"For the past 4 years we have been working mainly to export. For the last 3 or 4 years the main market was Russia. In the past year we have been working to expand our footprint in Europe and the United States," explained Andris Gailitis, CEO of DEAC, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The world is at a tipping point where the technology, the device and global adoption are converging to such a point that we will see an explosion of a world where smartphone devices not only allow us to talk to each other, but allow for communication between everything – serving as a central hub from which we control our world – MediaTek is at the heart of both driving this and allowing the markets to drive this reality forward themselves. The next wave of consumer gadgets is here – smart, connected, and small. If your ambitions are big, so are ours. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jack Hu, Developer Relations Manager from MediaTek Labs, will share his insights on MediaTek Labs' most important initiatives of 2015 in engaging developers through the MediaTek LinkIt™ development platforms and what will be the vision for the wearable and IoT markets in 2020.
It was recently revealed that Linux-powered drones were released which has unveiled a new frontier for open source software. Drone control, once limited to proprietary software, has now entered the open source realm. This opens up new possibilities of more flexible platforms for many Internet-connected objects as well as sparking conversation among the open source community about its potential relationship with the Internet of Things (IoT). Open source software has allowed drone builders and programmers to create a platform using a free open source software development kit. In some cases, individuals can operate drones from a smartphone or tablet and include sophisticated features in the drone’s operating system, such as gyroscopes, cameras, altimeters and GPS. Open software development kits have the potential to allow individuals to create drone applications suitable for use in a wide range of fields and with a wide variety of physical shapes. Open source powered drones are proving to be more cost effective and accessible, meaning that they can easily be applied in more areas and for more uses besides their traditional military applications.
I’ve been thinking a bit about microservices (μServices) recently. My immediate reaction is to think: “Isn’t this just yet another new term for the same stuff, Web Services->SOA->APIs->Microservices?” Followed shortly by the thought, “well yes it is, but there are some important differences/distinguishing factors.” Microservices is an evolutionary paradigm born out of the need for simplicity (i.e., get away from the ESB) and alignment with agile (think DevOps) and scalable (think Containerization) development and deployment architectures. Martin Fowler and James Lewis defined nine core characteristics of microservices in their seminal post.
Andi Mann has been serving as Conference Chair of the DevOps Summit since its inception. He is one of the world's recognized leaders in DevOps, and continues to be one of its most articulate advocates. Here are some recent thoughts of his in an interview we conducted in the run-up to the DevOps Summit to be held June 9-11 at the Javits Center in New York City. When did you first start thinking about DevOps and its potential impact on enterprise IT? Andi: I first started thinking about DevOps back in 2010, when I was an IT industry analyst. It was an intriguing concept, but initially I was very skeptical. Of course I have evolved my opinion since then – it is amazing what a little (okay, a lot) of learning can do! However, my early skepticism stands me in good stead to understand enterprise IT executives’ not-insignificant concerns about DevOps.
Bill Doerrfeld at Nordic APIs has written today about how APIs are evolving the B2B landscape. This is a particularly interesting article for me, because my personal background is working for an EDI provider, where I linked EDI processes from the private network to the Internet, over 15 years ago. Vordel was founded to allow new Web Services APIs to be used for B2B. Axway, a B2B software company, acquired Vordel in 2012 to link B2B with Web APIs. This caused a domino effect, with other API Management vendors being acquired shortly afterwards. However, none of the acquirers of the other startups had the B2B depth of Axway.
Thanks to widespread Internet adoption and more than 10 billion connected devices around the world, companies became more excited than ever about the Internet of Things in 2014. Add in the hype around Google Glass and the Nest Thermostat, and nearly every business, including those from traditionally low-tech industries, wanted in. But despite the buzz, some very real business questions emerged – mainly, not if a device can be connected, or even when, but why? Why does connecting to the cloud create greater value for the user? Why do connected features improve the overall experience? And why does connecting to the cloud enhance your business model? Or stated differently, if a company invests in making my toaster talk to my lawnmower, is that really a good business decision and why?
This is the final installment of the six-part series Microservices and PaaS. It seems like forever since I attended Adrian Cockroft's meetup focusing on microservices. It's actually only been a couple of months, but much has happened since then: countless articles, meetups, and conference sessions focusing on microservices have been delivered, many meetings and design efforts at companies moving towards a microservices-based approach have been endured, and five installments of this blog series have been written. There's no doubt that microservices, like containerization and DevOps, is a trending topic these days. But this raises the question: How many enterprise organizations are actually using microservices architectures in production?
We’re entering a new era of computing technology that many are calling the Internet of Things (IoT). Machine to machine, machine to infrastructure, machine to environment, the Internet of Everything, the Internet of Intelligent Things, intelligent systems – call it what you want, but it’s happening, and its potential is huge. IoT is comprised of smart machines interacting and communicating with other machines, objects, environments and infrastructures. As a result, huge volumes of data are being generated, and that data is being processed into useful actions that can “command and control” things to make our lives much easier and safer, and to reduce our impact on the environment.
No, this isn't a tirade on the security of IoT. It's about story about change. Specifically, change and its implications on security. Change is constant. There's a million different axioms and proverbs about change, so it's really hard to choose just one to sum up how it impacts security. Inarguably it does. And right now there's a lot of change going on that's impacting security. "Micro" movement like microservices and microsegmentation are dramatically changing perimeters and breaking apart traditional "edge" security into distributed pockets of security, each architected specifically for the application or architecture it's protecting.
Node.js and io.js are increasingly being used to run JavaScript on the server side for many types of applications, such as websites, real-time messaging and controllers for small devices with limited resources. For DevOps it is crucial to monitor the whole application stack and Node.js is rapidly becoming an important part of the stack in many organizations. Sematext has historically had a strong support for monitoring big data applications such as Elastic (aka Elasticsearch), Cassandra, Solr, Spark, Hadoop, and HBase, as well as more traditional databases, web servers like Nginx, Nginx Plus and Apache, Java applications, cache servers like Redis and Memcached, messaging middleware like everyone's darling Kafka, etc. With such rapid adoption of Node.js and now io.js, we'd be remiss not to add performance monitoring, alerting, and anomaly detection for them in SPM!
There will be 150 billion connected devices by 2020. New digital businesses have already disrupted value chains across every industry. APIs are at the center of the digital business. You need to understand what assets you have that can be exposed digitally, what their digital value chain is, and how to create an effective business model around that value chain to compete in this economy. No enterprise can be complacent and not engage in the digital economy. Learn how to be the disruptor and not the disruptee.
There are 182 billion emails sent every day, generating a lot of data about how recipients and ISPs respond. Many marketers take a more-is-better approach to stats, preferring to have the ability to slice and dice their email lists based numerous arbitrary stats. However, fundamentally what really matters is whether or not sending an email to a particular recipient will generate value. Data Scientists can design high-level insights such as engagement prediction models and content clusters that allow marketers to cut through the noise and design their campaigns around strong, predictive signals, rather than arbitrary statistics.
Once the decision has been made to move part or all of a workload to the cloud, a methodology for selecting that workload needs to be established. How do you move to the cloud? What does the discovery, assessment and planning look like? What workloads make sense? Which cloud model makes sense for each workload? What are the considerations for how to select the right cloud model? And how does that fit in with the overall IT transformation?
Once the decision has been made to move part or all of a workload to the cloud, a methodology for selecting that workload needs to be established. How do you move to the cloud? What does the discovery, assessment and planning look like? What workloads make sense? Which cloud model makes sense for each workload? What are the considerations for how to select the right cloud model? And how does that fit in with the overall IT transformation?
The Internet of Things is already changing the way we track fitness, manage our homes, and drive our cars. But while there is considerable discussion around how we securely provision our devices and who will have access to the data they capture, an important topic no one seems to be talking much about is the de-provisioning of smart objects. What happens when I ditch my Fitbit, trade in my connected car, or sell my house with its Nest thermostat, smart fridge and next-generation home security system? How do I manage to remove these smart devices from my life and make sure that no one has access to the data they have captured?
The Internet of Things will put IT to its ultimate test by creating infinite new opportunities to digitize products and services, generate and analyze new data to improve customer satisfaction, and discover new ways to gain a competitive advantage across nearly every industry. In order to help corporate business units to capitalize on the rapidly evolving IoT opportunities, IT must stand up to a new set of challenges. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jeff Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies, will examine why IT must finally fulfill its role in support of its SBUs or face a new round of disruption that could fundamentally reshape the function of IT forever.
Many people recognize DevOps as an enormous benefit – faster application deployment, automated toolchains, support of more granular updates, better cooperation across groups. However, less appreciated is the journey enterprise IT groups need to make to achieve this outcome. The plain fact is that established IT processes reflect a very different set of goals: stability, infrequent change, hands-on administration, and alignment with ITIL. So how does an enterprise IT organization implement change to achieve DevOps outcomes? Bernard Golden sat down with Andi Mann, VP in the Office of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies to address this thorny problem in a recent Cloud Luminary Fireside Chat. Andi and Bernard discussed topics such as: How does DevOps get started - top-down or bottom-up? Who should lead a DevOps initiative – Dev or Ops? Common pitfalls encountered in DevOps initiatives, and other considerations.
SYS-CON Events announced today that MetraTech, now part of Ericsson, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, NY. Ericsson is the driving force behind the Networked Society- a world leader in communications infrastructure, software and services. Some 40% of the world’s mobile traffic runs through networks Ericsson has supplied, serving more than 2.5 billion subscribers.
In a recent research, analyst firm IDC found that the average cost of a critical application failure is $500,000 to $1 million per hour and the average total cost of unplanned application downtime is $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion per year for Fortune 1000 companies. In addition to the findings on the cost of the downtime, the research also highlighted best practices for development, testing, application support, infrastructure, and operations teams.
The OpenStack cloud operating system includes Trove, a database abstraction layer. Rather than applications connecting directly to a specific type of database, they connect to Trove, which in turn connects to one or more specific databases. One target database is Postgres Plus Cloud Database, which includes its own RESTful API. Trove was originally developed around MySQL, whose interfaces are significantly less complicated than those of the Postgres cloud database. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Fred Dalrymple, product manager for EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Cloud Database, will address the issues encountered in using Trove to abstract a complicated cloud database, including gaining access to database functionality not native in the standard abstraction, providing portability for the database interface into non-OpenStack contexts, and preventing the database from being commoditized by abstraction.
EMC Corporation on Tuesday announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Virtustream. When the transaction closes, Virtustream will form EMC’s new managed cloud services business. The acquisition represents a transformational element of EMC’s strategy to help customers move all applications to cloud-based IT environments. With the addition of Virtustream, EMC completes the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid cloud portfolio to support all applications, all workloads and all cloud models.
The Internet of Things is already changing the way we track fitness, manage our homes, and drive our cars. But while there is considerable discussion around how we securely provision our devices and who will have access to the data they capture, an important topic no one seems to be talking much about is the de-provisioning of smart objects. What happens when I ditch my Fitbit, trade in my connected car, or sell my house with its Nest thermostat, smart fridge and next-generation home security system? How do I manage to remove these smart devices from my life and make sure that no one has access to the data they have captured?
Software is eating the world. Everywhere you look there's an app for that. And I'm talking everywhere - including places and activities that maybe there shouldn't be an app for. No, I won't detail which those are. The Internet is your playground, I'm sure you can find examples. The point is that software is eating not just the world of consumers, but the world of IT. While most folks take this statement to mean that everything in IT is becoming software and the end of hardware is near, that's not really what it's saying. There has to be hardware somewhere, after all. Compute and network and storage resources don't come from the Stork, you know. No, it's not about the elimination of hardware but rather about how reliant on software we're becoming across all of IT.
Hawaiian Airlines, Inc., a subsidiary of Hawaiian Holdings, Inc. , today announced its systemwide traffic statistics for December, fourth quarter, and end-of-year for 2006 (see chart below). In December, Hawaiian served 556,660 passengers, while recording Revenue Passengers Miles (RPMs) of 637,090,000, Available Seat Miles (ASMs) of 756,818,000, and Load Factor of 84.2 percent.