I have three words for everyone in software testing: prioritize, prioritize, and prioritize. You can’t test every possible permutation of your software, especially so with APIs and IoT devices where you’re placing much of the user experience in the hands of integrators to your core products and services. You just can’t, so we should throw our hands up now and just give up, right?
Monthly Archives: October 2015
Japan’s NHK TV to Feature @ThingsExpo | #IoT #M2M #API #InternetOfThings
NHK, Japan Broadcasting will feature upcoming @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley in a special IoT documentary which will be filmed on the expo floor November 3 to 5, 2015 in Santa Clara. NHK is the sole public TV network in Japan equivalent to BBC in UK and the largest in Asia with many award winning science and technology programs. Japanese TV is producing a documentary about IoT and Smart technology covering @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley. The program will be aired during the highest viewership season of the year that it will have a high impact in the industry through this documentary in Japan. The film’s director is writing a scenario to fit in the story in the next few days will be turned in to the network.
Ubiquitous Comms Through WebRTC By @MarkCastleman | @ThingsExpo #IoT #WebRTC
WebRTC converts the entire network into a ubiquitous communications cloud thereby connecting anytime, anywhere through any point.
In his session at WebRTC Summit,, Mark Castleman, EIR at Bell Labs and Head of Future X Labs, will discuss how the transformational nature of communications is achieved through the democratizing force of WebRTC. WebRTC is doing for voice what HTML did for web content.
AWS: examine fine print in data transfer legislation
In a week that has seen the European Court of Justice rule that the Safe Harbour agreement on data transfer as invalid, the significance of data transfer legislation in South East Asia has been under discussion at Cloud South East Asia.
Answering audience questions following his Cloud South East Asia keynote this morning, Blair Layton, Head of Database Services for Amazon Web Services, argued that some of the legislation against data transfer was not always as cast-iron as they appear.
Acknowledging that such legal concerns were indeed “very legitimate,” and that there were certainly countries with stringent legal provisions that formed an obvious barrier to the adoption of cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Layton none the less stressed that it was always worth examining the relevant legislation “in more detail.”
“What we’ve found in some countries is that, even though the high level statement might be that data has to reside in one country, what you find in the fine print is that it actually says, ‘if you inform users then it is fine to move the data,”’ he told delegates. “Also, that for sensitive data you think you may not be able to move – because of company controls, board level concerns etc. – we can have many discussions about that. For instance, if you just want to move data for back-up and recovery, you can encrypt that on the premise, maintain the keys on premise, and shift that into the cloud for storage.”
In the same session, Layton, when not extolling the impressive scope and effectiveness of Amazon Web Services in the South East Asian region and beyond, discussed other reasons for the arguable disparity between the evident regional interest in cloud services, and the actual uptake of them.
“There are in different cultures in different countries, and they have different levels of interest in technology. For example, you’ll see that…. people in Singapore are very conservative compared to the Taiwanese In other countries their IT is not as mature and they’re not as willing to try new things and that’s simply cultural.”
Advancing the cloud in South East Asia
Today is the first day of Cloud South East Asia in Kuala Lumpur, and the attendance alone testifies to the enthusiasm and curiosity around cloud development in the region in general and in Malaysia in particular.
One great authority on the topic is the chair of today’s event, Mike Mudd (pictured), MD at Asian Policy Partners LLC. Following keynotes from the likes of Amazon Web Services and the Asia Cloud Computing Association, Business Cloud News sat down with Mudd to discuss the significance of cloud computing standards in the region, something touched upon by a number of speakers.
BCN: Hi Mike. It was pointed out today that there is a slight disparity between the enthusiasm for the cloud in South East Asia, and the pace of actual adoption in the region. What would you say the big impediments are?
Michael Mudd: Well there’s the general one which is what I’ve described as the ‘trusted cloud’. This encompasses two things. One is security, and the other is privacy. The other issue however is that, only really half of the region here has adequate data protection rules. Some have them on the books but they’re either not enforced, they’re enforced laxly, or they are only applicable to the private sector, and not applicable to government. This is quite distinct to privacy laws in say Europe, where it goes across all sectors.
In addition, in certain countries, they’re trying to say that you cannot send any personally identifiable information across borders. This is important when it comes to financial information: banks, insurance, stock exchange, this type of thing, as well as healthcare.
And are regional governments taking up the cloud in general?
Forward looking governments are. Singapore, Hong Kong to a certain degree – but there’s not an idea of a ‘cloud first’ policy yet. It’s still very much ‘hug my server, build my data centre etc..’
From the point of view of the regulators, particularly the financial services, to do their job they’ve got to be able to audit. And one of the things they consider important to that is being able to physically enter premises if required. Certain jurisdictions want to see servers. If the data is in the cloud, then that too is an issue, and something that has to be addressed.
Do you think that the new Trans-Pacific Partnership could provide a way out of this impasse?
What has been drafted to my understanding (though we’ve still got to see the details) in the TPP, is wording which will enable or should enable cross border data flows to work far more easily. Again it was only signed two days ago so we don’t know exact words. (Like all trade negotiations they’re done in confidence – people complain they’re done in secrecy but all are done in the same way.)
Why is this so important?
From the point of view of cloud computing, this is new. Most trade agreements deal with traditional things. Agriculture being the first trading product, manufacturing the second, the third being services, but the fourth one is the new one: trading data, trading information, flowing across borders.
It actually goes right back to the very beginning. Information’s always been important for trade: being able to have a free flow of information. I’m not talking about security or government: that kind of thing is always sensitive and will always be treated separately as it should be, but commercial information is very important. It’s the reason your ATM card works here as well as in London. That’s a cross border data flow of information!
Standards are only just emerging. We obviously have technical standards – their objective is to enable interoperability between disparate machines. Those kinds of standards have been around a long time – they’re based on industry protocols etc. What have starting to come up now are management standards, standards coming out now very specifically for cloud.
Transaction-Centric NPM | @CloudExpo #APM #DevOps #Microservices
In my last post, I wrote about the value of IT / business collaboration, and the importance of a common language, a common definition of end-user experience – user transaction response time – as the one performance metric both IT and business have in common. In it, I provided some background on the importance of understanding exactly how we define response time, since this definition dictates the usefulness of the measurement. For the sake of brevity, I’ll summarize three common definitions here:
Microservices Matter | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #BigData #API #Microservices
Several years ago, I was a developer in a travel reservation aggregator. Our mission was to pull flight and hotel data from a bunch of cryptic reservation platforms, and provide it to other companies via an API library – for a fee. That was before companies like Expedia standardized such things.
We started with simple methods like getFlightLeg() or addPassengerName(), each performing a small, well-understood function. But our customers wanted bigger, more encompassing services that would “do it all.” Soon, we’d “evolved” into a handful of über services, black boxes like createBookingFromScratch (not a real name). In one call, it could create an account, all the passengers, reserve multiple flight legs, seats, hotel, you name it. It even submitted payment.
Japan’s IoT Consortium to Present at @ThingsExpo | #BigData #IoT #M2M #API #InternetOfThings
Nowadays, a large number of sensors and devices are connected to the network. Leading-edge IoT technologies integrate various types of sensor data to create a new value for several business decision scenarios.
The transparent cloud is a model of a new IoT emergence service platform.
Many service providers store and access various types of sensor data in order to create and find out new business values by integrating such data.
Is the Laptop Dead for Businesses?
“As workers enter the workforce, they demand the ability to run business applications via smartphones. There is simply no point in fighting the mobile wave—resistance is futile.” ~ Drew Robb, Small Business Computing. Consumerization of IT in SMBs The way small businesses operate has heavily changed over the last 10 years. Organizations are reducing investments […]
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Customer Story: “Parallels Saves Me Weekly.”
The following post is a customer interview from our Advocacy program with Parallels Desktop user Vincent Ferrari. We are incredibly thankful to Vincent for sharing his experience with us and allowing us to share it with you. Read on for Vincent’s experience choosing and using Parallels Desktop. What do you do and how do you use Parallels Desktop? Vincent: I […]
The post Customer Story: “Parallels Saves Me Weekly.” appeared first on Parallels Blog.