In DevOps, SRE, and operations, toil is the enemy. Fortunately, the repetitive and time-consuming manual work that drains team resources is steadily being automated. As a result, the automation tooling landscape has expanded to encompass a wide range of tasks. Whether it's testing, infrastructure configuration and management, provisioning, monitoring, or observability, there's now a tool to automate it. Evaluating and choosing among these tools is...

What is auto-tainment? Larry the cucumber is pretty sure it involves an automated set from the future, singing robotic children and some of the favorite veggie performing bizarre rendetions of songs.

Building Information Modeling (BIM), or the process of generating and managing digital information about physical representations of constructions, has been effectively adopted and benefited numerous civil engineering projects across the globe, particularly in developed countries. BIM Development and Trends in Developing Countries addresses the philosophies and practices for improved application of BIM in developing countries. Two case studies are...

We will primarily concentrate on the Blockchain. It is the most important component of the three, as it is the back-end data persistence layer, i.e., "the truth", while IoT and AI provide convenience and learned machine intelligence for front-end requests. Moreover, the Blockchain development tools have matured in the past year and developers want to know how these tools work. We'll start with a discussion of each technology providing introductory...

For the first time since the Space Race, the United States is facing a serious competitor with a plan to achieve technological dominance: China. Between China 2025 and the Belt and Road Initiative, it's become clear that the Chinese government is determined to capture the economic power that new technologies like AI, automation, 5G, and the cloud represent. And with economic power comes military power, and then political power. To win this competition,...

For almost thirty years, industrial processes have been controlled by people looking at computer screens. The displays used should provide the operator with accurate information, as well as assist in both normal plant operation and the handling of abnormal situations. This goal is rarely achieved. In fact, poor Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) have been identified several times as contributing factors to major industrial accidents. Many of the paradigms...

The Art of Automation, based on a podcast of the same name, is a practical guide for leaders who need to understand and evaluate how automation technology can transform their organization, business processes, and models. It combines both an aspirational and pragmatic overview of automation technology, its core capabilities, and the value they generate from a business perspective. It describes various real-world examples, implementations and approaches,...

Turning good ideas into marketable software quickly is now a business imperative for every enterprise. Delivering software features faster and with high quality is the first critical step. The subsequent step is to rapidly collect feedback from users to guide the next set of ideas for further improvements. Critical software development objectives such as these set the stage for The IT Manager's Guide to Continuous Delivery: Delivering Software in...

Springing from the international success of Books 1.0 and 2.0, the ISA-chartered ISA-95 Best Practices Working Group, chaired by Charlie Gifford, brings out its third collection of Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) methodology white papers. The Book 3.0 collection focuses on MOM system engineering to organize the complex 21st-century manufacturing plant and to optimize its role in a global supply chain. The methods do not trivialize the complexities...