Drivers are already ditching their cars because of apps like Uber. Imagine what happens when driverless cars hit the roads.
Why bother owning a car when you can easily get where you want via your iPhone? This concept is known as “mobility as a service”, where passengers no longer own to their own cars, instead signing on for transportation-on-demand booked through smartphones.
Perhaps, for instance, a commuting plan that charges by the mile or through a monthly fee, like Netflix. Getting rid of cars in growing urban centers is a smart idea, and the world’s automakers are preparing in various ways. A major switch to subscription transportation requires two components. The first is already well underway: the explosion of ride-hailing apps like Uber, Lyft, Grab and others.
The second is still in the works — driverless cars.
Removing the human from behind the wheel slashes the cost of a taxi ride which will make mobility as a service so cheap in many places, it won’t make financial sense to own a car any longer. Lowering the cost per mile will turbo-charge demand for mobility as a service, likely to become a $10 trillion business, according to Ford Motor Company.
That's why tech giants like Google and Apple are developing their own self-driving systems to take on the world's leading automakers, including Volkswagen, General Motors, Ford, and Toyota.
Eventually, a single smartphone app could connect us to a web of options, such as robo-taxis, self-driving shuttles, on-demand subway or tram, e-bikes, and electric scooters. No more driving ourselves though congested cities. All that parking freed up means more space for pedestrians and parks. Unless it is bad — fleets of individually-owned driverless vehicles loosed upon streets and highways, randomly ferrying individual occupants near and far. Or, with so many shared rides, significantly fewer vehicles will be on the road, where is the need to spend billions on bigger highways?
Autonomous vehicles will revolutionize passenger transport, but they are also rapidly changing the delivery business. Data generated from self-driving cars will provide cities with “a more granular viewpoint into everything from infrastructure wear-and-tear to detailed traffic flow information and even sidewalk congestion patterns,” says Brooks Rainwater, director of the Center for City Solutions at the National League of Cities.
Read more here… http://fortune.com/2019/02/22/self-driving-cars-cities/
Monday, June 24, 2019
Monday, June 17, 2019
How to Make Continuous Delivery a Reality in an Agile Environment
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are core elements of successful DevOps. Systems engineers may start with CI because it is familiar. With a DevOps focus, organizations uncover configuration, packaging, and orchestration that are necessary to effective software development life cycle (SDLC). This empowers developers, administrators and engineers to create valuable CD practices, adding to agility.
Where less experienced developers might struggle with CI/CD performance, testing delays and other bottlenecks, the enterprise would do well to develop processes and best practices to make DevOps in the cloud a value-driven methodology. To save money, this will shorten the SDLC — because CD is all about updating web services. In public clouds such as AWS and Azure, this is done through pipeline stages (e.g. dev, test, staging and production). When containers are implemented with a platform-as-a-service (PAAS) approach, stages become sandbox environments, scratch instances, and production instances.
The benefit of such an approach is that the work outputs and products themselves benefit from flexibility. Regular face-to-face interactions and collaborations between team members are conducted to ensure the scrum teams level-set expectations. Finally, add value by continuous delivery throughout the life cycle, so that the end product is more secure and more reliable. Implementing an agile manifesto tracks with addressing evolving end user requirements.
For CD, ensure user stories are married correctly to those requirements and that each story rolls up to an Epic that represents a standalone feature. This enables the devops team to release reasonably sized components of functionality that are consumable by users. These are also traceable back to the release plan. We want to ensure verification at each stage because this process defines acceptance criteria — so the stakeholders know when something is declared “finished.”
Schema, user interface, access control rights and static resources such as icons and images are all part of the creation process and we manage them just as diligently as source code. The DevOps team checks assets into a version control system as a single source of truth (GIT or Subversion). This benefits the client by ensuring that developers are making changes in a segregated environment — catastrophic failures are completely avoided with such approach, and integration into a risk management-based security framework is seamless.
The organization should understand automated quality processes are essential — Selenium is a go-to tool for testing functionality. There are several verifications to make before functional testing. Static code analysis tools, such as PMD, are essential to ensure code conforms to a single style. Unit test coverage is also essential — establish a set of Key Performance Inidcators (KPIs) for coverage of at least 75% of code. Finally, after these automated tests pass, implement a manual peer review. This enables seasoned developers to spot opportunities for performance improvement where automated tools can’t.
Monday, June 10, 2019
GDPR will impact more than privacy
Similar to how GDPR hugely impacted how millions of organizations handle personal data when it was enforced last year, Strong Customer Authentication (or SCA) will have profound implications for how businesses handle online transactions and how we pay for things in our everyday lives when it is enforced on September 14.
SCA will require an extra layer of authentication for online payments. Where a card number and address once sufficed, customers will now be required to include at least two of the following three factors to do anything as simple as ordering a taxi or pay for a music streaming service. Something they know (like a password or PIN), something they own (like a token or smartphone), and something they are (like a fingerprint or biometric facial features).
Without careful preparation, failed transactions and additional friction may have a significant negative impact on conversion rates.
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