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.
Related
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!
On Db2 v11.1, how do we get or setup the notification for DBA team if there is any hang or slowness situation in off shift working hours?
The answer depends on the external monitoring and alerting solution you deployed, and how you configure that tooling in your environment.
This application layer tooling is not built into Db2-LUW, although APIs exist in Db2-LUW for such tooling to get the data it needs in order to operate.
IBM and several third parties offer solutions for real time monitoring and alerting in this space. Many cover app-servers, web-servers, database layers, networks and operating-system layers and have different alerting configurability. Many have plugin type architecture with plugins for Db2-LUW monitoring. Do not use stackoverflow for product recommendations however.
For "slowness", this is only meaningful to measure usually at the application layer, in terms of response times and other metrics etc.
For database-hangs, IBM offers a db2-hang_detect script that tooling can orchestrate , requires careful interpretation and even more careful testing.
From my understanding, Informatica Cloud, Boomi, Talend, JitterBit are all integration tools which have "Connectors" to connect to servers (and I believe these Connectors in turn call APIs to access the required data). I saw many others but none of them are free although some are open source.
Are there any tools that help you visualize the integration process for free? If not, why not?
Tools like Informatica, Boomi provide drag and drop which show the entire flow.
Talend Open Studio is one such tool. not completely visual but almost there.
There are not many free tools as data storage technologies are constantly changing. It would be expensive for developers to keep up with constantly changing technologies without a source of income.
Developing data integration tools are resource intensive. Why would anybody(any enterprise company) spend so much of their effort and give away for free. Also the provider of the tools have to provide support for enterprise level . P1 means 4 hour response which means building the capability of the support team on par with the developer. All of these cost money and time. The only way to recoup is to sell the finished product and provide services.
I'm looking for a way to give out preview or demo versions of our software to our customers as easy as possible.
The software we are currently developing is a pretty big project. It consists of a client environment, an application server, various databases, web services host etc.
The project is developed incrementally and we want to ship the bits in intervals of one to two months. The first deliveries will not be used in production. They have the puropse of a demo to encourage the customers to give feedback.
We don't want to put burden on the customers to install and configure the system. All in all we are looking for a way to ease the deployment, installation and configuration pain.
What I thought of was to use a virtualizing technique to preinstall and preconfigure a virtual machine with all components that are neccessary. Our customers just have to mount the virtual image and run the application.
I would like to hear from folks who use this technique. I suppose there are some difficulties as well. Especially, what about licensing issues with the installed OS?
Perhaps it is possible to have the virtual machine expire after a certain period of time.
Any experiences out there?
Since you're looking at an entire application stack, you'll need to virtualize the entire server to provide your customers with a realistic demo experience. Thinstall is great for single apps, but not an entire stack....
Microsoft have licensing schemes for this type of situation, since it's only been used for demonstration purposes and not production use a TechNet subscription might just cover you. Give your local Microsoft licensing centre a call to discuss, unlike the offshore support teams they're really helpful and friendly.
For running the 'stack' with the least overhead for your clients, I suggest using VMware. The customers can download the free VMware player, load up the machines (or multiple machines) and get a feel for the system... Microsoft Virtual PC or Virtual Server is going to be a bit more intrusive and not quite the "plug n play" solution that you're looking for.
If you're only looking to ship the application, consider either thinstall or providing Citrix / Terminal services access - customers can remotely login to your own (test) machines and run what they need.
Personally if it's doable, a standalone system would be best - tell your customers install vmware player, then run this app... which launches the various parts of your application stack (maybe off of a DVD) and you've got a fully self contained demo for the marketing guys to pimp out :)
You should take a look at thinstall(It has been bought by vmware and is called thinapp now), its an application virtualizer.
It seems that you're trying to accomplish several competing goals:
"Give" the customer something.
Simplify and ease the customer experience.
Ensure the various components coexist and interact happily.
Accommodate licensing restrictions, both yours and the OS vendor's.
Allow incremental and piecewise upgrades.
Can you achieve all of these by hosting the back end (database, web server, etc.) and providing your customers with a CD (or download) that contains the client? This will give them the "download/upgrade experience" that goes along with client software, without dealing with the complexity of administering the back end.
For a near plug-and-play experience, you might consider placing your demo on a live linux or Windows CD. Note: you need a licensed copy of Windows for the latter.
Perhaps your "serious" customers might be able to request their own demo copies of the back end as well; they'd be more amenable to the additional work on their part.
As far as OS licenses, if your vendor(s) of choice aren't helpful, you might consider free or open-source alternatives such as FreeDOS or linux.
Depending on if you can fit all the needed services into a single OS instance or not...
Vmware Ace or whatever they're calling it nowadays will let you deliver single virtual machines under strict control, with forced updates, expiration and whatnot. But it sounds easier to just set up a demo environment and allow remote access to it.
The issue here I guess is getting several virtual machines to communicate under unknown circumstances - if one is not enough?
An idea then is to ship a physical server preconfigured with virtualisation and whatever amount of virtual servers needed to demonstrate the system.
Using trial versions of the operating system might be good enough for the licensing dilemma - atleast Windows Server is testable for 60 days, extendable to 240 when registering.
Thinstall is great for single apps, but not an entire stack....
I didn't try it yet, but with the new version of thinstall you are able to let different thinstalled application communicate.
But I guess you're right a vm-ware image would be easier
Most of the work I do is with what could be considered enterprise Web applications. These projects have large budgets, longer timelines (from 3-12 months), and heavy customizations. Because as developers we have been touting the idea of the Web as the next desktop OS, customers are coming to expect the software running on this "new OS" to react the same as on the desktop. That includes easy to manage automatic upgrades. In other words, "An update is available. Do you want to upgrade?" Is this even a realistic expectation? Can anyone speak from experience on trying to implement this feature?
At my company we have enterprise installations ranging into the thousands of seats. If we implemented an auto-upgrade, our customers would mutiny!
Large installations have peculiar issues that don't apply to small ones. For example, with 2000 users (not all of whom are, let us say, the most sophisticated of tool users), tool-training is a big deal: training time, internal demos, internal process documents, etc.. They cannot unleash a new feature or UI change without a chance to understand how it fits in their process and therefore what their internal best practices are and how to communicate that to their users.
Also when applications fail, it's the internal IT team who are responsible. Therefore, they want time to install a new version in a test area, beat it up, and deploy on a Saturday only when they're good and ready.
I can see the value in making minor patches more easy to install, particularly when the patch is just for a bug-fix and not for anything that would require retraining, and if the admins still get final say over when it's installed. But even then, I don't believe anyone has ever asked for this! Whether because they don't want it or they are trained to not expect it, it doesn't seem worth it.
Well, it really depends on your business model but for a lot of applications the SaaS model can end up biting you. It's great for a lot of things but for some larger applications the users are not investing as significant amount up front and could possibly move to something else before you've made any money.
See
http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-218408.html
and here
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/21/SoftwareAsAServiceWhenYourBusinessModelBecomesAParadox.aspx
for more information
One of the primary reasons to implement an application as a web application is that you get automatic upgrades for free. Why would users be getting prompted for upgrades on a web app?
For Windows applications, the "update is available, do you want to upgrade?" functionality is provided by Microsoft using ClickOnce, which I have used in an enterprise environment successfully -- there are a few gotchas but for the most part it is a good way to manage automatic deployment and upgrade of Windows apps.
For mobile apps, you can also implement auto-upgrades, although it is a little trickier.
In any case, to answer your question in a broad sense, I don't know if it is expected that all enterprise apps should make upgrading easy, but it certainly is worth the money from an IT support standpoint to architect them to allow for easy upgrading.
If you're providing a hosted solution, I wouldn't bother. Let the upgrade happen silently (perhaps with a notice that you did it). If you're selling an application that's hosted on their servers, let the upgrade decision be made by a single owner, not every user of the app.