In part one of this two-part post, I walked through how DevOps and the development philosophies of lean and agile are related. In part two, I make the case that similar to the dynamics I described in Recombinant Communications, where the application programming interface (API) economy and as-a-service industries are making possible revolutionary innovations in the enterprise communications market, these "genetics" concepts also apply elsewhere.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sure, you might be a bit unsatisfied with your current job as a technology professional, but consider that if you head out into the wild you could get nailed with interview questions such as:*How do you explain a vending machine to someone who hasn’t seen or used one before? (Bloomberg L.P. for global data analyst job)*How many fire hydrants are there in Los Angeles County? (Disney Interactive Studios, for software engineer)*Prove that hoop stress is twice the longitudinal stress in a cylindrical pressure vessel?OK, that last one comes from Elon Musk’s rocket-building SpaceX, and the average person isn’t going to be qualified to work there as a test operations engineer, but plenty of other tough interview questions for more mainstream tech jobs can be found among the list put forth this week by online jobs marketplace Glassdoor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This keyboard from Alinshi is flexible, soft, silent, waterproof, dustproof, lightweight, roll-up-able, portable and easy to store. If you're looking for a travel keyboard you can take with you and won't have to worry too much about, this one might fit the bill, especially when you consider it's been discounted 58% to just $13. See the discounted keyboard on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s hard to find a company that does not have some form of a hybrid (cloud and on-premise) ERP system. For most, that happened by accident. Someone in the organization bypassed IT and bought a cloud service to fill a need more quickly than they could with an on-premise solution. Salesforce.com, for example, has often been the start of a company’s march to a hybrid environment.Cloud applications can be relatively easy, low-cost solutions, but they do introduce new complexities when they need to be integrated with on-premise ERP systems and databases, or with each other. Ensuring that cloud and on-premise systems play nice together is just one part of the hybrid challenge. Making the right decisions about what will be in the cloud and what stays in-house is the other.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Richard McKinney set out to migrate the Department of Transportation (DOT) to Microsoft Office 365, he got a valuable lesson in shadow IT, one that could serve as a cautionary tale for other government leaders as they look to upgrade and consolidate their systems.McKinney, who only recently stepped down as CIO at DOT, had been leading a turnaround mission at the department since his arrival, but when it came time for the Office 365 rollout, he quickly discovered how chaotic the situation was, with hundreds of unauthorized devices running undetected on the sprawling network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies embracing DevOps practices are turning to chat-based and voice-guided virtual assistants to monitor applications, provision virtual machines and perform other operations. Such tools are instrumental in keeping developers and IT operations staff on the same page as they prioritize speedier software deployment in the digital era."The problems you run into in DevOps is teams are distributed," says Milan Hanson, a Forrester Research analyst who focuses on infrastructure and operations. "You can have the bot automate activities, address it in the chat like it's another person, and it will perform what you've asked it to do and bring the result back into the chat channel where everyone can see it. In a crisis, when people put together a war room or a SWAT team, being able to do that virtually through a chat is a huge advantage."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sixty-four percent of IT leaders say their departments are taking the steps necessary to drive innovation in their business. Are you one of them?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Several new high-profile Android smartphones are expected to launch this weekend in advance of Mobile World Congress, which opens Monday in Barcelona.Analysts and published reports have said these new Android smartphones will include: the BlackBerry DTEK70 (through a license with TCL); the LG G6; Moto G5 (the Motorola brand is owned by Lenovo); Nokia 8/P1 ( HMD holds the Nokia brand); Sony Xperia X2; the Huawei P10; and at least one model from HTC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ryzen is here. AMD said Wednesday that it plans a “hard launch” of its first three Ryzen processors on March 2, outperforming Intel’s high-end chips while undercutting its prices by as much as 54 percent. AMD executives confidently unveiled the first three desktop chips to attack Intel’s Core i7, supported by several top-tier motherboard vendors and boutique system builders. In many cases, executives said, AMD will offer more for less. The top-tier Ryzen 7 1800X will cost less than half of what Intel’s thousand-dollar Core i7-6900K chip does—and outperform it, too. You can preorder Ryzen chips and systems from 180 retailers and system integrators today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco is coming out with four next-generation firewall boxes aimed at giving smaller organizations protection that is better sized to their needs and engineered to minimize performance hits as additional security services are turned on.The devices make up a family called the Cisco Firepower 2100 series and are built around dual, multi-core processors. That architecture enables custom processing of traffic requiring threat inspection, and also supports tagging traffic that doesn’t need threat inspection so it flows through only the separate network processing unit.These features combine to provide ample processing power for services such as IPS and also lighten the total load on that processor by diverting traffic that doesn’t require those services, Cisco says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Modern software development is firmly focused on speed. The race to be first in the market is extremely competitive. To innovate, companies develop at breakneck pace, quickly establishing feedback loops that allow them to hone their software. Security, however, is often an afterthought for stressed developers and the business people pushing them to deliver faster.The importance of application security (AppSec) is widely understood, with 97 percent of respondents to the SANS Institute’s 2016 State of Application Security report revealing they have an AppSec program in place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In moments of optimism, I’d like to believe there is still some common ground upon which liberals and conservatives – even supporters of President Trump – can stand with firm resolve. One such patch should be ensuring privacy protections for the digital devices and sensitive personal information of all U.S. citizens when they pass through border checkpoints.Toward that end, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has signaled his intention to file legislation that would require customs and law enforcement agencies to acquire a warrant before compelling access to a U.S. traveler’s electronic device and also prohibit the growing practice of demanding social media identities and passwords. In a letter to John Kelly, director of homeland security, Wyden poses the following questions:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
CIOs appear to be a relatively happy bunch, despite the pressures of the job.Robert Half Technology surveyed 2,500 U.S. CIOs in 25 metropolitan areas. As a group, the tech leaders rated their overall job satisfaction at 8.5 in a 10-point scale. Respondents from 10 cities reported above-average happiness, with Miami hosting the most content IT chiefs.The top 10 cities for CIO job satisfaction, according to the tech staffing firm, are:1. Miami2. Boston3. Des Moines, Iowa4. Indianapolis5. Cincinnati6. Minneapolis7. Raleigh, NC8. Salt Lake City9. Dallas10. San FranciscoTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
San Francisco depends on a thousand miles of sewers to keep the city running smoothly.The city collects up to 500 million gallons of waste water in a day when it rains. This waste water is transported to one of three treatment plants where pollutants are removed before being discharged into San Francisco Bay.Processing sewage is challenging in San Francisco because the city has the Pacific Ocean on three sides of it. During storm conditions, groundwater and storm water can overload the sewage system. Physical, chemical and biological processes remove contaminants from the waste water. This produces environmentally safe water and sewage sludge as a byproduct.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Portions of this post were originally posted on the Puppet blog, and are republished here with Puppet's permission.As one of the world's largest banks, Wells Fargo competes by innovating its IT. At the heart of its innovation is the ability to continually launch, maintain and update software. You can get some sense of the scale when you hear that the Wells Fargo IT organization manages an infrastructure that supports 1 billion transactions per day.With more than 120,000 servers, 55,000 network devices, more than 2,300 applications in production, and more than 6,000 ways to deliver change to a server, Wells Fargo IT needs a consistent way to manage infrastructure, and a consistent way to plan each application's architecture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mobile device management vendor MobileIron announced today that it would form a dedicated IoT division and hire Intel and GE veteran Santhosh Nair to run it, in a move that analysts have been quick to praise.
MobileIron’s statement said that the company plans to have a saleable IoT product on the market sometime this year, and that the IoT offering will be designed with security in mind.
+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: How San Diego fights off 500,000 cyberattacks a day + Java and Python FTP attacks can punch holes through firewallsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In case you're wondering why Amazon is suddenly offering to clip $8.62 from most purchases of $50 or more this Wednesday, Feb. 22, here's the deal...The company is patting itself on the back for ranking #1 in an annual Harris Corporate Reputation Poll (just ahead of Wegmans, Publix, Johnson & Johnson and Apple). Amazon scored an 86.27, so is discounting purchases by the similar looking $8.62.MORE: The clumsy & shocking truth about computer-related injuriesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Buy at least $50 worth of stuff on Amazon today, Feb 22, and you'll see a magical $8.62 discount applied at checkout when you enter the code BIGTHANKS. Yes -- it's free money. Amazon is offering this one-day discount to celebrate a 86.27 score they were given on a recent corporate reputation survey. If you've been putting off some purchases, today might be a good day to pull the trigger. Head over to Amazon and get your discount right now.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple this week announced that its new 175-acre campus in Cupertino will be called Apple Park and is set to open in April. It will take six months to migrate 12,000 employees to the spaceship-like building, which Apple boasts runs entirely on renewable energy.Whereas Apple is generally cryptic about the locations of its facilities (the black hole that is Apple public relations, for example, recently failed to reply to our inquiry about its R&D spaces), the company is touting its new centerpiece for all things Mac and iOS. The facility, said to cost as much as $5 billion to construct, has previously been glimpsed mainly via drone fly-bys.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a recent blog post, Recombinant communications: The new 'genetics' of enterprise communications, I drew parallels between the impacts of genetic engineering and how the application programming interface (API) economy and as-a-service industries are changing the enterprise communications market. A set of techniques that are gaining increasing numbers of adherents among software developers in other industries is similarly providing new “genetic” material that also promises revolutionary changes. The innovation framework DevOps, microservices and containers are the tools and constituents of this new “genetic” engineering in the software world. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here