A few weeks back webserver request queueing came under heightened scrutiny as rapgenius blasted Heroku for not using as much autotune as promised in their “intelligent load balancing”. If you somehow missed the write-up (or response), check it out for its great simulations of load balancing strategies on Heroku. What if you’re not running on Heroku? Well, the same wisdom still applies – know your application’s load balancing and concurrency and measure its performance. Let’s explore how request queueing affects applications in the non-PaaS world and what you can do about it.
Is your organization interested in public cloud but needs the added security and compliance of a cloud dedicated to your data? Managed private cloud, located in a secure Dell data center, on-site at your location, or in a co-location facility, could be the answer. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Ed Conzel, Director of Product Management, Open Source Cloud at Dell, will discuss a managed single-tenant cloud based on OpenStack and how it provides public cloud attributes: usage metering, quotas/limits, API access, and self-service, but with a cloud that is solely dedicated to your organization. Learn how to simplify the provision of cloud services to your workforce while focusing on driving company strategy.
I started in the web performance industry – well before Application Performance Management (APM) existed – during a time when external, single page measurement ruled the land. In an ecosystem where no other solutions existed, it was the top of the data chain to support the rapidly evolving world of web applications. This was an effective approach to APM, as most online applications were self-contained and, compared to the modern era, relatively simple in their design. Soon, a new solution rose to the top of the ecosystem – the synthetic, multi-step business process, played back either in a browser or a browser simulator. By evolving beyond the single-page measurement, this more complex data collection methodology was able to provide a view into the most critical business processes, delivering repeatable baseline and benchmark data that could be used by operations and business teams to track the health of the applications and identify when and where issues occurred.
Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists. The solution may be to leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to build an off-premise Private Cloud to add scalability to your current private cloud. In his general session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer, will discuss: How to achieve scalability at Internet speed Why it makes technical and business sense to host the cloud off-premises What hosting options are available
“Cloud made Big Data what it is today,” stated Scott Morrison, CTO at Layer 7 Technologies, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Cloud gave us the massively scalable infrastructure necessary to practically do Big Data,” Morrison continued, “as well as the engineering mindset that made it a front-of-mind solution for organizations that may not have considered it before.” Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn't about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree? Scott Morrison: It's about both, but one or the other may be the driving motivator depending on the organization.
ADP delivers human capital management (HCM) solutions via the cloud to enable better business outcomes for its clients, and sees the cloud's real value as a gateway to providing clients with easier, faster, and more cost-efficient software services and solutions that can be constantly upgraded and fine-tuned. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Mike Capone, CIO of ADP, will share how companies can leverage a proven approach, from next-level offerings such as Access to Expertise, Managed Services, and Analytic Benchmarking, to the cloud in order to unlock optimal value for their customers.
Hibernate is an open source Java persistence framework project. Perform powerful object relational mapping and query databases using HQL and SQL. In general the widely used libraries are well designed and implemented, and it's very interesting to learn from them some coding best practices. Let's take a look inside the hibernate core library and discover some of its design keys.
As a CIO, it’s your responsibility to chart the technological course for your organization and to do so in a way that meets business needs while fitting inside a budget. Virtualization is one of the most significant advancements to hit the enterprise, and it can be a tremendous boon for the CIO who understands the technology and is willing to implement it across the enterprise.
There are four key areas related to virtualization that CIOs need to understand and keep on top of:
Today’s CIO is forced to deal with virtualization, like it or not. If you want your organization to come out on top, include these principles in your virtualization decision-making processes.
Social media applications like Facebook walls, Linked-in dashboards and Twitter tweet-boards have inadvertently opened up a new paradigm of pushing data/information to the users. Enterprise IT applications, on the contrary, expect users to navigate to the information using designated UI forms or user reports; obviously the social media type of paradigm of pushing relevant/important data can significantly improve the productivity and efficacy of users. Typically in a Manufacturing Supply Chain enterprise, operations span activities across complex manufacturing automation and supply chain automation processes. These processes churn a large amount of data, activities and events that are consumed by thousands of knowledge workers to execute business operations. This article proposes reference architecture for creating a new generation platform for delivering enterprise Data Information to knowledge workers to help improve their productivity and accuracy. It also articulates some high-level design options for implementing the platform.
The Java Virtual Machine specification limits the size of generated Java byte code for each method in a class to the maximum of 64K bytes. This limitation will cause the JVM throw java.lang.VerifyError at runtime when the method size exceeds this limit. This method size restriction of the JVM seems to be too stringent. A bug is open with the Oracle Java development team. This bug is taken as an enhancement request which is likely to be fixed in the future java versions. That said, the fix for this issue is rather supportive. Application/Container developers need to consider few factors and apply good programming/refactoring techniques to get around this problem. While future versions of JVM might increase the method size limit to a considerable extent, a the size will always be a finite value.
OpenXava is a framework for Rapid Java Web Development, well-suited for business and database oriented applications. OpenXava allows you to develop applications just by writing simple domain classes with Java or Groovy. The user interface is generated automatically in runtime, without code generation. OpenXava 4.7 has some new interesting features. OpenXava 4.7 supports WebSphere 8 and WebSphere Portal 8. An OpenXava portlet deployed in WebSphere Portal adapts its style to the portal style.
Today’s IT infrastructure is in the midst of a major transformation. In many ways, the data center is a victim of its own success. The growing number of technologies and applications residing in the data center has spawned increasing complexity, which makes IT as a whole less responsive and agile. While businesses are focused on moving faster than ever, large and complex infrastructure is inherently rigid and inefficient. As a result, IT is moving outside the traditional data center into colocation facilities and cloud infrastructures – essentially Infrastructure Anywhere. The move to Infrastructure Anywhere is driven by the core objective of improving responsiveness and agility and reducing costs. For example, you can scale up resources through the cloud in minutes, not months. But for all of its benefits, this new Infrastructure Anywhere model presents critical challenges. To make smart decisions about where to run applications and what kind of resources you need, you first must understand your workload: utilization, capacity, and cost. Gaining unified visibility is difficult when your application workloads are distributed across data centers and colocation facilities in different parts of the country or around the world. With limited visibility, how do you accurately align resources and capacity with workloads for efficient processing, cost control, and — more important — achieve the full business value of your IT investment?
As much as we try to avoid performance problems, they do happen. It is inevitable. But it is possible to learn to react fast, and in some occasions fast enough that the impact on the end users is negligible. Despite operators’ best efforts, 73% of performance issues are reported by users, according to "APM: Getting IT on the C-Level’s agenda" report by Aberdeen Group. This number is quite large considering that less than 5% of all users typically bother to complain at all. User Experience has a significant impact on business success. According to the Aberdeen report, poor performance of applications can reduce revenue by 9% and productivity by 64%.
We’ve all known the person that believed they knew everything there was to know about topic X. In IT this person is so commonplace that I have wondered if there isn’t an advanced cloning device that spits them out on a daily basis. While this self confidence (or bravado, whichever) in the right individual, at the right time, has done some amazing things in world history and specifically in the history of computer science, most of the time it is merely annoying. When any attempt is made to explain even what the individual doesn’t know, they tend to walk away thinking you’re too dumb to understand. That passes annoying and enters dangerous. Not dangerous in the sense that someone is going to get hurt, but dangerous in the sense that this person with incomplete knowledge and overweening arrogance is working on your IT systems. Without the complete picture.
It's interesting - and almost amusing - to watch the circle of technology run around best practices with respect to performance over time. Back in the day caching was the ultimate means by which web application performance was improved and there was no lack of solutions and techniques that manipulated caching capabilities to achieve optimal performance. Then it was suddenly in vogue to address the performance issues associated with Javascript on the client. As Web 2.0 ascended and AJAX-based architectures ruled the day, Javascript was Enemy #1 of performance (and security, for that matter). Solutions and best practices began to arise to address when Javascript loaded, from where, and whether or not it was even active.
Oracle said Monday that it’s buying Tekelec, which makes mobile broadband software that service providers use to manage and monetize multimedia applications and the increased mobile data traffic they’re seeing. Tekelec claims 300 SP clients in 100 countries. Terms were not disclosed. Seeking Alpha speculates that because Oracle has suddenly turned to the telecom sector – signaled by its recent deal to buy Acme Packet – that maybe its SaaS interests – distinguished by, say, Taleo and Rightnow – aren’t going too well – given the lack of growth in its licensing. It thinks SaaS rivals are getting away with rustling Oracle’s enterprise customer base.
Google Apps Script is a cloud based JavaScript environment which allows you to write powerful applications and workflows around Google Apps such as Gmail, Docs, Drive, Sheets and more. The development is entirely within a browser and it's free and easy to get started. At this session, Cloud Expo delegates have the opportunity to learn all the capabilities of Google Apps Script. Walk away being able to write your first script!
Achmea Holding, one of the largest providers of financial services and insurance in the Netherlands, has made large strides in running their IT operations like an efficient business itself by rearchitecting its IT operations based on clear metrics. Gardner: Why is running IT more like a business important? Why does this make sense now? Aarnink: Over the last year, whenever a customer asked us questions, we delivered what he asked. We came to the conclusion that delivery of every request that we got was an intensive process for which we created projects. It was very difficult to make sure that it was not a one-time hero effect, but that we could deliver to the customer what he asked every time, on scope, on specs, on budget, and on time. We looked at it and said, "Well, it is actually like running a normal business, and therefore why should we be different? We should be predictive as well."
Everyone has an argument for the ideal technological approach to cloud computing: public vs. private (vs. hybrid), open vs. closed, vertical vs. horizontal, etc. Larry Ellison’s thoughts on the proprietary cloud aside, an open cloud environment is inevitable. Companies will have a variety of tools and technologies working together to comprise the future cloud landscape. But, to be successful, a company using cloud technologies requires an open organization where the IT department and line of business embrace each other as partners in the venture. Therefore an investment in cloud computing, more than previous technology shifts, requires an investment in the IT department’s people and processes.
A component is a reusable software entity. A component is a deployable piece of software that can be independently developed and maintained. In the previous article –Componentizing a Monolithic Application in Java, we discussed the need for componentizing applications to get the benefits of reusability and modularity. We also looked at how an E-Store application can be componentized using a simple component model developed by the authors using a factory whiteboard pattern and a simple repository. In Part 1 of this article we will try to understand various component models in Java and provide a brief comparison of the features provided by them. Traditionally to explain component-based software engineering (CBSE) principles, popular component frameworks like CORBA, DCOM and JavaBeans are used. Instead of this traditional approach, this article will focus on the latest and widely adopted component models and frameworks specific to Java platform such as Enterprise JavaBeans Component Model (EJB), OSGi Component Model (OSGi), Spring Component Model (spring) and Component Model using Service Component Architecture (SCA).
Oracle, which was promising growth in its third fiscal quarter, missed across most product categories and all regions except, perversely, EMEA. Its stock dropped close to 8% after-hours to $35.76. It blamed its salesforce for its poor showing. Co-president Mark Hurd, the former CEO of HP, has hired 4,000 new sales people in the last 18 months and Oracle says they’re not acculturated yet and displayed little urgency about the quarter, transferring their ambitions to Q4, historically Oracle’s biggest quarter.
When the operations team gets an alert about potential performance problems that users might be experiencing, it is usually either the infrastructure or the actual application that is causing those problems. Things get interesting when neither the ISP nor the application provider is willing to admit fault. Can we tell who is to blame? Could it be that it is neither the ISP nor the application provider? The IT department of our customer, SerciaFood, a food production company from Sercia (names changed for commercial reasons), received complaints about the performance of one of its applications. The IT department suspected network problems while the local ISP stood firmly behind its infrastructure and blamed the solution provider.
With Cloud Expo New York | 12th Cloud Expo [June 10-13, 2013] hurtling towards us, let's start to take a look at the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference coming up June 10-13 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. We have technical and strategy sessions for you all four days dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...?
Many innovative hybrid cloud strategies are being used to address complex IT challenges. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Ed Laczynski, VP of Cloud Strategy & Architecture at Datapipe, will examine how you can take advantage of the scalability and efficiencies of the public cloud while addressing data security and compliance requirements through hybrid solutions. Cloud diversity will also be discussed in depth, providing attendees with insight on deploying resilient cloud infrastructure. Some of these techniques include: Hybrid solutions that utilize traditional architecture in conjunction with cloud infrastructure Hybrid solutions working with AWS via DirectConnect services to satisfy the requirements of highly available database clusters Cloud provider diversity
SharePoint is a popular choice for intranet applications and therefore it is important that it performs well to ensure employee productivity. Waiting ten seconds just to load the initial dashboard doesn’t necessarily support that. At a recent customer engagement we identified an interesting source of a potential performance problem that impacts all SharePoint and .NET-based installations that use the ServicePointManager to access web services. It turns out that ServicePointManager comes with a default setting that allows two concurrent connections. If you happen to have a SharePoint dashboard that queries data from more than two data sources, your end users will suffer from a very long page load time. In this blog I explain the steps that one of our customers took to identify and solve this particular problem. This issue has a broader impact beyond SharePoint; I suggest all .NET developers to look into this issue.