Gixtools Project On Twitter: The Essential Guide For Mac

• Gixtools Project On Twitter: The Essential Guide For Machine
• Gixtools Project On Twitter The Essential Guide For Machine Learning

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As a former Gartner analyst with more than 12 years of IT service management industry experience, Jarod understands the market from the vendor, end-user, customer, and analyst perspectives. His proficiency in IT service support management processes, organizational structures, and technology is sought after for speaking engagements, customer consultations, and product development. He has published numerous white papers, research articles, blogs, and delivers innovative IT-focused presentations at events around the world. Introduction and Background Effectively responding to the complex requirements of today’s IT customer demands a framework that is robust, agile, and adaptable to the modern, ever changing business paradigm. This Essential Guide to Developing a First-Class IT Service Catalog will provide an introduction to the IT service catalog and promote the value a well-designed catalog can bring to any organization. The IT service catalog was originally introduced as part of the IT Infrastructure Library’s (ITIL®) set of best practices for IT service management (ITSM).

The British Government was the first to introduce ITIL to the world, stemming from its dissatisfaction with the quality of IT service being provided during the 1980’s. As such, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) was given the responsibility to develop a fiscally re¬sponsible framework for the efficient use of Britain’s IT resources within the British government, as well as in the private sector. ITIL versions include V2, V3, and the most recent, ITIL 2011. ITIL is comprised of five primary publications, which include:. Service Strategy. Service Design. Service Transition.

Service Operation. Continual Service Improvement Service Catalog Management is an essential IT process contained within the IT Infrastructure Library’s Service Design publication. The Service Design publication is especially important to overall business operations, including everything required to identify, conceptualize, design, and improve the services your business requires. This guide defines the IT/ITIL service catalog, explains its purpose, and outlines how to develop a catalog that works for your business, metrics you should measure to monitor success, pitfalls to avoid, and how to leverage technology to implement your service catalog. What is the IT / ITIL Service Catalog The service catalog is at the core of IT service delivery and contains a centralized list of services from the IT service portfolio (the service portfolio includes the entire lifecycle of all IT services – services in development, services available for deployment, and retired services) that are available for customer use. Within the IT service catalog, you will find an organized, digitized presentation of all of the IT services that your company provides – from resetting a lost password to accessing a financial system. The typical service catalog is composed of two views: 1) The customer view This is how the end-customer experiences the service catalog.

Usually presented using an IT self-service portal, this view presents services in customer terms and gives them the means to initiate service requests. For example, the following are customer views into higher-education service catalogs:. 2) The technical view This is intended for internal IT resources and includes technical information that is required to effectively deliver a service, including important relationships, approval processes, and impact on related services. The service catalog should be designed with the end customer in mind. Most importantly, the information necessary to request a service needs to be clearly defined with easy to understand instructions. Some of the key service information includes:.

Name of the service. Description of each individual service.

Service category (i.e. IT Service Catalog Examples There are no 'right' or 'wrong' ways to develop an IT service catalog. That said, based on the best practices contained within this guide, we have compiled a set of real-world service catalog examples that were built to accommodate the unique needs of their businesses. Why Do You Need an IT Service Catalog?

The perception of IT has gone through enormous change in recent years. IT has historically been undervalued – viewed as “a necessary evil,” simply managing the company’s information technology systems without a clear understanding of how they impact the overall business goals. With the advent of the service catalog, the value of IT is now becoming more apparent. The delivery of services that are critical to the daily operation of business, such as company web access, email, software solutions, and related services, clearly demonstrates its present and future value to business.

Visibility into the essential business services IT delivers is one of the main benefits the IT service catalog offers. Additional benefits include. How to Develop a Service Catalog Developing a service catalog may sound simple, but in order to encourage customer engagement and set proper expectations, it helps to consider the following tips to make it work: 1) Identify the services your business needs in order to operate Developing a service catalog is an exercise in good communication. Know your company and learn about its wants and needs.

Business unit managers and other decision makers should work with both end users and stakeholders to determine what they need to perform their jobs. Differentiate between the services that your service desk and other IT teams currently provide and what may be missing. Are they essential and, more importantly, do they align with company goals? Key Service Catalog Metrics Don’t quit after you create and release your service catalog.

It is equally important to continually measure and improve your service catalog by removing unnecessary or unused services and adding new services. Review your processes and learn from both your successes and failures. And, most importantly, be sure to share your successes with both business stakeholders and management. Consider metrics such as:.

The number of people accessing your catalog. The least and most accessed services. The number of requests associated with services.

Costs associated with a service. Service level metrics (Did you meet, exceed or breach service level agreements SLAs?). Problem and incident resolution time (Has it increased or decreased?). Mean time to resolve by service Each of these metrics helps define the effectiveness of your service catalog. IT Service Catalog: Performance Metrics Dashboard Example Back to top.

Pitfalls to Avoid When Creating a Service Catalog There are “do’s and don’ts” to consider when implementing any ITIL process. You can achieve success when creating your service catalog by avoiding some of the most common mistakes:. Don’t use tech-talk to describe services. Avoid technical language, and keep details simple to ensure your customers know what to expect. Don’t limit services to what you THINK your customers need.

Offer the services that your customers are looking for to do their job. Don’t set access boundaries for internal office staff. Make sure the catalog is available anytime, anywhere. Don’t respond and deliver when you feel like it. Be responsive to the needs of your customers, make SLA commitments, and keep them.

Don’t stop communicating after a request is received. Provide your customers with a timeline for service delivery, and keep them apprised of status throughout the process.

Tips for Selecting the Right Service Catalog Software The key role of service catalog software is to provide simple access to services, creating a user-friendly experience, and automating the service delivery process. Your service catalog will be similar to a self-service portal, simulating an “online shopping” experience with web and mobile accessibility.

It must therefore be flexible enough to add additional services and related details, with the ability to automate approvals, and communicate via email and web. In addition, and depending on your industry, growing regulations and more complex business demands may have increased your need for technology solutions that support or are compliant with best practice frameworks/methodologies, such as ITIL, COBIT, ISO 20000, ISO 27000, VAL-IT, or Risk IT. Consider compliance, risk management, and industry regulations when selecting your solution. The software solution you choose may offer IT service catalog templates that can be configured to include your IT and business services. The tool should allow the creation of multiple service catalogs that can be accessible via a single self-service interface.

It should also have broad functionality that includes the ability to provide automatic service progress notifications, monitor metrics, and the flexibility to implement on-premises or in the cloud (software as a service, or “SaaS”). According the Gartner, organizations should “select an IT service catalog tool from one of these options, according to your organization’s I&O maturity:. I&O organizations with a lower I&O maturity (ITSIO Level 2 or lower) - Focus on service request fulfillment features from a basic or intermediate ITSSM suite for now, and be prepared to revisit service catalog at a later stage (see Note 3). Otherwise, they are likely to produce an asset database that is focused on technical components and IT capabilities that aren't really IT services. I&O organizations with a medium I&O maturity (ITSIO Level 2 to Level 3) - Buy service catalog functionality as part of an ITSSM tool suite after defining an IT service portfolio. I&O organizations with a high I&O maturity (ITSIO Level 4 or above) - Those ready for enhanced catalog features and movement into provisioning the catalog beyond IT offerings should buy a stand-alone IT service catalog tool suite, after defining an IT service portfolio.

Otherwise, use service catalog functionality as part of an ITSSM tool suite after defining an IT service portfolio.” Finally, consider integrations with related IT support applications, IT asset management systems, human resource management solutions, a CMDB, and financial solutions. As customer demands on IT continue to escalate, key shortcomings in IT service delivery practices become readily apparent. Automating the delivery of IT services is acknowledged to be the wave of the future, as business and technology are inextricably linked. Implementing agile, mobile, adaptable, and user-friendly capabilities within your service catalog will be an integral part of your company’s success.

Containers are exploding onto the application development scene, especially when it comes to cloud computing. This is largely because portability has been a big chasm in this area, given the proprietary nature of some public clouds, and this technology abstracts applications into virtual containers that can be moved from cloud to cloud.

The is the other major benefit. There's now a standard way to divide applications into distributed objects or containers. Breaking applications up this way offers the ability to place them on different physical and virtual machines, in the cloud or not.

This flexibility offers more advantages around workload management and provides the ability to easily make fault-tolerant systems. Also, with the use of clustering, scheduling, and orchestration technology, developers can ensure that applications that exist inside of containers can scale and are resilient. These tools can manage groups of containers using a well-defined container management layer that provides these capabilities.

As the container world continues to emerge, it's becoming difficult to build container applications without these management layers. Finally, the popularity of containers has led many large companies, such as AWS, HP, IBM, and others to pledge allegiance to them. This provides support directly from existing enterprise tools and technology.

Numerous well-funded startups are appearing as well, with innovative solutions to make much more interesting and productive. What does all of this mean to software engineers? To answer this question, here's a guide for leveraging software containers for those charged with application development, focused on what's important. The basics Docker, the most popular container standard, is that provides a way to automate the deployment of applications inside software containers. Docker really started the container movement. However, it's not the only game in town. Companies such as CoreOS have their own container standard called Rocket, and many standards and products are being built around these technologies.

Don't let containers scare you. This kind of approach is nothing new—containers have been used for years as an approach to componentize whole systems, abstracting them from the physical platform, allowing you to move them around from platform to platform (or cloud to cloud). Let's focus on Docker for now. The Linux kernel, which is in the container, allows for resource isolation (CPU, memory, I/O, network, and so on) and doesn't require starting any virtual machines.

Docker extends a common container format called Linux Containers (LXC), with a high-level API that provides a lightweight virtualization solution that runs processes in isolation. Docker also provides namespaces to completely isolate an application's view of the operating environment, including process trees, network, user IDs, and file systems. The use of this technology is rather exciting, considering it solves an obvious and expansive problem: How to provide true application portability among While workloads can certainly be placed in virtual machines, the use of containers is a much better approach, and should have a higher chance of success as cloud computing moves from simple to complex architectures. The ability to provide lightweight platform abstraction within the Docker container, without using virtualization, is much more efficient for creating workload bundles that are transportable between clouds.

In many cases, virtualization is just too cumbersome for workload migration. Thus, containers provide a real foundation for moving workloads around within hybrid or multi-cloud environments without having to alter much or any of the application.

What's important Containers have a few basic features and advantages, including the ability to:. Reduce complexity through container abstractions. Containers don't require dependencies on the application infrastructure.

Thus, you don't need a complex native interface to deal with platform services. Leverage automation to maximize portability.

Automation replaced manual scripting. These days, it's much more difficult to guarantee portability when using automation.

Provide better security and governance, external to the containers. Security and governance services are platform-specific, not application-specific. Placing security and governance services outside of the container significantly reduces complexity. Provide enhanced distributed computing capabilities.

This is due to the fact that an application can be divided into many domains, all residing within containers. The portability aspect of containers means they can execute on a number of different cloud platforms. This allows engineers to pick and choose the platforms that they run on, based upon cost and performance efficiencies.

Provide automation services that leverage policy-based optimization. There needs to be an automation layer that can locate the best platform to execute on, and auto-migrate to that platform. At the same time, it must automatically deal with needed configuration changes. How to scale container-based applications Most who look to make containers scale take one of two basic approaches. The first approach is to create a custom system to manage the containers. This means a one-off system that you build to automatically launch new container instances as needed to handle an increasing processing load. But remember that if you build it, you own it.

As with many DIY approaches, the maintenance will become labor- and cost-intensive. The second approach is to leverage one of the container orchestration, scheduling, and clustering technologies that will provide the basic mechanisms to enable scalability. This is normally the better of the two options. There are a few choices out there for the second approach: First, is an open-source container cluster manager, much like Docker Swarm (discussed below). Kubernetes can schedule any number of container replicas across a group of node instances. This container replication and distribution trick is typically enough to make most large container-based applications scale as needed.

This is pretty much the same approach to scaling containers that the other tools take. Second, Cloudify provides a that overlaps with Docker Compose and Docker Swarm. Its YAML-based blueprints let developers describe complex topologies, including the infrastructure, middleware tier, and app layers.

It's more orchestration-oriented, and thus should be considered when looking at orchestration and automation tools when clustering isn't needed. Finally, the newest tool, provides clustering, scheduling, and integration capabilities. This tool enables developers to build and ship multi-container/multi-host distributed applications that include the necessary scaling and management for container-based systems. Obviously, Swarm is designed to compete with Kubernetes, which has a larger market share. Consider both tools when there's a need to massively scale containers.

I would suggest a proof of concept with each technology, using real-world workloads. Best practices continue to emerge around scaling containers, including:. Devote time to the architecture of your container-based applications. Most scaling issues are traced back to poor designs, not poor technology.

Always do a proof of concept to determine the real scaling capabilities of the solutions you're considering. Use automated testing tools to simulate the workloads and massive amounts of data for testing. Consider your own requirements.

What works for other large companies may not be right for your container-based applications. Don't forget about security and governance. They have to scale as well. I suspect that scaling containers will be a bit tricky until more is understood about how containers behave at scale. However, with a good understanding of the proper use of containers and the right technology, you'll be scalable right out of the gate.

Understand the steps If you're running Linux already, then installing Docker won't be that complex. However, installing Docker on a Mac or Windows will require a few more steps. Just follow the appropriate OS. The next step is to attempt to run a Dockerized application. Docker has compiled a public registry of applications available as Docker images, and this community provides many jumping off points for building and running your own container-based applications.

Once Docker is installed and online, run a Docker application image by entering: sudo docker run -rm -p 3000:3000 imagename There are a few more details, but for simplicity's sake, we'll leave them out of this discussion. Note that the 'docker run' command above is running an image called imagename. If it can't find the image on your local system, it will check the public registry and invoke it there, if found. The Docker container is simply an instance of a Docker image, much like applications are instances of executables that exist in memory. So, you can launch multiple isolated instances of the app as containers on a single host. By adding '-rm' to the command, as done above, Docker is instructed to remove the container from memory once it completes its task.

This has the effect of removing any changes to the local environment that the application may have made but keeps the cached image. Building a Docker image for an application requires starting with a base image for the core OS, which runs in Docker. Install and configure the necessary tools, and then use the Docker 'commit' command to save the container as an image. Finally, push it to the public Docker image registry or keep it private. Another way to create an image is to note the steps required to build the image in a well-formed Dockerfile file. This automates the process of installing and, creating a repeatable process.

As with any development process, there are more details that you need to understand to master building and running Docker images and containers. In many respects, the success of containers and Docker has been around the ease of development. As the standard and product progresses, things will likely get even easier.

Gixtools Project On Twitter: The Essential Guide For Machine

A container in every shop The tendency is to think that new ways of building systems will be the way that we build systems for years to come. While that hasn't been the case in the past, it could be the case with containers. Containers deliver a standard, useful enabling technology and provide a path to application architecture that offers both managed distribution and service orientation. We've been trying to reach this state for years but have yet to succeed. Perhaps what's most compelling is the portability advantage of containers, and that remains the battle cry of container technology providers these days. However, it'll be years before we really understand the true value of containers, as we move container-based applications from cloud to cloud.

Gixtools Project On Twitter The Essential Guide For Machine Learning

I suspect that if this momentum continues, containers will be a part of most IT shops in the future—whether they're moving to the cloud or not. The viability and versatility of this technology will be something that we continue to explore and exploit over the next several years. Count on the fact that a few mistakes will be made, but the overall impact of containers is a foregone conclusion.