At the heart of the Cloud Native model is a microservices application architecture, and applying this to a telco SDN scenario offers enormous opportunity for product innovation and competitive advantage. For example in the ETSI NFV Ecosystem white paper they describe one of the product markets that SDN might address to be the Home sector. Vendors like Alcatel market SDN-based solutions for the home market, offering Home Gateways – A virtual residential gateway (vRGW) where service providers can streamline service delivery, turn up new and innovative services more efficiently, increase revenue, and lower CAPEX and OPEX for existing and new services, such as per device quality of service (QoS), parental controls, firewall and security/threat protection.
You can view software development as being very similar to any other highly mechanized process designed to build things. Rather like a factory with all of the interrelated processes that go into making the final product. Like any manufacturing process, the software development life cycle starts with analysis and requirements and then moves on to development and testing. A unit test validates that the code is working; then it's on to Quality Assurance for a series of standard tests that validate the whole package, including new features. Next step is a go-live scenario where inevitably something goes wrong. The developers are then called in to fix the bugs and, after further testing, the software is ready for release. By all accounts, this is a relatively simple and well-ordered workflow.
The start of a new year is always a good time for many businesses to get their IT strategies in place. However, there has been one issue in the past couple of months that may potentially cause a lot of complications in IT departments across the US and EU; the implications for cloud compliance of the recent nullification of the EU Safe Harbour Ruling. Safe Harbour, used by over 4,000 firms to move EU data to the US for the past 15 years, was declared invalid by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) back in October 2015.
We will never have complete and perfect information, or a full understanding. We are bound to operate in an environment of ambiguity, meaning unclear, uncertain and difficult to comprehend. We have a decision to make. We can use ambiguity as an excuse for inaction, or we can accept ambiguous environments as the norm and learn to thrive in them. Today we are facing unprecedented rates of change in consumer behaviors (watch Cutting Through Chaos in the Age of Mobile Me), which are increasing ambiguity levels and forcing enterprises to digitally transform. This is happening at the same time as we are analyzing more data than ever before. The challenge is less about increasing the volume of data, and more about finding the meaning in the data and associating it with relevant actions.
Although we live in a new On Demand Economy defined by the likes of Uber, Airbnb, Facebook and Twitter among others, firms who clearly demonstrate that the strategic use of modern new technologies like Cloud and Mobile to generate huge increases in shareholder value, many still struggle with adoption and are failing to react to the competitive threat the trend represents. As this IDC report shows only 25% of organizations have repeatable strategies for Cloud adoption, with 32% having no Cloud strategy at all.
In attending the 2015 DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES15) in October, I expected to catch glimpses of key insight from today's top technology organizations in regards to their implementations of DevOps practices. I expected a lot of talk to center around tools, around automation strategies and around tactical and clever use of software. These topics were definitely discussed, but what I found to be arguably the top theme of the entire summit was something different, though not entirely unexpected: Culture. Every speaker whose session I attended-whether the speaker represented a ‘unicorn' company, a ‘horse', or one at the beginning stages of its DevOps evolution-emphasized the cultural aspect of DevOps, and many sessions focused mostly on this aspect. It was interesting to hear even today's most successful companies discuss culture and their unique approaches toward improving it.
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.
"Internet-of-Things" (IoT) is touted as the next big thing slated to revolutionize how we communicate online or how we work. The majority of the chatter rising from industries nowadays is focused on how to deploy machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and optimally capitalize on the technology. Simply put, IoT is built on the paradigm of cloud computing and data gathering sensors networks. Hence, it provides instantaneous and mobile virtual connection. Proponents of the technology believe that within a few years IoT will make even the smallest speckle of technology in our lives, "smart'. Be it seaports or road transport systems, soon IoT will transform them into sectors driven by smart technologies.
Skyscanner is a global search engine that enables people to find comparisons for flights, hotels and car hire. Headquartered in the UK, Skyscanner has been an excellent customer of ours, providing feedback on new features and helping us with testing. When Lance Gobaira, a web operation engineer at Skyscanner, offered to share with us how they’re using VictorOps to alert on key business metrics, we jumped. Read on to see what he had to say…
Most of us can relate to the frustration of when the Wi-Fi is down, or running slowly, or if we travel away from an established network and aren't able to connect to another one nearby. The lack of Wi-Fi makes it impossible to check our emails, look up something on the internet, connect with others, or get our work done efficiently. In short, it makes us feel a little helpless and a whole lot of cranky because we've become way too accustomed to getting the information we want - when we want it - and staying in 24/7 connection with our world.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Catchpoint Systems, Inc., a provider of innovative web and infrastructure monitoring solutions, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's DevOps Summit at 18th Cloud Expo New York, which will take place June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Catchpoint is a leading Digital Performance Analytics company that provides unparalleled insight into customer-critical services to help consistently deliver an amazing customer experience. Designed for digital business, Catchpoint is the only end-user experience monitoring (EUM) platform that can simultaneously capture, index and analyze object level performance data inline across the most extensive monitor types and node coverage, enabling a smarter, faster way to preempt issues and optimize service delivery. More than 350 customers in over 30 countries trust Catchpoint to strengthen their brands and grow their businesses. Founded in September 2008 by former DoubleClick/Google veterans and backed by Battery Ventures, Catchpoint Systems is headquartered in New York City.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, Inc., the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the 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. Alert Logic, Inc., provides Security-as-a-Service for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, delivering deep security insight and continuous protection for customers at a lower cost than traditional security solutions. Fully managed by a team of experts, the Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service solution provides network, system and web application protection immediately, wherever your IT infrastructure resides.
SYS-CON Events announced today that AppNeta, the leader in performance insight for business-critical web applications, will exhibit and present at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. AppNeta is the only application performance monitoring (APM) company to provide solutions for all applications – applications you develop internally, business-critical SaaS applications you use and the networks that deliver them.
Whether you are new to Continuous Delivery or just need a quick refresher, The IT Manager’s Guide to Continuous Delivery is the perfect addition to your DevOps library. Having recently picked up the book myself, I can see how it has become an absolute essential addition in understanding the intricate world of Continuous Delivery. Below you will find a list of why The IT Manager’s Guide to Continuous Delivery is the perfect guide for beginners and experts alike.
From scaling Agile to creating a DevOps culture, there was plenty to take in as the software innovation community continues to band together to push industries forward. In fact, we are seeing the rise of FinTech and FinServ in this week’s posts – a vertical market that has been gaining a larger share of DevOps and IT news coverage in recent months. Read on to learn how software continues to impact the financial world and more on IoT, the Cloud and Continuous Delivery.
The founders of RedMonk unpack the often tricky path to DevOps and to explore how enterprises can find ways to make pan-IT collaboration a rule, not an exception. Gentleman, let’s look at DevOps through a little bit of a different lens. Often, it’s thought of as a philosophy. It’s talked about as a way of improving speed and performance of applications and quality, but ultimately, this is a behavior and a culture discussion -- and the behavior and culture of developers is an important part of making DevOps successful.
The principles, processes and tools that are core to the existing DevOps movement will expand beyond traditional development and operations teams. Non-technical teams are often in silos too, so can also get value from the benefits DevOps provides to software teams, including a high-trust open culture, creating and validating hypotheses, measurement, shortened feedback loops and enhanced collaboration; all of these lead to high velocity organizations regardless of type. Approaches and tools like pull-requests and ChatOps are no longer just for technical teams anymore – any modern organization can reap benefits from DevOps approaches.
During the last several years Oracle was working on their cloud solution, and several internal teams were creating JavaScript-based Web interfaces for the cloud. At some point Oracle decided to standardize on the set of JavaScript libraries used internally, and they also developed a set of reusable Web UI components both simple (e.g. buttons and forms) as well as complex (data grids, charts, accordion, and fancy gauges). All these components are based on jQuery UI and are responsive, so they can be used on mobile devices.
Azul Systems has announced the general availability of Zing runtime for Java release 16.01. This new release of Zing® is a highly scalable Java Virtual Machine (JVM) designed for enterprise applications and systems that require any combination of consistent low latency, high transaction rates, high scalability or large in-memory data structures.
Eighty percent of a data scientist’s time is spent gathering and cleaning up data, and 80% of all data is unstructured and almost never analyzed. Cognitive computing, in combination with Big Data, is changing the equation by creating data reservoirs and using natural language processing to enable analysis of unstructured data sources. This is impacting every aspect of the analytics profession from how data is mined (and by whom) to how it is delivered. This is not some futuristic vision: it's happening right now in industries across the globe.
Data-as-a-Service is the complete package for the transformation of raw data into meaningful data assets and the delivery of those data assets. In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Lakshmi Randall, an industry expert, analyst and strategist, will address: What is DaaS (Data-as-a-Service)? Challenges addressed by DaaS Vendors that are enabling DaaS Architecture options for DaaS
The following are a few Big Data companies that I was keeping an eye on starting back in January of 2015 (yeah, this is NOT a statistically significant sample)….some for “old times sake” because I knew the founding team and was curious how things were progressing, some because I trust their venture capital partners, and some because they inspire me with an application of the technology that is meaningful (I’m tired of hearing about yet another “Big Data Platform”).
The battle over bimodal IT is heating up. Now that there’s a reasonably broad consensus that Gartner’s advice about bimodal IT is deeply flawed – consensus everywhere except perhaps at Gartner – various ideas are springing up to fill the void. The bimodal problem, of course, is well understood. ‘Traditional’ or ‘slow’ IT uses hidebound, laborious processes that would only get in the way of ‘fast’ or ‘agile’ digital efforts. The result: incoherent IT strategies and shadow IT struggles that lead to dispersed, redundant, and risky technology choices across the organization. The battle, however, isn’t over the problem. It’s over what we should do about it. Perhaps we should add a third mode?
Digital transformation has increased the speed at which organizations must adapt. As they do so, it’s more important than ever to be able to choose solutions that will give them a comprehensive, real-time view of the network. Several factors contribute to this new priority: Root causes and threats must be quickly identified, so network and security ops personnel must have the ability to view and share real-time data from multiple network environments.