Kategorie: technology

How did we develop software without Docker?

Software developers have used container technology for some time now, but why is Docker so darn popular?
With Docker, a developer can use a command to build everything needed to run an application into a single package. Docker’s developers built its API to fit seamlessly into most development and deployment workflows.
Remember when it was a pain to move an application from one cloud environment to the next? This is no longer the case with Docker. Until recently a developer would write an application and then have to cobble together the runtime, database and operating system.
Now with Docker, a developer can package an application in a standard image and transfer it to virtually any server anywhere, whether a physical server in your company’s private cloud or an off-premises, virtual cloud such as Bluemix. With Docker, the developer no longer needs to know in advance where their application will end up running.
IBM developed an open integration model with Docker and the open-source Docker community. By combining IBM Java, Docker and WebSphere Application Server Liberty, a developer can now take advantage of faster startup time, half the memory usage, and dramatically faster input/output when compared to a traditional virtual server.
WebSphere Application Server Liberty is lightweight and designed for cloud. It makes it easier to build and deploy any kind of enterprise Java application on the public or private cloud. You can incorporate web, mobile, social, big data or any other services needed to innovate and move your business forward into the future.
You don’t have to worry about which cloud environment on which your application will be deployed. With Docker, you can package your application into a container with one command and ship it anywhere. This means much less effort and troubleshooting for your development team.
To learn more about how you can increase productivity with WebSphere Liberty, click here, or to see a comparison of costs between WebSphere Application Server Liberty and open source tools, click here.
The post How did we develop software without Docker? appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Cognitive computing assistant is a marketer’s new best friend

Fortune 1000 companies and other large enterprises manage data about website performance, customer relationship management and marketing automation platforms, just to name a few sources.
They may also have data from e-commerce, point-of-sale, loyalty or guest systems, as well as reports and presentations: marketing plans, strategic plans, audience personas and research, media plans, and so on. And then there’s the third-party data. It is a lot of information from a lot of systems that are owned or licensed.
It can be tough to make sense of all that data.
At Equals 3, we’re looking to help marketers solve that problem. Lucy, our cognitive computing assistant, is a trusted partner that’s easy to teach and talk to. She analyzes structured and unstructured data to help with research, segmentation and planning.
A cognitive computing companion
Equals 3 created Lucy as a cognitive computing companion for marketing professionals. We’re partnering with IBM and working with IBM Watson to make sense of all that marketing data using one natural-language interface.
With Lucy on their team, marketers can get what they need when they need it. Lucy can read and interpret every report, PowerPoint, PDF, Word document and repository of HTML. It can review each row and column of a spreadsheet or database at a moment’s notice.
Why we chose IBM
Lucy is developed and hosted in a hybrid IBM Bluemix environment. Through Bluemix, developers access numerous Watson APIs.
We chose to work with IBM because the technology was more robust than other providers’ solutions. IBM has a specific roadmap and is willing to partner with us on our journey. Additionally, Fortune 1000 companies — our target market — trust and use IBM on premises, so the ability to extend an on-premises environment to the cloud is beneficial.
Plus, IBM has a global presence, which is essential for companies that have restrictions on data leaving their countries.
Lucy at work
The ability to feed all that data through one natural-language interface means a huge boost in productivity for marketers, which means a big time savings.
For example, one of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods companies is using Lucy to review several thousand research studies formatted in PowerPoint, along with as much as 4 terabytes of customer survey data. The company wanted to mine data in a way that was meaningful to the business versus having to go out and spend up to $200,000 each time it wanted to understand the data in a different way.
Equals 3 implemented its cognitive computing solution for the organization within four weeks. Now it can get at all of the research and all of the data that was previously locked away. The company can mine and use the data in seconds versus previously taking weeks to repurpose.
Lucy is a master strategist and can inform everything from in-depth market analysis and audience segmentation to media mix modeling and targeted-channel planning.
Learn more about Lucy and Equals 3 in Martech Today, The Wall Street Journal and Twin Cities Business.
Find out about IBM Marketing Cloud, a cloud-based digital platform.
The post Cognitive computing assistant is a marketer’s new best friend appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Sleep easier with availability monitoring

Necessity is the mother of invention. Anything that can fend off the Saturday 2 AM call to my fellow developers, or even just reduce the pain of late-night troubleshooting, is worth the invention. If your team uses DevOps practices, offers your organization continuous delivery and is responsible for delivering always-on code, you know what I mean.
So what happens when a developer does get that call? It depends. We sometimes struggle a bit the first few times. Some of us are still discovering the smart way to instrument our application to get a quick pulse of the system rather than jumping from log to log to figure it out. That can hurt in the middle of the night, right?
More experienced developers might handle the call differently. They can go to a metrics dashboard and quickly pinpoint which part of the system needs a reboot – or even better, run a runbook automation.
No matter how you approach solving a problem, you are always keen to know whether an outage affects customers—and how badly. “Is the meter still ticking?” some developers say. This is where IBM Bluemix Availability Monitoring comes in.
Bluemix Availability Monitoring (BAM) can monitor your Bluemix Cloud Foundry application through 15 global points of presence by running continuous tests against it. You get to create tests which grow in sophistication every release, updated nearly every month. By running tests, you get a comprehensive view of how bad the outage is, and if it affects customers. Furthermore, you can see how the availability and response time of your synthetic tests aligns with your code push into the system.
Imagine you are in a continuous delivery mode making several daily code pushes. You BAM dashboard can tell you exactly which push caused the hiccup and set up alert notifications so there’s no need to keep staring at the UI. And to ensure all is well, some of us check the trend lines before leaving office or going to bed.
It takes only a few minutes to get set up with BAM, watch this video to see how:

You can get set up with BAM here. You’ll notice that when the tests run, BAM accurately measures how much time each element of a web page took to load from different parts of the world. Thid will also come in handy when you’re looking to optimize page response times by modifying images, style sheets or content delivery networks.
Interested in learning some additional DevOps best practices?  Watch this space. In future posts, I’ll blog  about developer pain points and more ways to solve them. At IBM, we are developing solutions in the same way you are – building them cloud native. We’re always glad to share tips and best practices.
I’d love to hear your feedback or questions, just leave a comment below. You can learn more about the importance of monitoring applications here.
The post Sleep easier with availability monitoring appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Data security is a must for building a digital business

Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller said in 2012, “There are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be.”
Companies — both business-to-business and business-to-consumer — are driven more than ever to rapidly adapt to digital business. The ways companies and their customers seek and consume information, make purchase decisions, and buy and sell goods and services have undergone rapid changes.­­­­
As the digital economy grows and expands, roping in multitude of channels including cloud and mobile, the need for data security has grown exponentially. The internet is filled with examples of data security breaches from large and small businesses, and how, in turn, those breaches affect companies’ biggest asset: customer trust.
Competing in the digital era
To remain competitive, organizations must focus intensely on the quality of their interactions with customers and business partners and innovate across more channels than ever, via web and mobile platforms, in the cloud, and through applications and services made possible by application programming interfaces (APIs).
As an enabling technology, APIs are rapidly making the new digital economy and accompanying opportunities for growth not only increasingly possible, but also more pervasive every day. Yet along with new opportunities, these innovations also bring new risks.
Digital business propels organizations to find answers to some compelling questions. They include:

How can organizations be open to change, yet remain secure?
How can businesses protect workloads, data and application infrastructure?
How can organizations add the capability to support new services for customers and integrate the necessary technologies within the existing infrastructure?
How can companies do this fast and stay ahead of the curve, considering the above questions concern competitors as well?

Providing needed data security
Success in the digital economy requires organizations to transform their client and business-to-business interactions by delivering a secure experience across a diverse ecosystem.
Businesses across industries are using APIs more than ever before. Mobile and cloud platforms use APIs to deliver application services and help businesses in their digital transformations. With this excitement comes deep responsibility and concern for security.
The explosive growth in data, ubiquitous use of mobile devices, and emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT make security a constant and ever-changing concern. The all-encompassing, multi-channel nature of today’s digital economy — including mobile computing, the cloud, APIs, business-to-business interactions and web services — requires close attention and powerful tools to ensure secure operations.
As former US National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism Richard Clarke noted, “If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, you will be hacked. What’s more, you deserve to be hacked.”
Check out the whitepaper from IBM that explores how organizations can meet the security challenges of the digital economy and how a secure, multi-channel gateway that supports participation in that economy through five key scenarios can help securely meet rapidly changing business needs at every interaction.
Learn more about API gateway and check out the Secure Gateway service in the IBM Bluemix environment.
The post Data security is a must for building a digital business appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Stay tuned to Thoughts on Cloud for cloud integration stories

Hello to regular readers of Thoughts on Cloud, home for news and expert analysis from the world of #cloud computing. I am thrilled to announce that, beginning today, the cloud content previously published at the IBM site In the Making will now run here.
We’ve moved to make it easier than ever for cloud professionals to learn, explore and engage with cloud stories from across IBM. On Thoughts on Cloud, we’ll continue to deliver insight and analysis on cloud integration topics from IBM thought leaders and experts, as well as from the broader world of cloud computing.
Some of the topics we’ll be adding or expanding include:

Application deployment and platforms
Business process
DevOps
IT Service Management
Software integration for cloud, business and applications

We’re always interested in your feedback. Follow us @IBMCloud and share your opinions, questions and ideas for future posts.
Stay tuned to Thoughts on Cloud by bookmarking our landing page or subscribing to our RSS feed.
The post Stay tuned to Thoughts on Cloud for cloud integration stories appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

What’s New in Red Hat CloudForms 4.2 (Video)

In the following weeks, I will post few videos recorded using Red Hat CloudForms 4.2. This first one is a short demonstration highlighting the latest enhancements coming with this release, including:

New dashboards for all infrastructure providers
Topology views for infrastructure, cloud, containers, network and middleware providers
Performance improvements
Administration tools using Cockpit
Networks enhancements for cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform)
New Middleware provider, including Hawkular integration
Notifications enhancements

 

 
Additional information on Red Hat CloudForms can be found on the Red Hat website.
 
 
Quelle: CloudForms