By embracing End-User-Experience (EUE) measurements as a key vehicle for demonstrating productivity, you build trust with your constituents in a very tangible way. The translation of IT metrics into business meaning (value) is what APM is all about. The goal here is to simplify a complicated technology space by walking through a high-level view within each core element. I'm suggesting that the success factors in APM adoption center around the EUE and the integration touch points with the ITIL / ITSM processes. When looking at APM at 20,000 feet, four foundational elements come into view: Top Down Monitoring Bottom Up Monitoring ITIL / ITSM Processes Reporting & Analytics
Apache TomEE supported in Jelastic PaaS is a Java EE server, which provides you with the best technology stack that can be deployed to a simple Java EE container. It's lightweight and at the same time is a full-blown application server, which remains simple and avoids architecture overhead. Today you'll see how easy it is to deploy Java web apps into TomEE. In the following tutorial you'll learn the basics of web application development with the help of the Apache Struts framework, which is an absolutely free open-source solution for creating Java web apps.
Ruby on Rails 4 features Russian Doll caching. Here, I apply Russian Doll caching to one of my poorer performing Rails 3 pages using the cache_digests gem. ActionView puts forth a great development pattern of views and partials that is easy to understand, implement and maintain but that comes at a cost: The rendering process is complex and slow. With no caching at all, the ActionView layer averages roughly ~365ms for this URL. This represents over 80% of average request processing time and dwarfs all of the other layers combined.
Efficient Development Workflows save a ton of time. In part 2 of our new series 'The Codeship Workflow' we talk about the steps necessary to get a feature shipped: Pull Request, Code Review and Merging. Check it out! As I mentioned last week we use GitHub Flow on GitHub. But the whole workflow we describe is also possible when working with BitBucket. We do not have a policy when a pull request should be opened. Some of our developers open them when they start a feature, some wait until the feature is implemented. Then we push regularly to that branch as explained in the last post. Open pull requests are helpful as everyone can see what we are working on. One really important part of feature branches and pull requests are proper commit messages.
The bottom line for the telcos is that Cloud-based offerings are value-added services, where the value they add is added to the plumbing. In other words, their fundamental cultural perspective is to make more money with the telecommunications infrastructure. The problem with this perspective, however, is that it’s not the best way for a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to think. Those of us whose careers have centered on moving bits around can easily forget that telephone companies have been in existence since Alexander Graham Bell and his partners founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. For most of this century and a half of history, telecommunications has delivered plain old switched voice networks. The rise of mobile telephony, the Internet, and now the Cloud have each in turn shaken the telco world to its core. And yet, its history, and hence its culture, rest in the world of the Public Switched Telephone Network. In other words, once a phone company, always a phone company.
Developers need to be able to run tests quickly. In this blog post we talk about how to speed up your test suite boot time. The biggest bane of test driven development, or whatever variant you practice, is long boot times. Even when you just run one test a slow boot will make it a tedious job. There are a number of ways to reduce startup times in a Ruby on Rails project. Load less dependencies to get a faster test suite boot time Project dependencies need to be loaded every time you start your test suite, less dependencies means faster startup. Keeping project dependencies to a minimum is always a good idea, not just because of boot time. Let's jump into an example. We're assuming you're using the following, simplified, Gemfile for your dependencies:
VMware vCloud Hybrid Service can greatly reduce IT capital expenditure by removing the need for a remote offsite location for DR/CO-OP operations. IT departments can simply scale up the capacity during disaster operations, greatly reducing the operational cost for maintaining a DR site.
Let’s look at some best practices for using another powerful class: ThreadLocal from java.lang, which is also implemented using WeakReference. As its name suggests, a single instance of ThreadLocal can store different values for each thread independently. Therefore, the value stored in a ThreadLocal instance is specific (local) to the current running Thread, any other code logic running on the same thread will see the same value, but not the values set on the same instance by other threads. (There are exceptions, like InhertiableThreadLocal, which inherits parent thread's values by default.)
We all know that our computer systems are underutilized. Most new desktops come with far more storage than is going to be used (or, to be more exact – should be used given file servers). Processors desktops and servers are busy only 20% of the time, and we always buy more memory than we need just in case. We are left with spending large amounts of capital for hardware that will sit idle most of the time. The solution is Virtualization – one of the latest buzzword floating around Information Technology. It seems that we have been talking about virtualization for a while now, but what does it actually mean and how do I get there? The key thing to know is that virtualization is all about making the most efficient usage of your infrastructure while allowing for maximum flexibility.
Let’s begin with a leading question: Can’t the hybrid economy model live within the public cloud? From the enormous number of conversations with top cloud thought leaders, CIOs, startups, and the like, it seems that the answer is YES. In this post, I will raise some basic questions and will delve deeply into this topic to debate the common resistance to what I call “pure cloud deployment.” I started my journey in the technology world only 10 years ago. I started establishing an online cloud and SaaS solution for the SMB, and 6 years later I was exposed to the great wonderful world of enterprise IT factory. I experienced and documented the challenge of moving the multi-million dollar IT shop to AWS cloud. I also supported and kept records on projects of enterprises and ISVs that moved resources from their on-premise applications to the Amazon cloud, beginning with their initial integration and continual maintenance all the way to the education and implementation of the cloud pay-as-you-go and on-demand models. In my journey, I saw how Salesforce grows like crazy and how its ecosystem mushrooms along with it. I've closely followed Amazon's every step of building the AWS cloud, which, without a doubt, has been a revolution from IT markets.
Ohio-based LLT Barcode & Label, has found powerful new ways to develop sales and leads inexpensively using Ariba Discovery to better connect with qualified new customers. Social tools, big data and business networks are reshaping e-commerce in such a way that buyers and sellers are linking up in ways not possible even a few years ago. In one example, Ohio-based LLT Barcode & Label, has found powerful new ways to develop sales and leads inexpensively using Ariba Discovery to better connect with qualified new customers.
Give Cisco 60 minutes - well, 52 minutes, in fact - and watch the networking giant unveil a game-changing technology to help you capture new business opportunities by creating innovative experiences with greater IT simplicity and investment protection. That is the value proposition of the video webinar that you can see this morning, this afternoon, this evening or indeed whenever is most convenient for you. It is free and it is only one click away.
A new report suggests that most users neglect to protect their mobile devices with security software. The use of personal mobile devices for work purposes means security providers have an opportunity to assist enterprise bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives, as a report from IT research firm Gartner suggested consumer adoption and willingness to pay for antivirus software on mobile devices is low, according to an article on eWEEK.com. The report predicts that 30 percent of consumer product selection criteria will be based on requirements to secure new mobile computing platforms by 2015. While the average IT-savvy consumer has five or more devices at home that connect to the Internet, consumers are far more likely to have an antivirus program installed on their laptops and desktops while tablets, mobile phones and gaming systems that connect to the Internet are often left unprotected.
In this hypercompetitive era faced with multiple technology transitions, businesses must change the game and transform how they engage customers to promote future growth. See Cisco unveil the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) Enterprise Networks Architecture, a game-changing technology that helps you capture new business opportunities by creating innovative experiences with greater IT simplicity and investment protection. Hear customers discuss how they use innovative networking technologies to solve IT challenges and impact business. Watch Rob Soderbery and Inbar Lasser-Raab introduce next-generation technology architecture unveiled at Cisco Live Orlando. Learn about breakthrough networking solutions that will help you to stay ahead of technology transitions.
It seems that everyone is a cloud provider these days. Much like the early Internet period of the ’90s or the early PC period of the ’80s, there is a lot of promise but also some peril. Standards are still being solidified, implementations vary even at the same service provider, and cloud deployments are hard to migrate. This last point is particularly problematic should the service provider choice be unfortunate. In his Opening Keynote at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Rich Place, Lead Partner - Cloud Services at SHI, will discuss the following trends: Needs-based vs. capability-based provisioning Cloud service portability Cloud service aggregation by meta-providers
Why has cloud computing failed to deliver on the promise of true high availability? Have we reached the limits of operational performance? Or are there emerging technologies that may make terms, like ‘downtime,’ ‘scheduled outage,’ or ‘unreachable’ obsolete? In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Dr. Jay Smith, CTO of Lagrange Systems will review weaknesses inherent in today’s approach to cloud computing and showcase how the next generation of technological advances will enable 99.999% or better.
There has been a lot of talk among vendors and industry experts in the last year about how APM fits in with the DevOps philosophy. There have been many claims that because a vendor is easy to install and use, it automatically make it a solution catered for a DevOps crowd. This can’t be further from the truth. Most vendors provide simple monitoring solutions that provide alerts on performance degradations. The problem is that to do performance properly in a DevOps setting you have to transition away from monitoring the performance of an application and start managing it –not just in the production environment, but across all phases of the software development and deployment process. DevOps is also about the equal share of application ownership between development, testing and operations teams. In order to share ownership you have to share a common language – a common set of tools and data – that is automated and integrated in your continuous application deployment process. But what does that really look like? Here is our perspective.
New reports show that when the NSA was conducting its surveillance programs, perhaps including XKeyscore and PRISM, the agency was not following its own legal guidelines. These reports, based on internal NSA audit reports leaked via the “Snowden leak”, showing the NSA violated its own privacy rules and overstepped its authority thousands of times in the past few years, will serve to further unsettle many enterprises abroad, even leading some to conclude that utilizing U.S. cloud applications is not worth risking unauthorized data access by the government and others. Recent reports estimate this new hesitation to use U.S. cloud applications may cost providers more than $35 billion in the coming years. With new revelations that the NSA broke its own privacy rules, enterprises globally may find even more reason to hold back from U.S. cloud providers, potentially making the size of the impact even worse for U.S.-based cloud providers. As we stated in a recent press release on the topic, when enterprises allow fears of surveillance to slow down or stop their adoption of U.S. cloud applications, it has the potential to put those enterprises at a competitive disadvantage to others in their industries – specifically in cases where they are “forced” to adopt a less beneficial/efficient cloud service for managing their business.
If transaction times jump from less than one second to more than 60 seconds after a software upgrade, it is evident that there is a problem that needs investigation. This scenario was experienced by a customer with its time-tracking application. Our customer identified this performance regression while executing extensive performance tests prior to its production upgrade. The company’s “traditional” approach of analyzing these types of problems was analyzing application and database log files as well as infrastructure metrics such as CPU, Memory and Network Throughput. Our customer couldn’t find a single slow database query, nor were there any indications of an error in the log files. The infrastructure also seemed to be fine because the application, the database server and the network didn’t show any bottlenecks. Analyzing the end-to-end transaction, such as the click on search, however, revealed a problem that turned out to be a “data-driven” performance issue.
Having an efficient Development Workflow is immensely important. In this new series 'Efficient Development Workflows' we show how the Codeship Crew works on new features, which apps it uses and how it communicates. With this blog post we start a new series about how we work on the Codeship. Many people asked us how we develop features, about our workflow and which apps we use every day. This blogpost focuses on the workflow to implement a new feature. From branching away from master until it is ready for the pull request. The following blogposts will talk about our internal communication, how we do pull requests and code reviews and an in-depth look into our deployment strategy.
Three of my colleagues here at Cognizant, Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring, are writing a new book on the subjects of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud), digital and business transformations, and successful strategies for navigating through them. The concepts in this book resonate with me. I see enterprise mobility and B2C mobile app strategies as key components. In this article, we get a sneak preview from the book. Several weeks ago we outlined the concept of "Code Halos™" - aka our digital fingerprint - and discussed how "personal" Code Halos are migrating into enterprise computing. We also analyzed the areas in which "organizational" Code Halos are changing what businesses do and how they do it. In this post we advocate how Code Halos create a repeatable pattern of disruption across a wide range of industries; by studying this pattern we have developed a business model - the Crossroads Model™ - to help business and technology leaders understand the impact Code Halos have on winning and losing in today's fast dgitizing global markets. We also provide a "playbook" for executives to win in the new "code rush" and avoid the "extinction events" that so many once great corporations, from Kodak to Newsweek, have experienced in recent years.
ARM-based Servers are poised to shake up the traditional Server market. This will also shake up the software market – creating opportunity for new vendors who choose to specialize in delivering solutions for this emerging computing platform. "There's a new class of technologies poised to shake up the Server market - the Microserver, sometimes called the ARM Server. But the Microserver will do more than shake up the X86 server market. It is going to shake up the software market as well." That's the message software and technology executive Chris Piedmonte, CEO and founder of Austin, TX-based Suvola Corporation delivered as we discussed the topic over coffee earlier this week.
When Melrose transitioned from nearly 100 percent server virtualization to a novel cloud capability built on VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, they discovered that they could not only host their own applications, but also those of nearby communities for an ongoing fee.
12th International Cloud Expo, held on June 10–13, 2013 at the Javits Center in New York City, featured four content-packed days with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of cloud computing led by exceptional speakers from every sector of the cloud computing ecosystem. The Cloud Expo series is the fastest-growing Enterprise IT event in the past 10 years, devoted to every aspect of delivering massively scalable enterprise IT as a service.
In the process of Java development, developers will come across data computation. But Java alone is not convenient to handle such computation. SQL has limited impact on improving the computational efficiency for Java. With Java alone it's difficult to handle such computations. Although it is powerful enough and also quite convenient in debugging, Java has not directly implemented the common computational algorithms yet. So, Java programmers still have to spend great time and efforts to implement the details like aggregating, filtering, grouping, sorting, and ranking. In the respect of data storage and access, programmers have to use List and other objects to assemble every 2D table and every piece of data, and then arrange the nested multi-level loops. In addition, such computation involves set and relation operations on massive data, or relative position between object and object properties. The underlying logics for these computations demand great efforts, not to mention the Excel or Text data, data from set, and the complex computational goal.