Introduction

In the world of web and application development, ensuring a seamless user experience is essential. As users increasingly demand high-performance, low-latency applications, and services, businesses must monitor how their websites, APIs, and applications perform in real-time. This is where synthetic monitoring comes into play. Synthetic monitoring simulates real user interactions with your digital services to detect issues before they impact actual users.

One of the most powerful tools for synthetic monitoring is New Relic Synthetics. New Relic Synthetics is a part of the New Relic monitoring platform that provides automated, scripted checks to simulate user interactions with your website or application. By using synthetic monitoring, businesses can proactively monitor uptime, availability, and performance from multiple global locations, ensuring their services are always operating as expected.

In this blog post, we will explore what New Relic Synthetics is, the top 10 use cases for it, its features, how it works and its architecture, installation process, and a basic tutorial to get you started with New Relic Synthetics.

What is New Relic Synthetics?

New Relic Synthetics is a monitoring solution provided by New Relic that enables businesses to simulate user interactions with their websites, applications, and APIs to ensure they are performing optimally. By using synthetic monitoring, New Relic Synthetics allows you to run automated, script-based checks to detect issues before they affect real users.

New Relic Synthetics supports a wide range of synthetic monitoring capabilities, including browser monitoring, API monitoring, and uptime monitoring, with tests running from multiple global locations. It is designed to help IT teams monitor web performance, reduce downtime, and identify areas for optimization. Synthetics provides valuable insights into response times, availability, and overall performance, helping teams to maintain the best possible user experience.

New Relic Synthetics is integrated with the broader New Relic platform, providing a unified view of application performance, infrastructure health, and user experience metrics.

Top 10 Use Cases of New Relic Synthetics

New Relic Synthetics is a versatile tool that can be applied to a wide range of use cases. Here are the top 10 ways businesses can leverage New Relic Synthetics:

1. Website Uptime Monitoring

New Relic Synthetics continuously checks the availability of your website or web application from multiple locations around the world. It simulates real user visits to detect any downtime or availability issues before they impact your customers.

2. End-User Experience Monitoring

By simulating real user interactions, New Relic Synthetics helps you monitor the actual user experience, including page load times, transaction completion times, and browser performance. This allows you to ensure that users receive a fast and seamless experience on your website or app.

3. API Monitoring

New Relic Synthetics can monitor APIs by simulating API calls to verify that they are working as expected. By monitoring response times, status codes, and API performance, you can quickly identify issues with your APIs before they affect end users or services dependent on them.

4. Global Performance Monitoring

With global monitoring locations, New Relic Synthetics provides insight into how your website or application performs from various regions. This is essential for businesses that serve an international audience and need to ensure that their services are optimized for users around the world.

5. Multi-Step Transaction Monitoring

New Relic Synthetics allows you to create multi-step scripted tests that simulate the entire user journey. This can include actions like logging in, making a purchase, or completing a form. Monitoring these critical transactions ensures that the most important user flows are functioning correctly.

6. Third-Party Service Monitoring

If your website or app relies on third-party services (such as APIs or external libraries), New Relic Synthetics can help monitor those services’ availability and performance. This ensures that your website or application doesn’t face disruptions due to third-party service failures.

7. Continuous Availability Testing

New Relic Synthetics can be set up to run continuous tests at regular intervals to ensure that your services are always available. Continuous availability testing is crucial for businesses that cannot afford any downtime and need to detect issues before they become critical.

8. Load Time and Performance Testing

In addition to uptime, New Relic Synthetics also tracks page load times and performance metrics. By simulating a user’s interaction with your site, Synthetics helps you monitor how quickly your pages load, which is critical for improving user satisfaction and search engine rankings.

9. Monitoring for Mobile Applications

New Relic Synthetics allows businesses to simulate user interactions on mobile websites and applications, providing insights into performance, availability, and user experience on mobile devices. This helps ensure that your mobile users have a positive experience, regardless of their device.

10. Alerting and Incident Management

New Relic Synthetics is integrated with New Relic’s alerting system, allowing you to set up notifications based on specific criteria such as downtime, slow response times, or failed transactions. This integration helps teams to respond to issues proactively and reduce incident resolution time.

What Are the Features of New Relic Synthetics?

New Relic Synthetics comes with a rich set of features that make it an effective solution for monitoring user experience, performance, and availability. Some of the key features include:

• Scripted Browser Monitoring: Simulate user interactions in real browsers (Chrome, Firefox) to test complex web applications.
• API Monitoring: Monitor REST APIs and other services with detailed checks, response times, and status code tracking.
• Global Monitoring Locations: Run synthetic tests from over 40 monitoring locations worldwide to simulate real-user experiences in different regions.
• Multi-Step Browser Monitoring: Automate multi-step transactions such as logins, purchases, and form submissions to monitor critical user journeys.
• Custom Alerts: Set up custom alerting thresholds for response times, errors, or downtime, and receive notifications via email, SMS, or integrations with Slack, PagerDuty, or other tools.
• Real User Data Integration: Integrates with New Relic APM to provide insights into both synthetic and real user performance in one unified dashboard.
• Advanced Scripting: Write custom scripts for more advanced, real-world simulations and test user flows on your site.
• Transaction Monitoring: Track critical transactions on your website or application, ensuring key actions work smoothly for users.
• API Response Time Tracking: Track response times and status codes for external API endpoints, ensuring that third-party services are functioning properly.
• Performance Optimization Insights: Get detailed reports on performance bottlenecks, including load times, response times, and overall site health.

How New Relic Synthetics Works and Architecture

New Relic Synthetics uses a combination of global monitoring locations and scripted tests to simulate real user interactions with your web services. Here’s how it works:

1. Global Monitoring Locations: New Relic Synthetics operates over 40 monitoring locations worldwide. These monitoring nodes simulate real user interactions with your website or API, ensuring you get a comprehensive view of your service’s availability and performance from different geographic regions.
2. Scripted Tests: You can create automated scripts using JavaScript to simulate user interactions like logging in, navigating through the site, completing transactions, and more. These scripts can test multiple steps in a user’s journey, helping to simulate real-world usage.
3. Data Collection and Analysis: Once tests are executed, data is collected and sent to New Relic for analysis. The data includes detailed metrics like response time, page load times, errors, and status codes, giving you a thorough understanding of how your service performs from a user’s perspective.
4. Alerting and Notifications: If a test fails or exceeds performance thresholds, New Relic Synthetics sends real-time alerts to notify you of the issue. You can configure these alerts based on specific metrics such as downtime, slow response times, or failed transactions.
5. Unified Dashboard: All data from synthetic tests is integrated with the New Relic platform, providing a unified view of your application’s performance. The data can be analyzed alongside real user monitoring (RUM) data, giving you a holistic view of your service’s performance.

How to Install New Relic Synthetics?

New Relic Synthetics is a cloud-based service, so there is no traditional installation process required. However, to set it up, follow these steps:

1. Create a New Relic Account:
   • Sign up for a free New Relic account if you don’t already have one.
2. Set Up Your Application:
   • After logging into New Relic, create an application within the New Relic Synthetics dashboard. You’ll need to configure the application by entering its details (e.g., URL) and specify the type of monitoring (browser, API, etc.).
3. Write Synthetic Scripts:
   • For browser and multi-step transaction monitoring, write custom scripts using JavaScript. These scripts simulate real user actions on your website.
4. Configure Monitoring Locations:
   • Choose monitoring locations from which your tests will be executed. New Relic Synthetics allows you to test from over 40 global locations.
5. Set Up Alerts:
   • Configure alerts based on your monitoring needs. You can define thresholds for performance and set up email or SMS notifications when those thresholds are crossed.
6. Start Monitoring:
   • Once you’ve set up your monitors and alerts, New Relic Synthetics will start simulating user interactions and gathering performance data. You can track results via the New Relic dashboard.

Basic Tutorials of New Relic Synthetics: Getting Started

Here’s a quick guide to getting started with New Relic Synthetics:

1. Create a Browser Monitor:

• Go to the New Relic Synthetics dashboard and click “Create a monitor.”
• Select “Browser” as the monitor type.
• Enter the URL of the website you want to monitor and choose the global locations from which to run tests.

2. Write a Simple Script:

• Use JavaScript to create simple test scripts for monitoring page load times or user interactions like logging in.
• Write code to interact with elements on the page and record performance data.

3. Set Up Multi-Step Monitoring:

• Create multi-step scripts to monitor critical user journeys, such as completing a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or submitting a form.

4. View Results:

• After running the tests, view the results from the dashboard. Analyze page load times, transaction performance, and any errors detected.

5. Set Alerts:

• Configure alerts to notify you when a test fails or when performance exceeds predefined thresholds.

The Value of New Relic Synthetics

New Relic Synthetics is an essential tool for businesses that want to ensure the best possible user experience on their websites, APIs, and applications. With its ability to simulate real user interactions, monitor performance from multiple global locations, and provide detailed performance insights, New Relic Synthetics helps businesses proactively identify and resolve issues before they affect customers.

Whether you’re monitoring website uptime, tracking API performance, or simulating complex user transactions, New Relic Synthetics is a powerful solution to help ensure that your digital services run smoothly, efficiently, and optimally.

The post What is New Relic Synthetics and Its Use Cases? appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

Introduction

In the fast-paced, always-on digital world, maintaining an online presence is essential for businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re running an e-commerce platform, a content-heavy website, or a SaaS application, ensuring that your website is always available and performing well is crucial. Downtime can be costly, leading to lost revenue, damaged customer trust, and a decline in user satisfaction.

To help prevent these issues, Uptime Robot is a popular and effective tool for monitoring the uptime and performance of websites, servers, and services. It continuously checks whether your website is online, monitors its performance, and provides notifications in case of any disruptions. In this blog post, we’ll explore what Uptime Robot is, the top 10 use cases for it, its key features, how it works, and provide installation instructions along with basic tutorials to help you get started.

What is Uptime Robot?

Uptime Robot is a free and reliable website monitoring service that helps ensure the availability of your website or web services by continuously checking their status. It is used by website owners, system administrators, and businesses to monitor the uptime and performance of their online assets, such as websites, servers, APIs, and databases.

Launched in 2010, Uptime Robot has gained popularity due to its simplicity, ease of use, and effective monitoring capabilities. It provides users with real-time notifications if their website or service goes down, helping them act quickly and resolve issues before they impact their users. Uptime Robot supports various monitoring protocols, including HTTP(s), ping, port, and more.

With Uptime Robot, you can monitor websites for uptime, track response times, and get instant alerts when things go wrong. This tool helps to keep your web services running smoothly and prevents costly downtime.

Top 10 Use Cases of Uptime Robot

Uptime Robot is a versatile tool, capable of monitoring various types of online services. Below are the top 10 use cases where Uptime Robot excels:

1. Website Uptime Monitoring

Uptime Robot’s primary use case is website uptime monitoring. It checks your website’s availability from multiple locations worldwide, ensuring your site is accessible to users at all times. If your website goes down, Uptime Robot will alert you instantly so that you can take action to resolve the issue.

2. Server Monitoring

Uptime Robot can also monitor your servers, ensuring they are online and responsive. It tracks server availability using protocols like ping or HTTP requests, allowing you to detect if there’s an issue with the server itself, such as network outages or server crashes.

3. API Monitoring

APIs are crucial for modern web services, and downtime can result in serious consequences for businesses. Uptime Robot helps monitor the health of your APIs by checking their endpoints for availability and response time. If an API becomes unresponsive, Uptime Robot sends alerts to notify the development team.

4. Domain Monitoring

In addition to monitoring websites and servers, Uptime Robot can monitor domain names (DNS) to ensure your domain resolves correctly and is not experiencing issues that would make your website inaccessible. It tracks DNS resolution and alerts you if there are any configuration problems or DNS downtime.

5. Database Monitoring

Databases are critical components of many applications and websites. Uptime Robot can monitor database availability by checking specific ports or services associated with your database, ensuring it is functioning properly and can serve data to users without interruptions.

6. SSL Certificate Monitoring

SSL certificates are essential for secure communication between users and your website. Uptime Robot checks the status of your SSL certificates, making sure they are valid and have not expired. If your certificate is close to expiring or if there’s an issue, Uptime Robot will notify you, allowing you to renew it before it becomes a problem.

7. Website Response Time Monitoring

Uptime Robot doesn’t just monitor if a website is online, but also measures its response time. By tracking how quickly your website loads, you can identify performance bottlenecks and ensure that your site provides an optimal experience for users, especially when traffic increases.

8. Ping Monitoring

Ping monitoring helps you check the availability of your servers, devices, or websites by sending a series of pings to a particular IP address or URL. Uptime Robot uses this to monitor your infrastructure for latency, packet loss, or connectivity issues, ensuring smooth operation.

9. Port Monitoring

Uptime Robot allows you to monitor specific ports on your server. Whether it’s HTTP (port 80), HTTPS (port 443), or any custom port, you can check whether specific services are running correctly. This feature is helpful for monitoring backend systems or custom applications that depend on specific ports.

10. Mobile Monitoring

For businesses that rely on mobile apps or mobile APIs, Uptime Robot can also be used to monitor the availability and performance of mobile services. This includes tracking the availability of APIs and mobile websites, ensuring that your app functions without issues for users across different platforms.

What Are the Features of Uptime Robot?

Uptime Robot offers a wide range of features that make it a powerful monitoring tool for businesses and website owners. Some of its key features include:

• Free Monitoring: Uptime Robot offers a free plan that allows you to monitor up to 50 websites or services.
• Multiple Monitoring Protocols: Uptime Robot supports various protocols, including HTTP(s), ping, port, and keyword monitoring.
• Global Monitoring Locations: Uptime Robot checks your websites from multiple locations around the world to ensure they are accessible to users from different regions.
• Real-Time Alerts: Get instant notifications via email, SMS, or through integrations like Slack, Telegram, or webhooks when your website or service goes down.
• Customizable Monitoring Intervals: You can configure how often Uptime Robot checks your websites (every 5 minutes by default, or as frequent as every minute for premium users).
• SSL Certificate Monitoring: Uptime Robot monitors SSL certificate expiry and alerts you when certificates are near expiration.
• Port and Ping Monitoring: Monitor specific ports on your servers or devices and track their availability with ping-based checks.
• Reports and Logs: Uptime Robot provides detailed reports and logs on the status of your website or service, which you can use for analysis or troubleshooting.
• Custom Alerts: You can customize how and when you want to receive alerts, including sending notifications only during specific hours or for certain types of issues.

How Uptime Robot Works and Architecture

Uptime Robot follows a simple yet effective client-server architecture for monitoring websites and services. Here’s how it works:

1. Monitoring: Uptime Robot has a network of monitoring servers located in various global regions. These monitoring servers periodically check your websites or services for availability by using different protocols such as HTTP, ping, or port checking.
2. Alerting: If a service goes down, Uptime Robot sends real-time alerts through email, SMS, or other notification channels. The alerts are customizable based on the type of issue detected.
3. Reporting and Logs: Uptime Robot aggregates monitoring data and provides reports on uptime, performance, and response times. You can access these reports via the Uptime Robot dashboard, and they include detailed logs to help you diagnose and troubleshoot issues.
4. API Integration: Uptime Robot offers a robust API that allows you to integrate monitoring data and alerts into your existing tools and workflows.
5. Dashboard: The web dashboard provides a user-friendly interface where you can configure your monitoring settings, review reports, and manage your monitoring tasks.

How to Install Uptime Robot?

Installing Uptime Robot is simple since it’s a cloud-based service that doesn’t require any installation on your server. Here’s how you can get started:

1. Sign Up for Uptime Robot:
   • Visit the Uptime Robot website and create a free account. If you need more advanced features, you can opt for a premium plan.
2. Add Your Websites/Services:
   • After logging in, click the “Add Monitor” button.
   • Choose the type of monitor (e.g., HTTP(s), ping, port, or keyword).
   • Enter the URL or IP address of the website or service you want to monitor.
   • Set the monitoring interval (e.g., every 5 minutes or every minute for premium users).
3. Configure Alerts:
   • In the alert settings, specify how you want to receive notifications in case of downtime or issues.
   • You can set up email alerts, SMS alerts, or integrate with services like Slack, Telegram, or webhooks.
4. Start Monitoring:
   • Once you’ve configured your monitors and alert settings, Uptime Robot will start monitoring your website or service immediately.
5. View Reports and Logs:
   • From the Uptime Robot dashboard, you can access detailed reports, view uptime history, and analyze performance metrics.

Basic Tutorials of Uptime Robot: Getting Started

Once Uptime Robot is set up, you can start monitoring your websites and services. Here’s a quick guide to help you get started with some common tasks:

1. Monitoring a Website:

• From the dashboard, click “Add Monitor” and select HTTP(s) as the monitor type.
• Enter the website URL and select the monitoring frequency.
• Set up alerting for when the website goes down.

2. Monitoring an API:

• Add a new monitor and choose the HTTP(s) monitor type.
• Provide the API endpoint URL and set a suitable interval.
• Choose to be notified via email or Slack if the API fails.

3. Ping Monitoring for Servers:

• Select the Ping option to monitor a server by IP address.
• Set the desired monitoring interval and alerting preferences.
• Uptime Robot will notify you if the server becomes unresponsive.

4. Viewing Reports:

• Use the dashboard to access real-time and historical uptime reports.
• You can export these reports as CSV files for further analysis.

The Value of Uptime Robot

Uptime Robot is a reliable and affordable monitoring tool for website and service uptime. Whether you’re an individual website owner, a developer, or part of an IT team, Uptime Robot helps ensure that your online assets remain accessible and perform well. With its straightforward setup, free plan, and rich set of features, Uptime Robot is a valuable tool for maintaining high uptime and preventing downtime-related issues.

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First let’s go to your Laravel project Your Controller Function and this code add

Now is your Result html tag remove

Refresh for this link => https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36247382/remove-html-tags-from-strings-on-laravel-blade/36247458

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Google today released Quantization Aware Training (QAT) API, which enables developers to train and deploy models with the performance benefits of quantization — the process of mapping input values from a large set to output values in a smaller set — while retaining close to their original accuracy. The goal is to support the development of smaller, faster, and more efficient machine learning models well-suited to run on off-the-shelf machines, such as those in medium- and small-business environments where computation resources are at a premium.

Often, the process of going from a higher to lower precision is noisy. That’s because quantization squeezes a small range of floating-point values into a fixed number of information buckets, leading to information loss similar to rounding errors when fractional values are represented as integers. (For example, all values in range [2.0, 2.3] might be represented in a single bucket.) Problematically, when the lossy numbers are used in several computations, the losses accumulate and need to be rescaled for the next computation.

The QAT API solves this by simulating low-precision computation during the AI model training process. Quantization error is introduced as noise throughout the training, which QAT API’s algorithm tries to minimize so that it learns variables that are more robust to quantization. A training graph leverages operations that convert floating-point objects into low-precision values and then convert low-precision values back into floating-point, ensuring that quantization losses are introduced in the computation and that further computations emulate low-precision.

In tests, Google reports that an image classification model (MobilenetV1 224) with a non-quantized accuracy of 71.03% achieved 71.06% accuracy after quantization when tested on the open source Imagenet data set. Another classification model (Nasnet-Mobile) tested against the same data set only experienced a 1% loss in accuracy (74% to 73%) post-quantization.

Aside from emulating the reduced precision computation, QAT API is responsible for recording the statistics necessary to quantize a trained model or parts of it. This enables developers to convert a model trained with the API to a quantized integer-only TensorFlow Lite model, for example, or to experiment with various quantization strategies while simulating how quantization affects accuracy for different hardware backends.

Google says that by default, QAT API — which is a part of the TensorFlow Model Optimization Toolkit — is configured to work with the quantized execution support available in TensorFlow Lite, Google’s toolset designed to adapt models architected on its TensorFlow machine learning framework to mobile, embedded, and internet of things devices. “We are very excited to see how the QAT API further enables TensorFlow users to push the boundaries of efficient execution in their TensorFlow Lite-powered products as well as how it opens the door to researching new quantization algorithms and further developing new hardware platforms with different levels of precision,” wrote Google in a blog post.

The formal launch of the QAT API comes after the unveiling of TensorFlow Quantum, a machine learning framework for training quantum models, at the TensorFlow Dev Summit. The QAT API was previewed during a recorded session at the conference.

The post Google releases API to train smaller, faster AI models appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

The world of payments is in a state of transition and rapid innovation. Global companies need to satisfy a customer base spread out across the world, with different areas using different payment methods and currencies.

Further complicating the landscape is that consumer demands are swiftly shifting. Consumers have more power and choice than ever before, and they have increasingly come to expect quicker and more seamless interactions and services.

This dynamic has caused customer experience (CX) to be a major focus of companies vying for customers’ business. A bad customer experience, even just one time, can cause consumers to go elsewhere. According to a study from Oracle, 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.

Since payments are central to the customer experience, the payments industry is especially focused on providing great CX. From real-time payments to biometric authentication, companies are offering tech-savvy consumers cutting-edge ways to manage, move, and spend their money.

To aid payments companies in adapting to the emerging trends, Worldpay from FIS published “Be a Champion of Change: How to Embrace Innovation to Meet Consumer Demand.” The white paper sketches out a blueprint for how to be successful in such a rapidly changing payments landscape.

It begins by identifying and elaborating upon four powerful technologies that can be used by payments companies preparing for the future: microservices, test-driven infrastructure, event-driven infrastructure, and hypermedia APIs.

Microservices

When it comes to video streaming, one of the most successful companies is Netflix. Every day, the company streams 250 million hours of video to 98 million customers in 190 countries. How does Netflix manage to do this? Microservice architecture.

As Worldpay from FIS’ white paper explains, “a microservice architecture is made up of multiple independently deployable, or loosely coupled, services.” In Netflix’s case, its platform is comprised of around 700 microservices.

Such an approach allows individual aspects of the system to be easily updated, added, or replaced without impacting the entire platform. This makes the system resilient to change, while also decreasing the time to take a new product to market.

In an industry like payments, where change is frequent and flexibility essential, microservice architecture allows companies to keep up with, and adapt to, shifting consumer trends.

Consider the proliferation of alternative payment methods. Consumers now have hundreds of ways of paying, varying by region, transaction type, and personal preference. The best way for a company to support the myriad of alternative payment options is through microservice architecture.

Worldpay from FIS notes that each payment method needs to be broken down “into its constituent domains, so that the mircoservices that make up its system can interact as needed.” This includes payment requests and connectivity, events, settlements, and so on.

Test-driven infrastructure (TDI)

TDI is a way of building infrastructure where the developer creates tests before writing the code. Since no code exists to pass the test, the test will invariably fail once run. This encourages the engineer “to write the simplest, most precise code that will pass the test,” explain the authors of the white paper.

The TDI approach results in robust infrastructure with more stable services and fewer instances of failure. And because TDI hinges on smaller iterations with small testable blocks of code, the systems are easier to maintain, the code is higher-quality, and it’s easier to get feedback if a failure occurs.

This is crucial in the payments industry, where the operating system needs to be strong and reliable. In e-commerce, for example, a slow website, or one that crashes, can cost the merchant a considerable amount of money.

When a customer wants to transact, it’s essential that they’re able to reliably do so in a timely manner.

Event-driven architecture (EDA)

The third area Worldpay from FIS explores is event-driven architecture, which refers to a paradigm of software architecture rooted in an event producer broadcasting a message that one or more event consumers capture.

An event, as Worldpay from FIS describes, is “any meaningful change to a system.” In the context of e-commerce, this could mean the placement of an order because the fulfillment center would receive a notification about the sale prior to the order being processed.

It’s important to note that the event-driven approach to software is faster than the request-response alternative, as the former responds to information in near real-time. When it comes to the payments industry, this is essential, especially as faster and real-time payment options continue to catch on.

Consumers increasingly expect transactions to occur quicker and quicker, and companies have to invest in their infrastructure to meet this demand. EDA is better equipped to handle these types of transactions.

EDA also improves the strategic, operational, and functional agility of an organization.

Hypermedia APIs

The last technology explored by Worldpay from FIS in the white paper is hypermedia APIs. These are a sophisticated type of REST API (Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface) that can make client integrations simpler, while improving resilience to change. An example of this type of API is Access Worldpay, a platform optimized for the payments industry.

Developers who interact with payment resources through hypermedia APIs, such as Access Worldpay, do not need to keep track of endpoints or URLs, possible states, or even the next step. Instead, “all API responses include the hypermedia links that provide pointers to the next possible state or step.”

The ability to simplify the integration process is important since the complexity of systems and applications has grown tremendously due to the rise of e-commerce, omnichannel apps, and changing consumer preferences.

For example, hypermedia APIs allow merchants to easily conduct identity and risk checks for e-commerce transactions.

Conclusion

With the payments landscape shifting and an emphasis on consumer experience becoming paramount, businesses need to leverage the newest technology and solutions in order to keep up. However, knowing what steps to take to get there can be challenging.

Microservices, test-driven infrastructure, event-driven architecture, and hypermedia APIs can help businesses offer the desired CX, but implementing them properly requires a plan and expertise.

As one of the premier companies in the payments landscape, Worldpay from FIS is well situated to provide this type of knowledge. The company’s white paper outlines the next steps a business should take in order to leverage these technologies.

The three major steps identified by Worldpay from FIS are:

1. Adopt a DevOps approach in product engineering teams
2. Empower teams and individuals with new skills
3. Get all departments thinking CX-first

The white paper sketches out exactly what each of these steps entail and provides relevant statistics and graphics to illustrate key points.

If you’re interested in learning more, Worldpay from FIS’ “Be a Champion of Change: How to Embrace Innovation to Meet Consumer Demand” can be accessed here .

The post Consumer Preferences Are Shifting. Here’s How to Keep Up. appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

Datawire this week launched Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0, which combines an open source application programming interface (API) gateway optimized for Kubernetes with a Level-7 load balancer, Kubernetes Ingress controllers, monitoring capabilities and a developer portal into a single platform.

Company CEO Richard Li says Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 enables IT organizations to provision these tools in a few minutes rather than having to configure each separately.

Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 also advances best DevOps practices because, via that portal, developers can apply security, resilience and traffic management policies to the services they develop on their own.

Each of those services can be secured using an automatic HTTPS configuration capability that supports ACME protocols, OAuth/OpenID Connect authentication, rate limiting and fine-grained access controls.

Developers can also configure automatic retries, timeouts and circuit breakers for their APIs, in addition to accessing an auto-updated API catalog and API documentation generated from a Swagger/OpenAPI specification.

Traffic management controls such as traffic shadowing, canary routing and cross-origin resource sharing can also be applied across a wide variety of protocols including TCP, HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, gRPC, gRPC-Web and WebSockets traffic.

Finally, Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 provides native support for distributed tracing, metrics collection and logging.
By bringing all these capabilities into a single platform, Li says Datawire is enabling organizations to reduce costs and operational overhead.

Kubernetes clusters require a different type of gateway than most organizations use today to manage APIs within a monolithic application environment, Li says. Microservices in Kubernetes environments require a gateway that makes it easier to create APIs at scale as microservices are developed and reduces latency by using a stateless architecture that is integrated natively with Kubernetes APIs. Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 is also tightly integrated with the open source Envoy proxy server for easier deployment on-premises or in a cloud computing environment, he adds.

It’s not clear who within an IT organization will take care of API gateways today and in the future. However, Li says that as microservices continues to mature, a separation of duties between developers and IT operations teams is becoming clear. IT operations teams can use Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 to provide developers access to a graphical user interface (GUI) to apply policies and controls to the APIs and services they develop.

Longer term, Datawire will use the Ambassador Edge Stack 1.0 platform to deliver additional services in a way that is streamlined alongside Kubernetes clusters.

It’s too early to say to what degree the rise of Kubernetes will force organizations to rethink the way they manage and secure APIs. However, as the number of microservices in any of those environments increases, it’s apparent the number of APIs being dynamically generated may require a different approach.

Ambassador Edge Stack is available for free as part of Datawire’s early access program. It’s scheduled to be generally available later this month in both free Community and Enterprise editions.

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The survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of API management platform provider Kong, polled 200 senior IT leaders in organizations with more than 1,000 employees. Among the results, 89% of technology leaders agree that companies that are not able to effectively support microservices will be less able to compete in the future.

The report also finds on average organizations are running 184 microservices, with 60% of respondents running 50 or more. The primary reasons cited for adopting microservices are improvements to security (56%), increased development speed (55%), increased speed of integrating new technologies (53%), improved infrastructure flexibility (53%) and improved collaboration across teams (46%).

Kong CTO Marco Palladino said the report makes it clear that just about every organization is on a journey to making a transition to microservices as part of an effort to reduce reliance on inflexible monolithic applications. Initially, that transition involves lifting and shifting monolithic applications in the cloud before decoupling functions using microservices, he said.

As part of that journey, Palladino noted, the survey also finds significant microservices challenges remain, including ensuring security (36%), integration with legacy applications (32%), the complexity of management (31%) and updating API documentation (31%).

Despite these concerns, however, more than 80% of survey respondents who have adopted microservices report that their organization performs well against metrics for development efficiency, the ability to use new platforms, collaboration across teams and sharing of services across applications.

Overall, a full 90% of respondents said securely connecting applications and ensuring performance at scale collectively represent one of the greatest technical challenges of the 21st century. Also, 71% said they believe that organizations would be out of business within six years if they fail to keep pace with innovation in their industry. For public companies, the urgency is even greater, with 39% reporting they believe organizations will be out of business in less than three years if they fail to keep pace with innovation. Overall, 57% of technology leaders feel organizations are concerned that they are at risk of competitive displacement.

Pressure on IT leaders is high as a result. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) agree that a failed digital transformation effort will result in a missed promotion, lost bonus or even termination. The report identifies the top three priorities for IT leaders as improving efficiency (47%), reducing cost (41%) and increasing security (40%).

Technology leaders, however, continue to place the highest importance on the availability (75%), security (74%), performance (65%) and scalability (64%). At the same time, technology leaders are focused on faster development speeds (95%), increased collaboration (94%) and reduced deployment risks (93%) as key desired outcomes for adopting any new technologies.

The challenges most cited in terms of achieving those agility goals are the complexity of using multiple technologies (35%), lack of automation (32%) and reliance on legacy technologies (29%).

The survey also notes 83% of organizations are relying on open source software to become more agile. The most commonly used open source technologies are databases (64%), containers (48%), API gateways (41%), infrastructure automation (40%), container orchestration (37%) and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools (36%).

In terms of cloud adoption, Microsoft Azure (43%) narrowly beat Amazon Web Services (AWS) (42%), with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) coming in third at 27%.

On the plus side, 78% of respondents said their organizations are increasing IT budgets in the coming year, with 27% of public companies expecting their budgets to grow 26% or more. Nearly 90% of companies will also be increasing headcount, with 56% hiring internally and 31% relying on more freelancers and/or outsourcing to meet hiring goals.

Hopefully, with that increased funding more organizations will be able to strike that elusive balance between stability and innovation.

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Google’s Android developer team updated ML Kit, which packages up the company’s machine learning expertise and technology for mobile developers creating Android or iOS apps.

ML Kit provides base APIs ready to be used “out of the box” for tasks such as creating custom models used on-device or in the cloud. The kit is used in conjunction with Google’s Firebase mobile development platform that includes a host of tools that can add back-end functionality for the development of mobile apps, including analytics, storage, syncing, cloud functions, authentication and more.

Optimized for mobile, the kit — still in beta — provides functionality for things like image labeling, barcode scanning, text, or optical character recognition (OCR), face detection and so on.

Thanks to a recent update, ML Kit now offers two more pieces of functionality: Language Identification and Smart Reply.

“You might notice that both of these features are different from our existing APIs that were all focused on image/video processing,” the team said in a post earlier this month. “Our goal with ML Kit is to offer powerful but simple-to-use APIs to leverage the power of ML, independent of the domain. As such, we are excited to expand ML Kit with solutions for Natural Language Processing (NLP)!

“NLP is a category of ML that deals with analyzing and generating text, speech, and other kinds of natural language data. We’re excited to start out with two APIs: one that helps you identify the language of text, and one that generates reply suggestions in chat applications. Both of these features work fully on-device and are available on the latest version of the ML Kit SDK, on iOS (9.0 and higher) and Android (4.1 and higher).”

The new Smart Reply API provides functionality that is increasingly being found in messaging apps: a list of suggested responses that can be sent as an action taken in reply to a notification or from within a mobile app.

“The API provides suggestions based on the last 10 messages in a conversation, although it still works if only one previous message is available,” Google said. “It is a stateless API that fully runs on-device, so we don’t keep message history in memory nor send it to a server.”

The post promised more news to come about ML Kit at the company’s upcoming Google I/O conference, set for May 7-9.

The post Google Enhances ML Kit, for Mobile Machine Learning appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

APIs help run the world. They allow software applications and digital platforms to interact with each other, orchestrating the exchange of requests between apps that have their own architectures. And, when properly managed, APIs ensure a neat, simplified experience for developers.

The challenge is to be sure proper API management is entrenched in your ongoing IT operations. Otherwise, you run the risk of introducing a break change, exposing an API to security vulnerabilities, among other dangers that can disrupt the effectiveness of a modern business.

The power of a microservices gateway

The API is an essential part of communication in distributed networks. Digital transformation and other major organizational shifts push companies to deliver cross-device, cross-platform applications, but those initiatives wouldn’t be possible without the right APIs providing the links between these platforms.

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