Current situation:
Thick client wrote in .NET
We have a very old computation software that we can't maintain anymore.
We don't really know how the kernel is working (people left, 15 years old code).
We have the code and some technical experts.
We want to migrate it to the cloud behind a public API in order to serve some SPA application or even thick client applications.
What is you recommendation about that problem?
We have thought about:
Lift-n-Shift
Lift-Adjust-n-Shift
Rearchitecting or redeveloping from the ground
Repurchasing a new cloud solution (but it doesn't seem to have any)
All options that you mentioned are possible but which one to choose really depends on your business needs time and budget.
Lift and shift (vms)
This is mostly quickest approach and you may simply use VMs to migrate to cloud. But managing VMs is your responsibility and is on going committment.
Lift adjust and shift (containers)
in my opinion you get benefits of cloud when you start using PAAS services. You may consider containerize (docker) your application and migrate it to cloud and start using paas services. your dev ops cycle will be quick and scaling is easy. Since you are not managing vms anymore it's less hassle.
rearchitect amd redevlop
this could be costly and time consuming and really depends if your business requirements allow you to do that. if you plan to expand the existing code base then you may consider this else it could be big deal when you can simply migrate your services using approaches mentioned above.
Related
I wonder if anyone could share their thoughts on my question regarding web based APIs (we use Microsoft stacks)..
We are currently in the process of building an infrastructure to host web apis across our business.
As a organisation we have seperate business areas that provide services to our customers. These individual areas of our business generally have their own best of breed IT system. Offering APIs is something we've long thought about and we have started the design process.
The APIs we aim to offer shall be web based (.NET/webAPI/WCF etc.) and will largely (99%) be consumed within our organisation but some may be exposed externally in the future should the requirement arise (new mobile app may need to use the services etc.)
I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences around how you architected yuor farms. I understand its quite an open question without understanding the crooks of our requirements but its more general advice/experiences I'd like to hear.
Particularly we are trying to decide whether we should design the infrastrcuture by:
1) Providing each area of the business with their own API server whereby we shall deploy each web API within a new application inside IIS.
or
2) Setup up a load balanced web api farm whereby we have say 2/3 iis web servers, all built the same, hosting the same web apis but the business areas will all share the same server effectively. Each area would have a segregated site within iis and new APIs shall be setup under new applications inside their respective web sites.
I dont foresee us having thousands of APIs but some will be business critical so I'm certainly bearing resilience in mind which is why as much as I like each business area having their own API server, I'm being swayed towards the option of having a load balanced farm which the whole business shares.
Anyone have any thoughts, experiences etc.?
Thanks!
That's a very interesting question, and i'd love to hear what others might think. I'm no big expert, but here are my two cents.
It seems to me, that the answer should be somewhere in between those two options you specified. Specifically, each critical business area, should get their own resilient, load balanced farm, while less critical services can utilize single machine deployments. Critical business area may not mean only one API, but can actually be a group of APIs, with high cohesion among themselves.
Using option 1 environment to full extent can be hard to maintain,
while utilizing option 2 fully, can be inefficient in terms of redeployment if (or better yet, when) business logic changes. Furthermore, i think it will be possible for greedy APIs to hog resources in peak traffic, making other services temporary less performant (unless you have some sort of dynamic scaling mechanism).
Background:
I'm thinking about web application organisation. I will separate front (web site for browser) from back (API): 2 apps, 2 repository, 2 hosting. Front will call API for almost everything.
So, if I have two separate domain services with my API (example: learning context and booking context) with no direct link between them, should I build 2 API (with 2 repository, 2 build process, etc.) ? Is it a good practice to build n APIs for n needs or one "big" API ? I'm speaking about a substantial web app with trafic.
(I hope this question will not be closed as not constructive... I think it's a real question for a concrete case, sorry if not. This question and some other about architecture were not closed so there is hope for mine)
It all depends on the application you are working on, its business needs, priorities you have and so on. Generally you have several options:
Stay with one monolithic application
Stay with one monolithic application but decouple domain model across separate modules/bundles/libraries
Create distributed architecture (like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) or Event Driven Architecture (EDA))
One monolithic application
It's the easiest and the cheapest way to develop application on its beginning stage. You don't have to worry about complex architecture, complex deployment and development process. It also works better if there are no many developers around.
Once the application is growing up, this model begins to be problematic. You can't deploy modules separately, the app is more exposed to anti-patterns, spaghetti code/design (especially when a lot people working on it). QA process takes more and more time, which may make it unusable on CI basis. Introducing approaches like Continuous Integration/Delivery/Deployment is also much much harder.
Within this approach you have one repo/build process for all your APIs,
One monolithic application but decouple domain model
Within this approach you still have one big platform, but you connect logically separate modules on 3rd party basis. For example you may extract one module and create a library from it.
Thanks to that you are able to introduce separate processes (QA, dev) for different libraries but you still have to deploy whole application at once. It also helps you avoid anti-patterns, but it may be hard to keep backward compatibility across libraries within the application lifespan.
Regarding your question, in this way you have separate API, dev process and repository for each "type of actions" as long as you move its domain logic to separate library.
Distributed architecture (SOA / EDA)
SOA has a lot profits. You can introduce completely different processes for each service: dev, QA, deploying. You can deploy just one service at once. You also can use different technologies for different purposes. QA process gets more reliable as it involves smaller projects. You can version communication (API) between services which makes them even more independent. Moreover you have better ability to scale horizontally.
On the other hand complexity of the high level architecture grows. You have much more different components you have to take care: authentication / authorisation between services, security, service discovering, distributed transactions etc. If your application is data driven (separate frontend which use APIs for consuming data) and particular services don't need to communicate to each other - it may be not as much complicate (but such assumption is IMO quite risky, sooner or letter you will need to communicate them).
In that approach you have separate API, with separate repositories and separate processes for each "type of actions" (which I understand ss separate domain model / services).
As I wrote on the beginning the way you choose depends on the application and its needs. Anyway, back to your original question, my suggestion is to keep APIs as separate as you can. Even if you have one monolithic application you should be able to version APIs separately and keep their domain logic separate. Separating repositories and/or processes depends on the approach you choose (eg. among these I mentioned before).
If I missed your point, please describe in more detailed way what answer do you expect.
Best!
Folks, I have question this morning that hopefully one of you techies can answer – during past few months, I have been heavily involved in preparing several SQL certifications study guides as it’s my desire to secure Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) or associate level. While I have previous experiences within this skill set and wanted to sharpen it by obtaining further experiences and hopefully securing this certification, it has been quite challenging setting up a home lab that allows me to create environment similar to what the big dogs use nowadays – windows server/several sql instances/virtualization and all that – due to lack of proper hardware or cost. In any case, my question today is to seek your advices and guidance on other possible options, particularly if this task can be accomplished using Amazons AWS – I understand they offer some level of space that can be used as playground or if one want to extend the capacity, subscription is an option. So, if I was to subscribe the paid version of it, is it possible to install all software needed to practice and experiment all needed technologies to complete and or master contents on the training kit. Again, I’m already using my small home network and have all proper software, but just feel that it’s not enough as some areas require higher computing power to properly test or rung specific areas..
Short: Yes
You can create a micro instance for free and install whatever you want on it. If your not familiar with using the CLI, it can be a bit daunting but there are plenty of guides online.
They also offer an RDS service where, they will allow you to set up a database instance and will maintain it for you but it's not free.
Edit
Link to there MS Server Page
http://aws.amazon.com/windows/
Azure is the windows cloud service, I think the comment was have you considered looking at azure instead of AWS
I have hadoop 1.0.4 running on my ubuntu 11.04,configured with eclipse I want to make a web application to run hadoop jobs, or may be Cassandra,Hbase and Hive might be a way but I don't have much time to learn thoroughly all these and I want to do it as quickly as possible.Any advice which one might prove the easiest to get started with ?
I don't know if this question really qualifies to be here on SO in its current form. This is the reason I did not write this initially. But, a lot of SO experts are out there to decide this(they can do it much better than me) :)
Having said that, I would like to share a few things with you based on my personal experience, so that you proceed towards the correct path. First of all, Hadoop jobs(MapReduce) and Hive are actually not a good fit for web services kinda use cases. They are most suitable for offline, batch processing kinda stuff. HBase/Cassandra can be used though, if you have real time needs(like web services).
Coming back to your actual question. Before diving into Hadoop, Hive, HBase etc, I would suggest you to get some hold on web services first(if you are new to web services as well). Reason being, a web service is something which has much wider scope of applicability as compared to tools like Hadoop, Hive, HBase etc. These tools are specific to some particular use cases and cannot be used everywhere. But, web services are used almost everywhere and with n number of different things, like RDBMSs, NoSQL datastores etc etc. So if you know web service concepts you definitely have that extra edge. To begin with you can visit these links :
Web Services Tutorial by W3Schools(Nice n easy. Would serve the quick start guide purpose).
For a detailed tutorial you can visit the oracle web services tutorial.
This link by IBM developerworks has references to some really good web services learning stuff.
You might find this one really helpful to start with(Shows how to create web services using Eclipse).
And you can obviously Google web service tutorials anytime.
One last thing. Although it's not mandatory to be a pro in things like Hadoop, Hive, HBase etc, but having some decent amount of understanding of the concepts would be really helpful in developing your solution in a much better manner. It'll allow you to think accurately in the correct direction.
HTH.
I'm trying to make the case for click-once and smart client development but my network support team wants to keep with web development for everything.
What is the best way to convince them that click-once and smart client development have a place in the business?
We use ClickOnce where I work; in terms of comparison to a web release I would base the case around the need for providing users with a rich client app, otherwise it might well actually be better to use web applications.
In terms of releasing a rich client app ClickOnce is fantastic; you can set it up to enforce updates on startup thus enforcing a version throughout the network. You can make the case that ClickOnce gives you the same benefit of having a single deployment point that web deployment possesses.
Personally I've found ClickOnce to be unbelievably useful. If you're developing rich client .net apps (in Windows, though let's face it the vast majority of real .net development is in Windows) and want to deploy it across a network nothing else compares.
Here is a couple of ideas that may help
long running processes, they are not asp.net best friend.
scaling, using client side processing as compared to bigger or more servers reduces cost etc.
They have a place in the Windows environment but not in any other environment and so if you intend on writing applications for external clients, then your probably best sticking with Web based development.
I heard this "Write Once, Run Many" before from Microsoft when Asp.net 1.1 was released, it never happened in practice.
#Mark
scaling, using client side processing as compared to bigger or more servers reduces cost etc.
I'm not sure I would entirely agree with this. It would seem to cost less to buy 1 powerful server and 1,000's of "dum terminals" than an average powerful server and 1,000 of powerful desktop computers.
#GateKiller
when i speak of scaling i was talking about the cost of buying more servers and not clients.
most workstations in an organization barely use 50% of their computing power right through the day. If i was to use a click once deployed application i would be using the grunt of existing workstations therefore not having any further cost on the organiztion.