Monthly Archives: September 2012

appMobi, Debugging, Free, HTML5, PhoneGap, Tools

appMobi Offers Free Remote Debugging Tool for HTML5

Today appMobi added to its lineup of free and open source HTML5 development tools with the immediate availability of debugMobi, a free remote JavaScript debugging tool.

Until now, HTML and JavaScript have been difficult for developers to debug on mobile devices because of the closed environments of smartphone hardware and Web browser software. An open source tool called “Web Inspector Remote” (WEINRE) provides remote Web debugging for mobile devices, but it requires developers to configure and run their own servers in order to work.

debugMobi dramatically reduces the complexity of remote debugging on mobile devices with a configuration-free, hosted version of WEINRE that developers and mobile devices can tap into from anywhere on the Internet. Like all appMobi cloud services, debugMobi is hosted on the global Amazon AWS “cloud,” which offers dependable high performance all over the world.

debugMobi provides Web developers with a remote window into the target mobile device while the hybrid app or site is actually running. JavaScript and CSS variables can be examined, and JavaScript code can be viewed and modified on the desktop viewer in real time. Because debugMobi is hosted on the open Internet (as opposed to the more typical WiFi or Intranet hosting), debugMobi can be used to debug devices that are physically anywhere in the world – making it the first truly worldwide “remote” debugging tool for mobile HTML5.

This new HTML5 developer tool can be used by anyone who is developing Web-based code for mobile devices, including Web app developers, and hybrid app developers using appMobi or PhoneGap. debugMobi is available immediately at www.debugmobi.com. For developers who use the Google Chrome browser, it is also available as a  Chrome extension.


Accel Partners, Tenable, Tenable Network Security, Venture Funding

Tenable Network Security Gets $50 Million for Vulnerability Management

Tenable Network Security, Inc., whose software identifies network security gaps before they are exploited by attackers, today announced $50 million in first-round funding from Accel Partners.

Tenable will use the funds to expand its innovative security offerings and accelerate global growth – while deepening its research into evolving threats that are becoming a critical trust issue for CEOs, regulators and customers worldwide.

“Security is a mainstream issue – especially with the explosion of mobile, cloud and virtual computing,” said Ron Gula, CEO of Tenable. “Serious network attacks are far more common than anyone wants to publicly admit – and our customers count on us to keep their networks safe.”

Tenable is the top choice for businesses of all sizes, governments and universities to manage network threats. The company’s flagship vulnerability management products, Nessus and SecurityCenter, are used by the most demanding security professionals and compliance auditors at 15,000 organizations worldwide, including:

  • The entire U.S. Department of Defense, where Tenable has become the
    vulnerability management standard
  • 12 of the 14 U.S. Federal Civilian Departments
  • Top Financial Services Companies: Barclays, Deloitte, RBS, Morgan
    Stanley, T. Rowe Price, Visa
  • Technology Leaders: Spotify, Dell, Etsy, Google, Intel, Microsoft,
    Skype, Apple, Yahoo
  • Top Universities: Brown, Dartmouth, Michigan, Ohio State, Purdue
  • Healthcare Leaders: Coventry, HealthSouth, Johnson & Johnson,
    Merck, Scripps, Sutter Health
  • Key Energy Players: Chevron, Chesapeake Energy, ConocoPhillips,
    ConEdison, Duke Energy, TXU
  • Retailer Innovators: Chipotle, GSI, Meijer, Diapers.com, Zappos.com
  • Media Visionaries: British Sky Broadcasting, CBS, Comcast, Time
    Warner, 20    th Century Fox
  • Telecom Providers: Alcatel Lucent, Bell Canada, British Telecom,
    Softbank Mobile, Verizon

Tenable’s user community has 1 million people who have learned the benefits of automated vulnerability scanning through their viral adoption of Nessus.

“Tenable is the thought leader in the rapidly growing and critical area of vulnerability assessment,” said Ping Li, General Partner at Accel, who will join Tenable’s board of directors. “IT security practitioners fight the constant battle to stay ahead of network attacks, and it’s only getting harder. Many of these practitioners globally rely on Tenable for their vulnerability management platform.”

Tenable’s SecurityCenter is the only security platform combining essential active and innovative passive vulnerability scanning, real-time network monitoring, and configuration and compliance management. Tenable’s Nessus, the industry’s most widely deployed vulnerability scanner, provides the deepest database of known vulnerabilities and compliance risks on the market today.

 


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Eureka, Load Balancing, Multitier architecture, Netflix, Open Source, Tools

Netflix Open Sources its Eureka Load Balancing Tool for AWS

Netflix has moved its Eureka mid-tier load-balancing tool, formerly known as the Netflix Discovery Service, to open source.Eureka Architecture Diagram

From the Netflix announcement of the move:

Eureka is a REST based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers. We call this service, the Eureka Server. Eureka also comes with a java-based client component, the Eureka Client, which makes interactions with the service much easier. The client also has a built-in load balancer that does basic round-robin load balancing. At Netflix, a much more sophisticated load balancer wraps Eureka to provide weighted load balancing based on several factors like traffic, resource usage, error conditions etc to provide superior resiliency. We have previously referred to Eureka as the Netflix discovery service.


Uncategorized

Racemi Announces Software-as-a-Service to Migrate Servers to Public Clouds

Racemi, the moving company for the cloud, announced that its Cloud Path software as a service is now generally available for migrating Windows and Linux server images to public clouds with no infrastructure to buy or maintain and no upfront costs or fees.
The fully-automated migration can be controlled from a web browser, with cost savings on average of $800 per server versus a manual migration to a public cloud provider, like Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace or Terremark.
In addition, Racemi Cloud Path’s zero-risk, pay-as-you-go licensing plan ensures that customers are only billed for successful migrations. There is no faster or lower risk way to migrate to the cloud.
“We’re taking ease of use to a new level for any administrator that wants to migrate existing physical or virtual workloads to a public cloud resource,” said James Strayer, vice president of product management at Racemi. “There is no need to rebuild from scratch or use templates and scripts, which saves administrators time and translates to significant cost savings versus migrating a server manually.”

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Nebula, Open Source, OpenStack, Venture Funding

Nebula Gets $25 Million for OpenStack Cloud Enabling

Nebula, the cloud systems company, has closed its Series B financing round, involving over $25M of additional equity and debt financing. The new round was led by Comcast Ventures, the venture capital arm of Comcast and NBCUniversal, with significant participation from Highland Capital Partners and included Kleiner Perkins, Innovation Endeavors and industry luminaries Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram. Investors that participated include Harris Barton, William Hearst III, Scott McNealy and Maynard Webb. Additionally, Silicon Valley Bank is providing additional debt and credit facilities to the company.

“We’re delighted to have the support of investors who have such remarkable track records of success as we continue on our path to make on-premise private cloud computing a reality for all businesses,” said Chris C. Kemp, Nebula CEO and co-founder.

Nebula is now powering next-generation cloud infrastructures in market-leading biotech, financial services and media companies in a private beta program that began in March. This investment will allow Nebula to expand the number of companies that will be able to participate in the beta, continue to expand its product and engineering teams, build a petascale test system, and accelerate development and testing of its product.

“We invest in companies that innovate with open source projects and teams that are focused on creating game-changing disruption,” said Louis Toth, Managing Director at Comcast Ventures. “After spending several years looking at this market, we are confident that Nebula is the company that will bring private cloud infrastructure to the enterprise.”

Nebula, co-founded by former NASA CTO and OpenStack co-founder Chris C. Kemp, has assembled a team of more than 50 engineers inspired by the opportunity to pioneer a new era of enterprise computing. In addition to Dave Withers, former Dell Executive and Senior Vice President of Field Operations, and Jon Mittelhauser, Netscape co-founder and VP of Engineering, Nebula now employs four OpenStack project technical leads, and the engineers responsible for a large percentage of the code in OpenStack.


Uncategorized

Oracle’s Cloud – An Enterprise Cloud for Business-Critical Applications

For enterprise class cloud services, companies need a broad, comprehensive and flexible platform for their applications. The Oracle Cloud, which offers a broad set of best-in-class, integrated services that are secure, elastic, and 100% open standards-based, offering organizations choice in development and deployment of business critical applications. In his General Session at Cloud Expo New York, Sandeep Banerjie, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Public Cloud, discusses how these subscription-based services can speed your application development and deployment time, offer the flexibility of application portability, and the ease with which you can access, use, and manage them.

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Uncategorized

Announcing the Cloud Maturity Model for RFPs

Following a number of months of work with a team effort of industry experts and requirements from key user groups like government agencies here in Canada, version 1.00 of our Cloud Maturity Model for RFPs is now complete and available for purchase.
Many businesses are at the point they believe the Cloud does indeed offer them considerable ROI potential but are finding that the supplier landscape and multitude of industry terminology is confusing and daunting.
This means it will slow their procurement and so both customers and suppliers lose out.

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Miscellaneous IT

Mind the Gap – Service-Oriented Management

IT management used to be about specialization.  We built skills in a swim-lane approach – deep and narrow channels of talent where you could go from point A to B and back in a pretty straight line, all the time being able to see the bottom of the pool.  In essence, we operated like a well-oiled Olympic swim team.  Each team member had a specialty in their specific discipline, and once in a while we’d all get together for a good ole’ medley event.

And because this was our talent base, we developed tools that would focus their skills in those specific areas.  It looked something like this:

"Mind the Gap"

But is this the way IT is actually consumed by the business?  Consumption is by the service, not by the individual layer.  Consumption looks more like this:

"Mind the Gap"

From a user perspective, the individual layers are irrelevant.  It’s about the results of all the layers combined, or to put a common term around it, it’s about a service.  Email is a service, so is Saleforce.com, but both of those have very different implications from a management perspective.

A failure in any one of these underlying layers can dramatically affect to user productivity.  For example, if a user is consuming your email service, and there is a storage layer issue, they may see reduced performance.  The same “result” could be seen if there is a host, network layer, bandwidth or local client issue.  So when a user requests assistance, where do you start?

Most organizations will work from one side of the “pool” to the other using escalations between the lanes as specific layers are eliminated, starting with Help Desk services and ending up in the infrastructure team.  But is this the most efficient way to provide good service to our customers?  And what if the service was Salesforce.com and not something we fully manage internally? Is the same methodology still applicable?

Here is where we need to start looking at a service-level management approach.  Extract the individual layers and combine them into an operating unit that delivers the service in question.  The viewpoint should be from how the service is consumed, not what individually makes up that service.  Measurement, metrics, visibility and response should span the lanes in the same direction as consumption.  This will require us to alter the tools and processes we use to respond to events.

Some scary thoughts here, if you consider the number of “services” our customers consume, and the implications of a hybrid cloud world.  But the alternative is even more frightening.  As platforms that we do not fully manage (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) become more integral to our environments, the blind spots in our vision will expand.  So, the question is more of a “when” do we move in this direction rather than an “if.”  We can continue to swim our lanes, and maybe we can shave off a tenth of a second here or there.  But, true achievement will come when we can look across all the lanes and see the world from the eyes of our consumers.

 

Uncategorized

NuoDB Releases New Beta

“A major goal in developing NuoDB has been the ability to scale elastically on hundreds of cores while also providing better performance than traditional centralized OLTP databases like MySQL,” said Barry Morris, CEO and Founder of NuoDB, as his latest start-up recently released Beta 8 of its groundbreaking web-scale SQL database.

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Uncategorized

EAT Signs Contract with NaviSite

NaviSite, Inc., a provider of enterprise-class hosting, managed application, managed messaging and managed cloud services, has been selected by EAT, a high street food retailer, to provide the NaviCloud platform Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for its new customer facing web system.

Following a period involving continuous expansion, EAT decided to launch a new customer facing web application. An external host facility was sought to meet high availability and flexible resource demands, whilst providing advanced security for customer transactions. EAT has long operated on a private cloud platform, allowing its 2000+ employees across 120 stores to work on a secure private network, but in order to launch the customer facing application, the hosting solution had to meet a strict set of requirements including full PCI Compliance, VMware compatibility, high availability and private VPN capabilities. All of this had to be achievable in a very short time scale. Navisite accepted the challenge and delivered.
Since the launch of the first EAT shop in 1996, EAT is now able to offer a full range of good, fresh and handmade food and drinks to customers online. With the new web application, customers can order their food to be delivered directly, Monday to Friday. The new platform also enables customers to place lunch orders on the same day as delivery, before 10am.

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