September 7, 2011
by Chintana
3 Comments
This is a step by step guide to show you how to build your first web application and host in WSO2 StratosLive. We’ll be creating a simple Twitter like webapp using Carbon Studio. Here goes.
P.S: Use a browser that supports HTML5.
August 3, 2011
by Chintana
1 Comment
Instant-On Enterprise concept by HP is brilliant and started in the right time and is heading toward the right direction. Traditional enterprise are seen as slow behemoth monsters that are,
… and I bet you can fill a lengthy and exhaustive list with a short amount of time. Things that everyone come to know and taken to be facts of life during their 10 – 15 year tenure. Often these are credited to necessary operational overhead for doing something. Selling a product, a step in the manufacturing process etc…
With the wide spread of Internet, the younger generation with very low attention span- Gen Xers if you will, have grown in numbers. It has become so large that traditional enterprise cannot ignore it. The amount of sales/money/customers they loose every time due to operational overhead is simply not acceptable anymore.
So how can enterprises leverage advancements of technology to make their business processes, IT infrastructure, operational costs for optimal levels? As I see it, this is where HP has defined an elaborate vision with the Instant-On Enterprise. Let me quote the five critical success factors that the Instant-On Enterprise defines,
| Flexibility | The Instant-On Enterprise runs on applications and services that are always available and can easily adapt to new opportunities. |
| Automation | The Instant-On Enterprise must rapidly and reliably scale technology resources up and down to meet changing needs. It neither over- nor under-provisions. |
| Security | In the Instant-On Enterprise, assets, resources and information are closely guarded to manage risk and protect innovation. They are protected against failure. |
| Insight | The Instant-On Enterprise harnesses the power of information to help executives make better decisions. It protects information and delivers it in accordance with enterprise needs. |
| Speed | The Instant-On Enterprise selects the best delivery model for the solution—the delivery model that provides the right outcome, in the right time frame, at the right price. |
There are a number of barriers that you have to consider in depth when trying to choose a path for making your business processes efficient. The key decision is to choose the right technology. Choosing the right technology is not an easy task. Consider the following points before you make an enterprise wide technology decision,
Did the last section sound as if it’s a pipe dream? Couple of years ago it would have been, yes. Let me show you how you would go about implementing an Instant-On Enterprise. Infrastructure as a Service providers like Amazon EC2 are too low level when it comes to having an Instant-On Enterprise. Yes, it’s a critical part of this solution but you need a high level platform which operate on top of this elastic infrastructure.
WSO2 Stratos is built to answer exactly that. Hosted version of WSO2 Stratos is called StratosLive. Most of the corporates doesn’t like their private information lying around in public servers. If it’s the case, you can download Stratos and host it inside your corporate data centers.
Now let me revisit HP’s critical success factors again and show you how Stratos helps to achieve those.
| Flexibility | Each service in Stratos (Application Server, Enterprise Service Bus etc…) can be configured to work in a cluster of nodes. Each cluster can be configured through a load balancer. Load balancer itself can be configured with a fail over setup so there are no single point of failures. In StratosLive (the hosted version of Stratos) WSO2 ESB is configured to act as a software load balancer. This allows your services to be always available.
With a straightforward programming model, supported by Eclipse based Carbon Studio, your applications deployed in Stratos can be modify/deploy/debug with ease allowing you to incorporate new requirements. |
| Automation | Stratos have auto scaling logic built in. This will seamlessly spin up new nodes when the load increases to your services and will terminate and decrease the number of nodes when the load gradually decreases. |
| Security | You can take advantage of number of different security mechanisms to safeguard your data as well as the communication that happens between your services deployed in Stratos. Identity Server supports single sign-on, OpenID, SAML2 and XACML for fine grained authorization policies. Stratos have a built in XACML editor for novices who are not well versed in XACML to define XACML policies. Also, you can take advantage of WS-Security when talking between your applications |
| Insight | The Business Activity Monitor collects and show information relating to your applications and services. Using the extensible framework, you can define your own user interface to include KPIs that interests you |
| Speed | The installation takes minutes. Deployment of services takes seconds. If you don’t like to install at all, that’s all fine too, the entire platform can be accessed through StratosLive! |
Tools needed for building an Instant-On Enterprise is right there. StratosLive has a free plan for you to play around and make yourself comfortable. Also has paid plans with differing SLAs for serious business usages. You don’t have to spend your time and money to buy some fairy tale big vendors usually preach about. You can play around with the entire platform and start building the bits and pieces you need for your enterprise. For free!
July 13, 2011
by Chintana
0 comments
I was at CassandraSF 2011 yesterday and was surprised by the 450 – 500 people showing up for the conference. The community and the momentum behind Cassandra at the moment is exciting. Jonathan Ellis kicked off the conference with his keynote speech where he laid out the progress so far and features that have been planned ahead for the project.
After Jonathan’s keynote, I went for the CloudSandra presentation where they’ve implemented a framework with Brisk. The presentation seem to be intriguing as they’ve developed a multi-tenant REST API for Cassandra. Although the meaning of multi-tenancy seemed to have interpreted differently as I’ve been used to the term. Multi-tenancy as I know it have been used to treat a particular organization (an entity as you will) as a tenant and you can have individual users inside that tenant. I felt the multi-tenancy in CloudSandra meant more like multi-user system. I may be wrong. Their usage of Apigee to play with the REST API was very cool as Apigee provide a neat UI for your REST APIs.
Next was an entertaining talk by Eric Evans. Was quite fun as Eric the guy who helped popularize the term NoSQL and the talk was regarding SQL like query language for Cassandra called CQL! It was mostly about high level info/rationale behind coming up with CQL and the current state and some hints as to how it might evolve in time to come.
After that there was a session about Brisk. An introduction and what Brisk is all about by Jake Luciani.
Then David Strauss did an entertaining talk where he demoed a highly available DNS server written using Cassandra. He showed how data propagetes to 3 machines hosted in 3 geographical areas. Very cool!
During Adrian Cockcroft‘s presentation he described how Netflix is using Cassandra, how they migrated to Cassandra from on Oracle DB. Also plethora of other operation aspects of Cassandra clusters. One point he stressed during the talk was, since they were running exclusively on EC2 nodes they had to take instance termination as a fact of life. So they write apps so that they’re resilient even couple of nodes go down. They also deliberately kill random instances and test if the system function as expected!
As the final session of the day attended the Cassandra internals by Gary Dusbabek walked the audience through the Cassandra code base. How everything is wired together and where critical components are at.