Bickel Blog

In 1996 we started a project called the Bluestone (actually Sapphire at the time) Application Manager. Kevin Minder led the project, Larry McCay and Rich Friedman were also key guys on the project as well. We felt it was very important to have Management tightly tied to our middleware. We saw tremendous synergies where customers could go way beyond simple Systems Management and move toward Application Management. I remember Kevin talking with me about how we could actually build something that was way better than things like Tivoli. Here is a link to a snapshot of the old Bluestone site - Fast forward to 2002 and when I first started working with Marc Fleury and JBoss. In my first presentation to Marc on my recommendations on where JBoss could go I had a slide that said we needed to create something like the Red Hat Network for middleware. It would give us value that we could bundle in our Subscription and it would allow us to go from the developer side of the house into the op...

This is not one of my usual social networking blogs, but I thought it was semi-related. Clearly the "Cloud" is one of the biggest changes happening on the web today. However, one of the concerns is how to track down if my application is down or the cloud service is down? Hyperic has just released CloudStatus BETA . This is the first tool that I know if that actually checks the availability and performance statistics of cloud services. In this first Beta, they do the 5 core Amazon cloud services: EC2 (Compute), S3 (Storage), Simple Query Service, Simple DB, and Flexible Payment Service. You can drill down one ach of these to see thruput of I/O in Europe and the US for example. Think of the next step - providing a common management platform to monitor my own apps as well as the cloud - all correlated together to make sure Web 2.0 operations teams have the best visibility to manage and monitor their critical services (like Social Web;). Note: I am on the board at Hyperic, ...