Posts

Shawn McAllister

The Long and Winding Road…to Solace Cloud

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As the Beatles famously sang: “I’ve seen that road before, It always leads me here, Lead me to…the cloud.”

OK, so I paraphrased the punchline, but anybody who’s been following Solace for a while knows it really has been a long road to today’s announcement of our new messaging as a service platform called Solace Cloud.

Our chairman of the board Craig Betts founded Solace with a big idea – solve the problem of routing messages using the same proven approach that had enabled the Internet, by routing packets in hardware. IP routers and switches for the former, messaging appliances for the latter. The financial services space ate up this innovative approach, which slashed the cost and complexity of their massive messaging estates and massively improved reliability. Other markets wanted the ability to implement our powerful messaging in either hardware or software form factors, so a few years ago we introduced our Virtual Message Router software – the same capabilities, and the fastest software-based message routing you can find, in a package you can easily deploy in a variety of on-premises or cloud environments.… Read the rest

Paul Kondrat

VMR Now Available in AWS Marketplace

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The Solace Virtual Message Router Community Edition is now available for free in the AWS Marketplace as a 1-Click Launch. The Solace Virtual Message Router lets you move data between applications, user interfaces and IoT devices using all kinds of message exchange patterns, qualities of service and APIs/protocols.

The VMR Community Edition is a fully functional version of the VMR supporting the same performance and messaging capabilities as the VMR Enterprise Edition, including support for open APIs and standard protocols including AMQP, JMS, MQTT, REST and WebSocket.  The VMR Community Edition provides an excellent platform for evaluation, development and test purposes, and you can even run it as a production system if you don’t require built-in high availability and disaster recovery functionality.… Read the rest

Jonathan Schabowsky

New Solace PCF Tile, What’s the Big Deal?!

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Solace recently released a new version of the Solace Messaging Tile for Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF). The Enterprise Edition of the tile supports fault tolerance and high availability, and it includes some game-changing features like TCP Routes and support for AMQP 1.0 that I wanted to share my excitement about.

TCP Routes: Integrating the Real World with PCF

PCF, and more generally all platforms as a service, have changed the way we view the development, deployment and scalability of applications. The ability to deploy applications on-prem or in any cloud provides the flexibility and freedom to meet today’s business needs, while on-demand implementation saves organizations money with “right size” scaling.  PCF is not an island, as applications running in the cloud must be fed data to provide business value. What if sensor data could be streamed into PCF? What if you could connect your legacy systems to new microservices running in PCF?… Read the rest

Darryl MacRae

New PCF Tile Adds AMQP 1.0 Support and WebUI

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Today we’ve released the latest version of our Solace Messaging for PCF tile.  Version 1.2.0 is generally available as part of the Pivotal Network.  The tile allows app developers to use Solace messaging in any Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployment.  The Solace tile has been Generally Available for several months, however, this new release introduces support for many new features, as well as the first VMR Enterprise Edition of the tile for deploying Solace Messaging in Production environments.

The highlights of this release include:

  • AMQP 1.0 (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) GA support
    This Enterprise grade, open and standard protocol helps organizations avoid vendor lock-in, and maintain flexibility in their distributed application infrastructure.  Solace’s implementation is compatible with a variety of available open source AMQP APIs.
  • An Alpha version of the new WebUI administration console
    This provides access to an extremely easy to use browser based interface for managing a solace-messaging service instance.
… Read the rest
Darryl MacRae

Simplifying the Deployment of Solace VMRs into the Cloud

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Helping our customers transition to running many of their applications in the cloud is central to our strategy as a company.   One of our key strategies to help customers take advantage of Solace messaging is to make deployments of VMRs in the various cloud environments as simple and easy as possible.

Our goal in this regard is specifically to simplify the work of IT/middleware organizations and developers in deploying VMRs in different configurations in all the most popular cloud environments used today.  This is so they can spend more of their time on developing apps that add value to their organizations, instead of setting up the required messaging infrastructure.  This is especially important/valuable, for hybrid cloud deployments where learning the intricacies of the different clouds involved could be complicated and time consuming.  As we clearly want to encourage the use of our messaging solutions, we are working to abstract away these individual complexities of deploying and configuring VMRs in the various different cloud environments through the development and release of native quickstarts, deployment templates, and other VMR features and deployment projects for each targeted environment.… Read the rest

Ken Barr

Bridging Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud Environments with Solace

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With this blog post I will describe and demystify the prominent orange lines in this “marketecture” diagram, i.e. the means by which you can link or “bridge” multiple clouds with Solace open data movement technology. I will walk you through the general use cases and drill down to the actual implementation details including example configurations.

Topologies

In most cases, these inter-cloud links will be implement with Solace’s bridging feature, which provides robust fault tolerant links that support message filtering, compression and transport level security. Generally speaking, a Solace bridge is an embedded specialized client that can transfer messages from one message router or HA cluster to another, either one way or bi-directionally.  Solace bridges can be established between any combination or number of virtual message routers and hardware appliances.

Use Cases

Let’s look at some use cases and map them to commonly understood message exchange patterns, then see how each is implemented.… Read the rest

Ken Barr

Solace in Azure Quickstart

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Earlier this month AWS announced the release of an AWS Quick Start for the Solace VMR.  Now there is also a quickstart on the Azure Quick Start page.

The VMR is a software message router that is fully compatible with the Solace message appliance and Solace SDKs, as well as open source AMQP, JMS, MQTT, REST and WebSocket.   The VMR provides message-oriented middleware with class-leading reliability, performance, scale and robustness.

This Azure Quick Start allows you to select between “Single Node” or “High Availability” deployment models.  The single node deployment model can use the community edition of the Solace VMR and provides a very simple way to evaluate all the functionality a non-redundant instance of the VMR has to offer. The high availability deployment model requires a time based evaluation instance of the VMR and adds the robustness of Solaces high availability solution.

Both of these deployment models utilize the simple template driven Azure Resource Manager (ARM) interface to quickly and easily deploy complete solutions.… Read the rest

Ken Barr

Solace Available via AWS Quick Start

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This week AWS announced the release of an AWS Quick Start for the Solace VMR.   The VMR is a software message router that is fully compatible with the Solace message appliance and Solace SDKs, as well as open source AMQP, JMS, MQTT, REST and WebSocket.   The VMR provides message-oriented middleware with class-leading reliability, performance, scale and robustness.

This AWS Quick Start is one of their “automated gold-standard deployments” which shows how to create a fully integrated production deployment of a Solace VMR high availability cluster.  Solace has had multi-cloud offerings for some time, but this Quick Start allows you to more quickly and easily deploy a fully configured HA cluster. We worked with AWS architects to develop and validate this deployment in an optimized configuration that eliminates the need to worry about the details and mechanics of configuring the cluster yourself.

Solace will continue to work with cloud providers to provide simple but complete deployments to make our multi-cloud offerings even easier to deploy and start working with in minutes. … Read the rest

David Hickman

SL Enables Easier Monitoring of Solace Hybrid Cloud Deployments

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David Hickman leads SL’s Product Marketing initiatives.

SL and have Solace have been working together for over a year now to perfect a monitoring solution for both Solace messaging appliances and Solace VMRs.  RTView® Monitor for Solace is now available for a free 30-day trial as an Amazon AMI download.

Monitoring Solace VMRs in the cloud is easy.  Just “download” our Amazon AMI, start it up in your AWS environment and point it to your Solace VMRs to get started.

The trick was not just monitoring a single instance, but rather monitoring every single instance of deployed Solace messaging regardless of location and version.  That’s right.  Monitor physical appliances and VMRs in the same dashboard.  Have Solace on-premise and in the cloud?  No problem.  More than one cloud provider?  We monitor hybrid cloud environments for breakfast! Deployed in containers?  We can monitor all of that.

Built on top of the RTView Enterprise platform, you can use RTView Monitor for Solace as a standalone tool, or you can monitor your entire middleware and application environment by choosing from dozens of Solution Packages for common middleware and application infrastructure components. … Read the rest

Dave McAllister

Webinar Recap: Solace: Messaging with Purpose on Pivotal Cloud Foundry

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On May 30, Solace Senior Architect Jonathan Schabowsky explained how messaging and microservices work with Pivotal Cloud Foundry as part of a Brighttalk webinar. He provided a great introduction to the concept of microservices and then dove into the details of architectural considerations.

As part of that he covered how Platform as a Service (PaaS) makes it easier to deliver on the microservice promise by eliminating some of the distractions that app developers face while providing a “deploy anywhere” capability. But, as Jonathan covers, “deploy anywhere” comes with its own headaches around communication and data movement.

Jonathan dug into a comparison of REST and other open protocols, like AMQP and MQTT. One of his comments (often mentioned in technology) refers to the fact that not everything is a nail to the REST hammer. Fortunately, we find out that there are a lot of different tools available in the Solace toolbox. You can find even more on microservices on the Solace dev site and find code, demos and more examples on the Labs site and Github repositories.… Read the rest