In today’s modern computing age, constant enhancements in software innovations are driving us closer to an era of software revolution. Perhaps in the distant future, that may be how the 21st century is remembered best. Among the popular software languages out there, however, Java continues to have the largest industry footprint, running applications around the globe producing combined annual revenue in trillions. That’s why keeping up on the JDK is a high priority. Despite having a massive API to improve programming productivity, Java has also grown due to its high performance yet scalable JVM runtime, building among the fastest computing modern applications. As Java’s footprint expands, JDK innovations continue to impact billions of lines of code. As AppDynamics continues to grow, our focus towards supporting Java is only furthered by our customer use & industry adoption of the JVM.
With the proliferation of both SQL and NoSQL databases, organizations can now target specific fit-for-purpose database tools for their different application needs regarding scalability, ease of use, ACID support, etc. Platform as a Service offerings make this even easier now, enabling developers to roll out their own database infrastructure in minutes with minimal management overhead. However, this same amount of flexibility also comes with the challenges of picking the right tool, on the right provider and with the proper expectations. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Warner Chaves, Principal Consultant at Pythian, will compare the NoSQL and SQL offerings from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, their similarities, differences and use cases for each one based on our own client projects.
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.
In most cases, it is convenient to have some human interaction with a web (micro-)service, no matter how small it is. A traditional approach would be to create an HTTP interface, where user requests will be dispatched and HTML/CSS pages must be served. This approach is indeed very traditional for a web site, but not really convenient for a web service, which is not intended to be good looking, 24x7 up and running and UX-optimized. Instead, talking to a web service in a chat-bot mode would be much more convenient, both for a user and web service developer.
Cognitive Computing is becoming the foundation for a new generation of solutions that have the potential to transform business. Unlike traditional approaches to building solutions, a cognitive computing approach allows the data to help determine the way applications are designed. This contrasts with conventional software development that begins with defining logic based on the current way a business operates. In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Judith S. Hurwitz, President and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, Inc., will put cognitive computing into perspective with its value to the business. The session will detail what it takes to build a cognitive application and the types of solutions that are the best fit for this data-driven approach.
Microsoft pulls a fast one! Good showing Microsoft. Project Natick is Microsoft's R&D feasibility project to explore, manufacture and operate a underwater. Hey, you don't look for cooling water, if you can take the salt out. How is latency improved? drop the datacenter at the nearest ocean or lake. Energy efficiency is no brainer considering the environment the datacenter is in. Bring in 3D manufacturing and you can have a datacenter manufactured and deployed in no time at all, no need for expensive land acquisition, licenses, certificates etc.
As organizations try to increase their velocity and agility, there’s a widening gap between the IT department and the provisioning of new services. This can lead to serious security risks and operational inefficiency. But if we really want to tackle shadow IT, we have to get to the root of the problem. Why are people bypassing the IT department or failing to ask management for permission? What can we do about it?
SYS-CON Events announced today that Interoute, owner-operator of one of Europe's largest networks and a global cloud services platform, 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. Interoute is the owner-operator of one of Europe's largest networks and a global cloud services platform which encompasses 12 data centers, 14 virtual data centers and 31 colocation centers, with connections to 195 additional third-party data centers across Europe. Its full-service Unified ICT platform serves international enterprises and many of the world’s leading service providers, as well as governments and universities.
In the Bimodal model we find two areas of IT - the traditional kind where the main concern is keeping the lights on and the IT focusing on agility and speed, where everything needs to be faster. Today companies are investing in new technologies and processes to emulate their most agile competitors. Gone are the days of waterfall development and releases only every few months. Today's IT and the business it powers demands performance akin to a supercar - everything needs to be faster, every screw is tuned over and over again to gain maximum speed and agility; to edge out competitors. With new technologies and approaches come new software packages, technologies and processes.
Over the years, one of my favorite pastimes has been working on the family genealogy. I first started work on it in the early 1990s. At that time, records were not digitized and research involved going to libraries, newspapers, and various local, state, and federal archives. There one would have to sift through reams of old records, documents and microfiche. If you were lucky, someone had created printed indices of the information contained in those documents. These indices, when they existed, were based on manual transcription of the data, and prone to the data quality. This is inherent in transcribing information from what frequently were old handwritten documents. The challenge was then trying to find those nuggets of information that would relate and connect to individuals you were trying to locate in your research.
Providing a full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP connection, WebSocket is the most efficient protocol for real-time responses over the web. If you’re utilizing WebSocket technology, performance testing will boil down to simulating the bi-directional nature of your application. Introduced with HTML5, the WebSocket protocol allows for more interaction between a browser and website, facilitating real-time applications and live content. WebSocket technology creates a persistent connection between the client and server, circumventing the requirement for a client-initiated HTTP request to trigger a server response. Providing a full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP connection, WebSocket is the most efficient protocol for real-time responses over the web.
It's easy to assume that your app will run on a fast and reliable network. The reality for your app's users, though, is often a slow, unreliable network with spotty coverage. What happens when the network doesn't work, or when the device is in airplane mode? You get unhappy, frustrated users. An offline-first app is an app that works, without error, when there is no network connection.
You are standing in the wings of the stage, it’s opening night, the curtain has just been raised, you hear the “James: Knocks on door” sound effects, and all of your hard work merges into a single step as you open the fake stage door. This is how most companies feel before they endeavor to take on Continuous Delivery. It can be a scary thing. All of the white papers, webinars and case studies in the world can only take you as far as that fake stage door. You have to open it and take the leap. But it’s exciting, it’s new, it’s the reason many of us got into the technology industry in the first place: it’s change. Today I want to talk about what you are already doing right now that will make your leap into Continuous Delivery more exciting than it is scary.
Many of us are grappling with the modern demands of digital business: developing new mobile apps, evaluating security in the face of IoT, moving to hybrid clouds, testing approaches to defining networks through software. It’s all part of the hard trend toward service-oriented IT, with a primary goal of delivering a premium end user experience (EUE) to all your users – internal, partners, and customers – with the speed, quality and agility the business demands. How do you meet these elevated expectations? As modern data centers evolve rapidly to meet these agility demands, network and application architectures are becoming increasingly complex, complicating efforts to understand service quality from infrastructure and application monitoring alone. Virtualization can obscure critical performance visibility at the same time complex service dependencies challenge even the best performance analysts and the most effective war rooms. While this may read like a recipe for disaster, within are secrets to success.
Network architectures are in the midst of a massive transformation. Not too long ago, traditional network designs began to strain under increased demand for compute and storage. This saw the advent of server and storage virtualization, giving organizations on-demand access to the resources required for supporting service-oriented architectures and machine-to-machine communications. The increased agility and provisioning of virtualization showed the immense flexibility of decoupling key network components from the underlying hardware and catalyzed what is now a movement toward software defined networking or SDN.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Interoute, owner-operator of one of Europe's largest networks and a global cloud services platform, 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. Interoute is the owner-operator of one of Europe's largest networks and a global cloud services platform which encompasses 12 data centers, 14 virtual data centers and 31 colocation centers, with connections to 195 additional third-party data centers across Europe. Its full-service Unified ICT platform serves international enterprises and many of the world’s leading service providers, as well as governments and universities.
Python began life in the late 1980s. It was developed by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, a math and computer science research center in Amsterdam Science Park in the Netherlands. Van Rossum continues to be an influential figure in the development and guidance of Python. In fact, members of the Python community have bestowed upon him the regal title of Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL). From those humble beginnings, Python has grown to become one of the most popular server-side languages on the Internet. According to W3Techs, it is used by more high-traffic sites than ColdFusion, PHP, and ASP.NET. More than 98 percent of those sites are running Python 2.0, and just over one percent are using 3.0.
The Federal Government’s “Cloud First” policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a mandatory government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Advantages for business include being able to market to many federal agencies after a single FedRAMP review following the government’s “approve once, and use often” approach.
The Federal Government’s “Cloud First” policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a mandatory government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Advantages for business include being able to market to many federal agencies after a single FedRAMP review following the government’s “approve once, and use often” approach.
Many of us are grappling with the modern demands of digital business: developing new mobile apps, evaluating security in the face of IoT, moving to hybrid clouds, testing approaches to defining networks through software. It’s all part of the hard trend toward service-oriented IT, with a primary goal of delivering a premium end user experience (EUE) to all your users – internal, partners, and customers – with the speed, quality and agility the business demands. How do you meet these elevated expectations? As modern data centers evolve rapidly to meet these agility demands, network and application architectures are becoming increasingly complex, complicating efforts to understand service quality from infrastructure and application monitoring alone. Virtualization can obscure critical performance visibility at the same time complex service dependencies challenge even the best performance analysts and the most effective war rooms. While this may read like a recipe for disaster, within are secrets to success.
Network architectures are in the midst of a massive transformation. Not too long ago, traditional network designs began to strain under increased demand for compute and storage. This saw the advent of server and storage virtualization, giving organizations on-demand access to the resources required for supporting service-oriented architectures and machine-to-machine communications. The increased agility and provisioning of virtualization showed the immense flexibility of decoupling key network components from the underlying hardware and catalyzed what is now a movement toward software defined networking or SDN.
You are standing in the wings of the stage, it’s opening night, the curtain has just been raised, you hear the “James: Knocks on door” sound effects, and all of your hard work merges into a single step as you open the fake stage door. This is how most companies feel before they endeavor to take on Continuous Delivery. It can be a scary thing. All of the white papers, webinars and case studies in the world can only take you as far as that fake stage door. You have to open it and take the leap. But it’s exciting, it’s new, it’s the reason many of us got into the technology industry in the first place: it’s change. Today I want to talk about what you are already doing right now that will make your leap into Continuous Delivery more exciting than it is scary.
Python began life in the late 1980s. It was developed by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, a math and computer science research center in Amsterdam Science Park in the Netherlands. Van Rossum continues to be an influential figure in the development and guidance of Python. In fact, members of the Python community have bestowed upon him the regal title of Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL). From those humble beginnings, Python has grown to become one of the most popular server-side languages on the Internet. According to W3Techs, it is used by more high-traffic sites than ColdFusion, PHP, and ASP.NET. More than 98 percent of those sites are running Python 2.0, and just over one percent are using 3.0.
Ah, the plight of software testers – destined to crank away behind the scenes ensuring all runs smoothly. Unlike musical conductors who command the spotlight while overseeing the performance of a piece, testers only seem to attract attention when things go terribly wrong. Okay, so life isn’t fair and software testers seem to have drawn the short stick, at least in regards to the blame game. When users notice application performance issues, the fallout may prove detrimental to the success of not only the application, but also the organization as a whole. To prevent reoccurring performance problems, understanding what went wrong and why is critical. Failing to adjust testing strategies accordingly will only lead to unhappy users, unhappy managers, and ultimately an unhappy you.
We live in an era of apps. More and more of our personal, social and work life is governed by apps. Communicating with one another through social apps, booking cinema tickets through your mobile device, or scheduling a business trip through the airline app. This digitization of services has arrived. Organizations that understand this sea-change have a unique opportunity to jump ahead of their competitors, acquire customers more quickly and grow revenues.