Do you like the idea of Agile software development, but you don’t think it’s a fit at your organization? Perhaps your enterprise is too rigidly hierarchical, or maybe your projects are too large and complex for Agile?

Think again. Agile is well on its way to becoming the standard approach for developing software, even for immense, complex applications for enterprise use. Just ask the United States federal government.

That’s the news from this week’s Agile in Government: Mutual Adaptation conference, put on by The Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI), a government IT-focused nonprofit organization. This conference focused in particular on adapting Agile to the government’s labyrinthine acquisition policies and procedures, and vice versa.

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When people talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) they tend to think about big data technologies like Hadoop where petabyte size datasets are store and analyzed for both known and unknown patterns. What many people don’t realize is that many IoT use cases only require small datasets.

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I read an interesting article the other day that resonated so much I felt it was worth sharing and expanding upon its premise here. The article, originally written by Andrew Dailey of MGI Research, delved into the role of growth and accelerated time-to-revenue in a successful enterprise business.
According to Dailey, there’s a new mantra reverberating in the halls and conference rooms of hungry businesses: accelerated time-to-revenue equals profit and power.

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Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture.
Containerization and micro-services are changing how development and operations teams design, build and monitor systems. Containerization of environments regularly results in systems with large numbers of dynamic and ephemeral instances that autoscale to meet demands on system load. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see thousands of container instances, where once there were hundreds of (cloud) server instances, where once there were tens of physical servers,

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FedRAMP is mandatory for government cloud deployments and businesses need to comply in order to provide services for federal engagements.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Abel Sussman, Director for Coalfire Public Sector practice, will review the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) process and provide advice on overcoming common compliance obstacles.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that SoftLayer, an IBM company, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place June 9-11, 2015 at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place November 3–5, 2015 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. With a global footprint of data centers and network points of presence, SoftLayer provides infrastructure as a service to leading-edge customers ranging from Web startups to global enterprises. SoftLayer’s modular architecture, full-featured API, and sophisticated automation provide unparalleled performance and control. Its flexible unified platform seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices linked via a worldwide network for secure, low-latency communications.

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Application experience aficionados take note: you have choices now. No longer are you constrained to just HTTP/1 with a side option of WebSockets or SPDY. HTTP/2 is also an option, one that like its SPDY predecessor brings with it several enticing benefits but is not without obstacles.

In fact, it is those obstacles that may hold back adoption according to IDG research, “Making the Journey to HTTP/2“.  In the research, respondents indicated several potential barriers to adoption including backward compatibility with HTTP/1 and the “low availability” of HTTP/2 services.

In what’s sure to noticed as a circular dependency, the “low availability” is likely due to the “lack of backward compatibility” barrier. Conversely, the lack of backward compatibility with HTTP/1 is likely to prevent the deployment of HTTP/2 services and cause low availability of HTTP/2 services. Which in turn, well, you get the picture.

This is not a phantom barrier. The web was built on HTTP/1 and incompatibility is harder to justify today than it was when we routinely browsed the web and were shut out of cool apps because we were using the “wrong” browser. The level of integration between apps and reliance on many other APIs for functionality pose a difficult problem for would-be adopters of HTTP/2 looking for the improved performance and efficacy of resource utilization it brings.

But it doesn’t have to.

You can have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.

HTTP Gateways

What you want is some thing that sits in between all those users and your apps and speaks their language (protocol) whether it’s version 1 or version 2. You want an intermediary that’s smart enough to translate SPDY or HTTP/2 to HTTP/1 so you don’t have to change your applications to gain the performance and security benefits without investing hundreds of hours in upgrading web infrastructure. What you want is an HTTP Gateway.

At this point in the post, you will be unsurprised to learn that F5 provides just such a thing. Try to act surprised, though, it’ll make my day.

One of the benefits of growing up from a load balancing to an application delivery platform is that you have to be fluent in the languages (protocols) of applications. One of those languages is HTTP, and so it’s no surprise that at the heart of F5 services is the ability to support all the various flavors of HTTP available today: HTTP/1, SPDY, HTTP/2 and HTTP/S (whether over TLS or SSL).

But more than just speaking the right language is the ability to proxy for the application with the user. Which means that F5 services (like SDAS) sit in between users and apps and can translate across flavors of HTTP. Is your mobile app speaking HTTP/2 or SPDY but your app infrastructure only knows HTTP/1? No problem. F5 can make that connection happen. That’s because we’re a full proxy, with absolute control over a dual-communication stack that lets us do one thing on the client side while doing another on the server side. We can secure the outside and speak plain-text on the inside. We can transition security protocols, web protocols, and network protocols (think IPv4 – IPv6).

That means you can get those performance and resource-utilization benefits without ripping and replacing your entire web application infrastructure. You don’t have to reject users because they’re not using the right browser protocol and you don’t have to worry about losing visibility because of an SSL/TLS requirement.

You can learn more about F5’s HTTP/2 and SDPY Gateway capabilities by checking out these blogs:

• What are you waiting for? 
• F5 Synthesis: Your gateway to the future (of HTTP)
• Velocity 2014 HTTP 2.0 Gateway (feat Parzych) 
• F5 Synthesis Reference Architecture: Acceleration

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RingCentral Inc., has unveiled the RingCentral Connect Platform™, a set of tools and services to build, deploy, and manage custom integrations using RingCentral APIs. With this platform, developers can build out-of-the-box integrations with RingCentral to add powerful communication capabilities to business applications.

“This is a significant step forward because businesses want to better connect with customers – and communications is at the heart of every customer interaction,” said Vlad Shmunis, CEO, founder and chairman of RingCentral. “In the past, integrating communications into business apps has been complex and expensive. We’re breaking down the barriers that have isolated communications from business applications.”

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When it comes to the Internet of Things, hooking up will get you only so far. If you want customers to commit, you need to go beyond simply connecting products. You need to use the devices themselves to transform how you engage with every customer and how you manage the entire product lifecycle.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Sean Lorenz, Technical Product Manager for Xively at LogMeIn, will show how “product relationship management” can help you leverage your connected devices and the data they generate about customer usage and product performance to deliver extremely compelling and reliable products, and build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with customers.

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