applications

Do you have the right aaS? This isn’t all or nothing – focus on the right cloud model for each application and not the entire data center There’s a lot of discussion about why you should choose one cloud computing model over another and all of them miss the point entirely. This isn’t a mutually exclusive deal; it doesn’t have to be just one model chosen. In fact it shouldn’t be. Data centers aren’t comprised of single types of applications. There’s custom applications, deployed sometimes on well-known packaged platforms and in other cases on open source or lesser known platforms. There’s packaged... posted @ Thursday, August 06, 2009 4:31 AM | Feedback (1)

Five questions you need to ask about load balancing and the cloud Whether you are aware of it or not, if you’re deploying applications in the cloud or building out your own “enterprise class” cloud, you’re going to be using load balancing. Horizontal scaling of applications is a fairly well understood process that involves (old skool) server virtualization of the network kind: making many servers (instances) look like one to the outside world. When you start adding instances to increase capacity for your application, load balancing necessarily gets involved as it’s the way in which horizontal scalability is implemented today. The fact that you may have already... posted @ Thursday, June 25, 2009 3:14 AM | Feedback (5)

No soup for you! Automation isn’t some special brand of soup and there’s no “automation nazi” who can deny access to its benefits. The recent McKinsey report on cloud computing has pundits everywhere choking on their donuts and scrambling to dispute the report’s findings, which essentially end up saying “cloud ain’t cheaper.” I’m not going to rehash the arguments. I’m not going to analyze the report. But I am going to dig into a few comments on the report by Thorsten at RightScale who started off by saying: “Its claim that cloud computing (in the... posted @ Wednesday, April 22, 2009 3:18 AM | Feedback (4)

SOA Announces Comeback Tour Finding new life for SOA in the cloud We’ve been having quite a few discussions with analysts over the past few months on the subject of “cloud”. The interesting thing about these discussions is the vast array of points of view from which those analysts are viewing “cloud”. Some are focused on the network aspects, others on pricing/differentiation, and some are even very focused on what “cloud” means to applications – and the organizations that will, allegedly, take advantage of the cloud as a means of application deployment. One such analyst is Daryl Plummer of Gartner. Daryl... posted @ Tuesday, April 07, 2009 3:37 AM | Feedback (3)

Cloud Computing: Application session management in a dynamic environment Deploying applications in a cloud computing environment, whether private or public, requires a bit of proactive thinking on the ramifications of a dynamic, on-demand environment, particularly when considering the impact on application session management. Consider that today, application sessions are often relied upon to remain in memory, on the application server, for hours. Persistence is achieved by storing the session in a file if necessary on the local server rather than in a database. This is particularly true of web applications developed in scripting languages like PHP that do not require a separate application server. But users who... posted @ Thursday, December 04, 2008 7:15 AM | Feedback (1)

Managing Virtual Infrastructure Requires an Application Centric Approach Thanks to a tweet from @Archimedius, I found an insightful blog post from cloud computing provider startup Kaavo that essentially makes the case for a move to application-centric management rather than the traditional infrastructure-centric systems on which we've always relied. We need to have an application centric approach for deploying, managing, and monitoring applications.  A software which can provisions optimal virtual servers, network, storage (storage, CPU, bandwidth, Memory, alt.) resources on-demand and provide automation and ease of use to application owners to easily and securely run and maintain their applications will be critical for the... posted @ Monday, December 01, 2008 2:59 AM | Feedback (4)

Understanding network-side scripting We all understand the lines in the sand (or the architectural diagram) that separate client-side scripting from server-side scripting. It's very clear that client-side scripting, e.g. JavaScript, VBScript, ActionScript, executes on the client while server-side scripting, e.g. PHP, ASP, executes on the server. But what about network-side scripting? "There is no such thing!" might be the first response to this question, but I beg to disagree. Programmable proxies, a la F5's BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, that provide a scripting language such as iRules, are simultaneously client-side and server-side, with the best definition to describe their placement in architectures being network-side... posted @ Friday, October 31, 2008 5:26 AM | Feedback (9)

Infrastructure 2.0: The Feedback Loop Must Include Applications Greg Ness calls it "connectivity intelligence" but it seems that we're really talking about is the ability of network infrastructure to both be agile itself and enable IT agility at the same time. Brittle, inflexible infrastructures - whether they are implemented in hardware or software or both - are not agile enough to deal with an evolving, dynamic application architecture. Greg says in a previous post The static infrastructure was not architected to keep up with these new levels of change and complexity without a new layer... posted @ Wednesday, October 29, 2008 4:08 AM | Feedback (3)

Hope to see you at SD Best Practices I'm off Monday to Boston for SD Best Practices. This is the first time I (and F5) have been at the show, and we're all excited about the opportunity to meet some new folks. Monday is a busy day, with travel and our keynote, "The Best Kept Secret in Building Scalable Applications." Wednesday, fellow blogger Colin and I will be running a technical session on the "9 Things You Can Do to Build Scalable Applications (and 3 You Can't)" that promises to be a lot of fun. In between our speaking engagements, we'll be hanging out... posted @ Friday, October 24, 2008 8:26 AM | Feedback (0)

3 steps to a fast, secure, and reliable application infrastructure You have just been promoted to CTO of Widgets, Inc. (Congratulations, by the way!) In your new role, on which of the following will you focus the most attention (and budget): (a) the network (b) the applications (c) the data Trick... posted @ Thursday, October 23, 2008 4:40 AM | Feedback (0)

Data center consolidation drives business case for secure remote access Everybody is jumping on the data center consolidation bandwagon again. It never really went away, it just took a leisurely Sunday drive through the countryside for a few years before turning back up on the streets of busy data centers everywhere. RELATED LINKS This time, it's virtualization that's driving consolidation, and this time it appears that the movement may actually have a better chance at... posted @ Monday, October 13, 2008 4:16 AM | Feedback (0)

My application is not the next Twitter so why should I care about high availability? It often seems that load balancing and high availability are associated with only high traffic sites, like Twitter and Google. But load balancing and high availability isn't just for Web 2.0 phenomenons or web monsters; it can be an invaluable tool in your strategy to maintain service level agreements and customer satisfaction no matter how large or small your customer base - and data center - might be. ... posted @ Tuesday, September 23, 2008 4:34 AM | Feedback (3)

The Three "Itys" of Cloud Computing No matter where you deploy it, it's still your application Related Reading Everyone's talking about cloud computing and cloudware (applications in the cloud) services and pointing to the hiccups of several major cloud providers already this year. Reliability, availability, and security are still major concerns, and yet some reports indicate these three "itys" aren't impeding adoption of cloud computing models at all. ... posted @ Wednesday, September 17, 2008 3:20 AM | Feedback (0)

The impact of the network on ... everything Back in the day when I was a technical architect and actually wrote code (yes, they did let me do that once) I got into a discussion with the rest of my team about the impact of our code on performance. I was saying white-space was evil because it can unnecessarily increase the number of packets necessary to transfer data. I wanted to go through the code (mostly JavaScript and HTML output) and reduce the white-space to make application... posted @ Thursday, September 11, 2008 8:01 AM | Feedback (1)

If Kernighan were a network architect he would say... My brother sent over a question to Don and I on a coding problem he's having. Yes, most of my family members are geeks, thank you. You can probably blame that on my COBOL-coding mother. In any case, his signature always contains this lovely quote from Brian Kernighan: Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. That got me thinking about network topology and... posted @ Wednesday, September 03, 2008 9:28 AM | Feedback (1)

Packets, shmackets. What about the apps? As I was reading the Internet this morning I happened across an article with "Tips for Optimizing Your WAN (Wide Area Network)" and I thought, "Huh. That's pretty ... generic."   While the article uses SAP applications as an example, it speaks in terms of generalities. Selective ACKs, quality of service, data reduction techniques, and HTTP compression. That's when I said, "Whoop de doo." Really, these techniques have nothing to do with SAP and applications and everything to do with packets. Every WAN and acceleration solution can do this stuff. I'm not really picking... posted @ Wednesday, August 27, 2008 5:14 AM | Feedback (1)

Links, Sex, and Application Fluency I ran across an interesting site containing an algorithm that predicts your sex based on browser history. This algorithm uses demographics from popular sites, determines which popular sites you have visited by digging through your browser history, and then predicts what gender you are based on your browsing habits.  This algorithm sounds a lot like an adaptation of the Turing Test. But instead of predicting which of two participants in the test is human, this one predicts what gender they are. The Turing Test has long been the standard for judging the intelligence of a computer system, even... posted @ Friday, July 18, 2008 5:11 AM | Feedback (5)

Horizontal and Vertical Security: Which do you need? No one questions the need to secure applications today, we just argue over how we should do it. Let's take a break for a minute from that debate to ensure that we don't get so focused on layer 7 (application) that we forget about the rest of the stack and the importance of securing it as well. Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, an application is only as secured as its most vulnerable layer in the stack. If your application is well secured, but the network layer (IP) is wide... posted @ Wednesday, July 16, 2008 8:24 AM | Feedback (0)

Recession Proofing Your Application Infrastructure Cisco CEO John Chambers recently announced that the slowdown in corporate IT spending will continue until 2009. NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Cisco chief John Chambers has some bad news for the technology sector: He no longer expects the recent slowdown in tech spending to pick up until next year at the earliest. IT is still spending dollars, but not as freely as in past years. In a constrained budgetary environment, IT now has to ask the question, "What's going to give me the best bang for my buck?" ... posted @ Tuesday, July 15, 2008 5:16 AM | Feedback (0)

Where art thou, Internet? In an interesting, if not annoying to those affected, situation it appears that Windows XP SP3 has been named the culprit in a string of broadband router crashes and reboots. This is obviously causing a great deal of stress to those affected, who must certainly find it difficult to obtain the necessary firmware upgrades released by the router manufacturer without access to the Internet. Dan Warne writes: Broadband modem/router maker Billion says XP SP3 has been causing its BiPAC 5200-series routers to go into a constant crash and reboot cycle. ... posted @ Monday, June 09, 2008 5:08 AM | Feedback (0)

Isn't That Just a Bunch of Templates? An analyst friend of mine recently asked about F5's Application Ready Networks. The question was, "Isn't that just a bunch of templates?" Now it's true that this particular analyst friend is not an application analyst, so the question was a good one coming from his background, but it got me to thinking that if he was confused, maybe others were as well. So what's an Application Ready Network anyway? F5 has a long history of deep strategic partnerships with application vendors like Oracle, BEA, Microsoft, and SAP. Through these partnerships, and F5's comprehensive technology center in Seattle, our... posted @ Wednesday, December 19, 2007 9:47 AM | Feedback (0)

Relative Speed When being chased by a dragon, you don't need to be faster than the dragon. You just need to be faster than the halfling behind you. I had a lot of discussions at RSA this past week, and of course some of them centered on performance. One of the challenges often associated with pure proxy-based application anything involves dealing with the argument that proxies degrade performance, especially in something as intense as an application firewall. That's because of the associated computational cost of buffering input, reassembling packets, and parsing through data in addition to the requirement of managing TCP connections... posted @ Monday, February 12, 2007 12:49 PM | Feedback (0)