Dasher Technologies is helping to usher in the democratization of big data value to more players in less time with analytics in a cloud services model
We’ve all had that moment where a friend comments (or complains) on social media about the new layout of a particular site. But you still see it the way it has been for months, and you have no idea what they are talking about. This is because the company that runs the site is likely using a Canary Release.
I have been following containers for quite some time now. A year ago it was safe to say that container technologies like Docker were far from production ready when it came to security. What I have seen over the past year is a ton of development towards closing that gap. Check out my latest post on The Virtualization Practice where I dicuss how Docker is closing the gap on container security.
This article series has covered a lot of ground: it presented an overview of application performance management (APM), it identified the challenges in implementing an APM strategy, it proposed a top-5 list of important metrics to measure to assess the health of an enterprise PHP application, and it presented AppDynamics’ approach to building an APM solution. In this final installment this article provides some tips-and-tricks to help you implement an optimal APM strategy. Specifically, this article addresses the following topics:
Overgrown applications have given way to modular applications, driven by the need to break larger problems into smaller problems. Similarly large monolithic development processes have been forced to be broken into smaller agile development cycles. Looking at trends in software development, microservices architectures meet the same demands. Additional benefits of microservices architectures are compartmentalization and a limited impact of service failure versus a complete software malfunction. The problem is there are a lot of moving parts in these designs; this makes assuring performance complex especially if the services are geographically distributed or provided by multiple third parties.
People, process, and technology has become a mantra within the world of DevOps proponents and practitioners, and it can easily be applied to the whole of cloud computing and all that it entails. Our DevOps Summit Chair Andi Mann led a panel discussion on the topic. Meanwhile, I led a technical discussion on aspects of the IoT with a panelist who went so far as to say the nascent M2M (machine-to-machine) IoT sector-which promises to reform the entire global $11 trillion manufacturing sector-will not be successful without the idea of M2M2H, the H standing for "humans."
None of us like slow mobile applications or those that ask us stupid questions. Our time has value. Google reports 82% of smartphone owners research and compare prices in stores, and we don’t want to be standing in the aisle answering questions the mobile app and vendor should already know. We want our apps to recognize us, the context, and to understand our needs. We want real-time mobile applications connected to mobile commerce vendors running at real-time operational tempos.
“This is interesting—didn’t we see this same thing in the logs just before we crashed last time?” – an anonymous and somewhat embarrassed DevOps team member Unfortunately the “same thing” is an obscure, otherwise uninteresting log entry, in a directory structure that’s rarely checked. More unfortunate is that the “last time” was two months ago, when their eCommerce site went down on Black Friday costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they had noticed this same entry but just now made the correlation. Companies have made great strides in attempting to speed up correlations like this and improve MTTR. The question that always arises (usually not long after the CFO sees the price tag) goes something like, “Is it really worth deploying an agent to all of our key app servers with the sole purpose of gathering and merging disconnected artifacts (logs) with the hope of finding an interesting correlation when it counts?”
Your Node.js application may be utilizing a backend database, a caching layer, or possibly even a queue server as it offloads CPU intensive tasks onto worker servers to process in the background. Whatever the backend your Node.js application interfaces with, the latency to these backend services can potentially affect the performance of your Node.js application performance, even if you’re interfacing with them asynchronously. The various types of exit calls may include:
The goal for many organizations now is to make analytics a natural part of most—if not every—employee’s daily workflow. Achieving that objective typically requires a shift in the corporate culture, and ready access to user-friendly data analytics tools.
WebRTC: together these advances have created a perfect storm of technologies that are disrupting and transforming classic communications models and ecosystems. In his session at WebRTC Summit, Cary Bran, VP of Innovation and New Ventures at Plantronics and PLT Labs, will provide an overview of this technological shift, including associated business and consumer communications impacts, and opportunities it may enable, complement or entirely transform.
Who are you? How do you introduce yourself? Do you use a name, or do you greet a friend by the last four digits of his social security number? Assuming you don’t, why are we content to associate our identity with 10 random digits assigned by our phone company? Identity is an issue that affects everyone, but as individuals we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ben Klang, Founder & President of Mojo Lingo, will discuss the impact of technology on identity. Should we federate, or not? How should identity be secured? Who owns the identity? How is identity created, addressed, and shared?
Containers are a hot topic these days. I have run a few workshops with clients, and one of the questions I get asked most frequently is “what are companies using containers for?” After answering this question a number of times, I thought I would share some common use cases with my readers. Check out my latest post at the Virtualization Practice where I highlight 3 common use cases.
Apache Spark continues to gain a lot of traction as companies launch or expand their big data initiatives. There is no doubt that it’s finding a place in corporate IT strategies. The open-source cluster computing framework was developed in the AMPLab at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009 and became an incubated project of the Apache Software Foundation in 2013. By early 2014, Spark had become one of the foundation’s top-level projects, and today it is one of the most active projects managed by Apache.
The goal for many organizations now is to make analytics a natural part of most—if not every—employee’s daily workflow. Achieving that objective typically requires a shift in the corporate culture, and ready access to user-friendly data analytics tools.
Look at production incident numbers, most organizations have sufficient data on that and sufficient problems to solve. It ends up being really compelling. Once you show the numbers, generally management just says do it, if that solves the problem just do it. Though you might have to prove that the approach you’re proposing, in other words putting the environments under better control and getting better control on the application releases. You can do that through proof of concept, but I would say that the hard dollar costs are generally there in almost every organization, and that if you’re not coming up with them, keep turning over rocks. Look for various sources of waste in a delivery pipeline process, look for errors, look for other things that you can catch earlier in the cycle and I think you’ll find really compelling numbers.
Containers have changed the mind of IT in DevOps. They enable developers to work with dev, test, stage and production environments identically. Containers provide the right abstraction for microservices and many cloud platforms have integrated them into deployment pipelines. DevOps and Containers together help companies to achieve their business goals faster and more effectively.
With the proliferation of connected devices underpinning new Internet of Things systems, Brandon Schulz, Director of Luxoft IoT – Retail, will be looking at the transformation of the retail customer experience in brick and mortar stores in his session at @ThingsExpo. Questions he will address include: Will beacons drop to the wayside like QR codes, or be a proximity-based profit driver? How will the customer experience change in stores of all types when everything can be instrumented and analyzed? As an area of investment, how might a retail company move towards an innovation methodology to bring new IoT solutions to market?
This article series has covered a lot of ground: it presented an overview of application performance management (APM), it identified the challenges in implementing an APM strategy, it proposed a top-5 list of important metrics to measure to assess the health of an enterprise PHP application, and it presented AppDynamics’ approach to building an APM solution. In this final installment this article provides some tips-and-tricks to help you implement an optimal APM strategy. Specifically, this article addresses the following topics:
Citrix announced that the company has been named as a leader in the Forrester Research, Inc. report, The Forrester WaveTM: Server-Hosted Virtual Desktops (VDI), Q3 2015. The report evaluated seven vendors based on 26 criteria, including current offering, strategy and market presence. According to the report, the "XenDesktop VDI offering is distinctive at several levels, from the user experience with Citrix Receiver endpoint clients that offer native HDX protocol support on all device and OS platforms to rich 3D graphics and multiple 4K monitor support and sophisticated features for multimedia and videoconferencing performance." The report also noted that Citrix offers a "clever Wi-Fi-based mouse that works with the Citrix Receiver on the iOS platform."
Now, with more hardware! September 21, 2015, Don MacVittie, Sr. Solutions Architect. The “continuous” trend is continuing (get it..?), and we’ll soon reach the peek of the hype cycle, with continuous everything. At the pinnacle of the hype cycle, do not be surprised to see DDOS attacks re-branded as “continuous penetration testing!” and a fee … Read More Continuous Provisioning
The Internet of Things (IoT) has quickly become the next “be all to end all” in information technology. Touted as how cloud computing will connect everyday things together, it is also feared as the real- life instantiation of The Terminator’s Skynet, where sentient robot team with an omnipresent and all-knowing entity that uses technology to control, and ultimately destroy, all of humanity.
Agile software development and agile marketing have followed similar, but unique paths. Buggy software, product delays and death marches were the norm in the 90s. A groundswell formed around the idea of taking the agile principles that had been so successful in manufacturing and applying them to software.
When organizations make the choice to put a digital platform in place, a discussion on MicroServices is never far behind. By putting a MicroServices layer in place, an organization creates the springboard to launch into the digital future, whether that involves apps, rich Web clients, or IoT devices such as in-store beacons.
Can call centers hang up the phones for good? Intuitive Solutions did. WebRTC enabled this contact center provider to eliminate antiquated telephony and desktop phone infrastructure with a pure web-based solution, allowing them to expand beyond brick-and-mortar confines to a home-based agent model. It also ensured scalability and better service for customers, including MUY! Companies, one of the country's largest franchise restaurant companies with 232 Pizza Hut locations. This is one example of WebRTC adoption today, but the potential is limitless when powered by IoT.