It is no surprise to anyone that service providers need to find new sources of revenue and increase profitability. The digital, cloud and as-a-service revolution provides a silver lining. As IT organizations feel the tension that comes from a combination of aging legacy B2B infrastructure, changing business mandates and rapidly evolving e-commerce requirements, they are increasingly looking at digital services and outsourcing to trusted providers. They want a trusted partner to deliver connected digital services; including mobile, cloud and M2M/IoT. The pressure is on for businesses to think about an end-to-end ‘order to cash’ process that spans multiple applications and systems, engages external business partners as well as taps into data and services that are increasingly located in the cloud. In other words – a giant mash-up of sorts. IT is not just about implementing an internal process as much as it is about structuring one shared multi-enterprise process(es).
It’s no secret that telecommuting is a highly disputed topic. For the general employee, the jury is still out on the pros and cons of telecommuting. For organizations like Yahoo!, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and U.S. Postal Service, telecommuting is not an option due to the need to foster collaboration, alleged employee abuse of telework benefits and mounting security concerns, respectively. Among the startup scene and various other organizations, though, telecommuting is seen as a way to provide flexibility and improve work/life balance.
Perhaps not quite as clear-cut as a logical AND in the programmatic sense, but the age of the CEO as we once knew it could be over. There’s a simple reason for this, CIOs (and yes of course we do mean Chief Information Officers) are starting to run their operations as business entities in their own right. In no way detracting from the popular assertion that IT has to “progress from simply being a function in the business to now become a business enabling function in and of itself” (as the expression goes)… there’s an even deeper truth to realize.
There has been a lot of discussion recently in the DevOps space over whether there is a unique form of DevOps for large enterprises or is it just vendors looking to sell services and tools. In his session at DevOps Summit, Chris Riley, a technologist, discussed whether Enterprise DevOps is a unique species or not. What makes DevOps adoption in the enterprise unique or what doesn’t? Unique or not, what does this mean for adopting DevOps in enterprise size organizations? He also explored different vendor approaches and success/failure examples with the idea of preparing you to help instill DevOps in your business
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.
SYS-CON Events announced today that IDenticard will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. IDenticard™ is the security division of Brady Corp (NYSE: BRC), a $1.5 billion manufacturer of identification products. We have small-company values with the strength and stability of a major corporation. IDenticard offers local sales, support and service to our customers across the United States and Canada. Our partner network encompasses some 300 of the world's leading systems integrators and security systems installation specialists.
Companies today struggle to manage the types and volume of data their customers and employees generate and use every day. With billions of requests daily, operational consistency can be elusive. In his session at Big Data Expo, Dave McCrory, CTO at Basho Technologies, will explore how a distributed systems solution, such as NoSQL, can give organizations the consistency and availability necessary to succeed with on-demand data, offering high availability at massive scale.
I keep coming across amazing use cases for IoT that radically change, enhance, or transforms industries. This week’s use case focuses on renewable energies like wind and solar power. I had the privilege of talking to Guido Jouret, president of the Digital Innovation Center at Envision Energy. Envision Energy is the maker of the Smart Wind Farm™ System which collects data from various sensors to aid in preventative maintenance of wind turbines and solar panels, optimizes the efficiency of energy production, and accurately and timely forecasts energy output.
I ran into an interesting problems with JavaFX. When the GUI is done in FXML it seems that if a scene has only shapes (e.g., Rectangle, Circle, etc.) the handler method doesn’t receive keyboard events. And the problem seems to be that there is no way (at least I don’t see it) to give a focus to such a scene. I found a workaround, but I’d appreciate if someone could offer a cleaner solution or confirm that this is a JavaFX bug.
One of the neat things about microservices is the ability to segment functional actions into scalability domains. Login, browsing, and checkout are separate functional domains that can each be scaled according to demand. While one hopes that checkout is similarly in demand, it is unlikely to be as popular as browsing, after all, and the days of wasting expensive money on idle compute resources went out when the clouds descended. In that same vein comes the ability to also create performance domains. After all, if you're scaling out a specific functional service domain you can also specify performance requirements for that domain - and do something about it. Whether it's through caching or minification or TCP optimization techniques, you can improve the performance of a specific logical domain right along with its scale.
Qubell announced on Monday the availability of the first autonomic application management platform for cloud applications. Qubell enables applications to become adaptive, self-managed services that configure, heal, optimize and protect themselves in response to changes within dynamic cloud environments. With Qubell, managing applications as an autonomic system dramatically accelerates application release cycles, improves quality, eliminates manual operations and reduces outages and operating costs. The platform is designed for a broad range of web, commerce and big data applications with an emphasis on retail, financial services and high-tech industries.
There has been a lot of discussion recently in the DevOps space over whether there is a unique form of DevOps for large enterprises or is it just vendors looking to sell services and tools. In his session at DevOps Summit, Chris Riley, a technologist, discussed whether Enterprise DevOps is a unique species or not. What makes DevOps adoption in the enterprise unique or what doesn’t? Unique or not, what does this mean for adopting DevOps in enterprise size organizations? He also explored different vendor approaches and success/failure examples with the idea of preparing you to help instill DevOps in your business
The benefits of cloud billing can be irresistible. Always-on availability, flexibility, elastic scalability, low cost, global reach. But with high-profile security breaches from the likes of Target, Sony and health insurer Anthem, it’s understandable that thinking about turning your billing system over to the cloud could give you the willies. How can you capitalize on the cloud’s tantalizing advantages while minimizing risk? Here are three things to look for in a cloud billing system you can trust.
SYS-CON Events announced today that IDenticard will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. IDenticard™ is the security division of Brady Corp (NYSE: BRC), a $1.5 billion manufacturer of identification products. We have small-company values with the strength and stability of a major corporation. IDenticard offers local sales, support and service to our customers across the United States and Canada. Our partner network encompasses some 300 of the world's leading systems integrators and security systems installation specialists.
VictorOps is making on-call suck less with the only collaborative alert management platform on the market. With easy on-call scheduling management, a real-time incident timeline that gives you contextual relevance around your alerts and powerful reporting features that make post-mortems more effective, VictorOps helps your IT/DevOps team solve problems faster.
Skeuomorphism usually means retaining existing design cues in something new that doesn’t actually need them. However, the concept of skeuomorphism can be thought of as relating more broadly to applying existing patterns to new technologies that, in fact, cry out for new approaches. In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, Senior Cloud Strategy Marketing and Evangelism Manager at Red Hat, will discuss why containers should be paired with new architectural practices such as microservices rather than mimicking legacy server virtualization workflows and architectures.
Security can create serious friction for DevOps processes. We've come up with an approach to alleviate the friction and provide security value to DevOps teams. In her session at DevOps Summit, Shannon Lietz, Senior Manager of DevSecOps at Intuit, will discuss how DevSecOps got started and how it has evolved. Shannon Lietz has over two decades of experience pursuing next generation security solutions. She is currently the DevSecOps Leader for Intuit where she is responsible for setting and driving the company’s cloud security strategy, roadmap and implementation in support of corporate innovation with a DevSecOps mindset.
Activiti and 4WS.Platform make it possible to manage business processes, including simple features such as email notifications or documents approval/storage and they also allow administrator to get a full control and monitoring of processes defined and in progress.
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. In a previous post I described how you can log from your java applications to Logentries using log4j and logback with our open source le_java repository on github. Well now thanks to github user joshuadavis you can now log from log4j2 too! See our product documentation on how to get started with le_java and log4j2, and here is theapache documentation for log4j2. Using log4j2 has some benefits over log4j, and is quite easy to transition to from log4j using the log4j 1.x bridge, which simply involves changing your log4j dependency to log4j2's log4j-1.2-api.jar. There are some limitations on this method which are described in full here on the log4j2 migration documentation.
Application metrics, logs, and business KPIs are a goldmine. It’s easy to get started with the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) – you can see lots of people coming up with impressive dashboards, in less than a day, with no previous experience. Going from proof-of-concept to production tends to be a bit more difficult, unfortunately, and it tends to gobble up our attention, time, and money. In his session at DevOps Summit, Otis Gospodnetić, co-author of Lucene in Action and founder of Sematext, will share the architecture and decisions behind Sematext’s services for handling large volumes of performance metrics, traces, logs, anomaly detection, alerts, etc. He’ll follow data from its sources, its collection, aggregation, storage, and visualization. He will also cover the overview of some of the relevant technologies and their strengths and weaknesses, such as HBase, Elasticsearch, and Kafka.
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.
Prior to implementing the Transmogrifier, I would get woken up for an alert and have no idea what it was, or what was needed to solve the problem. I would have to open 3 or 4 different tabs to try and wrap my head around the situation. Now with the Transmogrifier’s annotations, I save a good 5-10 minutes of trying to search for all the necessary documentation. There is no longer stress associated with having to obtain information from disparate places, and this has been extremely beneficial for the team.
Not all network management solutions are alike, even though they may sound that way sometimes. A sure sign of a network management tool trying to pass itself off as an enterprise solution is when it implements distributed polling as a way to scale. These systems scale server capacity by adding distributed pollers, each sharing a portion of the overall CPU load. But any network monitoring architect can tell you that the bottleneck in infrastructure management is I/O to the database. Having multiple pollers simultaneously send data back to a single data store does not solve the issue but can exacerbate it.
JMS provides a standard messaging API for interoperability of applications on the Java platform. This enables your JVM-backed applications to connect to each other to send and receive messages. RabbitMQ is a messaging broker that serves as an intermediary for messaging between multiple platforms/languages. ruxit now supports Java messaging, including monitoring of JMS message handlers, EJB message-driven beans, and the RabbitMQ consumer-plugin interface. We’ll continue to extend messaging support over the coming weeks.
About 15 years ago I gave an application performance presentation to some storage guys. Since I was a database jock at the time and didn’t “speak” I/O very well, I had to try a different approach. Rather than speaking over their heads in my own language, or faking it using their language, I tried to pick something neither of us were experts in – microeconomics. What’s interesting is that that presentation became my modus operandi for tuning systems. As I went from customer to customer, each with a different application or architecture, I needed a normalized approach so I didn’t get lost in the technology.