Downtime! Most major providers and organizations will face it one way or another. In a recent blog post titled “High Availability of Web Apps for eCommerce Starts with Real-Time Flow Analysis.” Atchison Frazer, the VP of marketing at Xangati and a tech exec with years of networking experience, talks about the importance of high availability of e-commerce web applications. For some of the e-commerce retailers such as Target and Amazon mentioned by Frazer in his post, outages/downtime can cost more than $1,000 of revenue per second. Frazer takes the time to explain both the problem and the solution.

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Hot off the press: a brand new Solr Cookbook! One of Sematext’s Solr and Elasticsearch experts — and authors — Rafał Kuć, has just published the third and latest edition of Solr Cookbook. This edition covers both Solr 4.x (based on the newest 4.10.3 version of Solr) and the just-released Solr 5.0.

Similar to previous Solr Cookbooks, Rafal updated the book significantly — half of the previous content has been changed — and rewrote all of the recipes.

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March is Women’s History Month. As we celebrate women and their role in our history, our workplaces, and our homes, I thought it was important to bring to the forefront some of the strengths that might make them stand out as compelling agents of change in such a time as this in the IT industry.
Recent research reveals that while women account for about one-half of the labor force, their numbers for employment in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields continues to lag behind men. There is much speculation as to the possible reasons for this, and this is not the focus of this article. After spending many years as one of the only women in the room in meetings and conferences, I’m starting to notice more women leading initiatives, programs, and companies in cloud computing technology.

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Synergy Research reports that cloud infrastructure spending has been growing rapidly:

“Cloud infrastructure is a fast-growing market and now accounts for almost half of all data center infrastructure shipments,” says Jeremy Duke, founder and Chief Analyst, Synergy Research.

“We are seeing strong growth across private, public and hybrid cloud deployments and across all geographic regions.

Pretty amazing…

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If you’ve spent any time at leading cloud computing conferences, you may have come across the meme “pets vs cattle.” (Here is a lengthy slideshare presentation by Randy Bias of EMC/Cloudscaling discussing the difference between pets and cattle in a cloud computing world.) The message associated with this meme is that we should have different attitudes about traditional infrastructure versus today’s cloud infrastructure.
Traditional infrastructure is expensive and individuated – we give servers names, we lavish attention on them, and when they suffer problems we do evaluation, diagnosis, and nurse them back to health via hands-on administration. In other words, we treat them as part of a family. This is true whether the server is physical or virtual; they are long-lived and stable, and therefore deserve personal attention and emotional attachment – just like a pet.

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Smart mobile teams know that delivering a 5-star app is more than just finding a good business use-case and designing an app with wow experience; it’s also about ensuring amazing app performance. Apps that perform well will engage the customer – poor app performance is a sure fire way to lose the customer and their business.

To deliver a first-rate app performance, mobile teams have to master the many variables which affect performance:

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As the cloud becomes the primary model for both IT and line-of-business professionals around the world, a certain amount of refinement and fine-tuning is a healthy part of the process. In other words, now out of its infancy, the cloud is growing up. Highlighting this trend, SAP SE has announced the results of a global survey conducted with Oxford Economics that showcase the fact that the cloud business model has not only become mainstream – indeed, over two-thirds (69 percent) of businesses surveyed expect to make moderate-to-heavy cloud investments over the next three years – but that companies are increasingly shifting from using the cloud for productivity and efficiency to specific business benefits like innovation in supply chain, talent management, collaboration and analytics.

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I read a thought provoking article called The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer. In this piece the author points out how software has evolved to the point where engineers can quickly assemble different components and build solutions in days for a minimal investment where as previously this would take months and tons of capital. There are some great points in this article but the final sentence set off a nerve that I had to respond to. Check out my response on Forbes.

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“Programmability in the network” is a wordy yet simpler way to describe the extension of network capabilities through the use of software-defined techniques.

See what I mean?

In any case, whatever you want to call it, there are two distinct methods of leveraging programmability in the network. One is specifically tied to SDN, using the extensible capability of an SDN controller supportive of a plug-in, module or app-based model. The second is more broadly applicable (in that it can be used for SDN but also as part of traditional or legacy architectural approaches as well) and implements an in-path model for executing logic (programmability) on inbound and outbound traffic.

As usual, I think a picture can probably suffice to explain it fully instead of inundating you with words, words and more words.

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As the cloud continues to grow as a topic of conversation, so too does load and performance testing within the cloud. You may be asking yourself questions like: When is it most appropriate to involve the cloud when load testing? When is the right time to conduct performance testing using the cloud? How can cloud load testing benefit my company?
What should I do and what shouldn’t I do?

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