The Complete Guide to Software As a Service


Book Description

The Complete Guide to Software as a Service is truly "everything you need to know about SaaS." This is the only book available today that covers the multiple facets of the SaaS model: functional, operational, technical, security and financial. Starting with the definition and the origins of SaaS, it gives a 360-degree view of the inner workings of a SaaS business. This book is a must read for entrepreneurs who are launching a SaaS company. Learn the six ways to fail your SaaS start-up. It will also guide any software company who is transitioning from an on-premise license model to SaaS. Learn what IT and business functions must evolve when moving from one business model to the next. It also provides useful information and insight to different functional managers within a SaaS company. As well, users of SaaS software will become more knowledgeable clients of their SaaS providers after reading this book. Learn how to "read between the lines" of your SaaS contract and focus on the clauses where you have real negotiating power. For anyone interested in learning more about this important shift in the software industry, this book fills a void that exists today in the world of SaaS.




Building Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models on Google Cloud Platform


Book Description

Take a systematic approach to understanding the fundamentals of machine learning and deep learning from the ground up and how they are applied in practice. You will use this comprehensive guide for building and deploying learning models to address complex use cases while leveraging the computational resources of Google Cloud Platform. Author Ekaba Bisong shows you how machine learning tools and techniques are used to predict or classify events based on a set of interactions between variables known as features or attributes in a particular dataset. He teaches you how deep learning extends the machine learning algorithm of neural networks to learn complex tasks that are difficult for computers to perform, such as recognizing faces and understanding languages. And you will know how to leverage cloud computing to accelerate data science and machine learning deployments. Building Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models on Google Cloud Platform is divided into eight parts that cover the fundamentals of machine learning and deep learning, the concept of data science and cloud services, programming for data science using the Python stack, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) infrastructure and products, advanced analytics on GCP, and deploying end-to-end machine learning solution pipelines on GCP. What You’ll Learn Understand the principles and fundamentals of machine learning and deep learning, the algorithms, how to use them, when to use them, and how to interpret your resultsKnow the programming concepts relevant to machine and deep learning design and development using the Python stack Build and interpret machine and deep learning models Use Google Cloud Platform tools and services to develop and deploy large-scale machine learning and deep learning products Be aware of the different facets and design choices to consider when modeling a learning problem Productionalize machine learning models into software products Who This Book Is For Beginners to the practice of data science and applied machine learning, data scientists at all levels, machine learning engineers, Google Cloud Platform data engineers/architects, and software developers




Practical Cloud Security


Book Description

With their rapidly changing architecture and API-driven automation, cloud platforms come with unique security challenges and opportunities. This hands-on book guides you through security best practices for multivendor cloud environments, whether your company plans to move legacy on-premises projects to the cloud or build a new infrastructure from the ground up. Developers, IT architects, and security professionals will learn cloud-specific techniques for securing popular cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud. Chris Dotson—an IBM senior technical staff member—shows you how to establish data asset management, identity and access management, vulnerability management, network security, and incident response in your cloud environment.




AI as a Service


Book Description

AI as a Service is a practical handbook to building and implementing serverless AI applications, without bogging you down with a lot of theory. Instead, you’ll find easy-to-digest instruction and two complete hands-on serverless AI builds in this must-have guide! Summary Companies everywhere are moving everyday business processes over to the cloud, and AI is increasingly being given the reins in these tasks. As this massive digital transformation continues, the combination of serverless computing and AI promises to become the de facto standard for business-to-consumer platform development—and developers who can design, develop, implement, and maintain these systems will be in high demand! AI as a Service is a practical handbook to building and implementing serverless AI applications, without bogging you down with a lot of theory. Instead, you’ll find easy-to-digest instruction and two complete hands-on serverless AI builds in this must-have guide! Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology Cloud-based AI services can automate a variety of labor intensive business tasks in areas such as customer service, data analysis, and financial reporting. The secret is taking advantage of pre-built tools like Amazon Rekognition for image analysis or AWS Comprehend for natural language processing. That way, there’s no need to build expensive custom software. Artificial Intelligence (AI), a machine’s ability to learn and make predictions based on patterns it identifies, is already being leveraged by businesses around the world in areas like targeted product recommendations, financial forecasting and resource planning, customer service chatbots, healthcare diagnostics, data security, and more. With the exciting combination of serverless computing and AI, software developers now have enormous power to improve their businesses’ existing systems and rapidly deploy new AI-enabled platforms. And to get on this fast-moving train, you don’t have to invest loads of time and effort in becoming a data scientist or AI expert, thanks to cloud platforms and the readily available off-the-shelf cloud-based AI services! About the book AI as a Service is a fast-paced guide to harnessing the power of cloud-based solutions. You’ll learn to build real-world apps—such as chatbots and text-to-speech services—by stitching together cloud components. Work your way from small projects to large data-intensive applications. What's inside - Apply cloud AI services to existing platforms - Design and build scalable data pipelines - Debug and troubleshoot AI services - Start fast with serverless templates About the reader For software developers familiar with cloud basics. About the author Peter Elger and Eóin Shanaghy are founders and CEO/CTO of fourTheorem, a software solutions company providing expertise on architecture, DevOps, and machine learning. Table of Contents PART 1 - FIRST STEPS 1 A tale of two technologies 2 Building a serverless image recognition system, part 1 3 Building a serverless image recognition system, part 2 PART 2 - TOOLS OF THE TRADE 4 Building and securing a web application the serverless way 5 Adding AI interfaces to a web application 6 How to be effective with AI as a Service 7 Applying AI to existing platforms PART 3 - BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER 8 Gathering data at scale for real-world AI 9 Extracting value from large data sets with AI




ERISA: A Comprehensive Guide, 6th Edition


Book Description

The Sixth Edition of ERISA: A Comprehensive Guide provides a thorough and authoritative analysis of the principal statutory provisions of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) and the corresponding provisions of the Internal Revenue Code (Code) dealing with employee benefits. It also discusses and explains the multitude of regulations, rulings, and interpretations issued by the Department of the Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Labor, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation in explanation of ERISA; the Code provisions relating to the requirements for tax-qualified retirement plans; and the subsequent legislation amending or supplementing ERISA and such Code provisions. Cited by the Supreme Court, ERISA: A Comprehensive Guide discusses and explains the multitude of regulations, rulings, and interpretations issued by the Department of the Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Labor, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation in explanation of ERISA and the subsequent legislation amending or supplementing ERISA. ERISA: A Comprehensive Guide has been updated to include: The Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act of 2019 and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020 Discussion of improvements in the ability for plan sponsors to take advantage of electronic disclosure opportunities for participant notices and disclosures. Updates to fiduciary duties and best practices based on litigation outcomes Analysis of the rising role of arbitration in the resolution of disputes between plan sponsors and participants Discussion of COBRA notice requirements due to COVID-19, pursuant to CARES Act Discussion of the impact of COVID-19 on union contracts and multiemployer plans Impact of CARES Act on bankruptcy filings and procedures




Advances in Information and Communication


Book Description

This book aims to provide an international forum for scholarly researchers, practitioners and academic communities to explore the role of information and communication technologies and its applications in technical and scholarly development. The conference attracted a total of 464 submissions, of which 152 submissions (including 4 poster papers) have been selected after a double-blind review process. Academic pioneering researchers, scientists, industrial engineers and students will find this series useful to gain insight into the current research and next-generation information science and communication technologies. This book discusses the aspects of communication, data science, ambient intelligence, networking, computing, security and Internet of things, from classical to intelligent scope. The authors hope that readers find the volume interesting and valuable; it gathers chapters addressing state-of-the-art intelligent methods and techniques for solving real-world problems along with a vision of the future research.




Google Cloud Platform in Action


Book Description

Summary Google Cloud Platform in Action teaches you to build and launch applications that scale, leveraging the many services on GCP to move faster than ever. You'll learn how to choose exactly the services that best suit your needs, and you'll be able to build applications that run on Google Cloud Platform and start more quickly, suffer fewer disasters, and require less maintenance. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Thousands of developers worldwide trust Google Cloud Platform, and for good reason. With GCP, you can host your applications on the same infrastructure that powers Search, Maps, and the other Google tools you use daily. You get rock-solid reliability, an incredible array of prebuilt services, and a cost-effective, pay-only-for-what-you-use model. This book gets you started. About the Book Google Cloud Platform in Action teaches you how to deploy scalable cloud applications on GCP. Author and Google software engineer JJ Geewax is your guide as you try everything from hosting a simple WordPress web app to commanding cloud-based AI services for computer vision and natural language processing. Along the way, you'll discover how to maximize cloud-based data storage, roll out serverless applications with Cloud Functions, and manage containers with Kubernetes. Broad, deep, and complete, this authoritative book has everything you need. What's inside The many varieties of cloud storage and computing How to make cost-effective choices Hands-on code examples Cloud-based machine learning About the Reader Written for intermediate developers. No prior cloud or GCP experience required. About the Author JJ Geewax is a software engineer at Google, focusing on Google Cloud Platform and API design. Table of Contents PART 1 - GETTING STARTED What is "cloud"? Trying it out: deploying WordPress on Google Cloud The cloud data center PART 2 - STORAGE Cloud SQL: managed relational storage Cloud Datastore: document storage Cloud Spanner: large-scale SQL Cloud Bigtable: large-scale structured data Cloud Storage: object storage PART 3 - COMPUTING Compute Engine: virtual machines Kubernetes Engine: managed Kubernetes clusters App Engine: fully managed applications Cloud Functions: serverless applications Cloud DNS: managed DNS hosting PART 4 - MACHINE LEARNING Cloud Vision: image recognition Cloud Natural Language: text analysis Cloud Speech: audio-to-text conversion Cloud Translation: multilanguage machine translation Cloud Machine Learning Engine: managed machine learning PART 5 - DATA PROCESSING AND ANALYTICS BigQuery: highly scalable data warehouse Cloud Dataflow: large-scale data processing Cloud Pub/Sub: managed event publishing




Amazon Web Services in Action


Book Description

Summary Amazon Web Services in Action, Second Edition is a comprehensive introduction to computing, storing, and networking in the AWS cloud. You'll find clear, relevant coverage of all the essential AWS services you to know, emphasizing best practices for security, high availability and scalability. Foreword by Ben Whaley, AWS community hero and author. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology The largest and most mature of the cloud platforms, AWS offers over 100 prebuilt services, practically limitless compute resources, bottomless secure storage, as well as top-notch automation capabilities. This book shows you how to develop, host, and manage applications on AWS. About the Book Amazon Web Services in Action, Second Edition is a comprehensive introduction to deploying web applications in the AWS cloud. You'll find clear, relevant coverage of all essential AWS services, with a focus on automation, security, high availability, and scalability. This thoroughly revised edition covers the latest additions to AWS, including serverless infrastructure with AWS Lambda, sharing data with EFS, and in-memory storage with ElastiCache. What's inside Completely revised bestseller Secure and scale distributed applications Deploy applications on AWS Design for failure to achieve high availability Automate your infrastructure About the Reader Written for mid-level developers and DevOps engineers. About the Author Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig are software engineers and DevOps consultants focused on AWS. Together, they migrated the first bank in Germany to AWS in 2013. Table of Contents PART 1 - GETTING STARTED What is Amazon Web Services? A simple example: WordPress in five minutes PART 2 - BUILDING VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE CONSISTING OF COMPUTERS AND NETWORKING Using virtual machines: EC2 Programming your infrastructure: The command-line, SDKs, and CloudFormation Automating deployment: CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, and OpsWorks Securing your system: IAM, security groups, and VPC Automating operational tasks with Lambda PART 3 - STORING DATA IN THE CLOUD Storing your objects: S3 and Glacier Storing data on hard drives: EBS and instance store Sharing data volumes between machines: EFS Using a relational database service: RDS Caching data in memory: Amazon ElastiCache Programming for the NoSQL database service: DynamoDB PART 4 - ARCHITECTING ON AWS Achieving high availability: availability zones, auto-scaling, and CloudWatch Decoupling your infrastructure: Elastic Load Balancing and Simple Queue Service Designing for fault tolerance Scaling up and down: auto-scaling and CloudWatch




Connected, Intelligent, Automated


Book Description

Quality 4.0 is for all industries, and this book is for anyone who wants to learn how Industry 4.0 and Quality 4.0 can help improve quality and performance in their team or company. This comprehensive guide is the culmination of 25 years of research and practice-exploring, implementing, and critically examining the quality and performance improvement aspects of what we now call Industry 4.0 technologies. Navigate the connected, intelligent, and automated ecosystems of infrastructure, people, objects, machines, and data. Sift through the noise around AI, AR, big data, blockchain, cybersecurity, and other rising technologies and emerging issues to find the signals for your organization. Discover the value proposition of Quality 4.0 and the leading role for Quality professionals to drive successful digital transformation initiatives. The changes ahead are powerful, exciting, and overwhelming-and we can draw on the lessons from past work to mitigate the risks we face today. Connected, Intelligent, Automated provides you with the techniques, philosophies, and broad overall knowledge you need to understand Quality 4.0, and helps you leverage those things for the future success of your enterprise. Chapter 1: Quality 4.0 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution Chapter 2: Connected Ecosystems Chapter 3: Intelligent Agents and Machine Learning Chapter 4: Automation: From Manual Labor to Autonomy Chapter 5: Quality 4.0 Use Cases Across Industries Chapter 6: From Algorithms to Advanced Analytics Chapter 7: Delivering Value and Impact Through Data Science Chapter 8: Data Quality and Data Management Chapter 9: Software Applications & Data Platforms Chapter 10: Blockchain Chapter 11: Performance Excellence Chapter 12: Environment, Health, Safety, Quality (EHSQ) and Cybersecurity Chapter 13: Voice of the Customer (VoC) Chapter 14: Elements of a Quality 4.0 Strategy Chapter 15: Playbook for Transformation




Mastering Salesforce DevOps


Book Description

This practical guide brings DevOps principles to Salesforce development. It fits together two major movements within the IT world: the movement to Software/Platform as a Service (SaaS/PaaS), and the DevOps movement. While SaaS and PaaS allow companies to invest in their core competencies rather than maintain their own infrastructure, the goal of DevOps is to optimize the process of delivering software innovation and value. The release of Salesforce DX in late 2017 unlocks the possibility of a true DevOps workflow on Salesforce. But DevOps is new to the Salesforce world and there is not a widespread understanding of its goals and methods, and so adoption of Salesforce DX is still in the early stages. Mastering Salesforce DevOps explains how to build a powerful and comprehensive DevOps workflow for Salesforce—allowing you to finally deploy the world's most innovative platform using the world's most effective and efficient techniques. It addresses the need for a comprehensive guide to DevOps for Salesforce, allowing teams to bring proven practices from the IT world to resolve the hardest problems facing Salesforce developers today. What You Will Learn Improve company performance and software delivery performance using Salesforce DX Translate DevOps concepts into the unique language and practices of Salesforce Understand why and how you can implement Salesforce DX to achieve greater productivity and innovation Enable continuous delivery on Salesforce Build packages and architect code so it can be deployed easilyAllow admins to participate in what has traditionally been a developer workflow Know the techniques for reducing the stress and risk of deploymentApply the full range of automated tests that can be used on Salesforce Who This Book Is for Salesforce developers, release managers, and those managing Salesforce development teams who need a guide to DevOps, and DevOps specialists who need to apply familiar concepts to Salesforce