The free version of KEMP Technologies' LoadMaster™ application load balancer is now available for unlimited use, making it easy for IT developers and open source technology users to benefit from all the features of a full commercial-grade product at no cost. It can be downloaded at FreeLoadBalancer.com. Load balancing, security and traffic optimization are all key enablers for application performance and functionality. Without these, application services will not perform as expected or have the required resilience. During testing and development, open source and free components, including load balancers, are often used for a frictionless experience free of sales and procurement processes or the red tape that comes along with support and services contracts. However, many of these solutions have limitations that make it impossible to truly replicate the interactions that will happen in a full production infrastructure once the development team creates the iterative link for the service or application to operations in the typical DevOps model.
Trust is the fundamental building block of any relationship. Whether it's personal or business, trust is something that cannot be replaced with anything. There are hundreds of books available on how to cultivate business relationships, how to maintain them, and how to leverage the best from them and so on. What forms the basis of a business relationship and what are the fundamental blocks of building trust? Here are three things that will get you started when thinking about using trust building trust and maintaining trust.
Traditional siloed IT organizations, which were primarily driven by strictly gated Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes and workflows, created tremendously effective controls around operating, and evolving IT systems. This operational methodology was effective when the business expected methodical change to happen via large releases of hardware and software functionality that most often were delivering new capabilities every six to 12 months. As businesses continue to transform to digital and become software-defined by nature, the need to iterate on software releases more rapidly has driven organizations to build specialized, faster-moving teams in order to adjust the business model and execution quickly. This began with development organizations adopting agile methodologies, including automated testing of software and continuous integration within the development lifecycle. On the IT operations side, there was a need to match the development velocity, requiring breaking down of some of the rigid infrastructure and application support silos.
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, will answer 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.
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture. Logstash is an open source tool for managing events and logs. It is used to collect, search and store logs for later use. If you are using Logstash to collect logs from across your infrastructure already, and you are looking for more sophisticated log analytics tool, you are in the right place.
SYS-CON Media announced that IBM, which offers the world’s deepest portfolio of technologies and expertise that are transforming the future of work, has launched ad campaigns on SYS-CON’s numerous online magazines such as Cloud Computing Journal, Virtualization Journal, SOA World Magazine, and IoT Journal. IBM’s campaigns focus on vendors in the technology marketplace, the future of testing, Big Data and analytics, and mobile platforms.
In September, Macy’s announced that they will invest $1 Billion into their omni-channel strategy. When spending so much money the question that immediately comes up is how to measure the success? Key questions such as “Are conversion rates increasing as planned?” and “How good is the User Experience for each channel?” need answers. Since my first blog about omni-channel monitoring, I came across a variety of customer implementations. Today, I want to share with you how Solocal Group, provider of the French Yellow Pages (PagesJaunes), brings all key metrics together on a single dashboard.
Do you like the idea of Agile software development, but you don’t think it’s a fit at your organization? Perhaps your enterprise is too rigidly hierarchical, or maybe your projects are too large and complex for Agile? Think again. Agile is well on its way to becoming the standard approach for developing software, even for immense, complex applications for enterprise use. Just ask the United States federal government. That’s the news from this week’s Agile in Government: Mutual Adaptation conference, put on by The Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI), a government IT-focused nonprofit organization. This conference focused in particular on adapting Agile to the government’s labyrinthine acquisition policies and procedures, and vice versa.
In my first blog I wrote about SharePoint System Performance Health Checks beyond looking at CPU and Memory Metrics. In this blog, I cover deployment related performance health problems that I always check when looking at a SharePoint Installation. Especially after deploying new hardware, new sites, pages, views, custom or third-party Web Parts (e.g., from AvePoint, K2, Nintex, Metalogix, etc.) it’s important to perform certain deployment sanity checks. While you may have nobody reporting issues in the moment there are several areas that you constantly need to check before they become a real problem.
There is more to being on-call than just knowing how to type in the latest ChatOps commands, reboot AMIs and print out java stack traces. There are life skills that come from being on-call for a while and fortunately, those are lessons that can be taught. Here at VictorOps we’re currently adding six new engineers to our on-call roster, so I’ve been thinking about the experience of being on-call and how to make the best of it. The first day you go on-call can be frightening. The most important thing to remember is that you’ve already passed the first test. You have the trust and respect of your teammates and are providing them with a valuable commodity: peace of mind. No one wants to be on-call, so stepping up to the plate and taking shifts helps to improve the lives of everyone on your team.
Flexiant, today releases the new look of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator in its latest version to deliver a simplified experience for service providers and their end users. Using the latest design concepts, Flexiant has reduced complex common work processes into a few simple, wizard driven clicks. The result is a differentiated and easier experience for service provider’s customers helping to increase profit, revenue and growth from cloud services.
Sensor-enabled things are becoming more commonplace, precursors to a larger and more complex framework that most consider the ultimate promise of the IoT: things connecting, interacting, sharing, storing, and over time perhaps learning and predicting based on habits, behaviors, location, preferences, purchases and more. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Tom Wesselman, Director of Communications Ecosystem Architecture at Plantronics, will examine the still nascent IoT as it is coalescing, including what it is today, what it might ultimately be, the role of wearable tech, and technology gaps still in play, as the industry strives to create a cohesive, secure, scalable, and beneficial network of ‘things.’
The Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS) market will grow to $6.4B by 2018. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, will begin by walking the audience through the evolution of Workspace as-a-Service, where it is now vs. where it going. To look beyond the desktop we must understand exactly what WaaS is, who the users are, and where it is going in the future. IT departments, ISVs and service providers must look to workflow and automation capabilities to adapt to growing demand and the rapidly changing workspace model.
The Internet of Things has emerged as the universally accepted term for the ‘next big thing’ wave, not replacing but building upon the Cloud Computing cycle, which itself built upon SaaS and ASPs. There are many technology aspects to this trend, which will be covered extensively throughout this guide and ongoing series, but overall our goal is to describe the associated startup venture opportunities. Indeed it’s not limited to startups, the IoT represents a new product innovation platform for any and all businesses, and this is the overall theme of this paper.
One important differentiator between what passed for digital back in the dot-com days and today’s notion of digital is the role mobile plays. Yes, this company had a mobile site, and they had what the AVP claimed was a “mobile first” plan for their web content, but as yet they had yet to roll out any responsive design. In the final analysis, their digital effort up to this point boiled down to little more than better brochureware, a la 1990s web redesigns. But more significantly, what was entirely missing from their digital achievements (although the AVP did indicate that it was a roadmap item) was pulling together their real-time platform or any of their other software-based products and combining them with the marketing effort that to date is the sum total of their digital effort.
DevOps is an approach that improves collaboration among Dev and Ops teams to enable fast delivery of applications and ensure impeccable end-user experience. BizDevOps takes the concept of DevOps to a new level – by bringing the business context and insights to day to day DevOps activities. BizDevOps ensures that Dev and Ops focus on what matters to the business and also introduces the Biz persona (line-of-business manager, product manager) as a key stakeholder in the process. IDC recently published research on these two topics in its report, “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified,” by IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot. In addition to eye-opening cost of application downtime and increasing momentum for DevOps, it also highlighted that “I=improved customer experience” is the most expected business outcome from DevOps practices.
The cloud has transformed how we think about software quality. Instead of preventing failures, we must focus on automatic recovery from failure. In other words, resilience trumps traditional quality measures. Continuous delivery models further squeeze traditional notions of quality. Remember the venerable project management Iron Triangle? Among time, scope, and cost, you can only fix two or quality will suffer. Only in today’s DevOps world, continuous testing, integration, and deployment upend the time metric, the DevOps cadence reinvents project scope, and cost metrics expand past software development to the total cost of ownership of the end-to-end digital initiative.
HP and Aruba Networks on Monday announced a definitive agreement for HP to acquire Aruba, a provider of next-generation network access solutions for the mobile enterprise, for $24.67 per share in cash. The equity value of the transaction is approximately $3.0 billion, and net of cash and debt approximately $2.7 billion. Both companies' boards of directors have approved the deal. "Enterprises are facing a mobile-first world and are looking for solutions that help them transition legacy investments to the new style of IT," said Meg Whitman, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of HP. "By combining Aruba's world-class wireless mobility solutions with HP's leading switching portfolio, HP will offer the simplest, most secure networking solutions to help enterprises easily deploy next-generation mobile networks."
Although programmers for decades have been starting their careers by writing a “Hello World” program, the phenomenon has remained as unknown to the general public as the song of the same name by Lady Antebellum. But the former is now about to change. Programming is in fact the real “new way of working”. For years education for the general public was largely confined to learning how to use computers. Thus we created operators rather than programmers. And today operators of all kinds are rapidly being replaced by automation. Just look at the big banks where people who “worked with computers” – in positions varying from cashier and teller to IT operator – are massively escorted off the property, while those same banks are currently struggling to find enough people who can make “computers work for them”(a.k.a. programmers).
This is my first blog post at AppDynamics, and I have to say that it’s great to be aboard. It’s been a hectic first couple of weeks, but the energy, enthusiasm and friendliness of everyone I have met has made me very excited about 2015! AppDynamics has a market leading APM and analytics platform but it also takes great people to make a great company – and AppDynamics has a wealth of talent! So to start my blogging life at AppDynamics I want to focus on something that is a red-hot buzzword in IT at the moment – DevOps! For the last couple of years, every conference I attended and nearly every call I had at Forrester had a discussion on DevOps. There is a good reason for this, because from my perspective, DevOps promises that the software-powered business can deliver quality app-fueled business services rapidly, to delight customers.
The term DevOps is not well defined, and you'd be hard pressed to get the same definition of "DevOps" from everyone you ask in your enterprise. Developers in your organization may equate DevOps with a specific approach to software builds and the use of popular tools such as Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, Git, and Docker. IT management might see DevOps as a continuation of existing processes with an emphasis on faster time to market and lightweight release procedures. Without a common definition of the term you'll have teams arguing over what is DevOps and what is not DevOps. If your software releases still involve the use of a change management tool such as BMC's Remedy is it really DevOps? If the build takes an hour to deploy a QA build is it really DevOps? The reality of Enterprise DevOps is that every organization's answers to these question will vary. Enterprise DevOps is compromise between self-service, rapid-fire agility and the ability to manage the risks that accompany mission-critical builds.
When it comes to finding useful articles, news and general information in the DevOps, CD or Agile industry, LinkedIn is usually the ticket. We all know LinkedIn is a great tool for networking and connecting with friends, but it has also turned out to be a tool used to start meaningful and productive conversations about whatever the latest innovation or industry partnership may be. Many of these conversations are had in specific groups on LinkedIn and if you aren’t a member, you are definitely missing out.
Then I’ve received an LinkedIn email from this woman stating that she had a business proposition for me, and if I was interested, she was ready to explain. She also provided her email that ended in outlook.com. I checked her LinkedIn profile again. Looked legit. She even had a Twitter account with recent tweets in two languages. I responded that I was ready to hear about this business proposition. Next day I’ve received a long email from her explaining how she had a private client named Lewis Fain who initially deposited €19M in their bank and she helped him to grow the wealth to €22M, but unfortunately he died in a car crash. She’s ready to wire transfer me the money, in one condition: we’d split the amount in half so she could improve the wellbeing of her family. She also asked me not to ruin her career in the bank if I was not interested.
In the consumer IoT, everything is new, and the IT world of bits and bytes holds sway. But industrial and commercial realms encompass operational technology (OT) that has been around for 25 or 50 years. This grittier, pre-IP, more hands-on world has much to gain from Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications and principles. But adding sensors and wireless connectivity won’t work in environments that demand unwavering reliability and performance. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ron Sege, CEO of Echelon, will discuss how as enterprise IT embraces other IoT-related technology trends, enterprises with industrial or commercial facets must also find ways for the disparate worlds of OT and IT to work together harmoniously.
When people talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) they tend to think about big data technologies like Hadoop where petabyte size datasets are store and analyzed for both known and unknown patterns. What many people don’t realize is that many IoT use cases only require small datasets.