Overgrown applications have given way to modular applications, driven by the need to break larger problems into smaller problems. Similarly large monolithic development processes have been forced to be broken into smaller agile development cycles. Looking at trends in software development, microservices architectures meet the same demands. Additional benefits of microservices architectures are compartmentalization and a limited impact of service failure versus a complete software malfunction. The problem is there are a lot of moving parts in these designs; this makes assuring performance complex especially if the services are geographically distributed or provided by multiple third parties.

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Who are you? How do you introduce yourself? Do you use a name, or do you greet a friend by the last four digits of his social security number? Assuming you don’t, why are we content to associate our identity with 10 random digits assigned by our phone company? Identity is an issue that affects everyone, but as individuals we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ben Klang, Founder & President of Mojo Lingo, discussed the impact of technology on identity. Should we federate, or not? How should identity be secured? Who owns the identity? How is identity created, addressed, and shared?

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There are so many tools and techniques for data analytics that even for a data scientist the choices, possible systems, and even the types of data can be daunting.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Harrold, Global CTO for Big Data Solutions for EMC Corporation, showed how to perform a simple, but meaningful analysis of social sentiment data using freely available tools that take only minutes to download and install. Participants received the download information, scripts, and complete end-to-end walkthrough of the analysis from start to finish, and were also given the practical knowledge to take their analysis to the next level and to have a conversation with their lines of business and management to show how easy it can be to add a social analytics package to their overall data analytics strategies.

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Beacon technology offers a new way for companies to deliver value to their customers by enabling micro-location based interaction at every physical touch point. This knowledge opens up a new playground for creating personalized services and inventing new experiences between a company and its customers, but how exactly can organizations monetize this? For the past two years we have heard about mobile notifications and messaging, but this has not taken off and could be considered spamming.

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Automating AWS environments is important for all businesses as it simplifies creation and setup of cloud resources, facilitates otherwise complex processes, and streamlines management. The benefits of automation are clear: accelerate execution, reduce human error and unwanted consequences, and increase the enterprise’s ability to rapidly adapt, all while reducing the overall cost of IT operations.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Patrick McClory, Director of Automation and DevOps at Datapipe, delved deep into the technical specifics of automation for AWS including a discussion of best practices and real world use cases for PCI compliance, application management, continuous integration, CloudFormation and auto-scaling.

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Rapid innovation, changing business landscapes, and new IT demands force businesses to make changes quickly. The DevOps approach is a way to increase business agility through collaboration, communication, and integration across different teams in the IT organization.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit, Chris Van Tuin, Chief Technologist for the Western US at Red Hat, discussed:
The acceleration of application delivery for the business with DevOps

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Between the compelling mockups and specs produced by analysts, and resulting applications built by developers, there exists a gulf where projects fail, costs spiral, and applications disappoint. Methodologies like Agile attempt to address this with intensified communication, with partial success but many limitations.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Charles Kendrick, CTO and Chief Architect at Isomorphic Software, presented a revolutionary model enabled by new technologies.

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Containers are revolutionizing the way we deploy and maintain our infrastructures, but monitoring and troubleshooting in a containerized environment can still be painful and impractical. Understanding even basic resource usage is difficult – let alone tracking network connections or malicious activity.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gianluca Borello, Sr. Software Engineer at Sysdig, covered the current state of the art for container monitoring and visibility, including pros / cons and live demonstrations of each method. Special emphasis will be put on sysdig, an open source troubleshooting tool. Sysdig offers unprecedented container visibility without the need to break the “sanctity” of the container.

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Manufacturing connected IoT versions of traditional products requires more than multiple deep technology skills. It also requires a shift in mindset, to realize that connected, sensor-enabled “things” act more like services than what we usually think of as products.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, David Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Ayla Networks, discussed how when sensors start generating detailed real-world data about products and how they’re being used, smart manufacturers can use the data to create additional revenue streams, such as improved warranties or premium features. Or slash maintenance costs by replacing parts before they fail. Or learn from the data to iterate better products that give customers what they really want.

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Over the course of 2015 I was exposed to many companies going through Lean software delivery transformations – some very successful, but many less so. Having this visibility into the software lifecycle architecture of such a broad range of the world’s leading organizations was eye opening.
Here’s what I found: most leading IT organizations are going through some kind of Lean transformation. The ones that succeed in accelerating software delivery will thrive. Those that fail will fall behind. And those that take no action, but continue down the complacent road of delivering software in the slow ways of yesteryear, will be displaced by their nimbler enterprise counterparts, or by startups. This will happen much more quickly than they realize. One of the most interesting things I learned was just how fast the return on investment from a successful transformation is, which spells market-changing dynamics for the Have and Have Nots of software delivery transformations in 2016 and 2017.

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