Pokemon Go has stormed onto the scene this past week and the buzz is everywhere about it! However, being so successful in such a brief period of time can have a downside. Reports of players being unable to access services started appearing in relatively short order. Amazon's CTO jumped into the fray offering their cloud services to help scale NiantecLab's (creators of Pokemon Go) server-side infrastructure. While the Pokemon Go app has been positively rated by the majority of players, there are clearly a large number of players who thought differently, as indicated in the Google play App ratings.
Infrastructure complexity is not unique to enterprise datacenters. Just because a business or organization is small does not mean it is exempt from the feature needs of big enterprise datacenters. Small and mid-size organizations require fault tolerance, high availability, mobility, and flexibility as much as anyone. Unfortunately, the complexity of traditional datacenter and virtualization architecture hit the SMB the hardest.
The big move is Amazon’s beating Exxon Mobile (used to be number 1 for many years) to the fourth spot. The switch came after Amazon posted its fifth straight quarter of profits last week as the oil giant’s profits tumbled 59 percent during the same rough period. If Exxon continues its drop, then Facebook will beat it in days.
DNS is a core component of the Internet. This rather complex system exists to perform the basic function of translating website Domain names (ex: Catchpoint.com) into an IP address. It acts as the liaison between the language that users can understand, and the address of the data center or destination in which the site is being hosted. DNS is what shapes the modern Internet. It enables users of all skill sets and technical knowledge levels to use this incredibly advanced resource on a daily basis. Businesses that exist entirely on the Internet like online banking and ecommerce companies have not only emerged into the market, but have steadily gained a global presence.
We in IT live in a complex world. While complexity is rapidly increasing, we are working hard on simplifying it. The two things occurring at the same time certainly do not make for a smooth or even linear transition, but at a minimum we are keeping complexity from overwhelming the number of man-hours available to manage the overall IT world. Our simplification efforts are across the board, which is an amazing phenomenon that I will happily lay the credit for on the DevOps world. While DevOps continues to mean different things to different people, that is the very reason we are seeing improvement in most areas of dev and operations both. And all of these efforts, while providing other benefits, generally work to make someone’s life easier by easing the burden of IT. Whether it be self-service to assist users, automated provisioning to help operations, or CI/CD to help developers, life gets easier and deployment times get faster through these efforts.
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of companies in the world: data rich and data poor. The richest of the data rich are easy to name: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple. But you don’t need to be at the top of this list to use data to create value. You need to have the tools in place to turn information (data) into action. That’s what the data rich do that the data poor and the data middle class do not.
Sharding has become a popular means of achieving scalability in application architectures in which read/write data separation is not only possible, but desirable to achieve new heights of concurrency. The premise is that by splitting up read and write duties, it is possible to get better overall performance at the cost of a slight delay in consistency. That is, it takes a bit of time to replicate changes initiated by a "write" to the read-only master database. It's eventually consistent, and it's generally considered an acceptable trade off when searching for higher and higher scalability.
I wanted to gather all of my Internet of Things (IOT) blogs into a single blog (that I could later use with my University of San Francisco (USF) Big Data “MBA” course). However as I started to pull these blogs together, I realized that my IOT discussion lacked a vision; it lacked an end point towards which an organization could drive their IOT envisioning, proof of value, app dev, data engineering and data science efforts. And I think that the IOT end point is really quite simple…
Right off the bat, Newman advises that we should "think of microservices as a specific approach for SOA in the same way that XP or Scrum are specific approaches for Agile Software development". These analogies are very interesting because my expectation was that microservices is a pattern. So I might infer that microservices is a set of process techniques as opposed to an architectural approach. Yet in the book, Newman clearly includes some elements of concept model and architecture as well as process and organization.
Competitors can't compete, and leaders can't lead if they don't know the rules of the game. Understanding how points are scored, and what is required to win is key to any competition. In the age of digital transformation there are key rules to learn: Data is the modern commercial battlefield Information dominance is the strategic goal
With over 720 million Internet users and 40–50% CAGR, the Chinese Cloud Computing market has been booming. When talking about cloud computing, what are the Chinese users of cloud thinking about? What is the most powerful force that can push them to make the buying decision? How to tap into them? In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Yu Hao, CEO and co-founder of SpeedyCloud, answered these questions and discussed the results of SpeedyCloud’s survey.
With 2016 crossing the half way point, let’s take a look at some technology trends thus far. Breaches: Well, many databases are half empty due to the continued rash of intrusions while the crooks are half full with our personal information. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), there have been 522 breaches thus far in 2016 exposing almost 13,000,000 records. Many are health care providers as our medical information is becoming the gold mine of stolen info. Not really surprising since the health care wearable market is set to explode in the coming years. Many of those wearables will be transmitting our health data back to providers. There were also a bunch of very recognizable names getting blasted in the media: IRS, Snapchat, Wendy’s and LinkedIn. And the best advice we got? Don’t use the same password across multiple sites. Updating passwords is a huge trend in 2016.
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of companies in the world: data rich and data poor. The richest of the data rich are easy to name: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple. But you don’t need to be at the top of this list to use data to create value. You need to have the tools in place to turn information (data) into action. That’s what the data rich do that the data poor and the data middle class do not.
This digest provides an overview of good resources that are well worth reading. We’ll be updating this page as new content becomes available, so I suggest you bookmark it. Also, expect more digests to come on different topics that make all of our IT-hearts go boom!
We all know the latest numbers: Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from last year, and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. We're rapidly approaching a data production of 40 zettabytes a day – more than we can every physically store, and exabytes and yottabytes are just around the corner. For many that’s a good sign, as data has been proven to equal money – IF it’s ingested, integrated, and analyzed fast enough. Without real-time analytics there’s no real-time insight, and without instant insight a company’s actions are doomed to forever lag behind its changing business conditions.
Actian Corporation has announced the latest version of the Actian Vector in Hadoop (VectorH) database, generally available at the end of July. VectorH is based on the same query engine that powers Actian Vector, which recently doubled the TPC-H benchmark record for non-clustered systems at the 3000GB scale factor (see tpc.org/3323). The ability to easily ingest information from different data sources and rapidly develop queries to make better business decisions is becoming increasingly important, particularly for those companies looking to respond to changes real-time or explore machine-learning. When paired with Actian VectorH, the industry’s fastest Enterprise SQL database that sits natively in Hadoop, Spark users have a new powerful way to help derive true business value from their data.
On Dice.com, the number of job postings asking for skill in Amazon Web Services increased 76 percent between June 2015 and June 2016. Salesforce.com saw its own skill mentions increase 37 percent, while DevOps and Cloud rose 35 percent and 28 percent, respectively. Even as they expand their presence in the cloud, companies are also looking for tech professionals who can manage projects, crunch data, and figure out how to make systems run more autonomously. Mentions of ‘data science’ as a skill rose 13 percent, followed by automation with 11 percent and program management with 10 percent.
Having automated workflows sounds like a sexy thing. And it is. It feels pretty awesome to be able to initiate a process with a button and forget about it while the work gets done. But that doesn’t mean you have to automate every process in your office. I mean, I think people can take care of replacing the copy paper on their own, right? Right? Come on, people. Because automation shouldn’t be blatantly applied to every corner of your business, it’s good to start with a very basic question before you begin. Why? There are a lot of ways to improve your business – why are you looking to automation? What do you hope to get out of it? Here are some good and bad reasons companies automate their processes.
ReadyTalk has expanded the capabilities of the FoxDen collaboration platform announced late last year to include FoxDen Connect, an in-room video collaboration experience that launches with a single touch. With FoxDen Connect, users can now not only engage in HD video conferencing between iOS and Android mobile devices or Chrome browsers, but also set up in-person meeting rooms for video interactions. A host’s mobile device automatically recognizes the presence of a meeting room via beacon technology and wirelessly initiates an onscreen FoxDen meeting, making FoxDen Connect the first solution to use beacons to start video collaboration.
In his session at Cloud Expo, Robert Cohen, an economist and senior fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, will provide economic scenarios that describe how the rapid adoption of software-defined everything including cloud services, SDDC and open networking will change GDP, industry growth, productivity and jobs. This session will also include a drill down for several industries such as finance, social media, cloud service providers and pharmaceuticals.
Node.js and io.js are increasingly being used to run JavaScript on the server side for many types of applications, such as websites, real-time messaging and controllers for small devices with limited resources. For DevOps it is crucial to monitor the whole application stack and Node.js is rapidly becoming an important part of the stack in many organizations. Sematext has historically had a strong support for monitoring big data applications such as Elastic (aka Elasticsearch), Cassandra, Solr, Spark, Hadoop, and HBase, as well as more traditional databases, web servers like Nginx, Nginx Plus and Apache, Java applications, cache servers like Redis and Memcached, messaging middleware like everyone's darling Kafka, etc. With such rapid adoption of Node.js and now io.js, we'd be remiss not to add performance monitoring, alerting, and anomaly detection for them in SPM!
I wanted to gather all of my Internet of Things (IOT) blogs into a single blog (that I could later use with my University of San Francisco (USF) Big Data “MBA” course). However as I started to pull these blogs together, I realized that my IOT discussion lacked a vision; it lacked an end point towards which an organization could drive their IOT envisioning, proof of value, app dev, data engineering and data science efforts. And I think that the IOT end point is really quite simple…
ReadyTalk has expanded the capabilities of the FoxDen collaboration platform announced late last year to include FoxDen Connect, an in-room video collaboration experience that launches with a single touch. With FoxDen Connect, users can now not only engage in HD video conferencing between iOS and Android mobile devices or Chrome browsers, but also set up in-person meeting rooms for video interactions. A host’s mobile device automatically recognizes the presence of a meeting room via beacon technology and wirelessly initiates an onscreen FoxDen meeting, making FoxDen Connect the first solution to use beacons to start video collaboration.
Having automated workflows sounds like a sexy thing. And it is. It feels pretty awesome to be able to initiate a process with a button and forget about it while the work gets done. But that doesn’t mean you have to automate every process in your office. I mean, I think people can take care of replacing the copy paper on their own, right? Right? Come on, people. Because automation shouldn’t be blatantly applied to every corner of your business, it’s good to start with a very basic question before you begin. Why? There are a lot of ways to improve your business – why are you looking to automation? What do you hope to get out of it? Here are some good and bad reasons companies automate their processes.
In his session at Cloud Expo, Robert Cohen, an economist and senior fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, will provide economic scenarios that describe how the rapid adoption of software-defined everything including cloud services, SDDC and open networking will change GDP, industry growth, productivity and jobs. This session will also include a drill down for several industries such as finance, social media, cloud service providers and pharmaceuticals.