Always test remote app performance with a WAN emulator

Many organizations deploy new applications for their remote site users without testing it on a WAN. Not testing these applications across a simulated WAN increases the possibility of performance issues during the early stages of usage because you have no idea how the application will perform once latency or jitter come in between the communication path of the client and server. If the application uses large amounts of bandwidth that causes congestion, then it can negatively affect the performance of other applications that share the bandwidth. A WAN emulator can enable you to measure the average bandwidth that an application may use before you deploy it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Location, location, location… it matters to the cloud

In real estate, there’s a mantra that most agents use of “location, location, location,” meaning houses that may be equal in many ways will cost more the closer you get to something of value. For example, the San Jose Mercury News recently published a story about a house in Sunnyvale, California, that sold for $782,000 over asking price. Why such a ridiculous amount? Because it’s near Apple’s new campus — location matters.Does location matter with the cloud? Given how fast data travels, one might not think so, but location does indeed matter. A recent report from EdgeConneX and Cedexis, Cloud, Content, Connectivity and the Evolving Internet Edge, shows just how much it actually does. The study conducted uses Cedexis’ RUM-based internet performance measurement tools to test how cloud applications perform in different locations and with various optimization techniques.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Location, location, location… it matters to the cloud

In real estate, there’s a mantra that most agents use of “location, location, location,” meaning houses that may be equal in many ways will cost more the closer you get to something of value. For example, the San Jose Mercury News recently published a story about a house in Sunnyvale, California, that sold for $782,000 over asking price. Why such a ridiculous amount? Because it’s near Apple’s new campus — location matters.Does location matter with the cloud? Given how fast data travels, one might not think so, but location does indeed matter. A recent report from EdgeConneX and Cedexis, Cloud, Content, Connectivity and the Evolving Internet Edge, shows just how much it actually does. The study conducted uses Cedexis’ RUM-based internet performance measurement tools to test how cloud applications perform in different locations and with various optimization techniques.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Why Net Neutrality can’t be implemented

Suppose for a moment that you are the victim of a wicked ISP that engages in disallowed “throttling” under a “neutral” regime for Internet access. You like to access streaming media from a particular “over the top” service provider. By coincidence, the performance of your favoured application drops at the same time your ISP launches a rival content service of its own. You then complain to the regulator, who investigates. She finds that your ISP did indeed change their traffic management settings right at the point that the “throttling” began. A swathe of routes, including the one to your preferred “over the top” application, have been given a different packet scheduling and routing treatment. It seems like an open-and-shut case of “throttling” resulting in a disallowed “neutrality violation”. Or is it? —Martin Geddes @ CircleID

The post Worth Reading: Why Net Neutrality can’t be implemented appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Docker Official Images are now Multi-platform

This past week, Docker rolled out a big update to our Official Images to make them multi-platform aware. Now, when you run docker run hello-world, Docker CE and EE will pull and run the correct hello-world image whether that’s for x86-64 Linux, Windows, ARM, IBM Z mainframes or any other system where Docker runs. With Docker rapidly adding support for additional operating systems (like Windows) and CPU architectures (like IBM Z) this is an important UX improvement.

Docker Official Images are a curated set of container images that include:

The official images have always been available for x86-64 Linux. Images for non x86 Linux architectures have also been available, but to be fetched either from a different namespace (docker pull s390x/golang on IBM Z mainframe) or using a different tag (docker pull golang:nanoserver on Windows). This was not the seamless and portable experience Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: What is a data fabric and why should you care?

What is a data fabric? The concept of a "data fabric" is emerging as an approach to help organizations better deal with fast growing data, ever changing application requirements and distributed processing needs.The term references technology that creates a converged platform that supports the storage, processing, analysis and management of disparate data. Data that is currently maintained in files, database tables, data streams, objects, images, sensor data and even container-based applications can all be accessed using a number of different standard interfaces.A data fabric makes it possible for applications and tools designed to access data using many interfaces such as NFS (Network File System), POSIX (portable operating system interface), a REST API (representative state transfer), HDFS (Hadoop distributed file system), ODBC (open database connectivity), and Apache KAFKA for real-time streaming data. A data fabric must also be capable of being enhanced to support other standards as they emerge in importance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What is a data fabric and why should you care?

What is a data fabric? The concept of a "data fabric" is emerging as an approach to help organizations better deal with fast growing data, ever changing application requirements and distributed processing needs.The term references technology that creates a converged platform that supports the storage, processing, analysis and management of disparate data. Data that is currently maintained in files, database tables, data streams, objects, images, sensor data and even container-based applications can all be accessed using a number of different standard interfaces.A data fabric makes it possible for applications and tools designed to access data using many interfaces such as NFS (Network File System), POSIX (portable operating system interface), a REST API (representative state transfer), HDFS (Hadoop distributed file system), ODBC (open database connectivity), and Apache KAFKA for real-time streaming data. A data fabric must also be capable of being enhanced to support other standards as they emerge in importance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How IoT can drive a productivity revolution in US manufacturing

The Internet of Things, which has captured the attention of investors and futurist alike as it continues to reshape our markets and everyday lives, is now generating buzz around a new topic: manufacturing. Business and tech analyst are increasingly coming to realize the boon that the IoT can offer to U.S. manufacturing, a fact the wealthiest companies and savviest innovators are already exploiting.So how exactly can the IoT drive a productivity revolution in U.S. manufacturing? Is it grand conjecture that’s driving this growing consensus that the IoT will reshape manufacturing, or does this idea have a serious basis of reality? A brief review of the IoT’s impact on U.S. productivity shows just how significantly it can optimize American manufacturing, and how little time we have until all of our production is seamlessly integrated with our internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 5 software licensing challenges in the next generation network

Every day we hear how the network is changing. Virtualization, Cloud, Software-defined Networking, the Internet of Things — it’s clear big transformational change is happening.   The technical aspects of these solutions seem to get the most attention, but if you manage IT/Network cost and delivery for a living, your success may depend more on understanding the changing network business models that accompany these new technologies and how to adapt your IT operations.I’ve assembled below what I think are five of the top operational challenges facing IT managers in the next generation network. Some of these are blocking and tackling fundamentals (excuse the seasonal American football analogy), while others are more strategic in nature. I’ll present a short rationale for why these are my top 5. I’d love to hear your perspective.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 5 software licensing challenges in the next generation network

Every day we hear how the network is changing. Virtualization, Cloud, Software-defined Networking, the Internet of Things — it’s clear big transformational change is happening.   The technical aspects of these solutions seem to get the most attention, but if you manage IT/Network cost and delivery for a living, your success may depend more on understanding the changing network business models that accompany these new technologies and how to adapt your IT operations.I’ve assembled below what I think are five of the top operational challenges facing IT managers in the next generation network. Some of these are blocking and tackling fundamentals (excuse the seasonal American football analogy), while others are more strategic in nature. I’ll present a short rationale for why these are my top 5. I’d love to hear your perspective.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Liveblog: Terraform Abstractions for Safety and Power

This is a liveblog for the HashiConf 2017 session titled “Terraform Abstractions for Safety and Power.” The speaker is Calvin French-Owen, Founder and co-CTO at Segment.

French-Owen starts by describing Segment, and providing a quick overview of Segment’s use of Terraform. Segment is all on AWS, and is leveraging ECS (Elastic Container Service) to schedule containers. Segment’s journey with Terraform started about 2.5 years ago. They now have 30-50 developers interacting with Terraform weekly, and Terraform is managing tens of thousands of AWS resources.

Digging into the meat of the presentation, French-Owens starts by answering the question, “Why is safety such a big deal?” There’s more to the puzzle than just preventing downtime. To illustrate that point, French-Owens shares some conclusions from an academic paper that explores why developers choose software programs. It turns out that to scale adoption, you must reduce the risk of adoption (developers avoid programs based on risk).

Naturally, French-Owens talks about how Terraform can “feel scary” since it’s so easy to destroy a bunch of infrastructure with only terraform destroy.

Before moving into a discussion on how to make Terraform feel less scary, French-Owens first covers some “Terraform nouns” (HCL, HashiCorp Configuration Continue reading

Cloudflare and Google Offer App Developers $100,000 in Cloud Platform Credits

Cloudflare and Google Cloud Platform logos

When Cloudflare started, our company needed two things: an initial group of users, and the finances to fund our development. We know most developers face the same issues. The Cloudflare Apps Platform solves the first problem by allowing third parties to develop applications that can be delivered across Cloudflare's edge network to any of the six million sites powered by Cloudflare. The Cloudflare Developer Fund alleviates the second by giving developers the financial support they need to fund their company. Today, we are excited to announce another initiative that will make it possible for developers to make their app dreams a reality.

Cloudflare and Google Cloud are working together to offer developers the resources needed to quickly launch and scale Cloudflare Apps. This partnership will give any Cloudflare Apps developer the chance to access a wide range of benefits including $3k - $100k of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for one year at no cost. Some startups will also be eligible for 24/7 technical support, and access to GCP’s technical solutions team. This supports a core belief of the Cloudflare Apps initiative: we want developers to focus on building great Apps, not worry about paying for infrastructure. Hundreds of startups have Continue reading

Liveblog: Journey to the Cloud with Packer and Terraform

This is a liveblog of the HashiConf 2017 breakout session titled “Journey to the Cloud with Packer and Terraform,” presented by Nadeem Ahmad, a senior software developer at Box.

Ahmad starts with a quick review of Box, but (thankfully) transitions quickly to his particular team at Box (the Productivity Engineering team). His team’s customers are the software developers at Box, and it’s his team’s job to help make them more productive and efficient. One of the tools that Ahmad’s team built was a tool called Cluster Runner, which is intended to streamline running unit and integration tests on the code the developers were writing.

This brings Ahmad to the crux of this presentation, which is telling the story of how Box went from a bare-metal environment to a cloud-based architecture. The purpose of this migration was to address some of the limitations of their bare-metal environment (inelastic, divergent host configurations over time, etc.). Box leveraged Platform9 to build an OpenStack-based private cloud, with the intent of switching to AWS, GCP, or Azure in the future as private cloud resources aged out.

Ahmad next goes into why Box selected the process they did; they wanted to move away from configuration Continue reading

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