Industry 4.0, Enterprise 4.0, The Cloud and Your Business

Cloud and SMB Deriving Long Term Benefits From Pandemic IT Decisions

The Exploding Use of Clouds: Which one is best?

Where are CIOs allocating budgets before, during and after a pandemic?

Best practices for the remote worker

How the CIO’s biggest challenges evolved in 2020

ModuleMD: A Cloud Case Study

MDwise: A Data Protection as a Service Case Study

What is Invisible Infrastructure?

IT infrastructure, what we’ve all come to know and love (or hate, depending on your viewpoint) is the driving force behind all of our machines. What if it were to be so widely available that you didn’t even have to think about it when building a program? In a less dramatic sense, this is the definition behind invisible infrastructure. History Remember back in the day when personal computer commercials used to say “powered by a 6 core processor with a million gigs of RAM and other awesome technical specs”? That’s because in those days, it was important to the consumer that their hardware was powerful and capable. But in today’s world of software-defined everything, edge computing and cloud-native applications, it’s expected that infrastructure is available, reliable, secure and compliant. To put it simply, it just has to work. Invisible advances? In the last 10 years, there have been huge advances in the hardware and data center worlds, but the rise of cloud computing especially means the location of our data is not as important as it once was. Data centers are built literally all over the world, and the hardware that powers them is cheaper and more readily available than ever….

What is Function as a Service (FaaS)?

We talked a little about serverless computing, and its basic building blocks known as functions in an earlier post. Functions have their own service, conveniently called Function as a Service (FaaS). What are functions, and how do they relate to serverless computing? FaaS is the concept of serverless computing using serverless architectures. It especially affects software developers, who can leverage this concept to deploy an individual “function”, action, or piece of business logic. These functions are expected to start within milliseconds and process individual requests before ending. The developer doesn’t have to worry about writing code to fit a given infrastructure–all he has to do is write code, and upload it to a serverless platform such as Azure Functions or AWS Lambda, which takes care of the rest. Like serverless computing, FaaS has its drawbacks. It’s best for event-based architectures (e.g., adding a file to blog storage, which would trigger a function to complete a task like sending an email or updating a database) such as Azure Event Grid (link), Microsoft’s serverless event-based management service. It’s not good for large applications, where containers (link) might be a better fit. The principles of FaaS include: Complete abstraction of servers away from the…