agility

Knowing is Half the Battle There’s a difference between automation and orchestration, and knowing which one you’re really doing is half the battle in achieving a truly dynamic data center. Randy Heffner on CIO.Com wrote an excellent article on SOA and its value, “SOA: Think Business Transformation, Not Code Reuse.” The problem I had with the article was not in any way related to its advice, conclusions, or suggestions. The problem I had was that I kept thinking about how perfectly much of his article could be applied to data center orchestration, operational transformation, and automation. Simply replace “SOA” with “orchestration”, “software reuse”... posted @ Monday, February 22, 2010 3:43 AM | Feedback (1)

Dynamic Infrastructure Makes Static Connection Limitations Obsolete One of the benefits of Infrastructure 2.0 is connectedness: the ability to collect and share pertinent data regarding the health and performance of applications and infrastructure services. Based on that data a dynamic infrastructure can adapt on-demand and make decisions that respect real capacity limits, not artificial ones. Randy Hayes writes “The CapCal Blog”, and describes CapCal as being about “measuring the performance and scalability of web apps using real, production level workloads.” In A Very Delicate Load Balancing Act he discusses the impact of load balancing configurations on the capacity and performance of applications. ... posted @ Wednesday, October 14, 2009 4:20 AM | Feedback (0)

The Thing Private Clouds Can Do that Public Clouds Can’t When an admin brags they can do some task with their eyes closed there may be hidden process inefficiencies that orchestration can uncover. But the orchestration in a public cloud is effectively done for you, with little opportunity to design based on your organization’s operational processes. Orchestration in a private cloud, however, is all up to you. I was doing the laundry a few weeks ago, folding the clothes before I took them upstairs and hung them up when I realized just what I was doing. What I had been doing for, well, a very long time... posted @ Friday, October 09, 2009 3:11 AM | Feedback (8)

The Infrastructure 2.0 Trifecta Balancing Cost, Performance, and Capacity in the Cloud There is a huge difference between provisioning applications to support capacity and provisioning them to support performance requirements. That as capacity increases performance decreases is one of the truisms of scalability that is likely to be one of the first axioms of cloud computing that will bite us in the proverbial rear-end while simultaneously reaching for our wallets. Alistair Croll of BitCurrent has a couple of great charts that illustrate this point perfectly. He then goes on to discuss how that affects cloud computing in “The cloud’s... posted @ Tuesday, June 09, 2009 3:20 AM | Feedback (4)

Can You Teach an Old Developer New Tricks? When SOA was declared dead there was a spate of articles and blogs on why the architecture “died.” Most pundits came to the conclusion that like many innovations it wasn’t the technology to blame but rather people. Architects lacked the skills to properly leverage SOA; business stakeholders failed to look at SOA as a strategic architecture, choosing instead to use it as a tactical integration-solving solution; network and systems’ administrators did not understand the unique characteristics and issues a well-designed SOA raised within the network and on systems; and developers were loathe to “reuse” and “share” services despite alternate... posted @ Thursday, June 04, 2009 4:07 AM | Feedback (1)

The Secret of the Security Safety Dance Attackers say, we can go where we want to; we can leave our code behind… There’s probably a raid going on right now in Naxxramas and the attackers are almost certainly doing the Safety Dance. They probably learned the Safety Dance the same way I learned about it; from someone well-versed in its intricate steps. See, if you don’t know the Safety Dance and you come up against Heigan the Unclean, well… he’s not called Heigan the Unclean for nothing. You will not survive. Not even if you happen to have a Holocaust Cloak at... posted @ Wednesday, June 03, 2009 3:58 AM | Feedback (2)

F5 and the Cloud There’s apparently been a bit of confusion over what, exactly, F5 thinks of cloud computing as an organization based on a recent blog post. I thought I’ve been fairly clear on where F5 stands in terms of cloud computing but I may be suffering what’s known as the “curse of knowledge”, which means I am so deeply entrenched in F5’s view of cloud that I forget that other people don’t have the luxury of that knowledge. So I’d like to take this opportunity to clear up any misconceptions that may be floating around and just set the record... posted @ Tuesday, May 26, 2009 4:09 AM | Feedback (0)

The Revolution Begins: The IT Bill of Rights First Amendment Vendors shall make no law respecting an establishment of architecture, or prohibiting the free design thereof; or constraining the flow of data, or of packets; or the right of the administrators easily to configure, and to ensure the fast, secure, and available delivery of applications. Second Amendment A well-performing network being necessary to the delivery of applications, the right of IT to optimization of any network environment, shall not be infringed. Third Amendment Budgetary constraints, though required for an efficient business, shall not force IT to compromise on security or... posted @ Friday, March 27, 2009 2:10 AM | Feedback (3)

So you say you want a revolution?   Remember when…it was sprawl or nothing? Remember when…you had to choose between security and speed? Remember when…you had to choose between agility and performance? It’s time for a change; a change that brings freedom and choice to the data center and puts IT back in control of its own architectural destiny.    Technorati Tags: F5,revolution,data center,choice,change,freedom,agility,infrastructure,infrastructure 2.0,dynamic infrastructure,web,internet,video,blog Related articles by Zemanta Unified Ontology of Cloud Computing (johnmwillis.com) ... posted @ Monday, March 23, 2009 3:27 AM | Feedback (0)

Remember when…it was sprawl or nothing? Ah, those were the days, weren’t they? When improving the security, reliability, and performance of applications over the LAN, over the WAN, and over the Internet meant you had to deploy many different solutions, each one standing on their own in the data center. When you had to learn how to configure and manage as many devices as you have fingers just to deliver a single business-critical application to users and customers across a wide variety of environments. When there really wasn’t an option because solutions weren’t unified, weren’t contextually aware, and were basically just a bunch of point solutions... posted @ Monday, March 23, 2009 3:21 AM | Feedback (0)

Remember when…you had to choose between security and speed? Ah, those were the days, weren’t they? When you needed a way to add security at several layers to your network and application network infrastructure but knew that implementing a solution capable of securing those pesky applications was more than likely going to end up with poor performance and angry users. When you needed to add something to secure applications and the network against the growing wave of attacks but knew that doing so would negatively impact performance. It was a tough choice, and most people ended up going the route of maintaining application performance at the expense... posted @ Monday, March 16, 2009 3:39 AM | Feedback (0)

Remember when…you had to choose between agility and performance? Ah, those were the days, weren’t they? When you needed a way to inspect data at the edge for application-specific issues but knew that implementing a solution capable of that kind of agility was more than likely going to end up with poor performance and angry users. When you needed to add something to secure applications and the network against the growing wave of attacks but knew that doing so would negatively impact performance. It was a tough choice, and most people ended up going the route of maintaining application performance at the expense of security and optimization... posted @ Monday, March 09, 2009 4:30 AM | Feedback (1)

Putting the network back in social networking A while back Joe blogged about some Twitter integration he'd done around monitoring of BIG-IP. He's  got a PERL proxy that monitors the BIG-IP and sends out notifications and alerts to a specified Twitter account. But I wanted something more interactive, something more social. I wanted to be able to send a tweet to my BIG-IP and have it respond; a BIG-IP Twitter bot, if you will. So Friday I finally decided it was time to do it. I set up a Twitter account for my BIG-IP and started coding. Luckily, the Twitter API is pretty straight-forward and... posted @ Monday, December 15, 2008 6:03 AM | Feedback (3)

Cloud Computing: It's the destination, not the journey that is important How the cloud acts and is used is more important than where it physically resides Cloud computing and SOA suffer from the same lack of prescriptive architectures. They are defined by how they act rather than what they are, or from what they are composed. They are, in a way, existential technology that cannot be confined to a simple architectural diagram but require instead a set of properties or ways of acting in order to be recognized. To over simplify and paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre's concepts of existentialism, we define ourselves (mankind) through our actions. To apply this to... posted @ Monday, November 03, 2008 3:29 AM | Feedback (0)

One Size Does Not Fit All Outside of the technology world a lot of products are billed as "one size fits all". Anyone who's purchased such a product generally knows, no, no they don't. They're close, but never a truly good fit. Inside the technology world we know better. Software and solutions are never a "one size fits all" proposition, that's why so many business software solutions are "customizable": ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), workflow, automation, and portals. Just about every software solution you can purchase these days takes a customizable approach to actually meeting the needs of the business. ... posted @ Monday, July 28, 2008 6:46 AM | Feedback (0)