The mobility and flexibility of modern business practice has created a demand to extend any application to virtually anyone. While this can bring many benefits to organisations, such as enabling employees to work remotely, cutting costs by using the cloud to simplify IT deployment and permitting contractors and supply chain members to self-serve their accounts, there is also a dark side. Think about it: by extending every application to virtually everyone, each users’ specific needs and uses of the application aren’t being taken into consideration. Does every employee really need to be granted remote access, and does each contractor hired really require the ability to enter the entire network? Of course not; after all, applications that are easier to share are also easier to hack.
In my last post I discussed how all major business models are facing a software-enterprise threat, and that IT will need to tackle this head on in order for businesses to remain successful. However: how can previous generation businesses ACTUALLY succeed in this new software-defined world? Last year Gartner introduced the concept of ‘bimodal IT': a new organizational model for enterprise IT in which IT organizations have two different modes of IT, each designed to address different technology and information goals. The first mode will focus on stability, scalability and efficiency, the second being more experimental and agile, with a focus on speed. They predicted that by 2017, 75% of IT organizations will have bimodal capacity (though 50% may make a mess of it).
Mobile testing is getting harder: more devices, multiple operating systems, higher quality expectations and shorter development cycles. In his session at DevOps Summit, Tom Chavez, Senior Evangelist at SOASTA, will discuss the seven steps to improving your mobile testing process. Tom Chavez, with 20+ years of experience as a product manager in software development tools, works in product management at SOASTA, the leader in performance analytics. He has worked across the Silicon Valley at industry leaders including Apple, Sun, PalmSource, and Intuit delivering tools for Mac, Java, PalmOS, and Android development and testing.
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., will focus on the challenges of managing remote teams, providing real-world examples that demonstrate what works and what doesn’t. It will cover proper training and integration of these teams into the corporate structure, and the most effective ways to introduce them to customers. It will also discuss proper vetting of third-party teams should these functions be outsourced.
The 17th International Cloud Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open. 17th International Cloud Expo, to be held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, brings together Cloud Computing, APM, APIs, Microservices, Security, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps and WebRTC to one location. With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!
This is the first DevOps book that shows a realistic and achievable view of the full implementation of DevOps. Most of the books and other literature I have read on DevOps are all about the culture, the attitudes, how it relates to Agile and Lean practices, and a high level view of microservices. This book includes all that, but they are not its main focus, and it goes several steps further with respect to the architecture and infrastructure needed for the implementation.
DevOps Summit, taking place Nov 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with 17th Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.
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, will discuss 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.
SYS-CON Events announced today that HPM Networks will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. For 20 years, HPM Networks has been integrating technology solutions that solve complex business challenges. HPM Networks has designed solutions for both SMB and enterprise customers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
In the Information Technology (IT) world, the word “enterprise” is bandied about quite often. First, I really have no idea how to bandy about. If it involves incense and oils, I may have an idea, but let’s talk about enterprises instead. If you do some serious digging, you’ll find out an enterprise is a federation, in other words, a collection of related business units with a common goal of profitability. It is an aggregate, dynamic yet unified entity that provides a product or service to benefit customers in return for revenue and profit. You’ll probably hear “enterprise” loosely and actually incorrectly used interchangeably with “company” or “business”.
17th Cloud Expo, taking place Nov 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS – software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.
Mobile, social, Big Data, and cloud have fundamentally changed the way we live. “Anytime, anywhere” access to data and information is no longer a luxury; it’s a requirement, in both our personal and professional lives. For IT organizations, this means pressure has never been greater to deliver meaningful services to the business and customers.
Amazon and Google have built software-defined data centers (SDDCs) that deliver massively scalable services with great efficiency. Yet, building SDDCs has proven to be a near impossibility for ‘normal’ companies without hyper-scale resources. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, David Cauthron, founder and chief executive officer of Nimboxx, will discuss the evolution of virtualization (hardware, application, memory, storage) and how commodity / open source hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions are changing the virtualization and cloud computing landscape to give more organizations access to web-scale performance at significantly reduced cost savings.
The web app is agile. The REST API is agile. The testing and planning are agile. But alas, data infrastructures certainly are not. Once an application matures, changing the shape or indexing scheme of data often forces at best a top down planning exercise and at worst includes schema changes that force downtime. The time has come for a new approach that fundamentally advances the agility of distributed data infrastructures. Come learn about a new solution to the problems faced by software organizations as their products become successful and the data grows beyond the initial scope of the database, whether it starts out as relational SQL, NoSQL, or somewhere in between.
Maybe EA is essentially governance. If someone from a line of business wants something from IT, they have to pass the request by the EA gatekeepers first. After all, nobody wants duplication or spaghetti integration, right? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. So nothing gets done until EA gives it the stamp of approval. If that’s the definition of EA, then the first thing we should do is burn that sucker to the ground. There’s no way any organization will ever be agile if there’s a whole department in charge of roadblocks. If Agile is up to the task, then more power to it.
During the last two #IoTuesday Twitter sessions, our chats have centered on what it will take to capitalize on the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunity and what the industry’s collective responsibility is to break down barriers to adoption. Topics ranged from the evolution of the Industrial Internet to consumer IoT applications to the role of APIs and API management. And underlying all of this, how we move from today’s connected devices and vertical siloes to a horizontal IoT marketplace with interconnectivity at its core. In this month’s IoT chat we will be joined by Alex Bakker and Ron Exler, from analyst firm Saugatuck Technology, to continue the discussion on the evolution of IoT, blockers and opportunities.
Our guest on the podcast this week is Helen Beal, Head of DevOps at Ranger4 Limited. We discuss how successful DevOps transitions depend on culture, so to start companies must identify their current problem areas. Helen describes the most successful DevOps culture as a place where each individual has autonomy as part of the larger team and where experimentation is encouraged.
You can never be too careful. Security is on everyone’s mind. Not too long ago, we talked about how beefed up security impacts load testing and we want to continue the conversation. How do you keep yourself and your company safe in the age of industrial and state-sponsored hacking? In this post, we'll outline a few things you must know.
This Enterprise Strategy Group lab validation report of the NEC Express5800/R320 server with Intel® Xeon® processor presents the benefits of 99.999% uptime NEC fault-tolerant servers that lower overall virtualized server total cost of ownership. This report also includes survey data on the significant costs associated with system outages impacting enterprise and web applications. Click Here to Download Report Now!
Whether you like it or not, DevOps is on track for a remarkable alliance with security. The SEC didn’t approve the merger. And your boss hasn’t heard anything about it. Yet, this unruly triumvirate will soon dominate and deliver DevSecOps faster, cheaper, better, and on an unprecedented scale. In his session at DevOps Summit, Frank Bunger, VP of Customer Success at ScriptRock, will discuss how this cathartic moment will propel the DevOps movement from such stuff as dreams are made on to a practical, powerful, and insanely valuable asset to enterprises. You may call it DevSecOps, or SecDevOps, or maybe even DevOpsSec. Choose your own adventure.
I've been asked several times recently about the difference between Verification and Validation in automated testing and for some advice on applying and documenting each kind of testing. Let me first take a minute to define these terms. Verification is testing that your product meets the specifications / requirements you have written. "Did I build what I said I would?"
SYS-CON Events announced today the Containers & Microservices Bootcamp, being held November 3-4, 2015, in conjunction with 17th Cloud Expo, @ThingsExpo, and @DevOpsSummit at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. This is your chance to get started with the latest technology in the industry. Combined with real-world scenarios and use cases, the Containers and Microservices Bootcamp, led by Janakiram MSV, a Microsoft Regional Director, will include presentations as well as hands-on demos and comprehensive walkthroughs.
Like me, you’re probably familiar with the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. A cautionary tale about the consequences of reneging on debt – it sure scared the crap out of me as a kid. In enterprise IT, we also accrue debt, but of the technical kind. While the results of non-payment aren’t as severe as those suffered by the good folk of Hamelin, not ‘paying the piper’ will have dire consequences for any businesses trying to compete on an economic playing field where the rules are determined by software. DevOps of course is now being touted as a tune organizations must play if they’re to digitally transform their businesses – and for good reason. Businesses in every vertical are showing that through effective cross-functional collaboration, automation, and the adoption of agile and lean practices, high quality software can be released more rapidly – the result, a high performance IT function that’s inextricably linked to increased customer satisfaction, profitability and market share.
Everyone talks about continuous integration and continuous delivery but those are just two ends of the pipeline. In the middle of DevOps is continuous testing (CT), and many organizations are struggling to implement continuous testing effectively. After all, without continuous testing there is no delivery. And Lab-As-A-Service (LaaS) enhances the CT with dynamic on-demand self-serve test topologies. CT together with LAAS make a powerful combination that perfectly serves complex software development and delivery pipelines. Software Defined Networks (SDNs) turns the network into a flexible configurable system of software components and connections that is powerful but presents new complexities and challenges for network software development, delivery and deployments.
“10 Hot Internet of Things Startups.” “5 Internet of Things Startups to Watch.” “Top 8 IoT Startups of 2015.” These are the actual titles of just a few of the many articles being written about IoT. It’s a concept that generates a lot of excitement among business leaders and consumers alike, a paradigm shift that will impact every person, home, business and public infrastructure in the developed world over the next decade. How might IoT impact your organization? What new revenue streams are waiting to be discovered? Read on for examples of how businesses are already applying the technologies that comprise the IoT to transform their organizations.