Mobile testing is getting harder: more devices, multiple operating systems, higher quality expectations and shorter development cycles.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Tom Chavez, Senior Evangelist at SOASTA, discussed the seven steps to improving your mobile testing process.
Tom Chavez, with 20+ years of experience as a product manager in software development tools, works in product management at SOASTA, the leader in performance analytics. He has worked across the Silicon Valley at industry leaders including Apple, Sun, PalmSource, and Intuit delivering tools for Mac, Java, PalmOS, and Android development and testing.

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(c)iStock.com/Enis Aksoy

The start of any year is always a good time to take stock, inspect the landscape, and see where the puck is moving. That is exactly what Tariff Consultancy (TCL) has done, with the company’s latest cloud pricing report revealing that while enterprise cloud computing prices have dropped by two thirds on average since 2014, the race to the bottom is finally letting up.

The report, entitled ‘Pricing the Cloud 2 – 2016 to 2020’, assessed a total of 24 vendors, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google, and cited the former two as a reason for stability in public cloud pricing. Price drops continue to fuel cloud adoption, but the landscape is different to 2014. Back then, both companies were offering free initial tier compute instances; now, free elements only come as part of promotional periods, or to entice customers in to paid options.

According to TCL, the average entry level cloud computing instance is now at $0.12 USD per hour (£0.08), and argues the range of pricing has narrowed in the past two years. The consultancy firm also anticipates that revenues for public cloud services will rise to approximately $82 billion (£56.8bn).

Pricing of cloud solutions, and what represents value for money, has been a hot topic in this publication in recent days. Amazon put forth its 51st price cut on EC2 instances last week, only for Google to retaliate by calling its rival’s pricing structure an “unpleasant surprise.” Earlier this week, analyst firm Cloud Spectator issued its benchmark report into cloud pricing and performance, with a surprising victor in 1&1, Google in fifth place, and AWS well outside the top 10.

Such analysis is, naturally, not always 100% objective, and it is always worth digging into providers in detail, asking key questions on data hosting, security, and SLAs, to avoid being stung. One interesting element the Cloud Spectator report found was that the adage ‘you get what you pay for’ is not entirely true; in terms of pure VM performance, the analysts argued there was little difference between all cloud service providers, although this test does not take into account support, managed hosting, and other value add benefits.

Despite the Cloud Spectator ranking however, TCL puts AWS at the top of its pedestal, citing the frequent price cuts. “New cloud services are being introduced to cater for specialised customer requirements as a means of avoiding price commoditisation – however, the market share and computing power of AWS gives the company a considerable advantage in providing economies of scale which are passed on to the end user,” the company writes.

Docker Swarm is a cluster manager for Docker. When accessed via the Docker API by Docker API Clients or Docker command line tools, a Docker Swarm cluster looks just like a single Docker Host. Docker Swarm distributes containers to multiple nodes using various deployment strategies in the cluster scheduler.

Having in mind that a Swarm cluster looks like a single Docker Host from the API point of view, it should be very easy to monitor Docker Swarm with existing Docker monitoring tools! Connecting a monitoring agent to the Swarm Master API endpoint should do the job, right? The Sematext Docker Agent could simply collect all container metrics, events and all logs from the Swarm Master – should be a piece of cake. Hmm, but could there a gotcha? It turns out there is more than one:

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When it comes to protecting their brand, there is little that any successful company would not do. But what if the brand is being damaged just by people being unable to find the store?

If you think of the internet as a virtual network, then DNS lookup and resolution is like the 411 service. Websites are not located at text addresses, but rather IP addresses – that series of numbers and decimals that may not make any sense to you, but actually identifies the actual server that you’re trying to contact. So when you type www.catchpoint.com into your web browser or click on a link to it from a Google search page, the first thing that your browser must do is find out where exactly that is.

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Printed electronics are being touted as the next best thing in Internet of Things (IoT), the technology that is rightly regarded as a boon of advancing technology. Silicon-based sensors are the first that have been associated with IoT technology. These sensors have numerous applications, such as track data from airplane, wind turbines, engines, and medical devices, among other internet connected devices.

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As the Internet of Things becomes more capable, moving from an initial ad hoc bundle of chaos to an optimized set of interconnected assets, we will need to ensure it performs and is reliable.
But this means the tools measuring the performance and reliability of the IoT will also need to mature as the need for timely, understandable, quality, business-critical information becomes paramount. Sensors that are malfunctioning, devices that are offline, data that’s little more than noise can all scuttle the best IoT monitoring strategies.
Let’s fix them. Let’s make sure the “Things” in IoT are doing what they are supposed to be doing.

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