DevOps Blog
Interested in how DevOps, IT Modernization and Agile practices can positively impact customer experience?
Specialty Retailer Fuels Customer Experience with DevOps Automation, AWS Cognito
Never rest on your laurels is a core tenet of successful retail. Embracing this ideology is a specialty home goods retailer that actively embraces innovation and continuous improvement. Excellence in customer experience tops the list when it comes to continuous improvement. And so it was that the retailer reached out to our AWS consulting services team to help it expedite a new customer enhancement to market. Pairing AWS Cognito, DevOps automation, and cloud security best practices, we enhanced the customer experience, linking its customer’s mobile and online experiences.
Best Practices for Building Agile Cross-Functional Teams
Enterprises are increasingly turning to Agile methods for their ability to help adroitly meet rapidly changing customer needs and expectations. Whether internal or external customers, Agile helps the business focus on continuous improvement that grows the quality of products, services, and other outcomes. By providing a framework for teams to rapidly adjust, the business gets products to market faster and grows customer satisfaction as it meets customer needs in a timely fashion. Yet, successful outcomes require motivated Agile cross-functional teams. Today, we’ll share our insights for identifying ideal team member characteristics that will help ensure Agile teams succeed.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 4.27.2020
As demand grows for cloud services, Alibaba announced its plans to invest 200 billion yuan ($28.26 billion) in cloud technologies. Over the next three years, the cloud computing division will invest in infrastructure, and technologies related to operating systems, servers, chips and networks in a bid to raise the competitive bar against Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. This news comes as cloud providers see a spike in demand due to Coronavirus inspired need for greater availability and scalability.
BI Firm Navigates SQL Injections with AWS WAF Rules
Consistently maintaining high-security standards for web applications is no easy task. Yet, with 68 percent of web applications open to the threat of a breach of sensitive data, according to research by Positive Technology, it is critically important to ensure the utmost security of these public-facing applications. This is especially true for our customer that provides its customers with sensitive business data over its web interface. With a strong cloud presence and the need to ensure the security of its web application — and its customer’s data — the company’s security team decided to migrate to AWS WAF, using AWS WAF rules, and AWS Shield for DDoS protection.
A Pragmatic Strategy For Legacy Application Modernization
In IT, we are all too familiar with the 80/20 rule where 80% of efforts are spent keeping the lights on and 20% is spent on innovation. Within this 80/20 balance, an AltexSoft white paper reports that enterprises spend 80% of their IT budget managing and maintaining legacy systems. With increasing pressure from the business to drive product and service innovation, it’s little wonder that enterprises are on the lookout for ways to approach legacy application modernization.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 4.20.2020
Researchers at Carbon Black found a 148% increase in ransomware attacks from February to March this year. The spikes in attacks correlate to key days in the COVID-19 news cycle. This suggests that “attackers are being nefariously opportunistic and leverage breaking news to take advantage of vulnerable populations.” Financial organizations were disproportionately targeted with business services, manufacturing, government, electronics, and software companies rounding out the list of top targets.
Automate HashiCorp Terraform Continuous Testing
Continuous testing is the process of testing early, often, and in an automated way — usually triggered by any change to code. Continuous testing reduces the time to obtain feedback on code quality, thereby reducing business risk. To achieve continuous testing, we rely on automation, which is not to be confused with test automation that is focused on simple pass/fail hurdles. Instead, with continuous testing, we shift our thinking to focus on acceptable levels of business risk and whether or not code can be released given that lens.
Research Firm Deploys AWS Fargate to Accelerate Innovation
A research and development arm of a global business, this organization is responsible for forging innovations that will drive the company’s future. As the business continues to expand, it has relentlessly pursued DevOps automation as a means to reach its business objectives faster and at scale. With automation set across other areas of its cloud infrastructure, the R&D firm sought to streamline its container processes. While it originally chose to use Amazon ECS for its ability to easily containerize applications, the firm elected to move to AWS Fargate on its introduction as it allows engineers to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 4.13.2020
IDC expects 2021 to be the year of multi-cloud according to a news release by the research firm. Analysts at the group believe that “the global COVID-19 pandemic will reaffirm the critical need for business agility.” A need they see being served by the public cloud’s ability to provide greater agility, scalability, and cost-effective IT infrastructure while keeping workloads in-house when public cloud is not an option. In related DevOps news, IDC finds that enterprises will strongly favor cloud AI solutions, as the technology can help them gain efficiency and agility.
Online Entertainment Group Standardizes by Replatforming for Public Cloud
Serving streaming media to millions of consumers each and every day means having a strong technology infrastructure with extreme scalability and availability. However, when this entertainment company was founded over a dozen years ago, commercially available tools to build infrastructure to this extreme level were lacking. As a result, developers at the media firm created their own solutions. Fast-forward several years and the business has found itself with several proprietary solutions that create significant challenges across development and deployment. As a result, the company sought to standardize its infrastructure by replatforming for the public cloud.
How To: Application Replatforming for the Cloud in Six Steps
According to 451 Research, 90% of companies are on the cloud. Odds are your company has workloads in the cloud, too. However, to achieve business objectives, a simple lift and shift to the cloud may not be enough. As a result, many organizations explore replatforming as a cloud migration alternative to more fully support corporate digital transformation goals. Yet, replatforming can seem like a black box if you haven’t been through the process before. Today, we’ll turn this mystery into a puzzle, walking you through the process of application replatforming for the public cloud.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 4.6.2020
As organizations continue to flux to move employees to work at home, more resources become available. Forrester offers its free recommendations for “Essential Technology For Remote And Quarantined Employees During A Pandemic” and the CybersecurityCares site launches as a resource during the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides free educational resources, a catalog of cybersecurity tools being offered for free during the coronavirus pandemic, and a curated list of charities to donate money and time. For more free resources, check out our DevOps News blog on free eConferences.