Basic Support vs "Advanced Support" for Bare Metal Server Hosting at IBM Cloud - ibm-cloud

We have a few bare metal servers at IBM with their basic support. I am considering upgrading our support level. The primary reason is the discomfort I have with not having any sort of account manager (although advanced support only gives us a faster support response time from what I can tell).
Does anyone have the specific experience they can share with the benefits (or lack of) of this added support level?
Thx

Related

Select a cataloging / metadata system?

We are setting up a GIS server based on qgis / postgresql-postgis and geoserver.
We are missing an important tool, the cataloging and metadata system.
Postgresql and geoserver are on a windows server 2019 virtual server.
We are GIS & geomatics people but not computer scientists. We are therefore looking for an opensource solution that is relatively easy to install and configure, which does not require extensive computer skills.
What solutions do you think would be suitable? We have identified :
Geonetwork,
Georchestra https://www.georchestra.org/software.html
Geonode
Are there others?
Among these 3 solutions, would there be one easier to set and use, which would be functional on both linux and windows?
Are there other criteria to take into account in our selection of technology?
Thank you very much for your help, recommendation and / or feedback.
GeoNetwork might be the silver bullet (though it tends to do more than the job, since it also features an integrated geodata viewer).
geOrchestra provides both GeoServer and GeoNetwork, and a Single Sign On feature. It also provides additional modules like a user management console, a data upload tool ("datafeeder"), analytics, mapstore and so on. It's very modular and leaves plenty of room for integration.
GeoNode provides a fully integrated environment. It's like a social network dedicated to data. It's also based on GeoServer and has a SSO.
None of the above are easy to setup & maintain if you do not have basic computer skills. With a docker composition, you may have one of them running pretty quickly though.
You may try to use Cartoview which is an extension of GeoNode, visualizing the layers and maps in geospatial apps. It can be used in different environments (Linux, Windows, macOS).
You can download the windows installer from the link above and give it a try!

MongoDB for commercial use

As I am pretty horrible in reading English legal documents I hoped one of you could answer this question.
In about a month I need to do an internship at a company for my bachelor. They would like me to develop a system for internal use (will not be sold) that requires a database.
They are allowing me a free hand (from what I understood) in selecting a database. As (as far as I understand atm) the data that needs to be stored does not contain a lot of relations (1 or 2) and is not heavily queried, I was thinking of using mongoDB as a back-end server.
Can mongoDB community be used freely in this type of an application under the new license? Most I find using Google involves the old license.
First of all, it's important to know why MongoDB adopted a new license for the product Community Server. This change was made as a response to a increasing number of cloud providers that are offering MongoDB database as a paid service to their users without playing by the open-source rules. Indeed, it's pretty unfair to have companies reselling the free version of a product you spent a lot of money to develop without contributing anything back.
As you can read in MongoDB new license's FAQ What specifically is the difference between the GPL and the SSPL:
A company that offers a publicly available MongoDB as a service must release the software it uses to offer such service under the terms of the SSPL, including the management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the source code made available.
That means that a company that offers MongoDB Community Version as a service to their users, must open the source code of the softwares developed to make that service work, like: monitoring tools, user interfaces, etc.
What changes to you: nothing.
Be the software you are developing for internal or external use, your company is just using MongoDB as a component of the project, not as the final product. So you are free to keep using it.

BLUEMIX support for Social media app

I'm building a social media app targeting a specific nitche of users.
The app is built in HTML5 with features similar to Facebook or Instagram.
Can the entire application run on Bluemix?
What exactly are the benefits of bluemix to an App of this nature?
Thanks.
Blumix is a PAAS. The benefits of Bluemix are the benefits of a PAAS infrastructure and of the support:
cost savings
reduced technical maintenance
The upfront costs for purchasing servers, other hardware, and the necessary software licenses are eliminated.
Technical Benefits
Choice to choose the programming models, languages, operating systems and databases
Switching in different environments – Development , Test ( System, Integration, UAT,etc)
Hardware Scalability - Auto scaling supported through DevOps Services
Elasticity - Supported through DevOps Services
Automation – Supported at various level from runtime provisioning to development lifecycle
Improved development productivity
Business benefits
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Faster time to market
Business Continuity
Savings on costs associated with hardware resource consumption and support infrastructure
Facebook is a social network.
And yes you can do something like this on Bluemix choosing the right services. I suggest you to take a look at Bluemix Catalog in order to understand what services you can create and use on Bluemix to do what you want: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/catalog/
In this particular case I suggest you to take a look to Object Storage Service (to store files) - DashDB (or other db service) to store db information - SSO to manage the authentication.
I suggest to take a look at this article too: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/96960515-2ea1-4391-8170-b0515d08e4da/entry/Moving_to_Cloud_Platform_as_a_Service_Pros_and_Cons?lang=en
This a quite large topic, however let's see some of the services you could use on Bluemix developing your application:
the first thing I think about is the IBM Graph service: it is an easy-to-use, fully-managed NO-SQL graph database service for storing and querying data points, their connections, and properties. IBM Graph offers an Apache TinkerPop3 compatible API and plugs into your Bluemix application seamlessly. This service can be used for building recommendation engines, analyzing social networks, and fraud detection.
Insights for Twitter: this could be useful if you need to integrate with Twitter for example analyzing the trends and providing your users updated news.
You could take a look at the Watson cognitive services in the Bluemix Catalog, some of them can be useful for social networking purposes (eg. Language Translation to connect people speaking different languages, or Personality Insights to identify psychological traits which determine purchase decisions, intent and behavioral traits).
The application can entirely run on Bluemix (you can choose the Runtime you prefer for the server-side code). The benefits, in addition to the services listed above (there are actually many others that could result useful), are the classic ones related to developing on a Cloud PaaS platform: scalability (both horizontal and vertical), availability, lower costs...

What are the top 5 deployment automation tools?

I am using IBM UrbanCode udeploy, great tool but afraid IBM will kill it sooner or later with their slow response in supporting. What are the other choices?
UCD isn't going anywhere. Its in high demand these days, and is gaining traction in z/OS shops as well.
However, there other popular tools are Chef and Puppet. Just be prepared for manual data entry and less friendly interface. They work, but are more work to use.

google compute engine files for HA LAMP are not there for download?

I found this guide in the google documentation for the cloud platform.
https://cloud.google.com/developers/articles/high-availability-lamp-stack-on-google-compute-engine
although the files it asks you to download, are not found when the link is clicked?
anyone know where they actually are?
Unfortunately we deprecated this sample application as it was focused on migrating applications around maintenance windows.
Now that we have live migration and transparent maintenance windows, developers no longer need to move components of their application around zones due to impeding maintenance. Additionally, Cloud SQL now supports MySQL wire protocol which significantly reduces the complexities of managing applications for high availability.
In the future we may develop a new application, but it will be greatly simplified since we can offload load balancing to Compute Engine load balancer and persistency to Cloud Datastore and Cloud SQL.