The Cloud Enables IoT – a Perfect Match and the Microsoft (Azure) Hackathon

IoT has been the hottest topic and buzz word within the technological community in recent years. While some of us think of IoT and the cloud as interdependent, the dependency is actually one directional. IoT cannot function without the infrastructure and countless possibilities that the cloud facilitates.

Being a cloud blogger, and the founder of IamOnDemand, I often get invited to key events related to cloud technologies. A few weeks ago, I was invited by Microsoft and ironSource to cover their joint IoT Hackathon, which hosted more than 50 developers from companies such as Mellanox, eBay, and mean.io. The Hackathon featured some of the newest Microsoft Azure cloud services features, including Microsoft’s events ingest cloud service, Azure Event Hubs; their new analytics data tool, Stream Analytics; Azure HDInsight ,Azure Machine Learning; and additional cloud related features and tools.

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Why DevOps Is a Role (and Not just a Concept)

Over the past five years, DevOps has evolved into an integral movement in the fields of software development and delivery. The agile manifesto has become increasingly popular in the tech world due to the business need for fast response times. This pushes IT to streamline development, integration and delivery into one smooth process. While this outlook on DevOps describes the concept, after much debating, I am here to explain why DevOps is in fact not just an important concept but a significant role in the tech world.

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Ghostwriting, Content Farms and Google’s 2014 Update

Ghostwriting can offer many advantages. Since not all experts and professionals have the ability, skills, or availability to write high-quality content, ghostwriters are used to bridge the gap between experts’ knowledge and their target audiences. However, the reality of today’s online content world has drifted far from these practices.

The Creation of Online “Fluff”

In an attempt to draw audiences to their websites and boost their online presence and pagerank, many companies and organizations turn to ghostwriters, SEO experts and content farms, to create articles. However, with the writers detached from the knowledge source (i.e. the experts), the odds of creating high volumes of quality content in a short amount of time are slim. The content that companies tend to receive back and then publish is often completely unreliable, inaccurate, and worst case scenario, just plain wrong.

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5 Writing Tips for Cloud Evangelists (from Someone Who’s Created 400+ Posts)

shutterstock_128309906Nearly every IT company these days has a blog. Whether it is meant to explain products/services, announce new releases, or update readers about relevant happenings in a specific business niche, the ultimate goal is to engage your target audience. You may want to build trust over time, or convince them in a single post that your cloud product or service is what they need. While the goal seems obvious, actual implementation can be much more challenging.

Over the past year, I’ve created approximately 400 posts in the realm of cloud computing at IamOnDemand (IOD). We interview developers, evangelists, and CTOs to extract information from its source. We then turn that knowledge into clear content that keeps readers interested and wanting more. While some of the following tips may seem obvious, keep them in mind. You may find a need for them more often than you think.

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Modern IT Monitoring: API-Based and the Human Touch

Screenshot_1011Monitoring is what allows you to generate complete transparency of the online service that you’re responsible for, including cloud infrastructure, application functionality and SLA. Modern IT monitoring seems to be composed of two layers: an infrastructure layer and an application layer. On the infrastructure layer, VMs, network, and storage are monitored, revealing memory consumption, CPU utilization, and network connection metrics. On the application layer, database performance, browsing latency, and actual application functionalities, such as users registration, login and cart are monitored. For mega sites like eBay and PayPal, even the slightest latency can lead to a loss of millions of dollars. If your online service isn’t monitored closely, the trust and confidence of your users can be significantly compromised. In this post, I would like to touch on several points that describe the current state of the market, how essential it is to monitor your resources, and what monitoring is built on.
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How IronSource Scales Node.js with Docker to Support Millions of Daily Users

[GUEST POST] ironSource is the world leading platform for software discovery, distribution, delivery and monetization. The solution consists of four cores – installCore, mobileCore, displayCore, and mediaCore – that connect software developers and users across platforms and devices.

The infrastructure department’s responsibilities include handling data received from all of our platforms for our own data analysis and billing. On any given day, we receive tens or even hundreds of millions of events from desktop computers, mobile phones, and web browsers. Our system comprises hundreds of servers supporting more than 5,000 concurrent connections.

In this article I will describe how we at ironSource scales Node.js with Docker – automatically build, deploy and run a Node.js application within a docker container to production.

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Ideation on Demand: Listen to Your Cloud Community

Cloud content ideationI have been responsible for editing and publishing over 1,200 articles in the realm of cloud computing over the last two years. Besides creating articles, at IamOnDemand (IOD), we also review trending topics, cultivate relevant ideas, and select the right headlines for articles we create. Just like every organization that wants to grow fast while enhancing its service, products and customer satisfaction, we are constantly on the lookout for creative methods and innovative technologies that support robust and quality delivery.

One of the main challenges in content writing is finding a healthy way to integrate innovative and unique ideas into an already existing and ever-fluctuating market. You may have spent hours or even weeks writing an amazing article, only to discover that no one read it once it was published. Maybe people overlooked it; maybe they clicked on its title and left the page after reading two sentences. Ultimately, the post did not achieve the user engagement that you had hoped for, leaving you with an 80% bounce rate.

Curious? check out IOD Ideation or just keep on reading.

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