How NBC Universal sped delivery and cut costs with DevOps

If businesses find the success with that NBC Universal has, it’s safe to say that it’ll be sticking around.
At IBM InterConnect Monday, Angel Diaz, IBM vice president of developer technology and advocacy, told the crowd, “We are living in a technology-fueled business revolution.”
He was referring, of course, to DevOps, the approach to building software and applications that breaks down barriers between developers, IT staff and operation managers in an agile, iterative environment. It’s about tapping into the collective skill of what Diaz refers to as “the business technical pulse.”
“It’s all about the people; the mastery of the machine and the method,” Diaz said.
One organization that has mastered the machine and the method is NBC Universal. John Comas, who manages the company’s platform DevOps, was on hand to share his account of his company’s journey.
The approach
In a joint session at InterConnect titled “DevOps: The New Reality for Enterprise Transformation,” Comas said his company implemented DevOps to “modernize our technology to align with the business strategy.”
“DevOps gives us the agility to keep up with changes in the marketplace,” he said, “and it enables us to instantly respond to the ever-changing business requirements. Most importantly, it allows us to remain competitive with our corporate rivals.”
He told the crowd that he approached a DevOps culture at NBC Universal through what are commonly referred to as “The 5 C’s”:

With DevOps, @NBCUniversal is &;developing faster and more efficiently than ever and at much lower costs,” says John Comas. pic.twitter.com/JgPXmzs8eP
— IBM Cloud (@IBMcloud) March 20, 2017

Continuous integration
Continuous delivery
Continuous testing
Continuous feedback
Continuous monitoring

“At its core, DevOps takes software development and systems integration and combines them together using agile methodology,” Comas said.
In his team’s continuous integration, developers commit code to the software configuration management and merge with the main line multiple times per day. Every commit results in a build. In continuous delivery, the same build is deployed to every environment, from development to production, and the team delivers smaller releases more often.
With continuous feedback, his team can provide “the pulse of the application development project” in real time, Comas said.
Continuous monitoring gives his team the ability to immediately alert the development team of any operational disruptions.
Comas said that NBC Universal’s software delivery life cycle was built on and powered through the IBM UrbanCode suite.
“It’s what I like to call ‘the central nexus of our DevOps,’” he said.
“We want to provide our consumers with the most comprehensive, robust, state-of-the-art, bleeding-edge DevOps capabilities in the industry,” he added. “We want to build software as efficiently as possible.”
The results
With DevOps, Comas said his team improved the quality of the code. He said the team is developing code “faster and more efficiently than ever and at much lower costs.”
His organization also brought together siloed teams: software development, quality assurance and technology operations.
But the real proof is in the numbers. For its Universal Orlando project, DevOps helped the business:

Reduce app deployment time from 2.5 weeks to 20 minutes
Reduce time for 1,000 test suite from 6-8 weeks to three hours
Instantly provision production-like test environments with Skytap through UrbanCode

Get started on your own journey
If you’re looking to get started with DevOps, the Bluemix Garage Method combines practices from design thinking, agile development, lean startup and DevOps to build innovative solutions.
“Anyone can learn from the experiences that we’ve had at building this stuff together along with the open source communities,” Diaz said, “by understanding the practices in the Bluemix Garage Method.”
Find out more about how you can get started with the Bluemix Garage Method here.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Azure Data Factory offer SAP HANA and Business Warehouse data integration

Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service that orchestrates and automates the movement and transformation of data, which support copying data from 25+ data stores on-premises and in the cloud easily and performantly. Today, we are excited to announce that Azure Data Factory newly enable loading data from SAP HANA and SAP Business Warehouse (BW) into various Azure data stores for advanced analytics and reporting, including Azure Blob, Azure Data Lake, Azure SQL DW, etc.

What’s new

SAP is one of the most widely-used enterprise software in the world. We hear you that it’s crucial for Microsoft to empower customers to integrate their existing SAP system with Azure to unblock business insights. Azure Data Factory start the SAP data integration support with SAP HANA and SAP BW, which are the most popular ones in the SAP stack used by enterprise customers.

With this release, you can easily ingest data from the existing SAP HANA and SAP BW to Azure, so as to build your own intelligent solutions by leveraging Azure’s first-class information management services, big data stores, advanced analytics tools, and intelligence toolkits to transform data into intelligent action. More specifically:

The SAP HANA connector supports copying data from HANA information models (such as Analytic and Calculation views) as well as Row and Column tables using SQL queries. To establish the connectivity, you need to install the latest Data Management Gateway (version 2.8) and the SAP HANA ODBC driver. Refer to SAP HANA supported versions and installation on more details.
The SAP BW connector supports copying data from SAP Business Warehouse version 7.x InfoCubes and QueryCubes (including BEx queries) using MDX queries. To establish the connectivity, you need to install the latest Data Management Gateway (version 2.8) and the SAP NetWeaver library. Refer to SAP BW supported versions and installation on more details.

What’s next

Beyond SAP HANA and SAP BW support, we also want to learn from you what other services in SAP stack you are using and looking to integrate. Go vote and comment on Azure feedback site.

Get started

To try out the new capabilities, provision a Data Factory from the Azure portal if you don’t have one, then click Copy Data to launch the intuitive copy wizard which will guide you through the configurations. In the source data store gallery, you will find SAP HANA and SAP BW as follows:

SAP HANA

After selecting SAP HANA from the gallery, specify the connection info on Data Management Gateway name, HANA server, user name and password. 

Then you will see a page with navigator and query editor. Browse and pick the measures and dimensions, a base SQL query will be auto generated in the Query Editor as reference according to your selection, and you can review and further customize there. Click Validate Query to see the preview data and schema. 

SAP BW

After selecting SAP BW from the gallery, specify the connection info on Data Management Gateway name, BW server, system number, client ID, user name and password. 

Then you will see a page with navigator and query editor. Browse and pick the measures and dimensions, a base MDX query will be auto generated in the Query Editor as reference according to your selection, and you can review and further customize there. Click Validate Query to see the preview data and schema.

Once you finish your settings on SAP source, continue following the wizard to configure the destination.

Reference

Learn more on Azure Data Factory from Introduction to Azure Data Factory and Move data by using Copy Activity
Refer to SAP HANA support and SAP Business Warehouse support respectively on connector details

Quelle: Azure