IBM has been solidly building its efforts in quantum computing over the past couple of years – and a new milestone has been reached with the launch of upgraded systems featuring 20 qubit processors, with 50 qubits on the way.

The company describes the latest news as “rapid advances in quantum hardware… as IBM continues to drive progress across the entire quantum computing technology stack, with focus on systems, software, applications and enablement.”

Quantum computing is gaining...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the availability of C5 instances, aimed at more compute-intensive workloads for the EC2 cloud.

The C5 instances – three from the sharp end in Amazon’s compute class, behind G2, P2 and F1 – were introduced as the newest iteration back in November last year at the company’s Re:Invent show. The C5 promises 3.0 GHz Intel...

Big data analysis can provide continuous business intelligence to managers, enabling sophisticated monitoring of current activities, and helping them to make smarter, faster decisions based on fact data and hidden trends and patterns. But while managers may think it’s cool, rushing to implement “a big data analytics” program can get you into trouble.  There are many architectures, tools, and algorithms to sort through, and you’ll need to manage stakeholder expectations. Software...

Research in quantum computing is closely tied to the discipline of information theory, a mathematical concept concerned with communication, coding, and encryption. Various applications of quantum information theory were developed in the last 50 years.

As a result, quantum computing has been high on the research agenda of governments and technology organisations worldwide. In a quantum computing model, the basic unit of information is called the quantum bit (qubit), which can be represented by photons.

Using...

Tech-savvy banks were among the first and most enthusiastic supporters of Docker containers.

Goldman Sachs invested $95 million in Docker in 2015. Bank of America has its enormous 17,500-person development team running thousands of containers. Top fintech companies like 

Cloud content management company Box has unveiled Box Skills, a framework for applying machine learning tools such as computer vision, video indexing, and sentiment analysis to stored content. Box Skills will facilitate businesses to re-imagine the business processes considered as impractical to digitise or automate or too expensive.

At BoxWorks 2017, Box previewed three initial Box Skills currently in development, leveraging machine learning tools from IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to solve...

IBM has announced a new capability at the Serverless Conference in New York City on October 10th, 2017 to further the development of serverless applications.

The new tool, Composer, comprises a library of patterns that are key for building serverless applications. It also has the inherent serverless features such as auto-scaling and pay-as-you-go built into it.

Currently, the programming model is available for use in only Node.js language, but developers can deploy the model to make it available in other...

• Manufacturing-based IoT connections grew 84% between 2016 and 2017, followed by energy & utilities (41%).
• 73% of executives are either researching or currently launching IoT projects.
• The IoT platform market is expected to grow 35% per year to $1.16B by 2020.
• B2B uses can generate nearly 70% of the potential value enabled by IoT.

These and many other fascinating findings are from Verizon’s State of the Market: Internet of Things 2017,...

By 2020 there will be 1.3 million unfilled jobs in Europe, many will be in cloud-related fields. As businesses invest in digital transformation (83% believe cloud skills are critical for digital transformation, according to Microsoft), demand for skilled cloud professionals is set to surge.

Microsoft’s leading cloud platform, Azure, now boasts

Demand for DevOps professionals continues apace, according to the latest analysis from Robert Half, with nine out of 10 CIOs in the UK seeing DevOps as a core competency for developers and infrastructure professionals in the next five years.

The study, which is based on more than 100 interviews with CIOs from companies across the UK, found that for 90% of respondents DevOps would be effective if security was built into continuous service and application delivery. 94% agreed that DevOps would need to...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) may have been the first of the major cloud vendors to announce per-second billing, but Google has become the first to implement it.

The company announced yesterday that customers of Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and App Engine flexible environment virtual machines (VMs) will move to the new system, applicable to all VMs.

Google’s change was made effective as of September 26, while AWS customers will have to wait until October 2 for their move. Google...

Database provider MongoDB has filed to go public, confirming reports from a month previously and potentially becoming the third major cloud IPO of 2017 after Okta and Cloudera.

The SEC filing, available to view here, shows MongoDB made $101.4 million in total revenues in the year ending January 31 2017, up 55% from the previous year’s $65.3m, which was up 37% from 2014-15’s $40.8m. Despite total gross profit of $71.4m, total...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to move to a per-second billing model for its EC2 and EBS services from October 2.

The move aims to go one step ahead of its competitors, Microsoft, Google et al, who have been since 2013 been utilising per-minute billing for its services.

Given the developments of products such as AWS Lambda, among others in the serverless realm, it makes sense to make the shift. AWS said many of its customers had been ‘dreaming up applications’ for EC2 that utilised a larger number...

If you want to get ahead – and get better paid – in the cloud game, then chuck in the sysadmin role and become a DevOps engineer instead.

That’s the primary finding from Puppet’s 2017 DevOps Salary Report, which finds that 66% of DevOps engineers and 69% of software engineers in the US take home pay packets of more than $100,000 per year – up 2% and 3% respectively from the year before – while sysadmins on six figures were only at 31%.

Naturally, this disparity lent itself...

Enterprise interest in container technologies continue to grow, but adoption has not gone up with it, according to a report from the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

The Global Perception Study report, which polled more than 540 enterprise developers across different industries, found that only 25% of organisations polled were using containers in 2017, up only 3% from 22% in 2016. There was, however, a greater uptick in companies evaluating options, at 42% from 31% in 2016.

Perhaps this is somewhat to be expected;...

Throughout the global economy and across all industries, companies are re-inventing themselves to become better at sensing the next big thing their customers need, and finding ways to deliver it to get ahead of the competition.

The concept of DevOps dates back nearly 10 years now. During this time, a lot has changed. As DevOps has matured, we have seen many successful implementations, lessons learnt and copious amounts of data gathered. One thing that remains unchanged to this day – DevOps is...

“Cloud computing platform as a service, recently adopted by the New York Times (6, 3, 6)”

The New York Times has announced it has moved its games platform to Google App Engine from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Having first published its daily crossword in 1942, the NYTimes built its first website in 1996, with the digital daily crossword starting life as a web-based Java applet. Since then, the publisher has overseen growth into a suite of mobile apps and a website with more than 300,000 paid...

More organisations are looking to hire server-based IT staff; but finding employees who can work across both traditional servers and converged infrastructure is increasingly tough.

That is the verdict of analyst firm 451 Research in its latest Voice of the Enterprise study, which finds that for two thirds of the more than 500 firms surveyed, recruiting for roles across both sectors is difficult. A similar number (67%) say the primary driver for more server-related employees is business growth, with 42% citing...

As cloud computing has matured, the benefits it delivers to organisations of all sizes are undeniable. Companies are enjoying agility, scale and speed like never before.

And cloud adoption shows no signs of slowing. Gartner earlier this year forecasted that the worldwide public cloud services market would grow 18 percent in 2017, and Forrester said global cloud services revenues totalled £100 billion in 2016, up from £50 billion just two years ago — that’s annual growth of 30...

Choices, choices, choices. User requirements and non-functional requirements are just the beginning of the balancing act of services development. New development paradigms usually take a few years before their practitioners get a handle of the factors that they need to balance.

In the case of microservices, this balancing act comes down to three things: granularity, data consistency, and performance. The most usable and best-performing services built on the microservices architecture will find a balance of...