Posts

Larry Neumann

Emphasis on SAP Leonardo at SAPPHIRE NOW 2017

/in /by

This week at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando the focus was on SAP Leonardo, an “innovation services platform” that offers advanced services in the areas of IoT, machine learning, big data analytics and blockchain. It’s an ambitious project that builds on SAP Cloud by adding business services designed to help companies embrace IoT at scale and modernize their traditional workloads while transitioning to the cloud.

In addition, SAP has started layering vertical projects on top of Leonardo, such as SAP Connected Goods for retailers and SAP Vehicle Insights for firms managing fleets of connected “planes, trains and automobiles.” It’s all a logical path forward for a company with such deep industry expertise and customer relationships.

These applications are all layered above a set of core PaaS services within the SAP Cloud Platform, including SAP Enterprise Messaging. As we have previously announced, Solace is the messaging foundation of that service, at the core of all these high-volume real time data streams.… Read the rest

Larry Neumann

Solace Says: CTO Shawn McAllister on Hybrid Cloud Data Movement

/in /by

In this edition of Solace Says, I interviewed Solace’s CTO Shawn McAllister to get his thoughts on hybrid cloud data movement. Here’s the 6-minute video, with the full transcript below. It’s a good introduction to the topic, and if you want to dive deeper after watching the video I recommend you read the substantial blog post Shawn wrote on the subject, and watch the video that explains the concept visually. You can find both on our hybrid cloud data movement page.

I wonder if you would kick things off by talking about what hybrid cloud means to a typical enterprise?

Well, the enterprises that we talk to are in situations where they have, today, they have applications running on mainframes, on A/S400s, Window environments, Linux environments.  And what they want to do is they want to build new applications in the cloud, or they want to move some of those applications to the cloud.… Read the rest

Shawn McAllister

Solace Pivotal Cloud Foundry Tile is now GA!

/in /by

This is an exciting time for us, our friends at Pivotal and our user community as we take our next step on improving accessibility to Solace Open Data Movement technology. Today our Solace Messaging for PCF Tile is generally available as part of the Pivotal Network. The tile, which allows app developers to use Solace messaging in any Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployment, has been in Beta for several months. This release is ready for prime time, with enough features and fixes to support your favorite microservice or IoT use case.

The highlights of this release include:

  • High Availability: VMR HA is now provisioned for you in key plans to add robustness for your applications with the click of a button
  • More Plan Choices: We now have 5 distinct plans for developers to choose from depending on your needs – some on a shared VMR for development, some on your own dedicated VMR, with choices of performance/capacity and high availability.
… Read the rest
Shawn McAllister

Enabling Open Data Movement in a Hybrid Cloud Environment

/in /by

Everybody wants to take advantage of the cloud to save money, make their infrastructure more instantly scalable and make app teams more productive. To realize those benefits you need to be able share data between legacy applications deployed on-premise and new apps in the cloud. Many people expect this to be easy, and are surprised to learn that this application connectivity can become quite complex and difficult to achieve if you don’t start with a holistic strategy.

So how do you achieve hybrid and multi cloud application connectivity in a simple, robust and secure manner without losing the functionality your applications need? In this article I’ll explore a few options.

The Situation You Face

In order to create a single data movement fabric that allows you to deploy applications in any cloud, you need to cover three types of connectivity:

  1. Messaging within each cloud – between distributed applications or microservices in each target cloud
  2. Hybrid Cloud data movement – between your existing on-premise apps and your new cloud apps
  3. Cloud-to-cloud data movement – so applications running in different clouds can share information

Cloud Messaging

Most enterprises have in place some form of on-premise message bus like IBM MQ or JMS, which can be based on open source or provided by a vendor.… Read the rest

Shawn McAllister

Talking Cloud Data Movement with Pivotal

/in /by

Yesterday I joined the Pivotal Insights podcast to discuss with Jeff Kelly and Dormain Drewitz the challenges developers face when building data pipelines and message queues in Cloud-native environments. During the episode, called Taming Data Movement Complexity, I talked about some specific IoT cases and explained how to get enterprise data moving with Solace in Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

I hope you’ll give it a listen to hear my thoughts on how Solace makes it easier to get messages moving in PCF.

Other Resources

… Read the rest
Magali Boulet

Demonstrating IoT at SAP TechEd Barcelona

/in /by

Last week I attended SAP TechEd in Barcelona. As a strategic partner of SAP, Solace had a booth where I had set up an Internet of Things demo. It consisted of a toy train carrying a sensor which collected information about temperature, direction and speed, and sent the data to a Raspberry Pi via Bluebooth. The Raspberry Pi in turn published this information to a topic in a Solace appliance in London using the MQTT protocol. A consumer represented by a Java program deployed locally on my Macbook in Barcelona subscribed to the topic and provisioned an influx database, which was used by a Grafana Dashboard to display the sensor information.

Here is the architecture of the demo:
sap-teched-demo-architecture

This simple demo illustrated the ability of Solace to easily provide a pub/sub architecture that’s robust, scalable and highly available. On top of this, Solace serving as the messaging back-bone of SAP Hana Cloud Platform was another real life example of the reliability of our solution, being used already in many SAP datacenters worldwide.… Read the rest

Larry Neumann

Globally Syncing the Popular Hazelcast IMDG

/in /by

This morning we announced a joint solution with Hazelcast, providers of the leading open source in-memory data grid (IMDG). IMDGs are an essential element of next-generation application architecture, and over 3, 000 companies — including several dozen Solace customers — use Hazelcast to keep data current across geographies.

hazelcast-solace-diagramThe new joint solution enables the replication of Hazelcast clusters across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. That means as data changes in one Hazelcast node, Solace automatically disseminates that update to other nodes using compression, TCP optimization and route optimization for high throughput and low latency over the WAN. The solution is ideal for companies who need real-time data to be current across diverse geographical areas as data values change, such as financial institutions who need to sync real-time risk data across global financial centers and mobile carriers who want to give customers fast access to customer and operational data culled from distributed datacenters.… Read the rest

Larry Neumann

Introducing Open Data Movement

/in /by

Today Solace introduced something we’re calling Open Data Movement. I’m going to do just two things here: define Open Data Movement, and give an example in pictures.

Breaking Down the Term

Each of the words are important and we’ve chosen them carefully.

Open

We see this as meaning free from proprietary lock in. Solace’s approach to real-time data movement favors:

  • Open protocols – the defined and de facto standards that have emerged for posting, messaging and streaming, including REST, JMS, MQTT, AMQP 1.0 and WebSockets.
  • Open APIs – where possible, we encourage use of open standard APIs like JMS, Paho or Qpid giving developers and enterprises maximum choice.
  • Open to all the popular cloud environments – Solace works the same in private or public IaaS and PaaS platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, VMWare, Cloud Foundry, OpenShift and more.
  • Delivering all the message patterns and classes of service – best effort, guaranteed or transactions for request-reply, publish-subscribe, fanin/fanout, and more
  • Openly integrated with popular DevOps tools – Modern products need to be fully integrated from getting started with shared sample code in GitHub, all the way to automating the test, stage and deployment process in tools like Puppet or Bosh (and everything in between).
… Read the rest
Dave McAllister

Open Data Movement Across All Clouds

/in /by

Driven by the ability to build new applications faster and the promise of SaaS, clouds are becoming the de facto standard way to deliver business services and solutions. As this chart from Wikibon shows, enterprise investment in cloud (purple and red) is set to supplant and surpass traditional software and hardware spending (green) within ten years. That’s an unprecedented amount of change for a single decade in enterprise technology.

enterpriseitMore than anything, embracing cloud is about future-proofing. As companies migrate mission-critical workloads from traditional systems to clouds, they want freedom (no lock-in), flexibility (ability to move workloads as desired) and continuity (progress and migration without disruption).

That means you need to be able to choose your clouds at will, public or private. To choose your environment at both the IaaS and PaaS layers. To build hybrid solutions that factor your existing infrastructure into the equation. And to work with open, standardized APIs and protocols that will meet your needs now and in the future.… Read the rest

Mark Spielman

Solace Messaging for Pivotal Cloud Foundry Available Now

/in /by

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is gaining considerable momentum as an open PaaS for public and private clouds. Our customers like that Cloud Foundry simplifies application developments while making it easier for operations teams to properly secure the environment. When you combine this simplicity with the fact that it is easy to run Cloud Foundry in any cloud, it is a clear winner.

We’ve been working closely with Pivotal and several early beta customers to make Solace a native service within PCF, and we’re pleased to announce that as of today, the Solace Messaging tile is available in the Pivotal Network, and you can directly access the Solace Messaging Service to download the tile. The Solace Messaging service is great for our customers, or for anyone looking for an enterprise grade messaging solution that can do MQTT, JMS, RESTful messaging and soon AMQP 1.0 natively within PCF.… Read the rest