An Englishman in New York...

...or an idiot abroad; i'll let you decide.

Anyhoo, just got back from a whistle stop tour of Toronto and New York, and familiarising myself with the subtle differences between us English speaking nations: "It's the little differences... Do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese?", "Royale with Cheese!".

Despite the general lack of sleep, overeating and drinking, through excessive coffee consumption I did manage to get quite a lot crammed into my 5 days.

Met some really smart guys from Apprenda, who have a very interesting offerings in the PaaS space. In particular their private PaaS solution addresses a lot of the underlying problems in IT organisations: i.e. from being infrastructure centric. They stitch together the infrastructure into a grid using their peer-to-peer fabric, which creates some interesting options in managing message flow.

Their approach enables development resources to focus on the job at hand: write code, and pushes the configuration and service level management to the platform. One thing I really liked is that they've managed to use containers not only on Linux, but also Windows...

It looks very slick, and for web apps it's a no brainer, but my challenge is that I face is a legacy of mid-range and mainframe apps, and all the [cultural] baggage that comes along with that... Any thoughts as to how to start the transition?

I also spent some time talking to the Hadoop distro vendor MapR to bounce around my IT Operations Analytics concept I'm trying to get some traction on. They also have a really interesting offering, though their marketing has let them down up to now. Basically their approach is not to champion particular products within the Hadoop ecosystem, rather they will support anything on top of their MapR-FS file system.

With MapR-FS they've basically ripped out HDFS and replaced with a file system that addresses some of the key issues in HDFS, yet still support the HDFS APIs:

1. The NameNode is a bottle neck
2. Start times on a NameNode recovery are lengthy
3. Lack of POSIX compliance
4. Supporting legacy UNIX/Linux apps
5. Small files support

You can find out more on their architect at the website, but the inclusion of an NFS server really helps get data into Hadoop, and as we are finding, the sooner we can start storing data the more we have once we work out what we're going to do with it ;-). They also have a tonne of NetApp like snapshot and replication tools, which is no surprise given their CTO is ex-NetApp.

I'm about to start kicking the tyres with MapR, so will report back once I have a bit more experience, but I'm impressed with what I've seen thus far.

Signing off.

Sting, sorry Alex.

Visualisation - a British spelling

An old colleague of mine has a great blog on BI (Business Intelligence) and it's application through a tool called Tableau. It was from reading Paul's blog that made me think I should start outputting some of my architecture ramblings; the ones I don't have the chance to during the working day, or the ones nobody wants to listen to;-)

In my head I see the visualisation piece as being the icing on the top of the cake: there is a whole data architecture that needs to underpin this, within the IT environment it is part of the ITOA movement I mentioned in a previous post.

That being said, Tableau is both a very powerful tool, and more importantly a very easy tool to get up and running to gain some valuable business insights.  Empowering a user base is one thing I look for in a platform, since it avoids service bottlenecks: i.e. a team of staff managing requests. Power to the people is what I say!

Anyhoo, recommend checking Paul's blog out for all your Tableau visualisation needs.

Going the ExtraHop

ITOA (IT Operations Analytics) is going mainstream big style in 2014. This is an area I am particularly interested in from an instrumentation, aggregation, analytics and visualisation perspective. This is an area IT folks can really add some business differentiation, but there are a number of hurdles to overcome: breaking down the silos, the usual road to DevOps enlightenment.

I had an interesting update from ExtraHop today. They have slick on-the-wire instrumentation product that does packet header analysis and correlation in real-time. They're also able to offload to Splunk to take advantage of Splunk's indexing capabilities; one nice result of this means you can use less Splunk license given you're targeting the data that's indexed using triggers (don't tell Splunk's sales people;-).