Cloud consumers need choice because workloads are different. In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, M. Srikanth, CTO of ComputeNext, will discuss how with the growth and adoption of cloud, there is a need to provide options for consumers of cloud with the ability to select and federate their workloads across heterogeneous cloud. M. Srikanth is CTO of ComputeNext. With 13+ years in search and semantic technology and most recently an applied researcher at Microsoft Bing, he is fascinated with how search and discovery can power efficient computing in federated cloud ecosystems.
Two types of cloud infrastructure have emerged to clearly differentiate the choices enterprises face in their cloud migration strategies: enterprise virtualization clouds versus elastic cloud infrastructure. The former defines infrastructure built to support legacy enterprise applications like those built on SAP and Oracle. The canonical example is a vSphere stack. The second cloud category – elastic cloud – defines infrastructure built to support new, dynamic applications like mobile, gaming, Big Data, and PaaS. The canonical example is public cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Troy Angrignon, Vice President of Sales & Partnering at Cloudscaling, will explain how enterprise CIOs are increasingly faced with the need to build and support new, dynamic apps built on REST-ful APIs under the devops model. Unfortunately, new apps are ill-suited to their enterprise virtualization stacks. Running them on public clouds like AWS works technically, but this presents regulatory, availability and proprietary issues. CIOs are asking for an elastic cloud infrastructure that's architecturally and behaviorally consistent with AWS, but they want it in their data center.
Recently FireScope Inc. introduced the general availability of its Stratis product. Stratis brings all of the FireScope Unify capabilities to the cloud, with the added advantage of a new architecture that delivers near infinite scalability. Moreover, the new Stratis architecture provides scalability at all application layers including its back-end operations, which were newly designed to leverage the benefits of MongoDB. In this article we will discuss several of the architecture choices that were made as part of this effort with the hope that others might benefit from the research and analysis that was performed to bring this product to market. As background a functioning FireScope deployment has the ability to gather metrics from all forms of existing IT assets, normalize the gathered metrics, provide historical analysis of the metrics, and most importantly provide service views for worldwide operations which is unparalleled in the IT industry. In the early phases of designing the Stratis product, FireScope undertook significant research into the scalable persistence architectures that were production ready at the time of this effort. FireScope ultimately chose MongoDB for its ability to scale and its flexibility in supporting an easy transition from a relational persistence model to a NoSQL model.
It’s interesting as a parent watching your kids grow up and learn how to do things for themselves. I have 2 boys ages 6 and 7 and they often amaze me and confound me. There are times when I think they are absolutely brilliant and other times where I think that significant amounts of remedial education may be in their futures. I recall a time not long ago when my kids first discovered the wonders of duct tape. What a magical substance. They really thought that you could fix anything with duct tape. Broke a lamp? Duct Tape! Cut your finger? Duct Tape! Building a boat out of sticks? Duct Tape! (Seriously, my oldest boy actually tried this.)
If people really don’t like negative political ads, why aren’t they sick of companies behaving like spoilers and trying to step on each other’s announcements? Google apparently can’t stand the thought of Apple and Microsoft unveiling products without it putting its two cents in. It’s sent the media an invitation to a mystery Android event on Monday October 29, the same day Microsoft is set to make its Windows 8 phone announcement. Google is also using New York as a backdrop having hired Basketball City at Pier 36 on the East River at 10am. Google will also live stream the event at http://www.youtube.com/android.
Mouse gestures are one of those great "add-ons" that enhance browser usability. For those that are not familiar with mouse gestures, they are a browser navigational aid that works via mouse movements. Mouse gestures have been around for some time now and we thought it would be good to show how to implement mouse gestures in WebRenderer. This demonstration application not only aids in browser navigation, but also shows how to draw on top of the WebRenderer browser. To enact a mouse gesture one holds down the right mouse button and moves the mouse in a direction or pattern and the browser matches this pattern against a predefined list. After the browser interprets the mouse movement pattern it is matched to a browser action, such as "go back" or "reload page". Mouse gestures can be visually interpreted by the user thanks to a "tail" which is drawn on the browser (web page) as the user performs the gesture.
Oracle has formally advised Judge William Alsup that it intends to appeal the verdict in its patent and copyright suit against Google and Android. Judge Alsup, you’ll remember, decided Oracle’s Java APIs weren’t copyrightable, an issue it’s got to prevail on in its appeal. Whether Oracle or Google wins at the Federal Circuit, FOSS Patents thinks the issue could get to the Supreme Court eventually. Oracle also needs to defeat Google’s fair use defense. FOSS thinks the judge’s instructions to the jury were confusing and prejudiced Oracle’s case because the jury couldn’t decide the point although it did find that Google infringed.
Red Hat is looking for a new name for the open source JBoss Application Server, a k a JBossAS, because the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has gotten bigger than just Java. So it’s staging a community election to rechristen the widgetry with a name that reflects polyglot programming and support for Java EE-alternative frameworks like Spring. In a press release issued Monday Red Hat said it is “embracing the evolution of transformational technologies such as dynamic service fabric, cloud, NoSQL, mobile and multi-language polyglot computing as part of its product strategy. To mark this evolution, Red Hat plans to enable broader developer access to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform product, and will be holding an open election to select a new name for the JBoss Application Server community project.” It’s hoping for quicker evolution.
If they plan to remain viable in today’s markets, now is the time for real estate firms to make some dramatic changes by offering intelligent amenities in their commercial properties. How do we prop up our dying shopping center? How do we develop and maintain more business for our stadium? How do we raise our commercial properties’ occupancy from 45% to 85%? These questions are being asked more and more in the commercial real estate industry as the economy remains in a slump in many locations. Many executives are baffled because their usual management techniques are not working. In addition, assessments and property appraisals that overlook or discount technology within the property’s infrastructure are inadequate at best, and totally erroneous at worse.
There is truly a difference in terms of scope, application and business need between security "in" the cloud and security "from" the cloud. No, this isn't 7th grade English...I promise. With all the important decisions IT departments make, what’s the big deal whether cloud security means from the cloud, in the cloud, of the cloud or for the cloud. Well, a lot. Amongst the various media, blogs, professional chatter, webinars, conferences and the like, the concept of cloud security is getting a significant amount of airplay. However, the difference in the application of a simple preposition completely alters the scope and meaning of these conversations to that of a problem or a solution.
Cisco has bought start-up vCider for its expertise in developing virtual network overlay technology for secure data center infrastructure. The price wasn’t disclosed. GigaOm rates it as a counter to VMware buying Nicira, which, it says, “has strained the once close partnership between Cisco and VMware.” It figures it’ll be used “to build a unified yet distributed Cisco-based cloud.” The new prize will be integrated into Cisco’s Cloud Computing organization, reporting to cloud CTO Lew Tucker, the vice-chairman of the new OpenStack Foundation. In a blog posting Cisco said it expects vCider to play an important part in its Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy, particularly in support of OpenStack, a key pillar of Cisco’s open, multi-hypervisor, multi-stack cloud computing strategy.
AMD said Monday that it’s going to contribute to the Sumatra OpenJDK Project, which is focused on bringing heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for server and cloud environments. Sumatra will explore how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), as well as the Java language and APIs, might be enhanced to let applications take advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD accelerated processing units (APUs).
Enterprise Framework service in Datapower environment is a service implementation to minimize the exposure of ports and their configuration on firewall. All services running inside the Datapower need to be installed on the appliance IP address and on the port. As the number of services increase on the appliance, it does create complexity and following underline issues to any environment.
The ability to conduct effective performance testing has become a highly desired skillset within the IT industry. Unfortunately, these highly sought-after skills are consistently in short supply. "Front-end testers" can work with a tool to create a realistic load and although this is an important skillset, creating the load is just the beginning of any performance project. Understanding the load patterns and tuning the environment makes the unique talents of a "performance engineer" worth their weight in gold. Performance engineers require skills in data analysis such as resource usage patterns, modeling, capacity planning, and tuning in order to detect, isolate, and alleviate saturation points within a deployment. Performance testing generates concurrency conditions and exposes resource competition at a server level. When the competition results in a resource (such as a thread pool) becoming over-utilized, this resource becomes a bottleneck or a saturation point. Performance engineers need to first understand the underlying architectures and develop a sense of where to look for potential scalability issues. Much of these "senses" or skills come from experience, working in many multi-tier environments and successfully tuning bottlenecks. Here are some tips to make the challenging but rewarding transition from a front-end tester to a performance engineer.
1972: Most commonly used languages (Cobol, Fortran, Algol, PL/1, Basic, APL) all had complicated syntax. The prevailing thought process was to add new language syntax for every new feature. Writing a compiler for such languages was a nightmare. Then came “C”. The syntax was simple and could easily be parsed. Compiler could be lightweight. Every additional feature were added though a function library. This was a paradigm shift. Syntax of most popular languages (Java, C++, C#, JavaScript) are C like. 2001: The focus was on formal, well specified software development processes. You had SSAD, OOAD, and RUP. SEI had just released its CMM framework.
Like most application servers, WebSphere 8.5 has a rich management infrastructure based on JMX, or Java Management Extensions. In fact, the WebSphere administration console uses JMX to connect to the server to issue queries and perform administrative operations. In a previous post I showed you how to secure JBoss’ JMX connector. While there is a lot of information out there on how to connect to WebSphere via JMX, most of the examples involve either disabling SSL, or worse – disabling security globally. So let’s see how we can access WebSphere’s JMX connector remotely in a secure way. Like most things WebSphere, this could look very daunting at first, but once done, you will have a reliable and secure setup.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) represents a complete preintegrated platform offering for the development and operation of general purpose business applications. A fully preintegrated and standardized platform - offered in a multitenant mode as a managed service - means much less manual effort than installing and configuring middleware components in on-premise servers. Enterprise architecture patterns and framework changed heavily during the last decade, the software / platform / framework upgrades eat up the major chunk of it budgets and leaving relatively smaller portion for business innovation. However, due to the support for Java EE full implementation and open standards along with extended support for common relational databases, Redhat Open Shift provides a better option for porting existing Java EE applications to Cloud.
Load and performance testing web applications will allow you to determine whether or not your deployment will require a clustered environment. When the test results show that the current throughput is restricted by the capacity of the server but target workloads are not yet met, this is a situation where you can achieve higher scalability by implementing clusters to your environment. Clustering achieves higher scalability by introducing more servers or nodes to expand the capacity of the environment. Obviously, the benefits of adding hardware include higher capacity, reliability, availability, and scalability. But also consider that clustering also adds complexity to your deployment by requiring added maintenance and an increased need for deployment/upgrade automation. To ensure quality of the environment you must always validate your clustered environment and prove out the increased scalability. Use a methodical performance testing approach. Don’t try to extrapolate! It’s not as easy as “3 nodes in a cluster will support 3x the workload.”
Alibaba CEO Jack Ma’s most heartfelt wish will reportedly come true next week when he’s able to put something of a period – or at least a coda – to Yahoo!’s rocky involvement with his company. It’s gonna cost him though. All Things Digital, that Yahoo know-it-all, says Yahoo has agreed to sell him back half its 40% interest for $7.6 billion in borrowed money, a sum that values Alibaba at $43 billion. It includes a $550 million final payment in annual licensing fees. Yahoo only paid $1 billion for its 40% piece seven years ago, a handsome return.
Because of the efforts of people like Steve Souders, John Resig, Sergey Chernyshev, Paul Irish, ... a lot has changed when it comes to optimizing web site performance. Browser and Application Performance Vendors built tools to make Web Performance Optimization easier than ever before. Web Frameworks are optimized to generate better web pages. However, looking at the following chart reminds us that best practices, conferences and tools alone didn't succeed and building optimized web sites is getting even harder. As can be seen, the main problem with modern web sites is the growing number of resources, the size of the content, and the declining user experience that results from the first two items.
WebRenderer is one of those SDKs that can appear overwhelming on first look. For this reason we always shipped a “bare bones” Test Browser (TestBrowser.java) with the product. The Test Browser has at times baffled people due to it’s lack of features. The Test Browser was “featureless” by design as we wanted to keep the starter example code as compact as possible so that developers could embed WebRenderer in just a few lines of code. This is important as we never wanted the learning curve and integration to be an overwhelming process. With that being said, for some time now our WebRenderer developer team has been utilizing a “Test Browser” that is rather substantial (130 classes) when compared to our standard Test Browser (one class). This test browser has been dubbed “Rich Test Browser” by the developer team. Given the amount of WebRenderer features demonstrated by the Rich Test Browser we thought it appropriate to publish the browser for all to use. The Rich Test Browser can be downloaded and includes both binary and source code.
Citrix has put an undisclosed amount of money in CumuLogic, the angel-backed private Java Platform-as-a-Service start-up founded last year by Sun Microsystems veterans with Java’s father James Gosling as an advisor. Citrix took the money out of its Citrix Startup Accelerator fund, which invests in early stage start-ups. By transforming virtualized environments and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds into a high-value PaaS cloud, CumuLogic technology is said to simplify the development, deployment and runtime management of mobile, web and enterprise Java applications in public, private and hybrid clouds.
Thanks to EPractize Labs folks for offering an excellent Training Kit for Oracle Certified Expert, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 Java Persistence API Developer Certification. The same company also offers mock exam simulator for other Java certifications including assignment related exams like OCMEA and OCMJD. You cannot equate the quality of EPractize Labs products with others. They are very unique in terms of learning style and content. Plan – Objective, provides enough information about OCE Java EE 6 Web Services certification/exam objectives, PPA methodology, Topic wise score split-up, exam benefits and FAQs about Training Lab
HTML5 is the latest iteration of the standard used by web programmers and developers. When completed in 2014, it will enable developers to write-once-run-anywhere (WORA) for consistent, cross-platform experiences across all operating systems and browsers. For example, a developer could create a single application with identical performance across Facebook, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and all other [...]
Let’s start with the basic question: What is the disruptor? The disruptor is a concurrency framework for Java that allows data sharing between threads. The age old way of coding a producer-consumer model is to use a queue as the buffer area between the producer and the consumer, where the producer adds data objects to the queue, which are in turn processed by the consumer. However, such a model does not work well at the hardware level and ends up being highly inefficient. The disruptor in its simplest form replaces the queue with a data structure known as the ‘ring buffer’. Which brings us to the next question, what is the ring buffer? The ring buffer is an array of fixed length (which must be a power of 2), it’s circular and wraps. This data structure is at the core of what makes the disruptor super fast.