I have recently started knowing about SAAS .I have a web application which as to be metered based on the usage of the application.My usage criteria is the tenant actions/clicks.Can any one guide me how/what technology to use for monitoring anthink like JMX wil
To metering and monitoring your SaaS apps you can do in many ways,
In my experience i suggest you better using log system integrated with your apps, you just need some logging function before or after user event. If you want to use 3rd party application to do this things for you, i suggest you use New Relic software.
Related
My intention is to develop and MVC app driven by WCF services.
I will then like to deploy these to Azure.
Can I go about developing my app and services without any consideration to the fact they will be hosted in Azure earlier on in the lifecycle? Or must I structure it differently?
EDIT: More specifically - am I right in saying I can develop this application just as I would prior to deciding it would be hosted in Auzre?
Based on my research and understanding, it is a better practice to consider your future implementation to azure prior to any development, however even if you later decide to move an existing application to azure, you may need to perform some modifications to your code.
please bear in mind that, Microsoft is currently offering websites in azure that can host you asp application, you may want to read more about that.
here is some links that may help you.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/web-sites/
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/web-sites/
The advert that appears on this page as I answer this question says "Move apps to the cloud without rewriting them".
The official position from Microsoft (who pays for the ads), is that you can migrate to Azure late in the development cycle.
The reality is:
You lose a lot of the benefits of could computing if you don't architect specifically for the cloud. This applies to any cloud platform, not just Azure.
There are likely some hidden 'gotchas' that will trip you up if you develop for normal Windows and then try and move it up to Azure. Just this morning I had a developer that was frustrated by errors on SQL Azure that didn't occur on his dev machine. The approach to SQL Azure is different to standard SQL (feature differences, throttling, etc).
There are two 'it depends' that are related:
Are you intending to use cloud services or Azure websites? Azure websites are easier to migrate because they are closer to a traditional web development approach.
Applications with lots of moving parts, or that are subject to high load, need special consideration (regardless of the target platform), so you will want to optimise for, and take advantage of, Azure specifics.
If you have a good reason not to develop specifically for Azure (such as your employers official position, platform portability, etc) then don't worry about Azure for now. If your long-term intention is to run your app on Windows Azure, then code for Azure up front — the effort to take it off Azure (lock-in) will form part of your decision later on.
I have several services growing in activity. I'm looking for a simple service that can monitor them (web service, oracle, web app), and send an email when one is down.
Thanks a lot :)
Go have a look at the xymon system. It is simple and easy youse and scales well. I used xymon at several organizations and it is awesome. The user community is also very vibrant and helpfull.
Other systems you can look at are Nagios and OpenNMS. These are more complex though and might be overkill.
I am trying to develop an ASP.net MVC website in which I need to show a map (whole world) with several markers and additional information for every marker.
Does anyone know a good library that would support that and which (if possible) also lets me use "offline" maps stored on my own server (open street maps for example).
It will be an intranet application which means in case of google/bing yearly license costs would have to be paid. The customer doesn't want that, but in general the library can be commercial (one-time per server and/or developer fee).
I already had a look at "ThinkGeo Map Suite", any other suggestions or recommendations.
SharpMap, it's flexible and easy to implement, can use with shapes or from spacial db.
for details... http://sharpmap.codeplex.com/
there is a couple examples who does exactly what you need, so can start from these
exist other libraries but I don't try it, research for another options.
Answer
Manifold is a very cheap system which has an basic internet map server framework:
http://www.manifold.net/info/ims.shtml
You already suggested ThinkGeo, I would put it in the same basket as Manifold. Be sure to evaluate performance and limitations with both packages.
Discussion
You'd be hard pressed to find a pure NET library for mapping that works well and won't blow out your budget (see ESRI). Depending on your skill level and your knowledge of GIS systems, I would suggest creating your own web map server and just embed it in your web application.
Some good environments for this which I can recommend are:
MapServer
GeoServer
As far as displaying and interacting with the map, there are several web based platforms available:
GIS SDKs For Web Apps
I am currently learning Erlang
Can SO users give interesting examples of any of their Erlang application deployments?
I want to gain some insight into common Erlang uses past telecomms, and any problems or unexpected benefits Erlang brought during development/deployment.
I hope this will give some broader context and whet the whistle for myself and anyone else jumping into Erlang!
Thanks in advance!
Who uses Erlang for product development:
Bluetail/Alteon/Nortel (distributed,
fault tolerant email system, SSL
accelerator)
Cellpoint (Location-based Mobile
Services)
Corelatus (SS7 monitoring).
dqdp.net (in Latvian) (Web Services).
Facebook (Facebook chat backend)
Finnish Meteorological Institute
(Data acquisition and real-time
monitoring)
IDT corp. (Real-time least-cost
routing expert systems)
Klarna (Electronic payment systems)
Mobilearts (GSM and UMTS services)
Netkit Solutions (Network Equipment
Monitoring and Operations Support
Systems)
Process-one (Jabber Messaging)
Schlund + Partner (Messaging and
Interactive Voice Response services)
Quviq (Software Test Tool)
RabbitMQ (AMQP Enterprise Messaging)
T-Mobile (previously one2one)
(advanced call control services)
Telia (a telecomms operator)
Vail Systems (Interactive Voice
Response systems)
Wavenet (SS7 and IVR applications)
Our first application was a web/sms social network and I wrote a long paper on the subject which can be read here.
We've built a web app based on an Erlang backend.
Erlang is in charge of the business logic, the security and data store.
The browser communicates exclusively through JSON services with it and do the rendering.
It will be in beta soon, and to give you an idea of the app there is a video here
There are as well some resources here and here about what we learned along the way.
Get to know the the release tools erlang/OTP already provides.
Erlang bootscripts are wonderful for ensuring that all the running applications needed are present and of the correct version. Working within the OTP framework for releases will be much easier than trying to invent your own. Erlang has lots of tools for making sure deployments can be done both live and without breaking running services. The language and runtime are designed for this so they've done a lot of the heavy lifting for you. I've found the tools useful even for small "non-enterprise" apps and deployments.
Of course there's always applications like wings3D which is for 3D modelling. It's not exactly a "deployment", because these sorts of programs are used anywhere from individuals to teams of artists in their pipeline. There are other projects for things like simulation, but I'm not sure how many companies are publicly stating that they use Erlang. As for me, I'm planning to adopt it for my company for industrial automation.
I just watched the Windows Azure intro video and it left me feeling like it was a front end shell for hosted IIS instances. Can anyone who know more (possibily that was part of the beta) shed on why you would use this vs. EC2.
it seemed easy enough but really didnt give specifics on how it works, why it works or why you would use this vs the traditional solutions out there?
According to the vision (and I can only talk about the vision here since the product isn't really out yet), here's a couple of reasons you might consider Azure over EC2.
Azure includes built-in load balancing abilities. If you want to do that in Amazon, you have to roll your own solution or buy a third-party solution like www.RightScale.com.
Azure-friendly-coded apps can be delivered internally or in Microsoft's cloud. If you write apps that have confidential information like financial data or health care data, not all of your clients will be willing to put their data in the public cloud. In that case, they can deploy your apps internally on Windows. That's sold as a skillset win, because you can go from public to private projects. Don't get me wrong - if you master Amazon EC2 development, then you can deploy your apps internally with Linux virtual servers in your datacenter, but it's not as turnkey. (Hard to describe a tech preview as turnkey when it's not licensed yet, hahaha.)
Having said that, it wasn't clear that the load balancing functionality is included in the box with internal deployments. If you have to do a combination of Azure plus ISA Server, that'll be a tougher deployment and management sell.
AppHarbor is a .NET cloud hosting environment that sits on Amazon EC2. The nice thing is they offer a free plan (much like Heroku does) so you can check it out yourself with very little friction.
My company is using Amazon EC2 now and I am down at the PDC watching the details on Azure unfold. I have not seen anything yet that would convince us to move away from Amazon. Azure definitely looks compelling, but the fact is I can now utilize Windows and SQL server on Amazon with SLAs in place. Ray Ozzie made it clear that Azure will be changing A LOT based on feedback from the developer community. However, Azure has a lot of potential and we'll be watching it closely.
Also, Amazon will be adding load balancing, autoscaling and dashboard features in upcoming updates to the service (see this link: http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/new-features-for-amazon-ec2/). Never underestimate Amazon as they have a good headstart on Cloud Computing and a big user base helping refine their offerings already. Never underestimate Microsoft either as they have a massive developer community and global reach.
Overall I do not think the cloud services of one company are mutually exclusive from one another. The great thing is that we can leverage all of them if we want to.
Microsoft should offer up the ability to host Linux based servers in their cloud. That would really turn the world upside down!
Well it's more than just web services. It will also allow you to host other types of connected applications. Plus it provides integrated access to other MS software on the cloud; i.e. SharePoint, Exchange, CRM, SQL data sevices, and will allow you to fully customize and extend those offerings in the same way that you would be able to customize and extend them if they were hosted on-premises.
At the Archtect Insight Conference last year they mentioned that they have started to alter core server products to deal with the large scale failover environment which is very interesting to me at least.
Its bunch of stuff that is coming into the Cloud. I think of this as more of Platform in the Cloud.
Sql Server
CRM
MOSS
Exchange
BizTalk
Geneva (identity)
The terms that are mentioned here are "STORE" and "COMPUTE"
For me this get really intersting around the IDEA of a Internet Service Bus.
It is also about moving to the development workflow process too.
OSLO DSLs and Qudrant - Moving to a Model Driven View
Entity Framework - giving developers strong typed model in code at a click of button
ADO Data Services and Data Dynamic Webtemplates using MVC
Then with the Azure Templates and the new "WebRoles" moving to deployment of the applications to the Cloud.
Then for the Admins one click provisioning of servers is awsome.
On the Data Privacy Rules... which is the one big elephant in the room and has been mentioned... Typically there is the often a ruling in each Country about information security.
UK RIPA
US Patriot Act
Are these really conceptully different? And these 2 countries do share information anyway...IMHO (legally they are different, but to a customer both laws give access to customer data its just question of who)
At this point, information on Windows Azure is pretty scarce. I was in the keynote during the announcement, and my best guess at this point is that they're trying to provide a more extensive virtualization environment than simply hosted IIS instances.
At this point, though, I can't say more than that.
We use S3 for storage very successfully and I've always kept an eye on EC2 for Windows and SQL Server support. So now these are available I dug further.
I was pretty worried when I read this:
http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2008/11/bad-storage-performance-on-amazon-ec2-windows-servers/
Perhaps, as we're developing what will hopefully become a very popular website, we should be considering the new data store models - Azure's or Amazon's SimpleDB. Hmmmmm - complete rewrite!
The major difference going forward is that Amazon EC2 is free from today Nov 1, Check this out.
http://www.buzzingup.com/2010/10/amazon-announces-free-cloud-services-for-new-developers/