While the Internet of Things (IoT) being condemned by Gartner in August as one of the world’s most overhyped technology trends of 2015 makes a good headline, this assertion is itself misleading by failing to acknowledge the rapid progress now being made as IoT emerges in clusters to deliver real benefits to users, even if these are still early days. However, Gartner was correct that the full promise of IoT as a joined up ecosystem of interoperable components is indeed five to ten years away.
Many of my blogs promote the business benefits of the data lake, both from a “save me more money” as well as the “make me more money” perspectives. But I fear that I’m making this thing called the data lake sound like a “silver bullet[1]” – just drop the data into the data lake and everything magically works. But much like in the world of data warehousing, there is significant work that needs to be done under the covers – in areas such as metadata management, data governance and security – to ensure that the data lake will perform for a business in a production environment. Many of the processes and techniques we learned in the data warehouse will benefit us here, though there are many new tools to be aware of that can help us in the operationalization task.
Agile software development is slowly but surely becoming the norm for a significant contingency of software developers. What used to be rigid, step-by-step processes that were siloed between specific teams have transformed into a collaborative, adaptive methodology that ultimately leads to the creation of superior solutions. As an integral component of software development, agile test management has also been evolving to be more accommodating to agile processes. Testing automation in particular is still coming into its role as an agile tool and, for some teams, this may create unique challenges. Still, by taking the following into consideration, testing teams can reap all the benefits of testing automation in an agile environment.
As I read through the various 2016 technology predictions lists, I started discovering a common theme: the inclusion of real-time data initiatives as a main priority for IT. Real-time streaming data and analytics is rapidly becoming the lifeblood of today’s data-driven economy. Why? Because your customers live in an age of information immediacy.
Silver Spring Networks, Inc. (NYSE: SSNI) extended its Internet of Things technology platform with performance enhancements to Gen5 – its fifth generation critical infrastructure networking platform. Already delivering nearly 23 million devices on five continents as one of the leading networking providers in the market, Silver Spring announced it is doubling the maximum speed of its Gen5 network to up to 2.4 Mbps, increasing computational performance by 10x, supporting simultaneous mesh communication on both 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz frequencies, integrating 4G LTE communications, and delivering simplified modularity for easier device integration. These Gen5 platform enhancements, coupled with Silver Spring’s existing multi-application, range, latency, scale, distributed intelligence, and power optimization capabilities, further enable utilities, cities and other Internet of Things (IOT) device and application providers to deliver multiple applications on a single, unified network without compromising reliability, speed, security, or cost.
Electric Cloud CEO, Steve Brodie, recently had the honor of speaking at an internal symposium at one of the largest banks in the United States about the benefits of DevOps for Financial Services (Finserv). Today, applications are the lifeblood of the business, and nowhere is that more true than in Financial Services, who rely on software to create economic value. Advances in virtualization, data integration, and consumer demand for new functionality have increased the pressure of these organizations to release software faster than ever before. This has led many to explore Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices as means to accelerate time to market and improve product quality.
If we look at slow, traditional IT and jump to the conclusion that just because we found its issues intractable before, that necessarily means we will again, then it’s time for a rethink. As a matter of fact, the world of IT has changed over the last ten years or so. We’ve been experiencing unprecedented innovation across the board – innovation in technology as well as in how people organize and accomplish tasks. Let’s take a look at three differences between today’s modern, digital context for enterprise IT as compared to conventional wisdom – wisdom that may have applied only a handful of years ago.
Many in the industry are searching for new ways to increase productivity and efficiency with Agile approaches to software development. That’s the theme of a new article on CIO.com by Bruce Harpham, who details the many benefits of Agile methodologies in software development and examines key considerations for implementing the practice. Our very own Scott Rose spoke with Bruce on the topic and discussed the ways organizations can employ Agile practices among a global team, where face-to-face is not feasible.
In the middle of World War II, very basic and primitive computers were designed to improve accuracy for naval gunfire. The first computers ran complex mathematical applications to calculate trajectories and gunfire from large battleships. The size of the computer was huge and was made up of vacuum-tube technology. You could literally walk into the computer. (And needed to, when a tube went bad and you had to replace it.)
CIOs and those charged with running IT Operations are challenged to deliver secure, audited, and reliable compute environments for the applications and data for the business. Behind the scenes these tasks are often accomplished by following onerous time-consuming processes and often the management of these environments and processes will be outsourced to multiple IT service providers. In addition, the division of work is often siloed into traditional "towers" that are not well integrated for cross-functional purposes. So, when traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) meets the cloud, and equally, DevOps, there is invariably going to be conflict.
I sat down with Michael Rösch, COO of POOL4TOOL, to chat about cloud computing. With a lot of buzz about the impact of the cloud on business, it was a chance to get a perspective, as well as a few hints and tips, from someone who has been at the coalface of procurement cloud services for the past 15 years. Michael has been at POOL4TOOL since 2000, becoming COO in 2012, and has worked on projects with German giants like Behr, Hansgrohe, Heidelberger Printing Presses, Carl Zeiss and ThyssenKrupp Presta in that time.
Recognizing the need to identify and validate information security professionals’ competency in securing cloud services, the two leading membership organizations focused on cloud and information security, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and (ISC)^2, joined together to develop an international cloud security credential that reflects the most current and comprehensive best practices for securing and optimizing cloud computing environments.
The arrival of the Microsoft Azure Stack Technical Preview marks a turning point in the cloud-computing market and forms a leading indicator of how dramatically Microsoft has changed in the past two years. The cloud turning point comes because the path to hybrid-cloud capabilities and benefits has a powerful new usher, one with the enterprise, developer, and service-provider presence, R and D budget, and competitive imperative to succeed in a market still underserved and nebulous.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Avere Systems, a leading provider of enterprise storage for the hybrid cloud, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Avere delivers a more modern architectural approach to storage that doesn’t require the overprovisioning of storage capacity to achieve performance, overspending on expensive storage media for inactive data or the overbuilding of data centers to house increasing amounts of storage infrastructure.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Men & Mice, the leading global provider of DNS, DHCP and IP address management overlay solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. The Men & Mice Suite overlay solution is already known for its powerful application in heterogeneous operating environments, enabling enterprises to scale without fuss. Building on a solid range of diverse platform support, the Men & Mice Suite is taking overlay dexterity one step further into the cloud through full support for Microsoft Azure DNS (January 2016) and AWS Amazon Route 53 (from 2014). Major cloud platform support allows Men & Mice Suite users free rein to extend their infrastructure into the cloud if, and when, they need it.
Network communications are a top priority for DevOps teams working in support of modern globally-distributed systems and microservices. But basic network interface statistics like received and sent traffic aren’t as useful as they once were because multiple microservices may share the same network interface. For meaningful analysis, you need to dig deeper and correlate network-traffic metrics with individual processes. This is however just the beginning … In this article, I’ll show you how deep the network monitoring rabbit hole goes. The types of meaningful analysis that DevOps engineers have been waiting for are finally available.
As utility companies continue to track usage, consumers are growing equally cognizant of individual energy use as well, especially with the growth of private alternative energy practices such as home solar panels or wind power. That's why this week's IIoT top news is focused on the utility technology of tomorrow. This practice of selling privately generated energy back to the smart grid is in its infancy, but consumers now expect device connectivity to track, say, the amount of energy used by lights or the refrigerator during nighttime, off-peak hours. Because of that, the onus lies on utility companies to gather data and deploy advanced analytics that can be translated into relevant information for the average user.
Microservices are a type of software architecture where large applications are made up of small, self-contained units working together through APIs that are not dependent on a specific language. Each service has a limited scope, concentrates on a specific task and is highly independent. This setup allows IT managers and developers to build systems in a modular way. In his book, “Building Microservices,” Sam Newman said microservices are small, focused components built to do a single thing very well.
While the Internet of Things (IoT) being condemned by Gartner in August as one of the world’s most overhyped technology trends of 2015 makes a good headline, this assertion is itself misleading by failing to acknowledge the rapid progress now being made as IoT emerges in clusters to deliver real benefits to users, even if these are still early days. However, Gartner was correct that the full promise of IoT as a joined up ecosystem of interoperable components is indeed five to ten years away.
With some of the busiest shopping days of the year behind us, now is the time for retailers to pause for a moment to evaluate what worked, and to consider new online strategies and technologies for the 2016 shopping season. We don’t yet have numbers for 2015, but in 2014, holiday season retail e-commerce spending in the United States amounted to 53.3 billion U.S. dollars with the most money being spent online on Cyber Monday. Fujitsu is working with Grid Dynamics to deliver an Oracle Commerce Platform as a fully-managed cloud service. I had a chance to sit down with Victoria Livschitz, Executive Vice President of Grid Dynamics, and ask her a few questions during our preparations for the upcoming National Retail Federation (#nrf16) show in New York City, January 17-19, 2016.
WebSocket is effectively a persistent and fat pipe that is compatible with a standard web infrastructure; a "TCP for the Web." If you think of WebSocket in this light, there are other more hugely interesting applications of WebSocket than just simply sending data to a browser. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Frank Greco, Director of Technology for Kaazing Corporation, will compare other modern web connectivity methods such as HTTP/2, HTTP Streaming, Server-Sent Events and new W3C event APIs with WebSocket. He will also look at how WebSocket provides innovative enhancements for dynamic hybrid cloud computing connectivity. By providing proprietary TCP-based IoT with a common connectable substrate (Web of Things), we can obtain advantages for connected devices such as global reach, ease of deployment, economies of scale, and ease of development.
At first adopted by enterprises to consolidate physical servers, virtualization is now widely used in cloud computing to offer elasticity and scalability. On the other hand, Docker has developed a new way to handle Linux containers, inspired by version control software such as Git, which allows you to keep all development versions. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Dominique Rodrigues, the co-founder and CTO of Nanocloud Software, discussed how in order to also handle QEMU / KVM virtual machines versions, they have developed a new tool, called Vm_commit, which can create commits, backup any commit, rollback to a previous commit or rebase all the commits up to a given one for any running virtual machine, on the fly.
As I read through the various 2016 technology predictions lists, I started discovering a common theme: the inclusion of real-time data initiatives as a main priority for IT. Real-time streaming data and analytics is rapidly becoming the lifeblood of today’s data-driven economy. Why? Because your customers live in an age of information immediacy.
Sensors and effectors of IoT are solving problems in new ways, but small businesses have been slow to join the quantified world. They’ll need information from IoT using applications as varied as the businesses themselves. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Roger Meike, Distinguished Engineer, Director of Technology Innovation at Intuit, showed how IoT manufacturers can use open standards, public APIs and custom apps to enable the Quantified Small Business. He used a Raspberry Pi to connect sensors to web services, and cloud integration to connect accounting and data, providing a Bluetooth LE workflow, iBeacon-based time tracking, and sensor-driven invoices. The quantified small business will not only be possible; it will be the norm.
Electric Cloud CEO, Steve Brodie, recently had the honor of speaking at an internal symposium at one of the largest banks in the United States about the benefits of DevOps for Financial Services (Finserv). Today, applications are the lifeblood of the business, and nowhere is that more true than in Financial Services, who rely on software to create economic value. Advances in virtualization, data integration, and consumer demand for new functionality have increased the pressure of these organizations to release software faster than ever before. This has led many to explore Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices as means to accelerate time to market and improve product quality.