Consider that the Age of the Cloud has precipitated a new agent concept which is lightweight, deploys quickly, and goes in virtually undetected with zero configuration. These agents are built with a survival mode in mind including a self-healing option for hands-free maintenance. At the time when we were looking for a monitoring solution (2006-2007) APM as we know it today had yet to be defined. There was no Gartner MQ, real-user-monitoring (RUM) was too high level, “agent monitoring” brought concerns of overhead and complexity, instrumenting the application meant to ARM it (i.e. Application Response Measurement), and transaction tagging was a pipe dream.
There was no Gartner MQ, real-user-monitoring (RUM) was too high level, “agent monitoring” brought concerns of overhead and complexity, instrumenting the application meant to ARM it (i.e. Application Response Measurement), and transaction tagging was a pipe dream. This created a fierce debate on the risks and rewards of agent vs. agentless monitoring…

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Go ahead. Name a cloud environment that doesn’t include load balancing as the key enabler of elastic scalability. I’ve got coffee… so it’s good, take your time…

Exactly. Load balancing – whether implemented as traditional high availability pairs or clustering – provides the means by which applications (and infrastructure, in many cases) scale horizontally. It is load balancing that is at the heart of elastic scalability models, and that provides a means to ensure availability and even improve performance of applications.

But simple load balancing alone isn’t enough. Too many environments and architectures are wont to toss a simple, network-based solution at the problem and call it a day. But rudimentary load balancing techniques that rely solely on a set of metrics are doomed to fail eventually. That’s because a simple number like «connection count» does not provide enough context to make an intelligent load balancing decision. An application instance may currently have only 100 connections while another has 500, but if the capacity of the former is only 200 while the capacity of the other is 5000, a decision based on «least connections» is not the right one.

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In her General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anne Plese, Senior Consultant, Cloud Product Marketing, at Verizon Enterprise, will focus on finding the right mix of renting vs. buying Oracle capacity to scale to meet business demands, and offer validated Oracle database TCO models for Oracle development and testing environments.
Anne Plese is a marketing and technology enthusiast/realist with over 19+ years in high tech. At Verizon Enterprise, she focuses on driving growth for the Verizon Cloud platform globally. Previous to Verizon, Anne spent over 10 years with Cisco. There she was focused on growing Cisco’s global data center and cloud revenue, and boosting market awareness and affinity for Cisco data center solutions within the Enterprise and Commercial market segments.

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This is the third in a series of cloud predictions for 2015, starting with When the Walls Come Down, which predicted that workload migration (into the cloud) costs would drop by more than 50% in 2015; then continuing with The Cloud Startup Ecosystem Explosion, which predicted the impact that cloud market share gains in 2015 […]

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The major cloud platforms defy a simple, side-by-side analysis. Each of the major IaaS public-cloud platforms offers their own unique strengths and functionality. Options for on-site private cloud are diverse as well, and must be designed and deployed while taking existing legacy architecture and infrastructure into account. Then the reality is that most enterprises are embarking on a hybrid cloud strategy and programs.
In this Power Panel at 15th Cloud Expo, moderated by Ashar Baig, Research Director, Cloud, at Gigaom Research, panelists will discuss how enterprises should develop their processes for choosing the cloud option that truly fits what they need.

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StackIQ offers a comprehensive software suite that automates the deployment, provisioning, and management of Big Infrastructure. With StackIQ’s software, you can spin up fully configured big data clusters, quickly and consistently — from bare-metal up to the applications layer — and manage them efficiently. Our software’s modular architecture allows customers to integrate nearly any application with the StackIQ software stack.

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As Platform as a Service (PaaS) matures as a category, developers should have the ability to use the programming language of their choice to build applications and have access to a wide array of services. Bluemix is IBM’s open cloud development platform that enables users to easily build cloud-based, creative mobile and web applications without having to spend large amounts of time and resources on configuring infrastructure and multiple software licenses. In this track, you will learn about the array of services to support and accelerate application development, as well as building applications on Bluemix using Java and node.JS. Learn more about Bluemix at www.bluemix.net.

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Bitium, based in Santa Monica, CA, works in the cloud to provide secure management of an enterprise’s applications, users, and passwords in one place. We asked company Co-founder and CEO Scott Kriz a few questions about the company’s vision and strategy.

Cloud Computing Journal: What was the inspiration behind starting the company?

Scott Kriz: Both Erik Gustavson, Bitium Co-founder and CTO, and I have started and worked for multiple tech companies throughout our professional careers. Most recently we ran product and engineering at a company called Fastpoint Games. We used a ton of SaaS and web-based applications to get our work done and continuously grappled with how to manage our own internal tools.

We had a revolving door of seasonal or contract employees and the onboarding/off-boarding process became cumbersome and inhibited us from focusing on our core business. As we looked for solutions we realized that no one in the industry was solving this problem well, which is when we first came up with the idea for Bitium.

With the proliferation of enterprise SaaS, we knew that there were countless companies having the same problems. We created Bitium because we want to empower companies and people to realize the full potential of web-based software. This would enable those companies to focus on their core business and not get bogged down managing software.”

CCJ: You provide what could be called a «SaaS Operating System.» Could you elaborate on that?

Scott: We look at it more like a Unified Cloud Management System. Bitium is the centralized system, or tool, for managing a company’s SaaS, web, and mobile applications.

With Bitium, IT can automate workflows, control and monitor SaaS usage, and manage employees all in one place. Bitium provides single sign-on, password and application security monitoring, auto-provisioning, HRMS synching, directory integration, industrial-grade security, and much more.

CCJ: What advantages do your customers see once they’ve centralized management of their apps?

Scott: Once everything is centralized in Bitium, IT can effectively and efficiently monitor organizational health in terms of application security, password strength and compliance through our Insights.

Bitium centralizes the management of an organization’s applications and employees. Administrators can use Bitium’s Reports to monitor app utilization and see user activity. The Audit Log allows admins to track who is logging into apps, at what time, and their IP address in addition to deeper metrics on who grants and revokes access to applications.
Bitium’s features help companies optimize SaaS and web-app usage. While there are many benefits to using web based software, including efficiency and cost, we have recognized inefficiencies that have been created with the shift to the cloud and have created a solution to those solve those inefficiencies.

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Applications typically log additional data such as exceptions to different data sources. Windows event logs, local files, and SQL databases are most commonly used in production. New applications can take advantage of leveraging big data instead of individual files or SQL. One of the most surprising experiences when we start monitoring applications is noticing the […]

The post How Do you Monitor Your Logging? written by Alex Fedotyev appeared first on Application Performance Monitoring Blog from AppDynamics.

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How do APIs and IoT relate? The answer is not as simple as merely adding an API on top of a dumb device, but rather about understanding the architectural patterns for implementing an IoT fabric. There are typically two or three trends:
Exposing the device to a management framework
Exposing that management framework to a business centric logic
• Exposing that business layer and data to end users.
This last trend is the IoT stack, which involves a new shift in the separation of what stuff happens, where data lives and where the interface lies. For instance, it’s a mix of architectural styles between cloud, APIs and native hardware/software configurations.
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Sumit Sharma, Director of API Strategy at MuleSoft, will describe the different types of relationships between IoT, cloud, APIs and integration.

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