The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision for what’s really coming. The mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as the “new normal,” where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or trading in bitcoins is as good as it’s going to get. Another foresees a dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job- and business-destruction. A third believes that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will characterize as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical capabilities. And machines, which make and move all manner of stuff, are undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. We’ve seen this pattern before. The technological revolution that drove the great economic expansion of the twentieth century can be traced to a similar confluence, one that was first visible in the 1920s: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). Single inventions don’t drive great, long-cycle booms. It always takes convergent revolutions in technology’s three core spheres—information, materials, and machines. Over history, that’s only happened a few times. We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.

"When it comes to predicting how technology changes our near future, there are two camps. One says we live at a time of a "new normal" where we've netted all the low-hanging fruit and ordering a ride or food on a smartphone is as good as it's going to get. The other camp sees lots of changes but mainly in destroying jobs and traditional businesses. They're both wrong, predicts Mark P. Mills, whose earlier book "The Bottomless Well" debunked the bleak consensus view that the world had reached "peak oil" production in the early 2000s. History will record the 2020s as one of the episodic pivots in human progress where technology-driven prosperity goes into high gear. And it doesn't come from any single 'big' invention, but from the convergence of radical advances in technologies in three domains: the "Cloud," history's biggest and newest infrastructure, built from next-generation microprocessors and democratizing artificial intelligence; new kinds of machines used for making and moving everything; and the emergence of unprecedented and novel materials from which everything is built. We've seen this pattern before. The structure of the technological revolution that drove the last long-run expansion can be traced to the 1920s. It too came from the same kind of convergence: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). It's true that we've wrung all the magic out of the last boom. But the next one starts now. The U.S. is again at the epicenter of these innovations, one that promise to upend the status quo in manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy and entertainment"--

How did salesforce.com grow from a start up in a rented apartment into the world's fastest growing software company in less than a decade? For the first time, Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change. Showing how salesforce.com not only survived the dotcom implosion of 2001, but went on to define itself as the leader of the cloud computing revolution and spark a $46-billion dollar industry, Benioff's story will help business leaders and entrepreneurs stand out, innovate better, and grow faster in any economic climate. In Behind the Cloud, Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish.

The Internet of Things offers massive societal and economic opportunities while at the same time significant challenges, not least the delivery and management of the technical infrastructure underpinning it, the deluge of data generated from it, ensuring privacy and security, and capturing value from it. This Open Access Pivot explores these challenges, presenting the state of the art and future directions for research but also frameworks for making sense of this complex area. This book provides a variety of perspectives on how technology innovations such as fog, edge and dew computing, 5G networks, and distributed intelligence are making us rethink conventional cloud computing to support the Internet of Things. Much of this book focuses on technical aspects of the Internet of Things, however, clear methodologies for mapping the business value of the Internet of Things are still missing. We provide a value mapping framework for the Internet of Things to address this gap. While there is much hype about theInternet of Things, we have yet to reach the tipping point. As such, this book provides a timely entrée for higher education educators, researchers and students, industry and policy makers on the technologies that promise to reshape how society interacts and operates.

A sneak peek at up-and-coming trends in IT, a multidimensional vision for achieving business agility through agile architectures The Agile Architecture Revolution places IT trends into the context of Enterprise Architecture, reinventing Enterprise Architecture to support continuous business transformation. It focuses on the challenges of large organizations, while placing such organizations into the broader business ecosystem that includes small and midsize organizations as well as startups. Organizes the important trends that are facing technology in businesses and public sector organizations today and over the next several years Presents the five broad organizing principles called Supertrends: location independence, global cubicle, democratization of technology, deep interoperability, and complex systems engineering Provides a new perspective on service-oriented architecture in conjunction with architectural approaches to cloud computing and mobile technologies that explain how organizations can achieve better business visibility through IT and enterprise architecture Laying out a multidimensional vision for achieving agile architectures, this book discusses the crisis points that promise sudden, transformative change, unraveling how organizations' spending on IT will continue to undergo radical change over the next ten years.

Kubernetes is the operating system of the cloud-native world, providing a reliable and scalable platform for running containerized workloads. This book shows developers and operations staff how to apply industry-standard DevOps practices to Kubernetes in a cloud-native context. You’ll learn all about the Kubernetes ecosystem and discover battle-tested solutions to everyday problems. In this friendly, pragmatic book, cloud experts John Arundel and Justin Domingus show you what Kubernetes can do—and what you can do with it. You’ll build, step by step, an example cloud-native application and its supporting infrastructure, along with a development environment and continuous deployment pipeline that you can use for your own applications. Understand containers and Kubernetes from first principles—no experience necessary Run your own clusters or choose a managed Kubernetes service from Amazon, Google, and others Design your own cloud-native services and infrastructure Use Kubernetes to manage resource usage and the container lifecycle Optimize clusters for cost, performance, resilience, capacity, and scalability Learn the best tools for developing, testing, and deploying your applications Apply the latest industry practices for observability and monitoring Secure your containers and clusters in production Adopt DevOps principles to help make your development teams lean, fast, and effective

World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolu­tion, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work. Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developments are affecting all disciplines, economies, industries and governments, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from supercomputers, drones and virtual assistants to 3D printing, DNA sequencing, smart thermostats, wear­able sensors and microchips smaller than a grain of sand. But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development. Imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manu­facturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made of biosynthetic materials. The fourth industrial revolution, says Schwab, is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than in any prior period of human history. He outlines the key technologies driving this revolution and discusses the major impacts expected on government, business, civil society and individu­als. Schwab also offers bold ideas on how to harness these changes and shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them; progress serves society rather than disrupts it; and in which innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than cross them. We all have the opportunity to contribute to developing new frame­works that advance progress.