We really are moving in the direction of truly commoditized hardware. Some uses will always have specific requirements that are not mainstream and thus will require specialized builds, this is true in every industry. But increasingly, who made your hardware and where they got their parts from is a secondary issue. Which makes one consider what really sells hardware these days. Years ago when I was working for Network Computing, I reviewed a low-end blade server company capable of cranking up blades at a fraction of the cost of most vendors. They (like far too many good companies) ran out of money before they could grab market traction, but they did show that it could be done at a price even small enterprises could afford.
USB GPS dongles have come down significantly in price in recent years and I picked one up to play with recently. Apart from using a GPS module to report your latitude, longitude, altitude and time for mapping applications, it’s also possible to feed the time information to ntpd as a back-up time source or as a highly accurate time source depending on the GPS module you end up getting.
During the last two #IoTuesday Twitter sessions, our chats have centered on what it will take to capitalize on the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunity and what the industry’s collective responsibility is to break down barriers to adoption. Topics ranged from the evolution of the Industrial Internet to consumer IoT applications to the role of APIs and API management. And underlying all of this, how we move from today’s connected devices and vertical siloes to a horizontal IoT marketplace with interconnectivity at its core. In this month’s IoT chat we will be joined by Alex Bakker and Ron Exler, from analyst firm Saugatuck Technology, to continue the discussion on the evolution of IoT, blockers and opportunities.
It’s been proven time and time again that in tech, diversity drives greater innovation, better team productivity and greater profits and market share. So what can we do in our DevOps teams to embrace diversity and help transform the culture of development and operations into a true “DevOps” team? In her session at DevOps Summit, Stefana Muller, Director, Product Management – Continuous Delivery at CA Technologies, answered that question citing examples, showing how to create opportunities for diverse candidates and taking feedback from the audience on their experiences with encouraging diversity in technology roles.
We chat again with Jason Bloomberg, a leading industry analyst and expert on achieving digital transformation by architecting business agility in the enterprise. He writes for Forbes, Wired, TechBeacon, and his biweekly newsletter, the Cortex. As president of Intellyx, he advises business executives on their digital transformation initiatives and delivers training on Agile Architecture. His latest book is The Agile Architecture Revolution. Check out his first interview on Agile trends here.
I can guarantee that if you are involved in recruiting new IT employees for your organization this year, then DevOps skills will be on your priority list. The problem is that I can also guarantee that many resumes and LinkedIn profiles will be awash with the word DevOps. After all, according to Puppet Labs, a DevOps engineer today can earn upwards of $100,000 – so if you are a job seeker in IT, then it makes sense to ensure that your resume includes DevOps skills. This means that recruiting the right IT professionals for your business is a difficult task. There are lots of articles and blog posts which state that DevOps is about culture (even I state that culture is critical), but how do you recruit someone with ‘the right culture’? From my experience, talking to AppDynamics customers and from my time at Forrester Research, here are 5 essential character traits to identify and avoid during the interview process.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Isomorphic Software, global leader and provider of the most advanced technology for building rich internet applications, has been named “e-Bulletin Sponsor” of SYS-CON's DevOps Summit 2015 Silicon Valley, which will take place November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Isomorphic Software develops, markets, and supports the SmartClient & Smart GWT HTML5/Ajax platform, combining the productivity and performance of traditional desktop software with the simplicity and reach of the open web.
There are a billion articles on ES6 at this point. What's one more? Here we discuss some emerging patterns and issues related to real world use of ES6 as well as how one can go about using it now via Babel. If you aren't yet familiar with the features and changes of ES6 itself, you'll probably want to check out the following links first:
Cloud has matured. Basic, but profoundly important for understanding where knowledge, perceptions, attitudes, and actions regarding data security and storage were just a few years ago in comparison to today. No longer an ambitious and innovative step, securing sensitive and invaluable data in the cloud has become the standard. After years of debate and non-consensus on the topic, we can now say that failure to maintain a tactical and informed cloud strategy will indeed prove to be seriously disadvantageous in an increasingly competitive, time and cost sensitive, and threat-dense data environment.
Our guest on the podcast this week is Alex Polvi, CEO at CoreOS. We discuss how CoreOS fundamentally improves the security of the internet by modeling the infrastructure best practices developed by Google, Facebook and Twitter. Alex also breaks down the specifications of CoreOS’ new innovative products from Rocket to App Container to Tectonic.
Yesterday I had the chance to attend a great conversation on Twitter and Youtube. Brillantly facilitated by Tim Crawford, the discussion revolved around the relevance of IT today and involved Mark Thiele EVP Datacenter at Switch, Stuart Appley CIO at Shorenstein, and Bob Egan CEO of the Sepharim Group. Throughout the conversation - that's not the words that were used - but it seemed that there was a consensus on the fact that the way we delivered IT services had reached an inflection point and that new paradigm more centered on"Piecing Together the Business and IT" and on "Not Seperating IT From the Business" would make IT more relevant particularly in today's digital age.
For being such a new industry there is a lot of video content based around DevOps. I found this out after trying to search for some entertaining or highly rated DevOps/IT videos on youtube. That process failed, so I decided to dig a littler deeper into the community to find some of the most entertaining, hilarious and informative DevOps-esk videos on the web. Many of the videos below are recommended by your peers and they are sure to not disappoint.
Of the many additions to Java 8 such as the Stream API and lambdas, I noticed one of the lesser talked about ones was CompletableFutures. So I decided to have a play around with them on the last Java component I wrote. My use case in a nutshell was piping large volumes of data from a distributed file system, compressing it and uploading to individual destinations on Amazon S3.
It seems like every time I write a blog, a new breach has occurred (for an up-to-date look at local, state and federal breaches I suggest you periodically review the Identity Theft Resource Center’s running list). Since I last penned a post, we’ve seen breaches of the Mayo Clinic, Citizen’s Bank, CVS and Arkansas BlueCross/BlueShield. To the average person, most breaches probably bleed together. If you’ve seen one breach, you’ve seen them all, right? If we’re going off of that logic, then one might assume all industries can take the same data security approach.
Ski helmets, seat belts, and encryption. What comes to your mind when you read these words? You may immediately think “safety,” and you’d be right, but how about “speed enablers”? At first blush, that may not be the first concept that comes to mind, but there’s a pretty compelling case to be made for this as another common theme. Let me give you a couple fun examples, starting with ski helmets. During the winter of 2002/2003 researchers studied different factors, and how they affect skier and snow boarder speed. One of the variables examined was “use or not of helmet”. The authors measured the speed of 650 individuals at three different US ski resorts and found the average speed for helmet users (28.4 MPH) was significantly higher than those not using a helmet (25.4 MPH).
SYS-CON Events announced today that Key Information Systems, Inc. (KeyInfo), a leading cloud and infrastructure provider offering integrated solutions to enterprises, 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. Key Information Systems is a leading regional systems integrator with world-class compute, storage and networking solutions and professional services for the most advanced software-defined data centers. These competencies are tightly complemented by a full suite of data center capabilities, including private and hybrid cloud offerings, connectivity services, colocation facilities and managed services.
As a class of business, IT providers may be hip to risk as a matter of course, but they aren’t exempt from the rules of the game and, given their special position in the information security ecosystem, attacks directed their way can be enormously consequential. Hacking doesn't happen only to other people. While last spring's notorious Sony hack may have implied that the biggest targets are the most vulnerable, any organization can be a victim - and, perhaps surprisingly, an unwitting perpetrator.
DevOps is about increasing efficiency, but nothing is more inefficient than building the same application twice. However, this is a routine occurrence with enterprise applications that need both a rich desktop web interface and strong mobile support. With recent technological advances from Isomorphic Software and others, rich desktop and tuned mobile experiences can now be created with a single codebase – without compromising functionality, performance or usability. In his session at DevOps Summit, Charles Kendrick, CTO and Chief Architect at Isomorphic Software, will demonstrate examples of complex UI widgets that behave differently in desktop vs. mobile context, and describe the API and code structures that enable these capabilities.
“Today due to the nature of cloud services, solutions and integrations, APIs are the way to go because of so many reasons,” stated Ian Khan, Head of Innovation at Solgenia, in this exclusive Q&A with Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff. “I strongly believe that any company today that builds any kind of a solution need to take the containers approach.” Cloud Computing Journal: It seems we're now in the era of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. To what degree does this hold true for your customers?
Localytics uses data and associated analytics to help providers of mobile applications improve their applications - and also allow them to better understand the uses for their apps and dynamic customer demands. To learn more about how big data helps mobile application developers better their products and services, please join Andrew Rollins, Founder and Chief Software Architect at Localytics, based in Boston.
For it to be SOA – let alone SOA done right – we need to pin down just what "SOA done wrong" might be. First-generation SOA with Web Services and ESBs, perhaps? But then there's second-generation, REST-based SOA. More lightweight and cloud-friendly, but many REST-based SOA practices predate the microservices wave. Today, microservices and containers go hand in hand – only the details of "container-oriented architecture" are largely on the drawing board – and are not likely to look much like SOA in any case. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Jason Bloomberg, President of Intellyx, will provide an insightful look into the nature of microservices architecture.
Once enterprises decide on proceeding with developing applications on Hadoop, they have to standardize on a specific application development framework. With this, enterprises can promote the reuse of code, set development best practices, comply with regulations, enable consistent quality, etc. I’ve seen all kinds of projects across different of industries. I’ve seen smart people go with the newest technology, even if it’s unproven, and have paid the price when they find it’s not enterprise ready. I’ve also seen projects fail because they overemphasized the niche capabilities of the platform instead of the basics, such as ease of integration to existing systems.
Regardless of what they are looking up, travelers’ first experience is on the go. Users are under pressure, trying to figure something out without wasting any precious time. They are distracted – navigating a busy ticket counter or conversing in a foreign language with a street vendor. The decisions they make at that moment really matter, and can mean the difference between a pleasant flight and a missed connection. Reliability of your app is key in these situations. If the app is slow, unresponsive, or difficult to understand, your user will give up.
Many organizations’ virtualization strategies begin and end with deploying VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V to virtualize as many servers as possible. But there’s so much more that an enterprise can do to extend the benefits of virtualization. In addition to virtualizing, a workflow-based management overlay can minimize operational costs while ensuring assets are fully utilized. Furthermore, taking advantage of applications in the public cloud can further reduce costs while ensuring agility and on-demand resources to meet changing business requirements. Here are four ways an enterprise can improve its overall cloud strategy.
Learn how you can use the CoSN SEND II Decision Tree for Education Technology to make sure that your K–12 technology initiatives create a more engaging learning experience that empowers students, teachers, and administrators alike.