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It’s hard to recommend the paid version of ChatGPT when ChatGPT Free offers a near equivalent experience for most people. Both use the latest GPT-4o model, which is fast, comprehensive and largely accurate. The main difference is that ChatGPT Free will revert back to the GPT-3.5 model if you’ve been asking it too many questions or if traffic is high. And ChatGPT Free doesn’t have access to the Dall-E 3 image generator. But for most people, is it really that big of a deal? Probably not.
Let’s compare the paid and free versions of ChatGPT side by side to see what the differences are and why paying $20 per month might be worth it for select power users, like writers, researchers or content creators.
ChatGPT Free vs. ChatGPT Plus: What does $20 get you?
ChatGPT Plus has two key advantages over its free counterpart: an always-online connection and unlimited access to GPT-4o. This means that if something isn’t in GPT-4o’s dataset, it can search the internet for an up-to-date answer. For example, a persistent online connection means that if you want to ask who the current prime minister of India is, ChatGPT Plus will answer the question all the time, whereas ChatGPT Free may answer it only sometimes.
This is because ChatGPT Free limits its use of GPT-4o. If you’ve asked too many questions or if traffic is high, ChatGPT Free downgrades back to the older GPT-3.5 model, which has information only up till January 2022. Though there isn’t an exact count as to how many questions it takes for ChatGPT Free to revert to GPT-3.5, in our testing it was a handful. According to the OpenAI website, Plus users can send 80 messages in a three-hour window on ChatGPT 4o, and 40 messages every three hours with GPT-4. Users on Reddit are reporting that as few as 10 questions forces a revert. ChatGPT Free will resume using the GPT-4o model after a few hours.
ChatGPT asking users to upgrade to Plus.Screenshot by CNET
Apart from differences in available models, a paid subscription gets you access to the latest builds of ChatGPT, data analysis capabilities and a Dall-E 3-powered AI image generator. At the very least, ChatGPT Free does have image analysis capabilities, meaning you can upload an image and get comments on its details.
ChatGPT Plus has DALL-E image generation support, advanced data analysis and cutting-edge features, Free doesn’t
Apart from differences in available models, a paid subscription gets you access to the latest builds of ChatGPT, data analysis capabilities and access to a Dall-E 3-powered image generator. This means that you can actually create AI-generated images with ChatGPT Plus, whereas you can’t with ChatGPT Free. At the very least, ChatGPT Free does have image analysis capabilities, meaning you can upload an image and get comments on its details — but you can’t use it to bring your image ideas to life.
Likewise, both ChatGPT Free and Plus let you upload files for data analysis. But only the paid Plus tier lets you add files from cloud services OneDrive and Google Drive or create visualizations like charts and tables.
Enhanced data analysis in ChatGPT Plus versus the Free version is a great example of how users on the paid, premium tier get cutting-edge features. On the whole, most folks relying on ChatGPT casually should be fine with the no-cost plan, but power users like researchers, content creators or writers may want to spring for the premium version.
How do responses compare?
Considering that both ChatGPT Free and ChatGPT Plus use the latest GPT-4o model, responses to questions are nearly identical — assuming you haven’t hit your limit and gotten bumped back to ChatGPT 3.5 temporarily on the free plan. (Because of the nature of generative AI chatbots, responses to the same question aren’t identical. They generate novel responses each time.)
It’s when ChatGPT Free gets downgraded to GPT-3.5 that changes to response quality become evident. Typically, answers are less comprehensive and more robotic than with GPT-4o. It’s not that these answers are bad. They’re perfectly serviceable and still give you the information you need. But GPT-4o hits on more of the nuances in complex issues than GPT-3.5 does. Plus, GPT-4o has more natural-sounding responses.
Here are excerpts from attempts by GPT-4o and GPT-3.5 to generate a sci-fi short story.
ChatGPT-4o: “In the year 2147, the world had transformed into a landscape defined by the symbiosis of humans and artificial intelligence. The Great Accord of 2099 had seen the transfer of global governance to AI, an unprecedented move that promised impartiality, efficiency, and the end of human corruption.”
ChatGPT-3.5: “In the year 2150, humanity had embraced the full potential of artificial intelligence. What began as a tool to streamline processes and enhance productivity had evolved into something far more intricate — a guiding force shaping every aspect of society.”
The former excerpt plays with language more, like a writer would, finding ways to meld words rhythmically so that it reads with flow. The latter, by comparison, is generic and brusk.
The question is, Do you really care? If you’re simply looking to get questions answered, find inspiration or brainstorm, the free version of ChatGPT is serviceable. Unless you’re a writer or researcher asking lots of questions by the hour and feel you need the absolute best responses, it’s probably not worth forking over $20.
ChatGPT Free vs. ChatGPT Plus: Final thoughts
I really like ChatGPT Plus, but if I weren’t reviewing it, I probably wouldn’t pay the $20 per month to keep my subscription active. That’s because ChatGPT Free largely gets the job done. When it’s using GPT-4o, it’s pretty much on par with Plus. When it gets reverted down to GPT-3.5, responses are still good enough for the average internet user. And if I’m really underwhelmed by an answer, I’ll just wait a few hours for GPT-4o to get reenabled.
Since that’s the case, who’s the paid version of ChatGPT for? It’s for people who need to rely on a powerful word calculator on a daily basis. This can include writers, editors, researchers, content creators and marketers. It’s also for developers who need access to OpenAI’s APIs or for users who need an AI image generator. But if you’re an average internet user who’s getting tired of having to comb through a messy Google search, then stick to the free version.
Salesforce is one of the most powerful CRM systems available. It helps keep your sales team on track by setting up reminders to follow up on leads, meetings, or any other task related to securing the deal.
Keeping your to-do list in Salesforce Lightning and staying on top of your deals and accounts can be easily accomplished by relating every task to records for leads, contacts, campaigns, contracts, and other information you need. Salesforce CRM gives you different tools to maximize productivity and quick ways to create and update tasks, prefiltered task lists, and task notification options.
So, when using the Salesforce Tasks feature, you may run into a specific task that happens repeatedly. If you are manually creating these tasks individually and wondering, “I wish there was a way to automate this.” Well, there is!
Automate Repetitive Tasks In Salesforce Lightning
A recurring task in Salesforce CRM is a way to schedule a task to repeat on a regular schedule, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. This feature can automate repetitive tasks, such as following up with a customer regularly or scheduling regular meetings with a team.
This can help ensure that essential tasks are remembered and that regular check-ins or follow-ups with customers and other stakeholders are done consistently. It can also manage recurring projects, automate administrative work, and keep track of deadlines, milestones, tasks, and more.
All that needs to be done is to activate the Activity Settings feature.
Activate Recurring Tasks In Salesforce Lightning
1. Go to Setup
2. Under Quick find, type Activity Settings and open.
3. Check Enable Creation of Recurring Tasks
4. Next, go to the ObjectManager
5. Do a QuickFind for the TaskObject
6. Click on the Page Layout Name
7. Find CreateRecurringSeriesofTask field
8. Drag the field to the PageLayout
9. Click on Buttons (under Fields)
10. Verify the buttons have been added or Add the following controls:
Create Follow-Up Task
View Series
Delete Series
11. Click Save
You can view and manage your recurring tasks in the Tasks tab. To edit or delete a routine task, click the task and then click the Edit or Delete button.
Create Recurring Tasks In Salesforce Lightning
1. Click CreateNew Task or Create Follow-Up Tasks (on task record)
2. Check off Create Recurring Series of Tasks
3. Enter information regarding the frequency of recurring task
4. Click Save
On the new task record details, you will see the field: Create Recurring Series of Tasks and the recurrence of tasks associated with it.
Note that there are a few steps you can take to complete a recurring task in Salesforce:
1. Navigate to the Tasks tab in Salesforce and find the recurring task you want to complete.
2. Click on the task to open its details, update, or add relevant information.
3. Change the task status from Not Started to Complete.
4. Save the Task.
Keep in mind that depending on the frequency and end date of the recurring task, completing it will only mark the current instance of the task as completed and will not affect any future occurrences of the task.
At this time, recurring Events in Salesforce Lightning are not possible.
In this article, we will explore the top 10 reasons why businesses should choose Boomi as their enterprise iPaaS versus other iPaaS alternatives in 2023, and why in my opinion, Boomi is the best enterprise iPaaS today. But before we go there, let’s start with “Why do you need an iPaaS” and “What is Boomi”.
Why Choose Boomi Over Other iPaaS Competitors and Alternatives—Table of Contents
An enterprise iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is a cloud-based platform that helps organizations integrate various cloud-based and on-premise applications, data sources, processes and services making it easier to automate business processes and share data across applications.
Another iPaaS definition, this time quoting Gartner, “Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations.”
The challenges of integration today are very different from the integration challenges that enterprises faced a decade ago. The rapid growth of cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) applications that solve “point needs” well has led to an explosion in the number of applications in use at a typical enterprise. This has, in turn, led to creation of data silos which make it difficult to see how individual data elements and processes fit within the overall enterprise, and overall business processes such as quote-to-cash, procure-to-pay and others. To work around the problem of data silos, enterprises need to “integrate” these applications, many of which are cloud-based.
Enter an iPaaS that is built to handle the integration challenges of today!
Figure 1: Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)
Integrating various applications and data into company-wide business processes using a modern integration platform (iPaaS) makes sense for enterprises that are growing and changing rapidly. Companies can quickly integrate new applications into their business operations, without having to build integration functionality from scratch. With the right iPaaS platform, you can ensure consistency across your entire organization on how you develop, monitor and maintain your integrations. You can empower both line-of-business users or “citizen integrators” and technical users or “integration professionals” to effectively manage and maintain integrations.
Bottom line, an enterprise iPaaS can help organizations improve efficiency, enhance data accessibility, become more agile, reduce the burden on IT, and lower costs.
Boomi is the leading cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution in the market today. Boomi offers a range of integration tools and services, including data integration, application integration, API management, EDI, and more. Boomi is designed to be easy to use and offers a range of features to help organizations streamline their integration processes and automate their workflows. Some of the key features of Boomi include pre-built connectors for popular applications and data sources, drag-and-drop integration mapping, and real-time data integration capabilities.
Now let’s dive into the reasons why in my opinion, Boomi is the best enterprise iPaaS today.
Boomi offers a lower total cost of ownership compared to its competition. This lower TCO starts with its simple subscription-based pricing model that offers cost savings for businesses. Instead of paying a large upfront cost for an on-premises integration solution, businesses can pay for Boomi on a monthly or annual basis. This can make it easier for businesses to budget for their integration needs and allows them to scale their usage up or down as needed.
In addition to its subscription-based pricing, Boomi also offers flexible pricing options based on the number of connectors used. This means that businesses only pay for the integration capabilities that they need, rather than being locked into a one-size-fits-all pricing model. This can help businesses save money on their integration efforts and only pay for the features they need.
Additionally, Boomi subscriptions include unlimited users that can use the Boomi iPaaS platform to build, deploy, and manage your integrations.
Figure 2: Lower TCO with Boomi
Boomi’s cloud-based platform also offers cost savings in terms of IT resources needed for integration development and operations. By using Boomi, businesses can reduce the need for IT staff to manage their integration efforts, as the platform is easy to use and requires minimal training. This can help businesses save money on labor costs and allow them to redirect their IT resources to other areas of the business.
Overall, Boomi’s cloud-based platform and flexible pricing options make it a cost-effective solution for businesses looking to integrate their applications, data, and processes. Its ability to reduce the need for IT infrastructure and personnel resources, as well as offering flexible pricing options, can help businesses save money on their integration efforts and improve their bottom line.
Boomi is the most complete iPaaS platform in the market, and it gives you all the key integration services you need in an integrated, cohesive manner so that you can look holistically across your disparate systems, applications, and data sources.
The Boomi AtomSphere Platform iPaaS offers you multiple capabilities:
Integration is the heart of the Boomi platform—it helps you break down data silos by integrating on-premise and cloud applications, data, and devices. Boomi Integration provides all capabilities of legacy integration tools while keeping development streamlined and easy with a drag-and-drop interface.
Boomi Master Data Hub—a cloud-native master data management (MDM) platform solution that sits at the center of the various data silos within your business and helps you keep the data used to track the “nouns” of your company’s business (customers, products, orders, vendors, employees) clean, accurate, and consistent.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) capabilities to help organizations exchange data electronically with their B2B trading partners. Boomi supports a range of EDI standards, including ANSI X12, EDIFACT, TRADACOMS, and VDA.
API Management—Boomi API Management supports the full lifecycle of APIs starting with the rapid development and publication of any on-premise or cloud endpoint (database, application, file system …) as an API for real-time integrations. It also supports centralized controls and monitoring over your endpoints.
Flow—a low-code development tool that allows you to build applications and automate workflows. Flow allows you to observe and respond to data flowing through your systems and integration processes. It enables you to build UI apps with workflows and human approval steps, and extend your connectivity from system-to-system to system-to-human.
Data Catalog and Preparation—Boomi DCP allows you to quickly discover, interpret, prepare, and govern your data, ensuring it is ready to drive data insights (or simply put, business intelligence).
Boomi is a pioneer of the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) category for cloud-native connectivity; it is a truly integrated iPaaS from the ground up that supports modern integration needs!
Boomi’s single instance multi-tenant platform provides all the benefits of the cloud, including flexibility, agility, design patterns, scalability, high availability, built-in redundancy, and automatic upgrades. This translates to reduced complexity and lower costs.
Boomi is designed to be easy-to-use and offers a range of features to help developers be more productive when creating integrations. Some of the ways that Boomi can improve developer productivity include:
Pre-built connectors: Boomi offers a range of pre-built connectors for popular applications and data sources, which can save developers time and effort when setting up integrations.
Drag-and-drop integration mapping: Boomi’s integration mapping tools allow developers to easily connect different systems and data sources using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
API management: Boomi’s API management tools allow developers to easily create, publish, and manage APIs with little-to-no code, which can streamline integration processes and reduce the workload for IT teams.
Collaboration tools: Boomi includes a range of collaboration tools to help developers work together more effectively and efficiently.
Also, as described below, Boomi is an intelligent tool that greatly improves developer and administrator productivity. Overall, Boomi is designed to be a comprehensive and user-friendly platform that can help developers be more productive when creating integrations.
Boomi has been in the enterprise integration business for over 20 years and has been a market leader in the iPaaS space for nearly 15 years. It has received various accolades from leading analysts including Gartner, which has positioned Boomi as a leader for the 8th consecutive year in its Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise iPaaS.
20,000+ companies globally and across industries are using Boomi to integrate their business, internally and externally (with customers, partners, and suppliers).
Boomi’s experience in the integration industry means that it has a deep understanding of the challenges and requirements that businesses face when it comes to integration. This knowledge is reflected in the features and capabilities of the Boomi platform, which are designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes and industries.
In addition to its experience, Boomi is also constantly innovating and updating its platform to stay ahead of the curve in the integration industry. This means that businesses using Boomi can trust that they are using a platform that is up-to-date and able to meet their evolving integration needs.
Boomi offers you all the deployment options you will need—from fully-hosted, fully-managed by Boomi (Boomi Atom Cloud) to deployment in public cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) or personal cloud to on-premise deployments. And you can even go hybrid where you combine 2 or more of these options based on the systems and applications you are integrating.
Figure 4: Boomi Deployment Options
Before I go on, let me introduce you to the Boomi Atom—a lightweight, dynamic runtime engine that executes all your integration processes and contains all the components required to run your processes from end to end, including connectors, transformation rules, decision handling, and processing logic.
Typically, if you are only connecting cloud-based applications, you can go with the Boomi Atom Cloud, which provides a “zero-footprint” integration solution without installing any server/network infrastructure or software because all computing occurs in the Boomi data center.
If, on the other hand, you are connecting to resources in your internal network, such as a database, file system, or other on-premise applications, you must install the Atom within your network. Depending on your system and network topology, this may translate to an on-premise Atom or a personal cloud Atom or even a public cloud Atom (if there is a VPN connection to that public cloud infrastructure).
Lastly, when talking about deployment flexibility, I want to also draw your attention to Boomi Molecules (clustered Atoms) and forked executions that allow multiple Atom processes to run concurrently and provide high-availability.
Boomi is INTELLIGENT, and its intelligence helps you be more productive. Its intelligence starts with data gathering—as its thousands of customers use the Boomi platform, Boomi anonymizes the meta-data, analyzes it, draws inferences, and provides suggestions and best practices to make every Boomi platform user (from developer to administrator) more efficient and effective.
Figure 5: Boomi’s Pervasive Intelligence
Some examples of Boomi’s intelligent features (source: Boomi) include:
Automated Data Mapping: Boomi Suggest generates maps and functions for new integrations, simplifying one of the most challenging and error prone aspects of building integrations
Automated Connector Configuration: Filter Suggest lets users configure the connector query filter with just two clicks—greatly streamlining a time consuming and daunting aspect of building integrations
Simplified Error Resolution: Boomi Resolve automatically suggests resolutions for common error messages, based on contributions from our ecosystem of Boomi developers and architects
Automated Regression Testing: Boomi Assure delivers crowd-sourced regression testing to customers, providing the confidence that platform updates will not break existing integration processes
Boomi can easily connect with a range of different systems, applications, and databases, making it easy for businesses to quickly and easily integrate their different data sources. This can save businesses time and money, as they do not need to invest in multiple integration solutions for different systems.
Boomi offers a wide range of 1500+ connectors that allow it to connect with a wide range of systems and applications, including popular CRM, ERP, and e-commerce platforms. This means that businesses can use Boomi to integrate their various systems and applications, regardless of the technology they are using.
In addition to its wide range of connectors, Boomi also offers API-based integration options, which allow businesses to connect to systems and applications that do not have a pre-built connector. This further enhances Boomi’s connectivity and makes it a flexible solution that can meet the needs of any business.
Boomi’s drag and drop visual UI and low code platform ensure the greatest speed and flexibility to support a wide range of projects – from the simple to the most complex. Most integrations can be handled via Boomi’s out-of-the-box, drag and-drop interface.
Additionally, Boomi provides starter templates (via process libraries) and pre-built integration accelerators for common use cases.
All of this translates to empowering a new breed of integration developers from your line of business users, also called Citizen Integrators. This helps your enterprise meet your integration needs more quickly, and eliminates IT as the bottleneck.
Boomi is compliant with a range of security standards, including HIPAA, GDPR, and FedRAMP (U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) Authorization, making it a secure platform for businesses to manage their integration efforts. This is especially important for organizations that handle sensitive or personal data, as they need to ensure that this data is protected. Boomi’s compliance with these security standards gives businesses the confidence that their data is secure and protected.
In addition to its compliance with security standards, Boomi also has various security measures in place to protect data. For example, it uses encryption to protect data in transit and at rest, as well as implementing security controls to protect against cyber threats. These measures help to ensure that businesses’ data is safe and secure when using the Boomi platform.
If all my top reasons for choosing Boomi over other iPaaS platforms were not enough to sway you, I cite some additional reasons to consider!
Boomi offers extensive online documentation and resources to help businesses create and manage their integrations. This includes guides, tutorials, and FAQs that cover a wide range of topics related to integration.
Boomi offers a self-paced learning portal on “all things Boomi” that can help your team learn Boomi.
Boomi’s built-in redundancy ensures that data is not lost in the event of a server failure. This is important for businesses that rely on their integration efforts to operate smoothly, as a data loss could disrupt their operations and cause significant issues. Boomi’s redundancy ensures that data is always available and accessible, further enhancing the platform’s reliability.
In summary, Boomi is THE leading enterprise iPaaS that offers a range of benefits for businesses looking to integrate their applications, data, and processes.
Its cost-effectiveness, completeness of capabilities (integration, API, EDI, MDM and more) and ease of use make it an ideal iPaaS choice for organizations in 2023. Its ability to connect with a wide range of systems, automate tasks, and offer customization options make it a flexible solution that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of any business. Additionally, Boomi’s pervasive intelligence accelerates development and enhances developer productivity. As such, businesses looking to adopt an enterprise iPaaS in 2023 should definitely consider Boomi as an option.
If you are interested in learning more about how Boomi can benefit your business, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. Our experts would be happy to discuss your integration needs and show you how Boomi can help your business connect and manage its applications, data, and processes more efficiently.
Sentiment analysis involves analyzing the opinions about a product or service expressed in the form of a text and categorizing those opinions to draw meaningful insights. Generally, these opinions are categorized into positive, negative, or neutral.
Sentiment Analysis Using Python Overview
In this blog, we’ll build a 2-way polarity (positive, negative, or neutral) classification system for stock prices based on the news headlines without using NLTK’s (Natural Language Toolkit) in-built sentiment analysis engine. We will use a Logistic Regression classifier, Bag-of-Words features, Random Forest classifier, and Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier. To see which performs best, we will also create our preprocessing module to handle raw news headlines.
Data Used
The news headlines dataset has 4,100 rows and 27 columns
Each row has the date of headlines, label (0 – Stock price goes down or stays the same, 1 – Stock price goes up), andtop 25 headlines.
Positive stock sentiment is slightly higher in the given dataset
Data Cleansing and Preprocessing
The first thing that we’ll do is to clean the data by filtering out null values and then preprocessing the headlines so that they’re easier to deal with and ready for feature extraction and training by the classifiers.
After cleaning the data, we’re going to split the data into train and test sets and extract the labels from both sets.
Split the data sets to extract Y labels.
Then for the preprocessing, we’ll first install NLTK libraries to process the data sets.
Next, we remove special characters and punctuation marks, rename columns and make all words lowercase. Finally, we combine all the columns into one.
After the above steps, the final output will be as follows:
Now, we create a word corpus by tokenizing the preprocessed headlines, removing stop words and joining the stemmed words.
Similarly, we can create a corpus for the test data set as well.
From this corpus, we can create a word cloud of down words (negative impact on stock market) and up words (positive impact).
With the available corpus, we extract features by using a bag of words model that can be used with machine learning algorithms to calculate scores.
Model Building
Now, we will run our data through a Logistic Regression, Random Forest classifier, and Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier. We also calculate the performance measures like accuracy, precision, and recall for the corresponding algorithms to select a model with the best results.
Logistic Regression
Confusion matrix is a performance measurement for classification algorithms. It is a matrix that gives a visual representation of True Positives (TP), False Positives (FP), True Negatives (TN), and False Negatives (FN).
Recall (true positives / all actual positives) = TP / TP + FN
Logistic regression gave us an accuracy of 86% which is a great start. We continue to use other algorithms to see if they give better results.
Random Forest Classification
Create a confusion matrix similar to logistic regression.
Random Forest classifier gave an accuracy score of 84% which is less than the Logistic regression.
Multinomial Naive Bayes
To recap what just happened, we created a Logistic regression classifier and its Confusion Matrix. We also created a Random Forest classifier and Naive Bayes classifier to see which gives the maximum accuracy.
The table below lists the different classifiers and their accuracy scores.
Classifier
Accuracy Score
Logistic Regression classifier
86%
Random Forest classifier
84%
Naive Bayes classifier
84%
As we can see, the Logistic classifier is better than the other classifiers. So, we use the LR classifier for the predictions.
Predictions
We can build a function to put all the steps in one place and test some of the headlines to see if the stock price will go up or down.
Example 1:
Example 2:
Drawing insights from social media posts and other sources is imperative for businesses in this information age because an abundance of information is generated in mere fractions of seconds on the Internet. In this blog, we have covered what Sentiment Analysis is, and how we can analyze given data using Python. However, these were just some basic ways to perform sentiment analysis. We can explore more models to use on our data.
If you have any questions about this blog or need help with sentiment analysis and other machine learning services, please contact us.
Why hire a Kubernetes partner (or Kubernetes services provider) to help with your Kubernetes infrastructure planning, implementation, deployment, and maintenance needs? The advent of container technology and Kubernetes has driven a major transformation in how enterprises develop and manage software applications. The benefits of using Kubernetes are significant, including deployment consistency, automatic scaling, self-healing, and better security; however, these benefits come at a cost. The learning curve for Kubernetes is extremely steep, and it is all too common for organizations to start working to migrate their workloads to Kubernetes only to fail spectacularly due to insufficient internal expertise and a lack of knowledge around best practices and common pitfalls for Kubernetes implementation projects.
Hiring a consulting services partner to assist with your Kubernetes migration is the best way to mitigate the risks with such a significant organizational shift. In this article, we’ll discuss how expertise,experience, cost, capacity, and mentoring all factor into a decision to hire a Kubernetes consulting implementation partner. I’ll also give you my pitch on why XTIVIA is the right Kubernetes implementation partner for your project!
Why Hire A Kubernetes Consulting Partner: Expertise and Experience
One of the primary reasons to hire a Kubernetes partner to assist with your Kubernetes journey is to take advantage of a team of experts who have experience setting up and managing Kubernetes clusters. These experts have a deep understanding of the Kubernetes platform and have worked with it in many different environments, addressing diverse use cases. A Kubernetes partner will be able to easily assist with the following implementation details:
Architecture: A Kubernetes partner can help you design an architecture for your cluster that is best suited for your specific needs, taking into account factors such as scalability, security, and performance.
Cluster Installation and Configuration: A Kubernetes partner can help you with the installation and configuration of your cluster, including setting up the necessary components such as etcd, the Kubernetes API server, and the Kubernetes controller manager.
Networking: A Kubernetes partner can help you set up the networking for your cluster, including configuring the overlay network, load balancers, and service discovery.
Storage: A Kubernetes partner can help you set up storage for your cluster, including configuring persistent volumes, storage classes, and dynamic volume provisioning.
Security: A Kubernetes partner can help you set up security for your cluster, including configuring role-based access control (RBAC), network policies, and secrets management.
Monitoring: A Kubernetes partner can help you set up monitoring for your cluster, including configuring metrics collection, logging, and alerting.
Automation: A Kubernetes partner can help you set up automation for your cluster, including configuring automatic scaling, rolling updates, and self-healing.
Best practices: A Kubernetes partner can help you follow best practices and industry standards for setting up and managing a Kubernetes cluster.
All of these domains need to be carefully planned out for your Kubernetes implementation to be a success, and these are only the beginning!
Why Hire A Kubernetes Partner: Cost
Planning a Kubernetes rollout can have serious cost implications for your business, regardless of whether you’re going with a managed Kubernetes platform (such as AWS EKS or Azure Kubernetes Service) or self-hosting your environment. A Kubernetes consulting services partner can help you accurately estimate your monthly spend on the resources you need to run your workloads and can help identify potential “money sinks” in your architecture.
Why Hire A Kubernetes Partner: Capacity
One of the problems that we see so often when we’re working with a new customer who has an existing Kubernetes environment is that they have “one person” who knows how the environment works. Relying on one or two people to plan an entire migration to Kubernetes is a great way to set your organization up for big problems. Bringing on a partner to assist with your Kubernetes rollout will avoid this issue, as you’ll have a team of seasoned Kubernetes engineers assisting with every stage of your migration, from planning, implementation, deployment, and maintenance. This translates into reduced time and effort spent on each of these project phases, allowing you to get your infrastructure online faster and with less cost.
Even if your team has multiple resources who have Kubernetes experience, a migration project requires a large amount of effort to complete successfully. Having additional experienced Kubernetes engineers to assist with a migration project ensures that you will be able to maintain velocity and handle any unexpected issues that crop up during the project.
Another, more long-term benefit from engaging with a Kubernetes consulting partner is the ability to leverage the partner’s Kubernetes team for ad-hoc and ongoing maintenance tasks. Having peace of mind that you’ve always got a team of individuals ready to jump on any problems that you may run into provides peace of mind, and with managed service offerings, you can get that peace of mind at a fraction of the price of building your own Kubernetes team.
Why Hire A Kubernetes Partner: Mentoring
An often-ignored benefit of working with a Kubernetes consulting services provider is that it gives your team the opportunity to work alongside Kubernetes engineers with years of Kubernetes experience under their belts. Not only does this improve the overall outcome of the migration project from an implementation standpoint, it also provides critical knowledge-sharing and mentoring opportunities, allowing your entire team to jumpstart their own Kubernetes expertise.
While a large number of training classes are available to bring people up to speed on Kubernetes, both from an implementation and utilization perspective, those courses tend to be more general and not tailored to your specific use cases. The complexity of the Kubernetes platform makes it a very difficult subject to truly learn through instruction, and the details of your own implementation will dictate which Kubernetes features should be focused on for training. Having a group of certified Kubernetes experts working alongside you, there to help guide your decision-making process and help explain how specific features and functionality can be used to solve your business needs can really shorten the Kubernetes learning curve for your team.
Finally, one of the most important aspects of mentoring is knowing where to go to get additional information as your use of the Kubernetes platform expands. Having a group of skilled experts with years of working with the Kubernetes platform available for your team to ask questions of is an invaluable resource. The breadth and depth of knowledge that a true team of Kubernetes consultants has available will allow your team to avoid time-consuming and error-prone experimentation and self-learning and will pave your way to a successful Kubernetes adoption.
So, Why Hire XTIVIA As Your Kubernetes Partner?
Whenever we’re presented with the opportunity to pitch XTIVIA to a potential customer, we start with our most important asset first: our people. XTIVIA is remarkable in that our company is mainly composed of long-term employees; the XTIVIA leadership team and a majority of our consultants have been long-term employees, celebrating 5-year, 10-year, 15-year, 20-year, and even 25-year anniversaries!
A part of why we have such a stable team is because we hire exemplary talent that takes a great deal of pride in their work. We know that being consultants, we are trusted with our customers’ most critical business problems. While we’re not a small organization (with over 400 team members as of 2022), we’re not large enough to tolerate failed engagements. Each and every XTIVIA customer, no matter how large or small, is critical to us, and our focus is always on delivering the best possible outcome for each and every one.
Now, some of the other reasons to choose XTIVIA as your Kubernetes consulting partner:
We are small enough to provide personalized delivery and large enough to take on your enterprise scale programs.
We have a team of Certified Kubernetes Administrators and Certified Kubernetes Application Developers on staff ready to assist with your most complicated Kubernetes projects.
Our Kubernetes Consultants have experience with all of the major Kubernetes distributions and platforms, including:
In addition, our consulting team has deep experience with all of the major cloud providers as well as experience with on-premises hosted solutions.
We provide you with strategic advice beyond the framework of a single project setting you up for long-term success. An example: it is critical to take into account organizational structure and patterns when designing your Kubernetes cluster and namespace architecture. A properly-designed Kubernetes topology is much easier to scale and secure than one that is built organically.
We specialize in delivering successful Kubernetes engagements from large-scale project implementations to managed services where we assist with Kubernetes projects and/or ongoing management and maintenance. XTIVIA has been delivering successful Kubernetes projects for small and large customers for over 5 years.
And when you zoom back out and look at the collective industry knowledge at XTIVIA, we have experience working with companies from a broad range of different industries. Some of these industries or verticals include E-commerce (B2B and B2C), Manufacturing, Technology, Legal, Professional Services, and Retail and we are constantly adding more all the time.
Our project lifecycle follows an agile, iterative, scrum-basedprocess with complete transparency. Every project has challenges, and we believe in illuminating and resolving risks and issues at the earliest.
We continually challenge ourselves to improve our people, processes, and tools. A key mantra at XTIVIA is: “Keep getting better to avoid going the way of the dinosaur.” Our team is constantly pushing the envelope, learning and sharing our learning through our technical brown bags; whether that is covering the changes included in a new Kubernetes release, reviewing a new Kubernetes-oriented product or service, or delving into best practices around cloud architecture, development, or security. When you choose to work with XTIVIA, you don’t just get the expertise of the Kubernetes Consultants specifically assigned to your account, but the expertise and experience of our entire team.
We don’t expect our people to know everything there is to know. One of our core principles is that we must embrace continual self-improvement. For us, the learning never really stops and “mastery” is a constantly moving goal. Our motto is “leave people better than you found them,” both for our team members and for our clients.
We mentor and help grow our client’s team members. We don’t just teach the “what” and the “how”, but also the “why”. This fits in with the old adage “teach a person to fish and they’ll never go hungry”. As an example of following this adage, we produce detailed documentation for each one of our projects; examples include high-level architectural design documents, design notes that detail the pros, cons, and details of any design decisions that are made, and operational runbooks that cover standard operating processes.
So, at this point, you’re probably thinking, “This sounds GREAT, but can I really believe it?” I understand. Any pitch should be evaluated with a healthy dose of skepticism. Give us a chance!
XTIVIA has the knowledge and expertise that you need to succeed for your Kubernetes implementation project and for securing Kubernetes using Aqua Security!
