Application Release Automation: Why and Not
You have a classic car. You’re in the middle of restoring it, and it looks mighty sweet. Paint is polished, wheels are stock, hubcaps (or spokes) are shiny, engine is completely restored to original spec. But it has no gas tank. A bit of a stark comparison, but that’s where we’re at with application release […]
Self-Healing Service Management and the Future of DevOps
How can DevOps teams take continuous delivery to the next step? Part of the answer lies in self healing, which could optimize performance management and monitoring and underpin the software delivery pipelines of the future. Self healing means the ability of systems or environments to detect and resolve problems automatically. It eliminates the need for […]
When Did Safety Nets Become Optional?
There are various reasons why some organizations would not be interested in protecting their data. These reasons could range from the lack of financial resources to the lack of non-financial resources, such as engineers to implement a solution. Regardless of whether there is a good reason to not protect your data, the net result is […]
Replication: Complementing Disaster Recovery, not Replacing
Many people believe that replicating a distributed database is a replacement for having a solid disaster recovery (DR) plan or backup system. While there are certainly elements of truth to this, it is missing the mark. Replication is a complement to a well thought-out DR plan, not a replacement. What is Replication? Replication is the […]
Why Reinvent Deduplication? Isn’t Cloud Storage Cheap?
Most people assume cloud storage is cheaper than on-premises storage. After all, why wouldn’t they? You can rent object storage for $276 per terabyte per year or less, depending on your performance and access requirements. Enterprise storage costs between $2,500 to $4,000 per terabyte per year, according to analysts at Gartner and ESG. This comparison […]
Multi-Cloud: The Danger of Data Lock-In
Enterprises rarely think about cloud portability issues before transferring large amounts of data onto a cloud service provider such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. They were likely to ask questions on usage by other players in the industry (“the herd effect”) as well as the reliability of the cloud service and […]
Backup and Recovery for Distributed Databases
Over the past five years, applications have undergone a paradigm shift. They now require more agility, scalability and availability. The key trends in this era are driven by the use of social platforms, mobile devices and software as a service (SaaS). Being able to ingest large amounts of data from various sources and process that data in […]
Will Deduplication Solutions Work for Cassandra?
Cassandra is a popular next-generation database system (NoSQL) that powers the back end of high-performance web-scale applications in enterprises. It is database software for cloud applications that accelerates the organizations’ ability to power the growing number of cloud applications that require data distribution across data centers and clouds. While Cassandra offers high availability, it also […]
How to Fail at Test Automation
Let me start by admitting that I am not a test automation expert. I have done some work with test automation and have supervised teams who practiced it, but when it comes to the intricacies of it, I have to call a friend. It is from such friends that I have learned why so many […]
The 3 Compliance Questions to Ask
As companies move to cloud, they require more certainty around export compliance. Of the many complexities associated with cloud computing, export compliance laws arguably are some of the thorniest. From a legal and technical perspective, the export compliance laws currently on the books—as they vary from country to country—can make even the savviest and most […]
DevOps Without Scale, Part 1
When most people think of DevOps, what comes to mind first are continuous integration (CI) and continuous development (CD) pipelines. While they are arguably the most important parts of DevOps, they are not all of it. So, then, what is DevOps? It is a philosophy of how to build and operate software products and systems […]
4 Tech Imperatives in 2016 to Prepare for Tomorrow
Around the start of every new year come a bevy of predictions about what’s coming (or what someone, or some vendor, or some analyst hopes is coming) in the year ahead. Rather than do that, based on recent conversations with many CIOs, I’ve collected what I think are imperative to-do’s for CIOs and IT leaders […]