How Are You Getting Your Cloud On?
With 71 percent of CIOs report having a cloud-first strategy, it’s clear enterprises are doing something. But it’s also clear that no two organizations are in the same place. While some organizations have gone “all in” by moving their production workloads to the cloud, most organizations are adopting a hybrid approach in which they are: […]
New Relic Extends Monitoring Reach
New Relic this week at its Future Stack 2017 conference extended the reach of its monitoring services via the release of a software development kit (SDK) that makes it possible for IT teams to monitor custom applications. In addition, New Relic unveiled Health Map, which makes it much easier for IT administrators to correlate data […]
Top 6 Challenges of API Testing
Testing teams face several unique challenges when testing application programming interface (API) implementations. API testing is part of the integration testing process and concerns the communication between two systems—one of which your staff likely has no control over. Below you’ll find the following six common challenges when testing APIs and our recommended solutions. Initial Setup of API […]
Understanding the App Development Life Cycle
More and more businesses nowadays are shifting to mobile. And that’s absolutely reasonable choice: More than 50 percent of digital media consumption accounts for mobile apps; Ninety percent of the time smartphone users spend on their mobiles goes to mobile apps; A typical user has about 30 apps installed on his mobile and spends more […]
The Challenges of Digital Experience Monitoring
One of the great ironies of DevOps is that the better you are, the less likely it becomes that anyone will ever see your best work. If the code is supremely elegant, the app runs flawlessly, the servers do not lag and users and managers rarely say anything because that is exactly the experience they expect. […]
The Top 10 Reasons to Use Cassandra
The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice of database if you are looking for scalability and high availability without compromising performance for your mission-critical applications. Additionally, Cassandra’s support for replicating across multiple data centers is best-in-class, providing lower latency for users and the peace of mind of knowing that you can survive regional outages. […]
When Bad Things Happen to Good Clouds: Why You Need a Recovery Plan
Amazon S3 storage service recently experienced a widespread five-hour outage in its East Coast availability zone. Many next-generation consumer and business applications rely on a cloud storage, so the S3 outage quickly cascaded and temporarily crippled organizations from Netflix to Slack. Cloud outages like this are normal, and notable because they affect so many businesses. The […]
Backup: Not So Easy in Certain Environments
We discussed how backup needs to be reinvented for a new era cloud-native applications, and what you should look for in a modern database backup and recovery solution. But even if you scrap the traditional approach to back up and write scripts to handle the task, backup and recovery of next-generation applications and databases (Apache […]
Why Reinvent Deduplication? Isn’t Cloud Storage Cheap?
Most people assume cloud storage is cheaper than on-premises storage. After all, why wouldn’t they? You can rent object storage for $276 per terabyte per year or less, depending on your performance and access requirements. Enterprise storage costs between $2,500 to $4,000 per terabyte per year, according to analysts at Gartner and ESG. This comparison […]
Is Cloud Adoption on Your Company’s Horizon?
Under pressure to increase the speed of innovation in the digital space and outpace competitors, companies large and small are turning to the cloud. Moving to the cloud provides flexibility of infrastructure, transparency of infrastructure costs and many other benefits. However, making the transition to the cloud is far more intricate for regulated industries—especially large […]
Protecting Data in Public Cloud and Hybrid Cloud
Backup, business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) have all been a critical part of IT for over 30 years—ever since we began relying on technology to run our businesses. Traditional solutions were designed for the world of on-premises infrastructure and structured applications and relational databases. But the world is changing. In the last blog, […]
3 Approaches to End-User Experience Monitoring
The volume of transactions running through websites and mobile apps make customer-facing applications crucial to online businesses. If these applications perform well for their users, they generate revenue for the business. If they don’t, they affect the credibility of the business, which in turn affects the overall revenue. It is therefore imperative that businesses using […]
Protecting Data in Public Cloud and Hybrid Cloud
Backup, business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) have all been a critical part of IT for more than 30 years—ever since we began relying on technology to run our businesses. Traditional solutions were designed for the world of on-premises infrastructure and structured applications and relational databases. But the world is changing. In the last […]
How Healthy is Your Office 365 Environment?
The IBM Domino environment was mostly replaced by Microsoft on-premises technology, then later replaced by the Microsoft Cloud Services. One thing that hasn’t been replaced is the need for administrators to have control and visibility of service delivery to end users. Whether you’re using IBM applications, Microsoft on-premises servers or Microsoft Office 365, as the […]
How IT Ops Teams Prepare to Prevent Web Downtime
IT operations teams can anticipate most periods of peak web traffic. The key to preventing outages and issues is to plan ahead. Here at BigPanda, we’ve prepared a checklist of the key factors IT ops teams need to consider to ensure their IT infrastructure is ready. Here’s is a recommended checklist for IT and ops […]
Should You Go ‘Serverless’? The Pros and Cons
The popularity of the “serverless” term started to grow when Amazon launched AWS Lambda in 2014. Ever since, we’ve seen the term exponentially grow in use and reference, with more vendors entering the market with their own solutions (Azure recently went GA with Functions, for example). What is it all about and how does this […]
Evolving Data Requirements in Multi-Cloud Environments
By design or by accident, multi-cloud is a reality that most enterprise IT teams have to cope with today. Multi-cloud (or, cross-cloud, as Dell EMC calls it) refers to an IT model where an organization uses services of one or more public cloud service providers, sometimes in addition to using its own data centers. In […]
12 Tips for Managing Your Multi-Cloud Environment
No single cloud vendor has the perfect solution for your unique business situation. The only way to maximize the benefits of cloud services to your business is by dealing with several cloud providers and monitoring all of them simultaneously. That’s the IT equivalent of singing an aria while standing on your head and scrambling eggs. […]
8 Ways to Focus on Cloud Software Security
Cloud Software Security Examined Cloud software security is critically important. Take, for example, health care: Doctors and other healthcare professionals are one of the biggest users of cloud software, yet recent studies demonstrate that more than 15 percent are considered to be operating at a high risk of security breaches, and more than half are […]
Mesos Usage Survey: Big Clusters, Big Workloads
Mesosphere, purveyors of DC/OS, recently released a survey of Mesos users focused on Mesos deployment information. There were some interesting results, and a few things I wish they’d dug a little deeper on. If you’ve ever given a survey, then you know that the results inevitably spawn more questions. No doubt Mesosphere has the same […]
Why DevOps Needs Cloudified NPM
One of the three “ways”—or principles that DevOps guru Gene Kim articulates as defining DevOps—is amplifying feedback loops. One of the key ways that Ops contributes to this amplification is by implementing rich monitoring instrumentation of operational conditions. The move toward more automated configuration management and the rise of cloud-friendly application performance management suites have […]
Moving to the Cloud? Consider These Questions
The cloud is going mainstream. That’s the word from a recent Cisco Systems-sponsored study, which found that more than two-thirds of organizations are using the cloud to “help drive business outcomes”—a whopping 61 percent increase from the previous year’s study. But almost the same number aren’t maximizing the true value of cloud computing. What does […]
PyMongo Pointers: How to Make Robust and Highly Available Mongo Queries
In today’s clusters made of commodity servers, failures are the norm. Having your code fail because one data node happened to be down when you were querying it is frustrating and no fun. Based on my experience hardening our product, I wanted to share a few quick and easy pointers that can help make your […]