“The thing about cloud is that a lot of it is about designing and operating for the future, so being mindful of where your providers are going and what their strategy is, is part of the decision criteria of partners that you pick. You are providing what people want but anticipating what they will need,” stated Jonathan King, VP Cloud Strategy & Business Development at Savvis, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The telecom industry provides mission-critical services, which means that the hardware and software that powers the network must be able to perform under some very extreme conditions. Servers, in particular, must be extremely reliable and function during and after everything from streams of heavy traffic to massive earthquakes. Carrier grade servers have to go through rigid testing to receive certification, and they have several characteristics that make them very important. Telecommunications, as a whole, is considered an important part of the national infrastructure. This means that any disasters that derail the service are a huge problem for everyone involved – from emergency response personnel to government officials to everyone who just wants to call and check on the people they know. This infrastructure has to be operational before, during, and after an event, which is why these servers are tested so ruthlessly. Carrier grade servers should never be the weak link that drops the ball in an emergency.
The average CIO doesn’t think with enough clarity and granularity about the type of device used by employees within the corporate data pool. Actually we hope they do. So this statement is posed as more of a question than a definitive judgement, proclamation or observation of any kind. Let’s put it another way. Given the “device form factor sprawl” currently being witnessed within the tech industry, CIOs should look more closely at the type of unit(s) being used by employees within the corporate data pool. This is because different devices lead to different data touchpoints and therefore onward to different security vulnerabilities, data management demands and application maintenance requirements. Actually the term “sprawl” is unfair. Hardware vendor OEMs and chipmakers such as Intel or Microsoft would call it something like a “widening platform of device types to suit different user requirements and computing styles” one would expect.
If you are considering learning jQuery, this is a great place to start. The author starts the book with an introduction that puts jQuery in context and then helps you set up a development environment. Although I think most people reading this book should already be at a level of experience in which they already have a development environment set up, you may want to use the author's suggestion because it is focused on HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. I am using Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate which works fine, but is a heavy install. After the introduction the author jumps right into some examples to show you the jQuery syntax in several different scenarios. If you have not used jQuery at all this chapter gets you familiar with the syntax quickly. Next the author introduces a bunch of basics. The topics include the Web, Web 2.0, XML, JSON, JavaScript's relationship to jQuery, AJAX, XMLHttpRequest, the DOM, CSS, and DHTML. The topics are not covered in detail, the author just makes sure to cover enough information about each to the level we can understand their place in relation to jQuery.
This book is not what I was expecting it to be. I was expecting a book with a ton of screenshots explaining what was wrong with each one, and then providing a solution to the problem. I also expected screenshots of all the different controls you can use and for them to be shown in different states. I am happy to report this book did not meet my expectations, it well exceeded them. Quite frankly, my expectation was well surpassed because the author does not just show you what to do and not to do, he explains why you should do things. Part I: Turning Ideas into Software walks you through the phases of design. The first seven chapters of the book walks through the design process in detail. It points out the importance of following a design process. The chapters in Part I are listed below.
This book is not what I was expecting it to be. I was expecting a book with a ton of screenshots explaining what was wrong with each one, and then providing a solution to the problem. I also expected screenshots of all the different controls you can use and for them to be shown in different states. I am happy to report this book did not meet my expectations, it well exceeded them. Quite frankly, my expectation was well surpassed because the author does not just show you what to do and not to do, he explains why you should do things. Part I: Turning Ideas into Software walks you through the phases of design. The first seven chapters of the book walks through the design process in detail. It points out the importance of following a design process. The chapters in Part I are listed below.
In this example, we look at how real-time Web communications can work well with a non-blocking JavaScript back-end server and a NoSQL database. Our demo is a simple drawing app. If all you use is WebSocket with simple pub-sub messaging, you can already achieve pretty amazing things with drawing. For example, you can share a drawing board among multiple browser clients and while viewing each other’s drawings in real time.
Microsoft has created Microsoft Ventures as a way to unify its sundry venture efforts by housing them under one roof and giving entrepreneurs a single point of engagement. It describes Microsoft Ventures as broad-based with a holistic approach, featuring a community evangelism program including BizSpark, which will continue to offer access to Microsoft tools and technologies, including Windows, Office, Visual Studio and Azure; an accelerator program; and a seed fund that works with start-ups worldwide.
That’s some serious savings, even in a state where just about everything seems to cost just a bit more. A recent study has found that moving common software applications used by 86 million U.S. workers to the cloud could save enough energy annually to power Los Angeles for a year. The six-month study was led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and conducted with Northwestern University. The report looks at three common business applications – email, customer relationship management software, or CRM, and bundled productivity software (spreadsheets, file sharing, word processing). Moving these software applications from local computer systems to centralized cloud services could cut IT energy consumption by up to 87 percent – about 23 billion kilowatt-hours. This is roughly the amount of electricity used each year by all the homes, businesses and industry in Los Angeles, according to an article on DailyFusion.net.
When it comes to the future impact of virtualization upon data centers and networks, we may already have experienced “the shot heard ‘round the world.” In fact, the stage is set for the next wave of the “virtualization revolution.” Most IT organizations already recognize the importance of virtual servers. Cost savings through better utilization of the underlying server hardware is well documented as are the environmental savings on power, cooling and rack space. A 2012 survey conducted by Gartner Research found that virtualization is among the top 10 highest IT technology priorities for CIOs. (“Gartner Executive Programs' Worldwide Survey of More Than 2,300 CIOs Shows Flat IT Budgets in 2012, but IT Organizations Must Deliver on Multiple Priorities,” 1/18/2012) Many IT organizations are now looking at extending those benefits to the rest of the enterprise. Virtual technologies will allow organizations to re-architect and evolve the entire enterprise network on a massive scale, dwarfing the first battle of the virtualization revolution.
The world of software applications and products is moving from on-premise to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Perpetual licence earnings are shrinking, while subscription revenue including SaaS is growing increasingly fast and at a steady pace. According to a recent PWC report, subscription revenue (including SaaS) is set to grow at a 17.5% compounded annual rate, reaching 24% of total software revenue by 2016. Approximately 40% of the turnover of 10 of the top 100 software companies globally is generated by the SaaS service. Gartner predicts that 77% of companies plan to increase their spending on SaaS in the next two years. So the big question is, how can you (as a software application or product vendor) quickly move to SaaS, test it and ride the wave of opportunity before losing your specific competitive advantage to some of the fast-progressing SaaS vendors like Workday, Oracle, Saleforce.com, SAP, Microsoft, Intuit, and Zuora.
Andreas Grabner described how he used the Compuware APM PureStack technology to identify the server-side performance issues during a recent load test run against the Compuware APM Community Portal, a production application used by our customers. He was able to quickly identify the CPU bottleneck that caused the performance degradation in the server environment, leading to an almost immediate resolution of the issue. But what about the external performance recorded during this load test? What would a customer have experienced if they had tried to access the site during this time? Well, at the peak of the test, I used WebPageTest to capture a video of the APM Community Homepage loading (Note: The video has been advanced to 50 seconds already).
The US Patent and Trademark Office has reinstated Apple’s famous so-called rubber-banding patent (US No. 7,469,381) and confirmed four claims, including claim 19 that Apple asserted last summer in the California trial that initially led a jury to dun Samsung $1.05 billion in damages. Samsung presumably made the anonymous request that the patent be re-examined and the PTO last October threw the whole patent out. Then the agency changed its mind and disallowed all but three claims, including the crucial claim 19. Now it’s changed its mind again and upheld another four claims including claim 19. Apparently the prior art the PTO was using to invalidate wasn’t good enough.
In part 1 of this article, we covered writing web app load tests using multi–mechanize. This post picks up where the other left off and will discuss how to gather interesting and actionable performance data from a load-test. The big problem we had after writing load tests was that timing data gathered by multi-mechanize is inherently external to the application. This means it can tell us the response times of requests when the app is under load but doesn't identify bottlenecks or configuration problems. So we need to be gathering a bit more data about how the internals of our web application respond to the workload.
In a previous post we showed how we hooked up our blog’s WordPress application with the new Compuware APMaaS offering. Since WordPress is a PHP application we use PurePath for PHP to monitor it. We highlighted that we got an alert about a response time violation on some of our blog posts. In this follow-up article I want to show you how we get to the root cause of this problem which turns out to be a third-party WordPress PHP plugin that detects Bad Requests including requests from Bots that try to put spam messages in blog comments.
Millennium Pharmacy Systems, Inc., has successfully deployed mission critical SaaS applications, and implemented advanced IT management and operational efficiency processes and systems to keep all the applications up to date, compliant, performant, and protected. Managing applications sprawl has long been a burr in the IT saddle, and the popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications hasn't exactly been a balm on the situation. As with on-premises applications, the key to SaaS and hybrid apps is getting better visibility and operational data on the applications' health, and then automating the processes across standardized methods and controls.
A few months ago experts predicted 2013 would be the Year of Big Data. To a large extent, those predictions have been spot on, with big data investment on the rise and success stories emerging across a variety of industries from insurance to pharma to professional basketball. The big data narrative may be shifting though, as debate around data privacy heats up. No doubt the two topics are almost inextricably linked, as the PBS News Hour points out, but it wasn’t until late last week that the issue of data privacy became a trending topic in the U.S. Citizens can vent, politicians can banter, news media can report, but the reality is big data is not going to be regulated away for the sake of privacy, so it’s incumbent upon organizations that collect big data to secure it, and ensure the data never falls into the hands of unauthorized individuals.
The pressure on enterprises to deploy applications as fast as possible has never been greater. The mobile revolution, the huge impact of cloud computing, and the BYOD trend have intensified the pressure, forcing large organizations to re-think and re-tool their approaches to app development. For many, the answer has been to embrace rapid app development. A recent survey by XebiaLabs discovered that most organizations’ delivery models are unsuitable and that application deployments fail up to 30% of the time. Much of the flaws in creating and updating apps come from human error. Partially scripted and partially manual application deployment is a huge drain on resources. It requires key IT staff with specific knowledge, and it can involve complex processes and multiple scripts. Manual scripting is not just time-consuming and error-prone, it’s also very expensive.
Last week, on the last day of HP’s Discover conference in Las Vegas, HP software chief Bill Veghte stood on stage and said that Workday, the promising HR SaaS company started by David Duffield, who also started PeopleSoft only to lose it to Oracle’ ravenous appetite for acquisitions, had left Amazon Web Services for HP’s OpenStack-based Public Cloud because enterprise customers need real support and stronger SLAs than Amazon offers. CRN captured the moment, but didn’t check it out. Veghte’s statement made tweeters sit up and take note, and Amazon denied it.
SDN is a new, dynamic network architecture that transforms traditional network backbones into more intelligent service-delivery platforms. IT leaders can use SDN as a tool to change the way they do business. For example, enterprises can foster closer relationships with their customers by offering greater online access to select data over the enterprise network. A financial services firm can give large corporate customers the opportunity for third-party reporting, governance, or even allow analytics firms to directly access enterprise credit card transactions, obviating the need for intermediate sites and cumbersome manual process steps that are needed to provide sufficient multi-level security. An SDN would create virtual network partitions governed by stringent and limited access policies, and security to decrease unauthorized access.
HP has made a big announcement around a broader vision for businesses to help them gain actionable intelligence from literally a universe of potential sources and data types. Fairly recently, only critical data was given this high-falutin' treatment for analysis, warehousing, applying business intelligence (BI) tools, making sure that it was backed up and treated almost as if it were a cherished child. But almost overnight, the savvy businesses, those who are looking for business results, are more interested in all the data of any kind so that they can run their businesses better, and find insights in the areas that they maybe didn’t understand or didn’t even know about. So what do you think has happened? Why have we moved from this BI-as-sacred ivory tower approach to now more pedestrian?
The US Patent and Trademark Office has reinstated Apple’s famous so-called rubber-banding patent (US No. 7,469,381) and confirmed four claims, including claim 19 that Apple asserted last summer in the California trial that initially led a jury to dun Samsung $1.05 billion in damages. Samsung presumably made the anonymous request that the patent be re-examined and the PTO last October threw the whole patent out. Then the agency changed its mind and disallowed all but three claims, including the crucial claim 19. Now it’s changed its mind again and upheld another four claims including claim 19. Apparently the prior art the PTO was using to invalidate wasn’t good enough.
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. TescaraHats used an APM tool to fix a number of e-commerce application performance and usability issues we presented in this mini-series. But there was still a missing link that would ensure TescaraHats increased sales. I guess you thought we forgot about the conversion rate? Nope, here is how an application performance management (APM) tool can tell you why it is so low.
In enterprises across the globe, CIOs are looking cautiously in one direction: up – to the cloud. Migrating to the cloud changes not only the operations of the data center but also the roles of the CIO and IT staff. As a result, management must carefully weigh the pros and cons of shifting to cloud-based computing so that they can prepare their organizations and themselves for change that cascades across budgets, vendor relations, job descriptions and career paths, as well as infrastructure and processes. The benefits of moving from an on-premises model to subscription-based, cloud-hosted computing are substantial. With cloud computing, CIOs have the opportunity to capitalize on a variable-cost structure. Until recently, data centers have needed to load up with hardware, software and networking devices to prepare for peak periods, even though these investments may lie underused or dormant for significant periods. Traditionally, IT costs only go up. By employing the cloud, however, IT departments pay for only the infrastructure and applications that they use, as they need them. They can easily scale up when the business grows or during peak selling seasons, then scale back if the economy shrinks. Over time, the cost of Software-as-a-Service subscriptions is far lower than that of licensing fees for software, middleware and databases, along with expenditures on hardware and staff to maintain it all.
Many types of performance problems can result from the load created by concurrent users of web applications, and all too often these scalability bottlenecks go undetected until the application has been deployed in production. Load-testing, the generation of simulated user requests, is a great way to catch these types of issues before they get out of hand. In this two-part series, I’ll walk through generating load using the Python multi-mechanize load-testing framework, then collect and analyze data about app performance