The (re?)emergence of Microservices was especially prominent in this week’s news. What are they good for? do they make sense for your application? should you take the plunge? and what do Microservices mean for your DevOps and Continuous Delivery efforts? Continue reading for more on Microservices, containers, DevOps culture, and more top news from the past week. As always, stay tuned to all the news coming from@ElectricCloud on DevOps and Continuous Delivery throughout the week and retweet/favorite to get your favorite pieces featured in our weekly recap.
With the Apple Watch making its way onto wrists all over the world, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a staple in the workplace. In fact, Forrester reported that 68 percent of technology and business decision-makers characterize wearables as a top priority for 2015. Recognizing their business value early on, FinancialForce.com was the first to bring ERP to wearables, helping streamline communication across front and back office functions. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Kevin Roberts, GM of Platform at FinancialForce.com, discussed the value of business applications on wearable devices, use cases and predictions for the evolution of wearables in the workplace.
In a previous article, I demonstrated how to effectively and efficiently install the Dynatrace Application Monitoring solution using Ansible. In this post, I am going to explain how to achieve the same results using Chef with our official dynatrace cookbook available on GitHub and on the Chef Supermarket. In the following hands-on tutorial, we’ll also apply what we see as good practice on working with and extending our deployment automation blueprints to suit your needs.
A few weeks ago my colleague PJ Hagerty wrote about driving your existing monolithic application toward a more modular design. This time around I'll dive a little bit deeper into its importance and the benefits of application modularization. One of the most important best practices in application development is testing, and more specifically automated and continuous testing. When your application is a monolith with multiple functionalities and responsibilities, automated testing becomes massively unwieldy. To illustrate this issue let's use the following illustration of conceptual (and, admittedly trivial) photo gallery web application.
Teams that have embraced DevOps and begun using the practice of test driven development are familiar with the headaches that accompany testing legacy code. This is particularly true for companies that have applications out in production that have been working for years, but have no formal tests or testing regiment associated with its codebase. Most of the time the physical code for the applications is known; many times it is not. In fact, both the code and the developer who wrote the code might have left the building years ago.
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.
With an estimated 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, several industries will begin to expand their capabilities for retaining end point data at the edge to better utilize the range of data types and sheer volume of M2M data generated by the Internet of Things. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Don DeLoach, CEO and President of Infobright, will discuss the infrastructures businesses will need to implement to handle this explosion of data by providing specific use cases for filtering, cleansing, enriching, storing and analyzing granular data at the edge that will help businesses achieve powerful insights from the many use cases of the Internet of Things.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Pythian, a global IT services company specializing in helping companies adopt disruptive technologies to optimize revenue-generating systems, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2015 at the Javits Center in New York, New York. Founded in 1997, Pythian is a global IT services company that helps companies compete by adopting disruptive technologies such as cloud, Big Data, advanced analytics, and DevOps to advance innovation and increase agility. Specializing in designing, implementing, and managing systems that directly contribute to revenue growth and business success, Pythian's highly skilled technical teams work as an integrated extension of our clients' organizations to deliver continuous transformation and uninterrupted operational excellence.
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.
Enterprises across all industries are in the midst of difficult, bet-the-company changes we call digital transformation. And yet, there remains broad confusion about the scope of the word digital. While the rise of mobile technologies are the impetus for many such transformations, digital goes well beyond the choice of user device. In fact, digital transformation reflects the fact that customer preferences and behavior are driving enterprise technology decisions – and such technology decisions impact the entire organization, from innovative, customer-focused efforts all the way to the traditional IT organization.
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.
More and more companies are looking to microservices as an architectural pattern for breaking apart applications into more manageable pieces so that agile teams can deliver new features quicker and more effectively. What this pattern has done more than anything to date is spark organizational transformations, setting the foundation for future application development. In practice, however, there are a number of considerations to make that go beyond simply “build, ship, and run,” which changes how developers and operators work together to streamline cohesive systems.
Companies can harness IoT and predictive analytics to sustain business continuity; predict and manage site performance during emergencies; minimize expensive reactive maintenance; and forecast equipment and maintenance budgets and expenditures. Providing cost-effective, uninterrupted service is challenging, particularly for organizations with geographically dispersed operations.
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., focused on the challenges of managing remote teams, providing real-world examples that demonstrate what works and what doesn’t. He covered proper training and integration of these teams into the corporate structure, and the most effective ways to introduce them to customers. He also discussed proper vetting of third-party teams should these functions be outsourced.
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.
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.
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.
Father business cycles and digital consumers are forcing enterprises to respond faster to customer needs and competitive demands. Successful integration of DevOps and Agile development will be key for business success in today’s digital economy. In his session at DevOps Summit, Pradeep Prabhu, Co-Founder & CEO of Cloudmunch, covered the critical practices that enterprises should consider to seamlessly integrate Agile and DevOps processes, barriers to implementing this in the enterprise, and provided examples on how an integrated approach has helped major companies embrace a cloud first, DevOps at scale approach to optimize speed and delivery across the enterprise that is required in today’s hyper competitive marketplace.
The principles behind DevOps are not new - for decades people have been automating system administration and decreasing the time to deploy apps and perform other management tasks. However, only recently did we see the tools and the will necessary to share the benefits and power of automation with a wider circle of people. In his session at DevOps Summit, Bernard Sanders, Chief Technology Officer at CloudBolt Software, explored the latest tools including Puppet, Chef, Docker, and CMPs needed to move from an insulated culture where automation is absent or hoarded to one where the power of DevOps is shared.
In a recent market study offering by Transparency Market Research (TMR), the global cloud security market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 12.80% from 2015 to 2022. The report, titled "Cloud Security Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2014 - 2022", states that the global cloud security market will reach a valuation of US$11.8 bn by 2022 increasing from its 2014 valuation of US$4.5 bn.According to the report, factors such as the rapid proliferation of handheld devices, the increasing trend of CYOD and BYOD policies in corporate organizations, increasing use of cloud-based computing by small and medium scale businesses, and ease of use of cloud security services are driving the cloud security market.
Earlier this week it was reported that researchers at Boston-based security company, Rapid7, identified several security flaws in an app connected to a new toy from Mattel's Fisher-Price brand. The news of the security vulnerability caught our attention for a few reasons: The name of the toy - Smart Toy Bear - is strangely close to the name of our company SmartBear Software. More importantly, the story caught our attention because the security vulnerability brought up an important reminder about the important issue of security in today's connected world
I attended a HIVE-sponsored Meetup yesterday evening titled, “Rocking the database world with RocksDB”. Since I had never heard of RocksDB, I was curious to learn how it is rocking the database world. Facebook built this key value store storage layer originally to use for MySQL (instead of InnoDB), as MySQL is used heavily at Facebook. They claim that was not the only motivation. Then in 2013, they decided to open source RocksDB. Last evening’s speaker in an earlier post on November, 2013 had said, “Storing and accessing hundreds of petabytes of data is a huge challenge, and we’re constantly improving and overhauling our tools to make this as fast and efficient as possible. Today, we are open-sourcing RocksDB, an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage that we built and use here at Facebook.”
Super Bowl 50 is upon us and while millions tune in for the faceoff between the Broncos and Panthers this Sunday, software testers will hold their breaths as these same fans flock to promoted web and mobile applications in droves. To the players, Super Bowl Sunday presents two paths: one to glory and one to crushing disappointment. Obviously, vying for victory is a team effort. But sometimes, just sometimes, the difference between winning and losing falls to one individual. With the biggest game of the year on the line and everyone watching, the final play commences.
Over the past year, Microsoft has been introducing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) as the preferred way to provision and manage resources in its Azure cloud. ARM is the successor to the original Service Management model, also known as “Classic.”[1] While Classic will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future, ARM is the preferred deployment model and all new Azure features are being released on ARM only. Here is an overview ARM and the new features it provides.
Over the past year, Microsoft has been introducing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) as the preferred way to provision and manage resources in its Azure cloud. ARM is the successor to the original Service Management model, also known as “Classic.”[1] While Classic will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future, ARM is the preferred deployment model and all new Azure features are being released on ARM only. Here is an overview ARM and the new features it provides.