DevCentral Top 5 04/06/2012
It's not uncommon in the slightest for various members of the DC team to work on projects of all kinds. Whether it's helping with a customer issue or creating a new, sleek, efficient skin for the site - we all tend to wear many hats and work on many things. When all of us go quiet for a while, however, that is a sure fire sign that there are many "super sekrit squirrel" (tm) things afoot. And boy, is that the case. Things deep inside the skunk works of the DevCentral team's imagination station castle (What..you don't have a castle?) have been blazing hot with all sorts of madness the past month or more. We're hard at work banging out what we hope proves to be the next dose of hawesome for the community as a whole. That being said, it's times like this that I'm even more grateful than usual (and I'm usually darn grateful) for the extended team of DC contributors. They've carried the torch and then some, putting out some wicked cool blogs and making sure DevCentralites (DevCentralers?) have plenty to keep up on. To that end, allow me to foist upon you my most recent favorites that have come about in the past couple of weeks. Here is this week's DevCentral Top 5:
F5 Friday: Are You One of the 61 Percent?
Lori, in her usual educational manner, points out to us that 61% of people recently polled aren't confident in their network when it comes to being ready for making the jump to light speed err ... the cloud. This is due to a lot of factors, but one of the most prevalent is pure performance. It takes a heck of a lot of juice to keep things moving when passing data in the volumes that some enterprises and certainly service providers do. There are just too many bits and bytes to process, send, receive and otherwise handle. ADCs play an amazing role in lightening the load on the back end servers with caching, compression, SSL offload, straight-up page replacement and serving content, etc. But as the needs of the many increase, so too does the load put on that magic middle tier of networking goodness that helps the servers serve. It should come as a relief, and exciting, then that F5 is now offering full 40GBE support. Not only that, but we're the first ADC out there to do so. How? Why? When? What wizardry is this you ask? Read the post and be enlightened dear reader. It's a whole new web, and we're intent on helping you (and your users) get where they need to go faster than ever.
TLS 1.2 for ssldump data decrypt revisited
There are some sure signs that we have smart people working here. The products, certainly, the white papers and presentations of course, but to me, as the geek that I am, one of the things that convinces me the most quickly are things like David Holmes contributing source to the ssldump tool so that it would support TLS 1.2 decryption. Come on...that's just plain cool. David submitted the original patch a while back, it got rolled in, and there was a bit of tweaking that needed to be done. Said tweaking has been...well...tweaked, and things are now decrypting as expected. So if you've already got it, get it again. If you don't, you should get it. ssldump is a handy tool in the ever more encrypted world we live in, and it's just one more sign of the wicked smart people we have working here to better our products, and by doing so your apps, that people like David are contributing to widely used tools like this. Go read, grab it, and enjoy your decrypted goodness.
Web App Performance: Think 1990s
Don has a way of using an analogy to depict things so they really resonate, at least with me. He's done it again with his commentary on web application performance. The reality of the matter is, things right now are fast. Really fast. Blazingly, painfully, unprecedentedly fast. We, as users, however...we still want more. Web application performance is only as good as the user's perception, after all, and we are greedy. When things take more than a second or two to load (or at least appear to), the average user starts to get antsy. This is especially problematic with the mobile browsing sector, which is growing more rapidly than anything else right now. Referencing Don's reference to a Louis CK bit, after a couple of seconds of waiting, the average denizen of the cell phone browsing sector will respond with "it.. it’s not working!”. The reality is, as Don so clearly depicted, try to imagine yourself in the 90s, on your cell phone, streaming high definition video while on the go. Yeah, I couldn't do it without laughing either. Things are faster, way, way faster, but there is still more we have to do in the ever present race to keep users happy. As perceptions become more and more demanding on just what "fast" is, we have to find new ways to tilt the game in our favor, as content suppliers. Don talks about some of those things, and more in this post. Go take a read, it's worth the time.
20 Lines or Less #55: Redirection, Masking and Auth
https://devcentral.f5.com/s/weblogs/cwalker/archive/2012/04/06/20-lines-or-less-55.aspx
Coming up for air a bit from the afore mentioned super sekrit squirrel things we've been working on as a team, I managed to get out a 20LoL today. There has been so much traffic coming through the forums I couldn't resist, just too much good stuff to not pass it on. This week I specifically focused on some super easy to consume, simple snippets. iRules may be a 7th dan black belt with fists of steel and the ability to hack through network based badness faster than Chuck Norris' roundhouse, but that doesn't mean that there aren't some easy, approachable ways to use iRules too. That is kind of where the 20LoL started, and I figured I'd dial it back a bit this week. The examples are still cool and useful, but might be a little less scary for those of you that haven't been in the dojo recently, working on your iRules fu. Take a look and see for yourself.
The Challenges of SQL Load Balancing
Last but not least, we finish how we started, with another awesome post from Lori's blog. In this one she specifically talks about SQL load balancing, which is something that is of a lot of interest to me. Well...to me and about 75% of the admins out there responsible for running a dynamic web application. So you know, a few of us. This is a bit of a sticky topic and there isn't a single silver bullet. We're getting there, we can do some of it, and the landscape is changing, but the devil is in the details, as always. Go read through the post as Lori puts it far better than I could here. Trust me, you'll learn something, or at least stop and think about how you are or want to do things. I did.
There you have it, another Top 5 filled with enough DevCentral goodness to warm your hearts and spread your networking cheer far and wide. Feel free, as always, to comment, ask for specifics or the like. And check out past Top 5s easily on DevCentral.
#Colin
Published Apr 06, 2012
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