We have been blogging about the same problems and problem patterns we see while working with our customers over the past few of years. There have always been the classic application performance landmines in the areas of inefficient database access, misconfigured frameworks, excessive memory usage, bloated web pages and not following common web performance best [...]

Based on the recent hype, we must all be convinced that Big Data is the opportunity of the decade. While business leaders are imagining the potential uses for these massive amounts of information, technical teams are struggling to harness its power. Perhaps the most practical challenge involves application performance – because the application is what [...]

In the last weeks I visited several Cloud and Big Data conferences. Especially the Big Data Innovation in Boston gained me a lot of insight. Some people only consider the technology side of BigData technologies like Hadoop or Cassandra. The real driver however is a different one. Business analysts discover Big Data technologies as the [...]

Thinking cloud is thinking application-centric. Organizations utilize public cloud offerings because they want to focus on their revenue-generating applications rather than managing infrastructure. And from there we already can draw the significance of Application Performance Management (APM) in public cloud environments. If we focus on our application, a focus on its performance is essential. Even [...]

software architects made a strategic decision to develop their SaaS application time cockpit, the semi-automatic time tracking solution for service professionals, on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. The promise of Microsoft is to have a highly scalable platform with full cost control. In order to ensure that the investment in Windows Azure is paying off they [...]

In my previous post, I focused on the APM challenges when implementing and running a VMware ESX server environment. In this post, I’ll discuss how to solve the APM challenges in a VMware environment. As I covered in the first post, when applications are virtualized and collapsed inside a single piece of hardware, the “one-to-one” [...]

Distributing stored data across different geographical regions is not uncommon. Due to regional laws you might even be forced to store your application data in a certain geographical region. Windows Azure PaaS therefore offers storage services, i.e. BLOB, Table or Queue distributed across their data centers. Distributing data however raises the question if you also [...]

On Thursday, we are rerunning the webcast with time cockpit, a SaaS offering for tracking billable hours running on Windows Azure with a Silverlight client. This time, the webcast is in German. In July, we run the webcast in English again, at a more friendly time for the US West Coast; stay tuned! Learn how [...]

Another year and another Cloud Expo in New York. This year I will be giving two different presentations. The first is on Application Performance Monitoring in the Clouds. In this talk I will cover the 5 top lessons we have learned about performance and cloud applications. The second is about Performance Management in ‘Big Data’ [...]

Today, many decision makers tend to favor public cloud environments over their own data centers. Often, the reason is easier and quicker scaling to cover daily or seasonal peaks and it sounds promising to be the cheaper way. However, it’s just different means of paying the bill, which is at first glance financially attractive. If [...]