I was working at a financial services software company in the early days of User Interface automation frameworks.
We decided that automating the GUI was the way to go, and immersed in developing the framework and our own tests.
The goal of automating our tests was to speed us up, while still providing broad coverage once the system was in place. We would then be able to perform repetitive or slowly changing operations, like building a very complex document, to see if the application had memory leaks or unexpected crashes. We wanted to be able to repeat the tests and have each run be identical.
We learned a lot about what you should do and – most importantly – what you shouldn’t do when reusing tests.
Monthly Archives: February 2016
Fixing the Agile Digital Transformation | @DevOpsSummit #Agile #DevOps
Enterprises are finally realizing that digital transformation must be end-to-end if they want to remain competitive in today’s software-driven, customer-focused world – but virtually every large organization has a massive boat anchor dragging them down – slow IT.
Legacy technology woes are bad enough – but what really makes slow IT slow are the people and the processes they follow. Nobody likes to change, yet change is what digital transformation is all about.
Amazing Amazon By @JnanDash | @CloudExpo #Cloud
I remember back in 2003 when I had a meeting with the then CTO of Amazon for a couple of hours. He was narrating his vision of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), where individual business or programming functions (called services) can be stacked up in libraries and get invoked as and when required. This notion of re-usable services was not new (remember subroutines from the mainframe era or stored procedures from the client-server days?).
Subsequently we called them “web services” because they were loosely coupled applications that can be exposed as services and easily consumed by other applications using Internet standard technologies. Phrases such as XML (EXtensible Markup Language), UDDI (Universal Discovery, Description, Integration), WSDL (Web Services Definition Language), and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) were new lexicons then. These were URL addressable resources that could exchange information and execute processes automatically without human intervention. Oh yes, we talked about how the equivalent of a phone dial-tone is evolving to a personal digital dial-tone (Internet) to an application digital dail-tone (web services).
Cisco to resell Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry service alongside Metapod
Pivotal and Cisco are to jointly will jointly offer an enterprise cloud service designed to help developers work quicker.
A global agreement between the two will see Cisco partners resell Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry services blended alongside Cisco’s own Metapod offering. The selling point for the combined service is the promise that it will help companies set up cloud native applications quicker, from a wider choice of hosted, public and private clouds.
While Cisco’s OpenStack-based Metapod is designed to run on company premises the Pivotal Cloud Foundry is available to clients as an externally hosted system. Cloud Foundry’s main promise is to improve the productivity of developers, fine tune operations and provide IT systems with enterprise grade security, scalability and availability. Both system take different approaches to a common delivery goal, to help companies get their software to market faster.
Under the terms of the Cisco Solution Partner Program, which is part of the Cisco Partner Ecosystem, Cisco and third-party independent hardware, software and technology vendors integrate various IT systems and offer them to clients. As a Cisco Solution Partner, Pivotal has already been granted Cisco compatibility certification and offers 24X7 customer support.
Cloud Foundry has five major elements to its service. Microservices help developers to move faster by using composable services designed for independent deployment, scaling and recovery. Containers help create a flexible, secure and manageable workload which can be distributed and scheduled in order to create greater efficiency. Cloud Foundry’s Open Source is backed by contributions from over 40 members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. A short software delivery cycle is the aim of the Continuous Delivery element of Cloud Foundry, while the DevOps element can provide a structured platform for app creation.
The integration of Cisco Metapod and Pivotal Cloud Foundry marries the top managed private cloud with the leading Cloud Native developer experience, according to Peder Ulander, Cisco’s VP of Cloud and Managed Services. The goal is to help customers “quickly and easily modernize their IT,” said Ulnder.
The combination of Metapod and Clod Foundry gives companies the clout of an enterprise but the stealth of an SME, according to James Watters, senior VP of Products at Pivotal. Enterprises can use the cloud service to build “next generation applications that rival that of Silicon Valley’s most renowned start-ups,” said Watters.
EMC and VMware launch hyperconverged VxRail appliance
Storage vendor EMC and virtualiser VMware have jointly launched a family of hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) for VMware environments. The plug and play gadgets are meant to simplify infrastructure management in departments experiencing high growth.
The VxRail appliance family combines EMC’s data services and systems management with VMware’s software such as vSphere and Virtual SAN. The intention is to create software defined storage natively integrated with vSphere in a single product family with one point of support. The all-flash VxRail appliances could simplify VMware customer environments and boost performance and capacity in a simple plug and play operation, the vendors claim.
The appliances were jointly engineered to integrate virtualisation, computing, storage and data protection in one system with a single point of support, say the vendors. Since they can be aggregated at great scale, the estate of appliances can grow from supporting two virtual machines (VMs) to thousands of VMs on a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ basis.
Starting prices for small and medium businesses and remote offices are around $60,000, with options for performance intensive workloads to be catered for with up to have 76 TB of flash. The appliances will run EMC’s data services including replication, backup and cloud tiering at no additional charge. In addition RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Virtual SAN, vSphere Data Protection and EMC Data Domain are all available.
Meanwhile VCE VxRail Manager will provide hardware awareness with timely notifications about the state of applications, VMs and events. VxRail Appliances can use EMC cloud tiering to extend to more than 20 public clouds such as VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Virtustream. These can provide an additional 10TB of on-demand cloud storage per appliance.
“The new appliances put IT organisations on a path to eliminating complexity and collapsing cost structures,” said Chad Sakac, President of the Converged Platforms division of EMC.
According to ESG research on hybrid cloud 70% of IT respondents plan to invest in HCI in the next 24 months. The new appliance family is due out n Q2 2016.
New IBM z13s mainframe was built with a BIOS for hybrid cloud
IBM has designed its latest mainframe to address the challenges stopping hybrid cloud from becoming the de facto model of enterprise computing. The result has been benchmarked by analysts as the world’s most secure server for enterprise hybrid cloud computing.
The new IBM z13s mainframe, unveiled on February and available from March, is pre-installed with high levels of security and a greater capacity to process security functions, according to the manufacturer. The new levels of security are created by embedding IBM’s newly developed cryptography features into the z13s’s hardware. By running cryptography functions in silicon the mainframe can run its encryption and decryption processes twice as fast as previous generations of machine, boosting the speed of information exchange across the cloud, it claimed.
The new mainframe creates the most secure server in environment in the world, according to an independent report quoted by IBM from researcher Strategy Analytics (2015 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey).
Encrypting sensitive data across company IT departments, regional offices and the public cloud has become a barrier to adoption of this more efficient model of computing, according to IBM’s senior VP of Systems Tom Rosamilia. In response the new z13s model has extra cryptographic and tamper-resistant hardware-accelerated cryptographic coprocessor cards. These have faster processors and more memory, encrypting at twice the speed of previous mid-range systems, which means that hybrid clouds can now handle high-volume, cryptographically-protected transactions, without delay.
The new model uses the Cyber Security Analytics which are standard within the z systems range of mainframes, with the addition of IBM Security QRadar security software, which correlates security intelligence from 500 sources in order to help it spot anomalies and potential threats. This can be used along with the Multi-factor Authentication built into the z/OS operating system for the mainframe range.
The system also uses IBM’s Security Identity Governance and Intelligence to create policy to govern and audit access, in order to cut internal data loss. Access to application programming interfaces (APIs) and microservices, configurable by IBM integration partners, can be used to shut down any further hybrid computing vulnerabilities according to IBM, which announced the addition of BlackRidge Technology, Forcepoint and RSM Partners to its Ready for IBM Security Intelligence partner programme.
The Future of IoT Data | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #BigData #InternetOfThings
The Quantified Economy represents the total global addressable market (TAM) for IoT that, according to a recent IDC report, will grow to an unprecedented $1.3 trillion by 2019. With this the third wave of the Internet-global proliferation of connected devices, appliances and sensors is poised to take off in 2016.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, David McLauchlan, CEO and co-founder of Buddy Platform, will discuss how the ability to access and analyze the massive volume of streaming data from millions of connected devices in real time and at scale will enable prediction and optimization, the areas where IoT’s greatest value lies.
DevOps Risks and Results | @DevOpsSummit #APM #DevOps #Microservices
DevOps is not just last year’s buzzword. Companies with DevOps practices are 2.5x more likely to exceed profitability, market share, and productivity goals.
But how do you enable high performance? What can you do right now to start?
Find out from DevOps experts including Gene Kim, co-author of “The Phoenix Project,” and the Dynatrace Center of Excellence.
Is Your Virtual Machine Optimized?
Guest blog by Manoj Raghu, Parallels Support Team Need a better performing virtual machine? Do you work on the Windows side more often than on the Mac? Let me guide you through a few built-in settings in Parallels Desktop that will have a positive impact on your VM performance. Using Optimization settings, you can: Balance […]
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Why Aren’t You Managing Your Macs? Part 3
If you’re ready to start managing Macs in your Windows-heavy environment, now’s the time to sign up for a technical demo of Parallels Mac Management. Spend 30 minutes with one of our Sales Engineers to find out everything you need to know about the product features and capabilities. What You’ll See in a Demo of […]
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