As John F. Kennedy put it, “everything changes but change itself.” This is particularly true in computer industry where things move faster than other industries. It’s further complicated when you also have dependencies that also move fast.
A good example is that your software project depends on another product which is also under development. Sometimes we call it synchronous development. The payoff could be huge if you can ship your product at the same time as the dependent product which presumably has bigger user base. You can then leverage the go-to market opportunity as first player in the bigger community. Read more... (542 words, estimated 2:10 mins reading time)
The first part of the title of this article may seem like mathematics, but it’s really not. This is just about software packaging – a topic not so often discussed. In plain English, it basically says something like: one application with N features vs. N applications, each of which has one feature. More generally speaking, it can describe software entity with sub-elements. I will discuss it in the contexts of mobile/desktop, and virtual/physical. Read more... (646 words, estimated 2:35 mins reading time)
As I tweeted last week, there would be a big announcement when the open source VI Java API gets 20,000 downloads. It hit target yesterday. To celebrate it, I decide to release the code generator for the API, which William (@lamw) rated as “awesome.” Read more... (299 words, estimated 1:12 mins reading time)
While installing and configuring vCloud Director recently, I kept thinking how to simplify it by removing un-necessary concepts and steps. To be fair, vCloud Director as of version 1.5 does a decent job to provide a high level abstraction for cloud infrastructure. Still it can be significantly improved just like every other new technology. Note that I pick vCloud Director as an example for the following discussion simply because VMware is the leader in virtualization space and what it does has ripple effects on other vendors. Read more... (579 words, estimated 2:19 mins reading time)
As I predicted for 2011, the cloud will be the ultimate powerhouse for mobile devices. The reason is simple: although fancy and stylish, the mobile devices typically do not have enough computing power and storage space for certain applications. Read more... (299 words, estimated 1:12 mins reading time)
If you’ve had a chance to use vSphere Web Service SDK, you must know the PropertyCollector is very hard to use. It takes a newcomer quite some time to learn how to use it, and even more time to learn to use it effectively. Luckily, you no longer have to if you use the open source vSphere Java API (a.k.a. vijava) because it has encapsulated the PropertyCollector behind these newly added getter methods of the managed object types. Read more... (549 words, estimated 2:12 mins reading time)
I went to EMC office at Milford, MA last week for a 5 day training class on Vblock Administration. As you may have known, VCE Vblock is the industry’s first and leading converged infrastructure with compute, network, and storage from industry leaders. For the compute, it uses Cisco UCS. If you have followed my blog, you should know that I have blogged about the UCS emulator and XML management APIs. Read more... (408 words, estimated 1:38 mins reading time)
While checking out the search engine terms to my blog, I found an interesting one there: “why so many programming languages?” A great question indeed. If you take a look at the Wikipedia page on programming languages, you will be surprised by the number of programming languages today. To give you a hint, the languages are categorized into different sections by their first letters. When I browsed the page, I found most of them were new to me and will definitely remain so in the future. 
Read more... (592 words, estimated 2:22 mins reading time)
IT automation is key to IT efficiency, agility and control. Here are some of my recent thoughts on this topic. Please feel free to share yours.
People and Automation Read more... (285 words, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)
- All automations ultimately start from people, not the other way around.
- Although automation has a role, it never takes the place of a good system administrator.
- Not everything can be automated, and not everything is worth being automated.
After finishing up my reflection of 2011 predictions , it’s time to make my predictions for 2012 as today is the last day of 2011.
1. Virtualization war will be heated between VMware and Microsoft. The trigger will be the Hyper-V 3.0 which is expected to ship in the middle of 2012 with the Windows 8 server. According to many people, the 3.0 release will bring it on par or better than latest VMware hypervisor. Read more... (675 words, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)
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