencies after a single FedRAMP review following the government’s “approve once, and use often” approach.
Ah, the plight of software testers – destined to crank away behind the scenes ensuring all runs smoothly. Unlike musical conductors who command the spotlight while overseeing the performance of a piece, testers only seem to attract attention when things go terribly wrong. Okay, so life isn’t fair and software testers seem to have drawn the short stick, at least in regards to the blame game. When users notice application performance issues, the fallout may prove detrimental to the success of not only the application, but also the organization as a whole. To prevent reoccurring performance problems, understanding what went wrong and why is critical. Failing to adjust testing strategies accordingly will only lead to unhappy users, unhappy managers, and ultimately an unhappy you.
We live in an era of apps. More and more of our personal, social and work life is governed by apps. Communicating with one another through social apps, booking cinema tickets through your mobile device, or scheduling a business trip through the airline app. This digitization of services has arrived. Organizations that understand this sea-change have a unique opportunity to jump ahead of their competitors, acquire customers more quickly and grow revenues.
We will never have complete and perfect information, or a full understanding. We are bound to operate in an environment of ambiguity, meaning unclear, uncertain and difficult to comprehend. We have a decision to make. We can use ambiguity as an excuse for inaction, or we can accept ambiguous environments as the norm and learn to thrive in them. Today we are facing unprecedented rates of change in consumer behaviors (watch Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me), which are increasing ambiguity levels and forcing enterprises to digitally transform. This is happening at the same time as we are analyzing more data than ever before. The challenge is less about increasing the volume of data, and more about finding the meaning in the data and associating it with relevant actions.
Although we live in a new On Demand Economy defined by the likes of Uber, Airbnb, Facebook and Twitter among others, firms who clearly demonstrate that the strategic use of modern new technologies like Cloud and Mobile to generate huge increases in shareholder value, many still struggle with adoption and are failing to react to the competitive threat the trend represents. As this IDC report shows only 25% of organizations have repeatable strategies for Cloud adoption, with 32% having no Cloud strategy at all.