Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

( Wall Street Journal ) Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations. Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds. This silly security breach got a chuckle but is deadly serious business. It could literally cost some soldiers their lives. One wonders about the deadlines and contraints that lead some project manager to say "We don't have time for that fancy security stuff the designer wants to include, and what backwoods dirty militant is going to have the brains to do go after our drones. W...

If you’re creating a brand new corporate IT structure (from scratch), choosing SOA is a straightforward choice. Since 99% of the time IT shops are modifying existing systems, replacing individual modules of the environment or integrating new applications (or replacements of old applications) into the enterprise, any further discussion on the ivory tower case of ‘build it from scratch’ is a waste of time. First the good news! IT vendors have been busy relabeling everything that connects, converts, bridges, transforms, and controls as a "SOA product" 100% guaranteed to get you from There to Here, easily and automatically without even a single solitary line of code. So what's the good news? Some of the products actually work! Oh, never automatically and easily, and never without requiring significant mindset changes. But still, producs that actually work and do (much) of what they say are a nice change. But the first SOA steps don't require tools, and missing the f...