Developers are often caught between a rock and a hard place. They aren’t allowed to employ the tricks of the trade that can squeeze more performance out of their code because the consequences – technical debt stemming from impaired maintainability - are generally considered even worse. It’s not appropriate, for example, to use bit-shifting techniques to do simple multiplication because while it might be milliseconds faster, it isn’t always universally understood and thus can cause issues with long-term maintainability.
If a slow or unresponsive application on your mobile device or PC has ever left you feeling angry, frustrated and unproductive, you're not alone. Business success in today's digital age relies on application performance. Yet according to the Riverbed Global Application Performance Survey 2015, nine out of 10 organizations suffer from poor performance on a regular basis. Executives say the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work on a regular basis. Consequently, this performance gap between the needs of the business and IT's ability to deliver leads directly to delays, missed deadlines, angry customers and damaged brands.
Were you surprised with that new car in your driveway sporting a huge bow this holiday season? Yea, me neither. But we did get a new gaming console that doesn't require you to hold a controller in your hand. You know The One. It has a camera that picks up your body movements and turns that into action on your screen. It'll even scan your face and create a digitized, animated You right in front of your eyes. You can then choose your You to play games. Now I realize some of you have had these for several years but we've been stuck in 2010 at our house...at least with gaming consoles.
SYS-CON Events announced today that eCube Systems, the leading provider of modern development tools and best practices for Continuous Integration on OpenVMS, will exhibit at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. eCube Systems offers a family of middleware products and development tools that maximize return on technology investment by leveraging existing technical equity to meet evolving business needs. Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies turn to eCube Systems to reduce risk, extend ROI and increase productivity as they consolidate existing capabilities and evolve legacy systems to meet modern requirements for productivity, flexibility and modern best practices.
Test automation is arguably the most important innovation to the process of QA testing in software development. The ability to automate regression testing and other repetitive test cases can significantly reduce the overall production time for even the most complex solutions. As software continues to be developed for new platforms – including mobile devices and the diverse array of endpoints that will be created during the rise of the Internet of Things - automation integration will have a huge hand to play delivering reliable, multifunctional products that end users want and need.
A brilliant business often starts with an entrepreneur dreaming up a fantastic business idea. Most entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journeys are often strapped for cash, and according to a recent study, 95% of seed-stage founders thought it would either remain the same or get harder to raise money. Even access to Angel funds at the very start (idea stage) is generally uncommon. Startups want to sprout their ideas fast, and the last thing they want is to spend their time and energy is to find the ground, dig the soil, remove the weeds before sowing the seed, and water it till the idea breathes life.
Today’s software defined and driven business requires fast changes in business models, this permeates successful businesses. What this means is that almost every company is learning how to make small rapid changes and adjustments within their business, especially within software systems. The result of this is that IT is feeling immense pressure to evolve, the net result is a major uptick of private cloud (especially Apprenda, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, RedHat OpenShift) and public clouds (especially Amazon and Microsoft) within our install base of large enterprises. These new platforms enable faster development, testing, and releasing of software. Enterprise customers are getting much smarter, by using automation to drive the software lifecycle including continuous integration, and even experimenting and beginning to use continuous release processes. This is no longer a startup scenario, it’s a strategy for our large enterprise customers. These companies trying to build agile development and operations teams, by changing people, process, and technology to enable a DevOps feedback loop:
Everyone is talking about the Cloud, whether on the news or in advertisements from top-tier tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple. More important, the small and medium business (SMB) community has embraced the Cloud. Specifically, more than half of SMBs in the US currently use cloud storage, according to a new survey from Clutch. Cloud storage's increased popularity in the SMB market arises from the numerous benefits the service offers, such as the reduced cost of data storage, backup and recovery, improved workforce productivity from file sharing and collaboration, and additional disaster protection. These factors make cloud storage appealing to SMBs and will increase the rate of cloud storage service adoption in 2016.
As every year begins, several experts and analyst firms like to make predictions. Let us try to make some observations in an area much talked about lately – Big Data. So here goes: Big Data quandary will continue as companies try to understand its value to business. Just dumping all kinds of data into a data lake (read Hadoop) is not going to solve anything. There has to be business value on what insights are needed. Therefore much like the Data Warehousing era brought additional tools in the ETL space, there is need for data curation and transformation for practical use besides the analytics piece.
Gartner predicts that number of IoT devices in use worldwide will grow from an estimated 5 billion in 2015 to some 25 billion connected devices by 2020. The best business strategies will perfectly balance the ever-growing IoT market opportunities versus a rapidly evolving threat environment. To help IoT solution providers define their 2016 product roadmap, here are some of INSIDE Secure’s top IoT predictions for the year.
Automating AWS environments is important for all businesses as it simplifies creation and setup of cloud resources, facilitates otherwise complex processes, and streamlines management. The benefits of automation are clear: accelerate execution, reduce human error and unwanted consequences, and increase the enterprise’s ability to rapidly adapt, all while reducing the overall cost of IT operations. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Patrick McClory, Director of Automation and DevOps at Datapipe, delved deep into the technical specifics of automation for AWS including a discussion of best practices and real world use cases for PCI compliance, application management, continuous integration, CloudFormation and auto-scaling.
Happy 2016. To help you think about the Environment Management year ahead, we've assembled a collection of resolutions for you to try out. Resolution #1 - I will plan ahead for environment requirements. Many environment managers operate in a reactive mode. They make some wildly inaccurate forecasts about future demand and they sit on excess capacity throughout the year. When a project needs a new environment they dole out VMs or physical machines to projects, but they rarely think ahead and they rarely base estimates on easily predictable demand.
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The application performance monitoring industry underwent a lot of big changes in 2015. And 2016 won't be any different. From changing consumer behavior to new tools and developments in the application performance space - there's a lot to keep an eye on in the New Year. Here are five ways application performance monitoring will change in 2016: Changing consumers and the device mesh
In the Gartner white paper Taming the Digital Dragon, they define the Hybrid Cloud model as an enabling blueprint for digital transformation and leadership. They give it such an elaborate name because their definition goes far beyond the normal industry use of the term, a mix of on-premise and public Cloud computing, whereas Gartner instead defines a Hybrid Cloud business model.
Manufacturing connected IoT versions of traditional products requires more than multiple deep technology skills. It also requires a shift in mindset, to realize that connected, sensor-enabled “things” act more like services than what we usually think of as products. In his session at @ThingsExpo, David Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Ayla Networks, discussed how when sensors start generating detailed real-world data about products and how they’re being used, smart manufacturers can use the data to create additional revenue streams, such as improved warranties or premium features. Or slash maintenance costs by replacing parts before they fail. Or learn from the data to iterate better products that give customers what they really want.
It's never easy to predict the future. But if you want to plan for the future, you need to keep an eye on what's coming next. This month, we reached out to people from different areas of the software industry to get their thoughts on what to expect in 2016. From DevOps to automation, security, and open API - these experts discuss new and continuing developments, changes, and trends that will impact that software industry in 2016. Here are thirteen software industry predictions.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been one of the most prominent IT buzz words of 2015. Whether you are talking about thermostats you can set before you get home, beacons wirelessly suggesting items to buy in your high street clothing store or wearable gadgets like the Apple Watch, IoT is more than just hype. It’s here to stay if consumers have anything to say about it. However, there is a lot more to IoT than first meets the eye; it is much deeper and has the potential to affect much more than our lives on a personal level. In fact, Gartner has predicted that over 25 billion ‘things’ will be connected by 2020, and this is not just limited to our wearables and smart fridges; this includes connectivity on a bigger level, by linking whole cities, improving sustainability of fuels, and making workplaces ever more productive.
Shadow IT is here to stay. IT departments need to appreciate that it is so culturally inbuilt that shutting it down is now impossible; in fact, policies punishing the use of third-party apps would more likely push rogue users deeper into the darkness. The battle that can be won is to better educate staff and make Shadow IT an integral part of the company’s wider security awareness program. Some staff are aware of the problems, and will ignore them, but many just simply won’t understand why what they are doing could affect the whole business.
As we inch our way closer to the New Year, we would like to take a moment and appreciate some of the technological advancements of 2015, as well as a few bold IIoT predictions for our connected-world enthusiasts. This medley of top news gives credit to our inventiveness, while highlighting a future forecast for IIoT. No matter your place in the world, drones have captured our attention. Precision Ag has changed the way farmers care for crops and animals. So naturally, more and more farmers would be jumping on the drone plan of action. Recently, the FAA has been putting a major kink in the farmer’s right to use drones in farming. The ruling states that if a farmer uses a drone for farm operations in any way, they must file with the FAA for a commercial exemption to use that technology legally. New permanent rules for drone usage could be in place next year from the FAA. So time will tell how the FAA’s ruling will impact the farmers and other commercial drone users in this country.
Developing software for the Internet of Things (IoT) comes with its own set of challenges. Security, privacy, and unified standards are a few key issues. In addition, each IoT product is comprised of (at least) three separate application components: the software embedded in the device, the backend service, and the mobile application for the end user’s controls. Each component is developed by a different team, using different technologies and practices, and deployed to a different stack/target – this makes the integration of these separate pipelines and the coordination of software updates for IoT more problematic. How do you coordinate the diverse moving parts that must come together when developing your IoT product or updating each of its components?
Did you think we forgot about our good friends Agile and Continuous Integration? With all the buzz around DevOps looking towards 2016, it’s been challenging to focus on anything else. DevOps, Agile, CI and Continuous Delivery are all joined at the hip, and this past week saw some great articles on these methodologies on our news feed. According to Joe Feccorata from InfoQ, adopting Agile practices can actually increase employee satisfaction. Not only can Agile promise happiness in the workplace, but the US Government is finding ways this method can save the planet. Still struggling with continuous integration adoption? Rami Honig from TechBeacon lays out 6 best practices of CI that even veterans can learn from. Continue reading for more on this week’s top news on DevOps, Agile and Continuous Delivery. As always, stay tuned to all the news coming from @ElectricCloud throughout the week and retweet/favorite to get your favorite pieces featured in our weekly recap!
Providing a full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP connection, WebSocket is the most efficient protocol for real-time responses over the web. If you’re utilizing WebSocket technology, performance testing will boil down to simulating the bi-directional nature of your application. Introduced with HTML5, the WebSocket protocol allows for more interaction between a browser and website, facilitating real-time applications and live content. WebSocket technology creates a persistent connection between the client and server, circumventing the requirement for a client-initiated HTTP request to trigger a server response. Providing a full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP connection, WebSocket is the most efficient protocol for real-time responses over the web.
Contrary to mainstream media attention, the multiple possibilities of how consumer IoT will transform our everyday lives aren’t the only angle of this headline-gaining trend. There’s a huge opportunity for “industrial IoT” and “Smart Cities” to impact the world in the same capacity – especially during critical situations. For example, a community water dam that needs to release water can leverage embedded critical communications logic to alert the appropriate individuals, on the right device, as soon as they are needed to take action.
"What is the next step in the evolution of IoT systems? The answer is data, information, which is a radical shift from assets, from things to input for decision making," stated Michael Minkevich, VP of Technology Services at Luxoft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
At year-end, we often consider where we’ve fallen short over the last twelve months – and how we can do better over the next twelve. For IT leaders, DevOps is likely to be a primary concern for 2016. As application awesomeness becomes more important to the business, IT must get great code into production faster. DevOps success is thus imperative – especially if you’re competing against digital-first market disrupters. DevOps, though, isn’t just about engineering better processes. It’s also about cultural transformation. This reality makes some IT leaders uneasy, because excellence at operational management – rather than cultural leadership – got them where they are today.