He admitted that his own experience of working in the private and public sector is that the public sector often takes a very long time to make a decision around committing to change.

Knowledge and experience

Chowdhury continued: “What I found was that organisations often drowned in bureaucracy – at times it felt as if the paperwork was more important than the change. I once described it as worrying about your curtains whilst your house burned down.

“The private sectors are not perfect either. In their race to reduce the bottom line a lot of shortcuts are taken. For example, I have seen redundancies made without real consideration of the knowledge that is being lost.

“There is known knowledge and experience that, at times, the private sector does not value experience.”

According to Chowdhury, the role of business analyst is required within any organisation wishing to make effective change.

“The business analyst role at JLR is very much needed since JLR are going through massive changes. Some of these changes are as a result of the new hybrid and full electric vehicle race. This is exciting times, but a lot of work,” said Chowdhury, while touching upon JLR and Blackberry’s multi-year agreement to collaborate and develop technology for the automotive manufacturer’s next-generation vehicles.

Understanding the business plan

From a business analyst point of view, to fully understand the business plan, it is important to understand the end-to-end process in an organisation.

Chowdhury explained: “Any change has an impact – there are very few changes that work completely in isolation. To give you an example, a prosthetic lower leg impacts not only the way you walk, but also how your entire body reacts to walking, running, standing, and resting.

“There isn’t a lot of difference in the application of change, large, medium or small. You may find that with large-scale changes you have more elements to consider, for example; cross-border, multiple languages, network and telephony coverage to minimise downtime, multi-currency; the list goes on.

“Ultimately the change is still part of the overall organisation process, and therefore it should be viewed in that way. There are some pitfalls with global change, and here are 2, which caught me out the first time I worked in the region. In Muslim countries, the working week is Sunday to Thursday, and in countries where Arabic is the mother tongue, screens are written and read right to left.”

Meeting stakeholders needs

According to him, the way to ensure projects are managed securely, up-to-date and fit for purpose is to make sure you have sufficient review points, upwards and downwards, as well as ensuring there is regular communication with stakeholders and customers, so proposed change continues to meet their needs.

Despite this, the pitfalls of going to old technology stacks to new, such as physical servers to VM and telegram messages to digital, can be challenging.

Chowdhury advised: “You need to consider and test your application, database, routine tasks, scheduler etc. on your new environments, even before configuration to avoid failure. Change should take an organisation forward, not back.

“This is a very big area and is based on an organisation needs. Therefore you should look to make a checklist of everything that is moving to VM, or messaging which is being updated. This should also show touch points, of systems or processes, which are not directly impacted by these changes. Ensure all handshakes between system continue to push file or instruction to continue and complete the process.”

Business intelligence

Differently, he then explained how business intelligence (BI) is dictated by what your requirements are.

According to Chowdhury, if you are looking for a simple error message report, and your underlying database is SQL, you can get a simple report using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).

“If you are looking for a dashboard, consolidation, KPI’s etc., you may want to deploy TM1 or Hyperion. This is really about tailoring your BI based on the organisations needs – there is no exact science to this,” he added.

In regards to approaching a project and what principles to implement, Chowdhury believes you should get involved and gather information from those working in the area where change will be implemented.

“You’ve got to understand the processes deployed by those using the app or process to know which parts are currently changeable and those, which are not,” he revealed.

The most effective methodologies and modeling techniques he uses are BPMN and UML. He also believes a process model should be understood by anyone viewing it, and that you shouldn’t need a doctorate to figure out the solutions being proposed.

Documenting actions

“There are many methodologies, Prince II, waterfall, and agile to name a few. Again, this is really down to the size of the organisation, and the scale of the project,” he added.

“All methodologies will have certain control functions and gateways, it is really about an organisation deciding how many of these they want to put in place.”

Furthermore, understanding and documenting a list of actions or event steps typically defining the interactions between a role (known in the Unified Modeling Language as an actor) and a system will help achieve a goal.

He also noted that the ratio of work carried out by people vs software is changing, so parts of the process carried out by software need to be thoroughly tested.

Written by Leah Alger

The post Project manager advises how to carry out transformation projects  appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The service will support computational and visualisation intensive workloads for UKCloud’s UK public sector and healthcare customers.

UKCloud’s GPU-accelerated cloud service, branded as Cloud GPU, is available in two versions:

• UKCloud’s Cloud GPU Compute: This is a GPU accelerated computing service, based on the NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU and supports applications developed using NVIDIA CUDA, that enables parallel co-processing on both the CPU and GPU. Typical use cases include looking for cures, trends and research findings in medicine along with genomic sequencing, data mining and analytics in social engineering, and trend identification and predictive analytics in business or financial modelling and other applications of AI and deep learning.
• UKCloud’s Cloud GPU Visualisation: This is a virtual GPU (vGPU) service, utilising the NVIDIA Tesla M60, that extends the power of NVIDIA GPU technology to virtual desktops and apps. In addition to powering remote workspaces, typical use cases include military training simulations and satellite image analysis in defence, medical imaging and complex image rendering.

Simon Hansford, CEO of UKCloud, said: “Building on the foundation of UKCloud’s secure, assured, UK-Sovereign platform, we are now able to offer a range of cloud-based compute, storage and GPU services to meet our customers’ complex workload requirements.”

UKCloud is the only provider that specialises in public sector and healthcare, which offers Cloud GPU computing services with NVIDIA GPUs.

“The public sector is driving more complex computational and visualisation intensive workloads than ever before, not only for CAD development packages, but also for tasks like the simulation of infrastructure changes in transport, for genetic sequencing in health or for battlefield simulation in defence,” added Hansford.

Written from press release by Leah Alger

The post UKCloud launches Cloud GPU services appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

According to Tech Republic, ACI only takes a few seconds to deploy and by using billing tags each container is billed by the second and admins can pick the number of virtual central processing units (vCPUs) and the amount of memory to make sure the container fits the application.

The director of computing for Microsoft Azure, Corey Sanders, said in a recent blog post: “Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is offered for each instance, and no virtual management (VM) tier or cluster orchestration tools are needed to get started. It is simply your code, in a container, running in the cloud.

“There are multiple deployment options for ACIs, starting with a template or the Azure Command Line Interface. However, users can deploy from a Docker Hub, or other public repository, as well as from a private repository.”

Microsoft launched its open source connector, letting users deploy ACIs from Kubernetes, so that organisations can deploy VMs alongside ACIs, allowing long-term scalability.

“Microsoft use virtualisation to make sure each container remains isolated from containers deployed by other organisations. Currently, container instances are only available for Linux containers, but Windows container support will be coming sometime in the coming weeks,” added Sanders.

The firm also offers a free container-hosting environment optimised for Azure, integrating with DCOS, Apache Mesos and Docker, to keep Azure relevant to emerging technologies and trends.

Written by Leah Alger

The post Microsoft’s ‘simple and quick’ way to deploy Linux containers appeared first on DevOps Online North America.