Learning OpenDaylight. A gateway to SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) ecosystem

Reza Toghraee

OpenDaylight is an open source, software-defined network controller based on standard protocols. It aims to accelerate the adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and create a solid foundation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).SDN is a vast subject; many network engineers find it difficult to get started with using and operating different SDN platforms. This book will give you a practical bridge from SDN theory to the practical, real-world use of SDN in datacenters and by cloud providers.The book will help you understand the features and use cases for SDN, NFV, and OpenDaylight.NFV uses virtualization concepts and techniques to create virtual classes for node functions. Used together, SDN and NFV can elevate the standards of your network architecture; generic hardware-saving costs and the advanced and abstracted software will give you the freedom to evolve your network in the future without having to invest more in costly equipment.By the end of this book, you will have learned how to design and deploy OpenDaylight networks and integrate them with physical network switches. You will also have mastered basic network programming over the SDN fabric.

Remote Usability Testing. Actionable insights in user behavior across geographies and time zones

Inge De Bleecker, Rebecca Okoroji

Usability testing is a subdiscipline of User Experience. Its goal is to ensure that a given product is easy to use and the user's experience with the product is intuitive and satisfying. Usability studies are conducted with study participants who are representative of the target users to gather feedback on a user interface. The feedback is then used to refine and improve the user interface.Remote studies involve fewer logistics, allow participation regardless of location and are quicker and cheaper to execute compared to in person studies, while delivering valuable insights. The users are not inhibited by being in a new environment under observation; they can act naturally in their familiar environment. Remote unmoderated studies additionally have the advantage of being independent of time zones.This book will teach you how to conduct qualitative remote usability studies, in particular remote moderated and unmoderated studies. Each chapter provides actionable tips on how to use each methodology and how to compensate for the specific nature of each methodology. The book also provides material to help with planning and executing each study type.

Apache Spark 2.x Machine Learning Cookbook. Over 100 recipes to simplify machine learning model implementations with Spark

Siamak Amirghodsi, Shuen Mei, Meenakshi Rajendran, Broderick Hall

Machine learning aims to extract knowledge from data, relying on fundamental concepts in computer science, statistics, probability, and optimization. Learning about algorithms enables a wide range of applications, from everyday tasks such as product recommendations and spam filtering to cutting edge applications such as self-driving cars and personalized medicine. You will gain hands-on experience of applying these principles using Apache Spark, a resilient cluster computing system well suited for large-scale machine learning tasks.This book begins with a quick overview of setting up the necessary IDEs to facilitate the execution of code examples that will be covered in various chapters. It also highlights some key issues developers face while working with machine learning algorithms on the Spark platform. We progress by uncovering the various Spark APIs and the implementation of ML algorithms with developing classification systems, recommendation engines, text analytics, clustering, and learning systems. Toward the final chapters, we’ll focus on building high-end applications and explain various unsupervised methodologies and challenges to tackle when implementing with big data ML systems.

Hands-on Design Patterns with Kotlin. Build scalable applications using traditional, reactive, and concurrent design patterns in Kotlin

Alexey Soshin

Design patterns enable you as a developer to speed up the development process by providing you with proven development paradigms. Reusing design patterns helps prevent complex issues that can cause major problems, improves your code base, promotes code reuse, and makes an architecture more robust.The mission of this book is to ease the adoption of design patterns in Kotlin and provide good practices for programmers. The book begins by showing you the practical aspects of smarter coding in Kotlin, explaining the basic Kotlin syntax and the impact of design patterns. From there, the book provides an in-depth explanation of the classical design patterns of creational, structural, and behavioral families, before heading into functional programming. It then takes you through reactive and concurrent patterns, teaching you about using streams, threads, and coroutines to write better code along the way By the end of the book, you will be able to efficiently address common problems faced while developing applications and be comfortable working on scalable and maintainable projects of any size.

Mastering Java Machine Learning. A Java developer's guide to implementing machine learning and big data architectures

Uday Kamath, Krishna Choppella

Java is one of the main languages used by practicing data scientists; much of the Hadoop ecosystem is Java-based, and it is certainly the language that most production systems in Data Science are written in. If you know Java, Mastering Machine Learning with Java is your next step on the path to becoming an advanced practitioner in Data Science.This book aims to introduce you to an array of advanced techniques in machine learning, including classification, clustering, anomaly detection, stream learning, active learning, semi-supervised learning, probabilistic graph modeling, text mining, deep learning, and big data batch and stream machine learning. Accompanying each chapter are illustrative examples and real-world case studies that show how to apply the newly learned techniques using sound methodologies and the best Java-based tools available today.On completing this book, you will have an understanding of the tools and techniques for building powerful machine learning models to solve data science problems in just about any domain.

Mastering VMware vSphere 6.7. Effectively deploy, manage, and monitor your virtual datacenter with VMware vSphere 6.7 - Second Edition

Martin Gavanda, Andrea Mauro, Paolo Valsecchi, Karel Novak

vSphere 6.7 is the latest release of VMware’s industry-leading, virtual cloud platform. It allows organisations to move to hybrid cloud computing by enabling them to run, manage, connect and secure applications in a common operating environment.This up-to-date, 2nd edition provides complete coverage of vSphere 6.7. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples and self-assessment questions, you will begin with an overview of the products, solutions and features of the vSphere 6.7 suite.You’ll learn how to design and plan a virtual infrastructure and look at the workflow and installation of components. You'll gain insight into best practice configuration, management and security. By the end the book you'll be able to build your own VMware vSphere lab that can run even the most demanding of workloads.

Ansible 2 Cloud Automation Cookbook. Write Ansible playbooks for AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack

Aditya Patawari, Vikas Aggarwal

Ansible has a large collection of inbuilt modules to manage various cloud resources. The book begins with the concepts needed to safeguard your credentials and explain how you interact with cloud providers to manage resources. Each chapter begins with an introduction and prerequisites to use the right modules to manage a given cloud provider. Learn about Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other providers. Each chapter shows you how to create basic computing resources, which you can then use to deploy an application. Finally, you will be able to deploy a sample application to demonstrate various usage patterns and utilities of resources.

Practical Game AI Programming. Unleash the power of Artificial Intelligence to your game

Micael DaGraça

The book starts with the basics examples of AI for different game genres and directly jumps into defining the probabilities and possibilities of the AI character to determine character movement. Next, you’ll learn how AI characters should behave within the environment created.Moving on, you’ll explore how to work with animations. You’ll also plan and create pruning strategies, and create Theta algorithms to find short and realistic looking game paths. Next, you’ll learn how the AI should behave when there is a lot of characters in the same scene.You'll explore which methods and algorithms, such as possibility maps, Forward Chaining Plan, Rete Algorithm, Pruning Strategies, Wall Distances, and Map Preprocess Implementation should be used on different occasions. You’ll discover how to overcome some limitations, and how to deliver a better experience to the player. By the end of the book, you think differently about AI.

Mastering Swift 3 - Linux. Click here to enter text

Jon Hoffman

Swift is a modern, fast, and safe programming language created by Apple. Writing Swift is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and the code runs lightning-fast. Swift’s move to open source has been embraced with open arms and has seen increased adoption in the Linux platform.Our book will introduce you to the Swift language, further delving into all the key concepts you need to create applications for desktop, server, and embedded Linux platforms. We will teach you the best practices to design an application with Swift 3 via design patterns and Protocol-Oriented Programming. Further on, you will learn how to catch and respond to errors within your application. When you have gained a strong knowledge of using Swift in Linux, we’ll show you how to build IoT and robotic projects using Swift on single board computers. By the end of the book, you will have a solid understanding of the Swift Language with Linux and will be able to create your own applications with ease.

Mastering Kubernetes. Master the art of container management by using the power of Kubernetes - Second Edition

Gigi Sayfan

Kubernetes is an open source system that is used to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. If you are running more containers or want automated management of your containers, you need Kubernetes at your disposal. To put things into perspective, Mastering Kubernetes walks you through the advanced management of Kubernetes clusters.To start with, you will learn the fundamentals of both Kubernetes architecture and Kubernetes design in detail. You will discover how to run complex stateful microservices on Kubernetes including advanced features such as horizontal pod autoscaling, rolling updates, resource quotas, and persistent storage backend. Using real-world use cases, you will explore the options for network configuration, and understand how to set up, operate, and troubleshoot various Kubernetes networking plugins. In addition to this, you will get to grips with custom resource development and utilization in automation and maintenance workflows.To scale up your knowledge of Kubernetes, you will encounter some additional concepts based on the Kubernetes 1.10 release, such as Promethus, Role-based access control, API aggregation, and more. By the end of this book, you’ll know everything you need to graduate from intermediate to advanced level of understanding Kubernetes.

Data Science Algorithms in a Week. Top 7 algorithms for scientific computing, data analysis, and machine learning - Second Edition

David Natingga

Machine learning applications are highly automated and self-modifying, and continue to improve over time with minimal human intervention, as they learn from the trained data. To address the complex nature of various real-world data problems, specialized machine learning algorithms have been developed. Through algorithmic and statistical analysis, these models can be leveraged to gain new knowledge from existing data as well.Data Science Algorithms in a Week addresses all problems related to accurate and efficient data classification and prediction. Over the course of seven days, you will be introduced to seven algorithms, along with exercises that will help you understand different aspects of machine learning. You will see how to pre-cluster your data to optimize and classify it for large datasets. This book also guides you in predicting data based on existing trends in your dataset. This book covers algorithms such as k-nearest neighbors, Naive Bayes, decision trees, random forest, k-means, regression, and time-series analysis.By the end of this book, you will understand how to choose machine learning algorithms for clustering, classification, and regression and know which is best suited for your problem

Kali Linux 2018: Windows Penetration Testing. Conduct network testing, surveillance, and pen testing on MS Windows using Kali Linux 2018 - Second Edition

Wolf Halton, Bo Weaver

Microsoft Windows is one of the two most common OSes, and managing its security has spawned the discipline of IT security. Kali Linux is the premier platform for testing and maintaining Windows security. Kali is built on the Debian distribution of Linux and shares the legendary stability of that OS. This lets you focus on using the network penetration, password cracking, and forensics tools, and not the OS.This book has the most advanced tools and techniques to reproduce the methods used by sophisticated hackers to make you an expert in Kali Linux penetration testing. You will start by learning about the various desktop environments that now come with Kali. The book covers network sniffers and analysis tools to uncover the Windows protocols in use on the network. You will see several tools designed to improve your average in password acquisition, from hash cracking, online attacks, offline attacks, and rainbow tables to social engineering. It also demonstrates several use cases for Kali Linux tools like Social Engineering Toolkit, and Metasploit, to exploit Windows vulnerabilities.Finally, you will learn how to gain full system-level access to your compromised system and then maintain that access. By the end of this book, you will be able to quickly pen test your system and network using easy-to-follow instructions and support images.

Docker on Windows. From 101 to production with Docker on Windows

Elton Stoneman

Docker is a platform for running server applications in lightweight units called containers. You can run Docker on Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10, and run your existing apps in containers to get significant improvements in efficiency, security, and portability. This book teaches you all you need to know about Docker on Windows, from 101 to deploying highly-available workloads in production. This book takes you on a Docker journey, starting with the key concepts and simple examples of how to run .NET Framework and .NET Core apps in Windows Docker containers. Then it moves on to more complex examples—using Docker to modernize the architecture and development of traditional ASP.NET and SQL Server apps.The examples show you how to break up monoliths into distributed apps and deploy them to a clustered environment in the cloud, using the exact same artifacts you use to run them locally. To help you move confidently to production, it then explains Docker security, and the management and support options. The book finishes with guidance on getting started with Docker in your own projects, together with some real-world case studies for Docker implementations, from small-scale on-premises apps to very large-scale apps running on Azure.

Hands-On Full-Stack Development with Swift. Develop full-stack web and native mobile applications using Swift and Vapor

Ankur Patel

Making Swift an open-source language enabled it to share code between a native app and a server. Building a scalable and secure server backend opens up new possibilities, such as building an entire application written in one language—Swift.This book gives you a detailed walk-through of tasks such as developing a native shopping list app with Swift and creating a full-stack backend using Vapor (which serves as an API server for the mobile app). You'll also discover how to build a web server to support dynamic web pages in browsers, thereby creating a rich application experience.You’ll begin by planning and then building a native iOS app using Swift. Then, you'll get to grips with building web pages and creating web views of your native app using Vapor. To put things into perspective, you'll learn how to build an entire full-stack web application and an API server for your native mobile app, followed by learning how to deploy the app to the cloud, and add registration and authentication to it.Once you get acquainted with creating applications, you'll build a tvOS version of the shopping list app and explore how easy is it to create an app for a different platform with maximum code shareability. Towards the end, you’ll also learn how to create an entire app for different platforms in Swift, thus enhancing your productivity.

SQL Server 2017 Administrator's Guide. One stop solution for DBAs to monitor, manage, and maintain enterprise databases

Marek Chmel, Vladimir Muzny

Take advantage of the real power of SQL Server 2017 with all its new features, in addition to covering core database administration tasks. This book will give you a competitive advantage by helping you quickly learn how to design, manage, and secure your database solution. You will learn how to set up your SQL Server and configure new (and existing) environments for optimal use. After covering the designing aspect, the book delves into performance-tuning aspects by teaching you how to effectively use indexes. The book will also teach you about certain choices that need to be made about backups and how to implement a rock-solid security policy and keep your environment healthy. Finally, you will learn about the techniques you should use when things go wrong, and other important topics, such as migration, upgrading, and consolidation, are covered in detail. Integration with Azure is also covered in depth. Whether you are an administrator or thinking about entering the field, this book will provide you with all the skills you need to successfully create, design, and deploy databases usingSQL Server 2017.

Practical GIS. Learn novice to advanced topics such as QGIS, Spatial data analysis, and more

Gábor Farkas

The most commonly used GIS tools automate tasks that were historically done manually—compiling new maps by overlaying one on top of the other or physically cutting maps into pieces representing specific study areas, changing their projection, and getting meaningful results from the various layers by applying mathematical functions and operations. This book is an easy-to-follow guide to use the most matured open source GIS tools for these tasks.We’ll start by setting up the environment for the tools we use in the book. Then you will learn how to work with QGIS in order to generate useful spatial data. You will get to know the basics of queries, data management, and geoprocessing.After that, you will start to practice your knowledge on real-world examples. We will solve various types of geospatial analyses with various methods. We will start with basic GIS problems by imitating the work of an enthusiastic real estate agent, and continue with more advanced, but typical tasks by solving a decision problem. Finally, you will find out how to publish your data (and results) on the web. We will publish our data with QGIS Server and GeoServer, and create a basic web map with the API of the lightweight Leaflet web mapping library.

Swift Functional Programming. Ease the creation, testing, and maintenance of Swift codes - Second Edition

Dr. Fatih Nayebi

Swift is a multi-paradigm programming language enabling you to tackle different problems in various ways. Understanding each paradigm and knowing when and how to utilize and combine them can lead to a better code base. Functional programming (FP) is an important paradigm that empowers us with declarative development and makes applications more suitable for testing, as well as performant and elegant. This book aims to simplify the FP paradigms, making them easily understandable and usable, by showing you how to solve many of your day-to-day development problems using Swift FP.It starts with the basics of FP, and you will go through all the core concepts of Swift and the building blocks of FP. You will also go through important aspects, such as function composition and currying, custom operator definition, monads, functors, applicative functors,memoization, lenses, algebraic data types, type erasure, functional data structures, functional reactive programming (FRP), and protocol-oriented programming(POP). You will then learn to combine those techniques to develop a fully functional iOS application from scratch

Learning Elasticsearch. Structured and unstructured data using distributed real-time search and analytics

Abhishek Andhavarapu

Elasticsearch is a modern, fast, distributed, scalable, fault tolerant, and open source search and analytics engine. You can use Elasticsearch for small or large applications with billions of documents. It is built to scale horizontally and can handle both structured and unstructured data. Packed with easy-to- follow examples, this book will ensure you will have a firm understanding of the basics of Elasticsearch and know how to utilize its capabilities efficiently.You will install and set up Elasticsearch and Kibana, and handle documents using the Distributed Document Store. You will see how to query, search, and index your data, and perform aggregation-based analytics with ease. You will see how to use Kibana to explore and visualize your data. Further on, you will learn to handle document relationships, work with geospatial data, and much more, with this easy-to-follow guide. Finally, you will see how you can set up and scale your Elasticsearch clusters in production environments.

Information Security Handbook. Develop a threat model and incident response strategy to build a strong information security framework

Darren Death

Having an information security mechanism is one of the most crucial factors for any organization. Important assets of organization demand a proper risk management and threat model for security, and so information security concepts are gaining a lot of traction. This book starts with the concept of information security and shows you why it’s important.It then moves on to modules such as threat modeling, risk management, and mitigation. It also covers the concepts of incident response systems, information rights management, and more. Moving on, it guides you to build your own information security framework as the best fit for your organization. Toward the end, you’ll discover some best practices that can be implemented to make your security framework strong. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with all the factors involved in information security, which will help you build a security framework that is a perfect fit your organization’s requirements.

Apache Spark Deep Learning Cookbook. Over 80 best practice recipes for the distributed training and deployment of neural networks using Keras and TensorFlow

Ahmed Sherif, Amrith Ravindra

Organizations these days need to integrate popular big data tools such as Apache Spark with highly efficient deep learning libraries if they’re looking to gain faster and more powerful insights from their data. With this book, you’ll discover over 80 recipes to help you train fast, enterprise-grade, deep learning models on Apache Spark.Each recipe addresses a specific problem, and offers a proven, best-practice solution to difficulties encountered while implementing various deep learning algorithms in a distributed environment. The book follows a systematic approach, featuring a balance of theory and tips with best practice solutions to assist you with training different types of neural networks such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). You’ll also have access to code written in TensorFlow and Keras that you can run on Spark to solve a variety of deep learning problems in computer vision and natural language processing (NLP), or tweak to tackle other problems encountered in deep learning.By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to train and deploy state-of-the-art deep learning models on Apache Spark.

Learning Apache Cassandra. Managing fault-tolerant, scalable data with high performance - Second Edition

Sandeep Yarabarla

Cassandra is a distributed database that stands out thanks to its robust feature set and intuitive interface, while providing high availability and scalability of a distributed data store. This book will introduce you to the rich feature set offered by Cassandra, and empower you to create and manage a highly scalable, performant and fault-tolerant database layer.The book starts by explaining the new features implemented in Cassandra 3.x and get you set up with Cassandra. Then you’ll walk through data modeling in Cassandra and the rich feature set available to design a flexible schema. Next you’ll learn to create tables with composite partition keys, collections and user-defined types and get to know different methods to avoid denormalization of data. You will then proceed to create user-defined functions and aggregates in Cassandra. Then, you will set up a multi node cluster and see how the dynamics of Cassandra change with it. Finally, you will implement some application-level optimizations using a Java client.By the end of this book, you'll be fully equipped to build powerful, scalable Cassandra database layers for your applications.

Hands-On Reactive Programming with Reactor. Build reactive and scalable microservices using the Reactor framework

Rahul Sharma

Reactor is an implementation of the Java 9 Reactive Streams specification, an API for asynchronous data processing. This specification is based on a reactive programming paradigm, enabling developers to build enterprise-grade, robust applications with reduced complexity and in less time. Hands-On Reactive Programming with Reactor shows you how Reactor works, as well as how to use it to develop reactive applications in Java.The book begins with the fundamentals of Reactor and the role it plays in building effective applications. You will learn how to build fully non-blocking applications and will later be guided by the Publisher and Subscriber APIs. You will gain an understanding how to use two reactive composable APIs, Flux and Mono, which are used extensively to implement Reactive Extensions. All of these components are combined using various operations to build a complete solution. In addition to this, you will get to grips with the Flow API and understand backpressure in order to control overruns. You will also study the use of Spring WebFlux, an extension of the Reactor framework for building microservices.By the end of the book, you will have gained enough confidence to build reactive and scalable microservices.

Android Development with Kotlin. Enhance your skills for Android development using Kotlin

Igor Wojda, Marcin Moskala

Nowadays, improved application development does not just mean building better performing applications. It has become crucial to find improved ways of writing code. Kotlin is a language that helps developers build amazing Android applications easily and effectively. This book discusses Kotlin features in context of Android development. It demonstrates how common examples that are typical for Android development, can be simplified using Kotlin. It also shows all the benefits, improvements and new possibilities provided by this language.The book is divided in three modules that show the power of Kotlin and teach you how to use it properly. Each module present features in different levels of advancement. The first module covers Kotlin basics. This module will lay a firm foundation for the rest of the chapters so you are able to read and understand most of the Kotlin code. The next module dives deeper into the building blocks of Kotlin, such as functions, classes, and function types. You will learn how Kotlin brings many improvements to the table by improving common Java concepts and decreasing code verbosity. The last module presents features that are not present in Java. You will learn how certain tasks can be achieved in simpler ways thanks to Kotlin.Through the book, you will learn how to use Kotlin for Android development. You will get to know and understand most important Kotlin features, and how they can be used. You will be ready to start your own adventure with Android development with Kotlin.

Microservices Deployment Cookbook. Deploy and manage scalable microservices

Vikram Murugesan

This book will help any team or organization understand, deploy, and manage microservices at scale. It is driven by a sample application, helping you gradually build a complete microservice-based ecosystem. Rather than just focusing on writing a microservice, this book addresses various other microservice-related solutions: deployments, clustering, load balancing, logging, streaming, and monitoring.The initial chapters offer insights into how web and enterprise apps can be migrated to scalable microservices. Moving on, you’ll see how to Dockerize your application so that it is ready to be shipped and deployed. We will look at how to deploy microservices on Mesos and Marathon and will also deploy microservices on Kubernetes. Next, you will implement service discovery and load balancing for your microservices. We’ll also show you how to build asynchronous streaming systems using Kafka Streams and Apache Spark. Finally, we wind up by aggregating your logs in Kafka, creating your own metrics, and monitoring the metrics for the microservice.