I know of several large financial institutions that do all of their performance testing inside the firewall, and thus they own all of their own infrastructure, including dedicated servers that are used solely for load generation. With some of the large load generation requirements (which can be in the hundreds of thousands of vUsers), you can imagine that even a small bump in optimization of a load server could potentially save a company quite a bit of infrastructure costs in the load server hardware alone. Which is why, as part of our best practices, SOASTA advocates calibration of load servers when using CloudTest.

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Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, a growing collection of integrated services—analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web. In the 12 months since Build 2014, Microsoft has delivered over 500 new Azure services and features, and greatly expanded the footprint and capabilities of what Azure delivers. Here’s a snapshot of Azure Allure, articulated by Microsoft exec Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise, at the Microsoft Build 2015 conference in San Francisco.

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In 2011 the US Federal Government issued a Cloud First policy mandating that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. Cloud computing is a design style that allows for efficient use of compute, storage, and memory in order to decrease cycle time for mission delivery and promises to change the way that agencies deliver services to citizens for the next twenty years.

Roger Hockenberry, CEO of Cognitio and former CTO for the National Clandestine Services of the Central Intelligence Agency, helped create and realize the potential of cloud capabilities for the Intelligence Community. Getting the Intelligence Community to accept Cloud computing as a viable platform was a difficult road to travel. This interview with Roger offers some thoughts and suggestions for a successful Cloud journey:

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Ten years ago, there may have been only a single application that talked directly to the database and spit out HTML; customer service, sales – most of the organizations I work with have been moving toward a design philosophy more like unix, where each application consists of a series of small tools stitched together. In web example above, that likely means a login service combines with webpages that call other services – like enter and update record. That allows the customer service team to write their own tools using the web, the command line, scheduled, or any other interface.

Sound too good to be true, doesn’t it? It is true, but it comes at a cost. For example, I never defined a mechanism to manage the explosion of APIs that will result under this approach. Consider this: uncontrolled growth is one definition of cancer.
Since the rapid creation of APIs is not quite so deadly, I will call this the API Sprawl; I’ve seen it across every client that moved to web-services approach, typically two to four years into conversion.

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There are a billion articles on ES6 at this point. What’s one more? Here we discuss some emerging patterns and issues related to real world use of ES6 as well as how one can go about using it now via Babel. If you aren’t yet familiar with the features and changes of ES6 itself, you’ll probably want to check out the following links first:

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Key Information Systems, Inc. (KeyInfo), a leading cloud and infrastructure provider offering integrated solutions to enterprises, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Key Information Systems is a leading regional systems integrator with world-class compute, storage and networking solutions and professional services for the most advanced software-defined data centers. These competencies are tightly complemented by a full suite of data center capabilities, including private and hybrid cloud offerings, connectivity services, colocation facilities and managed services.

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After the deluge of data breaches in 2014 and more emerging every day, security is without a doubt a top strategic initiative for just about every enterprise in 2015. Along with top-notch security, it is imperative for organizations – particularly cloud-driven ones – to also have leading operations tools in place to manage the availability and reliability of their infrastructure. Consider these statistics: more than 80 percent of attacks target known vulnerabilities and 79 percent of vulnerabilities have patches available on the day of the attack’s disclosure. It’s shocking then to realize that it takes 193 days on average to resolve the average vulnerability. Clearly, something needs fixing. The gap between IT security and IT operations teams needs closing.

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Ski helmets, seat belts, and encryption. What comes to your mind when you read these words?

You may immediately think “safety,” and you’d be right, but how about “speed enablers”? At first blush, that may not be the first concept that comes to mind, but there’s a pretty compelling case to be made for this as another common theme.

Let me give you a couple fun examples, starting with ski helmets. During the winter of 2002/2003 researchers studied different factors, and how they affect skier and snow boarder speed. One of the variables examined was “use or not of helmet”. The authors measured the speed of 650 individuals at three different US ski resorts and found the average speed for helmet users (28.4 MPH) was significantly higher than those not using a helmet (25.4 MPH).

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Learn how you can use the CoSN SEND II Decision Tree for Education Technology to make sure that your K–12 technology initiatives create a more engaging learning experience that empowers students, teachers, and administrators alike.

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There is no question that the cloud is where businesses want to host data. Until recently hypervisor virtualization was the most widely used method in cloud computing. Recently virtual containers have been gaining in popularity, and for good reason. In the debate between virtual machines and containers, the latter have been seen as the new kid on the block – and like other emerging technology have had some initial shortcomings. However, the container space has evolved drastically since coming onto the cloud hosting scene over 10 years ago. So, what has changed?
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Tenko Nikolov, founder and CEO of Kyup, discussed the security, speed, scalability, cost and outlook for the future of container cloud hosting.
Tenko Nikolov is the founder and CEO of Kyup and the main driving force behind the company’s product development and market growth. With a firm background in the field of web hosting as a managing partner at SiteGround – a leading tech innovator on the web hosting market for more than 10 years now – he has both the vision and the experience to foster the company’s business strategy and cater to the high-standards of delivering a truly advanced, next-generation cloud hosting products.

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