DevCentral Top5 5/21/2010

Phew! Having DC5 successfully out the door, I'm happy to resume my regularly scheduled programming. I'm back, bringing you my Top5 picks off of DevCentral every week. I'll help you sort through the content pouring across the (now new and improved!) site and offer you a few things that you should definitely check out. It's good to see that the content has still been chugging away even while the team was heads down working on the new site improvements. A big thanks to the awesome community and the extended DC team folks (Lori, Pete and co.) for keeping the lights on. Now that I'm back at it, though, allow me to offer you this week's DC Top5:

Network Optimization Won’t Fix Application Performance in the Cloud

http://devcentral.f5.com/s/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2010/05/20/network-optimization-wonrsquot-fix-application-performance-in-the-cloud.aspx

In her blog yesterday Lori pointed out some key differences between Network Acceleration/Optimization and Application Delivery Acceleration/Optimization that caught my eye and I thought were worth passing along. Her discussion really focuses on Application Performance and the idea that no amount of improving network performance can improve the performance of your application. You can do all the magic in the world to the network traffic while treating it like network traffic, buy the biggest pipes in the world, and still have a slow app. Why? Because changing the network speeds and feeds can't change your application or its behavior. Application Delivery, on the other hand, treats the application like an application and works with the application to try and better serve that application to the users trying to access it. As usual Lori goes into far more depth far better than I could, so just go read the post and thank me later.

 

Automated Gomez Performance Monitoring

http://devcentral.f5.com/s/Tutorials/TechTips/tabid/63/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/1084373/Automated-Gomez-Performance-Monitoring.aspx

Joe hit another solid one with his dive into Gomez and iRules working together to provide a detailed look at what your application is doing. First he talks a bit about how Gomez gives you a true look from the outside of what your users are actually seeing in regards to app performance and behavior, then he dives into how iRules can help you deploy the scripts necessary for Gomez to do that thing it does. iRules, as always it seems, make this task much easier and allows you to inject the required code in one place rather than across multiple servers, as well as giving you some other tweaks that you can perform, should you so desire. Take a look at the article for step by step walk through along with necessary code.

 

Multi-core Redux: Virtually Indistinguishable

http://devcentral.f5.com/s/weblogs/dmacvittie/archive/2010/05/19/multi-core-redux-virtually-indistinguishable.aspx

As sad as I was to see Don move on to another team within F5, I have to say I'm excited to see the kind of content he's been putting out since joining the TMM team. His delve into the multi-core world was of particular interest to me this week. In his spot-on commentary about how Multi-core, as amazing as it can be, tends to muddy the waters for developers as both individuals and as organizations thinking long-term, he talks about some personal experience he's had with that as well as a possible solution rapidly becoming more and more popular. Via virtualization you can all but ignore multi-core needs by simply supplying more instances of your application rather than a single instance making use of multiple cores. It's an interesting concept and one that I tend to agree is the path of least resistance and likely of most benefit as well. Take a read, I assure you it's worth your time.

 

20 Lines or Less #39 – Selective SSL, Port Stripping and Headers

http://devcentral.f5.com/s/weblogs/cwalker/archive/2010/05/21/20-lines-or-less-39-ndash-selective-ssl-port-stripping.aspx

Ahhh my beloved 20LoL. Long was it also neglected due to the steady march of impending deadlines which had to be met, but it too is back this week. I bring you three more examples of how awesome iRules can be in less than 21 lines of code. Take a look at how people in the community (not JUST hoolio, either!) are making use of network side scripting to selectively encrypt back-end SSL, strip port info from redirects, and deal with some interesting custom header needs.

 

Novell Shoots at the Cloud and Scores

http://devcentral.f5.com/s/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2010/05/18/novell-shoots-at-the-cloud-and-scores.aspx

This week I'll leave you with a quite humorous bit brought to you by the good folks at Novell, by way of Lori's blog. They've been running a series of adds in the style of dramatic poetry readings using interesting tech topics as content. Lori's "Get Your SaaS Off My Cloud" article was fodder for one such add and it had me spinning up the roflcopter, so I thought I'd share with you for a late Friday funny. Check out the source article as well, as it's definitely a good read.

 

That's it for my first week back post DC5 haze. I hope you've enjoyed it as I always do, and I'll be back next week with 5 more to keep your DC cravings fulfilled.

#Colin