Snowflakes are beautiful, unique creations. But, let’s keep them in nature. They don’t belong in our server infrastructure. Snowflake servers, where every configuration is just a little different, can introduce unnecessary security vulnerabilities and complications. While common in IT infrastructure, in the DevOps realm they are gradually becoming ancient history. At All Day DevOps 2016, Erlend Oftedal (@webtonull), with Blank and head of the OWASP Norway chapter, discussed the benefits of immutable infrastructure practices within serverless architectures. Erlend walked us through the positive effects on security as well as offered insight on potential problems.

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No hype cycles or predictions of a gazillion things here. IoT is here. You get it. You know your business and have great ideas for a business transformation strategy. What comes next? Time to make it happen. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jay Mason, an Associate Partner of Analytics, IoT & Cybersecurity at M&S Consulting, will present a step-by-step plan to develop your technology implementation strategy. He will discuss the evaluation of communication standards and IoT messaging protocols, data analytics considerations, edge-to-cloud technical architecture, IoT platform selection, end-to-end security, enterprise systems integration and monetization techniques. Seize market opportunities by following this methodology to design and implement a systems architecture that meets complex demands for security, flexibility, durability, and scalability.

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My discussions with organizations looking to “digitally transform” themselves is yielding some interesting observations. I expect that when these discussions move into the execution phase, we will start to create some “Laws of Digital Transformation” that will guide organizations digital transformation journey. So with that in mind, let me start by proposing these “4 Laws of Digital Transformation.”

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“Cloud computing platform as a service, recently adopted by the New York Times (6, 3, 6)”

The New York Times has announced it has moved its games platform to Google App Engine from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Having first published its daily crossword in 1942, the NYTimes built its first website in 1996, with the digital daily crossword starting life as a web-based Java applet. Since then, the publisher has overseen growth into a suite of mobile apps and a website with more than 300,000 paid subscribers. The further introduction of a free daily mini crossword three years ago put ‘a lot of strain’ on the company’s architecture, according to JP Robinson, NYTimes principal software engineer.

“As the crossword grew in popularity, our architecture started to hit its scaling limitations for handling game traffic,” explained Robinson in a post announcing the move. “Due to the inelastic architecture of our legacy system, we needed to have the systems scaled up to handle our peak traffic at 10pm when the daily puzzle is published.

“The legacy stack leaned on technologies that required some level of human interaction and could take hours to scale up and down. We needed to scale within minutes,” he added. “The system is generally at that peak traffic for only a few minutes a day, so this setup was very costly for the New York Times games team.”

Among the features of Google App Engine that Robinson and the games team have taken advantage of is combined access and app logging – helping simplify debugging – API security and autoscaling, although noting the 10pm daily peak caused problems at first.

Robinson added that while the migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was undertaken seven months ago, all games API traffic now goes through App Engine, with 90% of traffic served purely by App Engine services and GCP databases. The publisher also claims it has cut infrastructure costs by half as a result of the move.

AWS has been creating some interesting headlines of its own in recent weeks. As this publication has previously reported, in June Walmart told technology companies and vendors to move off Amazon’s cloud or risk losing the retail giant’s business. Last month, columnist David Auslander argued that the potential winners in such a move could be Microsoft and Google, AWS’ primary rivals in cloud infrastructure, adding that while AWS remains the “clear leader” in public cloud provisioning, it “also makes them the hunted.”

Since then, Walmart’s anti-Amazon feeling has become more pronounced. According to a note from Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research – first spotted by Barron’s – Walmart should expect to go “full steam” on NVIDIA, utilising its graphics chips to create its own NVDA GPU Clusters on ‘Walmart Cloud’, or, rather, OneOps, which the company acquired in 2013. Similarly, Walmart last month announced it was teaming up with Google for voice-enabled commerce – again with Amazon in its sights.

Despite all this, of course, Amazon remains by far and away the market leader. AWS hit $4.1 billion in revenue for its most recent quarter, and cited Discovery Communications, Ancestry California Polytechnic State University as among its latest customer wins, the latter two going ‘all-in’ on the Amazon cloud.

You can read the full NYTimes blog post here.

Box has announced revenues up 28% year over year beating analyst expectations, with the company “well-positioned” to hit its $1 billion revenue target.

Total second quarter revenues for the cloud storage provider were at $122.9 million (£95.1m), with revenue for the six months ended July 31 at $240.1m. Billings for Q218 were at $139.5m, up 31% from this time last year.

Despite this, shares went down in the immediate aftermath of earnings being revealed, albeit having recovered somewhat at the time of publication. The company’s results showed it moved to cash flow negative $14.7m for the most recent quarter.

The company’s highlights this quarter include growing to more than 76,000 businesses as paying customers, including the Metropolitan Police and United Talent Agency, the launch of Box Drive, looking towards firms retiring legacy network file share infrastructure, as well as an expanded partnership with Microsoft focused on machine learning.

Speaking to analysts following the announcement, Box CEO Aaron Levie focused on the latter as a strategic trend for the company moving forward, citing the company’s integration with Google Cloud Vision for advanced image recognition capabilities as key to the move.

“We believe AI is the most important technology trend since the cloud, and has the potential to completely change the way that we work,” said Levie, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “To leverage the strength of AI in machine learning, technology providers need three key assets…you need a lot of data…you need the ability to be able to use and learn from that data…and you need frequent activity to be able to train your systems at scale.

“At Box, we are fortunate to have all three, with one of the largest corporate repositories of content in the world,” he added. “This materially separates Box from traditional on-premises content management and storage providers. In this context, our new integration with Google Vision is just the beginning.”

Box was last month also named as a leader in Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for content collaboration platforms, previously enterprise file sync and share (EFSS).

Since its inception, cloud computing has come a long way, yet people still possess misgivings and misunderstandings about what it can do, particularly when it comes to workloads.
The history of cloud computing, if only conceptually, stretches back further than you may imagine. The cloud genesis, so to speak, dates right back to the 1960s when J.C.R. Lickider dreamed of an ‘intergalactic computer network’. Lickider imagined a time when everyone on the planet would be interconnected and able to access both programs and data from anywhere at any time. He may never have specifically called this grand plan ‘the cloud’, but its similarities to what we now utilize daily are striking.

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Like so many other IT solutions, cloud computing services have long been promoted from a standpoint of administrative efficiency. As the rationale goes, if you get your cloud services from a single provider, you’ll enjoy the reduced hassle of consolidating third party business relationships, receive IT services at bargain prices, and have an easier time coordinating those services.
It’s true that using fewer service providers can offer some nice perks, but cloud computing is moving in the opposite direction at many companies. Instead of reaping the benefits of placing cloud services under one umbrella, businesses are mining the advantages of the antithetical approach: receiving cloud services from multiple providers – a discipline known as “multi-cloud computing.”

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It’s all over for us humans. It may not have been “The Matrix”[1], but the machines look like they are finally poised to take our jobs. Machines powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning process data faster, aren’t hindered by stupid human biases, don’t waste time with gossip on social media and don’t demand raises or more days off.
While there is a high probability that machine learning and artificial intelligence will play an important role in whatever job you hold in the future, there is one way to “future-proof” your career…embrace the power of design thinking.

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