scalability
There are 89 entries for the tag scalability
Is it Linux? Is it third-party? Is it proprietary? Isn’t #vcmp just a #virtualization platform? Just what is inside an F5 BIG-IP that makes it go vroom? Over the years I’ve seen some pretty wild claims about what, exactly, is “inside” a BIG-IP that makes it go. I’ve read articles that claim it’s Linux, that it’s based on Linux, that it’s voodoo magic. I’ve heard competitors make up information about just about every F5 technology – TMOS, vCMP, iRules – that enables a BIG-IP to do what it does. There are two sources of...
#VDI #quasar #mobile The proliferation of mobile devices is pushing VDI closer to being “the solution” of the year to resolve the increasing complexity – and costs – associated with consumerization. Considering the innate differences between just the two most popular mobile operating systems – Android and iOS – gives rise to understanding how costly and complex an infrastructure might need to be to support both. It’s not at all unlike the issues with server virtualization. Management and delivery architectures require different solutions depending on the platform, so despite potentially costly investments to scale, organizations are often staying...
Hint: The answer lies in being aware of the entire application context and a little pre-planning Thanks to the maturity of load balancing services and technology, dynamically scaling applications in pre-cloud and cloud computing environments is a fairly simple task. But doing it right – in a way that maintains performance while maximizing resources and minimizing costs well, that is not so trivial a task unless you have the right tools. SCALABILITY RECAP Before we can explain how to do it right, we have to dig into the basics of how scalability (and...
#HTML5 Web Sockets are poised to completely change scalability models … again. Using Web Sockets instead of XMLHTTPRequest and AJAX polling methods will dramatically reduce the number of connections required by servers and thus has a positive impact on performance. But that reliance on a single connection also changes the scalability game, at least in terms of architecture. Here comes the (computer) science… If you aren’t familiar with what is sure to be a disruptive web technology you should be. Web Sockets, while not broadly in use (it is only a specification, and a...
#infosec #apt Advanced persistent threats are the new black in security. A more context-aware architecture may help avoid compromise and the ensuing ambush. Meet the new attack, same as the old attack. That’s because it is an old attack. Really. It’s an attack that’s already been executed, the results of which have lain dormant waiting for the highest bidder to lease it out. Advanced persistent threats or APT are not new, but because of their longevity are only beginning to receive the attention they deserve. An APT is so named because the exploit mechanism is deposited long before...
#v11 ScaleN breaks out of the traditional infrastructure scalability mold We previously introduced ScaleN but we didn’t really dig into how it’s enabled, other than to mention it’s been made possible in part by leveraging F5’s vCMP (virtual Clustered Multi-Processing) technology, which puts the “virtual” in “virtual networking.” The basic premise of infrastructure scalability is that if the component providing the scalability fails, well, the service for which it provides HA fails. That’s not good. So it was that HA architectures employing a variety of models came about to ensure that such a scenario...
It’s how much load that really generates and how it scales to meet the challenge. There’s some amount of debate whether Facebook really crossed over the one trillion page view per month threshold. While one report says it did, another respected firm says it did not; that its monthly page views are a mere 467 billion per month. In the big scheme of things, the discrepancy is somewhat irrelevant, as neither show the true load on Facebook’s infrastructure – which is far more impressive a set of numbers than its externally measured “page view”...
Examining responsibility for auto-scalability in cloud computing environments. [ If you’re coming in late, you may want to also read previous entries on the network, application, and management framework ] Today, the argument regarding responsibility for auto-scaling in cloud computing as well as highly virtualized environments remains mostly constrained to e-mail conversations and gatherings at espresso machines. It’s an argument that needs more industry and “technology consumer” awareness, because it’s ultimately one of the underpinnings of a dynamic data center architecture; it’s the piece of the puzzle that makes or breaks one of...
Examining responsibility for auto-scalability in cloud computing environments.
[ If you’re coming in late, you may want to also read previous entries on the network and the application ]
Today, the argument regarding responsibility for auto-scaling in cloud computing as well as highly virtualized environments remains mostly constrained to e-mail conversations and gatherings at espresso machines. It’s an argument that needs more industry and “technology consumer” awareness, because it’s ultimately one of the underpinnings of a dynamic data center architecture; it’s the piece of the puzzle that makes or breaks one of the highest value propositions of cloud computing...
Examining responsibility for auto-scalability in cloud computing environments.
[ If you’re coming in late, you may want to also read the previous entry on application-driven scalability ]
Today, the argument regarding responsibility for auto-scaling in cloud computing as well as highly virtualized environments remains mostly constrained to e-mail conversations and gatherings at espresso machines. It’s an argument that needs more industry and “technology consumer” awareness, because it’s ultimately one of the underpinnings of a dynamic data center architecture; it’s the piece of the puzzle that makes or breaks one of the highest value propositions of cloud computing and virtualization:...
Examining responsibility for auto-scalability in cloud computing environments.
Today, the argument regarding responsibility for auto-scaling in cloud computing as well as highly virtualized environments remains mostly constrained to e-mail conversations and gatherings at espresso machines. It’s an argument that needs more industry and “technology consumer” awareness, because it’s ultimately one of the underpinnings of a dynamic data center architecture; it’s the piece of the puzzle that makes or breaks one of the highest value propositions of cloud computing and virtualization: scalability.
The question appears to be a simple one: what component is responsible not only for recognizing the need...
#v11 Application-centric analytics provide better visibility into performance, capacity and infrastructure utilization Maintaining performance and capacity of web sites and critical applications – especially those of the revenue-generating ilk – can be particularly difficult in complex environments. The mix of infrastructure and integration can pose problems when trying to determine exactly where capacity may be constrained or from where performance troubles are originating. Visibility into the application delivery chain is critical if we are to determine where and at what points in the chain performance is being impaired or constraints on capacity imposed, perhaps...
Pondering the impact of cloud and Web 2.0 on traditional middleware messaging-based architectures and PaaS.
It started out innocently enough with a simple question, “What exactly *is* the model for PaaS services scalability? If based on HTTP/REST API integration, fairly easy. If native middleware… input?” You’ll forgive the odd phrasing – Twitter’s limitations sometimes make conversations of this nature … interesting.
The discussion culminated in what appeared to be the sentiment that middleware was mostly obsolete with respect to PaaS.
THE OLD WAY
Very briefly for those of you who are more infrastructure / network minded than application architecture fluent,...
JSON Activity Streams offers some interesting new scalability pattern possibilities via layer 7 (application) switching. One of the most interesting aspects of deploying applications is figuring out how to scale them. There’s many options, from simple scale out and scale up to more advanced architectural designs that take advantage of external, application switching services. The flexibility in the latter has become more obvious with the advent of not just cloud computing , but its underlying virtualized auto-scaling technologies. Combined with more targeted scalability strategies, infrastructure services provide a more operationally and financially efficient means of scaling...
It’s kind of like thinking globally but acting locally… While I rail against the use of the too vague and cringe-inducing descriptor “workload” with respect to scalability and cloud computing , it is perhaps at least bringing to the fore an important distinction that needs to be made: that of the impact of different compute resource utilization patterns on scalability. What categorizing workloads has done is to separate “types” of processing and resource needs: some applications require more I/O, some less. Others are CPU hogs while others chew up memory at an alarming rate....
The former is easy. The latter? Not so much. In the many, many – really, many – posts I’ve penned regarding cloud computing , and in particular the notion of Intercloud, I’ve struggled to come up with a way to simply articulate the problem inherent in current migratory and, for that matter, interoperability models. Recently I found the word I had long been groping for: architecture. Efforts from various working groups, standards bodies and even individual vendors still remain focused on an application; a packaged up application with a sprinkling of meta-data designed to make a...
It is the database tier and its unique characteristics that ultimate determine where an application will be deployed. cloud computing is mostly about “elasticity.” The extraction and contraction of resources based on demand. It is the contraction of resources which is oft times forgotten but without it, cloud computing and highly dynamic, virtualized infrastructures are little more than seamless capacity growth engines. For web and application architectural tiers, the contraction of resources is as much a requirement to realize the benefits of shared, dynamic capacity as the ability to rapidly expand. But in the database...
Improving the availability, performance, and security of Microsoft Lync Server 2010 with F5 BIG-IP
The word “consolidation” generally brings to mind these days a reduction in physical equipment, whether that physical equipment be servers or infrastructure. But consolidation can – and does – also refer to the bringing together of similar technologies in software to provide a unified system that better supports integration across similar functions.
It is the latter definition that has become common of late in the communications space, with providers and ISVs alike consolidating and unifying the communication and collaboration experience not only across functions but...
A deeper dive on how to apply scalability best practices using infrastructure services. So it’s all well and good to say that you can apply scalability patterns to infrastructure and provide a high-level overview of the theory but it’s always much nicer to provide more detail so someone can actually execute on such a strategy. Thus, today we’re going to dig a bit deeper into applying a scalability pattern – horizontal partitioning, to be exact – to an application infrastructure as a means to scale out an application in a way that’s efficient and supports growth...
A deeper dive on how to apply scalability patterns at the infrastructure layer. So it’s all well and good to say that you can apply scalability patterns to infrastructure and provide a high-level overview of the theory but it’s always much nicer to provide more detail so someone can actually execute on such a strategy. Thus, today we’re going to dig a bit deeper into applying a scalability pattern – vertical partitioning, to be exact – to an application infrastructure as a means to scale out an application in a way that’s efficient and supports growth...
If you’re replicating session state across application servers you probably need to rethink your strategy. There’s other options – more efficient options – than wasting RAM and, ultimately, money. Although the discussion of Oracle’s “cloud in a box” announcement at OpenWorld dominated much of the tweet-stream this week there were other discussions going on that proved to not only interesting but a good reminder of how cloud computing has brought to the fore the importance of architecture. Foremost in my mind was what started as a lamentation on the fact that Amazon EC2...
Too often software design patterns are overlooked by network and application delivery network architects but these patterns are often equally applicable to addressing a broad range of architectural challenges in the application delivery tier of the data center.
The “High Scalability” blog is fast becoming one of my favorite reads. Last week did not disappoint with a post highlighting a set of scalability design patterns that was, apparently, inspired by yet another High Scalability post on “6 Ways to Kill Your Servers: Learning to Scale the Hard Way.”
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Knowing the algorithms is only half the battle, you’ve got to understand a whole lot more to design a scalable architecture.
Citrix’s Craig Ellrod has a series of blog posts on the basic (industry standard) load balancing algorithms. These are great little posts for understanding the basics of load balancing algorithms like round robin, least connections, and least (fastest) response time. Craig’s posts are accurate in their description of the theoretical (designed) behavior of the algorithms. The thing that’s missing from these posts (and maybe Craig will get to this eventually) is context. Not the context...
Cloud is more likely to make an application deployment more – not less – complex, but the benefits are ultimately worth it. I was a bit disconcerted by the notion put forward that cloud-based applications are somehow less complex than their non-cloud, non-virtualized predecessors. In reality, it’s the same application, after all, and the only thing that has really changed is the infrastructure and its complexity. Take BPM (Business Process Management) as an example. It was recently asserted on Twitter that cloud-based BPM “enables agility”, followed directly by the statement, “There’s no long rollout of a...
What goes up, must come down. The question is how much it hurts (the user).
An oft ignored side of elasticity is scaling down. Everyone associates scaling out/up with elasticity of cloud computing but the other side of the coin is just as important, maybe more so. After all, what goes up must come down. The trick is to scale down gracefully, i.e. to do it in such a way as to prevent the disruption of service to existing users while simultaneously trying to scale back down after a spike in demand.
The ramifications of not scaling down are...
Discussions on scaling are focused on the application, but don’t forget everything else. And I do mean everything. You played with dominos as a child, I’m sure, or perhaps your children do now. You know what happens when...
Understanding the relationship between SNAT and connection limitations in full proxy intermediaries.
If you’ve previously delved into the world of SNAT (which is becoming increasingly important in large-scale implementations, such as those in the service provider world) you remember that SNAT essentially provides an IP address from which a full-proxy intermediary can communicate with server-side resources and maintain control over the return routing path.
There is an interesting relationship between intermediaries that leverage two separate TCP stacks (such as full-proxies) and SNAT in terms of concurrent (open) connections that can be supported by any given “virtual” server...
When strategies are formed it quickly becomes obvious that cloud computing is more about balance than anything else. At a time when you’d think cloud computing would be the primary “go to” strategy for managing scale and rapid growth multiple well-known and demanding organizations are building their own data centers instead. With all the hype around cloud being faster, cheaper, and more efficient these folks must be crazy, right? Not at all. In fact, these moves illustrate the growing friction between the economy of scale offered by cloud computing and the control and flexibility...
No, it’s not global server load balancing or GeoLocation. It’s something more… because knowing location is only half the battle and the other half requires the ability to make on-demand decisions based on context. In most cases today, global application delivery bases the decision on which location should service a given client based on the location of the user, availability of the application at each deployment location and, if the user is lucky, some form of performance-related service-level agreement. With the advent of concepts like cloud bursting and migratory applications that can be deployed at any number of...
It seems only fair that as the Internet caused the problem, it should solve it. One of the negatives of deploying an Internet-scale infrastructure and application is that until it’s put to the test, you can’t have 100 percent confidence that it will scale as expected. If you do, you probably shouldn’t. Applications and infrastructure that perform well – and correctly – at nominal scale may begin to act wonky as load increases. Dan Bartow , VP at SOASTA, says it is still often load balancing configuration errors that crop up during testing that impedes scalability...
Service virtualization is the opposite of – and complementary implementation to – server virtualization. One of the biggest challenges with any implementation of elastic scalability as it relates to virtualization and cloud computing is managing that scalability at run-time and at design (configuration) time. The goal is to transparently scale out some service – network or application – in such a way as to eliminate the operational disruption often associated with scaling up (and down) efforts. Service virtualization allows virtually any service to be transparently scaled out with no negative impact to the service and,...
load balancing fu for developers to avoid losing what is vital business data I want my client IP Now read the manuals that's the way you do it Give the IP to the SLB That ain't workin' that’s the way to do it Set the gateway on the server to your SLB (many apologies to Dire Straits) My brother called me last week with a load balancing emergency. See, for most retailers the “big day”...
Hidden deep within an article on scalability was a fascinating insight. Once you read it, it makes sense, but because cloud computing forces our attention to the logical (compute resources) rather than the physical (hardware) it’s easy to overlook. “Cloud computing is actually making this problem a little bit worse,” states Leach [CTO of domain registrar Name.com], “because it is so easy just to throw hardware at the problem. But at the end of the day, you’ve still got to figure, ‘I shouldn’t have to have all this hardware when my site doesn’t...
Just when you thought the misconceptions regarding cloud computing couldn’t get any worse…they do. We have, in general, moved past the question “what is cloud” and onto “what do I need to do to move an application to the cloud?” But the question “what is cloud” appears not to have reached consensus and thus advice on how to move an application into the cloud might be based on an understanding of cloud that is less than (or not at all) accurate. The problem is exacerbated by the reality that there are several types or models...
Standardization at the application platform layer enables specialization of infrastructure resulting in greater economy of scale In all versions of Dungeons and Dragons there is a nifty arcane spell for wizards called “Mirror Image.” What this nifty spell does is duplicates an image of the wizard. This is useful because it’s really hard for all those nasty orcs, goblins, and bugbears to tell which image is the real one. Every image does exactly what the “real” wizard does. The wizard is not impacted by the dismissal of one of the images; neither are the other images impacted by...
Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking dynamic infrastructure is all about scalability. If it were the case that a “dynamic infrastructure” was focused solely on issues of scalability then I’d have nothing left to write. That problem, the transparent, non-disruptive scaling of applications - in both directions – has already been solved. Modern load balancers handle such scenarios with alacrity. Luckily, it’s not the case that dynamic infrastructure is all about scalability. In fact, that’s simply one facet in a much larger data center diamond named context-awareness. “Fixed, flat, predictable, no-spike...
If you don’t know how scaling services work in a cloud environment you may not like the results One of the benefits of cloud computing, and in particular IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is that the infrastructure is, well, a service. It’s abstracted, and that means you don’t need to know a lot about the nitty-gritty details of how it works. Right? Well, mostly right. While there’s no reason you should need to know how to specifically configure, say, an F5 BIG-IP load balancing solution when deploying an application with GoGrid, you probably should...
No, scalability may not be rocket science but it is computer science and not nearly as easy as it might appear In what might be considered an ironic statement, scalability in cloud computing environments is as much about decreasing capacity as it is increasing capacity. I know, puts my knickers in a twist, too. The description of “scalability” associated with cloud computing in almost every definition that’s put forth1, however, clearly indicates the need for elastic scalability and it is that modifier that makes all the difference in the world. ...
Are you scaling applications or servers? Auto-scaling cloud brokerages appear to be popping up left and right. Following in the footsteps of folks like RightScale, these startups provide automated monitoring and scalability services for cloud computing customers. That’s all well and good because the flexibility and control over scalability in many cloud computing environments is, shall we say, somewhat lacking the mechanisms necessary to efficiently make use of the “elastic scalability” offered by cloud computing providers. The problem is (and you knew there was a problem, didn’t you?) that most of these companies are still scaling...
How should auto-scaling work, and why doesn’t it? Although “rapid elasticity” is part of NIST’s definition of cloud computing, it may be interesting to note that many cloud computing environments don’t include this capability at all – or charge you extra for it. Many providers offer the means by which you can configure a load balancing service and manually add or remove instances, but there may not be a way to automate that process. If it’s manual, it’s certain “rapid” in the sense that’s it’s probably faster than you can do it (because you’d have to acquire hardware...
When you combine virtualization with auto-scaling without implementing proper controls you run the risk of scaling yourself silly or worse – broke.
You virtualized your applications. You set up an architecture that supports auto-scaling (on-demand) to free up your operators. All is going well, until the end of the month.
Applications are failing. Not just one, but all of them. After hours of digging into operational dashboards and logs and monitoring consoles you find the problem: one of the applications, which experiences extremely heavy processing demands at the end of the month, has scaled itself out too far and...
In this case “baby” is load balancing and the corner is cloud computing. SocialCloudNow recently wrote up a pretty darn accurate (which is hard to find these days) description of “cloud computing” by walking through the components required. The author did an excellent job – especially where he dove into the relationship between orchestration and cloud computing. Loved that a lot – most folks ignore that piece of cloud computing even though it’s very, very important. But I was a bit put off (okay, a lot put off) at one statement: ...
Ultimately a highly-scalable, high-performance architecture will rely on choosing the right form factor in the right places at the right time.
Scale is not just about servers, and for corporate data centers and cloud computing providers looking to realize the benefits of rapid elasticity and on-demand provisioning scale simply must be one of the foundational premises upon which a dynamic data center is built. And that includes the infrastructure.
This isn’t the first time I’ve touched upon this subject, but it’s a concept that needs to be reiterated – especially with so many pundits and analysts looking for the...
Surprised? I was, but I shouldn’t have been. While working on other topics I ran across an interesting slide in a presentation given by Microsoft at TechEd Europe 2009 on virtualization and Exchange. Specifically the presenter called out the average 12% overhead incurred from the hypervisor on systems in internal testing. Intuitively it seems obvious that a hypervisor will incur overhead; it is, after all, an application that is executing and thus requires CPU, I/O, and RAM to perform its tasks. That led to me to wonder if there was more data on the overhead from other...
Or more apropos, it’s in the complex and intimate relationship between applications and their infrastructure. What’s the difference between a highly virtualized corporate data center and a cloud computing environment? There are probably many, but the most important distinction – and the one that earns the latter a “cloud computing” tag – is certainly that the former lacks a comprehensive orchestration system and was likely not architected using a rapid, infrastructure inclusive, scalability strategy. Mitch Garnaat, “The Elastician”, recently managed to sum up what should be every modern data center’s motto in a...
Scaling applications that include AJAX and non-AJAX components may require more than just tuning your web server A common problem after deploying a Web 2.0 AJAX-based application shows itself through poor performance or lower capacity on the server, often both. Web serving tuning is almost always the first step in improving performance and capacity, but the inherently competing behavior of AJAX-requests and “normal” HTTP requests quickly becomes problematic as well. Tune for the AJAX requests and performance of regular old HTTP requests suffers. Tune for regular old HTTP requests, and performance of AJAX-requests suffer. This is...
We seem on the verge of repeating the mistakes associated with failed SOA implementations: ignoring the larger issue of architecture. Everyone – from pundit to public – is asking the same question: “Where are the network virtual appliances?” But fewer people seem to be asking a question that needs to go hand-in-hand with that one: “Where are the architectural guidelines to support deployment of network virtual appliances?” SOA has been deemed by many to be a failure in part because it lacked true architectural guidance. Architects were simply unable – whether by lack of skills or training or...
I haven’t heard the term “graceful degradation” in a long time, but as we continue to push the limits of data centers and our budgets to provide capacity it’s a concept we need to revisit. You might have heard that Twitter was down (again) last week. What you might not have heard (or read) is some interesting crunchy bits about how Twitter attempts to maintain availability by degrading capabilities gracefully when services are over capacity. “Twitter Down, Overwhelmed by Whales” from Data Center Knowledge offered up the juicy details: ...
Sometimes the best answer to a problem is to hit the reset button, but it should probably be the last answer, not the first. My cohort Pete Silva attended the 2009 Cloud Computing and Virtualization Conference & Expo and offered up a summary of one of the sessions he enjoyed (‘Cloud Security - It's Nothing New; It Changes Everything!’ (pdf)) in a recent post, “Virtualization is Real” One of the sessions I enjoyed was ‘Cloud Security - It's Nothing New; It Changes Everything!’ (pdf) from Glenn Brunette, a Distinguished Engineer and Chief...
Microsoft has made some fairly substantial changes to the core architecture of Exchange 2010. Given that messaging can only be described as business critical today, it’s no surprise that many new aspects of Exchange 2010 and in particular its new architecture are designed to improve availability and management of its messaging systems. Exchange 2010 includes many changes to its core architecture. In Exchange 2010, new features such as incremental deployment, mailbox database copies, and database availability groups work with other features such as shadow redundancy and transport dumpster to provide a new, unified...
Carrying over the provisioning and capacity planning techniques used in a traditional data center to cloud computing negates the full power of the Force cloud computing. One of the benefits of cloud computing is supposed to be efficiency, particularly in the utilization of compute resources. Over-provisioning of compute resources has long been one way in which IT combats the need for scalability and availability of applications but this often leaves a large percentage of compute resources unused. The utilization rule once employed as a means to ensure availability and performance of applications, i.e. no device...
Vertical scalability used to require optimizations inside the application, at the code level. Cloud computing changes the nature of vertical scalability and, one hopes, will lead to a new model of scalability based on the capabilities of Infrastructure 2.0 and increasingly granular resource management capabilities. RightScale recently offered up its own analysis of Amazon Usage Estimates and while the details they provide on Amazon usage from their vantage point is very interesting I found one of their related observations even more fascinating: In earlier days the predominant method of scaling was by...
“Where are you storing your data these days,” he asked casually after trying to come up with a better opening line but failing. “Ah, dahhling,” she drawled while gesturing in no particular direction with an almost deprecating wave of her hand. “The Cloud, where else?” Thanks to the nearly constant misapplication of the phrase “The Cloud” and the lack of agreement on a clear definition from technical quarters I must announce that “The Cloud” is no longer a synonym for “Cloud Computing”. It can’t be. Do not be misled into trying, it will only cause you...
A lack of ability in the cloud to distinguish illegitimate from legitimate requests could lead to unanticipated costs in the wake of an attack. How do you put a price on uptime and more importantly, who should pay for it? A “Perfect Cloud”, in my opinion, would be one in which the cloud provider’s infrastructure intelligently manages availability and performance such that when it’s necessary new instances of an application are launched to ensure meeting the customer’s defined performance and availability thresholds. You know, on-demand scalability that requires no manual intervention. It just “happens” the way it should....
A question I often hear is “Why don’t you just move load balancing/application delivery into a virtual appliance model?” My answer is almost always “That’s the wrong question.” The question that should be asked is “What are the potential impacts to the infrastructure and application?” Because the whole point of deploying an application delivery solution – virtual appliance or hardware – is about improving some facet of the infrastructure in order to better deliver your applications. So in order to determine whether using a virtual appliance is a good idea or not you have to ask what the impacts might...
Operational efficiency in the cloud comes in part from automation and orchestration as well as from the outsourcing of management and maintenance of the hardware. While you can’t achieve the latter without cloud or hosting externally, you can realize a lot of the same efficiencies in a traditional architecture just by leveraging existing collaborative capabilities of infrastructure 2.0. Glenn Gruber of Software Industry Insights in “Who’ll Be the First to Offer Cash for Infrastructure” (which is a great read in general) says: And for those who are thinking about evaluating a private cloud...
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...
Idle resources will always need to exist, especially in a cloud architecture With IT focused on efficiency – for reduction in operating expenses and in the interests of creating a greener computing center – there’s a danger that we’ll attempt to achieve 100% efficiency. You know, the data center in which no compute resources are wasted; all are applied toward performing some task – whether administrative, revenue generating, development cycles, or business-related – and no machine is allowed to sit around idle. Because, after all, idleness is the devil’s playground, isn’t it? But before...
Without processes the cloud is not a cloud So you’ve virtualized your application infrastructure using VMware or Microsoft or the “virtualization solution de jour.” You probably also virtualized the application access via an application delivery solution so you can provide scalability on-demand. You might have even virtualized your storage to make it more efficient. Basically, you’re all ready to go and operators are standing by … And therein lies the problem: operators are standing by. The on-demand piece of your little private cloud is almost entirely managed by human beings, which means...
When it comes to availability, coding a solution is just delaying the inevitable Jonathan Howell, in Five Things That Will Kill Your Site – an excellent read, by the way, for all web application developers – asserts that there are several ways to avoid web application death that do not require the implementation of “expensive redundant hardware with top of the line load balancers and an enterprise class SAN.” In general he’s got some good advice to which application developers should pay attention, but I had to disagree with his assertion that a solution to provide graceful degradation...
Without availability scalability is irrelevant I really enjoyed Jeff Atwood’s recent blog on Scaling Up vs Scaling Out, which includes a fairly detailed comparison of the costs associated with each approach to scalability. I enjoyed it because not only did it take into consideration the cost of hardware, but also remembered to include the cost of software licensing. And of course there’s the fact that Jeff’s site is focused on development and coding, and this discussion broadened the discussion into the realm of application networking – a demesne with which I am of course particularly fond. ...
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...
Increasingly WAN optimization solutions are adopting the application acceleration moniker, implying a focus that just does not exist. WAN optimization solutions are designed to improve the performance of the network, not applications, and while the former does beget improvements of the latter, true application acceleration solutions offer greater opportunity for improving efficiency and end-user experience as well as aiding in consolidation efforts that result in a reduction in operating and capital expenditure costs. WAN Optimization solutions are, as their title implies, focused on the WAN; on the network. It is their task to improve the utilization of bandwidth,...
While doing some research on a related topic I dug into the technical aspects of Obama's Blueprint For Change. The plans around technology are fairly nebulous, with a few exceptions, such as those related specifically to broadband access: Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Barack Obama believes we can get broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives. On this front, a U.S. House committee recommended yesterday...
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,...
You may recall a recent overview on network-side scripting that described a few uses of this technology integrated with application delivery controllers. With thousands of examples of the uses of network-side scripting it's hard to choose just one to adequately represent its potential. Luckily, we don't have to stick to just one. Viva la Internet! Based on the technical session the great network-side scripting guru Colin and I ran at SD Best Practices in October, I've pulled nine ways to use network-side scripting that can enhance the scalability, security, and performance of web applications into a presentation for...
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...
Horizontal scalability achieved through the implementation of a load balancing solution is easy. It's vertical scalability that's always been and remains difficult to achieve, and it's even more important in a cloud computing or virtualized environment because now it can hurt you where it counts: the bottom line. Horizontal scalability is the ability of an application to be scaled up to meet demand through replication and the distribution of requests across a pool or farm of servers. It's the traditional load balanced model, and it's an integral component of cloud computing environments. Vertical scalability is the ability of...
It is often the case that application server clustering and load-balancing are mistakenly believed to be the same thing. They are not. While server clustering does provide rudimentary load-balancing functionality, it does a better job of providing basic fail-over and availability assurance than it does load-balancing. In fact, load balancing has effectively been overtaken by application delivery, which builds on load balancing but is much, much more than that today. Clustering essentially turns one instance of an application server into a controlling node, a proxy of sorts, through which requests are funneled and then distributed amongst several...
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...
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...
I'm in a bit of mood after reading a Javaworld article on server load balancing that presents some fairly poor ideas on architectural implementations. It's not the concepts that are necessarily wrong; they will work. It's the architectures offered as a method of load balancing made me do a double-take and say "What?" I started reading this article because it was part 2 of a series on load balancing and this installment focused on application layer load balancing. You know, layer 7 load balancing. Something we at F5 just might know a thing or two about. But you...
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...
Silverlight, if you recall, appears to be Microsoft's answer to Adobe's AIR platform. Microsoft released Silverlight 2.0 today, as expected. Part of the big exciting news is that you can now code up Silverlight applications in Eclipse. Yeah, not kidding. I know, you just hit weather.com too and checked to see what the temperature was. But seriously, Microsoft is fully supportive of the Eclipse environment for Silverlight despite its own support with its own free tool, Visual Web Developer Express. I haven't checked out the Eclipse version yet, so I'll be interested to see it and hear how...
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. ...
No one likes to hear that they need to rewrite or re-architect an application because it doesn't scale. I'm sure no one at Twitter thought that they'd need to be overhauling their architecture because it gained popularity as quickly as it did. Many developers, especially in the enterprise space, don't worry about the kind of scalability that sites like Twitter or LinkedIn need to concern themselves with, but...
No, it's not this one. It's not even mine. It's this one on High Scalability written by Todd Hoff. Not only does he explain latency and its sources, but its costs. Then he goes on to offer a plethora of ways to reduce latency. A couple of suggestions he offers are: Use a TCP Offload Engine (TOE). TOE tech offloads the TCP/IP stack from the main CPU and puts it on the network controller. This means network adapters can respond faster which means faster end-to-end communication. Network adapters respond faster because bus...
Abhik, in a reply to "Why can't clouds be inside (the data center)?" says that "the whole point (and primary benefit) of cloud computing is that someone else manages the computing resources. That set of resources is drawn as a cloud in a network diagram because you, the developer or the company using cloud resources, neither knows or cares to know the specifics of the computing infrastructure. An in-house cloud would require procurement, management, maintenance and continuous cost even during idle time -- it is just a grid."
Is it? Is that the primary reason enterprises might be considering cloud computing?...
No, that's not a typo. That's the reality of virtualization terminology today: a single term means multiple technology implementations. Server virtualization is used to describe at least two (and probably more) types of virtualization. 1. Server virtualization a la load balancing and application delivery 2. Server virtualization a la VMWare and Microsoft Server virtualization as implemented by load balancers/application delivery controllers is a M:1 virtualization scheme. An application delivery controller like BIG-IP can make many servers look like one server, a virtual server. This type of server virtualization is used...
twitter (v) to allow your services go up and down randomly under heavy load due to inadequate architecture or planning, annoying a lot of the known (online) world In case you've been living under a rock (or been heads down coding for the past week), Apple launched its latest iPhone today to the delight and, it appears, consternation of customers. A colleague relates his experience not just purchasing one of the eagerly awaited phones, but the disaster that was the activation process. Apparently Apple wasn't satisfied with all the good press it gets about how hip and trendy...
Cloud computing is, at its core, about delivering applications or services in an on-demand environment. Cloud computing providers will need to support hundreds of thousands of users and applications/services and ensure that they are fast, secure, and available. In order to accomplish this goal, they'll need to build a dynamic, intelligent infrastructure with four core properties in mind: transparency, scalability, monitoring/management, and security.
Transparency
One of the premises of Cloud Computing is that services are delivered transparently regardless of the physical implementation within the "cloud". Transparency is one of the foundational concepts of cloud computing, in that the actual implementation of...
Web 2.0 is built on primarily two technologies: AJAX and RSS. AJAX is used to develop interactive, real-time applications while RSS is primarily used as for integration and syndication. Import a feed, share a feed, drag-n-drop a gadget, widget, or component. It's all RSS (XML) today. It's further becoming a requirement of Web 2.0 sites that they provide some sort of API through which developers can write add-on applications. Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook. They all offer APIs that are quite heavily used at this time and startups are following suit. Other sites offer richer media, like video or slideware,...
Multi-tenant applications are extremely popular in the SaaS (Software as a Service) world. Almost all SaaS delivered CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) and SFA (Sales Force Automation) applications are necessarily multi-tenant. These applications use a meta-data driven model to enable the customization of applications on a per customer basis. This allows the provider to deploy a single application to scale vertically, supporting a wide variety of industries with a single code base. In order to scale horizontally, however, it is necessary to deploy multiple instances of that single code base. To enable a scalable architecture to properly support (hopefully)...
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...
I had several requests for access to my presentation at Web 2.0 Expo. Today, the fine folks at O'Reilly indicated that the presentation is now available for download. Enjoy! Imbibing: Mountain Dew Technorati tags: MacVittie, F5, presentation, Web 2.0 Expo, application delivery, scalability, Web 2.0
The second session I attended today was hosted by Blaine Cook (formerly of Twitter) and discussed the problems inherent in building the real-time web. His reason for dismissing HTTP as a method for building the real-time web: hard to scale for frequent updates and frequent polling. I call shenanigans. HTTP is not hard to scale in those situations if you have the right infrastructure. In fact, just about every application delivery controller in existence can easily scale HTTP - even under circumstances described by Blaine. The frequency of updating and polling is similarily a problem with any real-time web application,...
Anxiety's attacking me, and my air is getting thin.I'm in trouble for the things I havent got to yet.I'm chomping at the bit, and my palms are getting wet, sweating bullets. --Megadeth, "Sweating Bullets" If you can relate to the kind of stress and anxiety sung about by Megadeth - and it's coming from the workplace - you aren't alone. Last fall InformationWeek ran a short story based on a survey they conducted and concluded that "two out of three IT managers say they're kept awake at night worrying about work, and 75% admit ongoing anxiety about application performance concerns."...
Lei Zhu @ Digital Web Magazine has an interesting article on Client Side Load Balancing for Web 2.0 Applications. It is interesting in that it presents an alternative mechanism for implementing high-availability without the use of an intermediate load balancing solution. His solution relies solely on the client and takes advantage of the dynamic nature of Web 2.0. The problem with Lei's article is that there are a few assumptions made that are simply inaccurate. Lei contends that the negatives to using an intermediate load balancing solution are: There is a limit to the number of...
