Hey Santa Claus, what’s happening man?

Well, it’s that time of year again where unfortunately I have to work. Gift orders are up 50% and my elves are working their socks off right now stocking my warehouses for the big day. I honestly don’t know how I would have coped without my new ElfOps team–they’ve been elastic and fantastic thanks to our new AWS hosted applications. The bad news is that my applications have processed record orders in 2011 so I’ll have to work harder. Frankly, this sucks.

Come again? Santa is using the cloud?

Isn’t everyone these days? I mean what else can I possibly do when my orders and subscriptions double each year? If Santa can’t scale, I spend my vacation reading angry letters from parents about how I made their kids cry and upset on Christmas Day. Forget that. I’d rather sit on a beach in Hawaii drinking Mojito’s catching a nice tan. In fact, I should be able to upgrade myself to the Four Seasons in Hawaii in 2012 due to the money I’ve saved by migrating to the cloud. You simply wouldn’t believe how much my own data center was costing me, not to mention those expensive IT Elf consultants I had to bring in. I’m now a lean mean parcel delivering machine and it’s all thanks to the cloud.

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Amazon EC2, apm, App Man, appdynamics, Application Performance, Big Data, CA Wily, cloud, Hadoop, Order Fallout, Santa

Welcome Cassandra, let’s start with a quick introduction of who you are and what you can do.
I am a high-performance distributed scalable database.  I am really good at doing lots of operations and growing as your data needs increase, and to top that all off I run on commodity hardware which means I’m really great for running on the cloud.

Awesome, oh by the way, what beer are you drinking tonight?
Tonight I’m drinking a Shiner from good old Texas.

Excellent.  First, I heard it on the grapevine and you did tell me that you’re highly available.  Can you confirm or deny these rumors, and what does that really mean?
Highly available means that a distributed system can lose one or more of its servers and still keep the cluster as a whole up and running.  In other words, because I’m designed to run on commodity hardware, failure should be expected.  In my scenario, I can lose a server and keep on chugging along without the cluster going down.

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Apache Cassandra, appdynamics, Big Data, Cassandra, Cassandra JMX, Cassandra Monitoring, DataStax, NoSQL

Welcome Jeremy, lets start with a quick introduction of who you are and what you do at EMC.
I run marketing at EMC working for Joe Tucci, our CEO.  Been there about 18 months.

And what beer will you be drinking tonight?
That new Bud in bottles that includes Lime – why did no one think of that until now ?  I hate putting that real lime in my beer and squirting it all over my shirt.  American innovation leads the way again.

So this Cloud meets Big Data stuff, what’s all that about?
Cloud has emerged as the biggest disruptive force in IT for at least the last decade.  And maybe ever.  Complexity in IT departments is at a breaking point, so they are re-transforming their infrastructure around virtualized servers, storage, and networking, transforming their applications using frameworks like Spring and Ruby and transforming access using a myriad of consumer devices such as the iPad.   Once this transformation is complete, IT will be able to run the way God intended it to run – as an agile, efficient service.

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apm, appdynamics, Big Data, cloud, EMC, Hadoop, Jeremy Burton, NoSQL, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, VMWare

Welcome to a new part of my blog where I meet industry vendors, thought leaders and guru’s to discuss their thoughts on todays application architectures, technologies and challenges with regards to managing application performance. If you’d like to meet me for beers then please send a short request to appman@appdynamics.com and I’ll be in touch.

Welcome Gents, lets start with a quick introduction of what your roles are.
I’m Uri Cohen, Director of Product Management at Gigaspaces and I’m Yaron Parasol, XAP Product Manager at Gigaspaces.

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apm, appdynamics, Application Performance Management, Beers, Big Data, Business Transactions, cloud, Gigaspaces, Guiness, NoSQL, XAP