Ernie's Tech Directory (Recent Additions)

Aug 23, 2021

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Ray - A universal Python and Java API for building distributed machine learning-based applications. It helps parallelising single machine code, with little to zero code changes. (2021-06-28) 🌐

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Intelligence

Big Data and Analytics

Data Analysis

Arc42 - A template for architecture communication and documentation. (2021-06-17) 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Design Patterns and Architectural Principles

AWS Proton - A template-driven service for container and serverless applications that abstracts away from the need to hand craft configuration for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates. (2021-06-14) 🌐

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Databricks - A web-based platform for working with Spark, that provides automated cluster management and IPython-style notebooks. (2021-06-07) 🌐

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Intelligence

Big Data and Analytics

Data Analysis

Amazon Location - A managed service to add maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, tracking, and geofencing to applications without compromising on data security, user privacy, or cost. It provides an API across LBS data providers such as Esri and HERE. (2021-06-07) 🌐

AWS Application Migration Service - A solution to automate lift-and-shift migrations by automatically converting source servers from physical, virtual, or cloud infrastructure to run natively on AWS. (2021-05-24) 🌐

AWS App Runner - A service to run containers on demand (similarly to Lambda) without the need for a standby cluster as it is the case in standard Kubernetes. (2021-05-24) 🌐

Container Platforms (Non-K8S)

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Applications

Runtime Platforms

Container Platforms (Non-K8S)

Pega Low-Code Plaform - An “enterprise” take on the low-code paradigm. (2021-05-19) 🌐

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Integration and Rapid Application Development

Rapid Application Development (RAD)

Low Code and No Code

Progress Kinvey - A low-code platform with emphasis on DevOps. (2021-05-19) 🌐

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Integration and Rapid Application Development

Rapid Application Development (RAD)

Low Code and No Code

AutoCode.AI - A deep learning-based platform that generates code straight from business requirements. (2021-05-19) 🌐

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Integration and Rapid Application Development

Rapid Application Development (RAD)

Low Code and No Code

Be Informed - A platform that includes business process automation, case management, and compliance. (2021-05-19) 🌐

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Integration and Rapid Application Development

Rapid Application Development (RAD)

Low Code and No Code

AWS SaaS Boost - A set of open source core software components to create AWS-based SaaS applications with capabilities such as tenant management, deployment automation, analytics dashboards, billing and metering, and an administrative web interface. (2021-05-17) 🌐

Team Topologies - A paradigm for the organisation of technical teams based on the notion of four fundamental team topologies: the stream-aligned team, the enabling team, and complicated subsystem team, and the platform team. (2021-05-17) 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Business Models, Frameworks, and Tools

Instana - An automated Application Performance Management (APM) solution focused on microservices and cloud-native applications. (2021-05-11) 🌐

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Transversal

Observability

Dashboards and Alerting

Application Runtime Monitoring

Aerospike - A flash-optimised, in-memory open source distributed key value NoSQL data store. (2021-05-10) 🌐

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Backing Services

Structured Data Stores

Document and Key/Value Data Stores

Yellow Brick - A niche data warehousing solution focused on large-scale, real-time analytics using a high-speed proprietary hardware architecture on-prem, and carefully chosen and optimised AWS primitives in the cloud/SaaS version. (2021-05-05) 🌐

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Intelligence

Big Data and Analytics

Data Lake

Pixie - An open source, Kubernetes-native observability platform. It allows developers to see all of their applications’ metrics, events, logs, and traces with a single shell command, as well as through a web-based interface. (2021-05-05) 🌐

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Transversal

Observability

Dashboards and Alerting

Amazon FinSpace - A managed data management and analytics service to store, catalogue, and prepare financial industry data from internal data stores like portfolio, actuarial, and risk management systems as well as historical securities prices from stock exchanges. (2021-05-05) 🌐

Amazon Nimble Studio - An end-to-end, SaaS solution to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content entirely, from storyboard sketch to final deliverable. (2021-05-05) 🌐

HashiCorp Waypoint - A developer-orientated solution that automates the workflow required to build, deploy, and release across platforms using a single configuration file and single command. The goal is to relieve the developer from all the complexity associated with CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, Serverless templates, and so on. (2021-04-26) 🌐

HashiCorp Boundary - A solution to mitigate the issues associated with traditional secure access approaches like SSH bastion hosts or VPNs which require distributing and managing credentials, configuring network controls like firewalls, and exposing the private network. Boundary provides a secure way to access hosts and critical systems without having to manage credentials or expose one’s network. (2021-04-26) 🌐

Persistent Disk - Google’s block storage include a range of options, from low-lost HDD-based storage, to high-performance SDD-based one. (2021-04-26) 🌐

BigQuery - A petabyte-scale data warehouse by Google designed to ingest, store, analyse, and visualise data. BigQuery supports a standard SQL dialect that is ANSI-compliant. BigQuery (unlike Google BigTable) is ideal when there is the need to scan a large table including queries such as sums, averages, counts, groupings or even queries for creating machine learning models. (2021-04-26)

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Intelligence

Big Data and Analytics

TigerGraph - TigerGraph presents itself as the solution to Neo4j’s shortcomings. It offers a managed version in all of the three major clouds and it also includes a graphical user interface. It uses GQL (Graph Query Language), which is one of the newest standards (ISO/IEC 39075) and gradually being adopted by the other graph data store vendors. (2021-04-26) 🌐

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Backing Services

Structured Data Stores

Graph Data Stores

K0s - An open source and free free solution to install and run Kubernetes across on-prem and public cloud environments. (2021-04-26) 🌐

Lens - An open source and free IDE to control control multiple Kubernetes clusters. (2021-04-26) 🌐

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Transversal

Observability

Dashboards and Alerting

Mirantis - The Mirantis Container Cloud, is another player in the on-prem/multi-cloud Kubernetes space, like RedHat OpenShift. Like other vendors, Mirantis packs a number of features on top of the upstream Kubernetes distribution, including “single pane of glass” observability capabilities, among others. (2021-04-26) 🌐

AWS Ground Station - A fully managed service to control satellite communications, process data, and scale operations withou building or managing ground station infrastructure. (2021-04-26) 🌐

Amazon EMR Studio - A Jupyter Notebooks-based IDE for data engineers to develop, visualise, and debug big data and analytics applications written in R, Python, Scala, and PySpark. It also integrates tools such as Spark UI and YARN Timeline Service to simplify debugging. (2021-04-26) 🌐

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Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Machine Learning (General)

Bitemporal History - A design pattern that suggest the use of two time records in order to capture retroactive changes to time-stamped data entries. This is useful to differentiate between “the view of the world” at a given time, versus “the effective state of affairs” at the same time, once we learn the correct facts in the future. (2021-04-26) 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Design Patterns and Architectural Principles

Expand and Contract - Also known as “Expand, Transition, or Contract”, or “Parallel Change”, it is a pattern for changing and modernising both applications and databases. It is particularly applicable in the latter, where migrations are traditionally manual and potentially catastrophic endeavours. (2021-04-22) 🌐 🌐 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Design Patterns and Architectural Principles

Evolutionary Database Design - A number of techniques that allow a database design to evolve as an application develops. The techniques rely on applying continuous integration and automated refactoring to database development. (2021-04-22) 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Design Patterns and Architectural Principles

Arachnys - A solution for KYC, AML and adverse media screening. (2021-04-21) 🌐

Comply Advantage - A solution that includes customer screening and monitoring against AML profiles, adverse information and media screening, transaction screening against live sanction list updates. It also allows to set up regular transaction monitoring with customer-defined rules. (2021-04-21) 🌐

NICE Actimize - A compliance platform that provides AML, fraud and authentication management, and financial markets compliance capabilities. (2021-04-21) 🌐

Jumio - A SaaS KYC identity platform with support for more than 3,500 ID types across 200 countries and territories. It focuses on novel biometric-based authentication approaches such as using selfies in tandem with identity documents. (2021-04-21) 🌐

NetReveal - BAE Systems NetReveal provides financial crime, risk management and fraud detection and prevention across banking, financial markets, and insurance. (2021-04-21) 🌐

Zachman - The Zachman Framework is an enterprise ontology and provides a formal and structured way of viewing and defining an enterprise. The ontology is a two dimensional classification schema that reflects the intersection between an axis containing the primitive interrogatives: What, How, When, Who, Where, and Why and another axis derived from the philosophical concept of reification, the transformation of an abstract idea into an instantiation. (2021-04-20) 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

DoDAF - The Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) is an architecture framework for the United States Department of Defense (DoD). It is especially suited to large systems with complex integration and interoperability challenges, and it is apparently unique in its employment of “operational views”. These views offer overview and details aimed to specific stakeholders within their domain and in interaction with other domains in which the system will operate. (2021-04-20) 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

Archimate - An enterprise architecture modelling language to support the description, analysis and visualisation of architecture within and across business domains. The technical standard is maintained by The Open Group. From a notation perspective, it is a competitor to both UML and BPMN; it differentiates itself by offering a much smaller set of pictorial conventions. (2021-04-20) 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

TOGAF - The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is one of the most used frameworks for enterprise architecture. It conceptualises enterprise architecture at four levels: Business, Application, Data, and Technology. (2021-04-20) 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

Lenses - A solution to visualise Kafka-based workloads. The vendor claim their integration is “Google Maps for Kafka”. (2021-04-20) 🌐

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Transversal

Observability

Dashboards and Alerting

IxoPay - A SaaS, PCI-certified payment orchestration platform for white label clients and enterprise merchants. It offers plugin-based integration of acquirers and payment service providers. It supports over 200 payment methods. (2021-04-20) 🌐

Modo Payments - An AWS-based, cloud native payments orchestration solution. (2021-04-20) 🌐

IBM FileNet Content Manager - This is a document management engine for “enterprise content”, which includes security, storage features, and process management capabilities. (2021-04-19) 🌐

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Applications

Enterprise Software

Content Management Systems (CMS)

H2O - An ell-encompassing ML platform that is popular in the financial sector. (2021-04-19) 🌐

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Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Machine Learning (General)

OpenScoring - An open source engine to execute models produced using the likes of Apache Spark, R and Scikit-Learn. It uses the PMML XML format. It also offers conversion tools as well as actual “scoring” capabilities. (2021-04-19) 🌐

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Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Machine Learning (General)

Spreedly - A payments orchestration solution with over 100 payment gateways supported out-of-the-box. (2021-04-19) 🌐

Domain-Driven Hexagon Architecture - This is an opinionated architectural model for architectures based both on the DDD and CQRS principles. It is also greatly influenced by the Clean Architecture ideas from Uncle Bob. (2021-04-19) 🌐 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Design Patterns and Architectural Principles

Papaya - A mobile app that scans paper-based bills and allows paying them directly from within the app. (2021-04-19) 🌐

AQUA for Amazon Red Shift - Advanced Query Accelerator (AQUA) for Amazon Redshift (AQUA) is a distributed and hardware-accelerated cache that enables Amazon Redshift to run up to ten times faster by automatically boosting certain types of queries. (2021-04-19) 🌐

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Intelligence

Big Data and Analytics

Personio - Personio is a SaaS HR solution for SMBs that targets mainly the European market. (2021-04-16) 🌐

Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule for Decks - A rule that states that PowerPoint presentations (i.e., decks) should have 10 slides, last no more than 20 minutes, and contain no font smaller than 30 points. (2021-04-16) 🌐 🌐

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Transversal

People and Process

Business Models, Frameworks, and Tools

Oracle Cloud - Oracle’s cloud is a choice for those companies that are already invested in the ecosystem of traditional Oracle applications, and the Oracle SQL database in particular. (2021-04-15) 🌐

PEP - A Politically Exposed Person (PEP) is someone who has been appointed by a community institution, an international body or a state, to a high-profile position. Under anti-money laundering regulations, the main aim of applying additional scrutiny to work involving PEPs is to mitigate the risk that the proceeds of bribery and corruption may be laundered, or assets otherwise stripped from their country of origin. (2021-04-14) 🌐

vFunction - A solution to automatically extract microservices from complex JVM-based (i.e. Java) monolithic apps. An interesting feature of this solution is that it can convert direct method invocations between classes/objects into REST calls. (2021-04-14) 🌐

Harness - A CI/CD platform with a focus on the “self-service” paradigm. The idea is that DevOps SME can create roles and allow developers to self-provision their own pipelines. (2021-04-14) 🌐

NoCodeZ - An innovative no code solution based on a “conversational” paradigm. It allows building both Web and Mobile apps. (2021-04-14) 🌐

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Integration and Rapid Application Development

Rapid Application Development (RAD)

Low Code and No Code

Argo - A CI/CD platform for Kubernetes which includes workflows, and pipelines, continuous delivery, rollouts, and event-based dependency management. (2021-04-14) 🌐

Codefresh - A CI/CD platform specialised in Kubernetes deployments, and with a strong emphasis on GitOps best practices. It integrates with Argo. (2021-04-14) 🌐

Armory - A commercial distribution of the Spinnaker open source continuous delivery platform. (2021-04-14) 🌐

Spinnaker - Spinnaker is an open-source continuous delivery platform that offers both GUI-based and config-as-code instrumentation options. It was originally developed by Netflix and extended by Google. It is designed to work with Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. (2021-04-14) 🌐

FIPS 140-2 - The Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 140-2, is a U.S. government computer security standard used to approve cryptographic modules. (2021-04-14) 🌐

Communication Security

AWS IAM Access Analyzer - A command line tool that helps identify resources and accounts, such as Amazon S3 buckets or IAM roles, that are shared with an external entity in order to identify unintended access, which might pose a security risk. (2021-04-14) 🌐

Square POS - This is the de facto solution for those who use Square as their payments processor. It is suitable for small, low-risk business with low transactions volumes where no monthly fees are preferable to low commission fees. (2021-04-13) 🌐

SoftPos - A solution to process contactless payments made with plastic card and any of its virtual equivalents added to Google Pay, Apple Pay, wearables or proprietary HCE wallets. It is mainly targeted at Acquirers that want to improve the flexibility they offer to their existing Merchant base. (2021-04-13) 🌐

Workday - A SaaS financial management and human capital management software solution. It is the emblematic, “go-to” HR cloud solution. It was founded by the founders of PeopleSoft following Oracle’s hostile takeover in 2005. (2021-04-13) 🌐

Oracle HCM - Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) is a legacy HR solution that is now offered in a cloud basis. Buyers looking for an HR, cloud-based solution for the first time are better off with newer SaaS native offerings. (2021-04-13) 🌐

Alibaba Cloud - Alibaba is the undisputed Chinese giant whose market share keeps increasing quarter by quarter. (2021-04-13) 🌐

Tencent Cloud - Tencent competes head to head with Alibaba for cloud leadership in Asia but it is heavily expanding into other countries in the region such as Singapore and Indonesia. (2021-04-13) 🌐

MinIO - A Kubernetes-native object storage that runs on commodity hardware. It is open source and allows decoupling from Amazon’s S3 by offering a compatible API; this also provides an S3-like experience on an on-prem or hybrid setting. (2021-04-13) 🌐

Carbon Black - The VMWare Carbon Black platform offers “cloud endpoint security” for hybrid clouds and Kubernetes. In practice, it is an anti-virus, and an event scanning solution but it flirts with other security areas too. It signs the “One Platform” tune rather than specialisation in a given security dimension. (2021-04-13) 🌐

Trifacta - Trifacta offers a data ingestion and pipeline solution both for on-prem and cloud settings; it also has a SaaS flavour. Ingestion pipelines and transformation may be written using a visual editor, SQL, or Python. (2021-04-13) 🌐

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Intelligence

Big Data and Analytics

Data Ingestion

Schema Spy - A tool to generate documentation (tables and graphics) automatically from database schemas. (2021-04-12) 🌐

TestNG - TestNG was born to mitigate JUnit’s shortcomings, but the latter has caught up in recent versions. (2021-04-04) 🌐

JUnit - One of the oldest and most widespread Java unit testing frameworks. (2021-04-04) 🌐

Bitbucket - Atlassian’s commercial Git-compatible source code management (SCM) product in the same family as JIRA, Confluence, etc. (2021-04-04) 🌐

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Transversal

DevSecOps

Source Code Management (SCM)

AppDynamics - One of the most popular applications in the Application Performance Management (APM) space. AppDynamics is particularly well known for its agent-based instrumentation of the Java and .NET runtimes, among others. (2021-04-04) 🌐

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Transversal

Observability

Application Runtime Monitoring

TIBCO EMS - TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (EMS), is a popular Java Message Service (JMS) broker in legacy enterprise landscapes. (2021-04-03) 🌐

Neo4j - Network Exploration and Optimization 4 Java (Neo4j) is an ACID-compliant graph data store. It supports the Cypher and Gremlin query languages. (2021-04-03) 🌐

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Backing Services

Structured Data Stores

Graph Data Stores