One of the biggest impacts of the Internet of Things is and will continue to be on data; specifically data volume, management and usage. Companies are scrambling to adapt to this new and unpredictable data reality with legacy infrastructure that cannot handle the speed and volume of data. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Don DeLoach, CEO and president of Infobright, will discuss how companies need to rethink their data infrastructure to participate in the IoT, including: Data storage: Understanding the kinds of data: structured, unstructured, big/small? Analytics: What kinds and how responsive do you need to be? Reporting: What kinds of reports are needed beyond the standard statutory reports?
The true value of the Internet of Things (IoT) lies not just in the data, but through the services that protect the data, perform the analysis and present findings in a usable way. With many IoT elements rooted in traditional IT components, Big Data and IoT isn’t just a play for enterprise. In fact, the IoT presents SMBs with the prospect of launching entirely new activities and exploring innovative areas. CompTIA research identifies several areas where IoT is expected to have the greatest impact.
It’s become easy to monitor applications that are deployed on hundreds of servers – thanks to the advances in application performance management tools. But the more data you collect the harder it is to visualize the health state in a way that a single dashboard tells you both the overall status as well as the problematic component. Eugene Turetsky (Dynatrace) and Stephan Levesque (SSQ Financial Group) shared their solution for monitoring large IT infrastructures that contain several hundred components that support SSQ’s most-critical applications running on a variety of technology stacks including WebLogic, Oracle Databases, Ingres Databases, and WebSphere MQs. When Stephan showed me his SSQ dashboards, I knew I had to write a blog about this.
Over the last couple of years I have talked to numerous enterprise customers, analysts, industry pundits, and others interested in cloud technologies, and one thing is abundantly clear – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) seems to mean different things to different people. But the term PaaS is irrelevant – it's just noise. What is relevant, and what is important, is what PaaS does: enable applications. That's what enterprises care about. They want to accelerate application development to get products to market faster and into users' hands sooner.
Without question, the rise in cyberleaks, nation-state cyber terrorism and the beach of consumer data across multiple industry domains has led to a heightened awareness of the enterprise and personal responsibilities associated with cybersecurity. The consumerization of IT and the adoption of cloud, mobile and social media by enterprise organizations is opening a new threat landscape and new threat vectors. Everyone is affected and everyone is talking about it, from senior executives to teenagers.
I work in the Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant. We conduct original research, analyze the results and share it with the world. We also study trends from all sources and ponder their implications across many industries. My focus is most often on mobile computing technologies and systems, and IoT (Internet of Things). When we meet with large multinational companies, the most valuable thing they seek from us are ideas. Although we fancy ourselves to be analyst, writers and lecturers, we are in fact - merchants of ideas.
Application experience aficionados take note: you have choices now. No longer are you constrained to just HTTP/1 with a side option of WebSockets or SPDY. HTTP/2 is also an option, one that like its SPDY predecessor brings with it several enticing benefits but is not without obstacles.
In fact, it is those obstacles that may hold back adoption according to IDG research, "Making the Journey to HTTP/2". In the research, respondents indicated several potential barriers to adoption including backward compatibility with HTTP/1 and the "low availability" of HTTP/2 services.
In what's sure to noticed as a circular dependency, the "low availability" is likely due to the "lack of backward compatibility" barrier. Conversely, the lack of backward compatibility with HTTP/1 is likely to prevent the deployment of HTTP/2 services and cause low availability of HTTP/2 services. Which in turn, well, you get the picture.
This is not a phantom barrier. The web was built on HTTP/1 and incompatibility is harder to justify today than it was when we routinely browsed the web and were shut out of cool apps because we were using the "wrong" browser. The level of integration between apps and reliance on many other APIs for functionality pose a difficult problem for would-be adopters of HTTP/2 looking for the improved performance and efficacy of resource utilization it brings.
But it doesn't have to.
You can have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.
What you want is some thing that sits in between all those users and your apps and speaks their language (protocol) whether it's version 1 or version 2. You want an intermediary that's smart enough to translate SPDY or HTTP/2 to HTTP/1 so you don't have to change your applications to gain the performance and security benefits without investing hundreds of hours in upgrading web infrastructure. What you want is an HTTP Gateway.
At this point in the post, you will be unsurprised to learn that F5 provides just such a thing. Try to act surprised, though, it'll make my day.
One of the benefits of growing up from a load balancing to an application delivery platform is that you have to be fluent in the languages (protocols) of applications. One of those languages is HTTP, and so it's no surprise that at the heart of F5 services is the ability to support all the various flavors of HTTP available today: HTTP/1, SPDY, HTTP/2 and HTTP/S (whether over TLS or SSL). 
But more than just speaking the right language is the ability to proxy for the application with the user. Which means that F5 services (like SDAS) sit in between users and apps and can translate across flavors of HTTP. Is your mobile app speaking HTTP/2 or SPDY but your app infrastructure only knows HTTP/1? No problem. F5 can make that connection happen. That's because we're a full proxy, with absolute control over a dual-communication stack that lets us do one thing on the client side while doing another on the server side. We can secure the outside and speak plain-text on the inside. We can transition security protocols, web protocols, and network protocols (think IPv4 - IPv6).
That means you can get those performance and resource-utilization benefits without ripping and replacing your entire web application infrastructure. You don't have to reject users because they're not using the right browser protocol and you don't have to worry about losing visibility because of an SSL/TLS requirement.
You can learn more about F5's HTTP/2 and SDPY Gateway capabilities by checking out these blogs:
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.’
We continue to see an increasing trend in cyber-attacks in line with the growth of new technologies, and enterprises have to protect themselves. It is critical for enterprises to devise their own measures to protect against cyber-attacks because any tolerance on this front is more than an IT issue but may affect the very existence and the business model of the enterprise. We have seen in a recent incident where a cyber-attack prevented a large enterprise from performing their basic business process.
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.
DevOps was created to reduce many of these same conflicts and while DevOps has had several high-profile successes it still presents a challenge for larger organizations. Large enterprises managing mission-critical systems still have separate silos for development and operations. In this post I discuss how DevOps fits into the enterprise and what release managers can do to adapt and extend DevOps to meet the challenges present in larger businesses. First, I’m going to define DevOps. Then I’m going to discuss the impedance mismatch between DevOps and a larger enterprise. In conclusion I’m going to make some suggestions for how people practicing DevOps can adapt DevOps practices to these larger enterprises.
I attended a Meetup yesterday in Mountain View, hosted by The Hive group on the subject of Lambda Architecture. Since I had never heard about this new phrase, my curiosity took me there. There was a panel discussion and panelists came from Hortonworks, Cloudera, MapR, Teradata, etc. Lambda Architecture is a useful framework to think about designing big data applications. Nathan Marz designed this generic architecture addressing common requirements for big data based on his experience working on distributed data processing systems at Twitter. Some of the key requirements in building this architecture include:
Our guest on the podcast this week is Mark Thiele, EVP of Data Center Technology at Switch. We discuss the idea that private clouds are often equated with do-it-yourself and why that should be changed. Taking sure you are receiving the private environment you need at a cost that can support your business. Listen in to learn the different ways to own and manage a private cloud.
Creating global change that is actually good for the entire world is a mammoth task. With a population of almost 7 Billion people as of 2015, the planet is taking a toll with surviving the brunt of keeping the works going. What role can Cloud Computing play in making it easier for all of us?
Exponential growth in data and information at hand is forcing organizations to rethink their business models. With the rise of digital channels (both as sales channel and marketing channel) the business environment is becoming more complicated and challenging, and the competition is intensifying. Firms are responding by setting up dedicated analytics (or information science or insights) divisions, or repositioning existing teams, to enable a culture of data-driven decision making. There has been significant momentum in recent years with rampant hiring of analytics talent. However, business need to assess if the investment has paid off by achieving the intended objective, or showing signs of positive ROI.
Connected cars will create new business models and provide opportunities for current businesses to greatly improve their service offerings. Areas like targeted marketing, fleet management, event planning, city planning, insurance, and auto repair will benefit immensely from the data that connected cars will provide in the not too distant future. Check out my latest post on Forbes to see how.
Welcome to my four-part series on what I’m going to call the Art of DevOps. We will embark on a mission to reveal the extremely valuable intelligence that’s been collected about a unique strategy to continuously deliver assets to the operational battleground safely, securely and quickly. This strategy drives optimal monitoring of the frontlines and enhanced communications with the troops supporting the initial development. I do make the assumption that most of you are battle-worthy veterans in one or more of the environments that I’ll review. Beyond this introduction blog, I’ll brief you on some of the best DevOps tactics to aid in your deployments while providing maximum situational awareness within each environment. I’ll also do my best to expand upon the best lines of defense with minimal disruption. Unfortunately, in my experience, many of you will be deficient either over lack of preparation such as test automation, damaged assets or organizational challenges in one or more areas of deployment. The goal of this series is to help you recognize where your deficits are, how to address certain scenarios and which tactics you need to use to lead a successful DevOps operation.
Immutable infrastructure, which I think is more appropriately called disposable infrastructure, has been enjoying a reinvigorated life with the success of Dockers and containerization over the past year. Too, DevOps has played a role in resurrecting the notion of disposable infrastructure with its association with automation and the use of templates to automate everything from the acquisition to configuration to provisioning of, well, just about everything in the application data path.
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.
It’s easy to fall into a pattern of dysfunctional releases, release processes that are characterized by delay, inefficiency, and endless meetings that encourage people to view releases as a problem. These are the kinds of meetings that inspire references to the movie Office Space or emails that include clippings of the cartoon Dilbert - repetitive meetings to answer the same questions over and over again all because people lack the tools to connect the issue tracker with the change management systems. In organizations without a reliable process a release is also a time for production system outages and support calls that last well into the night as people try to diagnose errors that could have been anticipated with better communication and coordination. In short, if it’s not managed correctly a release can sap morale from entire departments and distract critical technical employees from being productive.
DevOps is all about removing barriers to rapid, safe delivery of new experiences to your customers. Much of this revolves around automating error-prone, human-driven processes so that processes can be standardized, scaled, and varied programmatically. Some of the types of tools used in a DevOps-minded organization might include version control systems, automation servers, and configuration management systems. Many tools can be used across categories, with varying amounts of success. Some vendors offer products that claim to address all of these needs with one solution – most rarely deliver on that promise.
For capabilities that are not a core competency of an enterprise, today’s IT teams are hard pressed to justify why the needs of the business could not be met with a leading SaaS solution. Here’s the truth. Check out my latest whitepaper that I coauthored for Bulger Partners.
One of the more interesting data points to come out of our State of Application Delivery 2015 was the overwhelming importance placed on availability - even over security. When respondents were asked which service they would not deploy an application without, they chose availability. Security came in a close second. This caused a great deal of discussion. After all, one of the most often cited impediment to adopting, well, everything has been and remains security. One would think, then, that security is top of mind and clearly a priority for everyone. Yet availability beat it out for what amounts to the "most important application service."
One of the more interesting data points to come out of our State of Application Delivery 2015 was the overwhelming importance placed on availability - even over security. When respondents were asked which service they would not deploy an application without, they chose availability. Security came in a close second. This caused a great deal of discussion. After all, one of the most often cited impediment to adopting, well, everything has been and remains security. One would think, then, that security is top of mind and clearly a priority for everyone. Yet availability beat it out for what amounts to the "most important application service."
Back in 2003 I wrote an article that described the forthcoming evolution of the Cloud, and with it the development towards the SIngularity. The growing use of XML Web services would see them evolve to become intelligent agents, forming the basis for this collective. This would fit well with the vision of the ‘Internet of Things’, where lots and lots of devices of all shapes and sizes will be equipped with an IP address and some small amount of self intelligence. Cars and traffic lights that are able to interoperate to better manage themselves for example.