DevCentral Top5 12/11/2009
There has been plenty to do the past couple of weeks, which means there's plenty to talk about today. Ranging from gaming to storage virtualization to interviews and more, I bring you my Top 5 picks of the week from DevCentral. And yes, of course there are some iRules in there. Here's your Top5:
Delivering SaaS Solutions with Hobsons Patrick McFadin
In this interview with Patrick McFadin, Ken Salchow talks about software as a service, virtualization, spikes in traffic causing delivery challenges, and more. Perhaps more importantly the two talk about how F5's offerings, most notably in their case LTM, allow them to make the most out of their systems and applications, and handle the challenges that get thrown at them. This isn't a new story. Making use of F5 products and advanced technologies such as iRules has made this kind of leg-work a thousand times easier for many people. I just found it extremely cool to be able to listen in on such a candid chat with one such user. Patrick even went so far as to say, "I don't think we could do what we do without our F5 units in place". That's some pretty cool stuff, right there.
X marks the Games
http://devcentral.f5.com/s/weblogs/psilva/archive/2009/12/08/x-marks-the-games.aspx
In his 24th offering in the great 26 Short Topics about Security series Pete Silva talks to us about gaming. I know, I know…g is not the 24th letter of the alphabet. I'll allow Pete the stretch, though. He's talking about gaming, gaming security, gaming platforms, and steers us carefully towards Xbox. Well played, sir. Having satisfied his need to find a letter X to which security is related, he goes on to discuss some very real issues with security in a gaming world. Being an avid gamer myself this was of interest, and I found most of it to be pretty spot on. Letting your guard down simply because you're online gaming may result in a stolen credit card almost as fast as clicking a bad link in an email and "logging in". It's a dangerous web out there, keep your guard up.
File Virtualization… The short primer
Don chose to talk about storage over the past week. In one of a couple of posts in a somewhat heated thread with another storage space writer, Don talks about ARX, though you may have missed it if you weren't looking closely. It's not that he barely talks about it, it's more that you might not realize that he's talking about it past the dropping of the name in the beginning. The commentary is solid though, discussing File Virtualization and NAS vs. SAN concerns. I'm not a storage expert, and he clearly is, so I won't try and re-write his post, but I'd definitely recommend checking it out. Virtualization is big and getting bigger and file virtualization is an important yet often overlooked part of any large-scale virtualization story. This one's worth a read.
Next-Generation Management of Data Centers Should be Modeled on Social Networking
Leave it to Lori to draw a correlation between Facebook and NMS. I mean, really? I love it, don't get me wrong, but never in a million years would I have thought to suggest it in such a manner, let alone create a pretty cool mock-up of just how "infrabook" might look. She makes some strong points though, if you think about it. Networking is networking, whether you're connecting people or servers, and the idea of building "relationships" between objects is germane in both the social networking and "networking networking" worlds as well. I like her thought process and some of the points she raises. Am I ready to log into Facebook and manage my Ubuntu systems for a corp. net there? No, but neither is she. That doesn't mean some of the same ideas and utilities wouldn't apply. Check this one out, it's fun and makes you think.
20 Lines or Less #33 - Killer contest entries in 20 Lines or Less
With three more entries to the 20 Lines or Less series, I'm happy to announce that we've broken the century mark. With over 100 cool examples of what iRules can do for you in just a few short lines of code, the 20LoL is now gunning for 200 entries. What's more is that that this week's 20LoL is a special iRule Do You? contest edition. Three of the entries into the contest that either won or received honorable mention were perfect examples for this series, so I figured I'd highlight them again. With two winners and an honorable mention in this year's contest weighing in at less than 21 lines of (actual) code each, there should be no doubt as to just how much power you can pack into a small iRules package. This series continues to be a blast to write, so look out for more small iRules kicking serious butt heading your way.
There are my Top5 picks for the week. Hopefully you found them helpful. Shoot me some feedback if you have it, otherwise thanks for reading and I hope you'll be back next week for more. As always, you can check out older versions of the Top5 here - http://devcentral.f5.com/s/Default.aspx?tabid=101
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