In a large corporation I worked in previously a manager purchased a $50,000+ Websphere production license despite the fact that he only needed a container to run a couple of servlets on a small intranet system.
Assuming we agree that this was overkill, to say the least, and that a free servlet runner like Tomcat would probably have sufficed, what type of business/technology use might justify the high cost of an application server such as Websphere? I'm thinking that integration projects are the most likely candidate - i.e. in environments in which multiple legacy systems need to be glued together using Java/Websphere as a bridge or wrapper. Any other good cases?
I don't necessarily agree with the following, but there is a fairly strong argument there...
<devil's advocate>
The key thing to remember when looking at licensing isn't necessarily the cost of the technology, but rather the cost of having someone point their finger at you at 2am when it's all gone belly up that you want money for.
There are a bunch of companies who have built their business model on this approach (eg Sun - leaving the obvious debate aside on whether that actually worked or not, RedHat, et al).
The benefits that IBM can provide for their products don't really come down to technology per se (as you said, you can get something that'll do the same job for a much better price), it's more about the business process around their products. If you're in an environment where you need predictable uptime, scalability, etc etc. (Banking for example)
IBM's products are reasonably well tested (one of the reasons they're usually a couple of releases behind the bleading edge elsewhere). You know that the things you're getting will be pretty robust, integrate well with other big-business systems (both legacy systems as you said, and other business systems like Siebel, Oracle, SAP, etc) not to mention the one-stop-shop support for integration with other IBM products (if you've drunk the full IBM cool aid).
You also know that where there are issues with what's being delivered, it's relatively transparent and there will be documented workarounds available for things you're likely to bump into.
</devil's advocate>
If you have smart enough people, you don't necessarily need the support that folk like IBM can offer (take the RedHat example - people can still go and download Linux for free and run their business on it). But at 2:00 you're on your own - you can't ring up Linux (or one of the Tomcat committers) and get them to tell you what you're doing wrong and help you fix it.
If you continue to look around, you'll find that many decisions like this aren't as based on technical considerations as you'd think they should be. I, like most other experienced practicioners, would choose one of the other stacks like Tomcat or JBoss. This isn't because they don't have licensing costs; it's because developers can build the best product in the shortest amount of time with them compared to the other J2EE products.
As to why IBM and other J2EE vendors still have as big a market share as they do, it's because of thought patterns like "Having a throat to choke", and "Can't get fired for buying IBM". Neither of which contain much technical merit, but that's because most of the time the people making these decisions aren't technically curent enough to understand the real factors, and don't have or don't trust the people that are qualified to make the decision.
This question is a little too fine-grained to give a short technical answer, since there are so many complicated aspects to building a successful product in the context of your situation. A couple general "Containers For Dummies" guidelines though:
Use either Tomcat or JBoss, move on, and focus on writing a good application. I see a strong up-vote for Glassfish, but I'd caution that it might not have the critical mass you'd be comfortable with. You can use one of the other vendor products and still succeed; They'll just weigh you down more.
When in doubt, listen to Rod Johnson. He and his company Spring Source are paving the way for the evolution of Java today. He's doing for Java containers today what Josh Block did for Java 1.2 (anyone use the Collections framework???)
Remember that Websphere is not just an overengineered Servlet container - it's an overengineered J2EE container. Hence, things like EJBs that are also supported in J2EE are present within WebSphere - so if an application does need them, they are available. Of course, why one would need WebSphere instead of a generic J2EE container is beyond me - unless they need overengineered feature Y that is due to be released in Milestone X of competing freely available product Z.
To be precise, Websphere is not a product. It's a product line. As stated by Martin, service is a crucial part of why people purchase IBM Websphere products (and btw. a big chunk of IBMs revenue).
Websphere consists not only of the J2EE stack (aka Websphere Application Server). It has many components/products built on top of it such as the Websphere Process Choreographer (workflow engine), Websphere Portal, Websphere Business Monitor and other useful components to run a business.
Websphere is a terrible product. Unless you need all the other IBM products that integrate with it and nothing else, theres no sensible reason to buy it. If all you want is a servlet container, grab Tomcat or Jetty.
They are infinitely faster and wont give your developers headaches. Websphere is a royal pain in the arse. Things that take seconds in tomcat eg deploying a small WAR, literally require minutes and a thousand clicks in Websphere.
In the end Websphere only gets sold to big corporate types where the manager, knows little technology, doesnt care about wasting^h^h^h^h investing the companies money, and becasuse of the old addage - nobody got fired buying IBM.
Many people dont use EJBs and stick to Hibernate and Servlets. If you do that in the beginning theres no reason why your WARs wont work in the future when you decide to move to Websphere because it - integrates with something. Then again you really should also be sure that you are aware of what other products you might need in the future and use that in your decision making process.
Im sure many other java types when forced to work with Websphere with just servlets often develop in Tomcat and then deploy at the very end in WS.
Related
I want to create a production management system to be used by a small manufacturing firm. The system will allow to document different stages in manufacturing of equipment. The requirements are as follows:
1.Non browser based interface.Need something like Swing or AWT based.While i understand the convenience of implementing a browser based solution,the business owner insists on a non browser interface
2.Accessed from multiple systems.These systems will allow CRUD operations on the central system (Thin Client?)
3.The application will not have more than 3 concurrent users.
I need some advice regarding what would be a good path for this kind of application.Currently, i'm thinking of using Griffon with RMI. However, i don't have much development experience.Read a bit about Apache River (Jini) too.Would it be a good idea to use Griffon with RMI?
Please provide some advice. Thanks.
EDIT:after some reading, i've decided to use more mainstream frameworks.So, Griffon is not an option. How about Jini(Apache River) or OSGI (Apache Felix)?
Hmm how is that a project which recently moved out of the incubation phase be considered mainstream vs a project that's been used in production for more than 3 years now? Anyway, Apache River gives you access to Jini technology and nothing more; meaning you can't achieve item #1 of your list with River alone. River may use RMI for accessing remote resources, however you can use RMI directly, or try out DRMI, Kryonet, Hessian/Burlap, Spring's HTTP Invoker, Protocol Buffers, Avro/Thrift, REST, SOAP, ZMQ and many more.
Even if you choose one of these options and/or River you still have to define the following things
application structure (file structure and runtime behavior)
build setup
dependency management
testing profiles
packaging
deployment strategies
These things and more are what Griffon brings to the table. As you may have noticed the framework allows you to build up applications by adding plugins, reducing thew amount of time you must allot for hunting down dependencies, setting up bootstrap mechanism and getting things done. On the subject of remoting technologies have a look at the different options Griffon has to offer http://artifacts.griffon-framework.org/tags/plugin/remoting
Even more, you can also combine OpenDolphin (http://open-dolphin.org/dolphin_website/Home.html) with Griffon. There's even an example application found at the opendolhpin repository showing a full client-server application (build with Griffon, Grails and OpenDolphin) https://github.com/canoo/open-dolphin/tree/master/dolphin-griffon-crud
With what seems to be your current understanding of the problem, I would not recommend OSGI, especially for a small manufacturing firm (Possible maintenance issues, depending on the "personel").
The main reason why I wouldn't advocate JINI or OSGI in your case is because of what you said
However, i don't have much development experience.
JINI (Apache River) is a viable option as long as you fully understand the concepts of LookupService and service registrations, etc. There's tons of RMI going on here with possible firewall implications...
OSGI is not difficult but you may have issues deciding how to structure your applications as well as interacting with services, etc.
Try to stick to the simplest approach that you can handle for the implementation (Flexible design in mind): Make it work and then improve it.
There are simple Web Services options such as Spring Remoting (over http/https for example), unless Spring introduces too many concepts and headaches for your app.
As per title. I don't know if this is the right place or way to ask this, admins feel free to edit/move/close the question if appropriate.
I'd like to get pointers to recent material clarifying the market trends, as well as real life examples. Even pseudo-pundit, Gartner-like stuff is OK. Thanks.
I am curious about the second part of the question. What is the basis of your statement that 'the ESB thing' appears to be fading? I don't believe it is.
The problem with ESBs however is that some vendors call their product an ESB, but it actually is much much more than that. In some companies this happened with their integration product just because Gartner or some other analysts company says that ESB is hot. Marketing strategy is changed: The product is called ESB and maybe somethings are added that are expected in an ESB.
Paul Fremantle of WSO2 wrote a very good article about what an ESB really is [1].
As for OSGi: The first company I saw using it in their middleware was WSO2. I have heard, that TIBCO, another middleware vendor, is also moving or has moved towards using it in their Active Matrix platform.
OSGi may help in various ways. The most important is that it decreases the effort of the installation of the platform. Install a minimum on each system used to deploy the application, and during deployment the components required to run the application will be added. You do not have to worry about having installed the right plug-ins, add-ons and what not. This is what both WSO2 and TIBCO are doing.
With some vendors, you see that you need to install an awful amount of software, of which you in the end may be using just a small part (e.g. IBM WebSphere). Because of this, you may have to use over-dimensioned systems, which adds extra costs.
OSGi may prevent this.
Have a look at the presentation of WSO2 about the WSO2 Carbon platform [2].
The statement at the end of the presentation says it all:
Adapt the middleware to your architecture, not the architecture to the middleware
So yes, I think OSGi has a future in enterprise apps.
[1] http://wso2.org/library/2913
[2] http://www.slideshare.net/wso2.org/the-carbon-story-presentation-855666
Disclaimer:
I am in no way affiliated with WSO2, TIBCO or IBM. I am a certified TIBCO BusinessWorks Developer and have been developing applications for the IBM WebSphere Process Server platform. Above all, I am a WSO2 Enthusiast.
I would say yes..WSO2 has proof for that..Check the following links
http://osgi.dzone.com/articles/carbon-osgi-and-soa
http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/wso2-upgrades-osgi-middleware-695
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I have a couple of different projects running for the moment - some PHP apps and a few WordPress instances, which all currently are kept at a web hosting company. The contract period time is about to end and I would lie if I wouldn't say that I really had considered making the switch onto a VPS server in the cloud with the prices getting really great.
I am totally in love with the fact of being able to turn the performance up or down when demand increases, or goes away and thereby cut the costs.
With my background as a PHP developer, with only a little hint of Linux (ubuntu) knowledge, I am thoroughly concerned about the security if I should run my own VPS.
Sure, I am able to install and get things running with my current knowledge (and some help by Google), but is it realistic nowadays to expect that my server (LAMP, really) will stay secure by running out-of the box stuff and keeping it up-to date?
Thanks
Maintaining your server is just one more thing to worry about, and if you're a developer, your focus should probably be on development. That said, it needs to make financial sense to go the managed route. If you're just working on toy projects (I've got a $20/month VPS that I use for my personal projects and homepage, and it's pretty hands-off) or if you're just getting off the ground, VPSes have the great advantage of being cheap and giving you lots of control of your environment. You can even mitigate some of the risk by keeping aggressive backups, since it's easy to redeploy a server quickly.
But, if you get to the point where it won't affect your profitability to do so, you probably should seriously consider getting someone else to take care of infrastructure for you either by buying managed hosting services or hiring someone to do it for you. It all depends on what you can afford to lose if you get rooted and how much time you can afford to invest in server management and recovery as opposed to coding.
I wouldn't. We did the same thing because the non-managed VPS are sooo cheap, but unless you really need to install applications or libraries that are not part of standard shared host setups, in my experience, being a pure developer as well, the time spent is never worth it.
Unless, of course, it is your own tiny blog or you just want to play around.
But imagine you (or whichever automation you use) update php, and for some reasons it fails (or worse, you render your current installation unusable) - are you good enough to handle this? And if so, how long will it take you? Do you have a friend at hand who can help?
We, as a small company, are getting rid of our VPSs step-by-step and moving back to our reseller package, hosted at a good hosting provider.
Good question, though.
As for security, I have successfully used Amazon EC2 for a number of things. It's not the cheapest around, but quite comprehensible in shared data stores between instances, connection to S3, running hosts at different hosting centers etc, grouping hosts in different clusters, etc etc.
They have a firewall built in, where you can turn all things off except say, TCP traffic on port 22 for SSH and 80 for web. That combined with something like Ubuntu, where you can easily run updates without worrying much about breakage, is probably all you need from a security point of view.
You need consider cloud computing as a statement of avaibility, not cost. You can be seriously surprised about the cost at the end.
I already have optioned to use VPS hosting. Good VPS hosting is costly, these days you may find cheap dedicated host compared to VPS. Have look at hivelocity.com – I like their services.
About security, most VPS host company takes care of security for you at the infra-structure level, and some may use antivirus software on files. On dedicated host, you need to take care by yourself or contract managed support services: a tradoff.
LAMP server is cheap everywhere. You can hire a private VPS and have some security, you may count on services like DNS hosting too – this is trouble to configure. VPS can be your first step as you're doubtful and has no experience on hosting. Thereafter when you find out the advantages of having your own server, you'll migrate straight to dedicated server.
What is acceptable from a security standpoint will differ depending on the people involved, what you want to secure and requirements of the product/service.
For a development server I usually don't care so much, so I usually do some basic securing of the server and then don't pay attention to it again. My main concern is more of someone getting a session and using my cycles to run something. I don't normally care about IP so that's not a concern for me.
If I'm setting up a box that has to meet Sarbanes-Oxley, Safe Harbor, or other PII/PCI standards I must meet I would probably go managed just because I don't want the additional security work load.
Somewhere in between is a judgment based on if I want to commit the required time to secure the server to the level I want it secured at. If I don't want to do it myself I pay someone to do it.
I would be careful about assuming your getting a certain level of security just because your paying someone to manage your server. I've come across plenty of shops where security is really an afterthought.
If I understood you correctly, you are considering a move from a web host to a VPS, and wonder if you have the skills to ensure the OS remains secure now that it's under your control?
I guess it's an open-ended question. You are moving from a managed environment to an unmanaged environment, and whether you maintain your environmental security is up to you. If you're running your own server then you need to make sure that default passwords aren't in use (for the database, OS and any services on top), patches are quickly identified and applied, host firewalls are configured properly and suspicious activity alerts are immediately sent to you. Hang on, does your current web host do any of this for you? Without details about your current web host and the planned VPS, you are pretty much comparing apples to oranges.
BTW, I would be somewhat concerned about my LAMP server security, but frankly I would be much more concerned about development errors (SQL injection, XSS) and the packages running on top of my server (default passwords + dev errors).
For a lamp stack, I would probably not do it. It would be a different case if you were using a Platform-as-a-service provider like Windows Azure - by my own experience there is minimal operational overhead and you just upload the app and it runs in a vm (and yes it supports php).
But for Linux there are no such providers that I know of, which means you will have to manage the Operating system, the app frameworks, the web server and anything else that you install on the instance. I wouldn't do it myself. I would consider the options as hiring a person with the relevant experience to do this for me vs the cost of managed services from the vps provider and go with one of those two.
Rather than give you advice about what you should do, or tell you what I would do, I'm just going to address your question "is it realistic nowadays to expect that my server (LAMP, really) will stay secure by running out-of the box stuff and keeping it up-to date?" The answer to this question, in my opinion, is basically yes.
dietbuddha is right, of course: what constitutes an acceptable level of security depends on the context, but for all but the most security-sensitive purposes, if you're using a current (i.e. supported) distro, with sane defaults, and keeping up with the security updates, then you ought to be fine.
I have two VPSs, each of them currently runs Ubuntu 10.04 server. On one of them, I spend some time installing and configuring tiger, tripwire, and taking various other security measures. On the other, I simply installed fail2ban and set security updates to automatic, and left it at that. They've been running for a few years, now, and I've had no problem with either.
You should do it for fun and for learning purposes. Other than that, don't; you're wasting your own time and a lot of other people's time.
I say this because I've wasted serious time setting up an EC2 instance to host my SVN server and a few other things. I mean, I loved setting everything up and messing w/ the server; I learned a lot especially because I'd never done anything a LINUX server before. However, looking back, I wasted a ton of time and had to keep buggin #Jordan S. Jones for help.
I'm am trying to figure out how the Oracle "Layered Architecture Model" works, and I am very confused about what the business, data, and presentation do, and how they relate to each other. I have seen many diagrams showing how this should work, but some real world examples would be useful?
For example I am guessing that web applications are what Oracle calls "Composite applications" and that these web applications are built up of what Oracle calls "Presentation Services".
Let me try to answer to the best of my knowledge:
The OSB is BEA's ALSB overhauled. The main purpose of this is the job of ESB. It sits between your presentation layer and rest of the application. It defines the boundaries of your application, and supports mediation between various units.
Your components and various subsystems that contain business logic (think of different departments in an organization) are termed Composites. For instance, these composites could internally use BPELs to represent business logic, and use JCA for reaching out services (database, ejbs, etc.,) local to them.
These Composites, if need to reach out to services outside their jurisdiction (sorry, could not think of a better word,) they need to contact the OSB.
Any internal requirements for a service mediation is satisfied by a Mediator (unfortunately, this is OESB overhauled)
As you can see, this is sort of a pathetic attempt by Oracle to sell both their original ESB solution, along with the products they bought from BEA. Let me tell you, nothing stops you from wiring your internal services in OSB itself (probably the ultimate direction of Oracle)
I am sure you will be able to find out more after rereading, and working hands on. Request to please update your question with your findings.
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Our company is considering moving from hosting our own servers to EC2 and I was wondering if this was a good idea.
I have seen a lot of stuff about can cloud computing (and specifically EC2) do x, or can it do y, but my real question is why would you NOT want to use it?
If you were setting up a business, what are the reasons (outside of cost) that you would choose to go through the trouble of managing your own servers?
I know there are a lot of cost calculations you can put in regarding bandwidth, disk usage etc, but there are of course, other costs regarding maintenance of your own server. For the sake of this discussion I am willing to consider the costs roughly equal.
I seem to remember that Joel Spolsky wrote a little blur on this at one time, but I was unable to find it.
Anyone have any reasons?
Thanks!
I can think of several reasons why not use EC2 (and I am talking about EC2, not grid comp in general):
Reliability: Amazon makes no guarantee as to the availability / down time / safety of EC2
Security: Amazon does not makes any guarantee as to whom it will disclose your data
Persistence: ensuring persistence of your data (that includes, effort to set up the system) is complicated over EC2
Management: there are very few integrated management tools for a cloud deployed on EC2
Network: the virtual network that allows EC2 instances to communicates has some quite painful limitations (latency, no multicast, arbitrary topological location)
And to finish that:
Cost: on the long run, if you are not using EC2 to absorb peak traffic, it is going to be much more costly than investing into your own servers (cheapo servers like Supermicro cost just a couple of hundred bucks...)
On the other side, I still think EC2 is a great way to soak up non-sensitive peak traffic, if your architecture allows it.
Some questions to ask:
What is the expected uptime, and how does downtime affect your business? What sort of service level agreement can you get, what are the penalties for missing it, and how confident are you that the SLA uptime goals will be met? (They may be better or worse at keeping the systems up than you are.)
How sensitive is the data you're proposing to put into the cloud? Again, we get into the questions of how secure the provider promises to be, what the contractual penalties and indemnities are, and how confident you are that the provider will live up to the agreement. Further, there may be external requirements. If you deal with health-related data in the US, you are subject to very strict requirements. If you deal with credit card data, you also have responsibilities (contractual, not legal).
How easy will it be to back out of the arrangement, should service not be what was expected, or if you find a better deal elsewhere? This includes not only getting your data back, but also some version of the applications you've been using. Consider the possibilities of your provider going bankrupt (Amazon isn't going to go bankrupt any time soon, but they could split off a cloud provider which could then go bankrupt), or having an internal reorganization. Bear in mind that a company in serious trouble may not be able to live up to your expectations of service.
How much independence are you going to have? Are you going to be running their software or software you pick? How easy will it be to reconfigure?
What is the pricing scheme? Is it possible for the bills to hit unacceptable levels without adequate warning?
What is the disaster plan? Ideally, it's running your software on servers in a different location from where the disaster hit.
What does your legal department (or retained corporate attorney) think of the contract? Is there a dispute resolution mechanism, and, if so, is it fair to you?
Finally, what do you expect to get out of moving to the cloud? What are you willing to pay? What can you compromise on, and what do you need?
Highly sensitive data might be better to control yourself. And there's legislation; some privacy sensitive information, for example, might not leave the the country.
Also, except for Microsoft Azure in combination with SDS, the data stores tend to be not relational, which is a nuisance in certain cases.
Maybe concern that that big a company will more likely be approached by an Agent Smith from the government to spy on everyone that a little small provider somewhere.
Big company - more customers - more data to aggregate and recognize patterns - more resources to organize a sophisticated watch system.
Maybe it's more of a fantasy but who ever knows?
If you don't have a paranoia it doesn't mean yet that you are not being watched.
The big one is: if Amazon goes down, there's nothing you can do to bring it back up.
I'm not talking about doomsday scenarios where the company disappears. I mean that you're at the mercy of their downtime, with little recourse of your own.
Security -- you don't know what is being done to your data
Dependency -- your business is now directly intertwined with the provider
There are different kinds of cloud computing with lots of different vendors providing it. It would make me nervous to code my apps to work with a single cloud vendor. that you specifically had to code for..amazon and Microsoft I believe you need to specifically code for that platform - maybe google too.
That said, I recently jettisoned my own dedicated servers and moved to Rackspaces Mosso Cloud platform (which have no proprietary coding necessary) and I am really, really pleased with it so far. Cut my costs in half, and performance is way better than before. My sql server databases are now running on 64Bit enterprise SQL server versions with 32G of ram - that would have cost me a fortune on my previous providers infrastructure.
As far as being out of luck when the cloud is down, that was true if my dedicated server went down - it never did, but if there was a hardware crash on my dedicated server, I am not sure it would be back on-line any quicker than rackspace could bring their cloud back up.
Lack of control.
Putting your software on someone else's cloud represents handing over some control. They might institute a file upload size limit, or memory limits which could ruin your application. A security vulnerbility in their control panel could get your site hacked.
Security issues are not relevant if your application does its own encryption. Amazon is then storing encrypted data that they have no way of decrypting.
But in addition to the uptime issues, Amazon could decide to increase their prices to whatever they want. If you're dependent on them, you'll just have to pay it.
Depends how much you trust your own infrastructure in comparison to a 3rd party cloud service. In my opinion, most businesses (at least not IT related) should choose the later.
Another thing you lose with the cloud is the ability to choose exactly what operating system you want to run. For example, the latest Fedora Linux kernel available on EC2 is FC8, and the latest Windows version is Server 2003.
Besides the issues raised regarding dependability, reliability, and cost is the issue of data ownership. When you locate data on someone else's server, you no longer control who views, accesses, modifies, or uses that data. While the cloud operators can limit your access, you possess no way of limiting theirs or limiting who they give access to. Yes, you can encrypt all the data on the server but you lack any way of knowing who possesses root access to the server itself and any means to stop others from downloading your encrypted data and cracking it open. You lose control over your data; depending on what type of apps you are running and the proprietary nature of the data involved, this could engender corporate security and/or liability risks.
The other factor to consider is what would happen to your company if Amazon and/or EC2 were to suddenly vanish overnight. While a seemingly preposterous position, it could happen. Would you be able to quickly fill the hole and restore service, or would your potentially revenue generating apps languish while the IT staff scramble to obtain servers and bandwidth to get them back online? Also, what would happen to your data? The cloud hard drive holding all your information still exists, somewhere, and could pose a potential liability risk depending on the information you stored there--items such as personal information, business transaction records etc.
If I was starting my own business now, I would go through the hassle of purchasing and maintaining my own severs so I retained data ownership. I could control root access to the hardware, as well as control who can access and modify the data.
Unanswered security questions.
Really, do you want your IP out there, where you're not the one in control of it?
Most cloud computing environment are at least partially vendor specific. There's no good way to move stuff from one cloud to another without having to do a lot of rewriting. That sort of lock-in puts you at the mercy of one vendor when it comes to downtime, price increases, etc. If you rent or own your own servers, hosting providers and colos are pretty much interchangeable. You always have the option of moving somewhere else.
This may change in the future, as these things become standardized, but for now tying yourself to the cloud means tying yourself to a specific vendor.
This is kind of like the "Why would you use Linux" comment I received from management many years ago. The response I got was that it is a solution in search of a problem.
So what are your goals and objectives in moving to EC2?
I'd be interested to know if you'd still want to move to a cloud, if it was your own.
Cloud computing has brought parallel programming a little closer to the masses, but you still have to understand how best to use it - otherwise you're going to waste compute cycles and bandwidth.
Re-architecting your application for most efficient use of a cloud computing service is non-trivial.
Besides what has already been said here, we have to consider uniformity across the business. Are all of you applications going to be hosted in the cloud, or only most? Is most enough to pull the trigger on using the cloud when you still have to have personnel to handle a few special servers?
In particular, there might be special hardware that you need to communicate with such modems to accept incoming data, or voice cards that make automated phone calls. I don't know how such things could be handled in a cloud environment.