application delivery network

How To Use CoralCDN On-Demand to Keep Your Site Available. For Free. Cloud computing and content delivery networks (CDN) are both good ways to assist in improving capacity in the face of sudden, high demand for specific content but require preparation and incur operational and often capital expenditures. How about an option that’s free, instead? While it’s certainly in the best interests of every organization to have a well-thought out application delivery strategy for addressing the various events that can result in downtime for web applications it may be that once in a while a simple, tactical solution will suffice. Even if you’re load balancing already (and you are, of... posted @ Monday, January 25, 2010 3:55 AM | Feedback (1)

Paradox: When Cloud Is Both the Wrong and the Right Solution Cloud offers an appealing “pay only for what you use” that makes it hard to resist. Paying on a per-usage hour basis sounds like a good deal, until you realize that your site is pretty much “always on” because of bots, miscreants, and users. In other words, you’re paying for 24x7x365 usage, baby, and that’s going to add up. Ironically, the answer to this problem is … cloud. Don and I occasionally discuss how much longer we should actually run applications on our own hardware. After all, the applications we’re running are generally pretty light-weight, and only see... posted @ Tuesday, October 13, 2009 4:30 AM | Feedback (1)

If Load Balancers Are Dead Why Do We Keep Talking About Them? Commoditized from solution to feature, from feature to function, load balancing is no longer a solution but rather a function of more advanced solutions that’s still an integral component for highly-available, fault-tolerant applications. Unashamed Parody of Monty Python and the Holy Grail Load balancers: I'm not dead. The Market: 'Ere, it says it’s not dead. Analysts: Yes it is. Load balancers: I'm not. The Market: It isn't. Analysts: Well, it will be soon,... posted @ Thursday, September 17, 2009 4:00 AM | Feedback (1)

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Makes Internal Cloud bursting Reality How to leverage a “private virtual cloud” such as Amazon VPC with your own dynamic infrastructure A couple of blog posts on Amazon’s recent announcement of its VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) have made much of the fact that the resources available within Amazon’s cloud via VPC aren’t public. These same commentaries seem to believe that this makes the resources not very valuable. One author called it a “terrible” implementation because “users can’t expose clients to the internet and can’t assign them IP addresses.” I understand how some might reach that conclusion if they... posted @ Monday, August 31, 2009 3:48 AM | Feedback (1)

The network ain’t big enough for the both of us There is a tendency to describe every device on a network as simply “the network” regardless of whether that device is dedicated to security, or application delivery (layer 4-7), or actual network (layer 2-3) functionality. It’s an artifact of aging data center architecture models that there exists an artificial line of demarcation between web and application servers and everything else. We used to depict “everything else” as a cloud, but with the emergence of The Cloud doing so simply complicates discussions even further because the “network” necessary to support a dynamic, on-demand operational model of computing like “cloud” is more... posted @ Friday, May 29, 2009 3:49 AM | Feedback (9)

Do you control your application network stack? You should. Owning the stack is important to security, but it’s also integral to a lot of other application delivery functions. And in some cases, it’s downright necessary. Hoff rants with his usual finesse in a recent posting with which I could not agree more. Not only does he point out the wrongness of equating SaaS with “The Cloud”, but points out the importance of “owning the stack” to security. Those that have control/ownership over the entire stack naturally have the opportunity for much tighter control over the "security" of their offerings.  Why?  because they... posted @ Wednesday, February 25, 2009 3:13 AM | Feedback (0)

Building an elastic environment requires elastic infrastructure One of the reasons behind some folks pushing for infrastructure as virtual appliances is the on-demand nature of a virtualized environment. When network and application delivery infrastructure hits capacity in terms of throughput - regardless of the layer of the application stack at which it happens - it's frustrating to think you might need to upgrade the hardware rather than just add more compute power via a virtual image. The truth is that this makes sense. The infrastructure supporting a virtualized environment should be elastic. It should be able to dynamically expand without requiring a new network architecture,... posted @ Tuesday, January 13, 2009 4:15 AM | Feedback (10)

Can the future of application delivery networks be found in neural network theory? I spent a big chunk of time a few nights ago discussing neural networks with my oldest son over IM. It's been a long time since I've had reason to dig into anything really related to AI (artificial intelligence) and at first I was thinking how cool it would be to be back in college just exploring topics like that. Then, because I was trying to balance a conversation with my oldest while juggling my (fussy) youngest on my lap, I thought no, no it wouldn't. Artificial neural networks (ANN) are good for teaching a system how to... posted @ Thursday, October 09, 2008 3:57 AM | Feedback (1)

Building a Cloudbursting Capable Infrastructure Reuven Cohen of the Elastic Vapor blog, in this article, puts forth the notion that infrastructure is required to enable cloudbursting and then asks an excellent question: To truly enable a capable cloudbursting infrastructure, I feel there needs to be a common consensus on how this may be archived and by what means. So the question in... posted @ Thursday, September 18, 2008 8:41 AM | Feedback (1)

Why Vulnerabilities Go Unpatched The good folks at Verizon Business who recently released their 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report sounded almost surprised by the discovery that "Intrusion attempts targeted the application layer more than the operating system and less than a quarter of attacks exploited vulnerabilities. Ninety percent of known vulnerabilities exploited by these attacks had patches available for at least six months prior to the breach." This led the researchers to conclude that "For the overwhelming majority of attacks exploiting known vulnerabilities, the patch had been available for months prior to the breach. [...] Also worthy of mention is that no... posted @ Thursday, June 19, 2008 5:24 AM | Feedback (0)

6 Reasons You Need an Application Delivery Controller Now Application delivery controllers, and load balancing in general, are often seen as solutions waiting for a problem to solve. We know what those problems are, but until we experience them we often don't feel a sense of urgency in acquiring and deploying an application delivery controller. While it's certainly true that an application delivery controller can solve many problems that arise, it's also true that there are benefits to acquiring and deploying an application delivery controller before it becomes absolutely necessary in order to save your application, your site, or your job. So here are six... posted @ Wednesday, June 18, 2008 7:59 AM | Feedback (0)

If You Have to Ask What the Big(O) Is You've Never ... Calculated It I recently made a passing remark about the value of being able to write the code for a linked list. The night before Don and I had been arguing with our oldest son about whether he should be using a stack or a linked list to implement a Java version of Freecell, hence data structures had been on my mind. Because he, like many college students (and graduates) today, hasn't had the proper instruction in the basics of these data structures he's somewhat at a loss to understand why a linked list is, in fact, a better solution... posted @ Monday, May 19, 2008 4:53 AM | Feedback (2)

Silos belong on farms, not in IT The role of "application delivery expert" is really coming into its own of late, along with the understanding that the traditional siloed approach to management of applications in IT no longer makes sense. TechTarget :: How networking professionals can prove their worth Jim Metzler [vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates] recently worked with NetQoS to survey more than 175 NOC and non-NOC IT professionals about how the evolving role of the NOC affects both network and IT professionals. Metzler moderated several sessions at Interop that had... posted @ Wednesday, May 14, 2008 11:29 AM | Feedback (0)

Web 2.0 Expo Wrap-up: Note to Self When explaining the benefits of an Application Delivery Network (ADN) it's a good idea to explain what it is first. Really. Like many people with deep knowledge of a particular subject, I sometimes forget that not everyone shares the same foundational knowledge. So when one of the Web 2.0 attendees who'd sat in on my session on scaling architectures for growth (which, of course, heavily relies on an application delivery network) visited me in F5's booth and essentially asked "What is it?" I realized my faux pas. I forgot to explain what it was in addition to what it did... posted @ Thursday, April 24, 2008 8:02 AM | Feedback (0)

Wanted: Application Delivery Network Experts On the heels of seeing a job posting for an Application Delivery Support Analyst this ComputerWorld article lists "Application Delivery" as #5 of the top 10 IT skills needed today. Unlike the job posting, this article actually seems to get the role of an application delivery expert right. While the author only cites the appropriate skills in general terms, at least she hit on all three of the primary categories and, to my surprise, added in the rarely cited fourth domain of application delivery: storage. Application delivery networks, according to Gartner, are required if companies want to deploy... posted @ Friday, April 18, 2008 12:21 PM | Feedback (0)

What a Tangled Web We Weave By deploying multiple point solutions when one would suffice I know it doesn't rhyme but honestly, between the number of words that rhyme with "weave" and the meter it was nearly impossible for my sleep deprived brain to come up with one that made sense. Feel free to come up with one and add it via the comments or mail me. Now it's time for a little story: In the beginning OSI created a model. Now the network was formless and empty, darkness was over the optical connections, and the spirit of the OSI was hovering over the web. ... posted @ Tuesday, April 01, 2008 11:32 AM | Feedback (0)

Integration You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Integration isn't a four letter word, but for many hapless IT folks stuck with the chore of integrating applications, it probably should be. SOA promised to make the world of application integration a painless, happy process in which the traditional basement sacrifice of live chickens and wild gyrations near a glowing rack of servers were no longer necessary. In many cases, the live chicken sacrifice was no longer necessary, but the wild gyrations were still a fact of integration experts' lives, mostly executed out of pain and frustration when systems failed... posted @ Tuesday, March 25, 2008 12:17 PM | Feedback (0)