This phrase is new and it originated at Netflix back in 2010. I was listening to Nora Jones, a Netflix engineer at the AWS re-Invent conference few weeks back, where she talked about this. The principle of Chaos goes like this, “Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.” Distributed systems have too many moving parts and failures can occur at various levels – hard disks can fail, the network can go down, a sudden surge in customer traffic can overload a fu...

Quantum Computing is becoming quite the hot topic lately. With research being done by Google, IBM, Microsoft, universities, and a number of other players, it’s looking this is really going to happen. In fact, Google may just be weeks away from announcing the Quantum Supremacy milestone. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of Quantum Supremacy yet, it’s basically the point where a quantum computer can complete a computation in a short time where a classical computer can’t complete it at all. This is a big deal. While there are some simple quantum computers out there right now (you can ...

Robotic process automation (RPA), a concept that has emerged over recent years, is still in a state of rapid evolution, existing without a clearly defined end-state or direction. As such, vendors are experimenting and pushing their products into uncharted waters - successfully or otherwise. Nonetheless, we can be sure that artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to develop and impact on automation solutions as whole, even if at the moment these capabilities do not frequently exist within the RPA space.

Bitcoins are a digital cryptocurrency and have been around since 2009. As a substitute for legal tender, they are becoming the rage for investors and others but because there is no government agency auditing or performing regulatory oversights, you wonder if it is the perfect breeding ground for electronic nanocrime. Since the introduction of the Bitcoin, some competitors have emerged and the whole segment of cryptocurrencies are defined as Altcoins. Altcoins include Dogecoin, Ethereum Feathercoin, Litecoin, Novacoin, Peercoin, and Zetacoin. Some of these cryptocurrencies are considered impro...

In this article, we'll cover how you can monitor an application that runs on the Java Virtual Machine by going over some of the critical metrics you need to track. And, as a monitoring tool, we'll use Stackify Retrace, a full APM solution. The application we'll monitor to exemplify these metrics is a real-world Java web application built using the Spring framework. Users can register, login, connect their Reddit account and schedule their posts to Reddit.

The goal of Microservices is to improve software delivery speed and increase system safety as scale increases. Microservices being modular these are faster to change and enables an evolutionary architecture where systems can change, as the business needs change. Microservices can scale elastically and by being service oriented can enable APIs natively. Microservices also reduce implementation and release cycle time and enables continuous delivery. This paper provides a logical overview of the Microservices Reference Architecture that highlights various sub systems needed to support Microservic...

While walking around the office I happened upon a relatively new employee dragging emails from his inbox into folders. I asked why and was told, “I’m just answering emails and getting stuff off my desk.” An empty inbox may be emotionally satisfying to look at, but in practice, you should never do it. Here’s why. I recently wrote a piece arguing that from a mathematical perspective, Messy Desks Are Perfectly Optimized. While it validated the genius of my friends with messy desks, it also generated a barrage of good-natured ribbing from my super-neat friends. Emotions aside, the math is the m...

How is DevOps going within your organization? If you need some help measuring just how well it is going, we have prepared a list of some key DevOps metrics to track. These metrics can help you understand how your team is doing over time. The word DevOps means different things to different people. Some say it a culture and every vendor in the industry claims that their tools help with DevOps. Depending on how you define DevOps, some of these metrics may matter more or less to you and your team.

The enterprise data storage marketplace is poised to become a battlefield. No longer the quiet backwater of cloud computing services, the focus of this global transition is now going from compute to storage. An overview of recent storage market history is needed to understand why this transition is important. Before 2007 and the birth of the cloud computing market we are witnessing today, the on-premise model hosted in large local data centers dominated enterprise storage. Key marketplace players were EMC (before the Dell acquisition), NetApp, IBM, HP (before they became HPE) and Hitachi. Co...

In 1977, the Eagles released “Hotel California”, a song about drugs and the effects an addiction has on people. Putting "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device" in the context of our today’s digital lifestyle we find a lot of truth. There is a reason why Google provides most of its services for free or why Amazon wants us to have an Echo in every home or why Facebook has become our directory of “friends”. What looks pretty convenient is a threat. It is a threat to the end consumers but also a threat to the established economy. And even if we have the choice to check out any time – w...

The cloud revolution in enterprises has very clearly crossed the phase of proof-of-concepts into a truly mainstream adoption. One of most popular enterprise-wide initiatives currently going on are “cloud migration” programs of some kind or another. Finding business value for these programs is not hard to fathom – they include hyperelasticity in infrastructure consumption, subscription based models, and agility derived from rapid speed of deployment of applications. These factors will continue to drive cloud adoption into the foreseeable future.

"Evatronix provides design services to companies that need to integrate the IoT technology in their products but they don't necessarily have the expertise, knowledge and design team to do so," explained Adam Morawiec, VP of Business Development at Evatronix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

Decentralization of everything, the great new idea of which the web can’t stop babbling, might still seem a bit utopian if you inspect it closely. Yes, blockchains are likely to reshape our economy, or a huge part of it, and benefit considerably those who are currently unbanked. They might also facilitate the creation of rating/reputation systems that are not controlled by any single entity and thus allow people (say Uber drivers who’d like to work for Lyft) to switch employers without having to establish their credibility anew. They might give users complete control over their assets; prot...

SAP HANA was released as a work in progress. Tenants could leverage the increased speed of the HANA database immediately, but had to wait for the updated SAP S/4HANA applications to be released. Each release has allowed applications to more fully harness HANA, creating new, compelling reasons to migrate for a range of use cases. With the S/4HANA 1709 release, SAP has taken yet another step toward creating a complete product, with substantial benefits over Suite on HANA for most use cases. As with any ERP software, there will be future improvements and innovations, but at this point upgrading ...

Accessing files using traditional VPN software comes at a great cost. In this article we quantify true costs of supporting VPN's for remote access. Businesses of all types utilize VPN software solutions to provide remote access to their employees. How do we quantify the true Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of supporting VPN software? Why is TCO Important? Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com) defines TCO as the total cost of using and maintaining an IT investment over time. TCO calculations include a combination of direct costs (hardware, software acquisition, management and support) and indirect...

To get the most out of their data, successful companies are not focusing on queries and data lakes, they are actively integrating analytics into their operations with a data-first application development approach. Real-time adjustments to improve revenues, reduce costs, or mitigate risk rely on applications that minimize latency on a variety of data sources. In his session at @BigDataExpo, Jack Norris, Senior Vice President, Data and Applications at MapR Technologies, reviewed best practices to show how companies develop, deploy, and dynamically update these applications and how this data-firs...

With IBM, Google, and Microsoft pouring funding into the research of quantum computing, it's really starting to look like we are going to see the benefits in the next 5 - 10 years. Google may be just weeks from announcing they reached the quantum supremacy milestone and IBM may not be far behind either. Today, I wanted to share my thoughts on how quantum computing may affect cryptography as we know it. When we talk about the basic cryptography used for things like TLS when you access your bank's website, the premise behind securing your data is surprisingly simple. The certificate uses a pu...

Following a tradition dating back to 2002 at ZapThink and continuing at Intellyx since 2014, it’s time for Intellyx’s annual predictions for the coming year. If you’re a long-time fan, you know we have a twist to the typical annual prediction post: we actually critique our predictions from the previous year. To make things even more interesting, Charlie and I switch off, judging the other’s predictions. And now that he’s been with Intellyx for more than a year, this Cortex represents my first opportunity to see if his auguries made the cut.

"Grape Up leverages Cloud Native technologies and helps companies build software using microservices, and work the DevOps agile way. We've been doing digital innovation for the last 12 years," explained Daniel Heckman, of Grape Up in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

As we end 2017, I’m tired of writing “lecturing” blogs about what organizations should be doing to master data monetization in order to power their business models and achieve digital transformation. While the objective of every organization should be to master big data and data science (artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning) to drive “data monetization,” let’s take a breath and have some fun. My recent ankle surgery afforded me the opportunity to binge watch “Game of Thrones.” As I watched the impending battle between the White Walkers and humanity, I couldn’t help but ...