Bill Schmarzo, author of “Big Data: Understanding How Data Powers Big Business” and “Big Data MBA: Driving Business Strategies with Data Science” is responsible for guiding the technology strategy within Hitachi Vantara for IoT and Analytics. Bill brings a balanced business-technology approach that focuses on business outcomes to drive data, analytics and technology decisions that underpin an organization’s digital transformation strategy.

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Consumer-driven contracts are an essential part of a mature microservice testing portfolio enabling independent service deployments. In this presentation we’ll provide an overview of the tools, patterns and pain points we’ve seen when implementing contract testing in large development organizations.

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Digital Transformation is much more than a buzzword. The radical shift to digital mechanisms for almost every process is evident across all industries and verticals. This is often especially true in financial services, where the legacy environment is many times unable to keep up with the rapidly shifting demands of the consumer. The constant pressure to provide complete, omnichannel delivery of customer-facing solutions to meet both regulatory and customer demands is putting enormous pressure on organizations of all sizes and in every line of business. Fintech is a constant battleground for this technology expanding trend and the lessons learned here can be applied anywhere. Digital transformation isn’t going to go away and the need for greater understanding and skills around managing, guiding, and understanding the greater landscape of change is required for effective transformations.

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Keumars Afifi-Sabet

Revenues at Alibaba have soared to $9.8 billion US (£7.2bn) for the company’s most recent quarter – with cloud computing revenues nudging $700 million.

The figures represent another good quarter for the Chinese eCommerce giant, whose cloud push continues to intensify. Cloud revenues, which topped at $699m went up 103% year over year, while total revenues saw a 61% yearly increase.

Alibaba puts its revenues in four buckets; core commerce, which was at $8.1bn, cloud, digital media and entertainment, at $840m, and ‘innovation initiatives and others’, at $158m.

The company said it was “seeing significant traction and diversification of customers and revenue” and that it “will continue to invest to further expand the market by developing value-added products and features.”

New customers highlighted by the company in the quarter included the China National Petroleum Corporation, Cathay Pacific, and – outside of China – the Malaysian government, which is using Alibaba’s cloud in an Internet of Things play around traffic management.

Like the rest of its competition in the cloud infrastructure space, Alibaba cited the importance artificial intelligence (AI) is playing in its roadmap. There were more than 300 new products and features launched by Alibaba Cloud in the most recent quarter with 20% focused on AI, data management and security, the company said.

Other initiatives the company has introduced this year included an expansion into Turkey, alongside further product launches in Europe, as well as the opening of data centre facilities in Indonesia.

“Looking ahead to fiscal 2019, we expect overall revenue growth above 60%, reflecting our confidence in our core business as well as positive momentum in new businesses,” said Maggie Wu, Alibaba Group chief financial officer in a statement. “We expect our new growth initiatives will drive long-term, sustainable value for our customers and partners and increase our total addressable market.”

You can read the full financial statement here (pdf).

Picture source: www.alibabagroup.com

Wayne Williams

Hidden deep inside Google Chrome are a vast number of secret, experimental options, or ‘flags’. These are features that are in the testing phase and might make it into the browser in due course, or might equally be removed at any time. They are to be found on Chrome’s Experiments page which you can access by typing chrome:flags (or about:flags) into the address bar and pressing Enter – this was recently redesigned to make it easier to browse and search.

Be warned that although enabling some of these features may improve your browsing experience, their experimental nature means that could also ruin it, so you should only enable features you fully understand. As Google itself warns: “By enabling these features, you could lose browser data or compromise your security or privacy. Enabled features apply to all users of this browser.”

Once you’ve enabled some flags, you’ll need to relaunch the browser for them to take effect. The option to do so will appear at the bottom of the flags window.

Give Chrome a Material Design makeover

Material Design is a visual language which, in Google’s own words, “synthesises the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science”, to make pages look more modern and text more readable. It is now used throughout Google’s products and services, but not everywhere just yet. The Experiments page hosts a number of Material Design flags, which you can enable to improve the look of the browser. These include: ‘Material Design in the rest of the browser’s native UI’, ‘New style notification’ and ‘Material Design Incognito NTP’ (which applies the look to your private browsing), and are worth applying to make Chrome feel fresher.

As of Chrome 64, Material Design will be applied to the browser’s Bookmark manager by default – turn to page 32 to find out more.

Close Chrome tabs more quickly

If you tend to have a lot of tabs open when you browse, you may have noticed that closing unwanted ones takes a little time. To fix this problem, Chrome offers a handy flag that speeds up tab closing by hiding the unwanted tab immediately, and then closing it in the background. To find this option, type ‘fast’ into the flags search box, and enable the ‘Fast tab/window close’ flag. After restarting, you should notice that tabs no longer hang when you click to close them.

Scroll web pages more smoothly

Scrolling down long pages can sometimes get a bit rough, and sluggish, especially if you have a lot of tabs open in your browser. Google has an experiment that fixes this issue, and it’s called, naturally enough, Smooth Scrolling. Type ‘smooth’ into the flags’ search box and enable the Smooth Scrolling option.

Mute noisy tabs with a single click

Sites that play audio or video without your express permission are among the biggest annoyances on the web. If you open a bunch of sites in tabs, and one of them turns out to be noisy, you can identify it quite quickly thanks to the speaker indicator that appears on the offending tab. Google offers a flag that turns this indicator into a button that can instantly mute that site when clicked. It also adds commands to the tab right-click context menu that will let you quickly mute multiple selected tabs. To enable this flag, type ‘audio’ into the search box and enable ‘Tab audio muting UI control’.

Generate and manage passwords

Chrome has a lot of password-related flags, some of which are definitely worth enabling. ‘Password generation’ leaps into life when Chrome detects that you are creating an account on a website, and generates a secure password for you. ‘Manual password generation’ shows a Generate Password option on the right-click context menu for all password fields, while ‘Manual password saving’ shows the password-manager icon when you type in a password. If you click this icon, Chrome will save the password, without you needing to actually log-in to the site in question.

Reload web pages automatically

If you lose your internet connection when browsing the web, or move from one hotspot to
another, Chrome can automatically reload open tabs once it detects you’re back online. There are actually two similar flags for this. Type offline into the flags search box and you’ll see ‘Offline Auto-Reload Mode’, which auto-reloads pages that failed to load while the browser was offline, and ‘Only Auto-Reload Visible Tabs’ which will auto-reload pages that failed to load even though their tabs were visible.

Flip Chrome’s interface around

An interesting – if not essential – hidden feature is the ability to switch Chrome’s browser interface from left to right to right to left. This will move buttons that usually appear on the right side to the left, and vice versa. So the back and forward buttons and refresh will move to the right of the address bar, and the menu and any extensions will appear on the left. This option could prove useful for left-handed Chrome users, or for anyone who fancies a change. There’s also the option to have your text direction switch to right to left, if you’re so inclined. To try these flags, type ‘direction’ in the search box.

Make mobile web pages easier to read

Reader Mode is a great feature in the mobile version of Chrome for Android. When enabled, it removes adverts and unwanted distractions from the page, making it easier to focus on the text. The ‘Reader Mode triggering’ flag lets you choose when the Reader Mode option appears. In the Experiments page of the Chrome app, search for ‘reader’ and click the drop-down menu next to ‘Reader Mode triggering’. Options include ‘With article structured markup’, ‘Non-mobile- friendly articles’, Always, Never, and ‘All articles’.

Stop background tabs wasting memory

All browsers – not just Chrome – tend to be memory hogs. The more tabs you have open, the more RAM they’ll consume. Chrome has an experimental feature that discards tabs from memory when it detects your system memory is running low, thereby freeing up important resources and preventing the browser, and possibly other software, from crashing. The tabs don’t get closed – they’ll still appear on the browser and will be reloaded when you click them. If your PC doesn’t has a massive amount of memory then this experiment is definitely worth enabling. Type discarding into the flags search box, and enable it there.

Image: Shutterstock

Microsoft Azure, like many other cloud service providers, have built their billing and subscription models on a pay-per-use basis, i.e., if you use one hour of CPU time you pay for the hour you have consumed. No more, no less.

This basic economic principle forms the foundation of most public cloud services. However, the implementation of this simple concept can be quite complex and intricate. This is especially true if the cloud provider offers a wide variety of cloud services which utilize computing resources in different ways as is the case with Microsoft Azure.

Azure solutions are built on multiple standalone services

The key concept to understand when determining Azure pricing is that each solution is comprised of a number of different services and building a solution price entails combining the cost of these multiple services.

If we take a web application as an example, it may not only consist of a web app service and a database; it may also include some form of static storage and perhaps need a few advanced networking services. All are priced individually by Azure, so understanding the full scope of the services your solution consumes will help you determine its ultimate cost.

One size does not fit all – each Azure services is priced differently

Each service on Azure is priced as a measured service. However, not all services use the same set of computing resources, so the hourly cost of each service is calculated differently.

For example, pricing for virtual machines is calculated by summing the individual unit prices for the virtual CPUs, memory, storage, and networking services consumed. Databases, on the other hand, are priced according to what Microsoft terms a Database Transaction Unit (DTU) which is a bundled measure of computing, storage, and IO resources. Storage and backup services measure their costs using GBs consumed.

The point is, each service is priced according to the resources you use on an hourly basis. One size does not fit all, unfortunately, so to price your solution, you should understand the full scope of the services consumed as well as how the cost of each service is calculated by Microsoft.

Azure pricing tiers – the more resources used, the more you pay

Over and above the different measures used to determine the cost of each service, each also has different pricing tiers and the price increases as you choose to consume more resources.

For example, virtual machines come in a variety of different preconfigured instances each with its own vCPU, memory, and storage configuration. The more resources the instance you choose consumes, the more you pay. Databases, on the other hand, give you the option to set the number of instances, the type (managed, elastic pool or single database), and the generation. Storage is calculated by the type of storage (blob, file, table, etc.), the level of redundancy you require, and of course, the size.

In essence, this illustrates how each service has its own unique permutation of resources used to calculate the cost per hour and the higher the number of resources used, the higher the cost. If we have multiple services to price, you can start to see how calculating the cost of a solution becomes overwhelming.

Don’t forget pricing for ancillary services

When pricing Azure services, remember to determine the ancillary services your solution uses. This is crucial to figure the overall cost as many solution calculations have failed to take these costs into account at their own peril.

For example, virtual networks carry a bandwidth transfer cost and backups are an additional charge. It is essential that every resource you use for your solution be accounted for up front to ensure there are no nasty price surprises down the line.

Azure pricing is complex – use the Azure Pricing Calculator

As we have seen, Azure offers a multitude of different cloud service solutions, each priced in its own way. Also, when we build our costing model, it is essential to itemize each service and understand how the cost is calculated, then choose the right pricing tier while also remembering to add in any ancillary services.

Building an Azure costing model can become overwhelming, but thankfully there are resources and tools available to assist us in getting the information we need. There are multiple pricing resources on the Azure portal which detail how each service is priced, however, the Azure Pricing Calculator is an invaluable resource to understand Azure costs. With this tool, you can itemize each service, choose the appropriate pricing tier, and also add any ancillary services you may need to consume.

Azure cost saving tips

Now that we have discussed how complex and intricate Azure pricing can be let’s take a look at a few ways you can save costs while ensuring your solution is not negatively impacted.

Switch off what you don’t use: Microsoft Azure works on a pay-per-use subscription model so the more you use, the more you pay. To reduce costs, you can deallocate certain types of resources when they are not in use to save money. Shutting down virtual machines which are not in active use is a perfect example. A shutdown virtual machine only incurs storage costs saving you money on the computing resources not in use when the virtual machine is not running.

Azure prepaid subscriptions and alternate regions: Pre-paying for Azure services also has saving benefits as Microsoft has built discounts into the different pre-payment models. In addition, if you have the flexibility to deploy to another Azure region, some services in certain regions cost less than the same service in a more popular or remote region where resources have high demand.

Choose the right pricing tier for your solution: The best way to save money when deploying your solution to Azure is to make sure you pick the right level of resource for the performance you expect. This is the key factor which ultimately impacts cost per hour.

Cloud vs. on-premise – TCO is a key measure

Hosting your solution on a cloud platform like Azure does come with costs, the intricacies of which have been discussed in this post. You may think that hosting your solution on-premise may be a better option with all the permutations to consider. This is not true. The Cloud is often the right financial choice, and the key here is to understand the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of your solution whether you to host it on Azure or on-premise.

To understand Azure’s TCO, it is important to realize that Azure pricing includes the procurement, management, and ongoing maintenance of the underlying hardware, software, and networking infrastructure which hosts these services. On Azure, you do not only pay for the cloud service you consume, but you also pay for the management, maintenance, and security of that service. If you compare hosting a solution on-premise versus hosting it on Azure, it is imperative that you take these management and infrastructure costs into account.

If you host your solution on-premise and accurately compare this cost to Azure, you have to calculate the direct costs associated with managing and maintaining your own hardware and software. You also need to add the inefficiency cost of not utilizing the full resources at your disposal as well as the opportunity cost of investing a large amount of capital which could be put to better use elsewhere in your organization. And it is these indirect costs which swing the balance in Azure’s favor.

If you take the full TCO of an on-premise solution and compare it to the Azure cost for hosting the same service, Azure is usually more cost-effective. It is especially true if we consider the hidden indirect costs which come with hosting solutions on-premise. Why would you want to take on this responsibility if it is not core to your business? Let Azure take care of your IT services while you take care of growing your business.

The post Microsoft Azure Pricing 101: Tips and Tricks appeared first on SherWeb.

Bobby Hellard

“DevOps is set to be one of the most profound disruptions to hit IT in decades,” said Andi Mann. “It is a natural extension of cloud computing, and I have seen both firsthand and in independent research the fantastic results DevOps delivers. So I am excited to help the great team at @DevOpsSUMMIT and CloudEXPO tell the world how they can leverage this emerging disruptive trend.”

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Before dismissing the information booth as a primitive and outdated concept, stop to consider that advanced analytics are starting to give us the Information Booth 2.0. That’s right! The information booth is still a cutting edge idea!!! It provided just the right information, in the right place, to the right audience. It influenced the customer journey at the very point of consumption. It wasn’t packed with irrelevant information about things that were not consumable then and there. In fact, global organizations are spending billions on marketing analytics trying to replicate the information booth concept for today’s digitally connected consumers and more often than not, failing to replicate the personalized experience that the information booth delivered.

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