Kubernetes: A Data Management Game Changer

February 12, 2019 | 206 views

The only sure thing in the data integration and management world is that technology will continually change. While this is good for companies looking for a better way to manage and use the explosion of data now available, it also presents a challenge: How do you know what technology is right for your needs, and will it really move you closer to your business goals? Every time a new tool is created, there is a lot of buzz about its capabilities, innovative approach to a problem or potential to move data integration or management to the next level.

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Avanade leads in providing innovative digital services, business solutions and design-led experiences for its clients, delivered through the power of people and the Microsoft ecosystem. Our professionals combine technology, business and industry expertise to build and deploy solutions to realize results for clients and their customers.

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Top 10 Low-Code App Development Platforms for Fast Custom App Creation

Article | July 20, 2022

Explore the top low-code platforms that enable fast and cost-effective app development with a strategic approach by creating and achieving MVPs and understanding the KPIs of a good platform. Contents 1 Low-Code Development Essentials: Creating and Deploying Effective MVPs 2 KPIs of a Good Low Code Development Platform 3 Top 10 Low-Code App Development Platforms 3.1 AIRKIT 3.2 BETTY BLOCKS 3.3 CREATIO 3.4 DECISIONS 3.5 INTERFACING 3.6 KISSFLOW 3.7 SKUID 3.8 TRACKVIA, INC. 3.9 ULTIMUS 3.10 XENOSS 4 Strategic Low-Code Development: Trend Forecast Analysis Low-code platforms have transformed software development, enabling fast and cost-effective app development. This article covers vital components like creating effective minimum viable products, execution strategies, and key performance indicators to look for in a good low code platform for mobile app development. The article also lists the top 10 platforms, like Airkit, Betty Blocks, and Creatio, which offer innovative solutions to reduce time-to-market and produce exceptional results. 1. Low-Code Development Essentials: Creating and Deploying Effective MVPs Creating a software product or app from scratch doesn't have to be long and tiresome when it can be fast and fun with the help of low-code application development platforms. Before you start building your app around the no code framework, you need to create a minimum viable product (MVP) that can thrive on its own in the market. Defining the attributes of your app to meet your value proposition is essential. Having a plan of execution alongside the best lowcode development tools leads to the success of your software development projects. Effective execution strategies and product development strategies are far more critical to the success of your product than the development process itself. Thanks to low-code platforms, developing and deploying the desired features in your app is faster and easier than ever before. Cutting down on the development time leaves you more time to think strategically about product design, marketing, and perhaps sales. 2. KPIs of a Good Low Code Development Platform Low-code platforms for mobile app development allow organizations to deliver new user experiences faster. While evaluating different low-code application development platforms that meet your business needs, we highly recommend these factors, KPIs, and features to look for: Drag-and-drop interface: Enables non-technical users to create apps, reducing IT burden. It boosts productivity and lowers development time and costs. Develop once and deploy anywhere: Low code mobile app development platforms create apps for multiple platforms (cross platforms) without extra coding. It cuts down on IT workload and speeds up time-to-market. Seamless integration with enterprise systems: Simplifies the integration of enterprise systems with low code app development platforms, trims development time and costs, and enhances system efficiency. Intelligent BI and analytics: Automatically analyzes data, minimizing the time and effort required for data analysis. Leverage insights for data-driven decisions and improves business outcomes. AI-enabled data enrichment: Automatically fills in missing values or adds more data points to enrich the data. Improves data quality and accuracy and reduces IT workload. Complete visibility of data with dashboards: Provides a real-time view of app performance and user behavior. Monitors and improves app performance and user experience. Compliance with international data security policies: Ensures compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, Intertek, BSI, and AICPA SOC, reducing the risk of data breaches and ensuring data privacy. Flexibility for coding and posting: Enables developers to use preferred coding languages and frameworks, improving developer productivity. Transparency and predictability with pricing: This provides transparency and predictability regarding pricing. Allows budgeting for app development and reduces the risk of cost overruns. Low-code platforms help businesses develop applications quickly and efficiently. They offer a visual development environment, integrate with existing systems, support rapid application development, cross-platform compatibility, customization, and security. They are an excellent solution for businesses wanting to build applications quickly and cost-effectively. 3. Top 10 Low-Code App Development Platforms Today's low-code development platforms, which use the most recent low code technology, put more emphasis on innovation and optimization of business processes than just quick development and deployment. When your prime focus is fast-paced app development, there are some platforms that go above and beyond to reduce time-to-market and produce exceptional results, as listed down below. 3.1 Airkit Building complex apps with beautiful front-end experiences requires custom components, workflows, and styles. Share and iterate with the team to collaborate on application development. Airkit uses a visual builder, conversation automation, agent automation, security, and integrations. Latching on to anything with pre-built integrations helps with fast and free additional functionalities. For excellent CX, use components for purpose-built CX across all platforms. Reusable components and templates for designing personalized cross platform buyer journeys. With app debuggers, you can debug, test, and preview apps and use multi-environment deployment with a single click. Manage and control security and scalability with role-based access, versioning and environments, as well as end-user authentication. 3.2 Betty Blocks Betty Blocks is an enterprise-grade no-code development platform that lets users build collaboratively with no limitations. It lets you build apps with rapid application development technology, automate processes, and maximize efficiency. It is utilized by citizen developers to build solutions that integrate with the current tech stack. Building internal applications, customer-facing apps, and process automations is simple and easy to innovate with Betty Blocks. It offers development, testing, and production environments on its public cloud as well as on-premise and cloud providers in its standard and enterprise plans, respectively. As far as free and fast integrations are concerned, it integrates with everything from its Betty Blocks Store. It also lets you build your own integrations using the API. Its intuitive drag-and-drop user interface builder allows reusability, radically shortens the time to market, and empowers the citizen development workforce. 3.3 Creatio Creatio is a no-code development platform with a compostable architecture. Creatio Studio allows for no-code application development with an extreme degree of freedom. It lets you select the available types of apps, connectors, and OOTB functionality templates to manage instances and facilitate the collaborative development process. It is packed with intuitive no-code design automation tools to create and modify pages and views, data models, workflows, and integrations in a no-code workplace. It has a library of predefined views, widgets, and templates to accelerate the design process. Optimize and manage structured and fluid processes using workflow management capabilities with advanced analytics. Add integrations with SOAP and REST integration connectors. Use AI and ML to automate your workflows and enhanced security and safety for enterprise application platform scalability. Using the collaborative process designer, accelerate process design and standardize process management with team efforts. 3.4 Decisions Decisions is a powerful low code automation platform and business process management software that is capable of building no-code and low code applications. It helps turn siloed decisions into centralized rules. Its no-code intelligent process automation platform enables the codification of business logic and automation decisions, manages workflows, finds and fixes problems, connects systems to unify operations, and designs seamless experiences. Its visual design interface helps to design, optimize, and launch complex processes without writing code. Building software apps that solve business problems by automating functions to simplify, standardize, and streamline business operations and stay compliant is easy with Decisions. 3.5 Interfacing. Intefacing offers a business transformation suite using low-code rapid application development technology. It primarily supports business process optimization, quality control, continuous improvement, change management, SOP development, digital transformation, business excellence, and stakeholder happiness. It extensively offers eFORMS, process automation, low code database table entity designer, system integration designer, tax monitoring and delegation, custom rules and actions, text and voice messaging services, custom dashboard design, and app mobile touchscreen for better control over your low code mobile app development. Interfacing allows building simple to complex consumer-focused applications and business processes in hours, not days. 3.6 Kissflow Kissflow's enterprise-grade low code application development platform lets businesses take control with no IT background. It helps digitize operations, automate processes, and modernize apps using its components. The software offers a comprehensive suite of features such as application builder, process designer, boards, reports, and analytics, and custom UI. It also provides collaboration, developer sandbox, extensive integrations, external portals, and roles-based access control for application deployment with new builds. Using a visual builder for forms with easy drag-and-drop options, work management, intuitive dashboards, communication, and collaboration, Kissflow has emerged as an industry standard in no-code development. Bring business and IT together with a DevOps approach, streamline ad-hoc requests, manage and control with a central console, and reap returns with high productivity and a lower time-to-market with Kissflow. 3.7 Skuid With Skuid, you can build low-code mobile apps from scratch for multiple platforms that are user-friendly. It allows design interdependence, composite apps, and rapid prototyping. Custom user experience options on Skuid NLX involve design decisions about interaction, navigation, and app structure. Skuid SFX helps build modern, custom Salesforce apps. It helps with lightning customization, portals and communities, and a high-performance engine. Skuid EXP for enterprise HR app creation brings features to maximize platform value, flexible deployment, and people-centered portal creation. Components on Skuid include account dashboards, customer request forms, opportunity management, quick orders, revenue and expense dashboards, dynamic forms, retail data dashboards, and a contact directory. These features help increase app adoption and innovation by 10x. 3.8 TrackVia, Inc. TrackVia helps automate processes in a business to connect and track everything that matters. It allows for seamless integration with existing ERP, CRM, BPM, financial systems, and more. It helps keep up with product and quality, compliance, custom workflows, supply chain management, project management, and field services. Its low-code app development platform enables users to build business apps without code and without limits with the help of its toolkit and a canvas. It brings intelligent workflow automation, single to multiple sandbox environments with unlimited applications and unlimited storage, and records for 1 administrator and 5 users. Its pricing plans include mobile, quick start, business, and enterprise for citizen developers in any industry. 3.9 Ultimus Ultimus offers a highly customizable platform with integration capabilities for business process management. It has a strong focus on security and compliance and offers scalability and dedicated support. Ultimus streamlines app development with a cost-effective platform, empowering non-IT business users to create custom apps easily. Its mobile-ready technology deploys on-cloud or on-premises servers, prioritizes decision-making, and improves the customer experience by eliminating isolated apps and data. A unified inbox and high-productivity portal fuses interactions with customers, employees, and partners. Ultimus avoids high upfront costs with flexible pricing options. 3.10 Xenoss Xenoss's mar-tech, low-code platform offers up to 40% cost savings and the fastest time-to-market in the industry. It has ad-tech and mar-tech parts like a bidding cluster, mission control, campaign front end, account server, logging cluster, predictor optimization engine, aggregator, reporter, DMP profile builder, DMP segment builder, DMP real-time audience DB cluster, health monitoring system, and real-time anti-fraud. Its feature set includes campaign management, budget management, creatives, supply integrations, device targeting, geographic targeting, audience targeting, dayparting, media planning, the DMP, automatic campaign optimization, manual campaign optimization, tracking, reporting, and analysis, support tools, and the data collection web SDK. It offers a customizable and integratable user-friendly platform. With a strong focus on scalability, it offers dedicated support. Its pricing is based on a per-user basis. 4. Strategic Low-Code Development: Trend Forecast Analysis Large companies will keep using low-code platforms for digital transformation in the near future because their visual interfaces and pre-built components can speed up software development. Strategic low-code development will be a must for reducing time-to-market, speeding up digital transformation, and putting security and compliance front and center. More and more people will use industry-specific solutions, AI integration, collaboration, and process automation, which will streamline operations and make them more efficient. Some of the best low code app development platforms will meet security and compliance requirements like HIPAA and PCI, so sensitive information will be safe. AI and machine learning tools will make it easier to solve problems and improve processes. This will bring IT and business operations closer than ever before. These automation platforms will be crucial to making businesses more profitable and stable because they will let them get the most done with the least amount of work.

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FUTURE TECH

Empowering Industry 4.0 with Artificial Intelligence

Article | July 26, 2022

The next step in industrial technology is about robotics, computers and equipment becoming connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) and enhanced by machine learning algorithms. Industry 4.0 has the potential to be a powerful driver of economic growth, predicted to add between $500 billion- $1.5 trillion in value to the global economy between 2018 and 2022, according to a report by Capgemini.

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SOFTWARE

How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Businesses

Article | July 14, 2022

Whilst there are many people that associate AI with sci-fi novels and films, its reputation as an antagonist to fictional dystopic worlds is now becoming a thing of the past, as the technology becomes more and more integrated into our everyday lives. AI technologies have become increasingly more present in our daily lives, not just with Alexa’s in the home, but also throughout businesses everywhere, disrupting a variety of different industries with often tremendous results. The technology has helped to streamline even the most mundane of tasks whilst having a breath-taking impact on a company’s efficiency and productivity

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The advances of AI in healthcare

Article | February 11, 2020

With the Government investing £250 million into the project, the Lab will consider how to use AI for the benefit of patients – whether this be the deployment of existing AI methods, the development of new technologies or the testing of their safety. Amongst other things, the initiative will aim to deliver earlier diagnoses of cancer. It is estimated that in excess of 50,000 extra patients could see their cancer being detected at an early stage, thus boosting survival rates. More specifically, a study has shown that AI is quicker in identifying brain tumour tissue than a pathologist.This would have a positive knock-on effect in other areas, such as enabling money to be saved (that otherwise would have been spent on further treatment) and reducing the workload of staff (at a time when there is a crisis in NHS workforce numbers).

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Spotlight

Avanade

Avanade leads in providing innovative digital services, business solutions and design-led experiences for its clients, delivered through the power of people and the Microsoft ecosystem. Our professionals combine technology, business and industry expertise to build and deploy solutions to realize results for clients and their customers.

Related News

Kubernetes’ Push to the Edge Shows Innovation, Challenges

SDxCentral | March 19, 2019

Kubernetes continues to proliferate across the cloud ecosystem, with one of its latest efforts focused on pushing the container orchestration platform further toward the edge. This is becoming more important as organizations look to extend the orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes across their cloud infrastructure and as the overall edge market sees increased service provider attention tied to 5G deployments. A recent example of this push toward the edge was Rancher Labs’ launch of its K3s platform. That platform is basically a slimmer version of Kubernetes, which is often referred to as “K8s.” That slimness is important because edge locations are more resource constrained compared with data center or network core locations. Shannon Williams, co-founder and vice president of sales at Rancher Labs, said the vendor pulled “alpha-level features that were still in development and also deprecated features” that were no longer needed or supported. This allowed the vendor to push out a platform that consumes just 40 megabytes of space and can run on x86_64, Armv8-A, and Armv7-A architectures. “We completely changed how Kubernetes works,” Williams said. “We removed drivers that were not essential for edge deployments, but still allow a customer to pull down those drivers if they need them.” Full to the Edge: While Rancher Labs moved to strip down Kubernetes, other vendors have been plugging the full version into their efforts. Mirantis last year plugged Kubernetes into its Cloud Platform Edge product to allows operators to deploy a combination of containers, virtual machines (VMs), and bare metal points of presence (POP) that are connected by a unified management plane.

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Kubernetes, Docker, ContainerD Impacted by RunC Container Runtime Bug

SDxCentral | February 11, 2019

The Linux community is dealing with another security flaw, with the latest bug impacting the runC container runtime that underpins Docker, cri-o, containerd, and Kubernetes. The bug, dubbed CVE-2019-5736, allows an infected container to overwrite the host runC binary and gain root-level code access on the host. This would basically allow the infected container to gain control of the overarching host container and allow an attacker to execute any command. “It is quite likely that most container runtimes are vulnerable to this flaw, unless they took very strange mitigations beforehand,” explained Aleksa Sarai, a senior software engineer at SUSE and a maintainer for runC, in an email posted on Openwall. Sarai added that the flaw is blocked by the proper implementation of user namespaces “where the host root is not mapped into the container’s user namespace.” The bug has received an “important” impact rating from some vendors. Sarai said the flaw has a 7.2 out of 10 CVSSv3 vector score. A patch for the flaw has been developed and is being sent out to the runC community. A number of vendor and cloud providers have already taken steps to implement the patch. RunC was initially spun out of work done by Docker Inc. It’s an Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant command line interface (CLI) tool for spawning and running containers.

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DriveScale Says Composable Is the Answer to Data-Intensive Compute

SDxCentral | January 15, 2019

DriveScale’s founders wanted to solve the problem of infrastructure over-provisioning when they started their company. But the technology wasn’t called composable infrastructure back then. “That was before 2013, and they were looking at the changing data center applications and workloads being created in the hyperscale clouds,” said Denise Shiffman, chief product officer at DriveScale. These were workloads like Hadoop, Casandra, and Spark, and they behaved differently than traditional data center workloads like Oracle and SAP. “These applications were much more dynamic and the demands for latency were very high, while the history had been running predictable applications in the data center,” she said. In addition to performance problems, data-intensive workloads also lead to server sprawl. Companies can’t predict how much storage and compute capacity they need. So they over-buy. “Many customers we talk to are really only using about 20 percent of the infrastructure they’ve deployed,” Shiffman said. “The [DriveScale] founders believed there was a new way to fix this and that was taking storage outside the server and putting it on the network.” Duane Northcutt, Satya Nishtala, and Tom Lyon founded DriveScale in March 2013. Northcutt, CTO at DriveScale, previously held that post at other tech companies including the Connected Home Division of Technicolor, Trident Microsystems, and Silicon Image. Nishtala, also a DriveScale CTO, is a former Cisco distinguished engineer. And Chief Scientist Lyon previously co-founded several companies including Ipsilon Networks and Nuova Systems, which was acquired by Cisco and became the basis for its UCS servers.

Read More

Kubernetes’ Push to the Edge Shows Innovation, Challenges

SDxCentral | March 19, 2019

Kubernetes continues to proliferate across the cloud ecosystem, with one of its latest efforts focused on pushing the container orchestration platform further toward the edge. This is becoming more important as organizations look to extend the orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes across their cloud infrastructure and as the overall edge market sees increased service provider attention tied to 5G deployments. A recent example of this push toward the edge was Rancher Labs’ launch of its K3s platform. That platform is basically a slimmer version of Kubernetes, which is often referred to as “K8s.” That slimness is important because edge locations are more resource constrained compared with data center or network core locations. Shannon Williams, co-founder and vice president of sales at Rancher Labs, said the vendor pulled “alpha-level features that were still in development and also deprecated features” that were no longer needed or supported. This allowed the vendor to push out a platform that consumes just 40 megabytes of space and can run on x86_64, Armv8-A, and Armv7-A architectures. “We completely changed how Kubernetes works,” Williams said. “We removed drivers that were not essential for edge deployments, but still allow a customer to pull down those drivers if they need them.” Full to the Edge: While Rancher Labs moved to strip down Kubernetes, other vendors have been plugging the full version into their efforts. Mirantis last year plugged Kubernetes into its Cloud Platform Edge product to allows operators to deploy a combination of containers, virtual machines (VMs), and bare metal points of presence (POP) that are connected by a unified management plane.

Read More

Kubernetes, Docker, ContainerD Impacted by RunC Container Runtime Bug

SDxCentral | February 11, 2019

The Linux community is dealing with another security flaw, with the latest bug impacting the runC container runtime that underpins Docker, cri-o, containerd, and Kubernetes. The bug, dubbed CVE-2019-5736, allows an infected container to overwrite the host runC binary and gain root-level code access on the host. This would basically allow the infected container to gain control of the overarching host container and allow an attacker to execute any command. “It is quite likely that most container runtimes are vulnerable to this flaw, unless they took very strange mitigations beforehand,” explained Aleksa Sarai, a senior software engineer at SUSE and a maintainer for runC, in an email posted on Openwall. Sarai added that the flaw is blocked by the proper implementation of user namespaces “where the host root is not mapped into the container’s user namespace.” The bug has received an “important” impact rating from some vendors. Sarai said the flaw has a 7.2 out of 10 CVSSv3 vector score. A patch for the flaw has been developed and is being sent out to the runC community. A number of vendor and cloud providers have already taken steps to implement the patch. RunC was initially spun out of work done by Docker Inc. It’s an Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant command line interface (CLI) tool for spawning and running containers.

Read More

DriveScale Says Composable Is the Answer to Data-Intensive Compute

SDxCentral | January 15, 2019

DriveScale’s founders wanted to solve the problem of infrastructure over-provisioning when they started their company. But the technology wasn’t called composable infrastructure back then. “That was before 2013, and they were looking at the changing data center applications and workloads being created in the hyperscale clouds,” said Denise Shiffman, chief product officer at DriveScale. These were workloads like Hadoop, Casandra, and Spark, and they behaved differently than traditional data center workloads like Oracle and SAP. “These applications were much more dynamic and the demands for latency were very high, while the history had been running predictable applications in the data center,” she said. In addition to performance problems, data-intensive workloads also lead to server sprawl. Companies can’t predict how much storage and compute capacity they need. So they over-buy. “Many customers we talk to are really only using about 20 percent of the infrastructure they’ve deployed,” Shiffman said. “The [DriveScale] founders believed there was a new way to fix this and that was taking storage outside the server and putting it on the network.” Duane Northcutt, Satya Nishtala, and Tom Lyon founded DriveScale in March 2013. Northcutt, CTO at DriveScale, previously held that post at other tech companies including the Connected Home Division of Technicolor, Trident Microsystems, and Silicon Image. Nishtala, also a DriveScale CTO, is a former Cisco distinguished engineer. And Chief Scientist Lyon previously co-founded several companies including Ipsilon Networks and Nuova Systems, which was acquired by Cisco and became the basis for its UCS servers.

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