Today's Tech Digest - Aug 13, 2019

What is instant recovery? A way to quickly restore lost files and test backup systems

The first challenge is that the hypervisor is not really reading a VMDK image; it is reading a virtual image being presented to it by the backup product. Depending on which product you're using and which version of the backup you chose, the backup system may have to do quite a bit of work to present this virtual image. This is why most backup systems recommend limiting the number of instant booted images at a time if performance is important. The second reason instant recovery is not typically high-performance is that the VMDK is on secondary storage. In a world where many primary systems have gone to all-flash arrays, today's backup systems still use SATA, which is much slower. The final enemy of high-performance in an instant-recovery system is that many backups are stored in a deduplicated format. Presenting the deduplicated files as a full image takes quite a bit of processing power and again takes away from the performance of the system. Some deduplication systems can store the most recent copy in an un-deduplicated fashion making them much faster for an instant-recovery set up.

How to Practice Pair Programming for Great Results

Pair Programming (PP) is an extreme programming approach to produce better software where two people work together at one computer and work is reviewed as it is done. The driver operates the keyboard while navigator is watching, asking questions, guiding, reviewing, learning and making suggestions. Find more about PP at Wikipedia. We often hear that Pair Programming is a “waste of time”, “doesn’t really work”, “suppresses creativity”, “kills privacy”, “stressful”, etc., These are all genuine concerns any team may have based on their circumstances and experience. ...PP helps in transitioning the knowledge and works great when you have new members on the team. Navigator plays a contributor role while the driver is the receiver. This approach indirectly reduces the training cost of the new members. Team members with heavy knowledge of the project tend to have more dependency, as they are knowledge-towers. It is always a good idea to spread that knowledge to others to reduce the dependency of those people. When these heavy-lifters pair with others, it helps to spread the knowledge easily.

8 features all enterprise SaaS applications must have

Reliability and security are two of the most important qualities for SaaS tools. Companies that run their software on premises are able to store corporate information in their own infrastructures, which helps them keep that sensitive data secure. However, when it comes to SaaS, the software providers are responsible for keeping user data safe. Consequently, it makes sense that security and data privacy are key capabilities in enterprise SaaS applications. Providers should also include features in their enterprise SaaS offerings that solve business issues and provide the availability and efficiency that are necessary in an increasingly challenging enterprise environment. There is little doubt that companies are looking into SaaS -- usually, in a multi-tenant model in which users from different organizations share the same instance of an application. SaaS is arguably the purest form of the cloud and the largest segment of the cloud market, with revenue expected to grow 22.2% to reach $73.6 billion this year, according to Gartner. In addition, SaaS is expected to reach 45% of total application software spending by 2021.

What Microsoft's upcoming 'outsourcing' licensing changes could mean

Microsoft's upcoming licensing change is going to be "massive" for customers who've been using AWS and Google Cloud dedicated hosts to run Windows Server and Windows client, says Directions on Microsoft's Miller. "Why? Those products never offered -- and still don't offer -- License Mobility through Software Assurance," he said. Microsoft officials note that beginning October 1 "on-premises licenses purchased without Software Assurance and mobility rights cannot be deployed with dedicated hosted cloud services offered by the following public cloud providers: Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon, and Google. They will be referred to as 'Listed Providers.'" On October 1, customers who already are running Microsoft on-premises software offerings from these listed providers will be able to continue to deploy and use Microsoft enterprise software under their existing licenses. But they won't be able to add workloads or upgrade to a new product version released after October 1 under their existing licenses.

How to implement edge computing

"Networking skills are important at the edge because you need highly skilled people who can make the decisions, such as whether they want to deploy one large network or a series of smaller, specialized networks," said Coufal. "These same network architects need to make decisions about which of their different networks under management should be federated with each other for information exchange and which they want to keep separate. In many cases, business security and information exchange requirements will dictate this." Coufal recommends that organizations take a measured approach when it comes to deploying computing at the edges of their enterprises. "This means pushing out portions of applications to the edges of your company, but not necessarily everything," he said. "You can always plan to scale out later." It's also important to place an emphasis on the security that will be needed at the edge, given that end user personnel, not necessarily IT, will be running and maintaining much of this edge computing. Finally, bandwidth is an issue. If you can place subsets of your data and your applications at the edge, the processing of data, as well as the data that is transmitted from point to point, will be faster.

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