SYS-CON Media announced today that Sematext launched a popular blog feed on DevOps Journal with over 6,000 story reads over the weekend.

DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing. DevOps Journal brings valuable information to DevOps professionals who are transforming the way enterprise IT is done.

Sematext is a globally distributed organization that builds innovative Cloud and On Premises solutions for performance monitoring, alerting and anomaly detection (SPM), log management and analytics (Logsene), and search analytics (SSA). We also provide Search and Big Data consulting services and offer 24/7 production support for Solr and Elasticsearch.

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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.

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For those of us that have been practicing SOA for over a decade, it’s surprising that there’s so much interest in microservices. In fairness microservices don’t look like the vendor play that was early SOA in the early noughties. But experienced SOA practitioners everywhere will be wondering if microservices is actually a good thing. You see microservices is basically an SOA pattern that inherits all the well-known SOA principles and adds characteristics that address the use of SOA for distributed, finer grained software services. And like all patterns, microservices are not applicable to all situations, and it’s very important to understand the cost/benefit equation. Those folks that are heralding microservices as the “new SOA” or “the right way to do SOA” are flat wrong. Microservices is a specialization of SOA that has applicability to a relatively narrow problem space.

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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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Almost half of companies surveyed by Britannic Technologies said they had cloud-based voice and telephony services, while two thirds said they had a partial voice solution in the cloud.

84% of respondents said they understood the proposition of cloud computing, yet there were some intriguing responses as to why companies aren’t putting their voice services in the cloud. Almost half (48%) of those polled said they were concerned about security worries, while 38% were worried over reliability, 29% found it difficult to integrate into existing systems, 19% were worried they couldn’t manage it in-house, and 19% didn’t understand it.

Interestingly, the most likely executive to approve cloud-based telephony was the IT director (49%), followed by the CEO (31%) and the rest of the board (31%). Cost savings (60%) were the main reason why voice and telephony services were being moved to the cloud, followed by greater business agility (55%), speed of deployment (40%), and freeing up the IT team to work on other areas (33%).

These figures, which were described in part as “staggering” in the press material, yet the wider story here may be the uptake – or lack of – of unified communications (UC) services. A recent report from Research and Markets described the trend as Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), and there are still plenty of partnerships taking place; StarHub announcing a deal with Avaya, and ShoreTel, Ingram Micro and HP partnering up in separate deals.

Yet the majority of recent research around the area has not been positive. The overall UC market of $21.1 billion is dwarfed by the global telephony market of $1.65 trillion.

As reported by CBR Online, a recent PwC report argues the case of there being two different markets: UC 1.0, used by more than half of small businesses which has a degree of integration between fixed and mobile telephony; and UC 2.0, companies having a more integrated solution which naturally commands a smaller audience. Similarly, a survey from Easynet argues European companies, while understanding the benefits of UC, aren’t utilising it to its full potential.

Jonathan Sharp, Britannic sales and marketing director, commented on today’s findings: “Senior managers are now aware that technology helps businesses differentiate themselves in today’s competitive marketplace. It also enables employees to work in more collaborative ways and essentially service customers better.”