From the Blogosphere

Big Data Meets Gamification

Sun, 19 May 2013 08:00:00 EDT

In the coming years, big data will change the way organisations and societies are operated and managed. Big data however, is not the only trend that will impact significantly how organisations operate. Another major trend at the moment is gamification. Gamification will change the way organisations connect with consumers and it will provide extremely valuable big data that can be turned into insights. Let’s first look at what gamification exactly is. Gamification is the use of game elements in non-game contexts. It can be used externally, to interact with customers and improve marketing efforts that lead to increased sales. Gamification is also used internally, where gamification can lead to increased employee productivity as well as internal crowd sourcing activities. Finally, gamification can be used to change behaviour of consumers. A great example of this is the quantified-self movement that get people to engage and change their behaviour.

How Mature Is Your API Testing Process?

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:45:00 EDT

Without an enterprise-level automated solution for ensuring the integrity of APIs and API-driven composite applications, organizations risk: Brand erosion as faulty software drives away customers Time-to-market delays that diminish market share Exposure to legal liability associated with application failure Failure to comply with applicable regulatory standards and technical contracts

Java Certifications

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:03:13 EDT

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.

Real-time Big Data or Small Data?

Sat, 11 May 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Have you heard of products like IBM’s InfoSphere Streams, Tibco’s Event Processing product, or Oracle’s CEP product? All good examples of commercially available stream processing technologies which help you process events in real-time. I’ve been asked what I consider as “Big Data” versus “Small Data” in this domain. Here’s my view.

EMC ViPR Virtual Physical Object and Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:00:00 EDT

ViPR is not a technology creation developed in a vacuum instead includes customer feedback, wants and needs. Its core themes are extensible, open and scalable. What is ViPR addressing? IT and data infrastructure (server, storage, IO and networking hardware, software) challenges for traditional, virtual and cloud environments. Data growth, after all, there is no such thing as an information recession with more data being generated, moved, processed, stored and retained for longer periods of time. Then again, people and data are both getting larger and living longer, for both little data and big data along with very big data. Overhead and complexities associated with managing and using an expanding, homogenous (same vendor, perhaps different products) or heterogeneous (different vendors and products) data infrastructure across cloud, virtual and physical, legacy and emerging. This includes add, changes or moves, updates and upgrades, retirement and replacement along with disposition, not to mention protecting data in an expanding footprint.

Static Analysis & Development Testing for Embedded Devices

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:45:00 EDT

You know those conversations that you have more times than you can count? Well, I recently had one of those at Design West with a very bright software engineer. This poor guy had a number of experiences with static analysis tools that left him with the “compiler warning equivalence” impression. If your static analysis experience is largely with freeware and your training is limited to Internet forums, then I certainly understand how that impression can form. On top of that, he said that the static analysis tools he tried reported “over 20,000 messages.”

Certifiably Cloud: AWS Announces Accreditation

Tue, 07 May 2013 08:45:00 EDT

Are you AWS certified? Last week several reporters, including Gathering Clouds friend in the field Barb Darrow, analyzed Amazon’s recent announcement of its cloud certification program. Widely seen as a positive move for the company, the announcement does raise some questions. While the practice of certification is well established, AWS’ announcement is of particular note, as it both solidifies the company from the perspective of it’s platform and tools becoming trainable skills (and therefore more applicable to enterprise standards of usage) and positions the service as becoming far more self-supporting (since it will require those specific trainable skills). If we thought AWS was a sticky service before (in terms of its proprietary functionalities, third party tool sets, and APIs, this move certainly makes that notion even clearer.

How Do You Choose Your Cloud Provider?

Sat, 04 May 2013 10:00:00 EDT

If you have been thinking how to choose your public cloud vendor you are not the only one. There are hundreds of offerings that you can choose from and comparing those can be a cumbersome exercise. Hence most of the people just run to the vendor (or technology) they are either most familiar with or gives them the best price. This is all good until they discover that… well, that vendor is not what they have been looking for. Lately I've been few times asked: "Which public cloud provider would you recommend to deploy our application?" Doesn't matter how much I want it to be, the answer is unfortunately not that simple. Here are few questions to ask yourself while doing the research.

Gazzang Brings Encryption and Key Management to Amazon EMR

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:43:50 EDT

We so often hear about companies putting "customers first" that the very notion can seem trite. But when it comes to innovation, listening to and learning from your customers is an absolute imperative. At Gazzang, the company I work for, we have a mantra that borders on religious fanaticism. “Customers First. Always.” It’s the reason we can claim deep expertise in securing unique, enterprise-scale big data environments. It’s the reason we know cloud encryption better than anyone else. And it’s the reason no one on our customer support team owns a bed.

SDN Network Models

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:00:00 EDT

As with most new exciting (read: hyped) technology there's always some initial fragmentation that occurs in the market. Everyone wants to have their fingers in the newest pie and from that comes what musicians call "variations on a theme." The melody is the same, but the harmony and chords are enough different so as to make them appear to be different songs. SDN is no different, and there is already some fragmentation in the basic SDN model. While ONF continues to focus on the "original" switch-based model, offerings that instead use an overlay-model are beginning to get noticed.

Measuring the Business Value of Cloud Computing

Fri, 03 May 2013 03:45:00 EDT

My favorite and least favorite question I get is the same – “Can you help me build a business case and ROI for cloud computing?” Well, yes… and no. The issue is that cloud computing has such a massive impact on how IT is delivered that many of the metrics and KPIs that are typically used at many enterprises don’t capture it. I mean, how do you capture Agility – really? In the past I have broken this down into 3 buckets. Yes, some people have more but these are the big three…

Five Smart Tips for Public Cloud Success

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:15:00 EDT

We often discuss the virtues of private and hybrid clouds, since so many companies utilize more complex clouds as they scale. But where public cloud is concerned, we thought we’d share some ideas for how to frame a smart approach to ensure that your public cloud is serving the needs of your business best. Multiple availability zone: An important first step to achieve a smart public cloud set up, ensuring your cloud is in multiple availability zones (AZs) sets the stage for a number of other important aspects of cloud functionality, be it performance or disaster recovery: being in multiple AZs can improve product delivery to end users as much as it can form the foundation of a highly redundant cloud architecture.

The Spring of 2013 Is Off to a Cool Start

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:15:00 EDT

Even though today's crowning ceremony in Amsterdam enjoyed some modest sunshine, the temperatures across Europe are at an all time low. A more reliable indication that spring has started, are the annual Cool Vendor reports being published. For the first time this series includes a note dedicated to cloud activity in Europe. The "Cool Vendors in the European Cloud Computing Market, 2013" note describes four European vendor making a difference in the local and global cloud market. The report also points to several other European cool vendors featured in other notes. Such as in the "Cool Vendors in Cloud Services Brokerage Enablers, 2013", "Cool Vendors in Cloud Services Brokerages, 2013" and "Cool Vendors in Cloud Management, 2013".

Business Strategy for Enterprise Cloud Startups

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:15:00 EDT

BusinessSuccessWith cloud computing becoming the center of almost every new enterprise IT project, more and more startups decide to compete in the area. This raises the question: "Are they ready to fulfill the enterprise needs?" Forget the need to have one big customer. This can open few doors but if your startup's business strategy is wrong those will be shut down soon. It is true that one prominent customer can boost your sales but in my opinion there are two more important things that can help your startup get customers fast. First question you need to ask yourself is: "Do I target the right audience?" If you want to play in the cloud space you need to look at two different points of view - the developer one and the IT one, and make sure that you understand both. And trust me, John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, is right by saying "the traditional datacenter admin, even the CIO, don't necessary understand a developer's standpoint" (see Cloud Operability and the Battle for the Open Cloud at forbes.com).

How the 'Internet of Everything' Impacts Financial Services

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:45:00 EDT

What does today's retail banking customer expect from a financial institution, and how can business technology be applied to enhance the overall experience. The latest results from the Cisco Customer Experience Report focused on the retail banking sector. The global report examined consumers' desire for a banking experience that is more personalized to help simplify the management of their finances over multiple channels -- including online, mobile phones, telephones, video conferencing and bank branches. It also examined views about the privacy of their personal information and the value of financial management tools used in their daily lives. Consumers globally identified the most important attributes when interacting with their financial institution or financial advisor as: availability (63%), competence (65%), and efficiency (68%).

Knapsacks, Shopping Carts and Application Workloads

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:45:00 EDT

Don't laugh or next week we'll talk fractals and tessellations and nature and tie that back to ERP. Somehow. Don't tempt me. I'm not kidding. The other day I was shopping (on-line of course, because you know, Internets) as I often do: I was putting things into my shopping cart and occasionally pruning it back to fit within this imaginary total I was willing to spend. That's time consuming (albeit fun and sometimes agonizing) so I decided I should write an application that, when presented with X number of items and prices, could arrange those items in multiple carts, each under budget so I had all the possible combinations represented. That, of course, immediately evoked thoughts of "How would you write that?" which immediately turned to the thought that it distilled down to a very basic knapsack problem. Which in turn - you knew it was going there - led to the realization that really, capacity planning is as NP-complete as provisioning of compute in the cloud. It's as difficult a process as manually (or automatically) rearranging my shopping cart because applications are not workloads, and vice-versa. Not today's applications, anyway.

Expertise-as-a-Service: How Much Is It Worth?

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:15:00 EDT

Simply outsourcing your cloud technology isn’t where the benefits your company can access end. By leveraging your cloud provider for more than just the technology, you can gain a wealth of experience and know-how (read: tech support) that can help your business get more value from your vendor relationship. The tendency for companies to pursue this path is well established at this point, but in the cloud era, managed service providers have become ground zero for both technological and experiential value for the companies that use them. That’s where IT strategy is now, but how does this compare to what IT used to be?

The New Standard: Intelligence-Driven Security

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Network perimeters are all but erased and traditional security strategies such as stacking don't adequately address the current needs of a modern enterprise. Many companies are still using strategies rooted in 2002 technologies and approaches. The new intelligence-based security model is one that integrates several alerting, analytical and preventative tools into a central monitor and management best practice. In a recent blog post, Art Coviello, the executive chairman at RSA, posed an important question. How do we move from traditional security to intelligence-driven security? In his answer he described that the quickly interdependent exchanges between parties (B2C, B2B, B2P, etc) have grown beyond the traditional means of securing the enterprise.

Your API Requires What??

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:15:00 EDT

If you’ve ever developed for an enterprise IT department, and had to please the end user, you know very well that they don’t care about what your technical limitations are, they care about getting a tool that helps them do their job better. Oh some will commiserate with you about your challenges, and the best of the business side will compromise to get to a product that helps, even if it’s not perfect, but much like everyday consumers, they want what they want, and you either provide it or not. The thing is, in the enterprise, the pool of users is much smaller than for a commercial application, but the users are more focused on what they need, precisely because there are less of them. On thing that many vendors fail to comprehend is that this “I need what I need and you provide it or you do not” approach applies just as strongly to enterprise developers. While most business to business (B2B) vendors (both hardware and software) understand the need to provide a useful, generally easy to learn user interface or command line, often that understanding does not extend to APIs.

Big Data and Banking – More than Hadoop

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 09:45:00 EDT

Fraud is definitely top of mind for all banks. Steve Rosenbush at the Wall Street Journal recently wrote about Visa’s new Big Data analytic engine which has changed the way the company combats fraud. Visa estimates that its new Big Data fraud platform has identified $2 billion in potential annual incremental fraud savings. With Big Data, their new analytic engine can study as many as 500 aspects of a transaction at once. That’s a sharp improvement from the company’s previous analytic engine, which could study only 40 aspects at once. And instead of using just one analytic model, Visa now operates 16 models, covering different segments of its market, such as geographic regions.

From Rent to Buy with Cloud? Wait a Minute

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Piston CTO Josh McKenty predicts a radical shift in the cloud computing space. Building off of his firm’s recent product launch, McKenty — who cofounded Piston in January 2011 — tells IT World that he expects to see a “giant explosion of businesses moving off Amazon Web Services.” Going forward, McKenty says many companies will opt to build their own OpenStack clouds, for example, rather than purchase cloud services. But as IT World’s Nancy Gohring (rightly) notes, that scenario is unlikely to be the case — or is, at the very least, an over-exaggeration. “McKenty obviously has reason to hope that businesses are moving away from AWS since it could mean more customers for Piston,” Gohring writes.

Is Object Storage Happening?

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Here is an answer I wrote to my dear friend StorageBod’s latest piece on Object Storage. As my response turned out quite a bit longer than initially intended, I thought I’d post it here as well. Very nice blog post as usual. Let me sacrifice my first sunny afternoon of the year in Belgium to write down some of my thoughts (rather than copy/pasting a data sheet like Paul did). Oh and … NAB would have been so much better with you over there,. Disclaimer: I am still in charge of the object storage product line at DDN. The below thoughts are my own, however, not necessarily the company’s. “Yet, it isn’t really happening”. I expect to be punished for writing this, but Martin: you are WRONG! Object storage is happening very much. Just not necessarily out in the open. Implementing object storage is a lot more game-changing than buying a new filer from a supplier you haven’t worked with before. We would have hoped for a faster wide adoption of object storage, but if you look at other recent paradigm changes, we are on the curve: I gave my first cloud presentation back in 2007. It took about 5 years for cloud to be embraced by the enterprise market. You could say that object storage has been around for more than five years (Centera etcetera), but if you look at the recent generation of object storage and the more modern use cases, we are on schedule. I wish I could talk to you about a few of those double-digit petabyte projects I’ve been involved with in the past 2 years.

Healthcare Data on the Cloud – The Reality of Sensitive Information Online

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:00:00 EDT

The convenience, efficiency and cost benefits cloud computing offers organizations has made moving healthcare data and records to the cloud make sense for hospitals, physicians and other healthcare providers. Security and data breaches are a concern for any industry utilizing the cloud, but healthcare unfortunately seems to be particularly vulnerable to attacks. The Washington Post recently reported that The Department of Homeland Security is fearful that the health industry is “inviting” an attack with its out-of-date policies and lack of oversight. A recent WIRED article discussed the current state of healthcare information in the cloud, including specifics on the vulnerabilities facing healthcare providers using cloud applications and why consumers should be concerned about their healthcare data being on the cloud. According to the article, hackers are particularly interested in healthcare information because of its comparatively substantial dollar value. An individual’s medical identity can be worth as much as $50, a significant amount considering a social security number is worth just $1. With personal medical information in hand, thieves are able to commit medical identity theft by using someone else’s personal information to receive goods or services, potentially wreaking havoc on that person’s records and creating liabilities for service providers and increasing costs for everyone.

A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EDT

With the increasing prevalence and acceptance of the cloud as a viable alternative to on-premise IT, today’s IT organizations are faced with a wide range of options. In fact, had you just woken from a five-year slumber, you might find the available array of cloud service options quite daunting. At just a moment’s notice, you can spin up pretty much anything, with Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings all readily available. Services can reside on public clouds in multi-tenant environments, private clouds within the four walls of an organization, community clouds shared between a limited set of tenants, or even a hybrid arrangement. For the many IT organizations mired in maintaining server and storage infrastructure, IaaS appears a very attractive alternative to managing hardware in-house. While it’s still a rare organization who seeks to move all their IT infrastructure to the cloud, there is a long list of benefits to strategically and selectively partitioning infrastructure using a hybrid strategy. Take a look at just a few benefits: reduction of capital expenses, maintenance expenses and avoidance of the often dreaded refresh cycles required on a 3-5 year basis.

Ride The Crime Coaster

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EDT

Now that would be a fun amusement park ride – the Crime Coaster – with the hills and valleys designed based on crime statistic charts. You can even get a digital photo of yourself as you fly thru the Tunnel of Turmoil. Muuhahahahahahahahahah! With all the dire warnings of how cybercrime is the nation’s top priority, I was wondering how other crimes have been faring. And NO, this is not a for/against ‘gun control’ rant but for instance, is burglary loosing its luster to smashing a server’s window? Since cyber crime is a billion dollar business will the door-to-door thief change tactics? Probably not for now but as physical, non-cyber crimes drop, does digital crime go up? Or, since ‘stealing something’ is the ultimate goal, as more available methods (like cyber) to accomplish the goal become available, does all crime go up? I should also note that crime stats should be taken with a grain of salt since law enforcement can only comment on the crimes that have been reported to them. Crimes like car theft are often reported due to insurance claims while other crimes, like domestic disputes, are under reported due to embarrassment or other hindering factors. Add to that, different jurisdictions have various scales of classification, penalties and measurement. Plus, the recent report that says few companies report that cybercrime results in big losses only adds to the confusion.

Cloud Security and the Omnibus HIPAA

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:15:00 EDT

The new and enhanced HIPAA omnibus standard brings an interesting question with regards to cloud security and the shared responsibility model in IaaS clouds. Since the release of the HIPAA omnibus, we’ve received many questions around “BAA” agreements, and how the responsibility split actually happens between (for example) the cloud provider and an ISV providing a healthcare application in an IaaS environment. Without getting to the details of what a “Business Associate Agreement” means, I’ll simply say that the updated regulation makes business associates (Healthcare ISVs’, and potentially the cloud providers themselves) of covered entities (i.e. clinics or hospitals) directly liable for compliance with certain requirements of the HIPAA privacy and security rules (read more about it in this excellent HIPAA survival guide post). In other words, the entire “food chain” (The cloud provider, the ISV, and any other business associates in the logical flow to the covered entity), should ideally sign a business associate agreement. But what is the practical meaning of such requirement in an IaaS cloud environment? As one should expect – full compliance can be achieved only if all parties (business associates) will enforce compliance where they can actually do so. The IaaS cloud provider for example, will prove compliance on the physical and hypervisor level, while the Healthcare ISV will prove compliance on the guest OS, the healthcare application, and PHI data stored in the cloud.

Virtual Apostasy

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:15:00 EDT

Yes, I'm about to say something that's on the order of heresy in the church of virtualization. But it has to be said and I'm willing to say it because, well, as General Patton said, "If everyone is thinking the same... someone isn't thinking." The original NFV white paper cited in the excellent overview of the SDN and NFV relationships "NFV and SDN: What’s the Difference?" describes essentially two problems it attempts to solve: rapid provisioning and operational costs. The reason commodity hardware is always associated with NFV and with SDN is that, even if there existed a rainbow and unicorns industry-wide standard for managing network hardware there would still exist significant time required to acquire and deploy said hardware. One does not generally have extra firewalls, routers, switches, and application network service hardware lying around idle. One might, however, have commodity (cheap) compute available on which such services could be deployed.

Navigating the Crowded Cloud Market

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Cost, tech, service: Which do you value most in a cloud solution? Whenever you go shopping there are usually a few factors that determine what you buy and what you pass up. One is obviously money (though we all wish this wasn’t the case). Price can be a deciding factor, but often we will pay a little more for something if it offers measurable value. Another factor is trust: Do you know what’s being sold? Do you trust who’s selling it? Can you trust that it will fulfill your needs? The flipside of trust is often chance: Are you willing to take a chance on a new product that will hopefully deliver the same or better results than your tried-and-true choice?

HP Moonshot 1500 Software Defined Capable Compute Servers

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:15:00 EDT

Riding the current software defined data center (SDC) wave being led by the likes of VMware and software defined networking (SDN) also championed by VMware via their acquisition of Nicera last year, Software Defined Marketing (SDM) is in full force. HP being a player in providing the core building blocks for traditional little data and big data, along with physical, virtual, converged, cloud and software defined has announced a new compute, processor or server platform called the Moonshot 1500.

Social Loginwall Failure

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EDT

It is not uncommon today to click an interesting link you see on Facebook only to be confronted by a "social loginwall". If you aren't familiar with that term it's probably because I just made it up to describe the use of CSS overlays to "hide" the content you want with a second overlay, usually containing a plaintive "login or register to see this content" dialog. It's annoying, particularly if it's a random site you're not sure you want to visit again and aren't comfortable openly sharing the gory details of your Facebook life with some third-party site. So what do you do? Close the tab? Swear? Sigh and move on?

Common ERP Software Problems and How to Overcome Them

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:16:53 EDT

According to recently conducted research, organizations using ERP software solutions were receiving less than 50 percent of the benefits promised to them prior to implementation. Yet, the main reason for failure in most of these situations was attributed to poor software selection. Here's how to avoid this same mistake. If you are a budding entrepreneur or company representative looking to weed out the problems in your Enterprise Resource Planning software solution and turn around your company's fortunes, you will be surprised to know that you are not the only company struggling to find the ideal solution that is perfectly tailored to serve your business' needs. According to recent research, organizations using ERP software solutions were receiving less than 50 percent of the benefits promised to them prior to implementation. Unfortunately, the core cause of this situation in almost 100 percent of these organizations was attributed to the poor selection of ERP software.

The Holy Grail of DoD IT

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:00:00 EDT

There’s nothing COMMON about the operational picture any more! We are currently in the throws of change – shifting a legacy force structure capable of fighting two strategic wars at one time, to a leaner, more agile force projecting power through “expeditionary warfare”. As we adjust to this significant refocus, the idea of a Common Operational Picture needs to be reevaluated. It used to be SO important to make sure that the picture seen on the Flag Ship matched the picture seen at the Shore Site, and a great deal of resources went into building the very capable family of systems known as the Global Command and Control System. A beautiful client framework developed and was capable of syncing across our functional and geographical boundaries to provide a common picture that everyone could trust.

Cloud Migration Tips #3: Plan to Fail

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:15:00 EDT

Planning to deploy or migrate an application to a cloud environment is a big deal. In my last post we discussed the value of using real business and IT requirements to drive the justification of using a cloud architecture. We also explored the importance of using monitoring information to understand your before and after picture of application performance and overall success. In this post I am going to dive deeper into the planning phase. You can't expect to throw a half assed plan in place and just deal with problems as they pop up during an application migration. That will almost certainly result in frustration for the end users, IT staff, and the business who relies upon the application.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and HP Servers

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 09:15:00 EDT

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) is proving itself to be a major player in the virtualization marketplace. With each new release, the technology offers more robust features, greater control, increased flexibility and more. One of the key factors in how well Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization meets your organization’s needs is the physical platform on which it runs. HP’s line of ProLiant servers are particularly well-suited to running Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Here are some facts you need to know as you make your decisions about whether to implement this open source virtualization solution and whether to choose HP servers to support it.

Weekly Roundup: Amazon Beefs up Cloud Security

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EDT

Last week, there have been few important feature releases from Amazon. Apache CloudStack proudly announces its graduation to Top Level Project. There were also some new releases from StackMob, Scalr and Appcelerator. Here’s a quick sum up of Cloud happenings over the last week. To begin with, IaaS leader Amazon has added another powerful security option, the AWS CloudHSM service. The CloudHSM service helps customers to meet strict requirements for key management without sacrificing application performance. Next, they have also announced about the newest version of Amazon Linux AMI. The goal of this version is to ensure that EC2 customers will have a stable, secure, and simple Linux-based AMI that integrates well with other AWS offerings.

The Event-Driven Data Center

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:00:00 EDT

One of the primary reasons node.js is currently ascending in the data center is because of its core model: event-driven, non-blocking processing. Historically, developers write applications based on connections and requests. It's blocking; it's not asynchronous; it's not fire and forget until some other event reminds them that something needs to be done. If the underlying network fabric worked like applications today work, we'd be in a heap of trouble. A switch would grab an incoming packet and forward it and then... wait for it to return. You can imagine what that would do to traffic flow and just how much bigger and beefier switches would have to be to support the kind of traffic experienced today by enterprises and web monsters alike.

Can Platform as a Service (PaaS) Vendors Meet User Expectations?

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 09:30:00 EDT

Platform as a Service is one of the least used cloud computing services also has a great opportunity for providing value to users. Vendors need to create transparent services to grow adoption. As enterprise cloud adoption increases, CIOs are looking not just to use the cloud as the next shiny technology but harvest major benefits. Regulations and compliance bring a set of new challenges when transformational technologies are adopted. Although large technology vendors have widely promoted private clouds, recent surveys show CIOs are likely to bypass embracing the private cloud trend until public cloud matures enough for broader use. In the same manner, many enterprises bypass some Windows releases until an upgrade is announced that is proven to deliver reliable and significant bottom-line revenue. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is hawked as a technology that can improve application development by abstracting the infrastructure layer. We can visualize a future where business users log on to a portal and assemble an innovative application without involving technical folks. For CIOs with large enough application development budgets, PaaS can deliver significant improvement to efficiency by embracing the DevOps model. For smaller enterprises and start-ups, PaaS can be a game changer by enabling custom applications to be built and delivered at lightning speed leveraging public cloud resources.

Cloud Conversations: AWS EBS, Glacier and S3 Overview | Part 2 S3

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:00:00 EDT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently added EBS Optimized support for enhanced bandwidth EC2 instances (read more here). This industry trends and perspective cloud conversation is the second (looking at S3) in a three part series companion to the AWS EBS optimized post found here. Part I is here (closer look at EBS) and part III is here (tying it all together). For those not familiar, Simple Storage Services (S3), Glacier and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) are part of the AWS cloud storage portfolio of services. With S3, you specify a region where a bucket is created that will contain objects that can be written, read, listed and deleted. You can create multiple buckets in a region with unlimited number of objects ranging from 1 byte to 5 Tbytes in size per bucket. Each object has a unique, user or developer assigned access key. In addition to indicating which AWS region, S3 buckets and objects are provisioned using different levels of availability, durability, SLA's and costs (view S3 SLAs here).

Cloud Conversations: AWS EBS, Glacier and S3 Overview | Part 1

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:15:00 EDT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently added EBS Optimized support for enhanced bandwidth EC2 instances (read more here). This industry trends and perspective cloud conversation is the first (looking at EBS) in a three part series companion to the AWS EBS optimized post found here. Part II is here (closer look at S3) and part III is here (tying it all together). For those not familiar, Simple Storage Services (S3), Glacier and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) are part of the AWS cloud storage portfolio of services. There are several other storage and data related service for little data database (SQL and NoSql based) other offerings include compute, data management, application and networking for different needs shown in the following image.

Programmable Cache-Control: One Size Does Not Fit All

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:00:00 EDT

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.