Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) is credited as the first person to classify our five sense organs: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing and Immanuel Kant, a famous philosopher from the 1700s said that our knowledge of the outside world depends on our modes of perception. Our highly developed organs of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and the skin on your hand provide the sensing equipment necessary to send that information to the brain. In some cases, one of the sensors might not work properly in the case of the blind or deaf, yet the four other senses are heightened and exceed normal operation to make up for the missing information. Daniel Kish, for example, uses echolocation like a bat to see the imprint of the sound waves as they bounce back. Pretty cool, eh?
The Internet of Things (IoT) is about the digitization of physical assets including sensors, devices, machines, gateways, and the network. It creates possibilities for significant value creation and new revenue generating business models via data democratization and ubiquitous analytics across IoT networks. The explosion of data in all forms in IoT requires a more robust and broader lens in order to enable smarter timely actions and better outcomes. Business operations become the key driver of IoT applications and projects. Business operations, IT, and data scientists need advanced analytics tools incorporating predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, and machine learning for rapid development and innovation to divine timely value out of IoT networks.
I am not sure how many people remember Cisco SANTap. About ten years ago, Cisco introduced a data tapping mechanism in the MDS 9000 fibre channel switches. The idea was to allow the data path to be “tapped” at-will. Tapping in this case meant using a mechanism in the switch to split the data being written from client hosts to the storage, allowing the identical “split” data to be routed through a second, separate path. SANTap therefore allowed a copy of the data to be seamlessly “mirrored” through the switch and subsequently used by other applications for multiple purposes (especially for backup). It facilitated real-time protection of critical data, and allowed advanced functions such as migration, snapshots, etc.
Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) is credited as the first person to classify our five sense organs: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing and Immanuel Kant, a famous philosopher from the 1700s said that our knowledge of the outside world depends on our modes of perception. Our highly developed organs of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and the skin on your hand provide the sensing equipment necessary to send that information to the brain. In some cases, one of the sensors might not work properly in the case of the blind or deaf, yet the four other senses are heightened and exceed normal operation to make up for the missing information. Daniel Kish, for example, uses echolocation like a bat to see the imprint of the sound waves as they bounce back. Pretty cool, eh?
SYS-CON Events announced today that DataClear Inc. will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The DataClear ‘BlackBox’ is the only solution that moves your PC, browsing and data out of the United States and away from prying (and spying) eyes. Its solution automatically builds you a clean, on-demand, virus free, new virtual cloud based PC outside of the United States, and wipes it clean, destroying it completely when you log out. If you wish to store your data, the solution will include a custom data encryption system with multiple factor authentication. DataClear also provides a corporate solution for multiple networked users and secure cloud based servers.
What does “big enough” mean? It’s sometimes useful to argue by reductio ad absurdum. Hello, world doesn’t need to be broken down into smaller services. At the other extreme, building a monolithic enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is just asking for trouble: it’s too big, and it needs to be decomposed.
DevOps has traditionally played important roles in development and IT operations, but the practice is quickly becoming core to other business functions such as customer success, business intelligence, and marketing analytics. Modern marketers today are driven by data and rely on many different analytics tools. They need DevOps engineers in general and server log data specifically to do their jobs well. Here’s why: Server log files contain the only data that is completely full and accurate in the context of how search engines such as Google are crawling websites. If a search engine spider encounters an error and does not load a page, the webmaster does not know because traditional traffic analytics tools such as Google Analytics do not track those issues. Log file data, on the other hand, does reveals what problems bots are encountering on a website – and many of those issues can hurt a site’s appearance and rankings in Google.
One of the perennial cloud predictions has been that 200x would be the year of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud. The logic goes that if an automated data center in the sky is good, an automated development platform in the sky must be even better. “Normal” clouds like Amazon AWS give the developer a virtual computer to load their OS and App onto. PaaS gives the developer a virtual computer with the OS, database and middleware “pre-loaded,” thereby simplifying the deployment. Yet so far, PaaS adoption has been anemic and Gartner puts PaaS at 1% of the overall cloud market. At the same time, new technologies like Docker and containers have attracted far more attention from the developer community.
The evolution of IT operations is upon us. There has been a lot of change in both direction and momentum over the last several years, and at this point, it is not hard to see the future of Ops. Perhaps, having worked for a networking firm and a server automation firm, it is easier to see than for the average operations person, so let’s just take a look at the burgeoning ops trends and technologies and see where they ultimately lead us…
Over the last few years we’ve seen just about every part of the data centre move towards virtualization and software. First we virtualized desktops, then storage, then even our security tools. So when the idea of Software Defined Networking (SDN) started being floated around, it wasn’t a big surprise. But what exactly is it?
DevOps has traditionally played important roles in development and IT operations, but the practice is quickly becoming core to other business functions such as customer success, business intelligence, and marketing analytics. Modern marketers today are driven by data and rely on many different analytics tools. They need DevOps engineers in general and server log data specifically to do their jobs well. Here’s why: Server log files contain the only data that is completely full and accurate in the context of how search engines such as Google are crawling websites. If a search engine spider encounters an error and does not load a page, the webmaster does not know because traditional traffic analytics tools such as Google Analytics do not track those issues. Log file data, on the other hand, does reveals what problems bots are encountering on a website – and many of those issues can hurt a site’s appearance and rankings in Google.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is about the digitization of physical assets including sensors, devices, machines, gateways, and the network. It creates possibilities for significant value creation and new revenue generating business models via data democratization and ubiquitous analytics across IoT networks. The explosion of data in all forms in IoT requires a more robust and broader lens in order to enable smarter timely actions and better outcomes. Business operations become the key driver of IoT applications and projects. Business operations, IT, and data scientists need advanced analytics tools incorporating predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, and machine learning for rapid development and innovation to divine timely value out of IoT networks.
Organizations from small to large are increasingly adopting cloud solutions to deliver essential business services at a much lower cost. According to cyber security experts, the frequency and severity of cyber-attacks are on the rise, causing alarm to businesses and customers across a variety of industries. To defend against exploits like these, a company must adopt a comprehensive security defense strategy that is designed for their business. In 2015, organizations such as United Airlines, Sony Corp, Anthem and the Office of Personnel Management experienced data breaches through malware and other targeted attacks. How will your business adapt to this shift in technology while keeping its security posture?
Developers are – despite their attention to what is considered a very logic-based field of study – a very creative group. Give them a hurdle to overcome and they will. The problem, of course, is not that they’ve solved a problem, it’s that in doing so they’ve likely created a source of technical debt that will, over time, become problematic. In fact, technical debt is a significant focus of the Agile methodology and is flows (quite naturally) into DevOps. That’s good, because technical debt, like real debt, compounds over time and can put a significant damper on future growth and success.
Brands are more than the sum of their brand elements – logos, colors, shapes, and the like. Brands are promises. Promises from a company to its customers that its products will deliver the value and experience customers expect. Today, digital is transforming enterprises across numerous industries. As companies become software-driven organizations, their brands transform into digital brands. But if brands are promises, then what do digital brands promise – and how do those promises differ from traditional, non-digital brands?
GoodData is exploring new technologies to make BI as a service more seamless across more data types for more types of users -- all in the cloud. To learn the ups and downs of BIaaS, we welcome Jeff Morris, Vice President of Marketing at GoodData in San Francisco, and Chris Selland, Vice President for Business Development at HP Vertica. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
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?
Any Ops team trying to support a company in today’s cloud-connected world knows that a new way of thinking is required – one just as dramatic than the shift from Ops to DevOps. The diversity of modern operations requires teams to focus their impact on breadth vs. depth. In his session at DevOps Summit, Adam Serediuk, Director of Operations at xMatters, Inc., will discuss the strategic requirements of evolving from Ops to DevOps, and why modern Operations has begun leveraging the “NoOps” approach. NoOps enables developers to deploy, manage, and scale their own code, creating an infrastructure that minimizes bottlenecks in key processes.
It’s a funny thing isn’t it? Vendors like to talk about so-called IT transformation in the context of the general move toward new mobile, digital, virtualized, cloud-centric initiatives that take us to the new style of IT we can achieve in the promised land. The trouble with media commentary in this space is… we are too often guilty of being superficial. We look at the big picture without talking about the granular components of transformation.
When I started exploring virtualization, like many folks, I was in awe of how much efficiency came with moving physical servers into VMs. To this day, the number of success stories about improved usage, reduced overhead costs and increased functionality makes virtualization a solid business model for IT folks. Then I learned about Containerization and well, it takes efficiency to another level.
In case you missed it, the first phase of cloud computing has left the building. Thousands of companies are in the cloud. Practically all organizations regardless of size already have production applications in a public, off-premises cloud or a private cloud. Yep. Been there, done that. And the vast majority of these applications use the classic “SaaS-style” public cloud model. Someone develops a useful service and hosts it on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud Marketplace, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or one of several other cloud vendors. Accessing this external service is typically performed via a well-defined API. Typically this API invocation is made using a simple REST call (or a convenient library wrapper around a REST call). This request originates from a web browser, native app on a mobile device or some server-side application and traverses the web. Using only port 443 or 80, it connects through a series of firewalls to the actual service running in the external cloud environment. The request is serviced by a process running in a service provider’s computing environment and returns a result to the client application.
In 2011 the US Federal Government issued a Cloud First policy mandating that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. Cloud computing is a design style that allows for efficient use of compute, storage, and memory in order to decrease cycle time for mission delivery and promises to change the way that agencies deliver services to citizens for the next twenty years. Roger Hockenberry, CEO of Cognitio and former CTO for the National Clandestine Services of the Central Intelligence Agency, helped create and realize the potential of cloud capabilities for the Intelligence Community. Getting the Intelligence Community to accept Cloud computing as a viable platform was a difficult road to travel. This interview with Roger offers some thoughts and suggestions for a successful Cloud journey:
The Microservices architectural pattern promises increased DevOps agility and can help enable continuous delivery of software. This session is for developers who are transforming existing applications to cloud-native applications, or creating new microservices style applications. In his session at DevOps Summit, Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata, will introduce best practices, patterns, challenges, and solutions for the development and operations of microservices style applications. He will discuss how application container solutions can be used to efficiently deploy and operate these applications in a highly scalable and flexible manner. He will also include a live demonstration of how microservices applications, packaged in Docker containers, can be deployed and managed across public and private clouds in a fully automated manner.
Our guest on the podcast this week is Nicola de Carne, Founder, President and VP of Marketing at Wi-Next. We discuss ways to manage data on the edge, by allowing end nodes to react and make decisions close to industrial machines without communicating back to a centralized ERP. We also see how the most disruptive part of IoT is not the new technologies, but the innovative ways businesses use the new information to optimize their initiatives.
Have you ever considered including users in performance testing? It may not be the most obvious thing to think about, but the benefits are really interesting. There is nothing quite like the feedback that a real user provides, even for performance. In this blog post, we'll show you how to do it.