Happy 20th Birthday, Visual Studio! As Microsoft Visual Studio celebrates their 20th year – developers are rejoicing as Visual Studio 2017 is released! Over the past two decades Visual Studio has grown from a J++ and InterDev development environment to a powerhouse suite of productivity. The new release of Visual Studio 2017 brings Visual Basic, Visual […]
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London-based Container Solutions has released the latest version of its minimesos project, an open source testing and experiment tool for Apache Mesos, which it claims brings production orchestration testing to the development environment.
The new offering targets the challenge of moving microservice applications from a developer’s laptop to the production environment, which can prove to be complicated as the target platform is different than the local one. The offering allows developers to bring up a containerised Apache Mesos cluster on their laptop, creating a production-like environment on their desktops for building, experimenting and testing.
“When we started building a number of Mesos frameworks, we found it hard to run and test them locally,” said Jamie Dobson, CEO of Container Solutions. “So, we ended up writing a few scripts to solve the problem. Those scripts became minimesos, which lets you do everything on your laptop. We later integrated Scope so that developers could visualise their applications. This made minimesos even more useful for exploratory testing.”
The company claims developers can now start a Mesos cluster through the command line or via the Java API, which is logically isolated as each of the processes run in separate Docker containers. Minimesos is aslo integrated: it exposes framework, state and task information to its Cluster State API.
Rackspace CTO John Engates speaking at Rackspace: Solve 2016
While the concept of cloud computing has been normalized to a degree, the industry is now leaning towards the perceived benefits which can be derived from the technology on the whole. For the majority of companies who are evaluating cloud technologies, reducing CAPEX and OPEX simply isn’t a strong enough business case anymore.
This is certainly the case for Rackspace CTO John Engates. In fact, we’re starting to see the beginning of a new trend which will define the future of a vast number of organizations, the ability and desire to experiment. Those who can experiment with new technology, and are prepared to fail, will succeed. And those who don’t, won’t.
Although there can be savings made through the transition to a cloud environment, early adopters are now looking beyond. Cloud will underpin the growth and success of the new wave of next generation technologies, whether it is virtual reality, artificial intelligence or autonomous vehicles. The early adopters are already defining how these technologies will take their business to the next level, though the risk for the rest is how far they will get left behind is they don’t get up to speed quickly.
“Cloud as a technology is just about hitting the mainstream now,” said Engates. “Everything pre-2015 has been early adopters, but for mass markets it was business as usual.
“The main problem is that the majority of these companies are two or three steps away from the cloud. The cloud is not about saving money, but freeing up your developers so they can experiment with new technologies, learn new language and take the company forward. If you’re not thinking about these technologies now, how far behind are you. And you’re probably going to be in a very difficult position in a couple of years.”
Blockbuster is a classic example. Blockbuster and Netflix were in a similar position pre-digitalization, as most people now forget Netflix initially rose to fame through the delivery of DVD’s to its customers through the post. Fast forward to the digital era, where Netflix evolved and created its current market position, one in which a number of major player are now trying to emulate, and Blockbuster no longer exists.
For Engates, this example highlights the importance of experimentation. Netflix was a company which allowed its developers to play with new technologies and methods of delivery, whereas Blockbuster attempted to hold onto the traditional model. This will be the same for other verticals in the coming years, those who embrace the new digital era, adapt their models and allow their developers’ freedom to innovate will continue to be competitive, those who don’t will take the same route as Blockbuster.
“The successful companies of the future will be software companies,” said Engates. “They may not sell software but they will use it as a means to define their business and be creative in the marketplace. The likes of Google, Facebook, Uber and Netflix are all software companies. They aren’t people companies or infrastructure companies, they are software. If you want to compete with these companies you need to get better at creating the software experience.”
Nike and Under Armour are two more companies highlighted by Engates. While both are lifestyle and sportswear brands, both have had to create a digital experience to meet the demands of customers. A few years ago industry giants such as Nike and Under Armour were too big to be bothered by such trends, but the cloud computing era has levelled the playing field. No-one is bigger than the software revolution.
“I think that companies have to enable some of their organization to be innovative and to be creative,” said Engates. “Most of IT has been behind the wall; they haven’t been innovators, they’ve been keeping the lights on. It wasn’t about transforming the company into something new and different that was product development’s job or marketing. But today, inventing the new it-thing means you have to have a digital component, to connect with you users through your mobile device.”
Mobile devices are now redefining business and consumer attitudes. For the most part this is how the consumer connects with new companies; it’s almost exclusively digital and if you’re company is not embracing this, Engates thinks it won’t be too long before you’re not relevant.
But will companies take those risks? “Not all of them will,” said Engates. “Not every company will make that leap. The ones that don’t will be left behind. Now even banks are starting to do this as you’re starting to see more automated investing and digital advisors. Why would you need to go to the branch if you can do it over the phone?”
For innovation to occur within an organization, the conditions have to be right. In the majority of large scale organizations, innovation is very difficult to achieve. There are too many risks, too much red tape and too much politics. The notion that a new idea might not succeed, or reap short term benefits, scares the board and stakeholders, which in turn will inhibit innovation. It’s a difficult loop to get out of, and for a number of larger, stodgy organizations, it will be immensely difficult.
“The reason cloud is so important is because to innovate you need to be using the most modern tools, for example data science, continuous integration, containers,” said Engates. “You need APIs to interact with, you don’t want to wait six weeks on a server. You want to experiment and do things quickly. If you want to do analytics, you need storage and compute power; you need to have the cloud.
“A lot of the people who want to work on these projects have a lot of options. There are a lot of smaller companies who have these conditions to be innovative, so they attract these developers. Companies have to adapt to them, not force them to adapt to the company. Decision makers need to change their organization to have the modern environment for these developers to work in, to be innovative and to make the company competitive in the digital era.”
Microsoft has unveiled a new DIY programming system called PowerApps and new features for Office 365 and Dynamics CRM 2016 at its annual Convergence EMEA conference in Barcelona.
The new features in Microsoft Office 365, include meetings and voice services in Skype for Business while there’s a new customer engagement option in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016. Meanwhile Microsoft PowerApps is a new enterprise service that helps employees to create apps and share them with co-workers.
Office 365 now has options for a Skype Meeting Broadcast, Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) Conferencing, PSTN Calling and Cloud Private Branch Exchange. In addition Office 365 customers now have one platform for calling, conferencing, video and sharing, Microsoft claims.
There are new analytics and data visualization tools in the cloud package too. Delve Analytics promises interactive dashboards that tell users who they are spending their time with and how. This, says Microsoft, will help employees to prioritise better. The cloud package will have greater levels of security and compliance, it claims, through a new Customer Lockbox feature which allows each user to set access control limits. A new eDiscovery option makes it easier to manage large quantities of data and find information.
These new features, along with new Power BI (business intelligence) and Advanced Threat Protection are available in a new premium enterprise suite, Office 365 E5.
Meanwhile the new Dynamics CRM 2016, Microsoft promises, will be a more intelligent, mobile and productive system, thanks to new data and intelligence components. Among the features is a new ‘intelligent product recommendations’ mode for sales reps to personalize up-selling.
Dynamics CRM 2016 can also simplify everyday jobs, like meeting follow-ups.
On that same theme PowerApps is a system for creating apps for everything from a simple survey to something more ambitious and mission critical, according to Microsoft. These can connect to line-of-business systems and cloud services and run on any device. They can be used by everyone from employees through IT staff to Professional developers.
The fourth employee of Infectious Media, Dan de Sybel started his career as an Operations Analyst for Advertising.com, where during a six year tenure, he launched the European Technology division, producing bespoke international reporting and workflow platforms, as well as numerous time saving systems and board level business intelligence.
Dan grew the EU Tech team to 12 people before moving agency side, to Media Contacts UK, part of the Havas Media Group. At Havas, Dan was responsible for key technology partnerships and spearheading the agency’s use of the Right Media exchange under its Adnetik trading division.
At Infectious Media, Dan’s Technology division yielded one of the first Big Data analysis systems to reveal and visualise the wealth of information that RTB provides to its clients. From there, the natural next step was to produce the Impression Desk Bidder to be able to action the insights gained from the data in real time and thus close the loop on the programmatic life cycle. Dan’s team continues to enhance its own systems, whilst integrating the technology of other best-in-class suppliers to provide a platform that caters to each and every one of our clients’ needs.
Ahead of his presentation at DevOps World on November 4th in London, Dan shares his insights on how he feels DevOps is affecting ICT teams, the DevOps challenges he is facing as well as what he is doing to overcome it.
What does your role involve and how are you involved with DevOps?
Infectious Media runs its own real-time bidding software that takes part in hundreds of thousands of online auctions for online advertising space every second. As CTO, it’s my job to ensure we have the right team, processes and practices in place to ensure this high frequency, low latency system remains functional 24×7 and adapts to the ever changing marketplace and standards of the online advertising industry.
DevOps practices naturally evolved at Infectious Media due to our small teams, 1 week sprint cycles and growing complexity of systems. Our heavy use of the cloud meant that we could experiment frequently with different infrastructure setups and adapt code to deliver the best possible value for the investment we were prepared to make. These conditions resulted in far closer working of the developers and the operational engineers and we have not looked back since.
How have you seen DevOps affecting IT teams’ work?
Before adopting the DevOps philosophy, we struggled to bring the real-time bidding system to fruition, never sure if problems originated in the code, in the operational configurations of infrastructure, or in the infrastructure itself. Whilst the cloud brought many benefits, never having complete control of the infrastructure stack led to many latency and performance issues that could not be easily explained. Furthermore, being unable to accurately simulate a real-world environment for testing without spending hundreds of thousands of pounds meant that we had to work out solutions for de-risking testing new code in live environments. All of these problems became much easier to deal with once we started following DevOps practices and as a result, we have a far happier and more productive technology team.
What is the biggest challenge you are facing with DevOps and how did/are you trying to overcome it?
The biggest challenge was overcoming initial inertia to switch to a model that was so far unproven and regarded as a bit of a fad. Explaining agile methodologies and the compromises it involves to senior company execs is hard enough, but as soon as you mention multiple daily release cycles necessitating fewer governance processes and testing on live, you are bound to raise more than a few eyebrows.
Thankfully, we are a progressive company and the results proved the methodology. Since we adopted DevOps, we’ve had fewer outages, safer, more streamlined deployments and, crucially, more features released in less time
Can you share a book, article, movie that you recently read/watched and inspired you – in regards to technology?
The Phoenix Project. Perhaps a bit obvious, but it’s enjoyable reading a novel that covers some of the very real problems IT professionals experience in their day-to-day roles with the very solutions that we were experimenting with at the time.
What are you hoping to achieve by attending the DevOps World?
Really my goal is to understand and help with some of the problems rolling DevOps practices out across larger companies can yield. In many respects, rolling out DevOps in small startups is somewhat easier as you have far less inertia from tried and trusted practices, comparatively less risk and far fewer people to convince that it’s a good idea. I’ll be interested to hear about other people’s experiences and hopefully be able to share some advice based on our own.
Software AG has launched an online shop for development components in a bid to make cloud application development easier for enterprises.
The Digital Marketplace allows programmers at enterprises to choose and use the essential IT development components they need to solve their business problems. The stock on offer includes solution accelerators, business process models, application components, adapters and industry frameworks. Clients can also get fully-fledged systems created by Software AG’s partners and customers.
Software AG says it has two million developers and an expanding partner base contributing to the online resource. Visitors to the site can browse and take inspiration from industry-specific use cases and – if they fit the bill for the client’s own installation – download components of the systems described.
The vendor was compelled to set up the resource as the model for software purchase and consumption is changing, said Eric Duffaut, Chief Customer Officer for Software AG. “Digitisation is changing everything. Enterprises and governments have to develop and implement their unique digital strategies to meet customer and citizen expectations,” said Duffaut.
The hub is designed to make the increasingly complex world of cloud computing less threatening to the enterprise buyer, many of whom are not particularly technical, according to Duffaut. “These are not run-of-the mill investments and every one is a strategic decision. The Digital Marketplace will make digitisation easier, based on the collective experience of Software AG, our partners and customers.”
Meanwhile, partners will have a new channel to market, said Harish Dwarkanhalli, the Global Delivery Head of Software AG partner Cognizant’s Integrated Process Management practice. “Co-innovation is a key part of the value to our mutual clients. The Digital Marketplace is a new way to highlight the innovation, frameworks and thought leadership we’ve developed.”
Cognizant is using the online market to launch its Intra Day Liquidity Monitoring (ILM) system to clients.
Enterprise software vendor MapR has unveiled plans to slash the workload of IoT developers and administrators by cutting the complexity of managing its NoSQL databases.
The key to this simplification, it says, is in more creative use of the JavaScript Object Notification (JSON) format, which it claims has the potential to make significant improvements in both database scalability and the analysis of the information they contain.
“We’re seeing big changes in the way applications are developed and how data is consumed,” said MapR’s chief marketing officer Jack Norris, “the underlying data format is the key to making information sharing easier.”
Bringing out the advantages of JSON makes administration easier, according to Norris, because users can make changes easily in a database built on documents. This in turn helps developers when they are planning applications, because it is easier to create a user friendly system. Tweaking JSON will benefit system builders in their own work too, Norris argued, since a document database can now be given enterprise grade scalability, reliability and integrated analytics.
The organisational improvements include the ability to personalise and deliver better online shopping experiences, reduce risk and prevent fraud in real-time, improve manufacturing efficiencies and cut costs. Savings will come from preventing cluster sprawl, eliminating data silos and lowering the cost of ownership of data management, claims MapR. Meanwhile it has promised a productivity dividend from continuous analytics of real-time data.
The MapR-DB supports the Open JSON Application Interface (OJAITM), which is designed to be a general purpose JSON access layer across databases, file systems and message streams, enabling a flexible and unified interface to work with big data, claims MapR.
The addition of a document database capacity extends the NoSQL MapR-DB to cover more types of unstructured business data, said one analyst. This could make it faster and easier to build big data applications, without the burden of shuffling data around first.
“MapR continues to build on the innovative data platform at the core of its Hadoop distribution,” said Nik Rouda, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.
Aliyun has launched what it claims to be China’s first AI platform
Alibaba’s cloud computing division Aliyun has launched what it claims to be China’s first artificial intelligence cloud service.
The DT PAI platform has been built with a series of purpose-built algorithms and machine learning technologies designed to help users generate predictive intelligence insights. Aliyun said the service features “drag and drop” capabilities that let users easily connect different services and set parameters.
The company claims the platform is China’s first commercially available artificial intelligence platform.
“Our goal is to create a one-stop AI development, publishing and sharing platform through data calculations and data connections, all with the aim of using AI to drive innovation in all aspects of life,” said Xiao Wei, senior product expert, Aliyun.
“In the past, the field of artificial intelligence was only open to a very small number of qualified developers and required the use of specialised tools. Such an approach was prone to error and redundancy. Hoewver, DT PAI allows developers with little or no experience in the field to construct a data application from scratch in a much shorter period of time. What used to take days can be completed within minutes,” Wei added.
The platform is based on Aliyuns recently update big data cloud infrastructure and its Open Data Processing Service (ODPS).
Alibaba seems to be following IBM’s lead on when it comes to AI. Big Blue has been using Bluemix as a drag-and-drop platform for Watson, IBM’s cognitive compute (AI) as a service, pitching it as a more accessible development and delivery platform for its big data services.
IBM is targeting IoT developers with developerWorks
As part of the recently announced developerWorks initiative IBM is creating a community, developerWorks Recipes, aimed specifically at developers creating Internet of Things (IoT) services.
The developerWorks Recipes community will offer participating developers access to IBM’s Bluemix platform as well as tutorials and technical guides on how to develop and deploy IoT services like connected car, healthcare device or industrial machine monitoring and diagnostic services.
“IBM has long been a leader in offering innovative tools for developers to create the applications of our future. Now, IBM is expanding that focus so anyone – from the software novice to the experienced hardware engineer – can easily and quickly access materials providing guidance in the creation, management and connection of IoT devices to each other and the cloud,” said Christopher O’Connor, general manager, offerings, Internet of Things at IBM.
“With developerWorks Recipes, IBM provides easy access to new analytics and operational insight capabilities that tap into the vast data from many connected devices, home appliances or cars,” O’Connor said.
IBM just launched developerWorks last week, a cloud-based platform that provides access to Bluemix and emerging IBM tech and expertise in the form of blogs, informational videos and other multimedia, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with specialists.
Jone Rasmussen, general manager of IoT developer tool startup Bitreactive said the platform has the potential to help companies that want to develop new services quickly at a time when device development and vendor activity is expanding rapidly and standards scarcely available.
“Developers just can’t be experts on each new ‘thing’ that gets added to the IoT,” Rasmussen said. “To control costs of IoT projects, developers need easy, repeatable ways to quickly extract data from devices.”
How are developers using cloud to develop IoT services? Click here to download the whitepaper created by BCN and IBM to find out.