Operational Hadoop and the Lambda Architecture for Streaming Data
Apache Hadoop is emerging as a distributed platform for handling large and fast incoming streams of data. Predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and Internet-of-Things analysis are examples where Hadoop provides the scalable storage, processing, and analytics platform to gain meaningful insights from granular data that is typically only valuable from a large-scale, aggregate view. One architecture useful for capturing and analyzing streaming data is the Lambda Architecture, representing a model of how to analyze real-time and historical data together.

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The annual holiday shopping season, which starts on Thanksgiving weekend and runs through the end of December, is undoubtedly the most crucial time of the year for many eCommerce websites, with sales from this period having a dramatic effect on the year-end bottom line.
Web performance – or, the overall speed and availability of a website or mobile site – is an issue year-round, but it takes on increased importance during the holidays. Ironically, it is at this time of year that networks and infrastructure come under the most strain from traffic and are more vulnerable than ever to performance degradations. Yet busy, hurried holiday shoppers expect better performance than ever, and the stakes for lost conversions are frighteningly high. When customers encounter long load times, they’re likely to abandon their current shopping destination and move on to a competitor’s site that is performing better, sending potential revenue out the door. What’s worse, studies have shown that if a site freezes or crashes, is too slow, or involves an overly complicated checkout process, 75 percent of shoppers will no longer buy from that site.

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Hang around any IT department (or the AppDynamics offices) and you likely won’t finish a cup of coffee before somebody brings up the cost of downtime or the ascent of DevOps. And that’s a good thing, because these are two topics that are central to the value that IT brings to enterprises today and how that value will increase in the future.
IDC recently published research on these two topics in its report, “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified,” by IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot. (See the full report.) AppDynamics was happy to cooperate with the study, along with a select group of other enterprise software companies. The survey was conducted among a cross-section of IT personnel in Fortune 1000 companies.

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NaviSite, Inc. has received the Global and Americas VMware Partner Network Award in the Service Provider Partner of the Year category. The award was presented at VMware Partner Exchange 2015, VMware’s annual partner event, held in San Francisco.
“I am pleased to recognize this select group of partners who distinguished themselves at the global level in 2014,” said Dave O’Callaghan, senior vice president, Global Channels and Alliances, VMware. “VMware is dedicated to educating and equipping our partners with the resources they need to thrive, while providing more agile delivery of IT services – to organizations of all sizes. We congratulate NaviSite on winning a Global VMware Partner Network Award and look forward to our continued mutual success in 2015.”

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Contrary to what your mother may have told you, going in circles is sometimes a good thing. When it comes to our economy, it is actually a great thing.
Throughout history, society has built itself up by transforming raw materials into finished, usable products. This manufacturing process has always been linear in that:
Materials (sand, iron, gold, etc.) are evaluated for purpose and taken from nature.
Modified and refined as necessary, these materials are combined and recombined into the services and products we use every day, until…
Their usefulness to society wanes and the everyday products and services are disposed of in a heap of useless trash.

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Picture credit: NandorFejer/Flickr

The latest figures from public cloud management workload provider 2nd Watch has found a significant uptake in network access storage (NAS) products from customers using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

2nd Watch, which manages more than 10,000 AWS instances for enterprise, put together a scorecard showing the hits and misses of Q414. EC2 remains the most popular AWS service, with 98% of customers using it, just ahead of S3 (97%). Amazon’s SNS push notification service was the next most popular (65%), ahead of hosted message queuing service SQS (46%), and relational database RDS (45%).

Yet it was storage that proved the most interesting entry in this quarter’s scorecard, with three SoftNAS services making the top five product rank. SoftNAS Cloud (#2), Cloud Standard (#3) and Cloud Express (#5) all featured, but all behind Barracuda Web Application Firewall which topped the chart. NGINX Plus rounded off the top five.

The majority of users plump for small EC2 types (35%), compared alongside medium (19%), large (17%) and extra large (13%). Performance monitoring analysts Cloud Spectator mused in a January report that EC2 offered “significant” cost advantages over a long term investments, therefore expect this trend to arguably increase in the coming quarters. AWS was also at the summit when CloudHarmony examined the most reliable public cloud providers in 2014.

The average rate for EC2-SQL Server Standard was $0.786, while it was $0.465 for EC2-SQL Server Web. By region, South America ($0.578) was the most expensive, followed by US East ($0.403), EMEA ($0.137), Asia Pacific ($0.135) and US West ($0.125).

Even though EC2-SQL Server Standard was the most expensive on the card, it had dropped from $1.27 in Q314. 2nd Watch attributes this to more companies leveraging the T2 class instance over the traditional M class – and adds that this trend will continue apace for Q115.

Figures from CloudEndure in January found AWS had a 41% reduction in performance issues quarter to quarter during 2014. With these numbers on top, it certainly provides a compelling argument. 2nd Watch has had a busy couple of months itself, announcing its Cloud Factory service to offer a fixed fee migration service to AWS, as well as doubling its revenue in 2014.

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Microsoft has released a series of instruction guides for setting up hybrid cloud environments, including putting together a SharePoint intranet farm and a web-based line of business application in a hybrid cloud.

The tech giant cites a lack of previous resources in this field as the reason for putting pen to paper – while there is plenty of content out there for creating a test environment in a cloud-only virtual network, for instance, hybrid environments have scant documentation in comparison.

For the tutorial on setting up a hybrid cloud environment, the configuration provides a basis and starting point for users to develop and test apps, as well as create test configurations of computers on the Corpnet subnet and within the TestVNET virtual network.

“When complete you can begin performing application development, experimenting with simplified IT workloads, and gauge the performance of a site-to-site VPN connection relative to your location on the Internet,” explained senior content developer Joe Davies in a blog post.

Hybrid has been given a kick start in recent news, thanks to VMware’s announcements about its hybrid cloud strategy going forward, which was then criticised by Red Hat. The open source tech provider described VMware’s vision of a unified platform of virtualised compute, networking and storage for the hybrid cloud was “fundamentally flawed”, adding  that its own solution, through an open hybrid cloud approach, was superior.  

A survey in March 2014 from Microsoft showed almost half (49%) of more than 2000 execs polled had deployed some form of hybrid cloud. These most recent guides, however, show that while the idea of hybrid cloud is a nice one for IT professionals to grasp, setting up and testing a deployment is another issue entirely.

You can find the full documentation here.

SYS-CON Events announced today that IndependenceIT, a leading software provider of simplified IT management solutions for workspaces, applications and desktops-as-a-service, 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.
IndependenceIT’s Cloud Workspace® Suite combines application, end-user and infrastructure management into a seamless, easy-to-manage platform, with a unified management interface and robust API for ease of integration with existing systems, simplifying deployment and increasing responsiveness.

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When it comes to cloud computing, there is no “one size fits all” platform for getting work done. High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are not web applications. Thankfully, there are clouds specifically designed for running HPC workloads rather than web applications.
No matter what type of work they do, all clouds have «Cloud Controllers» which put resources to work, and often feature load balancing and metering capabilities. An HPC Cloud uses a Job Scheduler to assign work when requested. Basically, this puts work in queues for future execution on appropriate resources. Jobs are then run as resources become available.

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