“Horizontal expansion loses the depth, though excessive depth that only provokes darkness is futile. Therefore a balance between depth and vastness is essential in learning” ― Privavrat Thareia This year, consider…
All Data is Not Created Equal
Analyzing Spark’s MPP Scalability with the USL
Over at the Percona Performance Blog, Vadim recently published benchmark results for Apache Spark, and the shape of the graphs caught my eye. Here’s one of Vadim’s charts: The benchmark…
There’s A Script for That
If there’s a chance to save time by using scripts or automation tools, I always take it. Over the years I’ve found that there are a set of common themes…
Designing a Monitoring Solution: Where Are Your Eyes?
Contemporary monitoring solutions are no different from any other distributed application in your environment. Even a small-scale deployment can include multiple components: often, these include a Web server, an application server, and…
The Factors That Impact Availability, Visualized
We all want our systems to have high availability, but sometimes the exact meaning of “high availability” isn’t very clearly defined. However, availability — like scalability, performance, and so on…
How Does your VMware Environment Look Today? A Rationale for the VOA
VMware® as a technology has a huge potential to sprawl. Have you created an environment for testing purposes? Have projects required a number of guest VMs to be built, but…
8 Reasons Why ChatOps Isn’t Working At Your Company
About a year and half ago I published a blog post about ChatOps at VividCortex (if you’re unfamiliar with ChatOps, that original post still serves as a good primer). At…
On Becoming a Virtualization Professional
I’ve been a VMware® evangelist and virtualization advocate for a decade. Even before I first started using VMware—by accident, I’ll admit—I’ve had the (dis?)advantage of wearing many hats in IT.…
SDN, Network Management, and You
The industry has been busy discussing the nature of SDN, or software-defined networking. They are wondering if SDN is Openflow. Or maybe it just programs the network through open APIs, which can be anything…
Configuring and Monitoring the Next Gen Network
In Intent-Based Networking – A Must for SDN, an article published on this site, Faisal Khan makes the very valid point that “SDN is about making networking more flexible and agile through programming…