Monitoring/Management
Cause without it, you wouldn't know what was going on
I get by with a little help from my friends… While cloud and virtualization primarily focus on improving the provisioning process, there is a lot more to managing a data center and its critical components than just deployment. There’s upgrades – both software and hardware – and migration to new solutions as well as tweaking knobs and buttons to optimize and troubleshoot issues. While public cloud computing may alleviate much of the pain associated with forward movement, private and hybrid environments as well as traditional data center models must face the reality of dealing with these...
#infosec #DNS #v11 DNS is like your mom, remember? Sometimes she knows better. Generally speaking, blackhole routing is a problem, not a solution. A route to nowhere is not exactly a good thing, after all. But in some cases it’s an approved and even recommended solution, usually implemented as a means to filter out bad packets at the routing level that might be malformed or are otherwise dangerous to pass around inside the data center. This technique is also used at the DNS layer as a means to prevent responding to queries with known infected or...
#fasterapp If you know these three axioms, then you’ll know application delivery when you see it. Like most technology jargon, there are certain terms and phrases that end up mangled, conflated, and generally misapplied as they gain traction in the wider market. Cloud is merely the latest incarnation of this phenomenon, and there will be others in the future. Guaranteed. Of late the term “application delivery” has been creeping up into the vernacular. That could be because cloud has pushed it to the fore, necessarily. Cloud purports to eliminate the “concern” of...
#devops An ecosystem-based data center approach means accepting the constancy of change… It is an interesting fact of life for aquarists that the term “stable” does not actually mean a lack of change. On the contrary, it means that the core system is maintaining equilibrium at a constant rate. That is, the change is controlled and managed automatically either by the system itself or through the use of mechanical and chemical assistance. Sometimes, those systems need modifications or break (usually when you’re away from home and don’t know it and couldn’t do anything about it if you...
#devops It’s a simple equation, but one that is easily overlooked. Most folks recall, I’m sure, the Pythagorean Theorem. If you don’t, what’s really important about the theorem is that any side of a right triangle can be computed if you know the other sides by using the simple formula a2 + b2 = c2. The really important thing about the theorem is that it clearly illustrates the relationship between three different pieces of a single entity. The lengths of the legs and hypotenuse of a triangle are intimately related; variations in one impact...
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...
Being too quick to shout “cloud” when the solution may be found elsewhere can lead to unintended consequences. As with all technology caught up in the hype cycle, cloud computing is often attributed with being “the solution” to problems irrespective of reality. Cloud is suddenly endowed with supernatural powers, able to solve every business and operational challenge merely by being what it is. Take, for example, the attribution of cloud as being “the solution” to the very real issue of severe snow in the UK. Cloud solutions can...
An architectural solution to the challenge of IP-address dependency. A rarely mentioned obstacle when attempting to duplicate or migrate enterprise-class applications is IP-dependency. Not just topological dependencies that are easily addressed with dynamic routing and switching protocols in conjunction with a boot script, but internal dependencies – the ones so deeply embedded in the application’s “identity” that to change the IP address is to break the installation and render it useless. These are the applications that, upon asking for an exported image for testing purposes, virtualization experts will tell you is far more efficient...
#iApp #v11 If you were wondering what these three things have to do with F5, read on … What has a strange sense of humor, an unhealthy love of bacon and donuts, and has held a wide variety IT roles and responsibilities for a whole lot of years? If you were said “the F5 Product Management Engineering team” give yourself a cookie (or better yet some bacon). The question is, why should you care? To understand that, you first have to understand the role that “PME” has within F5. Many of...
The secret to live migration isn’t just a fat, fast pipe – it’s a dynamic infrastructure Very early on in the cloud computing hype cycle we posited about different use cases for the “cloud”. One that remains intriguing and increasingly possible thanks to a better understanding of the challenges associated with the process is cloud bursting. The first time I wrote about cloud bursting and detailed the high-level process the inevitable question that remained was, “Well, sure, but how did the application get into the cloud in the first place?” Back then there was no...
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