SYS-CON Events announced today that DXWorldExpo has been named “Global Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Digital Transformation is the key issue driving the global enterprise IT business. Digital Transformation is most prominent among Global 2000 enterprises and government institutions.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Datera, that offers a radically new data management architecture, has been named «Exhibitor» of SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo ®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

Datera is transforming the traditional datacenter model through modern cloud simplicity.

The technology industry is at another major inflection point. The rise of mobile, the Internet of Things, data storage and Big Data are challenging the existing design patterns of the Data Center. The increase in complexity of managing legacy systems alongside new systems is beyond the ability of most IT departments. This leads to multiple tiers of storage and high economic costs, during a time in which IT is expected to do more with less.

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As organizations abandon the waterfall method of software development for Agile, many are stuck in what Hasan Yasar terms Water-Scrum-Fall. That is, the organization has not effectively embraced Agile and DevOps principles and remains in silos with no links to business goals. Enter DevOps, an extension of Agile thinking. While Agile embraces constant change and embeds the customer into the process, DevOps embraces constant testing and delivery and embeds operations into the team to internalize expertise on deployment and maintenance.

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These days, change is the only constant. In order to adapt and thrive in an ever-advancing and sometimes chaotic workforce, companies must leverage intelligent tools to streamline operations. While we’re only at the dawn of machine intelligence, using a workflow manager will benefit your company in both the short and long term. Think: reduced errors, improved efficiency and more empowered employees-and that’s just the start. Here are five other reasons workflow automation is leading a revolution in the 9-5 world.

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As many know, the first generation of Cloud Management Platform (CMP) solutions were designed for managing virtual infrastructure (IaaS) and traditional applications. But that’s no longer enough to satisfy evolving and complex business requirements.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Scott Davis, Embotics CTO, will explore how next-generation CMPs ensure organizations can manage cloud-native and microservice-based application architectures, while also facilitating agile DevOps methodology. He will explain how automation, orchestration and governance are fundamental to managing today’s hybrid cloud environments and are critical for digital businesses to deliver services faster, with better user experience and higher quality, all while saving money.

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FinTechs use the cloud to operate at the speed and scale of digital financial activity, but are often hindered by the complexity of managing security and compliance in the cloud. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Sesh Murthy, co-founder and CTO of Cloud Raxak, showed how proactive and automated cloud security enables FinTechs to leverage the cloud to achieve their business goals. Through business-driven cloud security, FinTechs can speed time-to-market, diminish risk and costs, maintain continuous compliance, and set themselves up for success.

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You know you need the cloud, but you’re hesitant to simply dump everything at Amazon since you know that not all workloads are suitable for cloud. You know that you want the kind of ease of use and scalability that you get with public cloud, but your applications are architected in a way that makes the public cloud a non-starter. You’re looking at private cloud solutions based on hyperconverged infrastructure, but you’re concerned with the limits inherent in those technologies.

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Company name translated into Chinese? Tick. Chinese social media accounts up and running? Tick. A Chinese-language website? Tick.

The IT team managing your Chinese website clicks ‘deploy’, and you’re now on the way to conquering the lucrative Chinese market.

The euphoria of global expansion endures for a few days, but then the teething problems start stacking up. Website availability is patchy. No one is coming to your site — except for spammers and existing customers who complain about slow load speed. Moreover, your website is lost eight pages deep on the Chinese equivalent of Google.

Overcoming Internet speed challenges

Website load speed is crucial anywhere in the world and especially in a mobile-centric market such as China. Hosting your website outside of China causes slower response times due to limitations on international bandwidth into China and high latency. This problem is especially acute for companies hosting their website in distant locations such as Europe and North America.

The most effective way to overcome these issues is to host your website in China. Hosting a website in China reduces site load time, minimizes latency, and is likely to improve search engine visibility in China over the long-term.

The other option is to deploy your website on a China-based Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN will cache your website on a distributed network of nodes. When a user in China requests access to your site, the CDN will serve a copy of your website from the closest node to the end-user. This dramatically reduces latency and is an ideal approach for companies that do not wish to migrate their origin server to a new location.

To deploy your website on a hosting server or CDN in China, you will first need to obtain an ICP (Internet Content Provider) license from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). If your business is not eligible for an ICP license, an alternative is to deploy your website on a server or CDN node located in Hong Kong.

Why cloud hosting is perfect for China

The scalability and built-in elasticity of the cloud are purpose-built for large online markets such as China, and businesses are realizing this advantage. Bain & Company predicts cloud computing sales to swell to 20% of China’s total IT market by 2020, up from a mere 3% in 2013.

Given the massive number of online users in China dispersed across distant geographic locations, cloud hosting offers businesses the ability to maximize coverage and respond in real-time to sudden changes in traffic. This includes adding new deployment regions and availability zones and the option to release resources when traffic subsides after a promotional event or unexpected spike in activity.

Alibaba, for instance, has broken records during promotional periods by leveraging the cloud to process up to 175,000 orders in just one second.

Safeguarding your website

China’s tech-savvy population is leading the way in adopting mobile payments, online-to-offline (O2O) services, mobile gaming, and designing their lives around their smartphone. While Android is the leading mobile operating system in China with approximately 74.4% of the market as of February 2017, its operating system can be susceptible to external attacks. To address mobile vulnerabilities and data security, companies need to carefully assess website and mobile security.

Cloud hosting provides access to a range of security products to protect your website from malicious attacks, including free services such as anti-DDoS protection and real-time monitoring. Advanced security products are also a must for commercial websites that integrate online payments. Cloud-based security products including server guard, mobile security, and web application firewall (WAF) can be integrated into your cloud architecture to protect against high volume DDoS attacks and other cyber intrusions.

To mitigate the threat of attacks, it is also vital to regularly update and backup your website. If your website is deployed on WordPress, this also means upgrading your WordPress theme and plugins to eliminate potential loopholes that hackers can exploit.

China is a highly competitive market, and consumers expect a smooth and secure online experience. The flexibility, scalability, and security offered by the cloud provides an optimal solution to boost your website in China’s competitive online space.

Choices, choices, choices. User requirements and non-functional requirements are just the beginning of the balancing act of services development. New development paradigms usually take a few years before their practitioners get a handle of the factors that they need to balance.

In the case of microservices, this balancing act comes down to three things: granularity, data consistency, and performance. The most usable and best-performing services built on the microservices architecture will find a balance of these three factors that work for the developers, users, and the business. Let’s start by defining these three factors in the context of microservices architecture.

Granularity

To be more specific: how many microservices and how granular the functionality of the services. The ultimate goal is to have the most granularity possible. Microservices architecture calls for the creation of a set of distinct functions that run on demand and then shut down.

The purpose of the granularity is twofold. Firstly, granularity enables rapid deployment of fixes and updates without lengthy and expensive testing cycles. Secondly, by execution on demand in a ‘serverless’ construct, the right level of granularity can help reduce cloud based infrastructure costs.

Data consistency

Since the microservices architecture calls for a discrete set of small functions defining an application or service the question arises as to how data will be passed between and acted upon by multiple functions while remaining consistent. Also, the question needs to be asked as to how multiple services built on microservices will access common data.

Think about a logistics system where multiple services, booking, confirmation, insurance, tracking, billing, and so on, each consist of multiple microservices functions and also need to pass information between them. Although the intent of this article is not to explore persistence technologies, some examples are: DBMS, journals and enterprise beans. The function of all of these and many others is to have data outlive the process that created it.

Performance

The starting and stopping of a process, even a microservices process, takes time and processing power. That may seem like an obvious statement but it requires some thought. If a process starts once and remains idle waiting for an input to run, there is no start-up delay except for the original startup or starting additional processes to handle the load.

In a microservices scenario, each time an input is received a process is started to handle the request. Then once the process ends its execution the process is shut down. This is an area where pre-provisioning of microservices servers (as in Microsoft Azure’s container based microservices solution) could be of benefit. 

Balancing act

Granularity, as defined above, is the ultimate point of balance in a microservices architecture. While trying to make their services as granular as possible, if a team makes their microservices too granular, problems arise in the data consistency/persistence and performance realms. If the services aren’t granular enough you might get performance gains but you lose resiliency, flexibility, and scalability.

If a service is built in too granular a form, data consistency can become difficult simply because of the rise in the number of data connections and elements that need to be kept consistent. Performance suffers, in an overly granular scenario, due to the processing requirements of startup and shutdown, as described above.

The balance between the various functional requirements, non-functional requirements and the will to utilise new paradigm capabilities can lead to many different balancing scenarios. Realistically, creating a solid microservices based environment comes down to basic application architecture principals.

Understanding the needs and architecting the solution based on all the functional and non-functional requirements. When developing in a microservices architecture we need to resist the temptation to go too granular in order while also introducing the scalability and flexibility that the microservices architecture is known for.