Intel’s new broom has begun to sweep, meaning its new CEO Brian Krzanich, in office four days, started reorganizing the place reportedly to make the old girl more focused and spry. The one-time plant manager has taken direct control of the company’s chip design unit, its fabled Architecture Group, which includes its PC client group, mobile communications operation and data center unit, giving its old boss Dadi Perlmutter the job of leading a so-called management transition effort whose point is unclear.
SYS-CON Events announced today that OpenStack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed by a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS applications and eCommerce sites, the world’s largest public clouds, and Global 1000 enterprises alike, each of whom rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day. The open source cloud platform controls pools of compute, storage and networking resources at massive scale, making them available via a self-service dashboard.
“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as offerings such as Rackspace.” Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn't about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree? Terry Woloszyn: It's actually both. Depending on the type of cloud – SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS, and whether it is private or public – the metrics that are used to determine the savings vary in weighting and importance. For example, the total cost of ownership in selecting, installing, configuring, managing, and ultimately replacing enterprise applications is quite large when compared to utilizing a public cloud SaaS equivalent. In this case, it's about saving time and money. On the other hand, utilizing a private cloud infrastructure as a host platform for enterprise applications is much more about saving time in provisioning, as the money difference is small, realized only in hardware utilization and platform management cost savings.
The saying “if it doesn’t exist on the Internet, it doesn’t exist”[1] is ringing truer every day. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine most businesses without an e-commerce platform, let alone without a web presence at all. Since e-commerce is becoming the new standard, e-commerce performance needs to be at its best. In this blog series, I have come up with several ways to ensure your company’s e-commerce performance success, including: avoiding unnecessary network load,reducing number of (internal) HTTP errors, improving backend performance,understanding your clients, ensuring scalability of e-commerce site and finally understanding sales results through conversion rate. Our client TescaraHats (name changed for commercial reasons), a European market leader in manufacturing customized hats, decided to expand its market reach with an e-commerce site where its potential customers could choose, customize and order hats online. Since the company’s core competence is in delivering highly customized products, TescaraHats could not simply use an off-the-shelf e-commerce application. It needs a customization wizard so that customers can create a uniquely customized product.
Although I started with ColdFusion for application development, I did plenty brochureware sites with HTML. I believe the version was HTML 2.0 for IE 2.0. I lived in the browser world for years doing ColdFusion, ASP, and HTML sites. When winforms and Smart Client with web services emerged I changed my religion. Since then I have been avoiding the browser whenever possible since. For the past couple of years I have used HTML/JavaScript/CSS a lot as a byproduct of building ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC applications for public consumption. Internal enterprise applications I will still push for using WPF and web services over ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC, but I lose that battle a lot, especially when the developers have never learned WPF (XAML) and have no interest in learning anything new. When it comes to Mobile Apps my first choice will always be native applications using Objective-C, XAML with C# or C++, and Java using the ASP.NET Web API for the services. The problem is I am going to end up fighting the same battle with the web developers that don't like learning anything new. They are going to turn to HTML/JavaScript/CSS to build their mobile applications as a mobile web site or hybrid application.
Enterprise cloud adoption revolves around pushing the BYOD movement and focusing on data security. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Ross Brouse, COO and President of Solar VPS, will cover how cloud adoption is driven by consumerism, humanity’s need to socialize, our addiction to new gadgets and the ability of data to stay secure in a growing collaborative world. The cloud is a drug and we’re just getting hooked. Ross Brouse is the COO and President of Solar VPS. He is a true creative thinker. He believes the solution to most challenges involves discipline, positive reinforcement and innovative problem solving. As an industry leader, he draws from decades of experience in film and television production, graphic design and development, and managed IT. A graduate of New York University, Ross founded FortressITX's subsidiary company, Solar VPS, in 2005.
In an ideal developer/systems administrator’s world, most applications would deploy seamlessly to multiple platforms and scale elastically with minimal effort bringing the unprecedented agility of the cloud within immediate reach of developer teams and IT organizations. OpenStack, a RackSpace and NASA initiative, is now managed by an independent foundation and is supported by multiple vendors. It defines APIs for compute, storage, networking, services, monitoring, and additional infrastructure services. jclouds is an open source library that helps you get started in the cloud and utilizes your Java or Clojure development skills. The jclouds API gives you the freedom to use portable abstractions for cloud-specific features. It's a cross-cloud toolkit that works with both public and private clouds, enabling hybrid cloud workloads.
Service Component Architecture (shortly referred as SCA) is a technology for creating services from components. SCA is a set of OASIS standards and part of it is developed with the collaboration of vendors from open source community, referred as “OSOA” Open SOA. SCA helps to build systems as a collection of interconnected components. The components created in SCA communicate through the services. The advantage of SCA is its neutral component model. It allows services to be built by any language component like Java, C++, BPEL, JavaScript, Ruby, Python etc. SCA addresses two important needs of component world: Complexity Reusability
Welcome to Java Certification Path. If you are reading this article, it means that you are thinking or have decided to take Java Certification. Let me start off by congratulating you on this decision to boost your career strength. To become a successful Java professional it is good to acquire Java certification to show their evidence. Java certifications adds more confidence to your job responsibilities as well as improves your career potential, of-course you can get higher salary than others. Oracle’s Java certifications are designed to be focused on particular roles in the software development cycle and, therefore, are more useful than all-in-one certifications. Oracle currently offers the following Java certifications, which are classified by level and specialization. Most of the certifications require you to pass a multiple choice exam, but some require you to complete an assignment plus an essay exam.
How your organization approaches capacity management will make or break your private cloud initiative. No longer a periodic sizing exercise, capacity management is now an essential element of daily infrastructure operations that impacts costs, performance risks, and the ability to respond to new workload requests. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder & CTO of CiRBA, will show how to integrate next-generation capacity control with cloud stacks, including OpenStack, in order to proactively reduce risk and maximize cloud efficiency.
The first law of change management is not to use change management. To be more precise, the first law of change management is not to use change management until you use configuration management first. Okay so that might be a slightly sneaky way of making a point, but many change management vendors will primarily label their software as an SCCM tool, i.e., Software Configuration and Change Management. There is a good reason why these two disciplines are stated in that order; you should never change until you configure (and analyze) so that you know what you have in the first place.
In the old world of IT, if you didn't have hardware capacity or the budget to buy more, your project was dead in the water. Budget constraints can leave some of the best, most creative and most ingenious innovations on the cutting room floor. It’s a true dilemma for developers and innovators – why spend the time creating, when a project could be abandoned in a blink? That was the old world. In the new world of IT, developers rule. They have access to resources they can spin up instantly. A hybrid cloud ignites innovation and empowers developers to focus on what they need. A hybrid cloud blends the best of all worlds, public cloud, private cloud and dedicated servers to fit the needs of developers and offer the ideal environment for each app and workload without the constraints of a one-size-fits-all cloud.
OpenStack Cells is one of the most anticipated features in Grizzly, the seventh release of the open source software that offers more block storage options and scalability. It has been running in production at Rackspace for more than a year. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Wayne Walls, OpenStack Developer Advocate at Rackspace Hosting, will discuss nova cells and how it is changing the way you design your cloud applications and infrastructure. He will explain how OpenStack Cells gives added flexibility in application and infrastructure design. He will also enlighten attendees on how it is similar to “zones” at AWS, and how OpenStack Cells helps enable the hybrid cloud and allow specialized workload distribution.
New breakthroughs in cloud-based data management empower databases with the necessary elasticity they need to be truly responsive to the ebbs and tides of supply and demand. Cloud computing allows all capital assets – computing power, memory and storage for example – to be exchanged at the best price, giving everyone the best value for their money. Like any free market, it will only deliver its full benefits to buyers and sellers if the right conditions are available. There can be no barriers to entry, and assets in the cloud must be capable of free movement. Unfortunately, the unsuitability of traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) has created such a blockage. Their lack of elasticity or liquidity demobilizes computing resources. However, new developments in cloud database technology (like database bursting and hibernating functions) show how the database component can have the necessary fluidity to bring cloud-computing closer to ‘perfect market’ conditions and begin to deliver its full benefits.
We are often asked how our clients use WebRenderer in their projects. There are thousands of different use cases our ingenious clients have come up with that have both delighted and surprised us. WebRenderer is more than just an embeddable Java Swing browser. WebRenderer also gives you, the developer, complete access and control of the browser. We thought we would put together an example that demonstrates some of the in-browser functionality. In this example we use WebRenderer Swing Edition to create a special “Zoom” effect when a click action is selected.
Cloud computing continues to gain momentum as enterprises of all sizes and across all industries seek to harness the business agility promised by this computing model. Despite its long-accepted benefits, the cloud has also fallen victim to performance and reliability challenges, combined with a perceived lack of security. As a result this has led to slower predicted growth and adoption of this still promising infrastructure methodology. In his Lunch Keynote at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Neil Cohen, Akamai’s Vice President of Global Product Marketing, will discuss how to overcome these challenges, and the role application delivery solutions play in optimizing public and hybrid cloud architectures without sacrificing performance, security or control.
Speed-to-market and improving ROI for new cloud services are an important element for adopting cloud computing. Open source technology translates into savings for clients in terms of flexibility and interoperability. OpenStack is leading the way in open source for IaaS, capturing the attention of the cloud customers, business partners and vendors alike, and producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Andrew Trossman, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Common Cloud Stack at IBM, will discuss IBM's role in OpenStack including key contributions to strengthen OpenStack, ending with a wrap up of an overview of IBM's plans for the adoption of OpenStack as part of the IBM SmartCloud portfolio.
Adding more memory to your JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) might be a temporary solution to fixing memory leaks in Java applications, but it for sure won’t fix the root cause of the issue. Instead of crashing once per day it may just crash every other day. “Preventive” restarts are also just another desperate measure to minimize downtime, but, let’s be frank: this is not how production issues should be solved. One of our customers – a large online retail store – ran into such an issue. They run one of their online gift card self-service interfaces on two JVMs. During peak holiday seasons when users are activating their gift cards or checking the balance, crashes due to OOM (Out Of Memory) were more frequent, which caused bad user experience. The first “measure” they took was to double the JVM Heap Size. This didn’t solve the problem as JVMs were still crashing, so they followed the memory diagnostics approach for production as explained in Java Memory Leaks to identify and fix the root cause of the problem. Before we walk through the individual steps, let’s look at the memory graph that shows the problems they had in December during the peak of the holiday season. The problem persisted even after increasing the memory. They could fix the problem after identifying the real root cause and applying specific configuration changes to a third-party software component.
This review covers both Core Java Volume I--Fundamentals (9th Edition) and Core Java, Volume II--Advanced Features (9th Edition). Both books are part of the Prentice Hall Core Series. I actually got Volume II first and liked it so much I ordered Volume I. I felt like I was missing the first half of the story. Especially when I downloaded the code and both volumes were included. These two books take you on quite a journey. The first volume starts off with a great overview and history of Java. It then goes into how to download, install, and configure both the JDK and Eclipse. The authors uses Eclipse throughout both volumes. The rest of Volume I is dedicate to covering the fundamental concepts of the Java language and the basics of user-interface programming. I have listed the chapters in Volume I below.
The supposed talks between IBM and Lenovo over the Chinese company buying IBM’s x86 server unit have reportedly broken down over price, which should come as a surprise to no one. Wong Wai Ming Lenovo’s CFO and chief negotiator reportedly left Armonk, got on a plane and went back to Hong Kong. The talks of course could be rekindled after he talks to his masters. Of course the breakdown could just be Lenovo stage craft. Lenovo bought IBM’s PC unit eight years ago for $1.25 billion and has done well with it. It is now the second- or third-largest PC company in the world and managed to shrug off last quarter’s dire drop in PC sales.
AWS has launched a new certification program like Microsoft’s, Novell’s and VMware’s. There will be courses available through AWS Training and certification will involve an independently verified test on AWS best practices and the applicant’s proficiency in designing, building, deploying and maintaining applications and services on the AWS Cloud. Test center sponsor Kryterion will act as the verifier; it has testing centers in 100 countries. There will be three certifications: Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator and Developer. The first will be architect. The two others will follow later this year.
QASymphony is the company behind qTest, a new test management tool that’s aiming to empower test teams. As software development has increasingly moved towards Agile methodology, with its focus on fast delivery, thorough documentation has fallen by the wayside and test cycles have shortened. Test teams have less time to identify and document defects, but expectations for bug-free software remain high. The flexibility to adopt feedback and accelerated build cycles offer real benefits for software development, but they require careful thinking from QA departments. These are the challenges that qTest is trying to address by equipping testers with a fast, intuitive tool capable of handling complex projects. It’s designed to be easy-to-use, it’s fully customizable, it can plug into existing bug tracking software, and it creates a chain of transparency that lays bare the entire life cycle of each defect. It should be a tool that’s appealing to teams trying to save time by implementing agile testing. Like so many new releases nowadays, it is a SaaS solution, based in the cloud and it’s offered at $20 per month per user. The 30-day free trial gives you five licenses, so you can test it out for yourself. How does it measure up?
We’re excited to announce three important changes to our TraceView pricing and product today. First, and most importantly, we are launching a free tier! Project includes all the data we collect on requests, hosts, service calls, JVMs and everything else, and we’re giving it away, free forever. We want you to have this, so we’ve packed everything you need into this version to help you get as much visibility into production as possible. Second, we’re changing the name of Tracelytics to TraceView. Since Tracelytics joined AppNeta in June of last year, there has been a lot of work under the hood on both products. Stay tuned for more cross-talk between these products — we think there’s a lot unexplored territory here, and this name change is just the first step down that path. Third, we’re also excited to change our pricing structure to a per-host model. While the first iteration of TraceView collected nothing but traces of requests, we’ve expanded since then. Today’s TraceView includes host metrics, JVM health stats, and more. Tomorrow’s will include even more information, and not all of it will be associated with a trace. Your web applications have a lot of moving parts, and we want to make sure we’re capturing all of it.
That boom you hear? That's the cloud. Cloud computing is experiencing serious growth – even the Department of Defense is joining the party. However, some people are a little concerned about giving up hard copies and going completely virtual. Getting on this bandwagon is a great idea that can save money and time (assuming the cloud server chosen has a solid reputation). Here are some reasons, posted on an article on HuffingtonPost.com, cloud computing is gaining in popularity. It Saves Money (and the Environment) Keeping paper copies, updating them, making more copies to distribute, shredding them, ordering more paper and ink – it's a vicious cycle. Many companies waste serious cash on this process, not to mention the leg work of employees whose sole responsibility is to keep up with the filing. Switching to cloud computing can save a lot of money and trees, which is why many companies are going green and upping the bottom line at the same time.
A question that every online application provider will face eventually is: Does my application scale? Can I add an extra 100 users and still ensure the same user experience? If the application architecture is properly designed the easiest way is to put an additional server behind the load balancer to handle more traffic. In this article we recount an incident that happened to one of our clients when the cause of poor application performance was eventually attributed to problems with the load balancing of the application servers. Around 8 am the Operations team at Rendoosia Inc. (name changed for commercial reasons) got an alert from the APM tool that one of three SharePoint servers was generating many HTTP Server (500) errors. All three servers were behind a load balancer; hence why the team decided to analyze the overall performance of all three servers with the report presented in Figure 1.