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Articles by Mark Boyd
The first signs of spring
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Development of a Social Determinants of Health Screening Tool (SDoHST): qualitative validation with stakeholders and patients in South Australia
Abstract Background It is well-established that social determinants of health contribute to health and well-being. Among the social determinants of health, health-related social needs (HRSNs) are unmet needs that can be identified by the health care system and addressed through referral to community services. Despite the importance of identifying patients with HRSNs, none of the few screening tools for HRSNs available internationally have received a comprehensive psychometric validation.
Serverless Architecture: Five Design Patterns
Amazon Web Services is seeing five predominant usage patterns for its Lambda serverless service, according to a presentation at the APIdays Australia conference last week in Sydney, given by AWS Solution Architect Cassandra Bonner.
What to Consider When Making the Shift Toward Multi-Cloud
As enterprises shift from private clouds and on-premise solutions to multi-cloud, distributed systems, the ways that applications are tested, developed, and put into production will also shift. Microservices have taken a place in many of today’s hybrid cloud deployments, with developers and operations teams alike finding the need to streamline and improve their workflow automation. Enterprises can make use of platforms such as Cloud Foundry to help break down their monolithic stacks.
The Emerging Cannabis Industry Seeks Help from the Cloud
Going from black market to legal business can brings a special set of challenges. Good thing technology is stepping in to help. “Data is critical in every industry and especially cannabis,” said Nick Kovacevich of Kush Bottles, in an interview last week. Not only do growers need to be taught how to use different software products for each part of the “seed to sale” cycle, but they also need to learn what he calls “white collar” business practices.
Google Firebase Trims the Middle Tier for Faster App Dev
At the Serverlessconf conference in New York last month, Google engineers Mike McDonald and Frank Van Puffelen explained the secret sauce of the Google Firebase: Namely, that the app doesn’t need to query the database, instead it listens for change notices from the database itself. “We’ve eliminated the middle-tier. Your clients talk directly to managed services,” McDonald said. “Data stored in a Firebase database is retrieved by attaching an asynchronous listener to a database reference.
Rocana Could Eliminate the Blame Game from Microservices Troubleshooting
“It’s not my side that’s broken,” is a seemingly never-ending game in play most often by teams spending too much time determining the root cause of a problem. When one adds microservices to the mix, the blame-game gets complicated further — as teams will then be divided up into subsets based on which application or service with which they are working.
AppFormix Pinpoints Noisy Neighbor Problems with Intel On-Chip Technology
The deep complexities that come with container orchestration surface when defining how to solve noisy neighbor problems on scaled out, distributed platforms. In terms of containers, the noisy-neighbor problem is one where the workload in one container, container pod, or virtual machine (VM), is hogging most of a machine’s resources, much to the detriment of other workloads running on the same server. But how does the server administrator know which container or virtual machine is the noisy one?
Brooklyn Microgrid: A Blockchain-based Platform for Locally Traded Electricity
Conventional, centralized power grids as we know them require a lot of maintenance for expensive infrastructure to transport electricity over long distances. And, as some may remember from the prolonged blackouts that Hurricane Sandy unleashed upon New York City and a dozen other states back in 2012, one major disadvantage of centralized grids is that they aren’t completely reliable and can be quite vulnerable to disruptions.
Unleash the Cattle: The Rancher Container Orchestration Platform Now Generally Available
Running containerized applications at the consistency levels the enterprise demands, while still having the flexibility to shift or pivot one’s container management strategy, has been a request on many developers’ wish lists. Offering some help in this task is Rancher Labs, which Tuesday, has released 1.0 of its namesake container platform, a project in work for the past 18 months.
Kubernetes 1.2 Offers Rolling Updates, Persistent Volumes
At the Google GCP Next conference last week in San Francisco, the company demonstrated how it was possible with Kubernetes to update a heavily used distributed application while keeping that app running. For a Kubernetes 1.2 on-stage demo, Greg DeMichillie, director of program management for Google Cloud Platform spun up a service and then used load testing software to dispatch 20,000 requests-per-second to the service.
Spark 2.0 will offer Interactive Querying of Live Data
The next version of Apache Spark will expand on the data processing platform’s real-time data analysis capabilities, offering users the ability to perform interactive queries against live data.
The Year Ahead: The Promise of Stateless Computing
When New York serial entrepreneur Daniel Ilkovich wanted a start a new business, one that would allow businesses to easily create their own business workflows, he based his technology on the Amazon Web Services’ Lambda service. The resulting service, called Dexter, provides a way to build simple applications by linking together services from different APIs. One sign of a promising new technology is how it opens the door to more features or even new business models.
Red Hat OpenShift 3.1 Opens the Door for Both .NET and JBoss Middleware
The walls that began a-tumblin’ down when Microsoft and Red Hat announced their historic partnership agreement last week, just keep on a-fallin’ . In time for the KubeCon conference going on now in San Francisco, Red Hat released for general availability version 3.1 of its OpenShift platform. This new version establishes critical bridges that didn’t exist before that link major parts of its technology stack — some of which were Red Hat’s parts to begin with.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry Supports Docker Images, Not the Docker Ecosystem
When a word processor is capable of opening a file in another word processor’s format, we don’t say the first word processor supports the second one. That’s a very similar distinction to the one Pivotal is now drawing, in announcing that Pivotal Cloud Foundry now works with the Docker container image format.
Getting a Handle on Node.js Deployments with Dynatrace
Hypothetical scenario: The marketing department for your company has just prototyped a sharp new website. They built it with the JavaScript Angular framework, so comes with mad personalization logic that draws data from various data sources. The company’s executives are pleased with the site, so now it is up to the system administrators to get it working quickly and to make sure it hums along with minimal latency. This can be a challenge.
A Brief Look at Immutable Infrastructure and Why it is Such a Quest
You’ve probably heard a thing or three about immutable infrastructure. It’s all the rage, and honestly it should be. It’s changing the paradigm in which software is shipped, built, and managed in a dramatic way. But what exactly is immutable infrastructure? Let’s talk about that for a minute, as with anything that gets popular, there are some core ideas behind it and some that are a bit more superfluous. Immutable simply means something that is created and left unchanged.
GitTorrent: A P2P Network of Git Repositories Shared Over BitTorrent
GitTorrent is a project in development by Chris Ball, that will allow developers to use decentralized remote Git repositories. While Git itself is distributed in nature — many developers can have their own complete copy of a project’s history — nearly all projects require some authoritative place for the project code. Currently, this single source of truth will be located in one place, such as GitHub, and will not have any sort of distribution or fallback.
Demo: Mesos Running a Single Cluster of Linux and Windows Machines
In mid-August, Mesosphere and Microsoft partnered to bring Mesos to Windows. This will allow organizations that have applications mixed between Linux and Windows servers to allocate a pool of resources and them manage them using the same interfaces and the same deployment technologies. Mesos ported to Windows Servers brings the level of container orchestration once limited to Linux and Microsoft Azure.
Google Container Engine is The Product Version of Kubernetes and It's Now Live
Still up in the air (if you’ll pardon the metaphor) is the matter of whether a preferred public platform for container deployment will emerge, out of the melee that is today’s market. Wednesday, Google took its next step in its bid to produce “the” container ecosystem, lifting the “beta” tag from its Google Container Engine service. Container Engine is effectively Google’s public product-ization of Kubernetes as a service. It gives full credit to Docker for popularizing the concept of containers.
Robots Could Someday be Controlled With Bacteria-Based "Brains"
In a future where hotels, restaurants and hospitals may be populated by an army of service robots, outfitting these machines with biological brains is becoming a distinct possibility. Scientists have already experimented with using rat-sourced neurons as a way to control hybrid robots or “hybrots,” and now researchers from Virginia Tech believe that bioengineered bacteria could someday be used to guide a biomimetic robot host in a similar fashion.
The Mainframe Push: What's in it for Developers?
Amid the huge growth in distributed database architecture providers and the rise of services that sit atop the public cloud such as Ravello Systems, which offers nested virtualization service that allows organizations to easily spin up replica environments for QA, testing, and other uses, IBM again is pushing the mainframe and plans to aggressively woo developers.
Google's Call to Stop Grooming Data and Accept Its Infinite Arrival
After an unexplained dearth of Google news that seemed, at one point, to have lasted several minutes on Wednesday, the company issued into general release the majority of its Google Cloud-based data warehouse portfolio. This release includes Cloud Dataflow, the unique data workflow management system that gives database admins more direct control over their cloud-based environments — more on the level that they would expect from on-premises data warehouses.
Containers for Non-Developers: Shifting the Conversation to a Wider Business Focus
A new post on the blog of Docker PaaS provider Deis moves the Docker and container conversation beyond the realm of the technician and web architect. It is a savvy piece by Catherine Oliver, who describes how a technical writer, developer evangelist and a marketing team could make use of containerized environments to work at an agile, reduced-time-to-market pace.
Observations: Hygieia, Capital One's Entry Into the Neflix and Etsy Land of Open Source
Did Capital One just put your DevOps environment to shame? When DevOps is often defined as that thing for smallish companies in the tech space, I laugh at them. But at the same time it’s often hard to find case studies where the DevOps framework is being used in a larger capacity within traditional non-tech business. And it is even harder to find examples in regulated industries. But actually financial services has been all over the DevOps movement.
Amazon Aurora Release Marks Shift to Database as Infrastructure
Showing even more signs of how much the DBaaS market is heating up, Amazon Web Services has this week released Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible relational database engine specifically aimed at facilitating the scalability of applications and cloud-based Internet architecture. Aurora was initially launched at Amazon’s signature re:Invent conference in November last year, but was only available in preview.
DevOps Study: How Painful Are Your Deployments and What About All That Stress?
Want to predict whether an enterprise has a high chance of success? Check if its IT team is implementing continuous delivery and a microservices architecture and you have your answer. Puppet Labs suggests that you only need to ask one question to know how well your IT department is operating: “How painful are deployments?” The answer will not only reveal a business’ IT performance, but their potential business success overall.
Google Launches a Separate Foundation Around Container Orchestration
Just five days after Google made an unexpected move to become a sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, the company has scheduled to make a formal announcement at the OSCON conference Tuesday of the Linux Foundation’s creation of a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It’s a group that will openly discuss the creation of reference implementations around orchestration platforms, one of which — Kubernetes, whose 1.0 general release is also scheduled for Tuesday — is stewarded by Google.
Apprenda Raises $24 Million, Makes Added Container Support a Priority
Platform-as-a-service-vendor Apprenda has closed off a $24 million funding round led by Safeguard Scientifics, with participation from New Enterprise Associates and Ignition Partners. The Troy, N.Y.-based company, founded in 2007, previously had raised $31 million in three rounds, bringing its total financing to date to $56 million.
A Reusable Code of Conduct for Companies Building Open Source Projects
The open source group TODO — which includes membership from GitHub, WalmartLabs, Google, Stripe, Facebook, and Twitter amongst others — has released a reusable code of conduct that they hope companies building open source projects will adopt. The Open Code of Conduct was released yesterday and is intended as a basic set of ground-rules for anyone contributing code to open source projects.
Welcome to The New Stack
How excited we are to launch The New Stack “beta.” I will say it from the top: Thank you to all our sponsors and the people I worked closely with over these past two months. You really made this happen. And everyone else — friends, family and the hundreds of colleagues who have provided such support —you are why we are here. I call this a beta for a few reasons. We have some functionality to add and smooth over which you will see roll out over the next few weeks.
Spinning Up a Hadoop Cluster with Apache Ambari and Brooklyn
Deploying and managing a Hadoop stack can be a daunting task. A huge number of services exist within the Hadoop ecosystem, and deploying them so they are correctly wired up to each other can be difficult and time consuming. Apache Ambari aims to make this much easier, and at Cloudsoft we have started to add functionality to Apache Brooklyn to enhance that provided by Ambari. Apache Ambari aims to make it easy to provision, manage and monitor Apache Hadoop clusters.
Hunting Down Asteroids with Machine Learning and a World of Programmers
There are millions of asteroids in space. If one of them hits, we know the results. It might disintegrate before reaching the earth’s surface, or the space object might be the size of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which hit the surface of Jupiter in 1994 with asteroids two kilometers in diameter, traveling at a speed of about 216,000 kilometers per hour. That’s about 134,000 mph. That discovery has changed our view a bit about how to detect these asteroids.
Kismatic Emulating Docker To Be the Anchor for the Google Kubernetes Platform
The startup Kismatic has taken on the ambitious strategy of building itself as the go-to commercial open source company at the center of the emerging Kubernetes open source project. CEO Patrick Reilly jokingly refers to Kismatic as both “the Kubernetes company that isn’t Google” and “what Mesosphere is to Mesos, we want to be to Kubernetes.” Reilly’s business model is for Kismatic to be the go-to distribution service provider for Kubernetes, Google’s open source container cluster manager.
The Apache Brooklyn Plugin for Cloud Foundry To Add Services Such as MongoDB
Apache Brooklyn is a platform for integrating services across multiple data centers. Cloud Foundry is a platform as a service (PaaS) for to deploy, run and scale applications. In part one of the series, the Cloudosft team showed how a user creates and use services for Cloud Foundry using the Brooklyn Service Broker for Cloud Foundry . In this post, Cloudsoft demonstrates how the Brooklyn Plugin for Cloud Foundry lets the developer create and manage services directly using cf .
Why the Redis Ecosystem is Flourishing
The in-memory, key-value data store Redis continues to consolidate its market position as more applications seek to use the open source project as a data structure server for on-the-spot, real-time application processing.
Pets and Cattle Symbolize Servers, so What Does That Make Containers? Chickens?
The shift to scaled out computing has changed how we view servers. But what about containers — how should they be treated in a scaled out world? In this story, originally posted on the ActiveState blog , Bernard Golden discusses how we may start to think of containers in similar fashion to how we are starting to perceive servers. In all, the real story is about density and the way to manage services in scaled out, distributed enviroinments.
TNS WarmUp Seattle: Internet-Scale Companies are the New Role Models
We have some seats left for our WarmUp tonight in Seattle. If you are in town, come on by. We’ll talk about the new reality of distributed app development and management. We’ll explore why containers, microservices and the new thinking about data architectures are shifting the discourse from IT to a more community-oriented way of developing and managing projects.
Running Hadoop on Docker, in Production and at Scale
What do you do when your business depends not only on running Hadoop in a multitenant configuration, reliably and at scale, but also on eking out every last bit of efficiency from the system? For Altiscale, provider of a Hadoop-as-a-Service offering specifically targeting Hadoop workloads, the answer was simple — run Hadoop on containers and Docker.
Docker Releases Orchestration Tool Kit
Docker has today released its promised orchestration toolkit, announced in December at DockerCon Europe. The three orchestration tools aim to demonstrate Docker’s “100 percent portability” across data server hosting infrastructures, including enabling hybrid cloud architectures to run containerized, distributed applications.
Microservices: Four Essential Checklists when Getting Started
Microservices could have won the buzzword of the year for 2014. There were countless presentations, conference talks and articles on the Web regarding the subject. However, few organizations use microservices, many people talk about it, but a general FUD remains that clouds how people perceive, and thus adopt, the technology. Companies like Nike, Netflix and Twitter pioneered microservices adoption.
ActiveState: Why Docker Without Container Orchestration is Not Enough
Docker, by itself, is not enough when deploying apps through a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The real value comes when users can apply ways to orchestrate the deployment of Docker containers as I discussed recently with ActiveState’s John Wetherill. Container orchestration is a timely topic as more users consider how to use Docker. Often, though, users find Docker is a lot more complex to manage when thinking of it in the context of an enterprise operation.
Logentries Uses Docker for a New Logging Container Service
Logging and analytics service Logentries has launched a logging container service specifically built using new features made available through Docker’s 1.5 release, including the availability of the new Docker Stats API.
Docker Shows Maturity in Latest Release with IPv6 Support, Read-Only Containers
Docker version 1.5 was released this week, highlighted by the upgrade of new features and bug fixes that focus on security, IPv6 and improved stats logging. The new features were announced on the Docker blog following four rounds of iterative progression with regular input from the Docker community via GitHub and the Google Users Group. In all, the feature upgrades are getting a general thumbs up from the community.
Docker in the Production Environment: Successes, Frustrations and Lessons Learned
Docker’s rapid growth in 2014 ended with several key Docker peeps declaring that the container service infrastructure had reached production-ready status. This year, analysts like Gartner have already flagged the security challenges of Docker for deploying distributed applications in the enterprise, yet are fairly supportive of the direction Docker is heading in overall.
Technology Pairings: JSON Documents and Databases
In the enterprise application world, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) continues to grow in popularity as a data format among developers. Consequently, many SQL-based database vendors have jumped on the JSON bandwagon, claiming JSON support. For many developers that are dealing with an integrated SQL set-up, this may seem like a convenient add-on. However, it is important to realize the purpose and function of a rich JSON document before stuffing it into a relational database with rows and columns.
The New Stack WarmUp Seattle: Give Docker Credit but Don't Forget the Rest
We’re going back to the Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle for our first event of the year. We loved having our event there so much the last time, that we thought it would make sense to come back again. Seattle is a unique city. It has a community of people who are turning it into a hub for platform service providers, developers and a new generation of ops pros. Our topic for the event: app development and management at scale across cloud services and platform providers.
A $28 Million Funding Round and a New Way From Ravello to Drag and Drop VMs On Google and Amazon
Only three weeks into 2015 and it already feels like some of tech’s greatest promises of recent years are beginning to come to fruition. The capacity to analyze realtime information at a global scale and manage transactions while keeping databases in sync has turned a corner and become a business tool. Big data is not just a hype term but an industry advantage for even mid-tier enterprises.
Databases at Scale Part Three: The Reality of Transactional Apps
This third and final part of our three-part series looking at current advances in database scalability for real-time transactions focuses onwhat steps businesses can take to manage early scalability while building a future infrastructure that can manage the growth trajectory. Part One of this series focused on the new generation of database services that are emerging to provide real-time transactional processing at scale.
Databases That Do High-Volume Transactions at Scale: Part Two
This second part of our three-part series looking at current advances in database scalability for real-time transactions focuses on how emergent players are sharing performance benchmark tests as a way to woo new customers to their product. Whereas one million transactions was the pinnacle at the mid-year point in 2014, by the end of the year, FoundationDB had surpassed the benchmark by an order of magnitude greater.
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