Recent technology advances in miniaturization has positioned the wearables as the pinnacle of technology convergence with the human body.
We inquire if wearables are mere standard miniaturized devices extended with the connectivity and present our views on considerations like design, applications, performance, efficiency, interoperability, usage scenarios, human device interaction and consequent trade-offs enabling wearables to impart optimal value.
As a developer, I want the pain the effort required to go from a code change to a running version of my app (which I can test) to be as minimal as possible. Luckily, there are a whole bunch of frameworks and tools that will give me an on-demand environment: Vagrant, Terraform, all the virtualization and cloud management platforms and now, of course, containers and all the related orchestration frameworks too.
But I really also don’t want to have to re-tool my environment provisioning scripts or container definitions every time I add or change some aspect of my app. And there are other use cases to consider: if I’m working in a plane, I’ll (for a little while longer, at least ;-)) want an offline version using Vagrant, Docker or so; when I want to test a bigger setup in e.g. EC2 that is a bit more like my production environment, I’ll use something like AWS OpsWorks.
SOASTA, the leader in performance analytics, today reported record growth of the CloudTest community, exceeding 30,000 registered users of the CloudTest platform in Q1 2015. SOASTA also announced widespread adoption of its Web and mobile testing solutions, with more than 1,600 customers completing more than 285,000 tests using CloudTest during the quarter. This rapid growth shows that DevOps-driven digital businesses are embracing a more continuous approach to testing, and CloudTest is meeting their needs for fast and efficient global performance measurement.
So I guess we’ve officially entered a new era of lean and mean.
I say this with the announcement of Ubuntu Snappy Core, “designed for lightweight cloud container hosts running Docker and for smart devices,” according to Canonical. “Snappy Ubuntu Core is the smallest Ubuntu available, designed for security and efficiency in devices or on the cloud.”
This first version of Snappy Ubuntu Core features secure app containment and Docker 1.6 (1.5 in main release), is available on public clouds, and for ARM and x86 devices on several IoT boards.
It’s a Trend!
This announcement comes just as VMware announced its Project Photon, a Linux container OS that also follows the minimalist ethos. CoreOS and Project Atomic are other efforts in this area. Even Microsoft is joining the quest, with its Nano Server project for cloud computing and containers.
The folks at Docker approve, noting in a recent blog, “VMWare’s announcement and other ecosystem announcements of this nature as being positive for the community because additional tools help to further liberate developers from the constraints of the infrastructure.”
This is great, ironic stuff, in that as the IoT is introducing insane new levels of complexity in end-to-end computing infrastructures, the operating systems need to become much smaller. The underlying principle is taken from the world of single-purpose computing such as game machines–the days of the general-purpose PC with a bloated OS to manage any contingency seem to be fading into the mist.
It’s wonderful that the leading edge is now crisp and snappy, even as it evokes quintessential old-man talk and old-man knowledge–to wit, the Wikipedia entry under “minimalism” in computer science has this marvelous chestnut:
“In the late 1970s and early 1980s programmers had to work within the confines of relatively expensive and limited resources. 8 or 16 kilobytes of RAM was common; 64 kilobytes was considered a vast amount and was the entire address space accessible to the 8-bit CPUs predominant during the earliest generations of personal computers. The most common storage medium was the 5.25 inch floppy disk holding from 88 to 170kB.”
As one sharing a birthday (more or less) with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Scott McNealy, I heartily approve of this new trend. It has nothing to do with ancient stories of how tough it was in the old days–Bronko Nagurski was a heck of a football player, too–and everything to do with creating a lean, flexible, massively scalable, highly performant IT infrastructure for this century, not the century just past.
In this session we look at creating interactive communications via the web by adding messaging, file transfer, and group communication (group chat and audio/video conferencing) into the web experience.
We will also discuss potential applications of this technology in areas including B2B, B2C, P2P, and gaming. Peter is Technical Director at Acision. He graduated from The University of Edinburgh in 2000 with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science.
After graduation Peter worked on a PSTN switch developing signalling stacks for SS7, ISDN and similar protocols and creating advanced routing and service applications.
Choosing between BIG-IP and LineRate isn’t as difficult as it seems….
Our recent announcement of the availability of LineRate Point raised the same question over and over: isn’t this just a software-version of BIG-IP? How do I know when to choose LineRate Point instead of BIG-IP VE (Virtual Edition)? Aren’t they the same??
No, no they aren’t. LineRate Point (and really Line Rate Precision, too) is more akin to an app proxy while BIG-IP VE remains, of course, an ADC (Application Delivery Controller). That’s not even pedantry, it’s core to what each of the two solutions supports – both in their capabilities, their extensibility, and the applications they’re designed to deliver services for.
Web application security. Everyone knows how important it is (and if they don’t, they should) and yet the complexity of managing services that provide it often result in, shall we say, less than holistic coverage of applications. At least that seems to be the case given some rather disturbing statistics around the rise of bots and malware, which can often be deposited thanks to some overlooked or obscure web application vulnerability. Some in the application itself, others in the platform (remember Apache Killer?), and still others in the protocols used by just about every web application in existence (HT to Heartbleed).
SYS-CON Events announced today that the DevOps Institute has been named “Association Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s DevOps Summit, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
The DevOps Institute provides enterprise level training and certification. Working with thought leaders from the DevOps community, the IT Service Management field and the IT training market, the DevOps Institute is setting the standard in quality for DevOps education and training.
The healthcare world is often overwhelming, and as a first time HIMSS exhibitor we were amazed at the scale and complexity of the event, not to mention the number of “cloud” providers who didn’t actually offer cloud services.
The frenzy of activity at HIMSS15 was a fitting reflection of the overwhelming nature of the healthcare system. Fortunately, we got better and better at navigating the show as the conference progressed, made great connections and left with significant promise for building new relationships in the industry.
The mammoth size and scope of the show serves as a fitting metaphor for how infrastructure…
Modern Systems announced completion of a successful project with its new Rapid Program Modernization (eavRPMa”c) software. The eavRPMa”c technology architecturally transforms legacy applications, enabling faster feature development and reducing time-to-market for critical software updates.
Working with Modern Systems, the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) leveraged eavRPMa”c to transform its Student Information System from Software AG’s Natural syntax to a modern application leveraging C# and SQL Server. The newly modernized system enabled UCSB to leverage agile development methods and more extensive application integration.