Ninefold

The next part in the series of ‘cool network stuff you can do in our cloud’ involves something that is the bread and butter of all networks: VLANs. If you aren’t familiar with VLANs, they basically allow you to put your servers, PCs etc into different subnets. Those subnets are then unable to communicate with one another unless you want them to. You need a layer 3 device (router) in order to have communication between your VLANs. There are many other technical reasons why VLANs are great, including their ability to break up broadcast domains, which allows you to create a structured and segmented network.

Read more

Avoiding a single point of failure in a database is, well, complicated. Most components in a solution should be relatively static – the site, the content, the assets, the logic etc. To have multiple copies of static, unchanging ‘read’ data is straightforward, but synchronising ‘writes’ is much more complex.

Read more

It’s obvious really; a ‘single point of failure’ is any point in your computing system where you have only one component doing the job. In short, you have no Plan B if something goes wrong. The problem with having a single point of failure built in to your system is that, despite your best efforts, from time to time components fail.

Read more

Cloud computing providers spend a significant amount of time ensuring their systems are monitored correctly. It makes good business sense, it’s straightforward to do and is as important as any other architectural tenet.

Read more

The other day, while giving a bright yellow Tonka truck to my 2 year old, I thought about how surprises are welcome at certain times and not at others. On one hand you have birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas and Easter where surprises are welcome. On the other, driving the car, reviewing your itinerary, or anything to do with your IT services, surprises are definitely not welcome. Preproduction environments are pretty much essential to remove surprises in any application environment.

Read more