Picture credit: iStockPhoto

The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) has published a new document assessing best practice for migrating applications to the cloud, including data transfer requirements and application performance management (APM).

The latest 16 page release is a supplementary document to the 28 page behemoth (pdf) released in December 2013 outlining a migration roadmap for businesses in six easy steps; assess applications and workloads; build a business case; develop a technical approach; adopt a flexible integration model; address security and privacy requirements; and manage the migration.

This paper, however, is more concerned with assessing performance and response time requirements, and offers up some interesting pitfalls for would-be adopters.  “Generally speaking, some applications and workloads are more suitable for cloud computing than others,” the researchers note.

The report assesses a series of data transfer requirements for each workload, be they high, moderate or low latency, yet questions the usage of data discovery tools or questionnaires in assessing each workload – “they do not assess the business requirements and end-to-end transaction flow.”

As a result, the researchers come up with a new three step routine to migrate existing applications to cloud computing:

• Identify business transactions and document their end-to-end application data flow: Understanding specific business transactions, in terms of their throughput and data usage, is much better than questionnaires and discovery tools, the researchers argue. The report cites an eCommerce application which may have both ‘Add to cart’ and ‘Go to checkout’ options. To assess whether it’s right to move to cloud, each facet has to be examined, from preparing the warehouse, to analysing customer behaviour.
• Perform a response time impact risk assessment: There are several factors at play here, according to the researchers: each transaction needs to be assessed based on sensitivity to delay and business importance. Transactions which score highly on both are worthy of being response time tested – again, this goes far deeper than the average questionnaire or discovery tool.
• Perform response time impact testing: Once it’s possible to assess each application’s response on a timed basis, the researchers split the services into two; tier 1 services which become remote, on a wide area network (WAN), from the end users when they were local area before; and application to application or shared services, which become separated across a WAN.

The report also gives advice on application management, with several ways developers can use APM. The researchers recommend end-user experience monitoring, deep dive performance monitoring, analysis of multi-step transactions and transaction based troubleshooting, among others.

You can read the full report here.

Life is difficult. Business life is sometimes argued to be even more difficult. If nothing else, business life is as socially complex as life itself.
This truism obviously means that there are different business types – but different in regard to what? Separating the old and the new is good way to look at how the family tree breaks down.
At one end of the spectrum we find the old languid non-transformative company (or user) who fails to grasp new digital information empowerment – and at the other end we find the true digital native. But the space in between is populated by a degree of other behavioural types.

read more

The rise of cloud computing has ushered in an era of unprecedented productivity for developers over the past several years. For those who have embraced this new world order, gone are the days of long lead times for hardware procurement and installation, architecture defined by slow-moving hardware upgrades, hardware-constrained scalability and flexibility, and a world where only sys admins have access to the infrastructure. But, as the barriers between development and delivery disappear, new challenges have emerged that can disrupt the lives of developers and slow down delivery of new products and features, giving back some of the efficiency gains that the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) created.
Whether you’re new to the cloud or you’ve been around since before cloud was cool, you are likely to see four common challenges emerge that can make troubleshooting your applications in the cloud more difficult. Let’s take a closer look at these common pain points first to help build awareness around the challenges, and then I’ll offer some suggestions for how to prevent these hurdles from tripping you and your team up when it comes time to unravel an application troubleshooting mystery.

read more

The top government leaders of the G20 nations are meeting this week-end in Brisbane, Australia. It’s an occasion to hear (and watch) U.S. President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi JinPing, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Instead, maybe everyone should be listening more closely to South Korean President Park Geun-Hye, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper – because these nations are among those setting the global pace of ICT development, which we believe will lead to long-term economic and societal development.

South Korea, in fact, leads the world in our rankings, which integrate several measures of technology and societal development into a unique mix that empasizes relative performance – that is, how well are the 103 nations we survey doing with the resources they have? How quickly are they being developed – not just growing economically, but developing societally – on a relative basis?

Among the G20 nations, South Korea is followed in our rankings by the UK, Germany, Canada, and Japan.

So it’s fair to say that people should also heed the words of UK Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, both of whom carry substantial influence on the world stage. But it’s important to note that the US, Russia, and China finish 8th, 10th, and 18th respectively among the G20.

This economic club of nations represents about 85% of the global economy. Its members include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK, the US, and the EU.

The G20 doesn’t strictly include the world’s top 20 economies (sorry about that, Netherlands and Spain), as it seeks to balance all the world’s regions. Including the EU as a member re-balances the exclusion of some large European countries.

The bottom tier of this group includes Italy, Argentina, Russian, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. These nations could benefit from witnessing the leaders’ commitment to ICT and how it is working to maintain the developed nations and transform the developing nations.

We have significant data and numeros, diverse rankings on all 103 nations that we survey. Our leaders possess a wide range of resources, population sizes, locations, and internal dynamics. There is no one way that they achieved this leadership. But they are all laying down relatively robust ICT infrastructures, often with the transformation and disruption that this implies.

We’re able to create custom reports for government, business, and NGO leaders who would like to know more.

read more

The software industry has seen a shift away from applications being housed at a company’s premise to the cloud. Such a shift allows companies to focus more on their business needs and less on their IT infrastructure needs.
In this article, we take a look at webapps developed for Tomcat and weblogic and attempt to deploy them into a cloud-based environment.

read more

the

read more

I was recently on a business trip out to Wausau, WI. The purpose was to conduct a training session on web application development for a new batch of associates at our onshore development center. When I picked up my rental car at the airport, I was very happy to discover it had built in Bluetooth integration for my phone. I have this feature on both cars at home. I love the convenience of having the car become an accessory for my mobile device. I immediately bound my phone with the car’s Bluetooth. Then something unusual happened. My phone prompted me with a question: ‘Chevy/Malibu would like access to your contacts list, click OK to grant request.’ My first reaction was no, and canceled the request. Each time I started the car, it would persistently ask the question. My curiosity got the better of me, and I finally relinquished and said OK to see what happened next.

read more

The revolutionary business aspects of cloud excite me every day, but the business diversity is even more exciting. This fact really struck me after teaching my last Learning Tree Cloud Computing Introduction class in New York City. I’ve been in the regular rotation here for four months now and have taught three classes during that time. The chart below breaks out the students in these classes by industry.

read more

Got a plan for your move to the cloud? If you do, you’re in the minority. According to a recent study, a mere 31 percent of those planning a move to the cloud actually have a strategy for migrating data and applications. The rest don’t.
To avoid the complexity and cost, we recommend heeding the following advice. It’s but a fraction of the endless recommendations we received from cloud experts who offered well-seasoned tips on what to do and not do when you begin planning to move workloads to the cloud.

read more