I believe that some style of PaaS is the long run. But I’m also coming to believe that pure-play public PaaS — which is, the Herokus and Google App Engines of the realm — are doomed so far as serious deployments go. They’ll be the DreamHosts of tomorrow, great for folk spending $10 a month or less on a small website, but essentially ignored by people with serious business needs. The exception: Microsoft’s Azure, which, as a “full stack” provider, can meet the danger- and regulatory-driven patching requirements of these serious businesses. The downfall of pure public PaaS is that, from a cloud security and risk perspective, it is a far more challenging model than either software-as-a-service or infrastructure-as-a-service. With both SaaS and IaaS, you delegate security, availability and compliance concerns to a single vendor, which ordinarily will make contractual commitments about the way it will meet those needs. With non-Azure pure public PaaS, however, you’re using a stack (Web server, Web framework, database server,... Read More »
Facebook Encourages Developers To Upgrade To Its iOS 7 SDK
Current rumors suggest that the iPhone 5S and iOS 7 are just a month away. As such, Facebook is prepping its SDK for the eventual release of the latest version of iOS and desires its developers to be ready besides. In an update at the Facebook Developers blog, Jason Clark writes that Facebook is doing things a bit differently this time around with reference to its iOS development. Rather than anticipating the overall release to begin issuing bug fixes, Facebook is operating to deal with as many bugs as possible before launch. He also says that any developer engaged on iOS 7 should want to upgrade to Facebook SDK for iOS 3.7.1 or newer. You’ll grab that here. Alongside the changes to its iOS development, Clark also announced some changes to Facebook’s platform policies. For starters, developers are not any longer required to manage promotions only within apps. They are able to now send out promotions on Page Timelines and Facebook Web apps. Obviously, you... Read More »
Salesforce.com, Workday Keep Cloud Momentum Rolling
Cloud computing heavyweights Salesforce.com and Workday both reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue increases last week, maintaining their impressive growth track records. It’s fresh evidence that enterprise applications are going in the cloud, with new InformationWeek research showing that the fashion isn’t limited to small- and midsize-businesses or to lightweight “edge” applications like travel and expense management. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> Salesforce.com’s latest quarter ended July 31 was highlighted by a 31% year-over-year increase in revenue to $957 million — well sooner than the $941 million revenue mark expected by analysts at Wells Fargo Securities. The rise was fueled partly by the company’s $2.5 billion acquisition of cloud-based marketing firm ExactTarget. However the bigger story is Salesforce.com’s effort to focus on “the biggest and essential companies on the earth,” as Benioff put it during last week’s conference call with analysts. [ Want our latest insight on enterprise apps? Download Research: Cloud Software: Where Next?. ] Salesforce.com’s customer list already included the... Read More »
Amazon’s Mobile Associates API Brings Retail Shopping On your Mobile App
Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer and it sells nearly everything. It’s also host to 1 of the world’s largest mobile platforms with its Kindle Fire devices and Amazon Appstore for Android. Now the retailer is combining the 2. Amazon announced today the launch of the Mobile Associates API. It’s a brand new tool that enables developers to integrate Amazon’s retail store into their mobile apps. In other words, a developer could sell physical items via in-app purchases, and the sale of these physical items will be handled by Amazon’s retail operation. “Developers now be capable of create an excellent deeper connection between their app and the goods customers value and buy through Amazon.com,” said Mike George, Vp of Amazon Appstore, Games and Cloud Drive. “Imagine a developer of a nutrition and fitness app can now offer their customers the power to buy vitamins, supplements and fitness gear in the app, directly from Amazon.com. It offers the client a more relevant experience and gives... Read More »
Hire Goats, Not Outside DevOps Engineers
9 Tips on how to Avoid IT Midcareer Slump (click image for larger view) The latest rage in IT hiring is the DevOps engineer. Quick searches on LinkedIn and Dice.com show openings for roughly 250 such jobs, often for positions on a “DevOps team.” The flaw during this thinking is that the DevOps competency is something that may be hired or crafted by individuals or teams. If you’ve followed the DevOps movement, by now that it’s about building collaboration and cooperation between software developers and other IT pros. Thus, in hiring a DevOps engineer, you’re trying to usher in an interloper to make sweeping cultural changes throughout your company. Read that last sentence again, and view how well most organizations will reply to an interloper trying to institute sweeping changes. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> In the event you must hire for this critical position, so be it, but I highly recommend which you instead identify someone from within your... Read More »