WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

you’ll learn about some of the expert roles that are often the hardest to find or are only required in specific situations. This paper details these roles, their responsibilities and the cross-functional processes that are required to successfully hunt for, respond to and prevent threats as part of a world-class security organization.

We launched a new product portfolio as a series of specialized clouds: Acquia Drupal Cloud, Acquia Content Cloud and Acquia Marketing Cloud. Each cloud is composed of a suite of products designed to help customers design, organize and execute solutions tailored to their needs, whether they’re a developer, digital marketer, content creator, IT professional or anyone else involved in shaping the digital ecosystem.

We've been working on isolating the 1,500 services that power Monzo. The sheer size and complexity of our platform made this difficult. But by protecting us against compromised services, it makes Monzo more secure. 

In the Security team at Monzo, one of our goals is to move towards a completely zero trust platform. This means that in theory, we'd be able to run malicious code inside our platform with no risk – the code wouldn't be able to interact with anything dangerous without the security team granting special access.

The idea is that we don't want to trust just anything simply because it's inside our platform. Instead, we want individual services to be trusted based on a short and deliberate list of which other services they're allowed to interact with. This makes an attack substantially more difficult.

This post will discuss the different architectures that have been prominent in previous years and how they’ve influenced the architecture of today. 

SketchAdapt, program-writing artificial intelligence system, learns how to compose short, high-level programs, while letting a second set of algorithms find the right sub-programs to fill in the details.

Common characteristics of microservice architectures that we saw in the field:
- Componentization via Services
- Organized around Business Capabilities
- Products not Projects
- Smart endpoints and dumb pipes
- Decentralized Governance
- Decentralized Data Management
- Infrastructure Automation
- Design for failure
- Evolutionary Design

We are in the midst of an open source renaissance. But how do you turn an open source project into a business? a16z's Peter Levine and Jennifer Li cover the complete go-to-market from community management to enterprise sales.

A lot has changed since most brands first “hired” their DMP—GDPR, the rise of Walled Gardens, browser tracking preventions. Has your data strategy kept up?

Although writing code once sounds like a great bargain, the associated overhead made the cost of this approach outweigh the benefits (which turned out to be smaller than expected anyway). In the end we no longer share mobile code via C++ (or any other non-standard way) and instead write code in the platform native languages.
In addition we want our engineers to have a delightful experience and to be able to contribute back to the community. This is why we made the decision to align our practices with industry standards.

(This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review )

AgileFall is an ironic term for program management where you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techniques. It often produces a result that’s like combining a floor wax and dessert topping.

Must-do's in order for your hires to reach their full potential you need to put a structure in place that encourages and nurtures their growth, both technically and as managers and leaders.

The WSE (pronounced “wise”) is the largest commercial chip ever manufactured, built to solve the problem of deep learning compute. The WSE is 1.2 trillion transistors, packed onto a single 215mm x 215mm chip with 400,000 AI-optimized cores, connected by a 100Pbit/s interconnect. The cores are fed by 18 GB of super-fast, on-chip memory, with an unprecedented 9 PB/s of memory bandwidth.

Superlatives abound at Cerebras, the until-today stealthy next-generation silicon chip company looking to make training a deep learning model as quick as buying toothpaste from Amazon. Launching after almost three years of quiet development, Cerebras introduced its new chip today — and it is a doozy.

AWS offers the only cloud born from retail and built for retailers. We share Amazon’s own tested, proven innovation to help retailers reinvent their legacy applications for new value, complete their view of customers for relevant insight, and transform their engagement for increased sales velocity – a head start 20 years in the making to lead their customer’s journey.

Global companies, like Amazon, Coca Cola or Zalando are transforming their IT infrastructures into a microservice architecture. In addition to this, they are rebuilding their internal organizational structures and pushing their businesses ahead of the competition. We take a closer look at examples of microservice architecture in eCommerce.

Digital business transformation trailblazers who are actively promoting the adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI) clearly need to be better at communicating, separating fact from science fiction. AI business champions must keep it real and stay focused on tangible business value. A data analytics, big data and AI pioneer shares how business leaders can effectively advocate for AI.

Inovation has always been part of the Amazon DNA, but about 20 years ago, we went through a radical transformation with the goal of making our iterative process—"invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again"—even faster. The changes we made affected both how we built applications and how we organized our company.

Succeeding is no longer just about who’s able to build the technology, or who’s first to market. It’s about who’s got the best experience.

Agile Practice Guide provides tools, situational guidelines, and an understanding of the various Agile approaches available to enable better results. It is especially useful for project managers accustomed to a more traditional environment to adapt to a more Agile approach. The Agile Practice Guide contains the following sections:
- An Introduction to Agile describes the Agile Manifesto mindset, values, and principles. It also covers the concepts of definable and high-uncertainty work, and the correlation between the Lean, Kanban, and Agile approaches.
- Life Cycle Selection introduces the various life cycles discussed in the practice guide and covers suitability filters, tailoring guidelines, and common combinations of approaches.
- Implementing Agile: Creating an Agile Environment talks about critical factors to consider when creating an Agile environment such as servant leadership and team composition.
- Implementing Agile: Delivering in an Agile Environment discusses how to organize a team and common practices the team can use for delivering value on a regular basis. It provides examples of empirical measurements for the team and for reporting status.
- Organizational Considerations for Project Agility explores organizational factors that impact the use of Agile practices, such as culture, readiness, business practices, and the role of a project management office (PMO).

In this article, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of coupled, decoupled, headless, and hybrid CMS architecture.

One of the many challenges with building or refreshing a website is the selection of a Content Management System (CMS). Despite our best efforts the CMS can often be a source of difficulty in a project, but there are alternatives. Read about the approach we took on www.thoughtworks.com to developing functionality to support content management in an incremental fashion.

CONCLUSION

This article has detailed an incremental approach to developing a content managed web application, in contrast to the adoption of a CMS at the outset. While there are the costs associated with developing functionality which you could get “off the shelf,” these are offset by some of the advantage of this approach – flexibility, simplicity, control, obviating the need to learn a bespoke framework and above all being able to move in small steps from a simple static web site to a managed one.

We applied the editing-publishing separation
pattern in building a two-stack CMS to support a global
readership while supporting complex coordination of legacy
editing tools. 

When content volume is low and only few trained people are responsible for content creation and maintenance, any added complexity of a two stack CMS isn't worthwhile. Such complexity makes it harder for content creators to learn how to use it and adds significant effort in system maintenance. (Although this may be mitigated by tools that are designed to work in this style.)