Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

Application WAN or Internet Performance We are looking at using more Akamai services such as sureroute to add optimization for our delivered products. Especially those products overseas. We are also looking at products from Juniper, Citrix, and others. I'm wondering how much these technologies will help web based applications. I wonder what Akamai uses internally.

SPAN ports are a pain So many products need access to your network stream to avoid installing much or any software on the servers and such. The problem is that a lot of switches especially Cisco can't do too many spans per chassis. You can use taps, which is good, but not if you need many of them to instrument a switch. This creates a big problem that some vendors are trying to solve with specialized devices. The problem with other large companies, such as mine is that we can't buy systems from small companies (well not easily). I know some companies are using products like Toplayer's IDS Balancer to do layer 7 span traffic routing. There are other players like Netoptics Maxtrix line, that makes a hardware switch. I don't know of anyone who is using these.

Web Application Hosting People in the java land normally deploy products in 3 tiers (webserver (static), app server (dynamic), database server). People in Microsoft land normally deploy applications in 2 tiers (webserver (static and dynamic), database server). I always hear the argument of separating them for security reasons, but in reality once you own the web tier its pretty easy to own the application tier. It may be slightly more secure, but its not a reason not to patch things (which is what people use it as). In reality the complexity of having a whole layer to do essentially nothing seems pointless to me. Why bother deploying more hardware for a minor benefit. Even in the java world, the application servers do everything a standard webserver can do, so what's the point? Any comments, please leave some.

SOA Management Once again we are dragging our feet trying to put out fires versus actually understanding the way that our application components interact with each other. I have been pushing us to get a POC going for the last 10 months. Once again I was told to wait due to time constraints. My new answer is forget that, we will run our own POC and show the value to one of our more complex products that has a not of issues due to the number and frequency of its calls to other webservices. I am moving ahead with this plan in the next 2 weeks.