As 2016 has arrived, we reflect upon one of the most debated issues around DevOps in 2015 – Information Security (InfoSec) and compliance. Needless to say, both are critical to an enterprise (especially given past examples of data breaches and looming cybersecurity threats). As a result, the combination of InfoSec and DevOps practices can be viewed as counter-intuitive, since the ability to “go faster” can be seen as a potential risk to security mechanisms in place, and thus harder to ensure compliance and enable auditability.
The web community is constantly churning out new technologies that make it easier to develop the applications that savvy users are demanding. It may be obvious, but new technologies often require new ways of thinking about testing – sometimes new tools, other times entirely new testing methods. You just can’t rely on the same old same old when things change as much as the web does.
Today on #c9d9 we talked about best practices for orchestrating enterprise software testing. Delivering software faster, but with lower quality, doesn’t help you win in the market. What are some of the challenges and proven tips and patterns used to test critical software – across all the different supported platforms – quickly and efficiently?
We started our Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) video podcast in late 2014 as a way for the DevOps community to connect with each others – sharing experiences, lessons learned and tips – to accelerate our mutual success.Each #c9d9 episode focuses on a different topic relating to your software delivery process, and features different speakers from around the development and IT community. Every two weeks, we get together for a casual video chat (over Hangout) to share best practices – and war stories – relating to real-world examples of implementing Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery.
SDN / NFV may not be new with next gen telcos and data centers but by 2016 it is certainly going to be the new beast in DevOps space. It's a multi-million dollar virgin market, so it's not only those traditional OEMs are in the fray even the DB companies will be entering this new market. Telcos and Data center wants a vendor agnostic network devices and are expected to replace all physical devices including those routers and switches with software devices. This not only drastically brings down the PCB replacement costs and other maintenance charges but the latest release automation tools and technology of DevOps will do radical changes by reducing the overall current service provisioning time from 4-5 months to few hours. In the near future the network administration may not require to have niche skill sets to manage large networks because the latest zero touch release automation technology with GUI based orchestration dashboard will do the network configuration.
Fujitsu and Grid Dynamics have teamed up to create the Cloud Commerce Platform to empower retailers with best-of-breed hardware, software and services for faster digital innovation. Retailers are under immense pressure to innovate faster. Working with them over the years, we have come to intimately understand their challenges. With the explosion of digital touch points and the expectation of a unified experience throughout a shopper's journey across the channels, retailers must innovate at an unprecedented pace while performing flawlessly even as traffic peaks.
Ten years ago, when I drove on Winchester Avenue in Los Gatos, I saw this new company called Netflix that was renting DVDs of movies. You didn't have to go to a store, but could sign up for home delivery service of DVDs. Now Netflix is building a much bigger headquarters near its old site. It is a huge success story – a disruption to the home entertainment business. When it decided to switch to “streaming only” a few years back, there were lot of doubters. But that’s all in the past. It is a global company now with huge success as a business.
Docker Swarm is a cluster manager for Docker. When accessed via the Docker API by Docker API Clients or Docker command line tools, a Docker Swarm cluster looks just like a single Docker Host. Docker Swarm distributes containers to multiple nodes using various deployment strategies in the cluster scheduler. Having in mind that a Swarm cluster looks like a single Docker Host from the API point of view, it should be very easy to monitor Docker Swarm with existing Docker monitoring tools! Connecting a monitoring agent to the Swarm Master API endpoint should do the job, right? The Sematext Docker Agent could simply collect all container metrics, events and all logs from the Swarm Master – should be a piece of cake. Hmm, but could there a gotcha? It turns out there is more than one:
In the late 1990's Tom Standage released the first edition of a book that would sweep across the tech community because of its incredible analogies to the rise of the Internet hitting the world at that time. The "Victorian Internet", first released in 1998, was updated and re-released again in 2013. It provided a well written history and meaningful assessment of the rise of the Telegraph, and made very interesting observations about how the remarkable impact of the Telegraph could help us all think through what may happen as the Internet progressed.
Over the past couple of years IoT has become the most hyped word around the world, and rightly so because we all know IoT is here to stay. So what is IoT? IoT stands for the Internet of Things. It refers to the devices that are connected through the internet. The basic concept is connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet, devices such as cell phones, wearable devices, coffee machines, connected homes even your refrigerator and all those things you can think of. We have collected a list of factors that will demonstrate how rapidly this sector is growing, and some mind-boggling numbers to prove that IoT (Internet of Things) is here to stay for a very long time.
For manufacturers, the Internet of Things (IoT) represents a jumping-off point for innovation, jobs, and revenue creation. But to adequately seize the opportunity, manufacturers must design devices that are interconnected, can continually sense their environment and process huge amounts of data. As a first step, manufacturers must embrace a new product development ecosystem in order to support these products.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Robert Doyle, Chief Technology Architect at eCube Systems, will examine the issues and need for an agile infrastructure and show the advantages of capturing developer knowledge in an exportable file for migration into production. He will introduce the use of NXTmonitor, a next generation DevOps tool that captures application environments, dependencies and start/stop procedures in a portable configuration file with an easy-to-use GUI. In addition to capturing configuration information between Development, Test and Production, the case study shows how NXTmonitor can create dependencies, automate health scripts and scalable performance groups to handle peak production loads.
The IoT's basic concept of collecting data from as many sources possible to drive better decision making, create process innovation and realize additional revenue has been in use at large enterprises with deep pockets for decades. So what has changed? In his session at @ThingsExpo, Prasanna Sivaramakrishnan, Solutions Architect at Red Hat, discussed the impact commodity hardware, ubiquitous connectivity, and innovations in open source software are having on the connected universe of people, things and information in the IoT.
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.
I have known Gartner for decades during my IBM and Oracle days. Even though I have observed how they invent new terms for stuff we already know (a bit annoying, but I guess that’s their business), they do a decent job in capturing key strategic trends. In a recent article, I saw ten strategic technology trends and this is how they are grouped: the first three address merging the physical and the virtual worlds and the emergence of the digital mesh (their new phrase); the next three trends cover the algorithmic business, where much happens in the background in which people are not directly involved; the final four trends address the new architecture and platform trends needed to support the digital and algorithmic business.
DevOps will play a major role in 2016 simply because DevOps is all about savings which is fundamentally different from the traditionally IT budgeted projects; without DevOps the dollars are anyway drained for nothing because the teams are working in silos which leads to the delay due to inter dependency, poor code quality, too much of un-warranted hand overs, post deployment issues, inconsistent environment, non-availability of infra structural resources etc as per Forrester research 60% of application failure & downtime are related to releases despite 75% of IT operation time spent on release management.
In a recent weekend edition of the #CIOChat tweetchat, the question was raised about what the CIO's role would look like in five years. The discussion focused on many different areas. One area was that the CIO would become more of a service broker, as more and more applications move to the cloud. The responsibility discussion becomes less about controlling / owning iron / hardware / space, which has been the traditional area of CIO responsibilities. This prompted a secondary question from me: Has the cloud industry reached the point where it is too big to fail? Granted none of the big players in the cloud show any signs of financial trouble, but there was a time when the auto industry and the banking industry could say the same. Have we reached that tipping point? Has the cloud industry become too big to fail and, if it has, what is the impact?
If you were too busy with things and unable to give the desired attention to planning the right steps for your business in 2016, fear not. You’re not alone, and yes welcome to the party! With too many things going on, I could completely believe if you said you don’t have time to breathe. The boss wants the reports, the customer wants the installation while the sales teams have been asking for help on some technical stuff. You can only do as much as you do. With so much going around us, it’s also sometimes hard to keep up with what really matters. Here is how to achieve planned success in this New Year and with no room for excuses.
Actifio has announced its partnership with Camouflage Software Inc., a leading provider of solutions for data masking in Test Data Management. The partnership brings a best-in-class solution to address the challenges of data access, control, security, and storage costs in the test and development space. "Software is eating the world," as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011. Since then, more and more industries have been transformed by software, to the point where the largest distributor of films has no theaters (Netflix,) the largest provider of delivery services has no cars (Uber,) the largest renter of rooms owns no hotels (Airbnb). Software - especially the development of company-specific applications and platforms with the power to create sustainable advantage and even transform entire industries - has become a critical lever of business strategy in even the most unlikely business segments. Meanwhile, physical and technical infrastructure, the source of differentiated capability for decades, if not centuries, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be accessed at the lowest possible cost. "Software is eating the world," as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011. Since then, more and more industries have been transformed by software, to the point where the largest distributor of films has no theaters (Netflix,) the largest provider of delivery services has no cars (Uber,) the largest renter of rooms owns no hotels (Airbnb). Software - especially the development of company-specific applications and platforms with the power to create sustainable advantage and even transform entire industries - has become a critical lever of business strategy in even the most unlikely business segments. Meanwhile, physical and technical infrastructure, the source of differentiated capability for decades, if not centuries, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be accessed at the lowest possible cost.
As 2016 has arrived, we reflect upon one of the most debated issues around DevOps in 2015 – Information Security (InfoSec) and compliance. Needless to say, both are critical to an enterprise (especially given past examples of data breaches and looming cybersecurity threats). As a result, the combination of InfoSec and DevOps practices can be viewed as counter-intuitive, since the ability to “go faster” can be seen as a potential risk to security mechanisms in place, and thus harder to ensure compliance and enable auditability.
Shot this late last year for Information Security Buzz. What are five information security new year’s resolutions for improving cyber security in 2016 and why?
We started our Continuous Discussions (#c9d9) video podcast in late 2014 as a way for the DevOps community to connect with each others – sharing experiences, lessons learned and tips – to accelerate our mutual success.Each #c9d9 episode focuses on a different topic relating to your software delivery process, and features different speakers from around the development and IT community. Every two weeks, we get together for a casual video chat (over Hangout) to share best practices – and war stories – relating to real-world examples of implementing Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery.
Ten years ago, when I drove on Winchester Avenue in Los Gatos, I saw this new company called Netflix that was renting DVDs of movies. You didn't have to go to a store, but could sign up for home delivery service of DVDs. Now Netflix is building a much bigger headquarters near its old site. It is a huge success story – a disruption to the home entertainment business. When it decided to switch to “streaming only” a few years back, there were lot of doubters. But that’s all in the past. It is a global company now with huge success as a business.
SDN / NFV may not be new with next gen telcos and data centers but by 2016 it is certainly going to be the new beast in DevOps space. It's a multi-million dollar virgin market, so it's not only those traditional OEMs are in the fray even the DB companies will be entering this new market. Telcos and Data center wants a vendor agnostic network devices and are expected to replace all physical devices including those routers and switches with software devices. This not only drastically brings down the PCB replacement costs and other maintenance charges but the latest release automation tools and technology of DevOps will do radical changes by reducing the overall current service provisioning time from 4-5 months to few hours. In the near future the network administration may not require to have niche skill sets to manage large networks because the latest zero touch release automation technology with GUI based orchestration dashboard will do the network configuration.
Instead of writing yet another “Big Data Predictions for the Next Year” blog, I thought I’d do something a bit different. Instead of predicting – like everyone else – what’s going to happen in 2016, let’s instead look out a few years and see how data and analytics might transform our lives and the lives of those around us. Probably a silly exercise, but a fun way to wrap up 2015 nonetheless. My wellness band actually woke me up about 15 minutes before my alarm because it had used data about my sleep patterns to determine that I was ready to get up (it automatically turns off my alarm so that it doesn’t bother my wife). I slept well last night. I get a gold star. Yippee…