Battery performance in Android M
Exploring the new Android M battery performance features.
It has been a long held personal belief that most battery drain issues on smartphone devices are due to applications that are improperly tuned. I work very closely with mobile developers to help optimize mobile apps for speed and battery life with AT&T’s own Application Resource Optimizer. I am also in the process of finishing up a book on High Performance Android Apps that will be published later this summer. So I am always excited to see mobile application performance hit the center stage.
Last month, Google held its annual Google I/O conference, where they announce new products, tools and features. This year, with the release of the Android M developer preview, performance of mobile devices/battery life and app performance were on the center stage (and unveiled at the keynote!). Lets look at the new features and tools available to users and developers to make Android’s battery life better.
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Compliance at Speed
Achieve performance goals in the face of compliance issues.
Download a free copy of Compliance at Speed, an O’Reilly report by Mark Lustig that breaks down the IT issues facing finance, healthcare, and other heavily regulated industries.
Today’s technology should work and perform without issues. When we build systems that work and perform, nobody pays attention; when they’re slow and unstable, everyone notices. This sentiment was no truer than during last year’s Healthcare.gov debacle. Building systems that work and meet our user’s expectations is always the number one priority.
Download Compliance at Speed.
Regardless of who we work for, the challenges of performance and DevOps are universal. There is one constraint larger companies seem to face more often — regulatory compliance. As privacy concerns have become more pervasive, compliance affects all of our companies in one way or another.
Reputation is based on trust. If I’m looking up my credit card balance and I end up seeing someone else’s information, I’ve lost trust in the credit card company, and they’ve lost a customer.
Large banks and health care organizations have been dealing with compliance for years, but every industry has constraints. Online retailers need to meet privacy and security standards. The social networking industry faces regulations specific to consumer protection and the use of customer information. No industry is immune to meeting compliance, as emerging regulations, both domestic and international, create more challenges to achieving performance objectives each year. Any website that uses, stores, or processes personal or payment information must address these challenges.
Plan to learn faster
See your product's big picture and streamline experimentation with user story mapping.
Download a free copy of Building an Optimized Business, a curated collection of chapters from the O’Reilly Web Operations and Performance library. This post is an excerpt by Jeff Patton from User Story Mapping, one of the selections included in the curated collection.
This is my friend Eric, standing in front of his backlog and task board in his team room. He’s a product owner working hard with his team to build a successful product, but right now it’s not. That doesn’t worry Eric, though. He has a strategy for making his product successful. And so far it’s working.
Eric works for a company called Liquidnet. Liquidnet is a global trading network for institutional investors. Long before Eric came to stand in front of the board in the picture, someone at his company identified a group of customers Liquidnet could serve better, along with a few ideas of how to do that. Eric is part of a team that took those ideas and ran with them. That’s what product owners do. If you thought they were always acting on their own great ideas, well, you’re wrong. One of the hard parts of being a product owner is taking ownership of someone else’s idea and helping to make it successful, or proving that it isn’t likely to be. The best product owners, like Eric, help their entire team take ownership of the product.
An introduction to immutable infrastructure
Why you should stop managing infrastructure and start really programming it.
Immutable infrastructure (II) provides stability, efficiency, and fidelity to your applications through automation and the use of successful patterns from programming. No rigorous or standardized definition of immutable infrastructure exists yet, but the basic idea is that you create and operate your infrastructure using the programming concept of immutability: once you instantiate something, you never change it. Instead, you replace it with another instance to make changes or ensure proper behavior.
Chad Fowler coined the term “immutable infrastructure” in a 2013 blog post, “Trash Your Servers and Burn Your Code: Immutable Infrastructure and Disposable Components,” but others have spoken about similar ideas. Martin Fowler described phoenix servers in 2012. Greg Orzell, James Carr, Kief Morris, and Ben Butler-Cole, to name a few, have contributed significant thought and work as well.
II requires full automation of your runtime environment. This is only possible in compute environments that have an API over all aspects of configuration and monitoring. Therefore, II can be fully realized only in true cloud environments. It is possible to realize some benefits of II with partial implementations, but the true benefits of efficiency and resiliency are realized with thorough implementation.
The language and metrics of UX evolve at Velocity 2015
As developers and designers converge, we're seeing an increased focus on the user's perspective.
Editor’s note: The O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Santa Clara was held last week. The event explored the essential trends driving web operations and performance forward. In the post that follows, Mark Zeman digs into recent changes he’s observed in one aspect of Velocity: the role, language, and metrics surrounding user experience.
I’ve attended four O’Reilly Velocity conferences over the last year, and I was struck by a notable shift in the conversations at Velocity in Santa Clara, Calif. Many speakers and attendees have started to change their language and describe the experience of their websites and apps from the user’s perspective.
The balance has shifted from just talking about how fast or reliable a particular system is to the overall experience a user has when they interact with and experience a product. Many people are now looking at themselves from the outside in and developing more empathy for their users. The words “user” and “user experience” were mentioned again and again by speakers.
Here are recent talks from Velocity and other events that highlight this shift to UX concerns. Read more…
Signals from the 2015 O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Santa Clara
Key insights from DevOps, Web operations, and performance.
People from across the Web operations and performance worlds are coming together this week for the 2015 O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Santa Clara. Below, we’ve assembled notable keynotes, interviews, and insights from the event.
Think like a villain
Laura Bell outlines a three-step approach to securing organizations — by putting yourself in the bad guy’s shoes (without committing actual crime, she stresses):
- Think like a villain and be objective: identify why and how someone would attack your company; what is the core value they’d come to steal?
- Create a safe place to create a little chaos: don’t do it live, but find a safe place without restriction and without fear to break things, to practice creative chaos.
- Play like you’ve never read the the rule book: Not everyone plays by the same rules as you, so to protect yourself and your company, you have to think more like the person willing to break the rules.