Life goes by too quickly, and that truth is never as poignant as when we lose one of our brightest minds. When the world said goodbye to Steve Jobs in 2011, we knew we had lost a visionary—the same visionary who pioneered technology that continues to impact the market and the world every day. But […]
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Container technology is shaping the future of DevOps and it’s also changing the way organizations think about application development. With the rise of mobile applications in the enterprise, businesses are abandoning year-long development cycles and embracing technologies that enable rapid development and continuous deployment of apps.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Kurt Collins, Developer Evangelist at Built.io, examined how Docker has evolved into a highly effective tool for application delivery by allowing increasingly popular Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (mBaaS) platforms to quickly create and scale enterprise apps across mobile, web and IoT.
Culture is the most important ingredient of DevOps. The challenge for most organizations is defining and communicating a vision of beneficial DevOps culture for their organizations, and then facilitating the changes needed to achieve that. Often this comes down to an ability to provide true leadership.
As a CIO, are your direct reports IT managers or are they IT leaders? The hard truth is that many IT managers have risen through the ranks based on their technical skills, not their leadership ability. Many are unable to effectively engage and inspire, creating forward momentum in the direction of desired change. Renowned for its approach to leadership and emphasis on their people, organizations increasingly look to our military for insight into these challenges.
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Research from B2B research firm Clutch has revealed just over half (52%) of small businesses are using a cloud storage solution, with Dropbox the most popular and Apple the highest rated service.
According to the report, which polled 438 small business across the US and 744 full time employees, Dropbox was used by 53% of respondents, ahead of Google Drive (45%), Apple iCloud (34%) and Microsoft OneDrive (30%). Box, in comparison, was used by only 6% of respondents, indicating a preference towards consumer services. Apple’s cloud storage was given the highest Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 62, ahead of Dropbox (54), Google Drive (50) and OneDrive (45).
Plenty of moves have been made in the storage space in recent weeks. Microsoft announced earlier in November that it was dropping its unlimited OneDrive plan, previously available to Office 365 subscribers, after the company admitted a small percentage of users were putting 75 terabytes of data into their accounts – more than 14,000 times the average. Dropbox continues to push itself towards the enterprise market, announcing enhancements to its Dropbox for Business product to include new account management tools and greater security at a recent event.
Yet these survey results show businesses are not as savvy as one might expect with storage. “Cloud storage has been around for a while, but there are still many people who do not know the full scope of what can be done with it,” said David Amaya, consultant at Cardinal Solutions.
“Security and compliance concerns hold many back from adopting the cloud – as small businesses become more aware of what is possible and how the cloud addresses these concerns, the number using the cloud will continue to increase,” he added.
Elsewhere, research from all-flash storage provider SolidFire has examined the state of storage in next-generation IT deployments and argues storage automation is ‘predominantly’ addressing immediate problems IT teams face – but more work can be done. VMware has the largest contingent of organisations using storage automation, while OpenStack and, increasingly, containerised solutions such as Docker, are ‘poised to be a disruptive force’.
I recently spent the weekend up in the lakes region of New Hampshire, and made the rounds of all the various country stores and craft shops that are a staple of the area. In one shop, I noticed something I hadn’t seen in a long time: a large set of Russian nesting dolls. The quality, craftsmanship, and level of detail were impressive. As I removed the cover on the first intricately painted doll, nestled inside was the next, slightly smaller one, a duplicate of the outer doll, with all of the same detail on a slightly smaller scale. As I continued opening each successive doll, revealing the next smaller duplicate, I started looking for discrepancies, loss of detail in the duplication as I dove recursively into smaller and smaller dolls. The quality and attention to detail, even at the smallest level, remained for each of the dolls. Each doll was a representation of information, just on different levels and scales.
The Internet of Everything is re-shaping technology trends–moving away from “request/response” architecture to an “always-on” Streaming Web where data is in constant motion and secure, reliable communication is an absolute necessity. As more and more THINGS go online, the challenges that developers will need to address will only increase exponentially.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Todd Greene, Founder & CEO of PubNub, exploreed the current state of IoT connectivity and review key trends and technology requirements that will drive the Internet of Things from hype to reality.
Every day, every hour, every minute, devices are becoming connected. The Internet of Things (or Iot) has gone from a buzzword floating through the echoes of Silicon Valley to a tangible and quickly advancing movement in the world of hardware. But, like a stone tossed into a pond, the effects of the Internet of Things are quickly rippling outward, causing immense changes to the environment surrounding it. And, as it turns out, the IoT is a rather big stone and it’s making a large splash. The IoT revolution is necessitating enormous changes to companies who want to play in this brave new world – and those companies are not few in number.
I recently attended and was a speaker at the 4th International Internet of @ThingsExpo at the Santa Clara Convention Center. I also had the opportunity to attend this event last year and I wrote a blog from that show talking about how the “Enterprise Impact of IoT” was a key theme of last year’s show. I was curious to see if the same theme would still resonate 365 days later and what, if any, changes I would see in the content presented.
Apps and devices shouldn’t stop working when there’s limited or no network connectivity. Learn how to bring data stored in a cloud database to the edge of the network (and back again) whenever an Internet connection is available.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Ben Perlmutter, a Sales Engineer with IBM Cloudant, demonstrated techniques for replicating cloud databases with devices in order to build offline-first mobile or Internet of Things (IoT) apps that can provide a better, faster user experience, both offline and online. The focus of this talk was on IBM Cloudant, Apache CouchDB, and related open source tools and open standards.
Google has announced a new more fitting way of buying virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. It claims the extra attention to detail will stamp out forced over purchasing and save customers money.
With the newly launched beta of Custom Machine Types for Google’s Compute Engine, Google promised that it will bring an end to the days when “major cloud buyers force you to overbuy”. Google has promised that under its new system users can buy the exact amount of processing power and memory that they need for their VM.
The new system, explained in a Google blog, aims to improve the experience for customers when buying a new virtual machine in the cloud. Google says it wants to replace the old system, where users have to choose from a menu of pre-configured CPU and RAM options on machines that are never quite adjusted right to fit the user. Since VMs usually come in multiples of two, Google explained, customers frequently have to buy eight CPUs, even when they only need six.
The Custom Machine Types system will let users buy virtual CPU (vCPU) and RAM in smaller units (Gigibytes rather than Gigabytes) and give customer more options to adjust the number of cores and memory as needed. If a customer’s bottom line expands, the cloud can be ‘let out’ accordingly. In another tailoring option, Google has introduced smaller units of charging (with per-minute billing) in a bid to create more accurate metering of the customer’s consumption of resources.
In the US every vCPU hour will cost $0.03492 and every GiB of RAM will cost $0.00468 per hour. The price for Europe and Asia, however, is a slightly higher rate $0.03841 per vCPU hour. Rates will decrease on bulk purchasing however.
Support is available in Google’s command line tools and through its application programming interface (API) and Google says it will create a special graphical interface for its virtual machine shop in its Developer Console. Developers can specify their choice of operating system for their tailored VM, with the current options being CentOS, CoreOS, Debian, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Google organisation, it is working with content deliverer Akamai Technologies to reduce hosting and egress costs and improve performance for Akamai customers taking advantage of Google Cloud Platform.