Agile has finally jumped the technology shark, expanding outside the software world. Enterprises are now increasingly adopting Agile practices across their organizations in order to successfully navigate the disruptive waters that threaten to drown them. In our quest for establishing change as a core competency in our organizations, this business-centric notion of Agile is an essential component of Agile Digital Transformation.
In the years since the publication of the Agile Manifesto, the connection between building better software and business agility has been a tenuous one at best. But now that Agile is maturing and Digital Transformation is driving change across enterprises large and small, companies are realizing that their best bet for achieving business agility is to take the best of Agile and apply it across the entire organization.
Monthly Archives: December 2017
[slides] @MapR’s Data First Approach | @CloudExpo #BigData #AI #Analytics
To get the most out of their data, successful companies are not focusing on queries and data lakes, they are actively integrating analytics into their operations with a data-first application development approach. Real-time adjustments to improve revenues, reduce costs, or mitigate risk rely on applications that minimize latency on a variety of data sources. In his session at @BigDataExpo, Jack Norris, Senior Vice President, Data and Applications at MapR Technologies, reviewed best practices to show how companies develop, deploy, and dynamically update these applications and how this data-first approach is fundamentally different from traditional applications. He covered examples of how leading companies have identified ways to simplify data streams in a publish-and-subscribe framework (for example, how focusing on a stream of electronic medical records simplified the deployment of real-time applications for hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies). He also detailed how a data-first approach can lead to rapid deployment of additional real-time applications as well as centralize and simplify many data management and administration tasks.
Cloud Collaboration Reaches New Heights for Fujitsu and Citrix | @CloudExpo #VDI #Cloud #Virtualization
Long-term partners Fujitsu Limited and Citrix Systems Japan have announced a new virtual desktop service based in the cloud. Designed to take some of the pain out of digital transformation, the new offering makes it easier to create digital workspaces in a secure manner that’s scalable.
The Fujitsu Managed Infrastructure Service Virtual Desktop Service VCC (Virtual Client on Cloud) employs the Citrix suite of virtual desktop infrastructure products, including Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, and Citrix ShareFile. The two companies have been working together in the VDI space for decades, but this new agreement enables Fujitsu to sell the new service.
How to Manage, Deliver and Govern Hybrid Cloud Services | @CloudExpo #SaaS #ITaaS #Cloud
Many enterprise and government IT organizations are realizing the benefits of cloud computing by extending IT delivery and management processes across private and public cloud services. But they are often challenged with balancing the need for centralized cloud governance without stifling user-driven innovation.
This strategy requires an approach that fundamentally reshapes how IT is delivered today, shifting the focus from infrastructure to services aggregation, and mixing and matching the best services for meeting organizations’ current and future needs.
[slides] Interactive Query Layer for Big Data | @CloudExpo #AI #DX #IoT #M2M #BigData
An increasing number of companies are creating products that combine data with analytical capabilities. Running interactive queries on Big Data requires complex architectures to store and query data effectively, typically involving data streams, an choosing efficient file format/database and multiple independent systems that are tied together through custom-engineered pipelines. In his session at @BigDataExpo at @ThingsExpo, Tomer Levi, a senior software engineer at Intel’s Advanced Analytics group, covered the challenges, architectural considerations, best practices, and frameworks available to enable interactive analytics integrated into a Big Data platform.
[video] Code on the Cloud with Codigm | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud #DigitalTransformation
“Codigm is based on the cloud and we are here to explore marketing opportunities in America. Our mission is to make an ecosystem of the SW environment that anyone can understand, learn, teach, and develop the SW on the cloud,” explained Sung Tae Ryu, CEO of Codigm, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The End of Net Neutrality Could Be Good for Marketers — And Bad for Almost Everyone Else | @CloudExpo #API #Cloud
The Federal Communications Commission announced that it will vote on December 14 to enact the exceptionally misleadingly titled “Restoring Internet Freedom” order. If passed, it will do the opposite of restoring anything resembling freedom — it will repeal the current net neutrality rules which were enacted to ensure that Americans would have equal access to the Internet.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already interested in the topic. Still, some quick background:
Renamed “Open Internet” a while back, net neutrality provided a regulatory framework that specifically prohibited:
CNCF details advancements in cloud projects
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) held its Kubecon CloudNativeCon North America conference on 6th December 2017 and shared developments in its open-source cloud efforts.
The CNCF houses the Kubernetes container orchestration system and 13 additional cloud project that enable organisations to build cloud native architectures. The event, which had over 4,000 attendees, introduced new members and shared multiple project updates – such as 1.0 releases from the containerd, Jaeger, CoreDNS and Fluentd projects.
Originally formed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project in July 2015, the CNCF now includes the likes of Microsoft and AWS among other major cloud providers.
Project updates
One of the new projects announced is the ‘containerd’ container runtime, originally developed by Docker, which joined the CNCF on 29th March at the CloudNative/Kubecon EU event in Berlin, Germany. The containerd 1.0 release was announced at KubeCon North America 2017 and provides a stable base for container engine development.
The Jaeger project also launched its 1.0 release. Jaeger is a distributed tracing system that can be used to help find application performance bottlenecks. It became a CNCF project on 13 September 2017. Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF CTO, said: "As you start building cloud native applications, having proper monitoring and tracing for applications are table stakes. Jaeger now gives cloud developers the ability to use distributed tracing within their stack."
The Fluentd data collector project, originally developed by software firm Treasure Data before joining the CNCF in November 2016, also reached the 1.0 milestone. Aniszczyk said: "Fluentd is already a fairly mature project. The 1.0 milestone shows they have grown their committer and maintainer base to be larger than just a single company, which is important for the long-term health of the project."
Aniszczyk expects as many as 11 additional new projects to join CNCF by the end of 2018. He said the CNCF is reviewing five new projects for admission to the foundation in December 2017.
"One of lessons we learned from other foundations is that it is not always healthy to force integration across projects via an aligned released cycle. Our attitude has been to allow the market to decide whether it makes sense to put different project together,” explains Aniszczyk.
CNCF and Aniszczyk have expressed interest in the emerging market for serverless technologies. He said all the major cloud providers – including Amazon, Google and Microsoft – are working together to identify important issues such as function portability through the CNCF serverless working group. The working group is developing a specification called Open Events that will standardise how function based events are executed across the different serverless platforms.
What are your thoughts on the CNCF’s projects and momentum? Let us know in the comments.
[slides] Shifting Left on Development | @CloudExpo #CloudNative #AI #DevOps
High-velocity engineering teams are applying not only continuous delivery processes, but also lessons in experimentation from established leaders like Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook. These companies have made experimentation a foundation for their release processes, allowing them to try out major feature releases and redesigns within smaller groups before making them broadly available.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Brian Lucas, Senior Staff Engineer at Optimizely, discussed how by using new techniques such as feature flagging, rollouts, and traffic splitting, experimentation is no longer just the future for marketing teams, it’s quickly becoming an essential practice for high-performing development teams as well.
[video] Learn the Cloud in a Fun Way with @CHEETAH_CLOUD | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Docker #Containers
“CHEETAH is not just a training company. What we are trying to do is something fun – how to learn the cloud in a fun way. So you can learn Docker, Cloud Foundry, a lot of complex technologies but in a fun way,” explained Etienne Cointet, CEO of App2Cloud, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.