Monday, September 22, 2014

Exploring Apache Kafka..

We had successfully used ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ in many projects and never felt the need to explore any other message broker. Today, my colleague introduced me to 'Apache Kafka' and was drooling over the high performance and reliability it provided. Kafka is extensively used within LinkedIn and can be used in many use-cases.

The following blog post gives a good performance benchmark of Kafka.
http://engineering.linkedin.com/kafka/benchmarking-apache-kafka-2-million-writes-second-three-cheap-machines

Another good blog post worth reading is: http://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying

Another good tutorial on using Kafka to push messages to Hadoop is available here - http://hortonworks.com/hadoop-tutorial/simulating-transporting-realtime-events-stream-apache-kafka/

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Monitoring TOMEE using VisualVM

A few years back, we moved to Jboss from Tomcat for our production servers, because there was no viable enterprise support for Tomcat.

Today, we have viable options such as support from Tomitribe.

The below article on Tomitribe gives a good overview of setting up VisualVM for monitoring Tomcat.

http://www.tomitribe.com/blog/2014/07/monitoring-an-apache-tomee-service-on-windows-with-visualvm/

Default tools in the JDK

Found the below article worth a perusal. We get so used to using sophisticated tools that we forget there are things we can do with a bare JDK :)

http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/the-6-built-in-jdk-tools-the-average-developer-should-learn-to-use-more/

Monday, September 01, 2014

Does Digital Transformation need 'Skunk Works' kind of environment?

Skunk Works is a term that originated during WWII and is the official alias for Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs (ADP).

Today Skunk Works is used to describe a small group of people who work on advanced technology projects. This group is typically given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy. The primary driver of setting up a Skunk Works team is to develop something quickly with minimal management constraints.
The term also refers to technology projects developed in semi-secrecy, such as Google X Lab.or the 50 people team established by Steve Jobs to develop the Macintosh computer.

For any organization embarking on a Digital Transformation journey, it would be worthwhile to build such as Skunk Works team that can innovate quickly and bring an idea to a required threshold of technology readiness. I have seen so many ideas die under the shackles of bureaucracy and long processes. Having a skunk works team operate like a start-up within your organization can do wonders in leap-frogging your competition in the digital age.