“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or...| By Alex Honor | Article Rating: |
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| October 31, 2008 10:15 PM EDT | Reads: |
8,958 |
The Dev2Ops Blog
Talk to any seasoned application developer who's about to embark on a new web application project and you can bet on the following: they have decided on or have narrowed down their choice on an application development framework. The use of some kind of framework is taken for granted. Why do application developers rely on and use frameworks? Because frameworks provide the necessary scaffolding that allows the developer to focus on just the business logic.
Talk to engineers and administrators that manage the online service of a SaaS or eCommerce business, and you see quite a different picture. Indeed, you'll even find a different set of assumptions. This group, the one that keeps the service running, writes and uses custom scripts and tools to get their job done. This "stuff" is software, and it is crucial for keeping the business online. Unfortunately, this software is almost always invisible to the business owners. And, you can also bet on the following: there isn't a framework, and there IS a whole lot of scaffolding being reinvented.
When I say framework, I'm not referring to EMS frameworks, the ones that include agents on each host for monitoring and (ahem) "management". What I'm talking about here are the scripts the engineers and administrators write, to automate the online service operations. These are done without an underlying framework. This body of management scripts ultimately boils down to business logic, the logic that governs the delivery of the service operation.
For those that may not be aware of or don't have first hand experience in the SaaS or eCommerce world, it turns out there really are two software development efforts going on. First, there is the software effort everybody knows about - the one the business and product owners focus on - making the software enabling the business model. Second, there is the effort producing all the stuff that enables the delivery of the business, in the form of an always-on online service. This software lets the operations team keep the service updated, maintained and available. Unfortunately, this second body of software is often taken for granted, seems to occur behind the scenes and is almost never subject to the same attention and rigors as the business model software.
Published October 31, 2008 Reads 8,958
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By Alex Honor
Alex Honor is co-founders and a committer of the CTL and ControlTier open source software projects that provide a comprehensive application service provisioning platform.
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S. Sunil 07/17/08 05:49:42 PM EDT | |||
@Eric Don't ask or you might get an answer ;) |
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Eric Scotts 07/17/08 05:38:32 PM EDT | |||
Spot on. Has anyone studied the amount of money that is drained off into these efforts? It must be massive as a whole. |
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Tristram Wright 07/09/08 03:48:58 PM EDT | |||
Excellent article! |
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“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or...Feb. 23, 2012 09:00 AM EST Reads: 626 |
By Liz McMillan As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...Feb. 23, 2012 09:00 AM EST Reads: 1,923 |
By Elizabeth White Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:45 AM EST Reads: 1,692 |
By Elizabeth White Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:45 AM EST Reads: 1,010 |
By Liz McMillan The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to rea...Feb. 23, 2012 08:30 AM EST Reads: 1,648 |
By Pat Romanski Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best...Feb. 23, 2012 08:30 AM EST Reads: 1,979 |
By Jeremy Geelan With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...Feb. 23, 2012 08:15 AM EST Reads: 854 |
By Jeremy Geelan With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...Feb. 23, 2012 08:10 AM EST Reads: 1,065 |
By Liz McMillan Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:00 AM EST Reads: 2,567 |
By Pat Romanski The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:00 AM EST Reads: 883 |
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As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. ...
Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...
The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to rea...
Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...
While the notion of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) may seem a bit far-fetched, Shadow IT, where users essentially bring unauthorized cloud services into business environments, has become an increasing corporate concern as highlighted in a recent CFO.com article. The risk of Shadow IT is that it comprom...
What happens when technology converges? When old meets new?
A fine example of what might happen is what has happened in the carrier space as voice and data services increasingly meet on the same network, each carrying unique characteristics forward from the older technology from which they sprung. ...
For many of the same reasons IPv6 migration is moving slower than perhaps it should given the urgent need for more IP addresses (to support all those cows connecting to the Internet) is the sheer magnitude of such an effort. Without the ability for IPv6-only nodes to talk to IPv4-only nodes, there’s...
The trade off between security and performance has long been a known issue across IT organizations. One of the first things to go when performance is unacceptable is a security solution. This isn’t just an IT phenomenon either; consider how many of us have disabled endpoint security solutions like a...
Let's face it right now the cloud is pretty immature. The level of automation and management of these environments are analogous to the early assembly lines, but it won't be this way long. This is not the industrial revolution and it moves at a wicked fast pace. Before we know it the next generation...
To build and maintain applications required to reach out to you customer through Mobile & Smart phone is expensive.
Why? Because of platform proliferation. Because of quick technology obsolescence. (See this)
Management perception compounds the problem.
Anybody, not intimately familiar with this...
We’re starting a new series of articles here called ‘Cloud Leaders of Tomorrow‘ – The objective of which is to showcase the movers and shakers of the Canadian Cloud industry.
Our first profile is Kevin Crowe, Director Cloud Services for Long View, and this is a perfect start because within our over...
Hybrid tools try to resolve the debate of … “Should you write a mobile web application which will render on multiple platforms without significant change but won’t be able to take advantage on native features?” Or “Should you create platform specific native application to fully utilize the power of ...
Is Big Data destined for only the top 3,000 companies worldwide? What about medium or small companies who are equally as data-driven? Is there a place for Big Data in SMB markets? When I talk to SMB companies about their use of public cloud services, it’s a no-brainer. Pay as you go, lower costs up...
What’s actually in a Cloud SLA, or what should be in such an agreement, is all over the map. Ask the public IaaS providers, and they’ll give you one answer. Ask SaaS or PaaS providers, and they’ll tell you something different. And what about private Clouds? SLAs take on an entirely new meaning there...








