Traditional siloed IT organizations, which were primarily driven by strictly gated Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes and workflows, created tremendously effective controls around operating, and evolving IT systems. This operational methodology was effective when the business expected methodical change to happen via large releases of hardware and software functionality that most often were delivering new capabilities every six to 12 months. As businesses continue to transform to digital and become software-defined by nature, the need to iterate on software releases more rapidly has driven organizations to build specialized, faster-moving teams in order to adjust the business model and execution quickly. This began with development organizations adopting agile methodologies, including automated testing of software and continuous integration within the development lifecycle. On the IT operations side, there was a need to match the development velocity, requiring breaking down of some of the rigid infrastructure and application support silos.
It’s been proven time and time again that in tech, diversity drives greater innovation, better team productivity and greater profits and market share. So what can we do in our DevOps teams to embrace diversity and help transform the culture of development and operations into a true “DevOps” team? In her session at DevOps Summit, Stefana Muller, Director, Product Management – Continuous Delivery at CA Technologies, will answer that question citing examples, showing how to create opportunities for diverse candidates and taking feedback from the audience on their experiences with encouraging diversity in technology roles.
SYS-CON Media announced that IBM, which offers the world’s deepest portfolio of technologies and expertise that are transforming the future of work, has launched ad campaigns on SYS-CON’s numerous online magazines such as Cloud Computing Journal, Virtualization Journal, SOA World Magazine, and IoT Journal. IBM’s campaigns focus on vendors in the technology marketplace, the future of testing, Big Data and analytics, and mobile platforms.
Flexiant, today releases the new look of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator in its latest version to deliver a simplified experience for service providers and their end users. Using the latest design concepts, Flexiant has reduced complex common work processes into a few simple, wizard driven clicks. The result is a differentiated and easier experience for service provider’s customers helping to increase profit, revenue and growth from cloud services.
The Internet of Things has emerged as the universally accepted term for the ‘next big thing’ wave, not replacing but building upon the Cloud Computing cycle, which itself built upon SaaS and ASPs. There are many technology aspects to this trend, which will be covered extensively throughout this guide and ongoing series, but overall our goal is to describe the associated startup venture opportunities. Indeed it’s not limited to startups, the IoT represents a new product innovation platform for any and all businesses, and this is the overall theme of this paper.
DevOps is an approach that improves collaboration among Dev and Ops teams to enable fast delivery of applications and ensure impeccable end-user experience. BizDevOps takes the concept of DevOps to a new level – by bringing the business context and insights to day to day DevOps activities. BizDevOps ensures that Dev and Ops focus on what matters to the business and also introduces the Biz persona (line-of-business manager, product manager) as a key stakeholder in the process. IDC recently published research on these two topics in its report, “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified,” by IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot. In addition to eye-opening cost of application downtime and increasing momentum for DevOps, it also highlighted that “I=improved customer experience” is the most expected business outcome from DevOps practices.
This is my first blog post at AppDynamics, and I have to say that it’s great to be aboard. It’s been a hectic first couple of weeks, but the energy, enthusiasm and friendliness of everyone I have met has made me very excited about 2015! AppDynamics has a market leading APM and analytics platform but it also takes great people to make a great company – and AppDynamics has a wealth of talent! So to start my blogging life at AppDynamics I want to focus on something that is a red-hot buzzword in IT at the moment – DevOps! For the last couple of years, every conference I attended and nearly every call I had at Forrester had a discussion on DevOps. There is a good reason for this, because from my perspective, DevOps promises that the software-powered business can deliver quality app-fueled business services rapidly, to delight customers.
The term DevOps is not well defined, and you'd be hard pressed to get the same definition of "DevOps" from everyone you ask in your enterprise. Developers in your organization may equate DevOps with a specific approach to software builds and the use of popular tools such as Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, Git, and Docker. IT management might see DevOps as a continuation of existing processes with an emphasis on faster time to market and lightweight release procedures. Without a common definition of the term you'll have teams arguing over what is DevOps and what is not DevOps. If your software releases still involve the use of a change management tool such as BMC's Remedy is it really DevOps? If the build takes an hour to deploy a QA build is it really DevOps? The reality of Enterprise DevOps is that every organization's answers to these question will vary. Enterprise DevOps is compromise between self-service, rapid-fire agility and the ability to manage the risks that accompany mission-critical builds.
The cloud has transformed how we think about software quality. Instead of preventing failures, we must focus on automatic recovery from failure. In other words, resilience trumps traditional quality measures. Continuous delivery models further squeeze traditional notions of quality. Remember the venerable project management Iron Triangle? Among time, scope, and cost, you can only fix two or quality will suffer. Only in today’s DevOps world, continuous testing, integration, and deployment upend the time metric, the DevOps cadence reinvents project scope, and cost metrics expand past software development to the total cost of ownership of the end-to-end digital initiative.
I attended a Meetup yesterday in Mountain View, hosted by The Hive group on the subject of Lambda Architecture. Since I had never heard about this new phrase, my curiosity took me there. There was a panel discussion and panelists came from Hortonworks, Cloudera, MapR, Teradata, etc. Lambda Architecture is a useful framework to think about designing big data applications. Nathan Marz designed this generic architecture addressing common requirements for big data based on his experience working on distributed data processing systems at Twitter. Some of the key requirements in building this architecture include:
For capabilities that are not a core competency of an enterprise, today’s IT teams are hard pressed to justify why the needs of the business could not be met with a leading SaaS solution. Here’s the truth. Check out my latest whitepaper that I coauthored for Bulger Partners.
One of the more interesting data points to come out of our State of Application Delivery 2015 was the overwhelming importance placed on availability - even over security. When respondents were asked which service they would not deploy an application without, they chose availability. Security came in a close second. This caused a great deal of discussion. After all, one of the most often cited impediment to adopting, well, everything has been and remains security. One would think, then, that security is top of mind and clearly a priority for everyone. Yet availability beat it out for what amounts to the "most important application service."
SYS-CON Events announced today that Vitria Technology, Inc. will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Vitria will showcase the company’s new IoT Analytics Platform through live demonstrations at booth #330. Vitria’s IoT Analytics Platform, fully integrated and powered by an operational intelligence engine, enables customers to rapidly build and operationalize advanced analytics to deliver timely business outcomes for use cases across the industrial, enterprise, and consumer segments.
Good food is not the most important attribute for a restaurant. Cleanliness is. It doesn’t matter how great your dishes are – if patrons catch even a glimpse of a roach, they won’t stick around to sample your cooking. The same principle applies to your company’s digital experience. You may have great products at a great price. But if customers have a bad experience with your digital channels, they won’t buy from you. In fact, studies show that 73-82% of customers abandon intended purchases because of a poor online experience.
Using Cloud (aka SaaS) applications is natural for most of us — simply sign up with your email, login and then use the service within minutes. The Cloud works particularly well with consumer-oriented services. Businesses, however, have slightly different needs. Up until now, Sematext Apps offered only App sharing. For instance, if you had an SPM App for monitoring your Elasticsearch cluster, another SPM App for monitoring Spark, and a Logsene App where you shipped all your logs, you could invite one or more of your teammates to each one of those apps separately, and give them either Admin or User role. This works fine when you have just a few teammates or just a few Apps.
When people think of IoT technology they usually think of silicon based sensors made by semiconductor companies. These types of sensors can be found tracking data on airplane engines, wind turbines, medical devices, and many more internet connected devices. The problem with silicon based sensors is that they are not feasible for cost sensitive items or items in small or bendable packaging where embedding sensors just won’t work. To solve this problem, a company called ThinFilm has created printed electronics.
The IoT market is projected to be $1.9 trillion tidal wave that’s bigger than the combined market for smartphones, tablets and PCs. While IoT is widely discussed, what not being talked about are the monetization opportunities that are created from ubiquitous connectivity and the ensuing avalanche of data. While we cannot foresee every service that the IoT will enable, we should future-proof operations by preparing to monetize them with extremely agile systems.
Perhaps not quite as clear-cut as a logical AND in the programmatic sense, but the age of the CEO as we once knew it could be over. There’s a simple reason for this, CIOs (and yes of course we do mean Chief Information Officers) are starting to run their operations as business entities in their own right. In no way detracting from the popular assertion that IT has to “progress from simply being a function in the business to now become a business enabling function in and of itself” (as the expression goes)… there’s an even deeper truth to realize.
The cloud has transformed how we think about software quality. Instead of preventing failures, we must focus on automatic recovery from failure. In other words, resilience trumps traditional quality measures. Continuous delivery models further squeeze traditional notions of quality. Remember the venerable project management Iron Triangle? Among time, scope, and cost, you can only fix two or quality will suffer. Only in today's DevOps world, continuous testing, integration, and deployment upend the time metric, the DevOps cadence reinvents project scope, and cost metrics expand past software development to the total cost of ownership of the end-to-end digital initiative.
Companies today struggle to manage the types and volume of data their customers and employees generate and use every day. With billions of requests daily, operational consistency can be elusive. In his session at Big Data Expo, Dave McCrory, CTO at Basho Technologies, will explore how a distributed systems solution, such as NoSQL, can give organizations the consistency and availability necessary to succeed with on-demand data, offering high availability at massive scale.
I ran into an interesting problems with JavaFX. When the GUI is done in FXML it seems that if a scene has only shapes (e.g., Rectangle, Circle, etc.) the handler method doesn’t receive keyboard events. And the problem seems to be that there is no way (at least I don’t see it) to give a focus to such a scene. I found a workaround, but I’d appreciate if someone could offer a cleaner solution or confirm that this is a JavaFX bug.
One of the neat things about microservices is the ability to segment functional actions into scalability domains. Login, browsing, and checkout are separate functional domains that can each be scaled according to demand. While one hopes that checkout is similarly in demand, it is unlikely to be as popular as browsing, after all, and the days of wasting expensive money on idle compute resources went out when the clouds descended. In that same vein comes the ability to also create performance domains. After all, if you're scaling out a specific functional service domain you can also specify performance requirements for that domain - and do something about it. Whether it's through caching or minification or TCP optimization techniques, you can improve the performance of a specific logical domain right along with its scale.
Qubell announced on Monday the availability of the first autonomic application management platform for cloud applications. Qubell enables applications to become adaptive, self-managed services that configure, heal, optimize and protect themselves in response to changes within dynamic cloud environments. With Qubell, managing applications as an autonomic system dramatically accelerates application release cycles, improves quality, eliminates manual operations and reduces outages and operating costs. The platform is designed for a broad range of web, commerce and big data applications with an emphasis on retail, financial services and high-tech industries.
There has been a lot of discussion recently in the DevOps space over whether there is a unique form of DevOps for large enterprises or is it just vendors looking to sell services and tools. In his session at DevOps Summit, Chris Riley, a technologist, discussed whether Enterprise DevOps is a unique species or not. What makes DevOps adoption in the enterprise unique or what doesn’t? Unique or not, what does this mean for adopting DevOps in enterprise size organizations? He also explored different vendor approaches and success/failure examples with the idea of preparing you to help instill DevOps in your business
SYS-CON Events announced today that IDenticard will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. IDenticard™ is the security division of Brady Corp (NYSE: BRC), a $1.5 billion manufacturer of identification products. We have small-company values with the strength and stability of a major corporation. IDenticard offers local sales, support and service to our customers across the United States and Canada. Our partner network encompasses some 300 of the world's leading systems integrators and security systems installation specialists.