In the 21 years since its inception, PHP has become the world’s most popular server side scripting language. Known as a powerful, easy to learn language, PHP, according to one metrics site, is used by 82% of all the websites whose server-side programming language is known. In more cases than not, if you encounter a desktop application that has a user-interface, such as an e-commerce applications or social media sites, the likelihood exists that it’s coded in PHP.

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Andrew Phillips recently spoke on the topic of “Mindset, Tools, and Goals: From Continuous Delivery to Containers” where he answered the following questions:

Why are we writing software in the first place?
Relation to Continuous Delivery and Devops: need to have delivery to the user in mind as the goal, not a “tech fest.”
How to balance incremental improvement via Agile/Devops/CD with transformative innovation: what’s missing in the “bi-modal” approach?
“Case study:” applying all this to containers and microservices.

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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.

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To manage complex web services with lots of calls to the cloud, many businesses have invested in Application Performance Management (APM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) tools. Together APM and NPM tools are essential aids in improving a business’s infrastructure required to support an effective web experience… but they are missing a critical component – Internet visibility.
Internet connectivity has always played a role in customer access to web presence, but in the past few years use of the Internet in the web experience has dramatically increased. The broadening use of Cloud Services sources means that web content is coming to the customer from all over the Internet in a multitude of paths. Relying solely on Network and Internet Service Providers will get you connected but at what cost to performance and cost. Gaining the ability to monitor, analyze and plan managing Internet paths and take more complete control of your customer’s experience is no longer a nice-to-have, it is critical to your brand and profitability.

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Shipping daily, injecting faults, and keeping an extremely high availability «without Ops»? Understand why NoOps does not mean no operations. Agile development methodologies require evolved operations to be successful.
In his keynote at DevOps Summit, David Tesar, Microsoft Technical Evangelist on Microsoft Azure and DevOps, will discuss how Microsoft teams who have made huge progress with a DevOps transformation effectively utilize operations staff and how challenges were overcome. Regardless of whether you are a startup or a mature enterprise, whether you are using PaaS, Micro Services, or Containerization, walk away with some practical tips where Ops can make a significant impact working with the development teams. Operational teams and functions are increasingly more important as the industry delivers software at a blazing pace.

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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.

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‘Tis the season of light. With Diwali recently concluded, we’ve now entered the days of the Hannukah Festival, the Advent Season, the Nativity Fast, and in the Philippines, the onset of Simbang Gabi (“Night Mass”), a series of evening services as Christmas approaches. The Yule log is also burning metaphorically if not literally throughout much of the Western world. All center on the presence of light.

As we enter the new year, fireworks will be obstreperously on display throughout the world, with the global light show extending into the Chinese New Year (literally, “Spring Festival”) in February. Meanwhile, the Ayat an-Nur (“Verse of Light”) burns for many throughout the year.

Overcoming darkness is a basic instinct of humans, reflected in a variety of ancient traditions, festivals, and holidays. Even people who aren’t afraid of the dark get gloomy in the prolonged absence of sun, moreso for those in northern climes who are now seeing their days shrink to precious few hours.

Overcoming the darkness of human poverty and violence thus seems a worthy topic this time of year, as much of the world enters a contemplative time devoted to celebration, family, and vows of renewal for the upcoming year.

Which leads us inevitably, of course, to PaaS.

Background
Work we’ve been conducting at the Tau Instittute for Global ICT Research over the past three years shows a strong correlation – if not outright causation – between aggressive ICT development and socioeconomic success.

We measure ICT development on a relative, income-adjusted basis, and have found South Korea, New Zealand, Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands, and Canada to be among our world leaders. Nations throughout the development continuum including Poland, Vietnam, Uruguay, Chile, Jordan, Morocco, and Ghana also show promise.

We believe that a fundamental and continuous commitment to ICT development is the best antidote to poverty and its attendant problems. The issue of violence is often separate, of course, but we believe a strong commitment to socioeconomic development among all nations of the world can grind away at resolving particular issues of violence as well.

Three Big Things
That commitment to ICT encompasses three big things—bandwidth, cloud computing, and PaaS. The first of these is obvious—bigger pipelines mean more information can be directed to all devices, whether datacenters, personal computers, or handheld devices. To take best advantage of bandwidth means efficient computing—and cloud computing continues to promise a much more effective use of all the iron being put into place.

The third leg of the stool is effective development of applications and services to make use of the iron and pump information through the pipelines. This is where PaaS comes in.

It’s an ungainly term, PaaS, and one that may go away some day soon. But it can light the road to development of the applications, services, and systems that will improve the lives of people throughout the world.

Global Phenomenon
During my time in the Philippines, I saw an actively engaged development community of (mostly) young people who were developing mobile apps that did everything from finding lower cost gas stations to bringing basic education to remote province villages to providing imminent flood warnings during that country’s notorious typhoon season. All done on one PaaS or another.

In the US, at the recent Cloud Expo/ThingsExpo in Santa Clara (for which I served as Conference Chair), I witnessed two happenings–the ElasticBox Hackathon and IBM Bluemix Developer Playground—that focused developers’ energy on solving problems in education, transportation, and health care.

In Africa, recent events in Johannesburg and Lagos focused on cloud computing and development, as well as the DevOps approach to development, with an emphasis on solving issues of poverty, government transparency, and private-public partnerships.

PaaS encompasses platforms that provide ways to develop, test, and deploy services quickly, and which work within the virtualized or specifically allocated world of provisioning provided by on-site and/or third-party cloud resources.

I’m presently enamored of Cloud Foundry and its growing community and influence; you no doubt have your own preferences and recommendations. Please feel free to send me your stories.

More than mere points of light, the presence and use of PaaS worldwide is the initial step in the long march toward improving lives and societies at all levels of development.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, has been named «Bronze Sponsor» of SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo® and DevOps Summit 2015 New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo® and DevOps Summit 2015 Silicon Valley, which will take place November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Alert Logic provides Security-as-a-Service for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid IT infrastructures, delivering deep security insight and continuous protection for customers at a lower cost than traditional security solutions.
Fully managed by a team of security and compliance experts, the Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service solution provides network, system and web application protection immediately, wherever an organization’s IT infrastructure resides. Alert Logic partners with all major cloud platforms and hosting providers to protect over 3,000 organizations worldwide. Built for cloud scale, Alert Logic’s patented platform stores petabytes of data, analyzes over 450 million events and identifies over 60,000 security incidents each month, which are managed by a 24×7 Security Operations Center.
Alert Logic, founded in 2002, is headquartered in Houston, Texas, with offices in Seattle, Dallas, Cardiff, Belfast and London.

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The 3rd International @ThingsExpo, co-located with the 16th International Cloud Expo – to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY – is now accepting Hackathon proposals. Hackathon sponsorship benefits include general brand exposure and increasing engagement with the developer ecosystem.
At Cloud Expo 2014 Silicon Valley, IBM held the Bluemix Developer Playground on November 5 and ElasticBox held the DevOps Hackathon on November 6. Both events took place on the expo floor.
The Bluemix Developer Playground, for developers of all levels, highlighted the ease of use of Bluemix, its services and functionality and provided short-term introductory projects that developers could complete between sessions.

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«The Federal government today is in the midst of a revolution. The revolution is challenging the norms of government by introducing new ways of serving the people. New models for creating services and delivering information; new policies and procedures that are redefining federal acquisition and what it means to be a federal system integrator. This revolution also lacks the physical and tangible artifacts of the past. Its ephemeral nature, global expanse and economic impact all combine in a tidal wave of change. This revolution is called cloud computing.»

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