The rise of cloud computing has ushered in an era of unprecedented productivity for developers over the past several years. For those who have embraced this new world order, gone are the days of long lead times for hardware procurement and installation, architecture defined by slow-moving hardware upgrades, hardware-constrained scalability and flexibility, and a world where only sys admins have access to the infrastructure. But, as the barriers between development and delivery disappear, new challenges have emerged that can disrupt the lives of developers and slow down delivery of new products and features, giving back some of the efficiency gains that the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) created.
Whether you’re new to the cloud or you’ve been around since before cloud was cool, you are likely to see four common challenges emerge that can make troubleshooting your applications in the cloud more difficult. Let’s take a closer look at these common pain points first to help build awareness around the challenges, and then I’ll offer some suggestions for how to prevent these hurdles from tripping you and your team up when it comes time to unravel an application troubleshooting mystery.
G20 Should Listen to South Korea & Canada
The top government leaders of the G20 nations are meeting this week-end in Brisbane, Australia. It’s an occasion to hear (and watch) U.S. President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi JinPing, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Instead, maybe everyone should be listening more closely to South Korean President Park Geun-Hye, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper – because these nations are among those setting the global pace of ICT development, which we believe will lead to long-term economic and societal development.
South Korea, in fact, leads the world in our rankings, which integrate several measures of technology and societal development into a unique mix that empasizes relative performance – that is, how well are the 103 nations we survey doing with the resources they have? How quickly are they being developed – not just growing economically, but developing societally – on a relative basis?
Among the G20 nations, South Korea is followed in our rankings by the UK, Germany, Canada, and Japan.
So it’s fair to say that people should also heed the words of UK Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, both of whom carry substantial influence on the world stage. But it’s important to note that the US, Russia, and China finish 8th, 10th, and 18th respectively among the G20.
This economic club of nations represents about 85% of the global economy. Its members include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK, the US, and the EU.
The G20 doesn’t strictly include the world’s top 20 economies (sorry about that, Netherlands and Spain), as it seeks to balance all the world’s regions. Including the EU as a member re-balances the exclusion of some large European countries.
The bottom tier of this group includes Italy, Argentina, Russian, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. These nations could benefit from witnessing the leaders’ commitment to ICT and how it is working to maintain the developed nations and transform the developing nations.
We have significant data and numeros, diverse rankings on all 103 nations that we survey. Our leaders possess a wide range of resources, population sizes, locations, and internal dynamics. There is no one way that they achieved this leadership. But they are all laying down relatively robust ICT infrastructures, often with the transformation and disruption that this implies.
We’re able to create custom reports for government, business, and NGO leaders who would like to know more.
Case Study: Moving from On-Premise to #Cloud | @CloudExpo
The software industry has seen a shift away from applications being housed at a company’s premise to the cloud. Such a shift allows companies to focus more on their business needs and less on their IT infrastructure needs.
In this article, we take a look at webapps developed for Tomcat and weblogic and attempt to deploy them into a cloud-based environment.
Archimedes & Measuring The Cloud
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It’s 11 PM – Do You Know Where Your Data Is? By @EFeatherston [#Cloud]
I was recently on a business trip out to Wausau, WI. The purpose was to conduct a training session on web application development for a new batch of associates at our onshore development center. When I picked up my rental car at the airport, I was very happy to discover it had built in Bluetooth integration for my phone. I have this feature on both cars at home. I love the convenience of having the car become an accessory for my mobile device. I immediately bound my phone with the car’s Bluetooth. Then something unusual happened. My phone prompted me with a question: ‘Chevy/Malibu would like access to your contacts list, click OK to grant request.’ My first reaction was no, and canceled the request. Each time I started the car, it would persistently ask the question. My curiosity got the better of me, and I finally relinquished and said OK to see what happened next.
What Are You Waiting For? The #Cloud Era Is Here! By @Kevin_Jackson
The revolutionary business aspects of cloud excite me every day, but the business diversity is even more exciting. This fact really struck me after teaching my last Learning Tree Cloud Computing Introduction class in New York City. I’ve been in the regular rotation here for four months now and have taught three classes during that time. The chart below breaks out the students in these classes by industry.
How the Project Management Office Can Drive Business Growth with Excellence in Customer Service
Project Managers today don’t just manage projects; they are a key contributor in managing the business. So, is there a way the Project Management Office can gain the business competitive positioning and better business results? I say yes. We can do this through delivering excellence in customer service.
Aristotle said it best when he said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle ~384-322 BCE. To create a culture of service excellence, the PMO must first define for itself what excellence in customer service is. Involve the members of the Project Management Office in this activity (after all, we know from our experience managing projects that stakeholder involvement facilitates buy-in). Ask each member to provide their best customer service experience. From the cumulative experiences, collaboratively define what service excellence is for your team in your business. This definition should become the mission statement of the PMO.
Next, have the Project Management Office members recommend the values they will guide themselves by to obtain service excellence. Below are a few general principles to build on. I agree that many may seem obvious or cliché, but you will find that they work:
- Be available
- Treat your customer the way you would like to be treated
- Provide a personal and individual level of attention to each client
- Be an expert in your role, discipline or practice
- Be empowered to make decisions
- Ask, listen and learn
- Analyze risk to identify potential problems and implement corrective and preventive measures
- Communicate early and often
- Request feedback and use it to evolve service excellence
- Be humble, honest, frank and prepared
Once the Project Management Office defines and outlines values, PMO management should create a formal documented Customer Service policy and roll it out to the team. The upkeep of the Customer Service policy should be considered an iterative process; the needs of the customer and feedback from stakeholders are regularly analyzed and constant improvements are made to the program.
Review the policy with the PM team regularly, especially when there are any updates, or new hires added to the team. Perform team building exercises in support of the program, and share lessons learned at regular team meetings to foster continued support of the program. We want to ensure everyone adopts this behavior. After all, service excellence must become the new norm.
Great service can be used as an effective acquisition strategy, as well as a retention strategy for happy customers. Roll out a Customer Service Excellence program in your Project Management Office and you will find that the customer service approach will lead to growth and profitability.
Are you interested in learning how effective project management strategies can help your business excel? Email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com
By Erin Marandola, Business Analyst, PMP
Sixteen Tips for Moving Your Workloads to the #Cloud By @GiladPN
Got a plan for your move to the cloud? If you do, you’re in the minority. According to a recent study, a mere 31 percent of those planning a move to the cloud actually have a strategy for migrating data and applications. The rest don’t.
To avoid the complexity and cost, we recommend heeding the following advice. It’s but a fraction of the endless recommendations we received from cloud experts who offered well-seasoned tips on what to do and not do when you begin planning to move workloads to the cloud.
Forrester 2015 predictions report explains how cloud will be “the motivator”
Picture credit: iStockPhoto
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Everyone who’s got an opinion will be telling the world and his dog about their predictions for cloud computing in 2015. CloudTech will bring you the very best of these in due course, but for now analyst house Forrester has got theirs in early and proclaimed 2015 is the year when companies fighting the cloud will finally be a thing of the past.
The report, entitled “Predictions 2015: The Days of Fighting the Cloud Are Over”, examines 10 key trends for the coming year, offering two up for its non paying customers.
Microsoft’s cloudy revenues go up and up
The first point concerns big vendors and cloud revenues. In 2015, Forrester predicts Microsoft will make more profit from cloud than on-premise software.
It’s been the goal of many historically large IT vendors, from IBM, to SAP, and Oracle. These companies have taken on this mission with varying degrees of success. Yet Forrester seems to be cast under the spell of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s cloud-first, mobile-first vision.
“Under Nadella’s new mandates, its development teams are focused on driving innovation into the cloud versions of its properties first, and its sales engines are all rewarded for pushing as much cloud into each enterprise license agreement as possible,” Dave Bartoletti, infrastructure and operations analyst at Forrester, wrote in a blog. “Consequently, Microsoft itself is embracing continuous delivery development methods.”
The company’s most recent financial results shed a little light on this prediction. Commercial cloud revenue grew 128% in the quarter, while server products and services revenue increased 13%. Comparatively, SAP saw cloud subscriptions at €738 million (£584.1m), a jump of 51% year over year, with software revenues at €2.53bn, a downturn of 3% from this time last year.
If SAP’s figures are going in the right direction strategically, nevertheless it’s a very long game, and therefore a bold prediction.
A change is as good as a REST
Forrester also predicts 2015 to be the year when back end systems will use REST to communicate with one another. REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications, and is increasingly being used to drive agile development, ahead of other protocols such as SOAP.
“If you want your back-office applications to be part of this move forward, relying on traditional integration methods such as enterprise service buses, JDBC connections and SOAP is inadequate for modern applications,” the report notes. “You’ll have to evolve your integration architecture to REST in 2015.”
Other trends, according to ZDNet, include the prevalence of Docker, an open source platform to ship and run apps from anywhere. Given Amazon is the latest company to buddy up with the software, after Google and Microsoft, this may be one of the safer bets. Similarly, Forrester also predicts the death spiral of the private managed cloud.
“In 2014, cloud entered the formal IT portfolio, and technology managers stopped treating cloud as competition,” Bartoletti wrote. “In 2015, cloud technologies will mature into the driving force powering the most successful companies.”
You can find the full report here (subscription required).
Cloud Key Management vs. Hardware-Based Key Managers | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Cloud security is a top concern for any organization migrating to the cloud. The threats are many.
For example, the fact your data resides in a shared, multi-tenant environment is a threat that has become a reality with the latest Xen virtualization bug, which allowed a malicious fully virtualized server to read data about other virtualized systems running on the same physical hardware or the hypervisor).
Other threats to cloud security include internal employees and even governments.
The consensus is that data encryption is a critical first step to migrating to the cloud; but in fact, encryption is the easy part. The real challenge lies with the management of the encryption keys. Allowing your cloud provider to encrypt your data and manage the encryption keys is as secure as parking your car in a public parking space and leaving the car keys in the ignition.