With cloud solutions quickly replacing on-premise software, more business applications are being deployed than ever before. IT organizations and software vendors are increasingly asked to make sense of this new world. Can additional mission-critical workloads be moved into the cloud? How can existing SaaS workloads be rolled into enterprise infrastructure? The need to connect these … continue reading
Drones are everywhere. Literally. My friend Steve, a wedding photographer, always includes drone shots. Drones are used by the military, of course, as well as spy agencies. They are used by public service agencies, like fire departments. By real estate photographers who want something better than Google Earth. By farmers checking on their fences. By … continue reading
Cloud-based storage is amazing. Simply amazing. That’s especially true when you are talking about data from end users that are accessing your applications via the public Internet. If you store data in your local data center, you have the best control over it. You can place it close to your application servers. You can amortize … continue reading
In a world of instant gratification: What response time goals should be set, and how will we achieve them? The early years It was only a few years ago when site designers wanted to get their websites to load under 10 seconds, and load testing was only used to verify if it will crash or … continue reading
SEYTON The tests, my lord, have failed. MACBETH I should have used a promise; There would have been an object ready made. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Loops o’er this petty code in endless mire, To the last iteration of recorded time; And all our tests have long since found Their way to dusty death. … continue reading
Technical debt is often the elephant in the room that we choose to ignore, but we do so at our own peril. Technical debt is directly responsible for many of the problems we have in building high-quality software quickly, especially as companies move to more agile methodologies. Having problems releasing quickly? Can’t complete your testing … continue reading
The industry has reached an inflection point in our thinking about data. It’s no longer about slicing and dicing data sets; it’s now about creating insights. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Steve Mills, who’s on the data science team within the strategic innovation group at Booz Allen Hamilton, the giant consulting firm. … continue reading
Washington, D.C. — “It’s not time to regulate and control and tax the Internet.” Those are words of wisdom about Net Neutrality from Dr. Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, held here at the MEF GEN14, the annual conference from the Metro Ethernet Forum. Bob Metcalfe is a legend, not only for his role in inventing … continue reading
A few months ago, I pondered the growing gap between the way we solve problems in our day-to-day programming and the way problems are being solved by new techniques involving Big Data and statistical machine-learning techniques. The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge has seen a leap in performance with the widespread adoption of convolutional … continue reading
I like this new Microsoft. Satya Nadella’s Microsoft. Yes, the CEO needs to improve his public speaking skills, at least when talking to women’s conferences. Yet when you look at the company’s recent activities, what appears are lots of significant moves toward openness, a very positive focus on personal productivity, and even inventiveness. That’s not … continue reading
We go through technology cycles, and often things that are incredibly popular evaporate over time. Eight-track tape players gave way to cassettes, which gave way to iPods, which gave way to iPhones and iPads. You might recall products like the Motorola Razr that folks lusted for, but that entire class of phone is largely gone … continue reading
Malicious agents can crash a website by implementing a DDoS—a Distributed Denial of Service Attack—against a server. So can sloppy programmers. Take, for example, the National Weather Service’s website, which is operated by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. On August 29, the service went down, hard, as single rogue Android … continue reading
Companies of all sizes have successfully pushed their way through the clouds and into the digital world in the last several years. Thanks to the new Web development tools available today, everyone from individual developers to startups can have as much or as little public-facing Web presence as they need, and can select a Web … continue reading
Organizations today get that they have to collect data to stay competitive. They understand how to store it, retrieve it and slice it. The idea now is to understand the data itself, to detect patterns and trends that will help the organization get new customers or members, service them more personally and engage with them … continue reading
