Developing software for the Internet of Things (IoT) comes with its own set of challenges. Security, privacy, and unified standards are a few key issues. In addition, each IoT product is comprised of (at least) three separate application components: the software embedded in the device, the backend service, and the mobile application for the end user’s controls. Each component is developed by a different team, using different technologies and practices, and deployed to a different stack/target – this makes the integration of these separate pipelines and the coordination of software updates for IoT more problematic. How do you coordinate the diverse moving parts that must come together when developing your IoT product or updating each of its components?

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The Internet of Things has the potential to disrupt all industries, not just consumer, as businesses leverage the new insights and capabilities enabled by new devices / things, automation, integration and analytics, etc., to transform how they do business.
One industry ripe for disruption is higher education. Colleges and universities are being challenged with serving more students and at the same time ensuring successful student outcomes.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principal Technology Strategist at Citrix, looked at the potential of IoT in providing the platform for the next generation classroom, helping schools to easily offer a blended learning environment for students inside and outside of the classroom.

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Agile, which started in the development organization, has gradually expanded into other areas downstream – namely IT and Operations. Teams – then teams of teams – have streamlined processes, improved feedback loops and driven a much faster pace into IT departments which have had profound effects on the entire organization.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Anders Wallgren, Chief Technology Officer of Electric Cloud, discussed how DevOps and Continuous Delivery have emerged to help connect development with IT operations (mainly through the introduction of Automation) to support and amplify agility, responsiveness and faster time to market throughout the software delivery lifecycle.

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Although the MIT makes the specific point that the Platform Business Model is exactly that – a business model, not a technology – there is naturally a clear and powerful link with the cloud model PaaS (platform as a service).

This offers literally that – a platform as a service – and so it can play a central component part in enabling the Platform Business Model.

Enterprise vs cloud PaaS

Enterprise PaaS refers to the internal application of the platform as a service model, with the goal of boosting software productivity through standardised developer tools and common components.

PaaS can be utilised via public or private Cloud deployment models. Public Cloud services include Microsoft Azure and Google, and vendor software for building your own in-house PaaS includes Cloud Foundry and Red Hat Openshift.

In their paper and ‘PaaS: Open for Business‘, Pivotal describes the essential ingredient:

“Platform as a service is a key enabler of software-driven innovation – facilitating rapid iteration and developer agility. It comprises a set of tools, libraries and services for deploying, managing and scaling applications in the cloud. Adopting an enterprise-grade, multi-cloud PaaS solution frees developers to create game-changing web and mobile applications. It also allows these applications to scale across cloud environments, based on the business need.”

In their report,‘Essential Elements of Enterprise PaaS’, Pivotal lays out a recipe for what constitutes Enterprise PaaS.

From concept to cash

Agile software practices are introduced in the Agile Manifesto, and described here by the Scrum Alliance explaining the relationship to DevOps, the integration of software development and operations management. As the vendor DB Maestro describes in this blog, DevOps builds on the software development best practices like version control and application lifecycle management, with additional functions to further automate the deployment to cloud procedures.

Application performance management provider Stackify makes a great observation that agile and DevOps combine to holistically address the full lifecycle of translating business ideas into working code running in the cloud hosting delivery environment.

Microservices continuous deployment: Infrastructure as code

This integration is conveyed through the idea of ‘Infrastructure as Code’, explained by one of the G-Cloud Digital team Gareth Rushgrove in the Continuous Integration for Infrastructure presentation.

Organisations such as Netflix and Nike aren’t just pioneering new business models, they are also new pioneering new technologies that accelerate these models, new cloud hosting and software design methods like ‘microservices’ and Continuous Deployment.

The cloud is not only changing how software is hosted and executed. It’s also changing how it is written and maintained as well as how it is architected and developed, achieved through DevOps practices and microservices design patterns.

The post Enterprise PaaS – Agile Architecture for Continuous Innovation appeared first on Cloud Best Practices.

In the ESG Research Report, “2015 IT Spending Intentions Survey,” IT professionals list improving backup and recovery, managing data growth and using cloud infrastructure services as top IT priorities over the next 12 months. So it is no surprise that cloud-based disaster recovery (DR), business continuity and backup initiatives solutions are under close examination by many companies.
Hybrid cloud backup and continuity solutions, in particular, have a variety of benefits that can greatly enhance the depth and breadth of protection for businesses that need to stay up and running through all sorts of downtime challenges. It’s now possible for a single backup and recovery solution to protect data locally and have multiple backup copies stored in various cloud locations. Local protection allows firms to have backups cached near IT for rapid recovery of minor issues, such as an accidentally deleted email. Storing multiple copies in the cloud provides geo-redundant disaster protection and failsafe long-term retention. While this was possible previously, the most powerful cloud recovery solutions today do this automatically and at a cost far cheaper than most companies can do it themselves.

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Actifio has announced its partnership with Camouflage Software Inc., a leading provider of solutions for data masking in Test Data Management. The partnership brings a best-in-class solution to address the challenges of data access, control, security, and storage costs in the test and development space.
“Software is eating the world,” as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011. Since then, more and more industries have been transformed by software, to the point where the largest distributor of films has no theaters (Netflix,) the largest provider of delivery services has no cars (Uber,) the largest renter of rooms owns no hotels (Airbnb). Software – especially the development of company-specific applications and platforms with the power to create sustainable advantage and even transform entire industries – has become a critical lever of business strategy in even the most unlikely business segments. Meanwhile, physical and technical infrastructure, the source of differentiated capability for decades, if not centuries, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be accessed at the lowest possible cost.

“Software is eating the world,” as Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011. Since then, more and more industries have been transformed by software, to the point where the largest distributor of films has no theaters (Netflix,) the largest provider of delivery services has no cars (Uber,) the largest renter of rooms owns no hotels (Airbnb). Software – especially the development of company-specific applications and platforms with the power to create sustainable advantage and even transform entire industries – has become a critical lever of business strategy in even the most unlikely business segments. Meanwhile, physical and technical infrastructure, the source of differentiated capability for decades, if not centuries, is increasingly seen as a commodity to be accessed at the lowest possible cost.

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