If you have a new hire, do you want him/her to push code into production system on the very first day? You may be OK with this sometimes. What if it’s a trading system with real money involved? More often than not, you come up with a different answer.
On Wednesday night, I attended a seminar organized by SDForum SAM SIG at LinkedIn headquarter. Pascal-Louis Perez and David Fortunato from Kaching.com engineering team gave a great talk on how they streamlined their software development process to the extent that they normally release 20 times a day to their production system. It’s quite a safe process that it’s OK for a new hire to push code on day one. Read more...(335 words, estimated 1:20 mins reading time)
Many people know VMware offers support on products, but not many know VMware actually started to support SDKs. I occasionally got questions on the SDK support. So I think a blog should help here.
A little history first. VMware used to provide support to partners who are part of Technical Alliance Program (TAP), but not to others including customer. VMware partners can also propose integration projects which may get people like me to provide architectual guidance. After SpringSource coming on board, Marty Messer took over the support program and expanded it to everyone as a paid service recently.
What You Can Buy?
The paid support is available in two levels: Read more...(462 words, estimated 1:51 mins reading time)
A fault is like an exception in Java or another modern programming language. It’s a data structure that holds information about an exceptional situation. Most of the faults are raised by the server; you can normally determine the cause from their fault names.
Close to 300 fault types are defined in the vSphere API. Let’s look at the top level hierarchy shown as follows.
The supertype for all faults is MethodFault. It is extended by InvalidCollectorVersion, InvalidProperty, RuntimeFault, and VimFault. The first two faults are not further extended to any other fault types. Read more...(518 words, 1 image, estimated 2:04 mins reading time)
It’s been two years since the first release of VI Java API on May 22, 2008. As of today, this VMware sponsored open source API has been downloaded more than 8,200 times including 1,000+ direct access to the source code from SVN. More importantly, the API has been widely adopted by VMware Community including partners and customers in their products and operation environment. I was amazed to hear success stories from companies which use this API to manage 10,000 servers.
Besides Java, people also started to use JVM languages such as Jython and Groovy to leverage the API. I think that is the direction for the API to be used by system administrators who look for an alternative to vSphere PowerCLI which is a great product with no choice but on Windows only.
How Was It Started?
The API was started because of my personal experience while helping VMware strategic partners. I found the Web Services SDK hard to use, and related samples hard to follow because of the procedural nature of Web Services. So I started to think how to solve the problem. During March and April 2008, I wrote code every night on my old Compaq notebook after helping my kid to sleep at night. Read more...(1146 words, estimated 4:35 mins reading time)
If you think Google is a superman and doesn’t need anyone, think twice. Yesterday in its Google I/O developer conference, it announced its Google App Engine for business. The notable features include centralized administration, a 99.9% uptime SLA and heightened security. It also announced the partnership with VMware on cloud portability.
Why does Google need VMware?
In short, it’s about Enterprise. As the “for business” in the name explains, the new service is targeted for enterprises which are not really Google’s strength. Read more...(266 words, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)
Most people who are interested in VMworld already know the public voting for the proposal is now open till 26th. If you would like to hear about specific topics, it’s high time to cast your votes.
For each track, all the presentation proposals are listed together in one page. To quickly locate a particular proposal, you can use find feature of your browser. Once you login, I would suggest to browse all the proposals and vote for those you find useful. Casting a vote is just two mouse clicks: one for voting and the other to close the confirmation message box. Read more...(523 words, estimated 2:06 mins reading time)
Yesterday I posted an article introducing the virtual appliance Timo created last week. I am sure some of you have given it a try. I hope you liked it. If you haven’t done so, you can download it from Timo’s post.
The virtual appliance ships with only two samples. Definitely not enough. That is why the community needs to work together so that we can match the functionalities of vSphere PowerCLI.
The following are two samples by David Rousseau who is an independent consultant living in Paris. Thanks for his permission to publish his code here. He owns the copyright of the code. If you want to use it, you can contact him or leave a message in this post.
jython_rest.py: This code shows how to use the tiny Client REST API I created. Check out this article for more details of the API itself.
jython_test.py: list all the hosts, resource pools, virtual machines and vApps that are found at the server.
To help you understand the code, I added a little comment before each file. Read more...(1489 words, estimated 5:57 mins reading time)
After creating a light virtual appliance last year, Timo Sugliani continued with a full fledged version of virtual appliance with all you need for vSphere development with Java and Jython. This is what Timo called “my linux powershell toolkit.” The biggest advantage is that you are no longer limited by Windows as your development platform. Read more...(268 words, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)
This week I attended an exciting seminar by Marc Raibert. He is a former MIT Professor who founded the Boston Dynamics Corporation in 1992 as a spin-off from MIT. The company develops a quadruped robot called BigDog among other types of innovative robots, including PETMAN, an anthropomorphic robot for testing equipment, RISE, a robot that climbs vertical surfaces, SquishBot, a shape-changing chemical robot that moves through tight space, and etc.
The BigDog is different from other robots in that it’s designed to operate in rough terrain like rocky, muddy, sandy and snowy surfaces. It can walk, trot, jog, climb a slope, follow a person, and even dance. Marc showed several cool videos, some of which are actually available on Youtube as well.
As you may have known, robots have many real world use cases. For example, it can help to carry weapons in battlefields, move heavy logistics for exploring wild areas, etc. In daily life, it can be a house maid who can help to handle house chores, take care of your kids; it can be a replacement for the Segway. Read more...(558 words, estimated 2:14 mins reading time)
Like it or not, many technologies in IT industry have a new tag called “cloud” these days. Tonight I came across yet another one at a SDForum emerging technology SIG meeting. It’s a great presentation Tropo & Moho: Disrupting telco with simple cloud-based communications by Jason Goecke, VP of Innovation of Voxeo Labs.
The company was started at Silicon Valley in late 1990s’ and almost went belly up in the Internet Bubble. It then relocated to Orlando FL and became profitable slowly thereafter. Now it’s emerging again with some cool technologies, mainly the communication cloud service.
Their cloud service is quite different from what most cloud companies offer in that it helps to build voice, IM related applications. To do that, the computing cloud has to connect to the telephone system, and be able to handle voice in real-time. This sets a high bar for most start-up companies. If we have to put the service into one of the IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, it fits in the PaaS where the platform is for real-time communication applications. Read more...(610 words, estimated 2:26 mins reading time)
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