Everything run by electricity will eventually be connected to the Internet. Get ahead of the Internet of Things revolution. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Akvelon expert and IoT industry leader Sergey Grebnov provided an educational dive into the world of managing your home, workplace and all the devices they contain with the power of machine-based AI and intelligent Bot services for a completely streamlined experience.

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@DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo, taking place November 12-13 in New York City, NY, is co-located with 22nd international CloudEXPO | first international DXWorldEXPO and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world.
The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.

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Commodity trading companies are rapidly switching from on-premise commodity trading and risk management solutions (CTRM) to cloud-based systems.  Research from Commodity Technology Advisory LLP shows that cloud-delivered CTRM solutions now outsell on-premise solutions and will significantly outpace spend on traditional deployments over the next five years.

Small commodity companies lead the way

One reason for this shift is a change in the commodity industry. Early adopters of cloud-hosted CTRM solutions tended to be small firms, usually trading a single commodity. A spate of divestitures, the trend to downsize trading desks, and the arrival of more niche start-ups created more of these smaller players in the market. Recognizing that generic spreadsheets (still the main competitor to CTRM systems in this space) were wholly inadequate to the task, this new cohort is taking advantage of the cloud to implement a single, uniform platform across all their commodities.

For these firms, having an implementation time in the region of 10-16 weeks rather than 10-16 months is obviously advantageous, as are the minimal upfront financial and technical investments. Having the software’s experts in charge of maintaining, upgrading, and securing the solution adds extra assurance, and small firms with big plans for new geographies, commodities and business lines, see cloud-deployed CTRM as a vital enabler of growth.

Equally, those firms operating in the more remote areas of the commodities supply chain found access to mission-critical information through mobile devices essential. And, since the success is often dependent on the ability to respond to rapid shifts in commodity markets, an equally agile and responsive CTRM platform like Eka’s has obvious appeal.

Large companies follow as they see the value

Increasingly rigorous regulations are driving larger, more established firms to recognize the value of CTRM solutions in place of traditional spreadsheets. Mitigating risks associated with extensive supply chains, multiple business lines, a network of overlapping counterparties, and volatile markets is challenging. Cloud-deployed systems can be implemented in just 12 weeks, robustly addressing regulatory and stakeholder mandates quickly and effectively.

Commodity markets are volatile, and commodities businesses have to respond to market shifts in a shorter timeframe because the consequences of delays are severe. The simplified scalability and elasticity of cloud-based CTRM solutions enables commodity trading companies to add new users, customers, counterparties, credit limits, commodity types and trading functions in hours rather than months. There are no capital expenditures required to expand.

The environment management services, upgrades and updates, DBA support, helpdesk, and technical support that accompany cloud systems have obvious appeal to CIOs who have seen maintenance of the status quo absorb ever greater amounts of their budget.

And lingering concerns about security – one of the biggest hurdles to take-up so far – have been eroded. Vendors like Eka have been working hard to build data encryption, HTTPS protocols, field-level security and role-based hierarchy controls into their products. Public cloud providers can also take much of the credit, having invested heavily in cybersecurity measures at an economy of scale that individual players cannot hope to repeat.

Real-time insight

Competitive and regulatory pressures have driven much of cloud take up to date. But cloud also addresses one of the long-standing problems within commodities trading. Highly compute-intensive tasks, such as end-of-day reporting, are traditionally run at fixed times – usually overnight – when no other mission-critical requirements are placed on the system.

But spinning up the compute power of cloud-delivered systems exactly when required overcomes this problem. Anyone can access real-time insight into chosen key metrics from counterparty exposures and risk reporting, to derivative P&L reports, or value at risk (VaR) whenever they are needed – not just when the IT system allows.

That changes the calculus around risk management and compliance, productivity and innovation, with long-tail consequences for the entire business.

It has taken some time for mainstream commodity trading and commodity management markets to fully embrace cloud. But functional, technical and financial arguments are breaking through – and it’s increasingly clear that cloud-delivered CTRM solutions will dominate the market in the coming years.

“Software is eating the world”, claimed Marc Andreessen back in 2011; though it may have seemed like an exaggeration when his essay was published, so far he has been proved correct. Now that software exists across every industry, organisations that rely on information need to reimagine themselves as software companies to avoid falling behind competitors.

In today’s society, childhood favourite Blockbuster couldn’t stand up against the likes of Netflix or Amazon Prime, music is at the mercy of iTunes and Spotify, and Google, Facebook and Twitter are the leaders in the marketing world.

The rapid adoption of cloud in recent years is one of the ways in which organisations are attempting to survive this new world. Regardless of what an organisation is built to do, budgets are increasingly being invested in cloud-based services and software-programming tools in order to compete in this new software-powered system.

However, with all new things come new challenges.

One place these are particularly apparent is in application development, and the test environments that organisations rely on to sustain the continuous deployment cycle of software, thereby hanging onto their significance. The size, intricacy and importance of test environments are increasing along with the budgets needed to keep up. Additionally, organisations are frequently finding themselves managing environments that are in the cloud, as well as on-premises and/or hosted by a third party – and often one environment can spread across all three. So, how can organisations efficiently manage their environments?

Managing test environments effectively and consistently across the software test lifecycle is a process that requires increased levels of automation and real-time collaboration in each phase of an application’s lifecycle. It’s not easy, but the benefits of doing it are worth the effort.

Let’s examine the three important foundations of the process that are imperative when managing test environments.

Visibility is vital

Running DevOps smoothly requires having an end-to-end overview of the environment while embracing continuous delivery (CD). To be truly end-to-end, with visibility and constant feedback, a business needs to understand that it’s not about one single tool; it’s a chain of solutions pulled together into one platform that provides an overarching view. This allows continuous integration and CD workflow, with feedback, visibility and the ability to provide customers with services quickly.

Having this visibility provides a space for both the Dev and Ops teams to monitor activities as they evolve across the entire portfolio of applications and the different combinations of cloud, on-premises and third-party environments. Having comprehensive end-to-end management that delivers test plans, identifies defects, supports agile-based testing and provides precise reporting, gives organisations a booking system to keep each environment in line and make sure they are operating as efficiently as possible.

High quality of work

Businesses with misconfigured environments risk producing false positives. The main problem with managing environments is tracking them. If unsound environments are used for testing, it creates problems by both slowing down the project and trying to move things through the pipeline without proper assurances. The end goal should be maintaining quality, so ensuring that the right test environment is ready and utilised when new code is available is essential for efficiency and accuracy.

Efficient test environment management also removes the complications of misconfiguration, and helps to ensure the quality of tests and therefore the quality of the final product. Quality is maintained by automatically reaching into source code control systems to make changes available to test teams, and then, in turn, it can be applied to accurate test cases to make sure they have accurate test coverage.

Quality can be guaranteed when software is evaluated properly, and teams work with testing and development seamlessly. Efficient test environments help eliminate the dependence on spreadsheets, and improve quality and predictability.

Essentially, an efficient platform closes the loop, streamlines communication throughout the company, and ensures a higher quality of work.

Faster delivery by streamlining deployment

Real-time visibility is provided by efficient environment management across the enterprise portfolio, and establishes a single source of truth to align teams and identify and resolve resource conflicts. Using an interactive environment map, and the functionality of a CD pipeline, enterprises can produce a structure to merge fast-moving CD activities, helping delivery teams to streamline the progression of code through each phase of a release.

Large enterprises often find that releases are tightly coupled, leading to more projects approaching the testing stage in parallel, which in turn creates more conflicted environments, and therefore possible delays if the release happens to get disrupted. Some businesses have thousands of test environments made up of a combination of cloud, on-premises and third party infrastructure. Release managers couldn’t possibly know the status of the delivery pipeline manually, and it can be incredibly challenging to spot risk. The need is for visibility, governance and the ability to manage version control across all environments to bring efficiencies into the pipeline.

Test environments along the pipeline move to more complex situations the closer you get to production. Adding an efficient test rate and default rate gives an improved ability to access schedule risk to streamline deployment and help assist in providing a shorter time to market. It gives release managers visibility and reassurance that the test coverage is complete and accurate.

No one should anticipate these steps towards managing test environments to be easy. It’s a complex, intimidating task that requires detailed planning, a strong team and supporting budget. But if we push forward with the knowledge that our world relies more than ever on software, and success depends on finding the most efficient ways to feed its growth, such as using the cloud, then we are on the right track.

Since 2000, according to Constellation Research, over half of the companies in the Fortune 500 are no longer on the list. Though there is a reason behind each one, the fact that over fifty per cent have fallen short over time suggests that there is likely more to it. We have observed a vast change in business models and the tools that organisations depend on the most, and this is something that we need to remember. It is clear that as the world continues to be “eaten by software”, as Andreessen predicted, organisations must strive to understand the best ways to manage this new reality.

Clare Hopping

WebRTC is great technology to build your own communication tools. It will be even more exciting experience it with advanced devices, such as a 360 Camera, 360 microphone, and a depth sensor camera. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Masashi Ganeko, a manager at INFOCOM Corporation, introduced two experimental projects from his team and what they learned from them. “Shotoku Tamago” uses the robot audition software HARK to track speakers in 360 video of a remote party. “Virtual Teleport” uses a multiple Intel RealSense Depth Camera to scan 3D and build 3D models in real-time, and display as hologram in front of remote participants.

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Founded in 2000, Chetu Inc. is a global provider of customized software development solutions and IT staff augmentation services for software technology providers. By providing clients with unparalleled niche technology expertise and industry experience, Chetu has become the premiere long-term, back-end software development partner for start-ups, SMBs, and Fortune 500 companies. Chetu is headquartered in Plantation, Florida, with thirteen offices throughout the U.S. and abroad.

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The standardization of container runtimes and images has sparked the creation of an almost overwhelming number of new open source projects that build on and otherwise work with these specifications. Of course, there’s Kubernetes, which orchestrates and manages collections of containers. It was one of the first and best-known examples of projects that make containers truly useful for production use. However, more recently, the container ecosystem has truly exploded. A service mesh like Istio addresses many of the challenges faced by developers and operators as monolithic applications transition towards a distributed microservice architecture. A tracing tool like Jaeger analyzes what’s happening as a transaction moves through a distributed system. Monitoring software like Prometheus captures time-series events for real-time alerting and other uses. Grafeas and Kritis provide security policy attestation and enforcement. And there are many more.

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Wayne Williams

Windows remains by far the most popular desktop operating system, but it faces increasing pressure from rival software. Chrome OS, Google’s browser-based operating system, is used a lot in schools and is spreading its influence in business environments, not least because the Chromebooks that Chrome OS runs on are secure and cheap, which makes them especially popular with students and IT departments.

Windows 10 S – a locked-down version of Windows 10 – is Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Chrome OS. Here’s how you can try it out without needing to fork out for a new laptop.

What is Windows 10 S?

Windows 10 S is, essentially, a more secure version of Windows 10 that can only run apps from the Windows Store. In other words, you can’t install regular Windows programs on it. This might seem like a strange idea but the reasoning behind it is sound – by controlling what software can be installed on the operating system, Microsoft is safeguarding users from everyday threats. Windows 10 S is, for example, immune from most malware, including ransomware.

Where can you get Windows 10 S?

The new operating system is currently only available pre-installed on certain devices, like Microsoft’s Surface Laptop. This will no doubt change in the future, but for now you can’t simply download and install it on any PC you like.

Except, that’s not strictly true.

Microsoft recently made Windows 10 S available for developers on the MSDN network to download in ISO format, and then released an installer (aimed at the education market) which lets anyone take the new OS for a spin. If you want to try out Windows 10 S, but you don’t want to spend money on a new laptop to do so, the easiest solution is to install it in a virtualised environment. The process is a little more convoluted than normal and takes a while longer as a result, but it’s easy enough to do.

What you need to know before you start

Unless you have the developer ISO (from the MSDN network) currently the only way to test Windows 10 S is to install it over a copy of Windows 10.

You don’t need to own or run Microsoft’s operating system to do this, as it’s easy enough to get a free (and perfectly legal) copy to use. This is the main reason why the process of installing and running Windows 10 S in a virtual environment takes so long – you first need to install Windows 10, and then “upgrade” it to Windows 10 S, which isn’t a quick process…

There are some other restrictions to be aware of. Firstly it’s not recommended to install Windows 10 S over Windows 10 Home as you won’t be able to activate it. You’ll also need to be running the Creators Update (1703), or later, which is currently only available as a Windows Insider Preview build.

You don’t need to activate Windows 10 S but if you want to, and can’t, then the troubleshooting option should solve your problem

While you can install a new version of Windows 10 and convert it to Windows 10 S, without a key, you won’t be able to access all of the features – including the personalization options – without activating it. If you plan on activating the installation, you’ll need to activate Windows 10 before starting the upgrade. Windows 10 S may activate once installed, but if not you’ll have to click the troubleshoot option on the upgrade page to do this.

Get a Windows 10 ISO

If you don’t have a copy of Windows 10 to hand (either on DVD or a digital download) you’ll need to get one. In some countries, you can download a Windows 10 ISO direct from Microsoft, but in the UK you need to download and use the software giant’s Media Creation Tool. Head here for the tool, then download and run the program.

The Media Creation Tool lets you download a Windows 10 ISO file to use in VirtualBox

Agree to the terms and then select the option to ‘Create installation media.’ Select the version of the OS you require. If you’re running Windows 10 already, the program will automatically select the same version for you. If that’s not suitable (perhaps you’re running Windows 10 Home but want an ISO for Windows 10 Pro) then untick ‘Use the recommended options for this PC’ and select the version you do want. Click Next and select ‘ISO file.’ Download this to your hard drive.

What’s new or different in Windows 10 S

You can download software from outside the Windows Store as normal but if you try to install it, you’ll be greeted with a message stating ‘For security and performance Windows 10 S only runs verified apps from the Store’. You have to use Microsoft Edge in the OS, not only because you can’t install Firefox or Chrome, but because Microsoft’s browser is the fixed default and there’s (currently) no way to change it.

Windows 10 S looks and behaves much like Windows 10, but starts quicker

Microsoft sees this as a big plus, because Edge is designed to work very closely with the operating system, but if you’re used to a different browser, Edge will seem rather alien. Many of the extensions you might rely on in your regular browser won’t be available to you.

Windows 10 S is tied to Microsoft products, so when you search the web in the operating system you’ll be using Bing (unless you browse to Google.com manually).

One good point about Windows 10 S is it’s much faster than Windows 10 because it isn’t bogged down in any way. This means it can run on lighter hardware. It can boot in around 15 seconds and, when installed on a laptop, deliver significantly better battery life. You won’t notice this kind of difference so much in a virtualised environment, though.

Installing Windows 10 S to a virtual machine

While there are a number of virtual machine options available, we used the highly popular VirtualBox application from Oracle.

Step 1

Download and install a copy of Oracle’s VirtualBox here www.virtualbox.org. Run the program and click ‘New’ in the Manager window. In the ‘Create Virtual Machine’ dialog box enter Windows 10 S as the name of the operating system. Select Windows 10 as the version or choose ‘Windows 10 (64bit)’ if you downloaded a 64-bit ISO.

Step 2

Click Next, then accept the default Memory Size. Choose to ‘Create a virtual hard disk now’ and click Create. Accept VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) as the hard drive file type. Choose the option to have your virtual drive dynamically altered (it will resize as required) and increase the default size to 64GB or above.

Step 3

Click Create and VirtualBox will build the drive. When done, select the entry in the Manager
and click the Start button. In the ‘Select start-up disk’ window, click the folder icon and
navigate to the Windows 10 ISO. Select it, click Start and Windows 10 will install.

Select your language settings, then click the ‘Install now’ button.

Step 4

Once Windows 10 is installed in VirtualBox and fully updated, you’ll be ready to convert it to Windows 10 S. Open Microsoft Edge (since this is the only browser you’ll have installed in your new virtual environment) and go to bit.ly/wins431. Read all about Windows 10 S and then when you’re ready, click the ‘Download installer’ button.

Step 5

Run the installer and you should see a message stating ‘Congratulations, Windows 10 S can be installed’. Click Next and the installation process will begin. Windows 10 S will be downloaded and once the files have been verified, you’ll be asked what you want to keep from your existing installation. Select ‘Nothing’.

Step 6

Click Next and the installer will fetch some updates, restart your system and begin the full installation. It will reboot several times along the way. When it finishes, you’ll be guided through the usual configuration steps. Spend some time customising the privacy settings. Once that’s out of the way, you can start using Windows 10 S.

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