Postgresql on Swisscom cloud - swisscomdev

I think Postgresql is part of the CloudFoundry services but I could not find it in the list of services for the Swisscom Cloud.
I would love to know if it will be added in the future ?
Thanks

The Cloud Foundry Open Source developer, user and engineering community loves PostgreSQL. For example our CI/CD pipeline doesn't support MariaDB. There are a lot of PostgreSQL fans working for the cloud project, but also some guys prefer MariaDB for non-technical reasons.
The official answer is something like this:
Your inquiry concerns a feature that is not currently available in our
platform. We do not comment on the availability of any new features.
We announce them when we are ready. Your request as well as you
e-mail address were transferred to the Application Cloud Product
Management team. They may try to contact you regarding the feature
you requested. We have aggressive road map for next few months and we
plan brining many exciting features for our customers. We can only
say that much that Postgres is defiantly on our radar. Follow our
announcements on twitter channel or on developer.swisscom.com. Our
newsletter also provides frequent updates updates of the Application
Cloud.
Sorry for the management type answer.

Related

Did IBM make Watson Visual Recognition paid?

It was originally free and I was using it for almost 3-4 months. It told me that I exceeded the quota so I deleted the project and created a new one. I went to Catalog then Watson Visual Recognition and the only plan avaialble is standard which means I have to pay but before I set it up for free and was using it fine since then. Am I doing something wrong or did IBM change something? I even tried this on a new account but it still says the same thing.
As per the Visual Recognition service release notes dated: 16-10-2020
Changes
The following new features and changes to the service are available.
16 October 2020
You can no longer create a Lite plan instance of the Visual Recognition service. However, existing Lite plan instances remain available. You can create new instances as billable Standard plans.
You can check the details in the documentation here
Yes,IBM has made visual recognition to paid..But lite version is still available on the cloud and you can use them for a while like 4-6 months and after the lite plan done you need to get a paid plan which gives you more abilities to do with IBM Watson services currently..And my suggestion if your trying to learn or want to learn or advance these topics see the docs of service.

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.

Create my personnel Cloud on my personnel server

I Would like to know if someone have any idea to Create my own Cloud, soon I'll buy a professional server and I Would like to create my own cloud. I also want to be able to host web sites and data . Thank you for your help
Response to your comment. This is possible. I would look into to the open source hyper-visor framework called Xen. The reason is every cloud provider hosts their own hardware. They mostly also use some virtualization technology. For a "lower" startup cost, look into Xen as it is open source and used by many cloud providers in the business today (AWS, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, Verizon) Understand that this is a huge undertaking and requires a lot of capital, but hopefully this will point you in the right direction.
http://www.xenproject.org/

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...

Atlassian Crowd experiences?

we (a team of about 150) are considering moving our ALM solution from Bugzilla/CVS to Jira/svn/Confluence/Bamboo/Fisheye. SO has a lot of good info on those, but I would be interested to learn about another tool from Atlassian - a Single Sign On (SSO) Crowd, I am considering adding it to the mix for an LDAP integration with our Novell id's.
has someone had any experience with Crowd?
how does it handle 100/200/500 (after recession, that is) users?
any tips/tricks?
would you choose different, open source SSO solutions?
thanks
EDIT:
a year has passed...
We got Crowd and went with ActiveDirectory integration along with internal Crowd directory (for short-term contractors, etc.). So far the solution works just great.
EDIT2:
Another year: still going strong (We have 1K users now). Nested groups is a killer feature, thankfully it is working fine after last point release.
EDIT3:
mid-2012 - 7.5K users - going strong. with a little automation for onboarding (Confluence pages with Ajaxified forms + a little Crowd plugin)
Major disclosure: I'm the Crowd Product Manager. So, apply as much NaCl as you think wise.
I'd be very surprised if you had any issues with 500 users. Especially since Novell seems to be one of the better directory servers in terms of performance. The only time I'd expect to see problems is if your Crowd server and Novell directory server are on opposite sides of the world. Don't do that unless you have to :-)
We have plenty of users connecting thousands of users to JIRA, Confluence, and the Dev Tools with Crowd.
Any issues - drop us a line (sales#atlassian.com or http://support.atlassian.com) and we'll help out.
Cheers,
Dave.
ps: I hope that didn't come off as a sales pitch or "we make magic products that are perfect in every possible way, now give us your money!"
We're using Crowd with about 80 users and expect that number to climb into the hundred when we roll it out for client access. Crowd is important to us because it allows us to integrate Jira and Confluence (the Atlassian wiki) with SSO, which is critical.
Crowd works well for us but it does have some quirks. We are using it to draw authentications from Active Directory. There are some things that are a little inelegant. We need to do some more digging to troubleshoot those.
But that aside, Crowd is a big win for us, for these two reasons:
SSO across Atlassian apps
Ability to have our internal users drawn from Active Directory, and add clients directly to Crowd and not bog down AD
We're very happy with all the Atlassian tools.
I haven't had experience with Crowd on such a large set of users as yours, but I did find it very easy to set up and manage our JIRA, Confluence and SVN instances with Crowd (we only have 25 users). It will handle Apache authentication as well, so I'm planning to switch our various authenticated Web sites to Crowd as well.
According to Atlassian's site, Crowd should easily be able to handle 500 users; there are some useful case studies and Webinar recordings on the site that will tell you more.
I do have few installations of Crowd with over 16000 users, most comming from LDAP/Active Directory and I would say that the performance would not be a problem but there are other problems which Atlassian did considered solving in years:
There is no auto account creation/registration in crowd
None of the Atlassian products allows people to register accounts with an email validation
There is no way to prevent people from creating several accounts with the same email address.
SSO works only if you have only one domain.
If you do no have many users you can configure Confluence to coonect to Jira directly instead of using Crowd. Atlassian products do already have an interal crowd instance in them, but its performance is limited to about 200 users or so (it's more about the number of authentications made, not the total number of users).
Considering the above limitations, I would summarize that Crowd is far overpriced for what it delivers, unless you are getting a free license if you are eligible.
We have also Crowd installed and connected within the Atlassian product family. It is backed by a corporate LDAP (M$ AD). So far it is great and works pretty well.
BUT currently we're struggling with integration of so called custom applications. We have e.g. Prometheus for monitoring data which doesn't have any authentication built in. So we have an Apache 2.4 in front as SSL endpoint. To add authentication we considered integrating it with Crowd. There is a Apache Crowd connector that is no longer supported (which would be fine by me). There are only the sources available, but built on Apache 2.2. We have to use Apache 2.4 (corporate policy) where some of the required API has been removed.
So either we invest considerable amount of time to migrate the Connector to current Apache API or we do something else (like using a generic LDAP connector towards AD). Which makes the whole Crowd idea a bit a two sided sword for us. (We wanted to centralize user management within our project into a single tool like Crowd to get rid of corporate processes and regulations on the central LDAP).
UPDATE: We now use https://github.com/fgimian/cwdapache connector for Apache 2.4 (with slight adaptions it can be built for Ubuntu 16.04). This adds support for Apache Basic Auth with Crowd groups/users.
UDAPTE2: Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, Crucible work out of the box of course. User migration is a bit cumbersome though (renaming old users and then integrate with Crowd or use unsupported SQLs).
Jenkins 2 and Nexus 3 seem to work fine.
FURTHER DOWN THE ROAD:
Right now I am considering Crowd as a centralized tool for identity and access management for Atlassian products. There it works fine and does what it should. Integrating numerous other applications just sucks since available integrations are not supported/updated.
Example: if you want to have Crowd authentication with nginx there is nothing usable available. There is a OpenId Connect module available, but Crowd lacks support for that (they only support outdated OpenId v2.0). Not even talking about OAuth. There is a Atlassian OAuth library, but Crowd doesn't have it yet (or will ever). Even the Google Apps support will vanish, since Google dropped support: https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/OpenID2Migration