Pentaho

3 years back, I started developing ETL application using Pentaho; it was observed as the noticeable industry product then.  In fact, Pentaho replaced Informatica with 'open-source' trump-card in our business use case.  Time fly; what is the current state of Pentaho ?

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., recently announced that it has completed its acquisition of Pentaho, a leading data integration, visualization and analytic company. Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Pentaho will retain its existing brand and continue to operate independently.

HDS is a rapidly emerging global leader in the Internet of Things (IoT), operational technology, big data and machine-to-machine (M2M) analytic. Its big data analytic solutions help organizations transform vast quantities of structured and unstructured data from disparate sources into knowledge through the application of advanced data analytic, connected intelligence from IoT devices, and operational technologies (OT)

Pentaho recently released cloud-based Hadoop integration, with support for Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Integration with SAP HANA is included too. Support for Apache Spark has been added to Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), allowing PDI to orchestrate Spark jobs. The look and feel of PDI has been updated as well, says Pentaho. And new APIs have been added to make Pentaho an even stronger solution for embedding BI features into custom and commercial applications.

By Pentaho platform integration, HDS is now extending its data integration, refinement, monitoring, management, and orchestration capabilities to deliver an incomparably sophisticated data analytics stack. This stack powers its Social Innovation solutions and delivers on the full promise of the “Internet of Things that matter,” by helping businesses to derive rich insights from their data with faster time to value, and supporting the development of smarter, safer, healthier and more efficient societies

Microsoft Build 2015

Yday, I had the chance to participate Microsoft Build conference 2015 at Bangalore. Just a recap, Microsoft runs this yearly campaign to reach their latest technology to the developers community. This year theme, is upcoming Windows 10, general availability on 29 July 2015.

Recently Microsoft announced the first year free upgrade for genuine Windows 7 & 8.x users. It is already popping up in the user's desktop to accept/roll back the auto free upgrade. Unlike earlier versions, Microsoft is pushing the upgrade without the traditional installation process. Njoy it at your Windows desktop, laptop, mobile, pad.

Back to the annual conference, couple of Redmond visitors ran the whole day hands on coding demo awesome sessions. Top-5 Game changing evolutionary upgrade list:

1. One App in One store to One Windows for any device 
2. 2500+ new platform features with pure API strategy 
3. IoT (Internet of Things) adoption, ready for 25 billion devices by 2020
4. Next generation browser - Edge, to replace Internet Explorer regime
5. As phone becomes unified device, Continum for phones to feel desktop experience

Just wanted to share other highlights during this demo:

Window Holographic
Windows Holographic is a mixed reality computing platform by Microsoft, which enables HD holograms of real-world elements. This emerging technology/artificial intelligence device is yet to PROD ready and so they didn't expand this topic. Of course, no demo on this space. Eager to see soon.

Machine learning
Microsoft has quietly built up its machine learning expertise over decades, transforming academic discoveries into product functionality along the way. Windows 10 platform is ready for the machine learning process using Azure Cloud solution. Sample App is available at how-old.net, which guesses the age of uploaded picture.

Unified Windows Platform (UWP) 
Universal Windows Platform is a single App platform that is available across all Windows device families, enabling you to reach a new user base and open up new revenue opportunities. For existing Android™ developers, ”Project Astoria” will enable you to build apps using Android code to target Windows 10. For existing iOS® developers, ”Project Islandwood” will enable you to build a universal Windows app from within Visual Studio 2015 using your existing Objective-C code.  Sample code is available at https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows-universal-samples

Big Data 
Azure HDInsight is their advanced big data solution by leveraging Hadoop, Cloud - Azure, Big Data DB-DocumentDB.  HDInsight uses the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) Hadoop distribution at Azure cloud.

App Recommendation 
Windows 10 has the high degree of coupling with low cohesive among its applications. As the result, it provides the smart recommendation with the available resources prior to connect the external links. Example: when user looks for weather update, Win10 smartly connects the existing local App if any, prior to external request.

Development Strategy 
Microsoft is aiming for one billion users of Windows 10 by next 2-3 years. It is promising to achieve by shifting their development strategy.  Instead of their own traditional effort, Microsoft is adapting the open source/community strategy for the bigger participation from the developer communities.

Action Centre 
Windows 10 is unified for any kind of application notification and seamless response actions. It is applicable not only for traditional Windows updates but also for any application like social media Facebook, Whatsapp, etc.  So, Microsoft makes Action Centre as the separate application for One-Stop notification.

Last couple of years, I'm so privileged to build the products by coding the undiscovered disruptive technologies like Big  Data, IoT, now Windows 10 SDK.  Will share my hands on experience soon.

Infosys Skava

India's second largest software exporter Infosys, on Friday announced $120 million acquisition of Kallidus (doing business as Skava) and its affiliate.

Skava is powering the next generation of digital commerce for leading retailers worldwide by delivering the most versatile technology platform in the industry.  With over 10 years experience in mobile, their evolution of digital commerce is only just beginning and create visionary technologies to ensure retailers are prepared for the multi-device, always-on world of today and tomorrow.

“The acquisition is in accordance with the terms set out in the agreement announced on April 24, 2015. The acquisition of Skava is part of Infosys’ strategy to help clients bring new digital experiences to their customers through IP-led technology offerings, new automation tools and unparalleled skill and expertise in these new emerging areas,” Infosys said on its website.

Infosys also acquired Panaya, an Israel based automation solutions startup for $200 million earlier this year.

AWS Summit 2015

Cloud technology has become the driving force behind the new era of growth.  So it is imperative that executives have a clear understanding of three key factors:

■ How Cloud has changed the market landscape
■ The effect it is having on their business
■ And, most importantly, the way it is changing how they engage with their customers

Taking place in June and July 2015, AWS Enterprise Summit in India has been designed as an education platform focused on supporting enterprise innovation, agility  and transformation through the application of Cloud Computing  technologies.

The Summit will showcase a galaxy of techno-commercial content including expert sessions as well as customer experience sharing. And the afternoon will offer a choice of cutting-edge tracks, allowing you to customize your experience to suit your specific needs.

Don't miss this opportunity to attend this landmark event. What You Can Expect?
■ Cloud-focused platform for senior executives.
■ Techno-commercial content
■ Best practices from customers
■ Expertise from worldwide

Space is limited so register now to secure your spot at http://aws.amazon.com/summits/enterprise-india/

IBM SoftLayer

IBM is two years into its SoftLayer acquisition, which has  transformed and helped form the backbone of its cloud offerings.

The SoftLayer acquisition is really exciting and transformational for IBM, and I think it provides a tremendous amount of value for our customers small and large.

Increasingly what we find is that customers want to put high performance workloads on the cloud. For example, they might be doing big data analysis or they might have mobile applications or social applications that they want to stand up on cloud.

What SoftLayer provides you is a full expanse of cloud capabilities so you can have what are known as bare metal dedicated servers which are ideal for IO-intensive workload applications. They don’t have virtualization so they can scale vertically, which is very important when you're doing big data analysis.

Then they have virtualized servers the way you would expect from many of the other providers out there. And they also have the ability to deliver this on a set of network options. So if you want a private cloud you can stand that up on SoftLayer. If you want public cloud, you can stand that up on SoftLayer. And, they give you a very high performance network as well.

So it’s the servers. It’s the security. It’s the other capabilities including firewalls, security devices, etc. It’s a high performance network. All of those are capabilities that SoftLayer delivers for IBM acquisition.

Amazon Cloud Free Tier

Amazon Web Service (AWS) Free Tier is now designed to enable you to get hands-on experience with AWS at no charge for 12 months after you sign up.

AWS Marketplace offers more than 700 free and paid software products that run on the AWS Free Tier. If you qualify for the AWS Free Tier, you can use these products on an Amazon EC2 t2.micro instance for up to 750 hours per month and pay no additional charges for the Amazon EC2 instance (during the 12 months).  Software charges may still apply for paid software.

After creating your AWS account you can use any of the 21 products and services, listed below, for free within certain usage limits.  Few samples are:

• Amazon EC2: 750 hours per month
• Amazon S3: 5 GB of Standard Storage; 20,000 Get Requests; 2,000 Put Requests
• Amazon DynamoDB: 25 GB of Storage; 25 Units of Write Capacity; 25 Units of Read Capacity
• AWS Lamda: 1,000,000 free requests per month; Up to 3.2 million seconds of compute time per month
• AWS Key Management Service: 20,000 free requests per month

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. You will not be eligible for the Offer if you or your organization create(s) more than one account to receive additional benefits under the Offer or if the new account is included in Consolidated Billing. You will be charged standard rates for use of AWS services if we determine that you are not eligible for the Offer.

You can sign up today to automatically take advantage of AWS’s free tier at https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/registration/index.html

AWS Storage Services

Today, I was invited to participate AWS Storage - Lunch & Learn Session at Amazon Web Service office.  Recently, I read AWS launched new storage service - Elastic File System (EFS) at CTO-Werner's blog http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2015/04/amazon-elastic-filesystem-machine-learning.html and so I was curios to learn their storage eco system as shown in the attached diagram

Now, AWS offers 4 major storage solutions namely objects, archive, block storage, file system.  Letz have a snapshot of each model.

1. Object Storage
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for object storage, presented as buckets of objects and accessible over the Internet using URLs or APIs.  Each storage items like image, video, html, dbfile, feed file, etc. is considered as Object or Resource.  It is accessible via URL.  So, AWS object storage is not file system or database system.  Each object can be range from 1 byte to 5 TB; virtually unlimited object storage with auto scaling.

2. Archive Storage
Amazon Glacier for archival storage, in the form of vaults of objects, available for infrequent access via APIs over the Internet.  Amazon Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost storage service for data archiving and online backup. Customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. To keep costs low, Amazon Glacier is optimized for infrequently accessed data where a retrieval time of several (roughly 3 to 5) hours is suitable. Glacier is technically accessible via S3; not directly.  User can set the purge rule to archive from running S3 data to archival Glacier and cleaning Glacier after specific interval.

3. Block Storage
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) for SAN-style block storage, presented as disk volumes that can be attached to one Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance at a time. I am seeing itz more of cloud mount to attach/detach with any type of system i.e. Windows, Linux, etc.  Multiple EBS can lead to build RAID storage.

In simple term, block storage - EBS is used as database for the application development.  DB content can be backed up with the combination of EBS, S3 & Glacier. Let me explain the business use case.  DB storage in EBS, can be snapshot/version with the flat storage at S3 for running instance.  On arrival of the next snapshot, older version can be pushed to Glacier as the archival.  It is completely automated via rules provided by AWS storage services.

4. File System
Amazon EFS is a fully-managed service that makes it easy to set up and scale shared file storage in the AWS Cloud. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can use Amazon EFS to create file systems that are accessible to EC2 instances and that support standard operating system APIs and file system semantics. Amazon EFS file systems can automatically scale from small file systems to petabyte-scale without needing to provision storage or throughput. Amazon EFS can support thousands of concurrent client connections with consistent performance, making it ideal for a wide range of uses that require on-demand scaling of file system capacity and performance.

Apart from the above 4 storage services, AWS Storage Gateway is making the power of secure and reliable cloud storage accessible from customers on-premises applications

My observation is that Amazon is doing wonderful achievements in Cloud platform.  Itz tip of ice berg; but enormous brilliant minds & efforts are underneath. Most of the companies are talking about API or Service model; but Amazon did it in reality with robustness after dog food on their own global on-line store App.