I agree with Bigelow on the matter of evolution, but not so much on the economical standing of businesses. It seems to me that credentials would be even more important when the economy is down. Making a huge investment, like hiring an IT professional would require more proof when making hire than ever before.

The current standing of IT certification has become so diluted with various sectors, you could spend more time than needed just to be ‘certified’ in a long line of areas. Many times the fields an IT professional will become certified in don’t necessarily pertain to the job they’re seeking. Therefore, the mindset is – why bother with certain certifications if they won’t even help land a job?

Even with all the problems surrounding IT certification, it will remain prevalent for one reason — change. IT related careers deal with some of the fastest changing problems one could imagine. What an IT professional learned about a year ago might be completely changed due to technological advancements in the present. It’s this fast shifting pace which will always keep IT certification a constant importance.

Many times a business will overlook IT, which can lead to some huge ramifications. Our own government is going through some problems regarding IT;dealing with network security. You can bet it’s vital their IT professionals receive professional training regarding the problems being faced.

It’s hard to argue the numbers presented in the survey I mentioned prior. However, I think many of those businesses simply haven’t learned the lesson yet. While there are plenty of competent IT professionals without certification, it just takes one bad apple to hurt a business. As technologies grow and continue to change, I think we’ll see businesses value the importance of certification, and realize why it’s so vital.

What options does one have?

To be rather precise, the answer is five — CompTIA (Computing Technology Industry Association), LPI (Linux Professional Institute), SAIR Linux, Novell Corporation and Red Hat. If you are wondering whether you should go with “Eeenie Meenie Mynie Mo” to chart your career path, allow me to elaborate and educate you on your options.

The two roads

CompTIA, SAIR and LPI are professional/industry vendor-neutral certification programs. What that means is they are not tied to any particular Linux distribution unlike Red Hat which focuses entirely on its own distribution i.e. it is vendor specific. Similarly Novell’s Linux certification programs focus on the SUSE distribution.

Eenie Meenie Mynie Mo

Yes, sometimes believing in serendipity is a tempting choice but for those of you driven by logic and reason, read on. For those fairly new to Linux, try the LPIC Level 1 or CompTIA Linux+. Developing strong basics will establish your credentials and form the basis for expanding your resume. These exams are also more affordable than Red Hat certifications and are available through testing networks like Prometric and PearsonVue. Novell Linux certifications are only through Novell Partners. SAIR has been integrated into the Linux Professional Group and is keeping a low profile since. For advanced administrators, Red Hat’s RHCE requires passing a hands-on exam and challenges your technical skills. Though it is vendor specific most of it is true of many other flavors of Linux.

How long will it last?

There is no expiry date or continuing certification requirements for most certifications but the vendor specific ones are also version specific. However upgrading for new versions is not required to retain certification. As for the question of pursuing cutting edge technologies. The basics of Linux will continue to remain on the bleeding edge of technology what with embedded technologies adopting the Linux OS to power their appliances. Many animation studios like Dreamworks run their entire pipeline on Linux.

Do I have to go back to school?

Whether you are an experienced Linux Admin or a newbie gingerly stepping forth into the world of Linux, you will need to prepare. We all often become experts in whatever we use everyday, but the scope of subjects covered in the exam may encompass more than you know. Just reviewing the contents of the syllabus may do it for some but others will need weeks of even months of preparation. Going back to the classroom will provide a systematic and regular disciplined approach to the examination. They also provide hands-on practice and prove to be well worth the expense. Your instructor will also clarify any doubts you may have. However self-study books and on-line resources can do the trick if you are determined and self-disciplined enough to chart your own course through the deep waters.

So what are you waiting for? All the links you need to access and more at your fingertips:

• LPI Certification Self-Study Guide
• Certification Crazy
• O’Reilly Linux Resource
• Redhat Certification
• SAIR Linux
• CompTIA Linux+
• Novell Certified Linux Professional

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For background about R, Ashlee Vance wrote:

“…R is a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.”

Zack previously suggested that R could become  an alternative to SAS or IBM/SPSS’s offerings in the business intelligence space. However, it seems that both SAS and SPSS have recognized the opportunity presented by R.

For instance, Jon Peck of SPSS wrote:

“Starting with Version 16, SPSS offers a free plug-in that lets users run R code within SPSS having full access to the active SPSS Statistics data, and writing its output to the SPSS Statistics Viewer. With Version 17, we began creating dialog box interfaces and SPSS-style syntax for R packages we thought would be interesting to SPSS users…We see the SPSS-R connection as a way for users to take advantage of the large number of R packages without the pain part of R.”

As Ashlee points out, R is being used by academics, university students and enterprises. If ignored, R could very well have become a threat to SAS and IBM/SPSS franchises.

IBM has a history of utilizing open source for competitive advantage. Instinctively, I thought SPSS decided to support R after being acquired by IBM. I’m encouraged to learn that SPSS made the decision to support R well before the IBM acquisition. It’s also great that SAS has followed suit. I suspect that SPSS and SAS made their individual decisions based on three factors. First, they likely both realized that based on the penetration of SAS and SPSS in the statistical community, neither were going away anytime soon. Second, adding R support enabled both vendors to take advantage of the community of users building extensions and new statistical methods for R. Finally, both vendors likely realized that customers have different skills and analysis needs, and as such, R would be used in conjunction with SAS and SPSS’s programming languages for statistical analysis. In short, both vendors had more to gain by adding R support than by attempting to fight an customer-driven trend.  It’s great to see vendors responding to the opportunities posed by open source projects instead of solely focusing on the risks.  As expected, commercial software vendors are quickly adopting their stance on open source as an enabler for growth.

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1.Detect garbage objects
2.Deallocate the memory of garbage objects and make it available for the program.

There are four approaches that a garbage collector may adopt to detect the garbage objects.

A) Reference -counting Collectors :-Reference counting garbage collectors keep a count of the references for the each live object.When an object is created ,the reference count of each object is set to one.When you reference the object ,the reference count is incremented by one.Similarly when a reference to an object is eliminated ,the reference count is decremented by one.An object which has reference count zero is a garbage object when the object is garbage collected ,the references of the object that it refers to are decremented.Therefore garbage collection of the one may lead to the creation of other garbage objects.This method can be executed in small parts with the program ,and the program need not to be interrupted for a long time. However ,there is an overhead of incrementing and decrementing the counter everytime something happens on the references side.

B) Tracing Collectors :-In this technique ,a set of root is defined from where objects are traced. An object is reachable if there are objects that referenced and cannot ,therefore be accessed in the program.Objects that are reachable are marked. At the end of the trace ,all marked objects can be garbage collected.
This is also known as the mark and sweep algorithm. The mark phase marks all the referenced objects. The sweep phase garbage collects the memory of unreachable and unreferenced objects.

C) Compacting Collectors :-These collectors reduce the degree of memory fragmentation by moving the all unused and free space on one side during garbage collection.The free memory is then available as one huge chunk.All references need to be shifted ,objects are the updated to refer to the new memory locations.

D)Adaptive Collectors :-This algorithm makes the use of the fact that different garbage collectors algorithm works better in different situations. The adaptive algorithm monitors the situation and uses the garbage technique that best suits the situation. It may switch from one technique to the other according to the need.

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General Syntax :-

expression 1 ? expression 2 : expression 3

Here expression 1 can be any expression that evaluates to a Boolean value.If expression 1 is true then expression 2 is evaluated else expression 3 is evaluated.Both the expressions expression 1 and expression 2 must have a return type,they can never be void.Make it more clear by understanding below example.

Example:-

public class optest
{
public static void main(String a[])
{
int ratio=0,num=20,denom=10;

/* The ” ? ” operator assignes 0 if condition denom==0 is true else it assigns num/denom to ratio if condituion is false*/

ratio=denom==0?0:num/denom;

System.out.println(”The ratio is “+ratio);
}
}

Output:-
The ratio is 2

Explanation:-When Java evaluates this assignment expression ,it first looks at the expression to the left of the question mark.If denom equals to zero then expression 2 between ? and : is evaluated else last expression is evaluated.The resultant is then assigned to the ratio variable used in expression 1.

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Low startup costs

One of the first things we had to do after we defined our business architecture, was to create a demo that our CEO could take with him on the road. My engineer, who had never used Amazon AWS before, created an account using the company credit card, and quickly built a working model of how our system would work. He built both a web site and WAP interface that allowed a consumer to select online coupons and built a prototype of a store system that redeemed the coupon by calling our redemption engine in the cloud. The process took about 2 weeks and our IT costs for the month (excluding labor) was $86. Our CEO could now go on the road and show potential customers and investors just how our system worked (or would work in the future). The wow factor of walking into a client site, having them pull up their cell phone or their browser and perform an end-to-end shopping experience that utilized the cloud live was huge. And we did it for under $100!!! In fact, the only hardware we have purchased to date is our netbooks.

Optimal R&D environment

In my post called Building Better Software in the Cloud I discussed how we were able to fire up many different configurations to prove out our architecture. In my previous jobs, we would normally either be told what hardware our target application would run on or we would have to take a best guess very early on because of the long procurement cycles that often took several months. Then when the hardware came it we hoped like hell that our projections were accurate. In the world of cloud computing, we were able to experiment with many different CPU and memory configurations and simply only paid for the time we spent using those virtual machines. After performing numerous tests with numerous configurations, we knew exactly what “hardware” we needed to get the job done. There is tremendous value in proving out your design before you buy your target architecture. For one, if the project ever got canned, you are not stuck with hardware. Second, you no longer need to guess what you need and risk buying too little or too much computing resources. The “Try before you buy” model is a key differentiator in my book!

Ability to perform huge performance tests

One of the most impressive experiences I had in my first year in the cloud was the massive performance test we performed with our testing as a service partner, SOASTA. As documented in a SOASTA press release, we were able to prove that our architecture could easily process one million concurrent transactions in 1/10th of a second! To perform this test, SOASTA fired up over 700 virtual servers to run their software and we fired up over 50. After the test we both quickly tore these servers down to “shut the meter off”. A test like this is not even feasible in the on-premise world! This test was executed in one day. That means both companies fired up a combined 800+ servers, ran the test, and decommissioned the servers all in a day’s work. We only paid for the time we used the servers. You simply just cannot do that on premise. What this means is that in the cloud, you have the ability to stress test your system and discover and fix your bottlenecks when running worst case scenarios before you go into production.

Speed to market

This part is every system administrator and DBA’s nightmare. We built an entire platform without having a single DBA or system administrator on staff. We invested some time upfront to create standard AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) that contained all of the appropriate security controls and configurations for the OS (Linux), the database (MySQL) and the app server (Apache). Once the standard AMIs were built, deploying more was as simple as a few clicks of a mouse and a 2-3 minute wait. We no longer had to go through long, painful procurement cycles. We no longer had to argue with the system administers or DBAs about the priority of setting up our server or our database. We no longer had to bother anybody about taking snapshots of production data for use in our test environment. I could go on and on but I think you get the point. Things that used to take weeks or months in our previous jobs now take minutes. This means we spend more time actually building business functionality and less time managing the infrastructure. Which leads to the next point.

Focus on the business needs

The beauty of building our architecture on Amazon is that they make it real easy to deploy and manage compute resources. We are able to build in auto-scaling capabilities, we can easily leverage S3 to replicate our data across multiple virtual data-centers, and quickly deploy a simple backup strategy consisting of snapshots and data replication (no tape!). What that means is we can easily build a self monitoring, self-healing system that requires minimal human resources to deploy and monitor, so our people can focus on building features for our customers. Amazon has recently released RDS which abstracts a lot of the core database administration functions for MySQL. We have been testing it recently and found some huge time savings with it. We are also testing the queuing service (SQS) which can save us an incredible amount of development. With SQS, we can get guaranteed delivery of all of our messages/transactions without having to build out the complex logic required to perform that function. Once again, Amazon provides the plumbing required to run systems and we focus on our business functionality.

Build secure systems

I have said it before and I’ll say it again, I can build highly secure systems on Amazon’s cloud platform. Security is something you build not something you buy. Many people underestimate the security and regulatory controls that are in place on the Amazon platform. I described it in detail in this post. As a startup, there is no way I would be able to build a solution even remotely close to being as secure with an on-premise solution than what I can build in the cloud. The reason is simple. I would never have enough cash to hire enough security professionals, build enough data centers, and develop all the proper controls. Even if I went the hosted route, I could never afford the costs of deploying across multiple data centers because of the lack of the “pay-as-you-go” model with hosted solutions.

Build high performance systems

When we first started this journey, our biggest concern was performance. We knew we could build things cheaper and faster but we did not know if the cloud would provide the level of performance our systems required. As I mentioned previously, we are able to process over a million transactions concurrently with sub second response time. It took a ton of sophisticated engineering to get there, but we proved it could be done. What is even better is that if we need to handle more transactions, we can just fire up more AMIs. We can scale this almost infinitely.

Amazon owns this space

Last but not least, Amazon is by far the clear leader in this space. Not everybody who has built systems in the cloud have enjoyed as much success as we have. Some companies like Rackspace have had severe outages. Others like Coghead have gone out of business. Then there are others who have lost customer data. The list goes on. Amazon has not had any of those issues. In addition, they are the thought leaders in this space and are providing many highly valuable services such as S3, SQS, RDS, and others that further abstract the infrastructure layer so that their customers (like me) can focus on their business. I was also fortunate enough to attend Amazon’s AWS Partner training and got some insights into future features and functionality (under NDA). I can tell you that building apps and services on AWS is going to continue to get easier and more cost effective as time goes on. Amazon has a great strategy of releasing services quickly with just enough functionality. Then they follow it up with many subsequent releases that increase the robustness of those services.

Summary

I had studied cloud computing for over a year before I had the opportunity to work on it. I was fully aware of the pros and cons and went into this journey with high expectations. A year later I can tell you that what we are able to do in the cloud far exceeded my high expectations. We have built a high speed transaction processing engine that is highly secure, meets all of our required regulatory demands, absolutely screams from a performance perspective, and allows us to get stuff done in days what used to take months. I actually feel sorry for all of the colleagues I left behind in the corporate world, well, most of them anyways!

The most amazing thing to me is that the cloud is still in its infancy which means that 2-3 years from now the capabilities will far exceed what we have today. I can see a day where an entire web site architecture can be a service that is provided by Amazon. Today I have to plan out a web server layer, a db server layer, a caching layer, etc. Tomorrow I might just access an AMI that represents that entire architecture.

So these are my lessons learned after one year. I don’t really have any “what not to do lessons” because we did our homework, we started with architecture first, we built in the appropriate level of security, and we didn’t have unrealistic expectations coming in. Oh, I do have one. Don’t listen to people who say that the cloud is not ready for prime time!

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For a number of years, I worked at a very large company that required continuing education of their IT staff. This meant the entire IT team was required to get or renew at least one certification every 2 years, regardless if they needed to be or not. I was not in that part of the company so I was not required to do this. The upper management thought this was a great idea because it kept all the IT team up on current technology. To the IT team, it meant retaking the A+ certification. The reason why they kept taking the A+ certification is that it was the cheapest and easiest certification to retake, so that’s what they did. The ones that have Windows certifications didn’t renew them because they were too expensive and the company would not pay for them unless they where under a certain amount. Many of the IT team members believed staying up with technology was a good idea, but they did not believe forcing employees to retake certification tests over was the way to go about it. They tried to force employees to start taking only new certifications, but that didn’t last because they realized very quickly that the test starting to go up after the A+ and Networking + certifications.

In my opinion, there is no need for certifications to expire because you must keep up with technology. If you don’t, you will not be able to keep your job as an IT professional for very long. If you are afraid your employees are not keeping up with the changes in technology, then talk to them. You will see that they are probably way ahead of you. Any IT team will be looking into different/new ways of making their job easier.

As the Facebook generation becomes a bigger part of the enterprise, companies face the challenge of implementing increasingly familiar social network technologies in concert with legacy systems.

That was one of the themes expressed by a panel of leading vendors here at the Collaborate 2.0 conference sponsored by SD Forum.

“In IT, a user is a login; on Facebook, a user is a profile with a picture and other details. That’s pretty empowering. End users are driving change,” said Chuck Ganapathi, senior vice president of products at Salesforce.com

The next generation of IT applications may well leverage something like Facebook’s look and feel for a logical reason. “Facebook has over 300 million users now and is on the way to training half a billion people on what is really a pretty sophisticated application — there’s a lot going on there,” Ganapathi said.

And as these collaborative, social network technologies inevitably spread, Ganapathi said a key issue to be resolved is IT control versus user power.

“There are lots of tools today to make the conversations in your company more social, but what about the data that’s sitting there in Excel, in ERP, in e-mail? How you make that data social is going to be key.”

Matt Thompson, general manager of Microsoft’s developer and platform evangelism in Silicon Valley, said the software giant is ready to make moves in the social network/collaboration space beyond its already successful SharePoint software. He said Microsoft Research has about 25 different social collaboration projects they’ve put under one group called FUSE Labs.

“You’re going to see some innovative stuff under social collaboration,” he said. “We have a vision for where this is going in the future. Video and telepresence is a key piece. And you’ll see a lot more interoperability as well. This can’t be a single stack.”

“Internal IT is a very fertile ground to disrupt,” Thompson said. “The key is there won’t be multiple social graphs. I don’t think Facebook realizes the big role they have.”

That said, Thompson gave Facebook big props for opening up its platform to let users take their Facebook identity with them when visiting other sites.

“Facebook Connect was a very smart thing,” he said. “Facebook Connect is growing faster than Facebook.com.”

Thompson also took note of Twitter, which he said he loves. Like Facebook Connect, he said a huge percentage of users use the service without Twitter.com as a starting point.

“They’re delivering collaboration at 140 characters wherever the user may be,” he said.

Like Microsoft, Cisco is investing in multiple social network and collaborative areas, including a portfolio of nine businesses in the incubation stage.

“Our thesis is that we’re on the cusp of a big transformation like the Internet in the ’90s around the future of work, putting people and productivity back into the equation,” said Didier Moretti, vice president of business incubation in Cisco’s Emerging Technologies group.

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