Dorothy the CIO was walking the yellow brick road of planning. She was on her way to the Emerald City to ask the great wizard of the agile data center for advice. Along the way she met two other CIOs who joined her on the journey, nicknamed Tin Man and Scarecrow. Their travels brought them to the edge of the dark forest of datacenter hype and fear. ‘‘Do you think we’ll meet any wild technologies and fears in there?’’ she asked her companions. ‘‘We might.’’ responded Tin Man. ‘One’s that devour IT projects?’’ whispered Scarecrow. ‘‘Possibly.’ said the Tin Man, ‘‘but mostly containers, and clouds, and security.’’ ‘‘Containers, and clouds, and security, oh my!’’ they all murmured in unison as they entered the dark forest.
This is a no-hype, pragmatic post about why I think you should consider architecting your next project the way SOA and/or microservices suggest. No matter if it’s a greenfield approach or if you’re in dire need of refactoring. Please note: considering still keeps open the option of not taking that approach. After reading this, you will have a better idea about whether building multiple small components instead of a single, large component makes sense for your project. This post assumes that you have experience with software architecture and services (you’ll find some words about my experience on the bottom of this post). I won’t go into the details of Wikipedia’s or Martin Fowler’s definitions per se. Much more I will talk about what microservices and/or SOA could and should do for your project.
Those from a dev-centric background might discount monitoring from their DevOps approach. But if you're already automating deployment and testing, why wouldn't you use the right set of tools to avoid manual performance monitoring? Of course, you do performance tests each time you release changes to pre-production. You're checking for response time, processor utilization, memory occupation, I/O activity and so on, but how can you ensure normal behavior without a reference point? In other words - despite your good intentions - aren't you using critical production as a first level of benchmark? If you run pre-production performance tests regularly and you can compare those results to what is seen in production, there is a greater chance of detecting the processor utilization jump that caused slowdowns and then relate it to a code change. But the reality is that most developers lack the ability to monitor how their code performs in the test, staging and production environments.
WebRTC Summit has announced today that Peter Dunkley has been named summit chair of WebRTC Summit 2015 New York. The 4th International WebRTC Summit will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in Manhattan, New York. @ThingsExpo anticipates 90% of WebRTC companies & developers will monetize their products & services through IoT by 2016. Peter Dunkley is Technical Director at Acision. He graduated from The University of Edinburgh in 2000 with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science. After graduation Peter worked on a PSTN switch developing signalling stacks for SS7, ISDN and similar protocols and creating advanced routing and service applications. Since 2005 he has worked mainly with SIP first leading a team developing a PSTN gateway and then managing the development of a SIP Application Server. Peter joined Crocodile RCS in September 2010 and has made numerous contributions to the Kamailio open source SIP Router project (particularly in the areas of presence, WebSocket, MSRP, and SIP Outbound) since then. Peter is one of the authors of the MSRP over WebSocket draft (draft-pd-dispatch-msrp-websocket) and is a contributor to several open-source projects.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Vicom Computer Services, Inc., a provider of technology and service solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. They are located at booth #427. Vicom Computer Services, Inc. is a progressive leader in the technology industry for over 30 years. Headquartered in the NY Metropolitan area. Vicom provides products and services based on today’s requirements around Unified Networks, Cloud Computing strategies, Virtualization around Software defined Data Centers including, Servers, Storage, IT Management, Data Protection/Availability, Security, Infrastructure Services and IT Consulting Services.
SYS-CON Media announced today that Unitrends, cloud-empowered all-in-one continuity solutions that increase your IT confidence, has launched ad campaigns on SYS-CON's i-Technology sites, which include Cloud Computing Journal, DevOps Journal, Virtualization Journal, and IoT Journal. SYS-CON Media's interactive programs with an average 47 million pages views per month, have proven to be one of the most effective lead-generating tools for our advertising partners. With 1.2 million qualified IT professionals across SYS-CON's network of i-Technology sites, your company will have access to a multitude of influential enterprise development managers and decision makers in the marketplace that you're not currently reaching. These packages will put you in touch with your best customers and deliver the reach, impact and visibility necessary to stay competitive in today's market.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Column Technologies, a global technology solutions company, will exhibit at SYS-CON's DevOps Summit 2015 New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Established in 1998, Column Technologies is a leader in application performance and infrastructure management for commercial and federal markets. The company is headquartered in the United States, with a diverse and talented team of more than 350 employees around the world, and offices in Canada, India and the United Kingdom.
This digest provides an overview of good resources that are well worth reading. We’ll be updating this page as new content becomes available, so I suggest you bookmark it. Also, expect more digests to come on different topics that make all of our IT-hearts go boom!
The world's leading Cloud event, Cloud Expo has launched Microservices Journal on the SYS-CON.com portal, featuring over 19,000 original articles, news stories, features, and blog entries. DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing. Microservices Journal offers top articles, news stories, and blog posts from the world's well-known experts and guarantees better exposure for its authors than any other publication. Follow new article posts on Twitter at @MicroservicesE
While DevOps most critically and famously fosters collaboration, communication, and integration through cultural change, culture is more of an output than an input. In order to actively drive cultural evolution, organizations must make substantial organizational and process changes, and adopt new technologies, to encourage a DevOps culture. Moderated by Andi Mann, panelists will discuss how to balance these three pillars of DevOps, where to focus attention (and resources), where organizations might slip up with the wrong focus, how to manage change and risk in all three areas, what is possible and what is not, where to start, and especially how new structures, processes, and technologies can help drive a new DevOps culture.
A few weeks ago, SmartBear hosted API Craft Boston with the folks from Akana, Ian Goldsmith and Laura Heritage, to talk about microservices. It was an extremely informative presentation of where microservices came from, what it solves, and considerations around how it might fit into an organizational API strategy. It’s one thing to read everyone else’s opinions on blogs, twitter, etc. It’s great to go to workshops and conferences, but this was so intelligently presented (and for a meetup too), that I walked away feeling epicly enlightened. Considering SmartBear is presenting at APIdays/APIstrat Berlin this month, the Architecture, Scalability and Microservices sessions should also be on the list of must see talks because this topic needs as much expansion and contending curation as possible, like all emergent tech.
The list of ‘new paradigm’ technologies that now surrounds us appears to be at an all time high. From cloud computing and Big Data analytics to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the Internet of Things (IoT), today we have to deal with what the industry likes to call ‘paradigm shifts’ at every level of IT. This is disruption; of course, we understand that – change is almost always disruptive.
Despite the prevalence of public and private clouds in the enterprise, most IT departments still adhere to operational models designed for physical infrastructure and servers that involve complex environment setup processes. As a result, organizations miss opportunities to take advantage of dynamic cloud-based deployments for non-production environments. There are a number of reasons why it is often too difficult for enterprises to stand up a non-production environment for testing or staging. Databases have to be provisioned, application servers need to be configured, and a testing environment for a complex system can take weeks or months to properly certify as ready for use. This involves a lot of coordination and effort to setup environments. Organizations typically simplify setup by treating environments as permanent because they lack a tool like Plutora to help them keep track of environment management efforts.
ProfitBricks, the provider of painless cloud infrastructure for IaaS, today announced the release of a Node.js SDK written against its recently launched REST API. This new JavaScript based library provides coverage for all existing ProfitBricks REST API functions. With additional libraries set to release this month, ProfitBricks continues to prove its dedication to the DevOps community and commitment to making cloud migrations and cloud management painless. Node.js is an open source, cross-platform runtime environment. It offers an asynchronous event-driven framework designed to build scalable network applications. Written in JavaScript, Node.js applications can be run within the Node.js runtime on OSX, Microsoft Windows, Linux and more.
The last couple articles presented an introduction to Application Performance Management (APM) and identified the challenges in effectively implementing an APM strategy. This article builds on these topics by reviewing five of the top performance metrics to capture to assess the health of your enterprise Java application.
How do you securely enable access to your applications in AWS without exposing any attack surfaces? The answer is usually very complicated because application environments morph over time in response to growing requirements from your employee base, your partners and your customers. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Haseeb Budhani, CEO and Co-founder of Soha, will share five common approaches that DevOps teams follow to secure access to applications deployed in AWS, Azure, etc., and the friction and risks they impose on the business.
What’s hot in today’s cloud computing world? Containers are fast becoming a viable alternative to virtualization for the right use cases. But to understand why containers can be a better option, we need to first understand their origins. In basic terms, containers are application-centric environments that help isolate and run workloads far more efficiently than the traditional hypervisor technology found in commodity cloud Infrastructure as a Service. Modern operating systems (Linux, Windows, etc.) are made up of two basic parts: kernel space and user space. As its name implies, Kernel space is home to the operating system kernel, or the low level instructions that boot the machine, control hardware, provide subsystems (e.g., networking, storage, etc.), and schedule tasks. Tasks (processes, threads, etc.) run in user space, which is home to applications and services. Different operating systems have different levels of modularity and functional “splits” between kernel space and user space, but most architectures are conceptually the same. While hypervisors run virtual machines that make up both spaces, containers encapsulate just the user space, greatly reducing complexity and redundancy. The immediate benefit is higher performance and less “bloat”, extremely important to the economics of cloud computing. The popularity of containers is a direct result of the realization that hypervisor-based technologies are expensive to host and manage for many types of applications.
SOASTA, the leader in performance analytics, today reported record growth of the CloudTest community, exceeding 30,000 registered users of the CloudTest platform in Q1 2015. SOASTA also announced widespread adoption of its Web and mobile testing solutions, with more than 1,600 customers completing more than 285,000 tests using CloudTest during the quarter. This rapid growth shows that DevOps-driven digital businesses are embracing a more continuous approach to testing, and CloudTest is meeting their needs for fast and efficient global performance measurement.
ProfitBricks, the provider of painless cloud infrastructure for IaaS, today announced the release of a Node.js SDK written against its recently launched REST API. This new JavaScript based library provides coverage for all existing ProfitBricks REST API functions. With additional libraries set to release this month, ProfitBricks continues to prove its dedication to the DevOps community and commitment to making cloud migrations and cloud management painless. Node.js is an open source, cross-platform runtime environment. It offers an asynchronous event-driven framework designed to build scalable network applications. Written in JavaScript, Node.js applications can be run within the Node.js runtime on OSX, Microsoft Windows, Linux and more.
“With easy-to-use SDKs for Atmel’s platforms, IoT developers can now reap the benefits of realtime communication, and bypass the security pitfalls and configuration complexities that put IoT deployments at risk,” said Todd Greene, founder & CEO of PubNub. PubNub will team with Atmel at CES 2015 to launch full SDK support for Atmel’s MCU, MPU, and Wireless SoC platforms. Atmel developers now have access to PubNub’s secure Publish/Subscribe messaging with guaranteed ¼ second latencies across PubNub’s 14 global points-of-presence. PubNub delivers secure communication through firewalls, proxy servers, and on unreliable mobile networks with a security model that guarantees no open ports on IoT devices. Developers can now implement important features like remote device control, firmware upgrades, and device provisioning using PubNub’s suite of IoT building blocks that includes realtime device presence detection, stream storage & playback, and data stream syndication. “PubNub’s realtime global data stream network combined with our embedded solutions helps IoT developers reduce time-to-market and solve the challenges of reliable IoT deployments,” said Reza Kazerounian, SVP and GM of Microcontroller Business Unit at Atmel. “By removing complexity and focusing on developer-centric tools and services, PubNub shares Atmel’s philosophy of driving competitive advantage for our customers.”
Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities. Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker's initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last year, CoreOS shook up the community with its Rocket containers announcement. Part of Rocket's strategy is apparently to return to the notion of a container as, well, a container, in the face of Docker expanding its container strategy upward into the overall PaaS realm. Meanwhile, Red Hat has its own view of containers. Along with that, there are viewpoints that perhaps containers haven't been used well up to this point. Red Hat's Gordon Haff, for example, a regular Cloud Expo speaker, recently wrote that developers and their customers need to re-think the concept of services themselves, and how they should be deployed discretely and loosely. Rather than just stuff an OS into a container, for example, developers and deployers should consider a spectrum of microservices and what they can do. Cloud Expo is still accepting submissions for this new track, so please visit www.cloudcomputingexpo.com for the latest information. As always, Cloud Expo is staying right on top of what's going on in this fast-evolving world. We look forward to seeing you in New York.
SYS-CON Media announced today that @WebRTCSummit Blog, the largest WebRTC resource in the world, has been launched. @WebRTCSummit Blog offers top articles, news stories, and blog posts from the world's well-known experts and guarantees better exposure for its authors than any other publication. @WebRTCSummit Blog can be bookmarked ▸ Here @WebRTCSummit conference site can be bookmarked ▸ Here
SYS-CON Events announced today that AIC, a leading provider of OEM/ODM server and storage solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. AIC is a leading provider of both standard OTS, off-the-shelf, and OEM/ODM server and storage solutions. With expert in-house design capabilities, validation, manufacturing and production, AIC's broad selection of products are highly flexible and are configurable to any form factor or custom configuration. AIC leads the industry with nearly 20 years of experience in mechanical, electronic, system-level engineering as well as a dedication to product innovation and customer support. Headquartered in Taiwan, AIC has offices and operations throughout the United States, Asia and Europe.
Deploying and operating cloud technology is difficult and falls outside the core competencies of most organizations. As a result, many on-premises private cloud installations falter, casting doubt on private cloud as a solution in general. Yet private clouds come with a unique set of benefits that continue to drive widespread interest. There must be a better way. This session will give participants a clear roadmap of private cloud implementation challenges and offer actionable ideas for how to overcome them. They also will learn how private cloud as a service might work in their organization and for their application workloads.
The WebRTC Summit 2015 New York, to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, NY, announces that its Call for Papers is open. Topics include all aspects of improving IT delivery by eliminating waste through automated business models leveraging cloud technologies. WebRTC Summit is co-located with 16th International Cloud Expo, @ThingsExpo, Big Data Expo, and DevOps Summit.