Category Archives: Cloud Computing
Cutting-edge information technologies adopted for agriculture in NE China’s Heilongjiang – Xinhua
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2022 shows a number of weather monitoring devices in a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)
Aerial photo taken on Sept. 2, 2022 shows an art creation made up of living plants of different colors in a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2022 shows some electric devices deployed in a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Lan Hongguang)
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2022 shows a field with water-saving and reduced-draining technologies in a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)
A staff member operates at the modern agricultural information service center of a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, on Sept. 2, 2022. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Lan Hongguang)
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2022 shows an art creation made up of living plants of different colors in a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Wang Jianwei)
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2022 shows a pest-control device in a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2022 shows an art creation made up of living plants of different colors in a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Wang Jianwei)
Aerial photo taken on Sept. 2, 2022 shows an irrigation volume experiment zone in a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)
A staff member gives a briefing at the modern agricultural information service center of a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, on Sept. 2, 2022. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Wang Jianwei)
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2022 shows the modern agricultural information service center of a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Wang Jianwei)
Photo taken on Sept. 2, 2022 shows a weather monitoring device in a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)
A staff member patrols green houses in a paddy rice technology demonstration park in Fujin City of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, on Sept. 2, 2022. Cutting-edge information technologies including the Internet-of-Things and cloud-computing have been adopted for breeding management, water-saving irrigation, weather monitoring, grain growth tracking, as well as pest and weed control at the demonstration park to improve both quantity and quality of rice produce. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)
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Cutting-edge information technologies adopted for agriculture in NE China's Heilongjiang - Xinhua
Jack Henry teams Up with Google Cloud to accelerate its multi-year modernisation strategy – ETCIO South East Asia
Jack Henry (Nasdaq: JKHY), a leading provider of technology solutions for the financial services industry, announced today a collaboration with Google Cloud to further enable its multi-year next-generation technology strategy focused on helping community and regional financial institutions innovate faster and meet the evolving needs of their accountholders.
Through its collaboration with Google Cloud, Jack Henry will build cloud-first technologies that modernise existing data, reporting, and integration systems while creating a new set of services that form a modern digital core for banks and credit unions. Google Cloud offers a number of technological benefits, including industry-leading scalability and operational uptime, leading security and compliance solutions, best-in-class data and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, and the flexibility to integrate services with other cloud providers. Building capabilities on the public cloud is a strategy that complements Jack Henry's existing core systems.
"We are pleased to work with Google Cloud to offer community and regional financial institutions our banking services natively in the cloud," said Jack Henry Board Chair and CEO David Foss. "Community and regional financial institutions are the lifeblood of Main Street America, and they are uniquely positioned to help consumers and businesses achieve financial health. Google Cloud is an important part of our next-generation technology strategy and will enable our bank and credit union clients to successfully compete in the ever-changing technology landscape by providing leading-edge, fast, reliable, and secure digital banking experiences to consumers and businesses that are only possible in the public cloud."
"Consumers today expect a personalised, on-demand digital banking experience that is secure, fast, and frictionless," said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. "We look forward to providing Jack Henry with secure and scalable cloud infrastructure to modernise their tech stack and accelerate innovation for their customers. With cloud-first tools and services, community banks and credit unions can create digital experiences that combine relationship banking with leading technology to better fit their clients' needs and promote financial wellness."
Amazon and Google are not happy with Microsoft’s cloud changes – Quartz
Microsofts recent changes to its cloud contracts arent going down well with othertech behemoths.
Microsoft has decided to amend the terms of its licensing deals, making it easier for customers to run Microsoft software on cloud platforms beyond its own Azure. According to Microsoft, the changes will enable new scenarios for how they can license and run workloads with infrastructure outsourcers and are due to go into effect starting Oct. 1.
The new flexible virtualization benefits, which are meant to benefit smaller EU-based cloud service providers, exclude certain listed providers such as Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft itself.
Amazon and Googles parent company, Alphabet, criticized Microsofts cloud computing changes, saying they limit competition and discourage customers from switching to rival cloud service providers, Reuters reported.
But Microsoft likely doesnt care what its rivals thinkthe plans aim to win over EU antitrust regulators. They are yet to react.
Brief history
On Feb. 1, 2010, when Microsoft launched Azure, it was among the trailblazers in the sector. Amazon Web Services (AWS) debuted much later in 2006, and Google Clouds in 2008.
While 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Azure, maintaining a stronghold hasnt been easy for the service. AWS has quickly climbed to the top of the chart.
Complicating matters further, Microsoft has been hit with a litany of complaints in Europe. In 2019, EU antitrust regulators launched a probe into the Washington-based firm after several smaller European competitors complained that Microsofts licensing terms made it prohibitively more expensive to run Microsoft software such as Office on cloud platforms other than its own Azure.
Microsofts move is meant to appease these critics, but drew ires from other tech giants.
Quotable
The promise of the cloud is flexible, elastic computing without contractual lock-ins. Customers should be able to move freely across platforms and choose the technology that works best for them, rather than what works best for Microsoft. At Google Cloud, we believe that openness matters, and we continue to gain customers trust by promoting the security, cost, and benefits of using multiple cloud providers. We urge all cloud providers to avoid locking in their customers and compete on the merits of their technologies.Marcus Jadotte, vice president of government affairs & policy at Google Cloud
By the digits
1.6 billion ($1.6 billion): How much Microsoft has been fined by EU antitrust regulators over the last decade
32, 19, and 7: The cloud market share commanded by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud respectively
715 million: Microsoft Azure users globally (as of 2017)
200: Microsoft Azure products
Fun fact
The Microsoft Cloud is connected by enough fiber to stretch to the moon and back three times.
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Amazon and Google are not happy with Microsoft's cloud changes - Quartz
Theres a storm brewing in cloud computingand most firms arent prepared for it – Fortune
Like so many other internet-era staples, cloud computing has evolved a great deal from its beginnings more than a quarter-century ago. What started as a way to centralize server capacity has grown to encompass thousands of services from providers big and small.
Yet for many firms, an understanding of the cloud and its associated costs remains primitive. PwCs Cloud Business Survey found that more than half (53%) of companies have yet to realize substantial value from their cloud investments.
With economic uncertainty growing by the month, pushing cloud-related decisions down the road could prove costly. Weve reached a critical juncture for business leaders to change how they approach the cloud, and the urgency is greater than you might think.
Firms that prepare today can recast the cloud as a driver of new business models, not just an outsourcing tool. They can minimize service creep, find value in what theyve paid for, and form partnerships to maximize return. By contrast, firms that wait could be forced into a more transactional view. They might treat the cloud like an on-or-off mechanism, cut from stacks they dont fully understand, and neglect to leverage the capabilities that remain.
The hard part is not deciding which organization you want to be in. The hard part is making the right investments to bring that vision to life.
To varying extents, most companies are undergoing some sort of digital transformation. They expect technology to form more of their business operations, and they want digital leverage to get there faster.
From their early days, cloud platforms have offered some fundamental tools to help. They replaced physical infrastructure with a virtual environment and solutions that required no physical footprint or hands-on management. But firms that still view cloud computing as just that, or even mostly that, are selling themselves short. Yes, storage and processing capacity are an important part of the cloud. But what youre really buying is agility: the speed to operate, scale, and change your enterprise. What once took two or three years to build in a physical environment can happen overnight.
That unlocks huge potentialand budgetary creep. Computing costs are here to stay, and overall technology costs will continue to rise with the main driver being increasing energy prices and consumption. They can equate to nearly 10% of revenue for some companies, with cloud services comprising a significant chunk of that. Already, the bill for cloud services can top $100 million per year for some firms. Leaders who see the cloud as a transition to a cheaper operating model might be in for a rude awakening. Instead, they should leverage the agility of the cloud and keep costs under control using a new approach that combines discipline and smart investments.
Companies should seek to reduce costs and capture returns.
Its easy to spin up cloud services at a moments noticeand its hard to manage the growth of infrastructure you cant see. Firms need the operating discipline to ask themselves whether they really need specific computing power or storage capability.
In the age of data centers, shutting down an application meant reallocating server space to another capability. Today, youd just acquire more cloud capacity to gain that new capability before shuttering the old. Even with watchful eyes at the top, its easy to end up with inefficient infrastructure usage.
Its vital to align the growth of cloud infrastructure with the growth of the larger business and manage the two similarly. What does that look like? Leaders need to embrace new mental models, expand digital upskilling for relevant employees, and invest in the headcount to engage the services theyve bought. Firms need to innovate faster, deploy low-code/no-code solutions, and leverage the cloud to create better experiences for their employees and customers.
That creates value in cloud services, which tightening market conditions will make even more critical. Efficient cloud usage can make the difference in retaining the very jobs responsible for managing that usage.
Of course, businesses should absolutely manage their cloud services just as they do other variable utilities and put processes in place to ensure they turn off whats not being used, even if it served a past purpose. Just like you wouldnt blast the HVAC at home while you were on vacation, unused cloud capacity is running up a bill.
The cloud still needs people. Recasting the cloud, remaining disciplined on spending, and extracting value from the services you retain requires a wholesale change of thinking.
Internally, leaders need to build transparency with partners who are less technologically oriented to explain how deriving value from the cloud means investing in the right talent to leverage its capabilities. In return, those same partners can feed business acumen back into cloud management. The cloud offers opportunities for efficiency for all parts of an organization, so everyone in the C-suite has a stake in itand should align on strategy. Having a unified executive team on these converging and complex business issues will remind you of businesswide priorities and help enhance the return on your cloud investment.
The best organizations have a harmonious relationship with their cloud provider so they can be in lockstep to develop new services as business environments change. They should align on the goals, pathways, and budgets of their business. Absent those conversations, the relationships become transactional: Clients derive less and less value, and thin budgets risk indiscriminate cloud cuts.
That gets back to the original point: Maximizing cloud potential, especially in uncertain economic times, requires new mentalities, more discipline, and some level of strategic investment. Firms that wait until the balance sheet forces their hand wont have the time or space to develop the best strategy. Its time for a completely new approach to managing the cloud.
Joe Atkinson is Chief Products & Technology Officer at PwC.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs ofFortune.
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Theres a storm brewing in cloud computingand most firms arent prepared for it - Fortune
Still thinking about moving to the cloud? Worried about your cloud utilization? Then read this! – PaymentsJournal
In the past, businesses would have to invest heavily in their own hardware and software infrastructure. This inflexible approach made it difficult to respond quickly to changing market conditions. Cloud computing has changed all that by providing a more agile and flexible way to build and deploy applications.
Joe Atkinson, the Chief Products & Technology Officer at PwC wrote this cloud computing article for Fortune in which he identifies agility as the primary reason organizations should adopt the cloud. The article doesnt provide much proof to support the thesis, which isnt surprising in that calculating the value associated with agility is very difficult. As a result, most companies take the easy way and instead calculate potential savings possible when outsourcing the IT physical infrastructure. However, when making cost savings on infrastructure the primary driver, companies often fail to invest and encourage agility in software development. But adopting agility is far from free. Many software development shops continue to code relatively monolithic software. To become agile developers must embrace modularity, if not microservices, which are enabled using APIs. The cost associated with becoming agile was in the back third of the article, and I can only say this doesnt really do justice to the costs associated with going agile:
Its vital to align the growth of cloud infrastructure with the growth of the larger business and manage the two similarly. What does that look like? Leaders need to embrace new mental models, expand digital upskilling for relevant employees, and invest in the headcount to engage the services theyve bought. Firms need to innovate faster, deploy low-code/no-code solutions, and leverage the cloud to create better experiences for their employees and customers.
That creates value in cloud services, which tightening market conditions will make even more critical. Efficient cloud usage can make the difference in retaining the very jobs responsible for managing that usage.
Of course, businesses should absolutely manage their cloud services just as they do other variable utilities and put processes in place to ensure they turn off whats not being used, even if it served a past purpose. Just like you wouldnt blast the HVAC at home while you were on vacation, unused cloud capacity is running up a bill.
Overview byTim Sloane,VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group.
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Still thinking about moving to the cloud? Worried about your cloud utilization? Then read this! - PaymentsJournal
Filings buzz in the aerospace and defence sector: 265% increase in cloud computing mentions in Q2 of 2022 – Airforce Technology
Mentions of cloud computing within the filings of companies in the aerospace and defence sector rose 265% between the first and second quarters of 2022.
In total, the frequency of sentences related to cloud computing between July 2021 and June 2022 was 200% higher than in 2016 when GlobalData, from whom our data for this article is taken, first began to track the key issues referred to in company filings.
When companies in the aerospace and defence sector publish annual and quarterly reports, ESG reports and other filings, GlobalData analyses the text and identifies individual sentences that relate to disruptive forces facing companies in the coming years. Cloud computing is one of these topics - companies that excel and invest in these areas are thought to be better prepared for the future business landscape and better equipped to survive unforeseen challenges.
To assess whether cloud computing is featuring more in the summaries and strategies of companies in the aerospace and defence sector, two measures were calculated. Firstly, we looked at the percentage of companies which have mentioned cloud computing at least once in filings during the past twelve months - this was 68% compared to 28% in 2016. Secondly, we calculated the percentage of total analysed sentences that referred to cloud computing.
Of the 20 biggest employers in the aerospace and defence sector, Leonardo was the company which referred to cloud computing the most between July 2021 and June 2022. GlobalData identified 57 cloud-related sentences in the Italy-based company's filings - 0.7% of all sentences. General Dynamics mentioned cloud computing the second most - the issue was referred to in 0.2% of sentences in the company's filings. Other top employers with high cloud mentions included Leidos, Thales and Saab.
Across all companies in the aerospace and defence sector the filing published in the second quarter of 2022 which exhibited the greatest focus on cloud computing came from Leonardo. Of the document's 3,598 sentences, 27 (0.8%) referred to cloud computing.
This analysis provides an approximate indication of which companies are focusing on cloud computing and how important the issue is considered within the aerospace and defence sector, but it also has limitations and should be interpreted carefully. For example, a company mentioning cloud computing more regularly is not necessarily proof that they are utilising new techniques or prioritising the issue, nor does it indicate whether the company's ventures into cloud computing have been successes or failures.
In the last quarter, companies in the aerospace and defence sector based in Western Europe were most likely to mention cloud computing with 0.14% of sentences in company filings referring to the issue. In contrast, companies with their headquarters in the United States mentioned cloud computing in just 0.04% of sentences.
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Filings buzz in the aerospace and defence sector: 265% increase in cloud computing mentions in Q2 of 2022 - Airforce Technology
Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) Market 2022 Size, New Innovations, Technology, and Research Forecasts till 2030 Big Apple Buckets – Big…
The Global Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) Market is expected to grow from USD $$ Millions in 2022 to USD $$ Millions by the end of 2030 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of %. The market research report is compiled by Report Ocean with the participation of experience analysts from various industry domains. The market research report explains the various market determinants along with widely researched market sizing. Market estimation is a major part of the research report, which consist of quantitative analysis from available and analyzed market related data.
These data pointers help to get insights about competitors behavior in the report. Report also covers market overview from geographical viewpoint. For geography-based research, the market report covers all the regions and major countries of the world, that shows a regional development status, price, value and volume, market size and other related data.
Research Methodology:
Market forecasting is based upon a market model that is derived from market dynamics, connectivity, and various market related driving factors, which support the market assumptions. These market assumptions are based on facts that are derived from primary and secondary researches.
Manufacturer Detail, Cloudflare, IBM Cloud, Oracle, Salesforce, Google, ServiceNow, Apache Stratos, Windows Azure, AWS, OpenShift, Plesk, Zoho Creator, Red Hat, VMware, SAP
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Market Overview
In the past few years, the Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) market experienced a huge change under the influence of COVID-19, the global market size of Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) reached (2021 Market size $$) million $ in 2021 from (2016 Market size $$) in 2016 with a CAGR of 15 from 2016-2021 is. As of now, the global COVID-19 Coronavirus Cases have exceeded 200 million, and the global epidemic has been basically under control, therefore, the World Bank has estimated the global economic growth in 2021 and 2022. The World Bank predicts that the global economic output is expected to expand 4 percent in 2021 while 3.8 percent in 2022. According to our research on Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) market and global economic environment, we forecast that the global market size of Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) will reach (2026 Market size $$) million $ in 2026 with a CAGR of % from 2021-2026.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to World Bank statistics, global GDP has shrunk by about 3.5% in 2020. Entering 2021, Economic activity in many countries has started to recover and partially adapted to pandemic restrictions. The research and development of vaccines has made breakthrough progress, and many governments have also issued various policies to stimulate economic recovery, particularly in the United States, is likely to provide a strong boost to economic activity but prospects for sustainable growth vary widely between countries and sectors. Although the global economy is recovering from the great depression caused by COVID-19, it will remain below pre-pandemic trends for a prolonged period. The pandemic has exacerbated the risks associated with the decade-long wave of global debt accumulation. It is also likely to steepen the long-expected slowdown in potential growth over the next decade.
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Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) Market 2022 Size, New Innovations, Technology, and Research Forecasts till 2030 Big Apple Buckets - Big...
Colleges Move Communications to the Cloud – EdTech Magazine: Focus on K-12
The IT staff eliminated every desk phone and requires employees to use the Zoom app instead. Employees are familiar with the Zoom app, so no training was needed. The only change was that a phone icon popped up on the app, Logan says.
Now, employees have the flexibility to make phone calls, launch videoconferences or message their colleagues or students. Zoom Phone also allows faculty members to communicate with students via SMS texting, a popular feature. Logan equipped every staff member withAppleAirPods to serve as headsets.
Staff can toggle back and forth between the communication options, Logan says. Its true collaboration.
Down south,Texas Christian University, a private university with 12,000 students in Fort Worth, Texas, recently migrated to RingCentrals cloud-based phone service, which has improved communications on and off campus, its IT leaders say.
About three years ago, TCUs maintenance contract for its traditional phone system was up for renewal. TCU CTO Bryan Lucas noticed a trend among customer premises equipment-based phone vendors where more of their research and development was being spent on their cloud-based solutions.
TCUs existing phone system was an antiquated mix of analog and digital phones. So, to modernize phone communications, Lucas and his team explored cloud-based options and chose RingCentral.
The migration of 5,000 user and campus phone numbers took meticulous planning. They implemented the project in 14 phases, installing between 500 to 1,000 phone lines in multiple buildings at a time, with each phase taking two months to complete, says Joshua Tooley, TCUs director of IT support.
First, they took inventory of each buildings phone lines and office business processes. Then they contacted their phone company to port the numbers over to RingCentral. While that was in progress, TCUs IT infrastructure team installed switches and network jacks in the areas that needed ports in preparation for the phone transition.
They then trained employees on the new system, deployed new Poly VVX phones, and after migrating phone service to RingCentral, they provided tech support to make sure numbers transferred successfully, Tooley says.
The IT team completed the user migration in spring 2021, about 2 1/2 years after the project began. Its a very comprehensive, coordinated effort, says Travis Cook, the universitys executive director of telecommunications and distributed antenna systems.
Today, about 90 percent of employees just use RingCentral for its phone and voicemail services. The other 10 percent take advantage of RingCentrals other features, including SMS texting and faxing, Tooley says.
Texting is an important new feature. TCU faculty members can now communicate with students through texts without having to give out their personal mobile phone numbers, Tooley says. Remote phone access is also important and has made a big impact on TCUs out-of-state recruiters, for example.
Instead of using a mobile number that might show the recruiters names, they can now call or text students on the RingCentral app, and the caller ID will show a TCU number, which increases the chances of students answering the call.
The biggest change is that were no longer restricted to being on campus, and it allows employees to be anywhere in the world, and they can take their work phone with them, Tooley says.
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Colleges Move Communications to the Cloud - EdTech Magazine: Focus on K-12
Java as a Choice for the Era of Cloud-Native Computing – ITPro Today
Computer programming languages evolve, but the importance of so-called legacy languages upon which many mission-critical applications rely on is recognized, and modernizing these languages is paramount. Java is a case in point. Whoever asked if Java is dead (there were and still are plenty out there who ask this question) has not looked at the longevity of COBOL. For starters, Java was never about the language but the ecosystem surrounding the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), a language platform. But the efforts to make Java performant in cloud-native computing (CNC), including serverless and WebAssembly, reflect the investment many enterprises have made in Java and want to use it in the latest development environments.
To get the most out of CNC, developers build software applications in microservices architecture and use serverless services, such as function as a service. This requires applications to load up in super-fast time. A container can be spun up in milliseconds, an application run, and then the container is terminated. On a public cloud, there are also charges related to how long containers are in use. A function run in serverless mode is charged by memory used and duration, typically rounded to 1 millisecond, so fast-running languages have a clear cost benefit. Programming languages need to load in milliseconds to be CNC-compatible.
Related: Java Language at 25: Write Once, Run Anywhere Lives On
The first rule of advice is to use the existing programming language that predominates, if possible, causing the least change and having the skills available. For many organizations that have invested in Java, the question is whether Java is CNC-ready. Traditional Java runtimes are unsuited for microservices. Each instance would need to load too many megabytes, whereas other languages such as Node.js and Go are far more streamlined and faster to start up. This motivated the Java community to address the challenge of modernizing Java. Several high-tech companies with a stake in Java, including Fujitsu, IBM (including Red Hat), and Oracle, formed the open source MicroProfile project within the Eclipse Foundation, which, to quote its mission, "is aimed at optimizing Enterprise Java for the microservices architecture."
One of the lessons learned in working with microservices is that when multiple microservices run within the same JVM, a greedy microservice can starve others of resources. The solution is to deploy a single microservice per application server, which led to specialized Java runtimes such as Liberty (IBM), Quarkus (Red Hat), and Spring Boot (VMware). To avoid fragmentation in the Java community, as Java began to be used for microservices, MicroProfile was created to provide a common set of APIs for multiple Java frameworks and runtimes. Since its launch in 2016, the project moved quickly and has released multiple specifications and updates to move at the speed the CNC industry is evolving.
Related: How and When to Use Cloud-Native Technology
The need to support Kubernetes is essential in today's CNC environments, and runtimes like Liberty, Quarkus, and Spring Boot are designed to be Kubernetes native. These runtimes address the memory consumption, fast startup, and other concerns that enable Java to be a first-class choice for microservices running in Kubernetes environments.
Liberty is not something IBM has talked about much, but we believe this will change, and it is worth taking note of what it offers the Java community. Created in 2012, WebSphere Liberty is a modern progression of the WebSphere application server (WAS), and much of it was given over to Open Liberty, an IBM open-source project launched in 2017. Many monolithic enterprise Java applications, typically running in virtual machines, continue to use application servers like WebLogic and WebSphere, and are in a keep stable and maintain mode. Liberty is designed for Java applications being modernized and for fresh CNC projects and is a small, lightweight kernel to which individual capabilities can be added, so keeping the startup load to a minimum with just enough to support an application or microservice. It offers all the benefits of a MicroProfile implementation.
Open Liberty is a production-ready open source Java runtime for CNC and is supported by WebSphere licenses. WebSphere Liberty is a commercial build of Open Liberty and adds several functions for helping modernize monolithic enterprise Java applications.
Omdia has seen IBM's benchmarks with Liberty having the best throughput across its portfolio of Java runtimes, as well as rivals, and lower memory requirements, which will lower running costs. In its near-term roadmap, IBM will launch new features in Open Liberty that will demonstrate an "instant on" feature, with super-fast first response times, making it suitable for serverless where scaling containers down to zero and up to hundreds is typical. Liberty InstantOn uses Linux Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace (CRIU), which takes process snapshots and allows them to be restored instantly in Kubernetes managed containers. This also applies to a full Java monolithic application that can be started in under a third of a second. These forthcoming features in Liberty will be a boost for Java in CNC.
The W3C standard WebAssembly (Wasm) is a growing development approach that allows in-browser code to run at near-native performance and is supported on all major browsers. Languages such as C/C++, C#/.Net, Rust, Python, and Go are currently supported. Efforts are in progress to run Java natively in the browser using WebAssembly. There is an open source project, JWebAssembly, a Java bytecode to WebAssembly compiler.
Browsers are how many end users interact with applications, and allowing browsers to run applications as fast as native opens new opportunities for developers. Wasm is a nascent and growing technology, and when anything runs in the browser, additional security considerations need to be made. Remembering that security issues plagued the era of browser engines like Flash and Silverlight (JavaFX is still active) and were a factor in their demise, it is important for the Wasm community to develop the technology with security in-built from the ground up.
Michael Azoff is Chief Analyst, Cloud and Data Center Practice, at Omdia.
This article originally ran on Omdia, the research arm of Informa.
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Java as a Choice for the Era of Cloud-Native Computing - ITPro Today
Food industry found it harder to fill cloud vacancies in Q2 data – just-food.com
Cloud-related jobs in the food industry that were closed during the second quarter had been online for an average of 36.7 days when they were taken offline, data suggests.
This was an increase compared to the equivalent figure a year earlier, indicating that the required skillset for these roles has become harder to find in the past year.
Cloud computing is one of the topics that GlobalData, our parent company and the source of the data, has identified as being a key disruptive technology force facing companies in the coming years. Companies that excel and invest in these areas now are thought to be better prepared for the future business landscape and better equipped to survive unforeseen challenges.
On a regional level, these roles were hardest to fill in Europe, with related jobs that were taken offline in the second quarter online for an average of 56 days.
At the opposite end of the scale, jobs were filled fastest in the Middle East and Africa, with adverts taken offline after 15 days on average.
While the food industry found it harder to fill these roles in the latest quarter, these companies actually found it easier to recruit cloud jobs than the wider market, with ads online for 10.5% less time on average compared to similar jobs across the entire jobs market.
GlobalData's job analytics database tracks the daily hiring patterns of thousands of companies across the world, drawing in jobs as they're posted and tagging them with additional layers of data on everything from the seniority of each position to whether a job is linked to wider industry trends.
Hygienic Load Cells and Weighing Solutions
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Food industry found it harder to fill cloud vacancies in Q2 data - just-food.com