March 4 is Employee Appreciation Day, and in honor of those who keep systems running, businesses thriving and innovation moving forward, we are offering IT employees some tips and best practices that we have picked up from industry experts over the past year on theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to help make your job a little easier.

How open source can future-proof IT

Rishi Yadav, CEO of InfoObjects, Inc., joined John Furrier, host of theCUBE at Hadoop Summit 2015, to talk about how he is helping IT employees future-proof the enterprise through open source.

“Open source is part of the distribution, whether it is hardened source distribution or cloud-based data distribution, they are going to use the same open source of Hadoop. And then they add a lot of extra features, so the idea is that in the future whatever happens with these companies, with any of these distributions, the pure open source will remain there … You’re not really stuck with any vendor because the base is the same, which is open to everyone.”

Developers: Solve the business problem

Robert Fedoruk, CEO and cofounder of Wolfpack Cloud Services LLC, spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, cohosts of theCUBE, at ServiceNowKnowledge15 to advise developers how to use the platform to benefit business.

“They [ServiceNow] step away from the actual process application development, and they move more to raw platform development to empower people like my team and I and all the other developers out there who will have the vertical experience and can say, ‘We know all there is to know about this particular thing.’ It would take ServiceNow far too long to develop a mature process in that type of thing, but us, working in our basement, we can build that and put it on the app store.”

Advice to developers:

“You always have to be sure you are solving a business process or some kind of function that’s just not done right. Be careful around developing around interface issues … solve a business problem.”

Package and deliver to make it real

IBM Fellow Jason McGee sat down with John Furrier and Jeff Frick, cohosts of theCUBE, at DockerCon 2015 to provide his thoughts on the role of the developer.

“There are a couple of dimensions to what people have to think about to make this real. As an applications developer, the center point is: ‘I am building applications, how do I move those applications, and how’s the infrastructure that I choose on-prem or off to support that?’ You need a way first and foremost as a developer to package up the code and deliver it in a way that doesn’t have to change as I move in between cloud environments, hypervisors … so that’s where containers fit into the picture.

“The second piece is no software today is built completely self-contained … one of the things the Docker community has today is to open up their thinking that not everything is a collection of containers. You’re going to have containers; you’re going to have services on the cloud that you just call and use as APIs; you’re going to have existing systems that you need to connect back to – so how do you make those services available in a consistent way on premises and off premises?

“The third piece is what’s the delivery process around it? How do you do DevOps? How do you do delivery and things like that? You have to get to some consistent model for how you deliver.”

Release fast and frequently

Neil Manvar, solutions architect at Sauce Labs, Inc. talked to theCUBE’s Brian Gracely at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015 to discuss changing the mind set of web applications versus mobile applications.

“Sauce Labs is a source infrastructure so that you can concentrate on source code and test code for your source code in that we take care of the automated infrastructure.

“So mobile was a little late to the game in the fact that it’s hard to implement, and now continuous delivery is getting increasingly popular all across the board with all types of products. Whether it is web or mobile or native or hybrid, and because of that when you release, it’s critical that you get things correct, especially in the mobile world. And to release fast and frequently is hard to do without automated testing.”

Container security requires Database as a Service

Mark Davis, CEO of ClusterHQ (the main driver behind Flocker), appeared on theCUBE at DockerCon 2015 to talk to host Stu Miniman about security in the container market.

“The security domain within containers is the container itself. So we are reliant on the security infrastructure that is built into the container. And then Docker made some statements today about how they are working on it. In that realm, the idea of having extreme multitenancy is what containers are about, so one of our customers is building a Database as a Service where they have thousands of containers on a server, maybe as many as 10,000 containers on a single server. And they do this for customers who expect their data to be private. This is Database as a Service, so the security model has the support data and it is what containers are about, to have a box around the data itself.”

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