The Apache Cassandra Project released today v4.0 of Apache Cassandra, the Open Source distributed Big Data database management platform. A NoSQL database, Apache Cassandra handles massive amounts of data across load-intensive applications with high availability and no single point of failure. Cassandra v4.0 handles unstructured data, with thousands of writes per second. New features:
Increased speed and scalability – streams data faster during scaling operations and throughput on reads and writes, that delivers a more elastic architecture, particularly in Cloud and Kubernetes deployments.
Improved consistency – keeps data replicas in sync to optimize incremental repair for faster, more efficient operation and consistency across data replicas.
Enhanced security and observability – audit logging tracks users access and activity with minimal impact to workload performance. New capture and replay enables analysis of production workloads to help ensure regulatory and security compliance with SOX, PCI, GDPR, or other requirements.
New configuration settings – exposed system metrics and configuration settings provides flexibility for operators to ensure they have easy access to data that optimize deployments.
Minimized latency – garbage collector pause times are reduced to a few milliseconds with no latency degradation as heap sizes increase.
Better compression – improved compression efficiency eases unnecessary strain on disk space and improves read performance.
Welocalize, a language service provider (LSP) announced the acquisition of Next Level Globalization (NLG), the third largest LSP in Germany. NLG, whose clients are specialized in medical devices, diagnostics, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals, doubles Welocalize’s portfolio of global brands in the life sciences sector. NLG has extensive expertise supporting highly regulated companies with language services ranging from medical translation and in-country review to regulatory consulting to software localization. Joined together, this significantly expands Welocalize’s presence in Europe, the primary hub for the life sciences industry.
Over the last 18 months, the life sciences industry has been under unprecedented pressure to accelerate how it communicates and relays information across the globe. Jointly, Welocalize and NLG will work with their clients to help them deliver a better customer experience through their intelligent workflow solutions, high quality language services, and their proprietary technology for in-country review and project submission. The acquisition of NLG is Welocalize’s 19th and its fourth within regulated industries, alongside Park IP Translations in 2012 and Nova Language Services and Global Language Solutions in 2016. The combined client portfolio will benefit from a breadth of complementary services including IP and legal translation and ISO-certified machine translation services.
Adobe announced the Adobe Analytics curriculum for education, a global program that supports the future workforce with in-demand data science skills. As part of the next generation of the Adobe Education Exchange, college instructors and students will be able to use Adobe Analytics, a customer data analytics platform, for free and get access to course curriculum with hands-on activities. Students will learn how to use data to drive business decisions and gain skills for careers spanning data science to marketing and product management.
Participants get access to a sandbox environment, which allows students to use Adobe Analytics with rich demo data. It is meant to be self-paced. instructors can pick and choose modules to incorporate. The four modules:
Data Collection: Students learn the fundamentals of data collection, warehousing and cleaning, as well as implementation.
Data Strategy and Architecture: Once data is collected, teams have to set up a data structure to make the data consumable across an organization.
Standard Metrics and Functionality: Focuses on reporting and how data is presented to functions such as marketing, product development, eCommerce and design.
Analysis Workspace Fundamentals: Provides students an opportunity to curate data, collaborate with others, produce new visualizations and uncover insights that advance business objectives.
First of all please note that next week I’ll be on vacation. 🏖
This week we have articles from the Netflix Technology Blog, HBR, and McKinsey. This week’s news comes from Widen and Clarifai, Sinequa, Microsoft, Agilty CMS, and Appfire and Spartez.
Opinion / Analysis
Not every organization has the digital asset management challenges that Netflix has, at least in terms of scale. But even if you don’t, our first article this week is a generous how-they-did-it by Netflix software engineers Burak Bacioglu and Meenakshi Jindal, to share with product and development teams.
We follow with two explainers / perspectives on quantum computing. Both are short, high level, and will help keep you current. First, Francesco Bova, Avi Goldfarb, and Roger Melko explain why computing applications that require combinatoric calculations are an effective way to understand existing and near term uses of quantum computing. Next, Victor Galitski, Dmitry Green, Benjamin Lev, Yuval Oreg, and Henning Soller discuss how to navigate investment decisions in quantum computing given its nascent state.
Elasticsearch indexing strategy in Netflix digital asset management platform
At Netflix, all of our digital media assets (images, videos, text, etc.) are stored in secure storage layers. We built an asset management platform (AMP), codenamed Amsterdam, in order to easily…
Digital computing has limitations in regards to an important category of calculation called combinatorics, in which the order of data is important to the optimal solution. Computers and software that are predicated on the assumptions of quantum mechanics have the potential to perform combinatorics and other calculations much faster…
The Gilbane Advisor is curated by Frank Gilbane for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. The focus is on strategic technologies. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.
dotCMS, a hybrid content management system, launched dotCDN, a new integrated content delivery network (CDN). dotCDN enables faster content delivery through a reliable network of intelligent edge servers across the world and uses real-time analytics based on your content and network metrics to make sure users are always served content from the most optimal edge server. dotCDN can make both traditional and headless architectures perform fast, while still allowing for fully customized, context-based experiences and omnichannel marketing campaigns. dotCDN’s capabilities:
dotCDN includes a workflow that will automatically invalidate pages, content and assets as they are updated and published or deleted in dotCMS.
dotCDN enables users to speed uncached requests across regions, so even content that’s not cached on the CDN is accessible.
dotCDN offers optional edge storage which statically stores files and replicates them across 4 continents.
dotCDN monitors your content and traffic and can offer you different routing options and optimizations.
See the traffic your CDN is getting with graphs and figures showing Bandwidth Used, Requests Served and the Cache Hit Rate.
dotCDN automatically monitors and stops many types of DDoS attacks.
Sinequa, a provider of Intelligent Enterprise Search announced the launch of Sinequa for Microsoft Teams. The Sinequa platform offers a single access point to surface relevant insights both from within and outside the Microsoft ecosystem. Built for Azure and Microsoft 365 customers with Teams, Sinequa has extended its search technology to Teams to help enterprises elevate productivity and enable better decision-making all in one place.
Improve information findability. Now, employees can have a single access point to content stored within and outside the Microsoft ecosystem.
Data and content intelligence. Data within the enterprise is largely unstructured content. The Sinequa platform ingests, analyzes, and learns from data and content, while allowing employees to use natural language to surface it quickly.
Strengthen collaboration. Easily share content without duplication and uncover expertise without needing to know where to find it.
Remove friction from workflows. Not all content is created equal, and every job has a very different workflow.With a 360-degree view of any topic – such as customers, products, issues, processes, and much more -employees have everything they need to make informed decisions. An advanced analytics dashboard helps provide this complete view by cross-analyzing and connecting content from diverse sources.
Appfire, a provider of apps that help teams solve challenges with digital solutions, announced the acquisition of Spartez Software. The acquisition includes the Whiteboards collaboration toolset, built to enable in-context visual communication for distributed teams. Spartez’s product portfolio also includes apps for IT Service Management, Agile, DevOps. Based in Gdańsk, Poland, Spartez was founded in 2007 and is an Atlassian Platinum Marketplace Partner with nearly 9,000 installations worldwide. Spartez’s full 35-person team will join Appfire with all four founders continuing their involvement in various roles.
Whiteboards provides a collaborative workspace for running remote creative brainstorming sessions, planning and retros, project management, stakeholder updates, within the collaboration tools that globally distributed teams already use. The Whiteboards product set includes apps for Jira and Confluence and a GitHub integration. Another of its apps, Agile Poker, facilitates backlog estimations for teams. Also part of the acquired product line is Spartez Software’s TFS4JIRA. It offers an Azure DevOps (previously known as Team Foundation Server, or TFS) integration and migration app for Jira to connect the two solutions and link relevant tasks and projects. Additionally, Spartez adds both live Chat and Canned Responses apps to Appfire’s IT Service Management offerings.
Agility CMS, an API-first headless CMS, announced the general availability of its GraphQL API. The introduction of GraphQL supports developer productivity and enables fast, agile development of enterprise-grade websites and applications. Agility CMS launched v1 of their GraphQL API, which provides users with a GraphQL Playground Interface where they can query content from their Agility CMS Instance, using a GraphQL schema based on its defined content models. Agility CMS allows developers to use any API they choose to manipulate data, for flexibility and productivity. GraphQL is designed to make APIs flexible, fast, precise, and developer-friendly, and it’s rapidly becoming the standard for API-based data access. GraphQL ensures that developers and applications only load the relevant and absolute necessary data in a single request, even if it’s from multiple sources, which means no more over or under fetching of data. Agility CMS now supports both GraphQL and Content Fetch REST API, as well as Content Sync SDK.