Testing tools and frameworks are infinitely useful when planning cloud architecture for many reasons.
“The confidence of a well-tested codebase brings the ability to deploy quickly, and often. Testing infrastructure assures that incremental changes to the codebase do not affect the overall application performance,” said Omid Rahmat, president, Burnside Digital.
One of the Rahmat’s favorite testing tools is rspec, used for ruby applications. Rahmat said it takes a «behavior-driven» approach to testing. “We follow the best practices of writing tests that explain what our code should do before writing it. This gives us a clear path to follow to implement solutions with great confidence and far fewer defects. Having that test and seeing it pass lets us know that we have written features to specification.”
Accelerating the Hybrid Cloud
Last night CloudVelocity CEO Rajeev Chawla was able to talk to Brian Gracely at The Cloudcast on CloudVelocity and the hybrid cloud. The 33 minute interview (Accelerating the Hybrid Cloud (#83) is now available for download. A special thanks to Brian, who asked some of the most probing hybrid cloud questions asked by anyone to date.
Here is the outline of the conversation (created by the team at CloudCast) so that you can navigate to the part that you are most interested in (if you don’t have time for the entire interview):
Description: Brian talks with Rajeev Chawla (CEO @ CloudVelocity) about the evolution and challenges of Hybrid Cloud, working across multiple clouds, and how start-ups are innovating in a highly competitive cloud market.
Cloud Expo New York: Build Modern Business Applications
Today’s developers want platforms that make innovation faster, less complex, and more efficient.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Gene Eun, Sr. Director, Oracle Cloud at Oracle, will provide an overview of Oracle Cloud’s easy-to-use, enterprise-grade, and open standards-based platform services. Learn how you can transform the development experience and quickly build applications in the cloud using the tools and techniques developers love and already use today.
Gene Eun is Sr. Director, Oracle Cloud at Oracle.
Weekly Roundup: Windows Azure IaaS Moves into GA
Over the last week, the cloud world seems to have received some significant announcements from Microsoft and Amazon. Also, HP Cloud has introduced a new messaging service. Plus, Appcelerator has announced the release of Titanium 3.1 and Node.ACS GA.
Here’s a quick sum up of Cloud happenings over the last week.
Microsoft has announced the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. This new service allows users to host Virtual Machines in Azure. In addition, they have also reduced GA prices on virtual machines and cloud services by 21-33%. Next, they have also announced the availability of Django (a high-level Python Web framework) in the Windows Azure Web Application Gallery. This tutorial helps users to create a website on Azure for Django Framework in just a few clicks.
Microsoft remains top software vendor as cloud increases its influence
The International Data Center (IDC) has released a report which reveals that Microsoft remains the largest software vendor globally through 2012 revenues and overall market share.
Figures from the Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker put the Washington-based tech giant at a 17.1% market share, lower than its 2011 figure of 17.4% but still nearly twice as far ahead as its nearest competitors, IBM and Oracle.
IBM has an 8.5% market share, compared to Oracle’s 8.1%, with SAP and Symantec comprising the top five.
Elsewhere, the report provided further evidence that cloud computing is at the epicentre of enterprise growth.
For many cloud-based segments, including data access, CRM applications and security software, their growth rate was double the rate for enterprise software overall.
Yet the overall growth in the software market for 2012 was at 3.6%, less than half the overall growth of 2010 and 2011 …
NIST to Sponsor FFRDC Widespread Adoption of Integrated CyberSecurity
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Department of Commerce, intends to sponsor a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) to facilitate public-private collaboration for accelerating the widespread adoption of integrated cybersecurity tools and technologies.
This is the first of three notices which must be published over a 90-day period in order to advise the public of the agency’s intention to sponsor an FFRDC. DATES: Written comments must be received by 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on July 22, 2013.
Not Quite Ready to Live in the Cloud
Google’s impressive Chromebook Pixel is just the latest in a series of devices which are trying to entice users to compute in a different way. With (almost) ubiquitous connectivity, and an increasing reliance upon web-based services for mail, calendars, document creation and more, might we be reaching a point at which the browser really can be our means of accessing everything? Philosophically, the idea resonates. And yet, although I am not a power user who needs to regularly process video or edit high resolution images (the usual excuses for not embracing the Chromebook vision), I still remain uncomfortable with giving up my non-browser tools. Despite living and working in the cloud, I find that locally installed client software continues to deliver real value. Maybe, the next time I upgrade a computer, I need to try installing nothing more than a browser for a week or two, and see if it’s as painful as I feel it could be… The cloud powers my business. The cloud is what I talk to clients about, it’s what I write about, it’s what people pay me to know about. The cloud (and, more generally, the web) make it possible for me to work with clients […]
Cloud Expo NY: Best Practices for Delivering Oracle Database as a Service
Many enterprises are pursuing cloud computing to reduce costs and speed time to value, all with lower risk and improved service levels. We’ve seen many customers succeed by organizing their transformation into distinct, manageable phases: a Journey to the Enterprise Cloud.
Service Delivery is an advanced phase of the journey, and provides elasticity, resiliency, automation and self-service capabilities. When the journey is planned and executed correctly, enabling these capabilities does not require upgrades or re-architecting. Instead, meeting these goals is a natural evolution that builds on the earlier phases by employing the relevant features and options.
Cloud Expo NY: Best Practices for Architecting Your Cloud Infrastructure
Before you start to envision and design your cloud, you’ll need to make sure it’s built on a solid architectural foundation.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Matt Mullins, Principal Consultant – Cloud Platform Implementation Engineer with Citrix Systems, will cover critical concepts and principles for architecting your cloud and best practices for supporting multiple workloads from a single cloud platform. You will learn about:
Components and architecture of a cloud orchestration
How workloads and workload availability drive cloud architecture
Sample reference architectures from leading implementations
Google Details Cause of Wednesday’s Widespread Apps Outage
Google issued an incident report on the Wednesday outage that affected less than one per cent of gmail users, but was significant for other services, including half of Admin Panel and 60% of Sync login requests. As has happened in the past, it was a configuration error for a central system, in this case Google Services Login, where the configuration glitch caused too many requests to be routed to too few servers, causing them to buckle under the load:
From 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. PT, some users received errors when trying to access Gmail, Drive, Talk, Google Sync, the Admin panel, and the Cloud Console, and to a lesser extent Groups, Sites, and Contacts. At the peak of the outage, this issue affected 50% of the Admin panel and 60% of Google Sync login requests. The percentages of affected users for other services were lower such as 0.18% users for Gmail. The root cause was an issue in the system that manages login requests for Google services.
At 5:00 a.m. as login traffic increased, the misconfigured servers were unable to process the load. This began to cause errors for some users logging in to Google services. The request load, exacerbated by retry requests from users and automated systems such as IMAP clients, initially appeared as the cause of the login errors. At 5:48 a.m., the Engineering team determined that the root cause was not excess traffic but insufficient capacity
The full report is less than two pages, and clearly outlines what happened and how they hope to prevent it in the future.
