The Benefits of Serverless Applications in a Data-Rich World

Serverless applications are the source of much confusion of late. For one thing, they’re not “serverless” at all. In fact, it’s more accurate to refer to them as “multiserver apps” — their components are distributed among cloud servers far and wide and assembled on demand.

This begs the question, “Do you know where your app is?” In today’s microservices-based computing environments, the question becomes meaningless. Exactly where particular pieces of a full-blown application live matters much less than the network’s ability to retrieve and assemble the required components accurately, and in a timely manner, when and where they’re needed.

Such widely distributed applications demand a new approach to development, deployment, maintenance, and updates. Forbes’ Janakiram wrote in a March 22, 2016, article that the growing interest in serverless apps is driven by two trends: mobility and the Internet of Things. In both cases, applications need to follow the IFTTT model: respond in an instant as current circumstances dictate in terms of location, time, input, and context. Read more..

How the Financial Industry Is Doing DevOps

The second DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) Europe, once again held in London, brought together the DevOps enterprise community. The financial industry was well represented, giving the attendees a unique perspective on the challenges facing this heavily regulated industry and how DevOps is helping to overcome them.

One of DOES’ main goals is to gather high-fidelity experience reports and to gather evidence that negate the objections to the adoption of DevOps in an enterprise environment. The set of presentations by large financial institutions highlighted their common challenges: legal, compliance, security requirements and the prevailing bureaucratic and siloed culture of such organizations. The approaches taken to takle those challenges also have commonalities: automated continuous delivery pipelines; lean approaches and organization alignment based on value streams; automated testing; automated compliance and security checks; close collaboration with legal and compliance departments. Some organizations are also moving away from outsourcing and into insourcing. Read more..

The Best Technology Conferences of 2017

tech-conferences-2017
If you are looking for the best technology conferences to learn what’s new in tech world. We’ve put together few technology conferences to help you choose the ones you want to attend in 2017.

Digital Transformation Forum 2017

Web: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/digital-transformation-forum-2017-tickets-32189411396

Date: June 22, 2017

Location: Fort Lauderdale, FL

Join at the Intersection of Business, Technology, Marketing, and Strategy at this Can’t Miss Executive-Level Forum

Adapt and Thrive in Changing Times

Are you frustrated with the ever-quickening pace of technology change? Digital Transformation is one of the most challenging topics for CIO’s, CMO’s, and CDO’s (and their CEOs) across the globe. It’s about establishing new relationships with your customers, employees, and other stakeholders in your business, and giving them the platforms, tools, and opportunities to achieve the best outcomes.

Looking AHEAD 2017

Web: https://www.thinkahead.com/looking-ahead-2017/

Date: June 22, 2017

Location: Chicago, IL

When you attend Looking AHEAD, you’ll be immersed in a day full of sessions from industry-leading experts and thought leaders on topics spanning across the data center and in the cloud. You’ll have unlimited opportunities to meet with like-minded IT professionals, partners, and AHEAD staff, and bring back key takeaways to use in your own organization!

NEXT 2017

Web: https://www.nutanix.com/next/experience.html

Date: June 28 – 30, 2017

Location: Washington, DC

NETWORKING AT .NEXT

Don’t miss these unique opportunities to meet like-minded professionals and have fun in the process.The .NEXT 2017 Conference is helping to build the future of the Enterprise Cloud and will introduce you to the product experts who will provide new solution demo’s that demonstrate the latest features and provide answers to your questions right there live.

O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference

Web: https://conferences.oreilly.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-ny?cmp=ot-data-confreg-home-ainy17_cio

Date: June 26 – 29, 2017

Location: New York, NY

Discover the untapped opportunities of applied AI

The brightest minds in artificial intelligence will gather in New York to share how to implement AI in real world projects. Join us as we explore the future of AI—and how to get there from here.

Gartner Catalyst Conference

Web: http://www.gartner.com/events-na/catalyst/?

Date: August 21 – 24, 2017

Location: San Diego, CA

An IT strategy is only as effective as the ability to execute it.

Gartner Catalyst Conference gives a comprehensive view into the technologies that will power the future of your digital business. Through sessions tailored to your role and key initiatives, you’ll gain the insights into topics such as big data, cloud, IoT, DevOps, AI and machine learning needed to guide you through an entire technology project lifecycle — from strategy to architecture to execution.

INDUSTRY: The Product Conference

Web: http://indsum.com/

Date: September 14 – 15, 2017

Location: Cleveland, OH

TAKE TWO DAYS IN SEPTEMBER TO STEP OUT OF EXECUTION-MODE, GET INSPIRED BY OTHER MAKERS AND REALLY THINK ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT.

Product teams from across the world convene once again in the center of America’s industrial heartland on September 14th and 15th for INDUSTRY 2017. Join 600 others in learning, sharing and celebrating the latest disruptive trends in product management.

Eventful Forum 2017 – The New Paradigm of Virtualized Consumerism

Web: http://eventfulforum.com/

Date: September 14 – 15, 2017

Location: New York, NY

Eventful Enterprises presents the second annual gathering of the Eventful Forum, an executive conference dedicated to addressing the future of business through the world’s converging industries. Last year, EF2016 hosted participants from 12 cities around the country and 4 countries around the world. For this year’s followup, EF2017 will be the first conference anywhere to bring the martech and fintech worlds together under one roof, to address the most urgent and actionable collaborations needed for facing the imminent new paradigm of virtualized consumerism.

Strata Data Conference

Web: https://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata-ny/

Date: September 25 – 28, 2017

Location: New York, NY

Where business is going—and how to get there first

For those who know how to turn algorithms into advantage, data delivers insight, efficiency, and untapped opportunities. Strata is a unique opportunity to tap into the leading minds in technology and business and network with thousands of data scientists, engineers, analysts, and business managers.

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Web: https://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata-ny/

Date: October 1 – 5, 2017

Location: San Francisco, CA

The World’s Most Important Gathering of CIOs and Senior IT Executives
Turn your vision into action at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, where the world’s top CIOs gain a strategic view of the emerging trends shaping IT and business. Through an unparalleled intersection of Gartner analysts, industry experts, peers and solution providers, you’ll explore new ways to approach critical challenges, make decisions with confidence and achieve greater impact as a leader.

Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference

Web: http://www.gartner.com/events/na/data-center

Date: December 4 – 7, 2017

Location: Las Vegas, NV

The Premier Destination for Infrastructure, Operations Management and Data Center Leaders

Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations Management & Data Center Conference 2017 is the premier gathering for senior IT and business leaders, offering a depth and breadth of I&O topic coverage unavailable at any other event. This year, 60+ members of the Gartner I&O analyst team will present fresh, research-based content and actionable, unbiased advice—all designed to accelerate decision-making, prioritize your initiatives and link I&O strategies to the goals of the business.

WBENC 2017 National Conference & Business Fair | Las Vegas, Nevada 2017

Date : June 20-22, 2017
Location : Las Vegas, Nevada
Venue : Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino

WBENC 2017 National Conference & Business Fair

The National Conference & Business Fair is the largest conference of its kind for women business owners in the U.S. The WBENC National Conference & Business Fair is attended by Women’s Business Enterprises (WBEs); senior executives and procurement representatives from the Fortune 500 and the U.S. Government; and select partner organizations whose missions’ align with WBENC’s vision of expanding women’s business opportunities in the marketplace. With three days of robust programming, the conference features lectures and presentations from today’s thought leaders, engaging panel discussions, 1:1 MatchMaker sessions, networking receptions, and a notable Business Fair. [Know more about the Conference]

About Idexcel: For more than 19 years, Idexcel has been achieving excellence by delivering high quality custom application development services, devops services, aws cloud services, innovative testing solutions, and providing competitively priced IT staffing services to our esteemed clients. Our name, “Idexcel”, is a representation of our core principle “Ideas to Excellence”. We are relentlessly driven by results and take pride in our customer centric engagement models. We blend our clients’ needs with proven delivery models and highly talented execution teams to deliver outstanding results.

Headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, Idexcel has offices and delivery locations in the US, Europe and Asia Pacific supporting global clients.

Allolankandy Anand Sr. Director Technical Sales & Delivery will be attending this event. For further queries, please write to anand@idexcel.com

AWS makes Greengrass Generally Available

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that AWS Greengrass, software which allows customers to run AWS compute, messaging, data caching, and sync capabilities on connected devices, is now available to all customers. With AWS Greengrass, devices can run AWS Lambda functions to perform tasks locally, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices while leveraging the full processing, analytics, and storage power of the AWS Cloud. More than a dozen AWS partners, including Annapurna, BSquare, Canonical, Digi International, Intel, Lenovo, Mongoose, Qualcomm Technologies, Raspberry Pi, Samsung, Technicolor and Wistron are integrating AWS Greengrass into their platforms so devices will come with AWS Greengrass built-in. To get started with AWS Greengrass, visit https://aws.amazon.com/greengrass/. Read more..

Check Out 10 New AWS Cloud Services of 2017

aws_cloud_servies
Amazon has given a new lease on life to the Cloud Services through DevOps, especially since the launch of the AWS services. Right from data scooping, to bringing on the revolution of facial recognition, Amazon has done it all. If you go thinking about the past, you would realize how simple life was in the Cloud earlier. All you needed was your credit card to start rooting your machine.

Gone are the days of the past, where technology was limited to the developer’s knowledge. As more and more developers are trudging forward, the Cloud services being offered are becoming more and more complex by the day. With complexity riding high on the wings of multi-functionality, it’s becoming difficult to reign in all the services within the Cloud itself. For this very reason, there is a lot of change which needs to be accepted, with the introduction of the AWS methodology.

Without further ado, let’s delve deeper into the 10 new AWS cloud services you never expected:

Glue: Data collection is the most challenging part of data science; when it comes to analysis, if your data is correct, the analysis is so much easier. Gathering data and putting it into a usable format is like solving 90% of the job. Glue, an Amazon initiative, runs Python based scripts which collect data and transform it into a usable format, before transporting it into the Cloud for further use. The Python layer can be used, even when you don’t know how to write the Python script. Glue is well equipped to run jobs without interruption. You can bid adieu to all manual efforts, once you have Glue doing all the work for you.

FPGA: FPGA or Field Programmable Gate Arrays have been used extensively by hardware designers to make their software ends meet. With Field Programmable Gate Arrays, you don’t need to worry about building custom masks or try and keep fitting multiple transistors into one piece of silicon. An FPGA is well designed to rewire itself to act like a real chip, while keeping in mind the software configurations.

Who needs such kind of technology? Bitcoin miners, who use cryptographically secure hash functions a gazillion times to speed up their searches can benefit extensively from the use of this technology. One can rent machines to run repetitive algorithms, which are further embedded into silicon, allowing programmers and software developers to ease out their work drastically.

Blox: As Docker gains a lot of publicity, Amazon comes to the rescue again, as it allows people to run Docker anywhere. Blox is designed in such a way so as to run the optimum number of instances; since it is event driven, one can write the logic in a simplistic manner. The best part is that one does not need to keep tracking the machines, to understand which applications are being run.

X-Ray: Loading job instances and managing efficiency has always been a tedious task for a lot of people. In order to ensure the smooth functioning of your cluster, the developer had to write elaborate code to track the progress at every step. This promoted a lot of people to purchase third party tools to do their bidding. However, Amazon’s X-Ray is a step ahead, since it offers to take care of all your work for you. In other words, it’s beating the competition and emerging as a clear winner, when it comes to watching your stack for you.

In simple words, as soon as your website gets the request for data, X-Ray has been enabled to trace the flow from your network of machines and services. Once the information is traced, the X-Ray suite aggregates the data from different zones and regions to create a one stop shop on a server. This way, the authorized personnel can access the data as and when required.

Rekognition: Rekognition is pretty much aimed at image work, since it allows your apps to do a lot more than just store images. It chews through images, while searching for objects. By using some of the best known and well tested algorithms, Rekognition has been able to perfect the art of data science. All you need to do is point the algorithm at the image (the image needs to be stored in the Amazon Cloud) and you will immediately get a list of objects you would like to choose. The payment is on a per image basis, which makes it even trendier.

Athena: Amazon’s Athena lets you run queries on their S3 model. Forget about writing extensive, complicated looping coding. With Athena, everything is done and ready for you. By using SQL based queries, Athena has been tuned to charge you per byte of information searched. Thankfully, the price is around $5 per TB, so it turns out to be rather cost effective for developers and companies alike.

Lambda@Edge: Amazon loves to invent and make the lives of developers easier. Lambda@Edge is exactly another app in Amazon’s fully functional kitty; it lets you push Node.js code out to the edges, where it runs and performs the desired tasks. Unlike other data, which is usually stored at a centralized data store on the server, waiting for the requests to pour in from different sources, Lambda@Edge believes in cloning data, to enhance efficiency. Once the data is enhanced, the results are delivered in microseconds, making it available to different users in a more time effective manner. You get billed only when the code is running, so you save on the cost of renting different machines to pull data.

Snowball Edge: Some people are extremely finicky, when it comes to getting their data in one place. Snowball Edge is the answer to the problems of all such people, who want everything in one place only. It enables data to be shipped anywhere one wants, with a shipping label. If you have data stored in the Amazon Cloud, and want it to be physically delivered somewhere, Amazon will copy it into a box and ship it to the desired location. Such is the convenience you get with Snowball Edge. This way, one prime purpose is served. Since downloading large blocks of data can often be slow and very time consuming, it becomes easier to have Amazon do the work for you.

Pinpoint: As your company grows, so does your network of customers’, subscribers, employees etc. There will be times when you would want to push some updates through messages. However, most of the times, such mails usually end up in the junk folder, which makes it highly difficult to track. With Pinpoint, targeted mailing is a beneficial feature for companies and businesses alike. As soon as your users are ready to receive the mails, Pinpoint will shoot out the messages, allowing everyone to receive the mails in their inboxes. Further on, once the messages are delivered, Pinpoint will help you collect and report data efficiently, so that your campaigns can be fine tuned as and when required.

Polly: Audio interfaces always have a better conversion rate than normal text based messages. For this very reason, it becomes imperative to use Polly, software which helps convert text messages into sound waves, which are easily understood by the human ears. By using the concept of speech synthesis, it converts text to sound, to make conversions easier and stronger.

These were the top 10 AWS Cloud services which are doing the rounds of the market these days. With extended features all geared towards making your life easier, there is a lot more to AWS than meets the eye. Which service are you using today?

AWS Public Sector Summit 2017 | Washington, DC

Date : June 12-14, 2017
Location : Washington, DC
Venue : Walter E. Washington Convention Center

AWS Public Sector Summit for government, education and nonprofits

Why should you attend?

AWS is bringing government, education, and nonprofit technology leaders from around the world to Washington, D.C this June 12-14, 2017 for their eighth annual AWS Public Sector Summit.

What to expect in 2017
• 2 full days
• 1 Pre-Day (June 12) with bootcamps and deep-dive workshops
• 100+ breakout sessions on topics such as DevOps, big data, Internet of Things, security and
compliance, adoption models, scientific computing, open data, and more
• 2 keynotes with a lineup of global speakers
• 2 parties and many more networking opportunities with partners and peers
• Cloud Lounge
• Direct access to AWS technologists

[Know more about the Conference]

About Idexcel: Idexcel is a global business that supports Commercial & Public Sector organizations as they Modernize their Information Technology using DevOps methodology and Cloud infrastructure. Idexcel provides Professional Services for the AWS Cloud that includes Program Management, Cloud Strategy, Training, Applications Development, Managed Service, Integration, Migration, DevOps, AWS Optimization and Analytics. As we help our customers modernize their IT, our clients should expect a positive return on their investment in Idexcel, increased IT agility, reduced risk on development projects and improved organizational efficiency.

Jed Tonelson Director Cloud & DevOps Sales will be attending this event. For further queries, please write to jed.tonelson@idexcel.com

Advantages of DevOps and Continuous Delivery

DevOps
Given the rate of growth of DevOps in the technical industry, CIOs and tech teams are always on the lookout for newer opportunities to develop digital products and lower development costs. Keeping both things in mind, the thoughts about continuous delivery and DevOps come into the picture.

DevOps implementation is most practical when it is implemented with the best known continuous delivery practices. During the implementation stage, it’s necessary to put into use activities related to building, testing and deployment. This way, the necessary software is always enabled and available in a ready to release mode.

Thankfully, by adopting DevOps through Continuous Delivery, a business can gain a lot of advantages, which includes technical advantages as well as financial gains.

Here are some of the advantages which a business can obtain:

• Shorter development cycles: A faster time to market helps businesses respond to the changing market conditions, which can enable businesses gain a competitive edge over other businesses in the market.
• Increase in productivity: Increased productivity means better efficiency, which results in higher throughput and lowered costs.
• Increased customer service: With higher quality software results, there is a lot of customer satisfaction which helps improve customer retention and attracts new customers for a business.
• Delivery of emerging technologies: Since businesses are getting a competitive edge on their competitors, developing DevOps tools can help companies earn a position in the market for their products and services.
• Flexibility: Extending an ability to extend and replace the existing tool sets, DevOps lends a helping hand when it comes to sustaining future technologies.
• Facilitates business growth and change: DevOps help facilitate change and business growth, by ensuring best practices are followed at all given periods of time.
• Updates are easy to track: Even though there are a lot of changes within DevOps, it’s nevertheless easy for everyone involved to stay abreast of the changes.
• Improved interpersonal relationships: When people work together, there is harmony between people, which helps improve interpersonal relationships. Either way, this helps improves the company’s working culture as well.

In a non DevOps environment, there are often chances of tension developing when it comes to releasing new features and stability. On the other hand, in a DevOps environment, the entire team is often responsible for driving development and stability. This combination of shared code base, test-driven techniques and continuous integration helps reduce the complexity of problems, making them an instant hit with the businesses.