The move to digital business platforms is compelling infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to rethink their data center strategies. Digital business platforms like AI, which encompasses machine learning (ML), deep neural networks (DNN) and the IoT, are driving requirements for agile and scalable compute infrastructures. In 2018 I&O leaders should focus on enabling increased agility … continue reading
Serverless technology is being called the next generation of the cloud. The first layer abstracted organizations from their physical servers. (Serverless, like cloud, of course, doesn’t literally mean ‘no server;’ it simply means not YOUR servers!) In its simplest terms, serverless is about developers writing code as a function, which the cloud provider then hosts … continue reading
Server provisioning has historically played a key role in IT’s control over enterprise systems: IT approved and provisioned developers’ requests for compute resources, enforcing security controls and policies along the way. Cloud technologies are being adopted widely, creating hybrid environments. Cloud undermines the traditional provisioning model; developers can now allocate resources themselves with the swipe … continue reading
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. To deliver more customer value, a software team decides to upgrade the database. They talk to their operations people, who say, “Sorry, we can’t upgrade to the latest version because another team shares the database, and their application won’t support it.” Resigned to their fate, they put the … continue reading
One of the questions raised by the August and September hurricanes that wreaked massive destruction on Texas and Puerto Rico concerns the role of software and digital transformation in accelerating rescue and recovery efforts. The question of the role of software and digitization in facilitating those efforts deserves amplified relevance because of the dramatic acceleration … continue reading
The use of low-code platforms is expanding, driven by the idea that non-developers working with the right tools can take a more active role in the development process. Application development has never been more complex due to the staggering number of components required for modern multi-tiered application development, which makes the idea of utilizing business … continue reading
Have you ever tried to read a complicated article with music on? Or turned your coffee machine on and completely failed to return to it when it was finished dripping? You might be confronting our most human of frailties: the fact that our brains just can’t keep track of a whole lot of information at … continue reading
Over the past few years, open source software has transformed the way enterprises operate and ship code. In an era where companies are striving to deliver the next best application, enterprises are turning to the sea of open source contributors to create projects faster and more effectively than ever before. For instance, 65 percent of … continue reading
Agile is often mis sold to senior management as a way of achieving quicker time-to-market, when the objective is really more accurate delivery to market. The dirty secret that we don’t tell anyone is that this actually comes at a cost… slower time-to-market! Yes, we are releasing more often (i.e. “sooner”), but it ultimately takes longer to get the … continue reading
Interactive software needs users to guide it through a process. But many steps have been or can be automated. The promise of machine learning is to automate any remaining un-automated steps. How should a software architect find the limits of automation and the right role for people in a system? In the early days of … continue reading
The days of software packages are coming to an end. Say hello to what JFrog co-founder and chief architect Fred Simon calls “liquid software.” “Once the number of applications and libraries and pieces of the software that needed to be managed reached a certain point, we started to see an exponential increase in the amount … continue reading
You’ve probably heard the conventional wisdom that teams should be aligned around a common goal. But while it’s important to have a shared business objective, the idea that everyone needs to have the same goal is selling your engineering team short. Productive tension is beneficial for organizations. In my engineering group, I have at least … continue reading
Like all technologies, smartphones are transitory. They came up from a blending of two-way pagers, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), MP3 Players (like the iPod), and have recently been taking over much of the space once occupied by tablets — which had a surprisingly short run as the “it” product. We are starting to give wearables … continue reading
As Marc Andreessen so aptly predicted, software is eating the world. A growing number of companies that developed physical products are adding software capabilities to their offerings. This means a growing need for companies to add software development expertise, software product engineering, embedded software engineering, ecosystem platform engineering, and new software-based application programming interfaces. The … continue reading
