5 Pillars Of Enterprise PaaS Strategy

Platform-as-a-service is becoming a common solution to build out an agile, Web-oriented business, but watch out for risks. Editor’s note: The writer suggests PaaS started looking something like Force.com, as offered by Salesforce.com. It worked with Salesforce applications and will be used to provide new ones, provided you lived within its limits. But open-source PaaS, akin to Red Hat’s OpenShift, is way more general-purpose than that. The writer is a Red Hat employee. As platform-as-a-service enters the mainstream with increased enterprise adoption, it’s vital for IT managers to have a transparent, five-point strategy. Enterprises were reluctant to embrace PaaS within the early days by reason of vendor restrictions on application architecture and the chance of vendor lock-in. Modern enterprise PaaS offerings, mostly driven by open-source, are designed to attenuate these risks. Still, it is vital for organizations to develop a technique that helps them profit from the immense benefits offered by PaaS while also minimizing the hazards. Listed below are the five pillars of enterprise... Read More »

Developers Now Eyeing the Wearable Device Market

[ Developer] With smartphones now dominating cell phone sales worldwide, manufacturers are looking past tablets toward a better untapped device market. Judging by the success of the poorly-reviewed Samsung Galaxy Gear, the subsequent big market is shaping as much as be wearable devices. Market research firm Strategy Analytics predicted that the worldwide wearable device market will hit 125 million units sold by the year 2017. The firm believes that smart watches, smart glasses, and fitness bands could be the biggest sellers in wearable computing over the subsequent five years. As well as the arriving wave of smart watches and the headwear segment which will begin with Google Glass, Strategy Analytics believes that both Apple and Microsoft would be “key vendors” within the years yet to come. “Texas Instruments, Google, and Samsung have to be seen because the pioneering vendors for launching products at an early stage within the markets’ life-cycle, but key vendors among the many second wave of entrants will include Apple and Microsoft,”... Read More »

PHP 5.5 Updated, Version 5.3 On Its Way Out

PHP is the weapon of choice for lots Web developers. It’s an excellent thing then that the team behind it’s been very diligent with its releases. Surely, they’ve got recently released an update to handle some bugs which have popped up within the latest version. If you recall, the PHP Group in late June released PHP 5.5. This latest version included quite a few additions and improvements. For a refresher, here’s the entire new stuff that was added: Added generators and coroutines. Added the finally keyword. Added a simplified password hashing API. Added support for constant array/string dereferencing. Added scalar class name resolution via ::class. Added support for using empty() at the results of function calls and other expressions. Added support for non-scalar Iterator keys in foreach. Added support for list() constructs in foreach statements. Added the Zend OPcache extension for opcode caching. The GD library have been upgraded to version 2.1 adding new functions and improving existing functionality. A lot more improvements and fixes.... Read More »

How FedRAMP Can Accelerate Cloud Adoption

Federal IT leaders can foster cloud adoption by incorporating automated, repeatable security processes. Top 10 Government IT Innovators Of 2013 (Click image for larger view.) The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) has made important contributions to cloud security. However, FedRAMP focuses totally on security compliance for public government cloud services. The approval process requires a variety of time and may hinder innovation and drive up costs. However, FedRAMP leaders have a chance to enable — not simply enforce — faster government IT operations by fostering repeatable, high-quality, automated security operations — briefly, by championing a DevOps approach in government clouds. In the 1980s, US manufacturing faced fierce competition from abroad, which forced a big overhaul of producing processes. That led companies to target new business practices, like Lean, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints, to eliminate process constraints and optimize costs. IT operations are undergoing an analogous transformation today. DevOps, automation, and the cloud are on the core of this IT revolution. DevOps... Read More »

IBM Builds a wiser OpenStack Scheduler

IBM’s Platform scheduler uses more efficient resource management to enhance on OpenStack’s own scheduler operations. IBM has launched a proprietary product to work with OpenStack’s resource scheduler, the portion of the cloud software stack that assigns workloads to virtual machine hosts within the cloud. IBM has a history of mapping out resource schedulers, because of its experience in mainframes and with Tivoli Workload Scheduler LoadLeveler. To boot, the corporate acquired 20-year-old Platform Computing two years ago, adding its Load Sharing Facility to IBM’s scheduler product line. In making that acquisition, IBM, a supporter of the OpenStack open source code product, is saying unequivocally that OpenStack’s scheduler remains a rudimentary model of the breed and users might want to buy into IBM’s expertise to get the foremost out in their OpenStack clouds. OpenStack’s scheduler is static, staring at information inside the Nova SQL database before assigning a workload to a server host. (Nova is the provisioning and scheduling element of OpenStack.) However it looks just once,... Read More »