Thanks to Docker, it becomes very easy to leverage containers to build, ship, and run any Linux application on any kind of infrastructure. Docker is particularly helpful for microservice architectures because their successful implementation relies on a fast, efficient deployment mechanism – which is precisely one of the features of Docker. Microservice architectures are therefore becoming more popular, and are increasingly seen as an interesting option even for smaller projects, instead of being reserved to the largest, most complex application stacks.
Microservices, for the uninitiated, are essentially the decomposition of applications into multiple services. This decomposition is often based on functional lines, with related functions being grouped together into a service. While this may sound a like SOA, it really isn't, especially given that SOA was an object-centered methodology that focused on creating services around "nouns" like customer and product. Microservices, while certainly capable of being noun-based, are just as likely to be verb-based, that is to say, based on a functional grouping like "login" or "checkout." SOA was essentially an extension of object-oriented design while microservices are more about decomposition for purposes of rapid (agile) development with the bonus of having significant scalability advantages over object-oriented architectures.
“In the past year we've seen a lot of stabilization of WebRTC. You can now use it in production with a far greater degree of certainty. A lot of the real developments in the past year have been in things like the data channel, which will enable a whole new type of application," explained Peter Dunkley, Technical Director at Acision, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
It didn’t hit me until after a second viewing of Jez Humble’s recent webinar with Perforce that his ways to predict high IT performance aren’t just a neat party trick; they’re absolutely essential. The days of bugs making it into production, distrust between departments, and delayed fixes and releases are becoming a thing of the past, at least among “high performers” of the world. And as the complexity of software grows year after year, being able to accurately predict success may be the only way to actually achieve it.
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. Logentries has announced a new integration with Elasticsearch's Logstash, an open source solution for managing logs and event data. The new integration enables users to easily forward logs collected via Logstash into the cloud-based Logentries service for more meaningful analysis and visualization over time. Similarly the Logentries Open API allows easy extraction of data from the cloud service for Logstash users, promoting interoperability between both solutions.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Vitria Technology, Inc. will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Vitria will showcase the company’s new IoT Analytics Platform through live demonstrations at booth #330. Vitria’s IoT Analytics Platform, fully integrated and powered by an operational intelligence engine, enables customers to rapidly build and operationalize advanced analytics to deliver timely business outcomes for use cases across the industrial, enterprise, and consumer segments.
Experts predict that the cloud computing will continue to grow this year. According to the Computerworld Forecast Study, spending on cloud computing is expected to rise by 42% in 2015. Moreover, Esna projects that in a bid to increase the use of mobile, social, customer-facing and collaboration technologies, 40% of IT teams will spend more on software as a service and a mix of public, private and hybrid solutions this year.
The speed of software changes in growing and large scale rapid-paced DevOps environments presents a challenge for continuous testing. Many organizations struggle to get this right. Practices that work for small scale continuous testing may not be sufficient as the requirements grow. In his session at DevOps Summit, Marc Hornbeek, Sr. Solutions Architect of DevOps continuous test solutions at Spirent Communications, will explain the best practices of continuous testing at high scale, which is relevant to small scale DevOps, and if there is an expectation of growth as the number of build targets, test topologies and delivery topologies that need to be orchestrated rapidly grow.
Telum in Northeast Mexico improved their ISP services delivery reliability through quality assurance and higher availability using advanced monitoring software. The next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series delves into how Telum in Northeast Mexico improves their ISP services delivery reliability through quality assurance and higher availability using advanced monitoring software.
As we kick off 2015, I predict that this will go down in history as the year of the Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP). We say goodbye to the year of the advanced persistent threat (APT) in 2014, just as this time last year we waved adieu to mobile device management (MDM). We’ve seen the security ecosystem evolve from all-in-one systems to point solutions to a bi-directionally integrated fabric knitting these silos together. This year that will extend into community-based, big security data digesting TIP systems.
Good food is not the most important attribute for a restaurant. Cleanliness is. It doesn’t matter how great your dishes are – if patrons catch even a glimpse of a roach, they won’t stick around to sample your cooking. The same principle applies to your company’s digital experience. You may have great products at a great price. But if customers have a bad experience with your digital channels, they won’t buy from you. In fact, studies show that 73-82% of customers abandon intended purchases because of a poor online experience.
Over the last few years, Motus experienced a surge in business driven by its transformation to a mobile hub for their customers. As the company expanded their existing client footprint, they seized an opportunity to also integrate mobile workforce data with CRM, sales and expense management offerings. With the new business requirements, Motus knew they had to move from their legacy PHP single stack to a more nimble, service-based architecture to meet the demands of rapid development. As the new infrastructure development started, Motus' VP of Engineering Scott Rankin realized that Motus' existing log management and analytics solution, Splunk, was too difficult to manage and too costly to maintain within their environment. With a team of 11 developers, eight QA engineers and three operations professionals, Scott's team was losing tens of hours per week analyzing logs across 20 servers at once. The cost of the product, the necessity of on-premise hosting, and the unwieldy interface led Scott to seek out alternative options; he knew they needed an agile, easy-to-use and scalable log management solution.
A friend of mine's son recently returned from an extended absence which basically removed him from nearly all aspects of technology, including the Internet, for a bit longer than 5 years. Upon return, observing him restore his awareness of technologies and absorb all things new developed over the past 5 years was both exciting and moving. To be fair, the guy grew up in an Internet world, with access to online resources including Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications. The interesting part of his re-introduction to the "wired" world was watching the comprehension flashes he went through when absorbing the much higher levels of application and data integration, and speed of network access.
RingCentral Inc., has unveiled the RingCentral Connect Platform™, a set of tools and services to build, deploy, and manage custom integrations using RingCentral APIs. With this platform, developers can build out-of-the-box integrations with RingCentral to add powerful communication capabilities to business applications. "This is a significant step forward because businesses want to better connect with customers – and communications is at the heart of every customer interaction," said Vlad Shmunis, CEO, founder and chairman of RingCentral. "In the past, integrating communications into business apps has been complex and expensive. We're breaking down the barriers that have isolated communications from business applications."
We explore how retailer Columbia Sportswear has made great strides in improving their business results through modernized IT, and where they expect to go next with their software-defined strategy. To learn more about the new wave of IT, we sat down with Suzan Pickett, Manager of Global Infrastructure Services at Columbia Sportswear in Portland, Oregon; Tim Melvin, Director of Global Technology Infrastructure at Columbia, and Carlos Tronco, Lead Systems Engineer at Columbia Sportswear. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Using Cloud (aka SaaS) applications is natural for most of us — simply sign up with your email, login and then use the service within minutes. The Cloud works particularly well with consumer-oriented services. Businesses, however, have slightly different needs. Up until now, Sematext Apps offered only App sharing. For instance, if you had an SPM App for monitoring your Elasticsearch cluster, another SPM App for monitoring Spark, and a Logsene App where you shipped all your logs, you could invite one or more of your teammates to each one of those apps separately, and give them either Admin or User role. This works fine when you have just a few teammates or just a few Apps.
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.
NaviSite, Inc., a Time Warner Cable company, has opened a new enterprise-class data center located in Santa Clara, California. The new data center will enable NaviSite to meet growing demands for its enterprise-class Cloud and Managed Services from existing and new customers. This facility, which is owned by data center solution provider Digital Realty, will join NaviSite’s fabric of nine existing data centers across the U.S. and U.K., all of which are designed to provide a resilient, secure, high-performance environment for business applications and mission critical data.
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.
When people think of IoT technology they usually think of silicon based sensors made by semiconductor companies. These types of sensors can be found tracking data on airplane engines, wind turbines, medical devices, and many more internet connected devices. The problem with silicon based sensors is that they are not feasible for cost sensitive items or items in small or bendable packaging where embedding sensors just won’t work. To solve this problem, a company called ThinFilm has created printed electronics.
SYS-CON Media announced today that XebiaLabs launched a popular blog feed on DevOps Journal with close to 2,000 story reads in less than a day. DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing. DevOps Journal brings valuable information to DevOps professionals who are transforming the way enterprise IT is done.
It’s inevitable that web application problems are going to happen. Here at Neotys, our business is based on helping you prevent problems through website monitoring and testing. But problems can come from anywhere, and sometimes you just need to know where to look. So we decided to put together a short guide on some of the most common performance issues you’ll encounter. Now, it's important to remember that the best way to address performance problems is to find and eliminate them before they affect users in the first place. One of the best tools you can have in your pocket is a good maintenance program. Develop a strategy for downtime and create redundancy and scaling plans. Think about what kind of user load you'll need to handle over the next month, as well as the next year. And of course, test load regularly and monitor production performance continually.
The IoT market is projected to be $1.9 trillion tidal wave that’s bigger than the combined market for smartphones, tablets and PCs. While IoT is widely discussed, what not being talked about are the monetization opportunities that are created from ubiquitous connectivity and the ensuing avalanche of data. While we cannot foresee every service that the IoT will enable, we should future-proof operations by preparing to monetize them with extremely agile systems.
Big Data is amazing, it's life changing and yes it is changing how we see our world. Big Data, however, can sometimes be too big. Organizations that are not amassing massive amounts of information and feeding into their decision buckets, smaller data that feeds in from customer buying patterns, buying decisions and buying influences can be more useful when used in the right way. In their session at Big Data Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, will provide an insider view of the data derived from different industries and how data can be used to create a massive shift in changing your business direction and make more informed, engaged and credible decisions that drive your bottom line.
IaaS will drive further consolidation among data center outsourcers and hosting providers. Why? Because the flexibility and cost advantage of IaaS cloud providers requires data center outsourcers and hosting providers to either adopt IaaS or move into niches. With standards driving down IaaS licenses and implementation costs, data center outsourcers and hosting providers could move into IaaS either on their own (which requires sufficient scale) or through partnerships. It's easy to imagine a net of partnering providers offering IaaS under a virtual umbrella as a standardized offering to customers.