Kategorie: technology

Cognitive for the greater good at the Watson Developer Conference

Three years ago, I decided to learn how to code. A large part of the reason why I decided to embark on a career in tech was to empower myself with the ability to create an application, thereby providing value to society.
I was reminded once again why I chose to go down this route during IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty’s opening presentation at the Watson Developer Conference in San Francisco this November. Rometty invited Joshua Browder, a 19 year-old student at Stanford and co-founder of DoNotPay, and Ashok Goel, professor of computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology, on stage with her.

Browder was there to talk about the DoNotPay application he created. With it, users can appeal parking tickets automatically and — get this — for free. Browder said he was inspired to create his savvy legal bot after receiving a hefty number of parking tickets. I think it’s safe to say we can all relate to this dilemma.
According to Browder, his bot has successfully appealed 4 million in tickets in New York and London. This is, quite frankly, mind-boggling. Legal services are some of the most sought-after and costly services that most people use at some point in their lives. The problem is that most of us can barely afford legal fees. This application saves not only money, but also the time and headaches necessary to find legal counsel.
What’s even more impressive — and touching — was the direction in which Browder announced he is taking his application development efforts. He intends to use Watson Language Translator to create an application with an Arabic language feature to aide Syrian refugees through the legal technicalities of seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. Cognitive is not only applicable in the business domain, but can also be applied to multiple domains, including the advancement of human rights.
Goel discussed how he secretly created a teaching assistant (TA) bot using the Conversation API for his online artificial intelligence course. With only nine teaching assistants and 300 students, Goel’s bot, “Jill Watson,” reduced some of the TA workload in the class-wide forum, answering questions about the class, assignments and the subject matter.
Using the Conversation API and training in natural language classes, student teams at Georgia Tech used 1,200 question-answer pairs that enabled them to train and chat with Watson to answer engineering, systems, architecture and computing questions. Comically, only at the end of the semester, Professor Goel unveiled that Jill Watson was not an actual person. Professor Goel’s approach scores an A in my book.
As I reflected throughout the day, I concluded that the benefits and democratization of cognitive and #cloud computing technology in 2016 are truly a privilege. The types of problems we can solve are not unique to one domain, and the technology is easily and quickly accessible through cloud computing and the API economy.
It is an unprecedented time to live in a society in which the tools of modern technology merge with creative minds to solve business and social issues spanning the fields of healthcare, law, education and international relations. With that in mind, my question to you is: what will you create? As John F. Kennedy once said, “Ask not what can your country do for you, but what can you do for your country?”
Let Watson help you change the world. Learn how.
The post Cognitive for the greater good at the Watson Developer Conference appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Surviving Black Friday and holiday shopping with cloud

Just as steel is strengthened through the application of heat, human character is “strengthened” through surviving the crucible of the holiday shopping season.
My family has attempted to take me shopping in the wee hours of the morning on “Black Friday,” the day after the US Thanksgiving holiday, to no avail.  I’ve seen enough news reports about Black Friday to cure me of any desire to experience the phenomenon. I heard recently that there have been four deaths and 76 injuries over the last seven years of Black Friday shopping.
Thank goodness, then, for online shopping. Last year, between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, online orders topped $5.5 billion. While online shopping has been of great benefit to mankind by helping us avoid crowds, it also has introduced another experience that “strengthens” our character: coping with slow responsiveness.
There is a direct correlation between website response time while shopping, unhappy online shoppers, and impact to bottom-line sales. I’ve seen reports that indicate more than 40 percent of online buyers abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load. More than 80 percent of online buyers who are dissatisfied with their online shopping experience are unlikely to buy again from that site.
Now imagine a retailer that delivers its online shopping experience via the cloud. Using cloud, a key design point and benefit for retailers is elasticity through something referred to as “auto-scaling.”
Auto-scaling is fairly straightforward to implement. Cloud service providers have auto-scaling policies that are created when these workloads are deployed on cloud. These policies are defined and triggered based on environment resource usage (such as CPU, memory usage, or network traffic) or time-based settings (for example, Friday at 6 AM until Sunday at 7 AM).  Once deployed, additional instances are spun up and scaled when these thresholds are exceeded.
Of course there are a few other things that go with auto-scaling that must be considered. Load balancing, a properly architected online shopping application and having a disaster recovery / high availability solution as part of the overall online shopping solution will help provide a delightful shopping experience, regardless of the shopping season.
With these things in place, retailers may rejoice that they can scale to support all their online users (which means more revenue for them).
Online buyers can rejoice because not only can they purchase your gift efficiently, but they also don’t have to participate any other character “strengthening” exercises by being frustrated with a slow online shopping experience.
Create seamless retail solutions on the cloud.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Great mobile applications come from a great mobile development platform

Users increasingly expect more and more from their mobile applications.
Where mobile apps once simply supplemented a larger application with useful-but-limited functionality, they now — in many cases — have become the key interface that drives sales or user adoption of a service because they offer an “any time, any place” experience.
Increased functionality has led to increased complexity. Today’s mobile apps must interface with multiple data sources. They need to be secure. They must be responsive, and they have to evolve quickly to meet the changing demands of people that use them.
Mobile apps must also deliver analytics, which help with future development of both the application and the services it delivers.
To meet these challenges and others, a feature-rich development environment is required. A good development environment, in which complex applications are easier to create and maintain, will lead to faster-to-market applications and better developer and user experiences.
The IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation, available through IBM Bluemix, has recently been named a leader in “The Forrester Wave: Mobile Development Platforms, Q4 2016,” Forrester Research Inc., 24 October 2016.
Forrester “evaluated vendors against 32 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level buckets”: current offering, strategy and market presence. Each of the criteria assessed is important to application development and delivery professionals. Strengths and weaknesses in those criteria can determine the suitability of a particular tool.
Because the IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation is delivered on IBM Bluemix, developers have a rich, cloud-enabled environment at their fingertips, which is recognized in the Forrester report. Data access and delivery from multiple sources is an important aspect of modern, mobile systems of engagement.
Underpinned by IBM Bluemix, IBM MobileFirst provides a strong API ecosystem, giving developers secure access to systems of record through integration services, along with powerful analytics and DevOps capabilities. This further enriches and accelerates the development experience, enabling a two-speed IT model in which born-on-the-cloud mobile systems of engagement can rapidly evolve and change according to consumer and market need, while traditional, on-premises systems of record can remain on their typically slower change cycle.
Like many other professionals, developers like to work with tools that make their jobs easier: tools that are feature-rich, yet simple; that enable building common and complex functionality, such as interfaces and analytics at the click of a mouse; that help them get on with the important job of coding, and that make their apps stand out from the rest. To develop the best mobile applications, developers need a versatile, intuitive mobile development platform.
Download a copy of “The Forrester Wave: Mobile Development Platforms, Q4 2016” here and find out why Forrester says the IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation is a leader in its evaluation.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Chasing the trunk, but not too fast

As explained in a previous post,
in RDO Trunk repositories we try to provide packages for new commits in OpenStack
projects as soon as possible after they are merged upstream. This has a number of advantages:

It allows packagers to identify packaging issues just after introduced.
For project developers, their changes are tested in non-devstack environments,
so test coverage is extended.
For deployment tools projects, they can use these repos to identify problems
with new versions of packages and to start integrating any enhancement added to
projects as soon as it’s merged.
For operators, they can use these packages as hot-fixes to install in their RDO
clouds before patches are included in official packages.

This means that, for every merged commit a new package is created and a yum repository
is published in RDO trunk server. This repo includes
the just built package and the latest builds for the rest of packages in the same
release.

Initially, we applied this approach to every package included in RDO. However,
while testing these repos during the Newton cycle we observed that jobs failed
with errors that didn’t affect OpenStack upstream gates. The reason behind this
is that commits in OpenStack gate jobs are tested with versions of libraries
and clients defined in upper-constraints.txt files in requirements project
for the branch where the change is proposed. Typically these are the last tag-released
versions. As RDO was testing using libraries from last commit instead of last
release, we were effectively ahead of upstream tests, running too fast.

While this provided some interesting information and we could identify issues very
early, it made very difficult to get stable repositories that could be promoted and
used. After some discussions in RDO weekly meeting, it was decided to apply some changes
in the way libraries are managed to leverage the work done in upstream gates
but try to keep catching issues as soon as possible:

For master branch, it was decided to pin libraries and clients to the versions
included in upper-constraints for repositories served in http://trunk.rdoproject.org/centos7.
This repositories are used by RDO CI promotion jobs and marked as current-passed-ci when
all tests succeed.
Additionally, a new builder was created that chases master in all packages,
including libraries, clients, etc… This builder is able to catch issues based
on unit tests executed when packages are created. The produced repos are available in

http://trunk.rdoproject.org/centos7-master-head

but promotion jobs are not executed using them.

The differences between master and master-head are shown in following diagram:

For releases in maintenance phase we pin libraries to what’s found in
upper-constraints.txt file in the corresponding branch.

Implementation

In order to manage the libraries versions properly, RDO is using a peer-reviewed
workflow of gerrit reviews proposed to the rdoinfo project in

http://review.rdoproject.org.

You can see an example here.

A job is executed periodically that automatically creates gerrit reviews when
versions are updated in upper-constraints files. Manual approval is needed to
get the changes merged and the new versions built by DLRN builders.
Quelle: RDO

Solving infrastructure management in the transition to strategic IT

Has your department started its shift toward more strategic IT? If you have, you’ve probably also faced the question, “How will I manage my business infrastructure to optimize performance?”
Some of your peers have found an effective solution: managed cloud services.
In a recent Frost & Sullivan survey, 52 percent of IT decision makers said that a lack of in-house expertise hampers their cloud implementations. Of those using cloud today, 11 percent said finding qualified staff is an issue, and 91 percent are seeking outside assistance to deploy their clouds. Of those seeking help, some turn to managed service providers, and rightly so. Managed cloud services can offer big benefits as you balance strategic projects with the need to manage infrastructure.
What are managed cloud services?
Managed cloud services create a partnership between your business and a cloud service provider that extends beyond service provisioning.
In a managed services relationship, the provider contributes cloud technology, infrastructure and expertise while you retain control and oversight of application performance. It’s a best-of-both-worlds scenario. You gain expert assistance to deploy and manage your infrastructure without having to worry about using internal resources to physically deploy, manage and optimize it. The beauty is that you don’t relinquish workload control; you work with the provider to ensure that the infrastructure supports the performance you need to ensure optimal service operation.
For many CIOs, the benefits of managed cloud services are clear. In an atmosphere where your focus is on fast response to business needs, managed service providers offer experts who optimize your infrastructure to ensure application performance with high levels of security and compliance and guaranteed service-level agreements (SLAs).
Above all, businesses are seeking managed cloud providers that will work to align their services with business outcomes, and provide SLAs that guarantee it. Need infrastructure that bursts to accommodate a specific throughput to enable online sales? Your managed service provider should be able to accommodate such a request. If not, you should be looking elsewhere.
What should you look for in providers?
Frost & Sullivan has identified seven key criteria that you should look for when considering managed cloud providers who will meet your business needs, today and in the future. These include:

Core expertise in infrastructure and workload
Support for multiple hardware types and hypervisors
Hybrid management expertise
Customizable services and SLAs
Robust security features
Compliance assurance and related reporting
A robust portfolio of managed services

As your IT department shifts from the role of asset manager to strategic IT business driver, it’s critical to focus your resources wisely. For many CIOs, this means turning to managed cloud service experts. Managed cloud partners handle routine management tasks through experts with the know-how to tailor configurations to ensure optimal function, giving your business the best platform on which to succeed.
For more information on how to use managed cloud services as you shift to a strategic IT model, read our whitepaper titled “Cloud-Based Managed Services: Tips for Selecting a Provider that Can Help You Re-Tool Your IT Department.”
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud