Big Data applications are used for everything from targeting retail customers to bringing new pharmaceuticals to market more quickly. As their name suggests, they are built to acquire, sort and put to use vast sets of information, whether the data points are historical sales figures for a product, results of clinical trial simulations or details in an online dating profile.
True Story. Over the past few years, Fannie Mae transformed the way in which they delivered software. Deploys increased from 1,200/month to 15,000/month. At the same time, productivity increased by 28% while reducing costs by 30%. But, how did they do it? During the All Day DevOps conference, over 13,500 practitioners from around the world to learn from their peers in the industry. Barry Snyder, Senior Manager of DevOps at Fannie Mae, was one of 57 practitioners who shared his real world journey through his enterprise transformation.
Hardware virtualization and cloud computing allowed us to increase resource utilization and increase our flexibility to respond to business demand. Docker Containers are the next quantum leap - Are they?! Databases always represented an additional set of challenges unique to running workloads requiring a maximum of I/O, network, CPU resources combined with data locality.
Enterprises are rapidly implementing private clouds for sound business reasons. Private clouds offer greater agility, enabling companies to quickly adapt to constantly changing business needs and innovate faster than competition. Digital and cloud services can be provided to developers at a pace of innovation that equals any public cloud. Companies can maintain security and compliance, along with the reliability, availability and stability of IT systems of large enterprises. Private clouds also provide better SLAs for new services than most public clouds offer.
“DevOps is really about the business. The business is under pressure today, competitively in the marketplace to respond to the expectations of the customer. The business is driving IT and the problem is that IT isn't responding fast enough," explained Mark Levy, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Serena Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Thanks to Docker, it becomes very easy to leverage containers to build, ship, and run any Linux application on any kind of infrastructure. Docker is particularly helpful for microservice architectures because their successful implementation relies on a fast, efficient deployment mechanism – which is precisely one of the features of Docker. Microservice architectures are therefore becoming more popular, and are increasingly seen as an interesting option even for smaller projects, instead of being reserved to the largest, most complex application stacks.
WebRTC is about the data channel as much as about video and audio conferencing. However, basically all commercial WebRTC applications have been built with a focus on audio and video. The handling of “data” has been limited to text chat and file download – all other data sharing seems to end with screensharing. What is holding back a more intensive use of peer-to-peer data? In her session at @ThingsExpo, Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, WebRTC Applications Team Lead at National ICT Australia, looked at different existing uses of peer-to-peer data sharing and how it can become useful in a live session to enable richer collaboration using WebRTC and HTML5.
The insurance industry is well aware that digital transformation is coming, even if some CIOs can’t really say what their individual companies will look like at the end of it all. In a survey of thousands of C-level execs around the world, insurance came in among the top five industries that are most likely to see “moderate to massive” digital disruption within the next 12 months. Only 20 percent of business leaders felt that they had the talent they needed to transform the enterprise, though. Here’s a closer look at what’s coming next in the exciting new era of software-defined insurance companies.
Another year has come and gone, and many of us are reflecting on the past and looking ahead to see how we can best prepare for the future. Let’s see what Gartner has to say about it in terms of the application development world. As last year was beginning to wind down, the research firm published the Predicts 2017: Application Development report authored by analysts Mike West, Maritess Sobejana, Joachim Herschmann, and Keith James Mann. It includes key findings in application development that will impact organizations and recommendations for application leaders to provide insight for planning in the years to come. These Gartner analysts make multiple predictions for 2017 and beyond, but two stand out to me as worth highlighting.
There has certainly been no lack of punditry and controversy in the US regarding the hacking of John Podesta’s email account (along with the DNC email hack), with some claiming they were responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s loss in the election. I will leave the impact of these claims to those who write and talk about politics. I don’t discuss politics in a work setting, so will leave that aspect to them.
Every organization collects, stores and retains portions of dark data. It's the digital equivalent of emotional baggage which hangs around after every user interaction, transaction, and customer engagement. In fact, not using data effectively is costing United Airlines almost $1 Billion annually in lost revenue. Gartner Inc. describes dark data as "information assets that organizations collect, process and store in the course of their regular business activity, but fail to use for other purposes."
It's not the oldest shipper of this list (that would be syslog-ng, ironically the only one with "new" in its name), it's certainly the best known. That's because it has lots of plugins: inputs, codecs, filters and outputs. Basically, you can take pretty much any kind of data, enrich it as you wish, then push it to lots of destinations. Logstash's main strongpoint is flexibility, due to the number of plugins. Also, its clear documentation and straightforward configuration format means it's used in a variety of use-cases. This leads to a virtuous cycle: you can find online recipes for doing pretty much anything. Here are a few examples from us: 5 minute intro, reindexing data in Elasticsearch, parsing Elasticsearch logs, rewriting Elasticsearch slowlogs so you can replay them with JMeter.
‘Tis the season for technology predictions in 2017. This one goes in-depth on the job skills that will be most important in the year ahead. There's nothing too extreme (we're not actually hiring robots yet) but mobile and big data jobs, two trends a few years back, are at the bottom of this top ten list. Programmers and help desk employees are in highest demand. Any and all of these job roles will likely be involved with cloud apps and services in some way.
Has anyone not heard this phrase yet? This analogy was first presented by Clive Humby at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Senior Marketers Summit at Kellogg School in 2006. If you have been following and or are active in the analytics and data science community, I am sure that you have, and honestly I would hope so. This was not the first time we heard the phrase “data is the new oil,” and it certainly will not be the last.Interestingly enough this exclamation is actually at least ten years old. For example, marketing commentator Michael Palmer blogged back in 2006: “Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc., to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.”
2016 has been an amazing year for Docker and the container industry. We had 3 major releases of Docker engine this year , and tremendous increase in usage. The community has been following along and contributing amazing Docker resources to help you learn and get hands-on experience. Here’s some of the top read and viewed content for the year. Of course releases are always really popular, particularly when they fit requests we had from the community.
In 2014, Amazon announced a new form of compute called Lambda. We didn't know it at the time, but this represented a fundamental shift in what we expect from cloud computing. Now, all of the major cloud computing vendors want to take part in this disruptive technology. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, John Jelinek IV, a web developer at Linux Academy, will discuss why major players like AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Bluemix, and Google Cloud Platform are all trying to sidestep VMs and containers with heavy investments in serverless computing, when most of the industry has its eyes on Docker and containers.
Another year has come and gone, and many of us are reflecting on the past and looking ahead to see how we can best prepare for the future. Let’s see what Gartner has to say about it in terms of the application development world. As last year was beginning to wind down, the research firm published the Predicts 2017: Application Development report authored by analysts Mike West, Maritess Sobejana, Joachim Herschmann, and Keith James Mann. It includes key findings in application development that will impact organizations and recommendations for application leaders to provide insight for planning in the years to come. These Gartner analysts make multiple predictions for 2017 and beyond, but two stand out to me as worth highlighting.
There has certainly been no lack of punditry and controversy in the US regarding the hacking of John Podesta’s email account (along with the DNC email hack), with some claiming they were responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s loss in the election. I will leave the impact of these claims to those who write and talk about politics. I don’t discuss politics in a work setting, so will leave that aspect to them.
Containers have changed the mind of IT in DevOps. They enable developers to work with dev, test, stage and production environments identically. Containers provide the right abstraction for microservices and many cloud platforms have integrated them into deployment pipelines. DevOps and Containers together help companies to achieve their business goals faster and more effectively. In his session at DevOps Summit, Ruslan Synytsky, CEO and Co-founder of Jelastic, reviewed the current landscape of DevOps with containers. In addition, he will discuss known issues and solutions for enterprise applications in containers.
All organizations that did not originate this moment have a pre-existing culture as well as legacy technology and processes that can be more or less amenable to DevOps implementation. That organizational culture is influenced by the personalities and management styles of Executive Management, the wider culture in which the organization is situated, and the personalities of key team members at all levels of the organization. This culture and entrenched interests usually throw a wrench in the works because of misaligned incentives.
Thanks to its many business benefits, cloud computing is becoming commonplace within organizations of all sizes. Historically, companies have struggled to determine which model – public or private – best met their needs. But of late, IT professionals are increasingly starting to realize that both public and private clouds can exist harmoniously within the same organization, and that, in many instances, a hybrid cloud model can actually be the most effective approach.
Our outlook for the year in technology is pretty rosy. Businesses of all stripes are getting more agile and more cloud-savvy. They're using SaaS apps and cloud services for all kinds of workloads, discovering new capabilities as cloud technology matures. IT teams are looking at the big picture to help users have better experiences. We hear from customers that they're working on modernizing their networks and getting control and visibility of their infrastructure, wherever it's deployed. It's all part of how IT is adapting to a new cloud world as their role changes to keep up.
Has anyone not heard this phrase yet? This analogy was first presented by Clive Humby at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Senior Marketers Summit at Kellogg School in 2006. If you have been following and or are active in the analytics and data science community, I am sure that you have, and honestly I would hope so. This was not the first time we heard the phrase “data is the new oil,” and it certainly will not be the last.Interestingly enough this exclamation is actually at least ten years old. For example, marketing commentator Michael Palmer blogged back in 2006: “Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc., to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.”
In 1943, a psychology theory was introduced by Abraham Maslow outlining a hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy describes the stages of growth, starting with basic survival needs and moving onto more complex needs. If basic needs are not met, higher-level needs will not be attainable and individuals will feel anxious and tense.
All organizations that did not originate this moment have a pre-existing culture as well as legacy technology and processes that can be more or less amenable to DevOps implementation. That organizational culture is influenced by the personalities and management styles of Executive Management, the wider culture in which the organization is situated, and the personalities of key team members at all levels of the organization. This culture and entrenched interests usually throw a wrench in the works because of misaligned incentives.