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Heroku is a platform that offers an effective join of the best parts of scaling cloud infrastructure with simple but great tools for immediately provisioning Ruby applications. Last week, at the Under the Radar event, where Heroku is a alumni, the company announced that they are nearly at 60,000 applications - marking a growth rate of over 1,000 new applications hosted weekly. In this quick analysis, we'll review Heroku and New Relic as two pieces of cloud infrastructure that helps web sites perform to service level agreements even the developer can love. Sponsor $ sudo gem install heroku - or - Getting Started is Easy Feeling like impressing the boss? Tell 'em you can transform that whiteboard sketch into an working web application in two weeks. That is what some inspired Ruby developers are doing. Some significant enterprises are giving it a shot. We found this list of enterprises that are known to have a Ruby application in production. So, the boss says " do it " What do you do next? If the answer needs to be "now", Heroku can fit in nicely as a place to launch your application without having to bring new technology or skills into the organization. Heroku's ruby platform lives on top of Amazon Web Services. The company sells a unit of computing called a Dyno, and bundles packages like the Ronin that are comprised of compute plus storage packages. All of Heroku's offerings come with infrastructure curation build ton top of EC2, S3 and a host of Amazon Web Services. Shown here is a snapshot of the Heroku Add-ons , partners the company offers to developers. It offers simplicity to the developer in the way the platform is bundled into Ruby. It has simple documentation that almost makes it fun to flip through architecture diagrams. And, it uses a model for add-ons that both promote the partner and make it easy to on-board. For example, when buying the popular Ruby application performance tool, New Relic for use in Heroku, the billing comes directly through Heroku's console and process. Recently, Heroku teamed up with NorthScale to introduce a memcache implementation to Heroku customers. Now, memcache is a command away, provisioned in your Amazon infrastructure cloud, all tuned and orchestrated by Heroku. All of the sudden, the cloud looks even smarter for developers scaling Ruby. New Relic Saves the SLA So, your app is ready, it looks exactly like your team wants it to. Is it ready for production launch? This can be an important time, and more and more often, developers are turning to tools like New Relic to test for application bottlenecks as part of the acceptance process. Sometimes, however, something is missed, and an application starts getting reports of "slowness", perceived or real. New Relic is ready to offer help, where you can tune your application, or do a quick two-minute install and troubleshoot. Here is a demonstration application company hosts with a sample application. New Relic has become a dominant application performance management tool. Its services provide a way to tune Ruby (and now Java) applications and report on a number of factors such as application performance satisfaction. The company has chosen to guide users towards simplifying the way SLAs are defined by implementing Apdex (Application Performance Index) which buckets application SLAs into three buckets, "satisfying" "tolerable", and "frustrating". By taking this approach to judging performance, the company moves users to the true experience of the web application instead of the raw metrics. What this boils down to is business owners being able to pinpoint where they need to be satisfied with the overall application performance. Ruby hosting in the cloud is catching on. With cloud offerings for real-time performance tuning and scaling up in the cloud a whole new door for growth with the language and adoption for the enterprise. Platforms like Heroku and tools like New Relic are bending the time-honored boundaries of Information Technology. The old joke "quality, time, cost - pick any two" is about meeting reality face-to-face. Yet, we wonder if Ruby in the cloud will offer the opportunity to break the rules of reality and let developers have it all. With commands such as "heroku scale memcache" directly near our fingertips, it may be time to claim a future where quality, time, and cost are joined as one. Discuss
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Developer Trends: Ruby in the Cloud with Enterprise Class SLAs
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web-sites
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Yesterday, Hitachi took the wraps off their Unified Computing Platform by introducing its open data center platform. It is aimed at consolidating the enterprise functions of networking, storage, and compute into an orchestration layer. Virtualization is still guiding the evolution of the data center, in this case all the way to the physical form. If you like consolidating your systems into big iron with lots blinking lights, Hitachi has you covered. And if you like open systems that connect to your existing infrastructure, Hitachi believes that playing nice with others is in the domain of unified computing. Sponsor If you're interested in this idea, check out the video summary of the platform . The company shares us a deeper view of this product line and the problems it is intending to solve. Many of the opportunities targeted address budgets, for example, how to remove operating expense through the orchestration of resources. Orchestration is the Huddle on Third Down Orchestration merges network, system, and storage resources as a single unit to be managed and reported in. An analogy might be found in football. In the huddle, the quarterback might call "the slant 6" and all eleven members of the team interpret that play and perform their respective jobs. Orchestration, as Hitachi describes it behaves in a similar way. It will respond to plays like "scale up for product launch". All the members of the team (disk, server, and network) go to their respective places and do the jobs needed. And, if needed, adjust appropriately to the conditions on the field. Hitachi leverages a partnership with Microsoft's System Management tools to closely align the plan and reality to bring more intelligence into the equation. The Computing Stack is the Team This product is also about abstracting systems through software. The company is betting that the coordination of the tasks of operating systems, storage and networking within a single framework provides a lot of value to the business. Hitachi takes the point of view that it is best to harmonize existing assets though open standards and looks at computing as a utility to be shared in the organization. Some of the features the product contains make it easier for organizations to achieve scale across functions and environments. It is designed to support this modern data center principles: Multi-tenancy Charge back for resources Distributed physical data centers Public cloud resources through open APIs Hitachi Unified Compute Platform looks like an impressive physical device. It brings together resources normally held in separate racks and hosts them in a single location and reduces a lot of the work of wiring up data centers. As we unfold another chapter in computing, Hitachi is leveraging its strength in consolidation to meet the trend of massive growth of data. At a glance, there are a lot of reasons why IT managers might choose unified computing products: cost, ease, agility. Looking out a few years, it is easy to imagine growth in this category overall. Is Hitachi well positioned for aggregation of data center resources with its Unified Computing products? How will EMC, Cisco, IBM, and HP fare in the movement towards unified computing? Photo credit: idovermani Discuss
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Hitachi's Unified Compute Platform Goes for the Endzone
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Virtualization is a star - at least in the big stage of the iPad. Since the device launched, Citrix Receiver has been one of the top ranked business apps in the store. Chris Fleck, mobility leader on the Citrix team shares this demonstration showing a Citrix Receiver application enabled with four applications running side by side on iPad. He goes further to show the same apps running on a host of other devices. Sponsor Born to Multitask Citrix Receiver uses HDX, the name of the remoting technology Citrix has innovated based on the ICA Protocol (Independent Computing Architecture) the company has been developing on for over 15 years. Fleck tells us that HDX is conceptually similar to RDP/VNC but it includes significant optimizations for WAN performance, Multimedia, and user experience across multiple devices and OS's. Here is a clip from the demonstration video showing four side-by-side apps running on iPad. Citrix Receiver is able to zoom on in each application to make it full screen, or display all four simultaneously. Many Apps - Many Devices The demonstration continues showing each device in this picture, from Mac to PC, iPhone to Android, all running the same applications. At one point, Fleck goes on to demonstrate how to "flick" multiple applications on the iPhone. This demonstrates one app showing full screen and the four other applications are swipable, like photos in your photo library. This seems like a natural extension of the iPhone and really could be useful for building larger enterprise applications or portals. This demonstration reminded us of one thing, the apps matter. When we see an iPhone application on Android, or Windows 7, it still looks pleasing to navigate. Perhaps there is room in the enterprise for a Apple's Mobile Human Interface Guidelines . Enterprise designers, maybe it's your time to build insanely great apps for the enterprise that follow patterns of the iPhone and iPad. Whether new, or old, Citrix Receiver is breathing life into applications and iPad is getting down to business. The company plans to release this capability with its partner SoftwareFX at the Citrix Synergy event next month. Virtualization could become a default way to connect iPad in the enterprise - at least in year one. Discuss
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Coming Soon: Multi-Tasking on the iPad with Many-Device Apps
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Taking advantage of the increasing importance of social media management for businesses, Spredfast , a finalist at this year's Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, has received $1.6 million in funding from Austin Ventures. Featured here on ReadWriteWeb in January, Spredfast is the first enterprise-class social media management system. Sponsor Spredfast supports companies at both the enterprise and SMB levels, allowing businesses to manage their social media campaigns through a single dashboard. Spredfast incorporates data from multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and most blogging platforms (such as WordPress, Blogger and MoveableType). As the information from these platforms is in one location, and as the service integrates both Omniture and Google Analytics, Spredfast facilitates social media automation and then ties social media analytics with Web analytics to secure "click to conversion" metrics. The pricing for the services range from free to $100 per initiative per month. Since its public launch in January, Spredfast has attracted Oracle, AOL, HP and IBM to its customer base. "We've been working to establish Spredfast as the 'Omniture for social media', a valuable tool for anyone trying to effectively manage and measure a social media initiative," said Kenneth Cho, Spredfast's CEO. "Our relationship with Austin Ventures, specifically with AV partner Mike Dodd previously of Omniture, is great validation of the huge gap Spredfast is filling in the social media market and the reception so many customers are having toward the product." Discuss
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Social Media Management System Spredfast Secures Series A Funding
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For the past few days, we attended SAS and SugarCRM user conferences in Seattle and San Francisco. These are just a few of the observations that comes from conversations with developers, business managers, product managers, entrepreneurs and executive management. At both companies, you see the influence of social technologies in the discussions and what their partners are offering. With this social wave comes a variety of new methods to crack the biggest nut: "The most effective way to organize, discover and share information." We've been pounding on that last issue for the past week. We have numerous examples for how web applications can be aggregated into environments like SugarCRM but its the complexity of organizing that data which becomes the biggest challenge. Sponsor The consumer social networks give people lots of ways to use applications. For example, Twitter is a hub for delivering messages to external sites from the application or services such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic. It is a bridge for external services that provide data services that aggregate Twitter data to be uses for specific uses. Recommendation services like Mr. Tweet provide a person with references to other people the individual may want to follow. The enterprise is a different beast. It is not the most popular for the hungry young entrepreneurs and developers we met at companies like Twillio Tuesday night on the eve of Chirp, the Twitter developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Still, in conversations there, we met a few people who are developing for the enterprise environment. What they bring is a fresh look at how the social technologies apply in a world where compliance issues abound, complex processes rule the day and knowledge often exists in ERP silos and email archives. What these young people see are front-end tools like Google Wave that serve as the foundation for collaborative services. These are platforms, for instance, that seek to eliminate email from the process. These young developers create a certain effect. They've developed ways to organize and share information that the enterprise accepts. So much so that the giants have developed their own services, again, in many respects, inspired by the developers building web oriented platforms. And it is having a transformative effect. On Sunday night, we sat in a conference hall at the Washington Convention Center. It was the 35th anniversary of the SAS Users Conference. It was our first time attending. Twitter was the focal part of the opening. Large screens showed the Twitter updates. Their vice president of marketing used his time on stage to push out his second tweet...ever. The singing group even tried to collaborate with the crowd to create an improvised song from their Twitter stream. We learned the next day that this was a first for SAS. Twitter and the variety of other social technologies in the market are giving this conservative, data analytics company a new view, best illustrated in the launch this week of its Social Media Analytics platform. It's a complete, powerful service that takes structured and unstructured data from social networks, applies it to preset rules and delver the results in a dashboard environment. It's lacking a certain level of automation. It's not self-service by any means. It requires SAS to do the analysis and then present it through a web site. But that's okay. The service acts as a pivot that gives SAS the capability to move into new markets. It moves them from the back of the deal to the front of the deal. In the back of the deal, for instance, SAS helps analyze customer guarantees. They do a lot more than that but it's an example of the textual analysis the company provides. Now they have greater access to the front side of the deal to. They can use the platform to reach into agencies where they can help customers craft brand strategies. That should have an effect all of its own. It gives SAS the opportunity to interact with marketers, designers and UI specialists. They may recruit a few people or take the knowledge inside the company and turn it into something. That should help SAS improve the Social Media Analytics platform, making it a service that is more easily available for users to do more on their own. At SugarCon, the story is also a social one. Perhaps best summed up in the second day keynote by Paul Greenberg: "Do You Really Have To Worry About the Social Customer?" I am not so sure you have to worry about a social customer. But it might be a good idea to get know them a little bit better so you can build on your own transformations, whatever they may be. Discuss
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From Seattle to San Francisco, Social is Everything
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