Welcome to my four-part series on what I’m going to call the Art of DevOps. We will embark on a mission to reveal the extremely valuable intelligence that’s been collected about a unique strategy to continuously deliver assets to the operational battleground safely, securely and quickly. This strategy drives optimal monitoring of the frontlines and enhanced communications with the troops supporting the initial development. I do make the assumption that most of you are battle-worthy veterans in one or more of the environments that I’ll review.
Beyond this introduction blog, I’ll brief you on some of the best DevOps tactics to aid in your deployments while providing maximum situational awareness within each environment. I’ll also do my best to expand upon the best lines of defense with minimal disruption. Unfortunately, in my experience, many of you will be deficient either over lack of preparation such as test automation, damaged assets or organizational challenges in one or more areas of deployment. The goal of this series is to help you recognize where your deficits are, how to address certain scenarios and which tactics you need to use to lead a successful DevOps operation.

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Hello, from a new member of AppDynamics team. I recently joined the team to lead application performance management (APM) product marketing.
Last month, when I was talking with Jyoti Bansal, CEO of AppDynamics, he shared his vision for the company. Where the market is heading and how application performance and end-user experience insights can influence business outcome. This conversation not only cemented my decision to join the company, but also I came back with a quest to learn more about a term he used – BizDevOps

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Hadoop as a Service (as offered by handful of niche vendors now) is a cloud computing solution that makes medium and large-scale data processing accessible, easy, fast and inexpensive.
In his session at Big Data Expo, Kumar Ramamurthy, Vice President and Chief Technologist, EIM & Big Data, at Virtusa, will discuss how this is achieved by eliminating the operational challenges of running Hadoop, so one can focus on business growth. The fragmented Hadoop distribution world and various PaaS solutions that provide a Hadoop flavor either make choices for customers very flexible in the name of options or restrictive in the name of abstraction provided.

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Experts predict that the cloud computing will continue to grow this year. According to the Computerworld Forecast Study, spending on cloud computing is expected to rise by 42% in 2015. Moreover, Esna projects that in a bid to increase the use of mobile, social, customer-facing and collaboration technologies, 40% of IT teams will spend more on software as a service and a mix of public, private and hybrid solutions this year.

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FedRAMP defines the requirements for cloud service providers’ security controls, including vulnerability scanning, incident monitoring, logging, and reporting. CSPs in use at federal agencies or in acquisition must meet the cloud computing requirements defined by FedRAMP.

Whether or not your company currently works with government agencies, there are several benefits to preparing for FedRAMP.

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The market transition from education and evaluation to remediation is marching along as the End of Support (EOS) nears for Windows Server 2003. The market has moved from being unaware of the challenge that EOS would pose for most IT organizations at the beginning of 2014 to POCs, trials, and evaluating how to get help with these projects by the end of 2014. You can get a sense of how the market has moved by reading the 2014 Windows Server 2003 End of Support Survey Results.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Open Data Centers (ODC), a carrier-neutral colocation provider, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Open Data Centers is a carrier-neutral data center operator in New Jersey and New York City offering alternative connectivity options for carriers, service providers and enterprise customers.

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These are some the Key Release Management Metrics our clients use to continually tune their release management process.

1. Number of Changes pending future system releases (Backlog)

2. Number of Successful Changes within a Release

3. Number of Failed Changes in a Release (Percentage of Failed Changes)

4. Number of Outages Caused by a Release

5. Number of Incidents Caused by a Release

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Even as cloud and managed services grow increasingly central to business strategy and performance, challenges remain. The biggest sticking point for companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud is data security. Keeping data safe is an issue in any computing environment, and it has been a focus since the earliest days of the cloud revolution. Understandably so: a lot can go wrong when you allow valuable information to live outside the firewall. Recent revelations about government snooping, along with a steady stream of well-publicized data breaches, only add to the uncertainty

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Data-intensive companies that strive to gain insights from data using Big Data analytics tools can gain tremendous competitive advantage by deploying data-centric storage. Organizations generate large volumes of data, the vast majority of which is unstructured. As the volume and velocity of this unstructured data increases, the costs, risks and usability challenges associated with managing the unstructured data (regardless of file type, size or device) increases simultaneously, including end-to-end data risk protection, search, discovery and access.
In his session at Big Data Expo, Shahbaz Ali, President, CEO and Co-founder of Tarmin, will introduce new data-centric strategies that focus on the value of information as a strategic business enabler.

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