Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

December 04, 2014

Juniper Unbundles Switch Hardware, Software
Combining Junos with OCP hardware removes the burden of support, installation and maintenance from cloud providers and places it squarely on the vendor – in this case, Juniper. Juniper has not yet announced pricing for the OCX1100 hardware, but customers buying in large volumes will “be pleased,” says Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager for Juniper’s Security, Switching and Solutions Business Unit. Smaller-volume purchases will be priced comparably to Juniper’s internally designed top-of-rack switches, Davidson says.

Colo Business Thrives as Enterprises Move to Cloud
“The relative spend on (and prospects for) colocation, enterprise data centers, and cloud are all intertwined,” said Dinsdale. “Clearly enterprises are pushing more and more IT workloads onto the cloud, which diminishes their potential spend on their own data centers. Colocation is in an interesting middle ground. The growth of cloud is a big driver for colocation growth while trends in the enterprise are inhibiting growth in enterprise spend on colocation.” Most of the spend on retail colocation doesn’t come directly from enterprises, but from various types of service providers such as cloud, IT, telcos, and content providers.

The Power of Transformational Feedback – Entering the ZOUD
It might sound like something out of science-fiction, but the ZOUD – the “zone of uncomfortable debate” is a pithy phrase first coined by Professor Cliff Bowman as part of his research at Cranfield School of Management into the nature of high performing teams. It describes the area of creative tension that exists in any conversation that is more than a social chat and which needs to be penetrated if we’re going to be able to deliver the message we need to get across. For most of us entering the ZOUD does not come naturally since we have learnt the skills of comfortable debate and we have learnt to prize rapport highly in our everyday relationships.

6 Things Slowing Down Big Data
Organizations also gather data in bulk from other sources, namely sensor networks, remote sensing via satellites, vehicle diagnostic data and point-of-sale terminals. This trend of automated data collection has the potential to drive a radical transformation in how enterprises research, innovate, market and ultimately grow. While one would think this glut of information collected by machines would be a boon for enterprise users of Big Data, it has become apparent that it is a victim of its own success. While Big Data can be very useful to an organization, there are six issues that currently hinder the progress of the field.

COBIT 5 Advantages for Small Enterprises
The process of implementing this principle—and the other core COBIT principles—can be managed as simply or with as much detail as the enterprise deems appropriate. It is sensible to ensure that COBIT is properly consumed and understood, of course, but even taking a basic approach is likely to provide the organisation with tangible benefits when properly considered. COBIT 5 Implementation provides a good high-level overview of the principles and how they relate to the life cycle. It also provides a more granular description of how these principles can be applied in practice.

Operational Intelligence: The Next-Generation of Business Intelligence
With the emergence of the Internet of Things and the demand for greater customer personalization, companies are increasingly striving to quickly make sense of their data as it changes. Operational intelligence – the ability to analyze live, fast-changing data and provide immediate feedback – takes business intelligence to the next level and creates amazing new opportunities. Using in-memory computing technology allows live, fast-changing data to be stored, updated and analyzed continuously. Ever changing data streams enriched with historical data and then analyzed in parallel provide powerful feedback on the fly. The benefits of operational intelligence are far-reaching and applicable to a wide range of industries, Tincluding manufacturing, cable, and retail.

How Global Enterprises are Grappling with New Data Protection Demands
Yes, disruptions in protection will continue to limit product and service development. Yes, downtime will continue to take a bite out of revenue. And yes, incremental business opportunities, customer acquisition and repeat business will continue to be affected by the way we protect our data. But the bigger issue – the one that global enterprises of all sizes will really want to pay attention to – is how data protection will affect new business opportunities and revenue streams going forward. That’s why we’ll likely see these types of business consequences, along with a loss in market value, move to the top of the disruption list.

Around the World With BYOD
BYOD is stalling in Europe, too, according to an IDC Europe report earlier this year. One reason is that employees simply expect the company to provide a mobile device for work. "There's a cultural expectation here that your employer will provide you with the tools you need to do your job," says John Delaney, associate vice president of mobility at IDC. "You don't expect to have to buy it yourself." In Brazil, workplace regulations require corporations to provide all required technology to employees, according to the Dell study. In terms of IT maturity, many Brazilian companies lack the infrastructure and security requirements to easily integrate BYOD. As a result, BYOD hasn't taken off there.

Microsoft's microservices vision for Azure starts taking shape
Vanhoutte also said that the new BizTalk Micro Services platform will be available through Microsoft's Azure Pack, which will allow customers to run the service "in the cloud of their choice." According to another attendee, @phidiax, a platform preview of Azure BizTalk Microservices is due in the first quarter of 2015. "BizTalk Micro Services will all run in their own scalable container (similar to Azure web sites) and that the communication engine seems to be following the lightweight HTTP approach," Vanhoutte blogged.

NexGen Cloud: Pressure To Adopt Software-defined Data Center Tech Mounting
"There are tremendous pressures causing data center administrators to consolidate," he said. "Now they're talking about looking at new ways to do it." Some industries such as networking and storage are still basically stuck in the past, which is unlike server virtualization which has exploded since 2005 to offer customers flexibility, efficiency and the ability to decouple apps from the server hardware, Elliot said. "Now we're seeing similar trend lines across networking and storage ... When you think about networking and storage industries, these businesses are ripe for disruption," he said.

Quote for the day:

"An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot." -- Thomas Paine

December 03, 2014

Why FBI Is Wrong On Encryption Workaround
Regardless of what the FBI wants to call it, the fact of the matter is that by creating opportunities to circumvent security features in computing devices, the FBI would fundamentally make them less secure. Keys can be stolen, and the federal government hasn't been immune to data breaches. There are at least two likely consequences of pursuing this course. First, in a market where security is king, products and services with weaker security are less competitive. In the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, the US tech sector already has begun to lose out to European and Asian competitors that promise better security from the prying eyes of the government.

Natural Course of Refactoring – a Refactoring Workflow
Refactoring is not a new technique yet still quite a hot topic. It became an indispensable tool in a programmer toolbox. At least in theory. In practice surprisingly I still see that this practice is abandoned in many teams. “We don’t have time”. “We are not allowed”. I think that one of the problems is a false dichotomy thinking here. Refactoring is not a zero-one decision: do it or not. This is why I differentiate two types of refactoring: everyday refactoring and strategic refactoring.

Australia reaches mobile market saturation: ACMA
The ACMA Communications Report 2013-14 revealed that over the past year, there has been a small decline in operational mobile services in Australia, indicating that Australia's mobile landscape has reached saturation point. "Mobile services are now at saturation levels, with 2013-14 seeing the first, albeit small, decline in the number of mobile services in operation to 31.01 million mobile services" the report said. "There is evidence of a similar slowdown occurring in the growth of internet connections, with approximately 81 percent of Australians (14.7 million) having an internet connection in the home, with growth slowing over the past three years."

Big Data Ethics for Targeted Segmentation
Financial services and insurance firms face these practical dilemmas more often than businesses in other sectors, perhaps because denying people equal access to insurance, loans, and credit can be an effective tool for disenfranchising specific segments of the population. For example, consider scenarios in which an insurer decides to shunt specific minority groups into high-risk categories that, as a consequence, pay higher premiums or receive lesser benefits than other groups and/or are less likely to receive any coverage whatsoever.*

To Gain the Upper Hand, Amazon Disrupts Itself
While Amazon does not give numbers of Prime subscribers, most analysts think those numbers have been increasing rapidly from a base of 20 million. The Prime subscribers, who pay $99 a year for two-day shipping and all of the media, are the most enthusiastic Amazon customers. Set against that opportunity, what is a few missing media sales? “In essence it appears they’re mortgaging one smaller business” — media sales — “to drive the much bigger, longer-term business opportunity of overall retail leadership,” said Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group, a book industry research firm.

Proposed Cybersecurity Norms to Reduce Conflict in an Interdependent World
Microsoft believes that there are certain acts in cyberspace that, whatever the national or strategic aim, nation states should not pursue. Because of that we are today publishing a new white paper “International Cybersecurity Norms, Reducing Conflict in an Interdependent World”,as part of the EastWest Institute’s 2014 Global Cyberspace Cooperation Summit in Berlin, Germany. In the paper we recommend six cybersecurity norms with the intention of reducing the possibility that Information Communication Technology (ICT) products and services are used, abused, or exploited by nation states as part of military operations.

The Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts
it was not neural realism that led to most of the progress. The algorithm that has proved the most successful for deep learning is based on a technique called back propagation. You have these layers of processing units, and you get an output from the end of the layers, and you propagate a signal backwards through the layers to change all the parameters. It’s pretty clear the brain doesn’t do something like that. This was definitely a step away from neural realism, but it led to significant progress. But people tend to lump that particular success story together with all the other attempts to build brainlike systems that haven’t been nearly as successful.

#NoEstimates Project Planning Using Monte Carlo Simulation
Deterministic planning used these days forces certainty on uncertain situations and masks the uncertainty instead of highlighting it. It calculates the project-specific costs based on a detailed study of the resources required to accomplish each activity of work contained in the project’s work breakdown structure or in other words, taking an “inside view” on the project being estimated. For high-level planning, deterministic estimation of all work items is wasteful of people’s time and infers precision when it isn’t present. The techniques presented here are fast and for most of the projects they will produce more accurate results.

Eight Reasons IT Needs to Consider Multi-Factor Authentication
Today’s IT administrators juggle a whole portfolio of third-party platforms, including remotely accessed cloud apps, within their network environments. Security is clearly a top priority, but it must be balanced with cost, convenience, interoperability, effectiveness and ease of use – many of which often take precedence over security depending on the moment’s needs. Therefore, the IT administrator must ensure that any strategy to secure remote access must work seamlessly and easily with every platform in the portfolio, without breaking the budget. Multi-factor authentication does just that.

Exclusive: FBI warns of 'destructive' malware in wake of Sony attack
The five-page, confidential "flash" FBI warning issued to businesses late on Monday provided some technical details about the malicious software used in the attack. It provided advice on how to respond to the malware and asked businesses to contact the FBI if they identified similar malware. The report said the malware overrides all data on hard drives of computers, including the master boot record, which prevents them from booting up. "The overwriting of the data files will make it extremely difficult and costly, if not impossible, to recover the data using standard forensic methods," the report said.

Quote for the day:

"If you define your company by how you differ from the competition, you're probably in trouble." --Omar Hamoui

December 02, 2014

Fog Computing Aims to Reduce Processing Burden of Cloud Systems
"We clearly see data and content being created at the edge of the network via the Digital Universe (i.e. if it can create information, it will—be it a human, a car, a house, a factory... sensors)," Turner said in an email to eWEEK. "Quite a lot of this content won’t be sent over the network to be processed by the 'enterprise-based' cloud infrastructure. Rather, you will need cloud computing-like processing at the edge," he said. "In summary–this is a big deal," said Turner. Cisco estimates that there currently are 25 billion connected devices worldwide, a number that could jump to 50 billion by 2020. And these smart devices are generating a lot of data, according to the company.

Stephen Hawking's Communications Interface Gets Its First Overhaul In 20 Years
Three years ago, Hawking reached out to Intel for help. At that point, his typing speed had dropped to one word per minute, making it more difficult to communicate than ever. "He wanted to be more independent and in control of his system," explains Dr. Horst Haussecker, a senior principal engineer and director of Intel's Computational Imaging Lab. "When we came in, we said, 'We’d like to treat you like a scientific experiment.' Of course being a scientist, he really liked that idea." Today, Hawking and Intel unveiled the new interface, dubbed ACAT (Assistive Context Aware Toolkit).

InformationWeek Chiefs Of The Year: Where Are They Now?
We asked this year's Chief of the Year -- Bessant, who led a number of Bank Of America business units before getting tapped to head IT and operations -- whether she aspires to become CEO of BoA. No, she replied, saying the 24/7, all-consuming demands of that position aren't for her, even though she's a hard-charger herself. What follows is a "where-are-they-now?" look at the career paths of past InformationWeek Chiefs of the Year. We've selected Chiefs of the Year since 1986, sometimes with multiple selections in a single year, as we did in 2001 and 2013. Here are just 10 of those leaders.

BYOD Brings Corporate Contradictions
Educating and training employees about BYOD policies is tricky business. Policies tend to be like every other IT policy, which is to say, excruciatingly difficult to comprehend. Most people scroll to the bottom of an IT policy, check the agreement box and click "OK" -- all without reading a single word. "I don't think the users understand anything, because you have to read and learn," says another Wisegate member. "Generally speaking, our society no longer does that very well."

Too many IT workers not willing to up-skill, says Moneysupermarket.com CIO
"A lot of [the employees] have technology skills that I don't need, and I need new ones. You have to look at which of the workforce is just generally interested in technology and open-minded so that you can send them to training courses and conferences and they will put the time in to learn new skills," he explained. "You need to ask which ones of your staff are going to pick up skills in testing, development, cloud and big data, and which ones are going to say they have expertise in using Windows Server and don't want to learn anything new. "You have a level of attrition in your workforce because of those who are not willing to be an expert," he said.

Hortonworks accelerates the big data mashup between Hadoop and HP Haven
Via YARN, applications or integration points, whether they're for batch oriented applications, interactive integration, or real-time like streaming or Spark, are access mechanisms. Then, those payloads or applications, when they leverage Hadoop, will go through these various batch interactive, real-time integration points. They don't need to worry about where the data resides within Hadoop. They'll get the data via their batch real-time interactive access point, based on what they need. YARN will take advantage of moving that data in and out of those applications.

The Importance of Emotional Intelligence
And as the song goes, “The times they are a’changin’.” Managers used to be encouraged to hire employees based on intelligence (IQ) and expertise in their fields. Yet today’s experts say that you shouldn’t only hire the smartest people anymore. Rather you should look to hire employees who show good emotional intelligence (EQ), with good self-awareness, self-management, and the ability to maintain good relationships. It’s very disruptive to your company to have an employee who has little emotional intelligence. Whether employees are emotionally intelligent or not can make all the difference.

Uptime Institute to Evaluate All CenturyLink Data Centers for Operations Certification
The audit takes into consideration everything from the processes for servicing equipment and investment in training to effectiveness of its communications to staff and subcontractors. “Each individual site has its own process, each site gets audited,” said Matt Stansberry, Uptime’s director of content and publications. “It’s all about operational excellence,” said Drew Leonard, vice president of colocation services at CenturyLink.”We’ve stood on that for a very long time as an operator. We’ve established a history of uptime that is born out of the way we operate, train – on the methods and practices and procedures.”

10 Hottest IT Skills for 2015
The pace of job growth in IT may be slowing down, but it’s still moving at a strong clip. ... Moreover, the kinds of technical skills in high demand are those needed for enterprises in expansion mode, suggesting that organizations are continuing to invest in their IT infrastructures. “There are large initiatives [underway], and you have to have the people to get those done,” says Jason Hayman, market research manager at TEKsystems, an IT staffing and consulting firm. Here’s a look at the 10 IT skills that the 194 IT executives who responded to our survey said will be most in demand heading into 2015.

José Valim on the Elixir Language, Concurrency, Iteration
It’s a functional language, if you are going very basic in terms of code, it’s a functional language, you package your code inside modules, but I don’t really like a lot the functional language description; in my talk that I am giving here at GOTO I say Elixir is a functional programming language, but more than a functional programming language, it’s a concurrent programming language, more than being concurrent is being distributed, and that’s one of the parts I like to focus on because when you come to Elixir you need to start to think how you design in terms of those processes, so I think that's the big difference, even with other functional programming languages.

Quote for the day:

"The person who says it cannot be done, should not interrupt the person doing it." -- Chinese saying

December 01, 2014

FDA Scrutinizes Networked Medical Device Security
To protect networked devices, the FDA recommends that manufacturers consider controls such as limiting access to devices via authentication features, using layered authorization models based on specific user needs, and implementing methods for retention and recovery of device configuration by authenticated users. For purposes of documentation, manufacturers should provide a formal hazard analysis of the risks associated with the device, as well a description of the plan for how identified and unidentified cyber security risks have and will be addressed. Failure to heed the recommendations on the implementation of appropriate controls or documentation of those controls could result in delayed or even denied premarket submission reviews.

Big video data could change how we do everything — from catching bad guys ..
A Skybox satellite might photograph or video a particular city several times per day, not for the static or moving imagery, but for the data gathered in each frame of each image. The significant value of the data comes from comparing it across time or location, looking for change. For example, when is that store’s parking lot full? What is the progress of the highway construction to build a new overpass? Which roads are open for faster delivery service during the day? Which movie theaters attract the most customers week-to-week? How have weather patterns changed over the past 24 hours, or from the same time last year?

Top cybersecurity predictions of 2015
As noted by Websense, healthcare data is valuable. Not only are companies such as Google, Samsung and Apple tapping into the industry, but the sector itself is becoming more reliant on electronic records and data analysis. As such, data stealing campaigns targeting hospitals and health institutions are likely to increase in the coming year.

Be more productive by moving systems from a PaaS to an interoperable IaaS
A Platform as a Service (PaaS) sits atop an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) running virtual machines. The PaaS developers control information systems that are anywhere in the development system life cycle, from development to deployment. A group of developers builds an information system while another group tests a different system. Whatever roles the developers take, the group leader should keep communications open with an IaaS infrastructure specialist, who can perform certain tasks a PaaS developer can't.

Contract Testing
Whenever some consumer couples to the interface of a component to make use of its behaviour, a contract is formed between them. This contract consists of expectations of input and output data structures, side effects and performance and concurrency characteristics. Each consumer of the component forms a different contract based on its requirements. If the component is subject to change over time, it is important that the contracts of each of the consumers continue to be satisfied. Integration contract tests provide a mechanism to explicitly verify that a component meets a contract.

Public Cloud Storage Can Be Efficient, But the Potential is Still Limited
“The balance that all companies are heading towards is ‘how can I take my existing investment, leverage a set of cloud resources where I possibly can, and do so in a way that increases my efficiency?” he said. “It’s so clearly the direction of the future.” Practitioners say, however, to be careful when assessing the pricing promises. “The assumptions I see are never realistic,” says Nancy Newkirk, vice president of technology for IDG (the parent company of Network World). And what’s more, the pay-as-you-go model ties your hands a bit when it comes to budgeting. Storage becomes a recurring monthly expense and “you can’t defer any expenses,” she says. “I don’t think it’s a slam-dunk on the cost evaluation.”

Bank of America Tech Chief Cathy Bessant: What I Believe
"I believe technology is part of the journey. It's not the destination. The destination is great things for clients and customers and for shareholders and employees. Technologists who think that what they do is the destination miss the point of being in business. The belief that a charismatic technologist can drive a level of investment into a black box over a period of time just doesn't prove out over time. Most people in my chair who are like that, four-and-a-half years later they're gone."

Please stop innovating – digital heresy from Accenture
We often hear from chief executives ‘We don’t really see any billion pound opportunities. We see some things that move the needle here and there, but we don’t see anything that really moves the needle. We don’t agree on the size or urgency of digital.’ That’s more important. You better agree how quick digital matters because that’s usually what’s going to galvanize organizations into doing something. Some of this is down to not having the stomach for digital investments. We kind of know what needs to happen, we might even understand the investments required, but we don’t have the stomach for it, it’s not where we are.

DFDL - An Open Standard for Data Modeling
In this age of big data, the bulk of the data begging to be analyzed is not XML, but rather it is other structured and semi-structured formats, both text and binary. Until now, no open standard has been developed that is capable of describing a wide variety of such data formats. Learn about the Open Grid Forum (OGF) proposed recommendation for a powerful language that describes many different data formats, the Data Format Description Language (DFDL).

How enterprises see big data analytics changing the competitive landscape next year
The study also shows that many enterprises are investing the majority of their time in analysis (36%) and just 13% are using Big Data analytics to predict outcomes, and only 16% using their analytics applications to optimize processes and strategies. Moving beyond analysis to predictive analytics and optimization is the upside potential the majority of the C-level respondents see as essential to staying competitive in their industries in the future. A summary of results and the methodology used are downloadable in PDF form (free, no opt in) from this link: Industrial Internet Insights Report For 2015.

Quote for the day:

"You can learn from anyone even your enemy." -- Ovid

November 30, 2014

Three Questions with Slack’s CEO
Slack emerged from the wreckage of Glitch, an online game that Stewart Butterfield, a cofounder of Flickr, built with his company Tiny Speck but shut down last year. While working on Glitch, the four-person Tiny Speck team was divided between San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver, so they cobbled together a new communications tool by slowly adding features—like the ability to archive and search messages—to a simple IRC-like instant-messaging app. They used the tool so much, Butterfield says, that they stopped using e-mail to communicate. After shuttering Glitch, the company switched its focus to popularizing the new communication tool.

Parallelism is not concurrency
The first thing to understand is parallelism has nothing to do with concurrency. Concurrency is concerned with nondeterministic compositionof programs (or their components). Parallelism is concerned withasymptotic efficiency of programs with deterministic behavior. Concurrency is all about managing the unmanageable: events arrive for reasons beyond our control, and we must respond to them. A user clicks a mouse, the window manager must respond, even though the display is demanding attention. Such situations are inherently nondeterministic, but we also employ pro forma nondeterminism in a deterministic setting by pretending that components signal events in an arbitrary order, and that we must respond to them as they arise.

Richardson Maturity Model
Recently I've been reading drafts of Rest In Practice

: a book that a couple of my colleagues have been working on. Their aim is to explain how to use Restful web services to handle many of the integration problems that enterprises face. At the heart of the book is the notion that the web is an existence proof of a massively scalable distributed system that works really well, and we can take ideas from that to build integrated systems more easily. To help explain the specific properties of a web-style system, the authors use a model of restful maturity that was developed by Leonard Richardson and explained at a QCon talk. The model is nice way to think about using these techniques, so I thought I'd take a stab of my own explanation of it.

We need to be pragmatic about the principle of net neutrality
As an organising principle, net neutrality explains why the internet has enabled such an explosion of creativity over the past 30 years. It meant that if you were smart enough to invent something that could be done with data packets, then the internet would do it for you with no questions asked. What that meant was that the barriers to entry for innovators were incredibly low – which is why Tim Berners-Lee was able to launch the web and a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg could unleash Facebook on an unsuspecting world. Net neutrality created what the Stanford scholar Barbara van Schewick calls “an architecture for permissionless innovation”.

API Best Practices: Spec Driven Development
One of the main reasons for REST was to focus on long-term design, or as Dr. Roy Fielding pointed out, we as humans, as developers are very good at short term design, but horrendous at long-term design. What may seem like a good solution in the short-term, if not carefully thought out and tested long-term is likely to create big problems down the road. Think of it like this, how many times have you written code only to look back at it three months later and wonder “what was I thinking?!” Your API is a contract, and unfortunately the one thing you cannot fix is poor design. For that reason it’s important to avoid editing your spec during the development cycle.

Integration Architecture: How We Got Here
Developers generally try to build loosely-coupled software components in their applications, so the basic concept of SOA is intuitive to many developers. In the late 2000’s, however, the perception of SOA became tied to the ESB architecture, which many argue is not the best way to build SOA. Though I’ve given the basic definition of SOA above, it is trickier to define in practice [1]. ESBs and SOA received some backlash from the development community because enterprise-scale ESBs often seem to have too many unnecessary features or too strict a tie to a vendor’s product suite. Developers using ESBs also tend to use them as a place to hide complexity, instead of dealing with it more effectively.

Steve Jobs Lives on at the Patent Office
Altogether, a third of the 458 patented inventions and designs credited to Jobs have been approved since he died. Jobs’s patent documents are a record of Apple’s history from startup to one of the world’s largest companies. His first patent, won in 1983, is titled simply “Personal Computer.” One of the newest, filed after his death and approved in August, covers the design of the dramatic glass cube that’s the entrance to Apple’s store on Fifth Avenue, in Manhattan. Some Apple watchers have questioned if Apple can succeed without its iconic founder. Its current CEO, Tim Cook, is a pragmatic supply chain specialist who rose through the company making sure Chinese factories delivered iPhones on time. Cook’s name has never appeared on any patent.

Harnessing Situational Awareness
To help you get started on your project assignment, you are given “high level requirements.” They are disparate materials that state business problems vaguely, but urgencies clearly. If the problems are not solved, the company will lose market share, revenue, and be beaten by its competitors. You assess all the project information. Nothing is clear except the following: (1) a fixed budget, (2) a fixed timeline, and (3) a partial project team of three full-time people, two more to be recruited, and a few others who are here part time for your project. In addition, you have some offshore developers that you can pull in. As you talk with various stakeholders and members of the project team, you begin to get a picture of the personalities you will be working with throughout the project lifecycle.

Distributed Configuration Management and Dark Launching Using Consul
The usage of Consul has also been driven by a need to improve an existing piece of our system – the Dark Launch mechanism. It’s one of the key ways Hootsuite is able to be nimble and keep our deployment rate up, without sacrificing quality. Dark Launching, or “feature flagging”, allows us to have control over very granular pieces of the codebase through an interface we created. We can modify the execution of our code at runtime by setting conditions on the execution of a certain block, such as boolean true or false, random percentage, specific members, and more.

Mitigating Mobile Risk: It’s Time for Action
Unfortunately, many security professionals continue to apply, or attempt to apply, traditional computing solutions to this new mobile reality -- and it's just not working. One big reason is that traditional network computing security features like firewalls and anti-virus protection do nothing to address the risks posed by unsecured mobile applications, or so-called "leaky apps." This seemingly harmless collection of icons, the individual squares we tap and access every day, can act as a gateway for attackers seeking to find and exploit weaknesses.

Quote for the day:

"Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others." -- Jack Welch