After having looked into Vagrant, it became clear that Puppet and Chef are “the” tools to do the structured and repeatable configuration of machines. I picked the recent book “Learning Chef” to learn and experiment a bit. Tools The book uses the recent Chef Development Kit which should gradually replace the tool called Knife.
After looking a bit into Docker, I went on to look into Vagrant, another well-known tool to provision and configure virtual machines. To learn about Vagrant, I read the book “Vagrant: Up and Running“. This O’Reilly book is well-written and the examples all work. While
The holiday period between Christmas and New Year is an ideal period to catch up on some reading and experimenting. Devops and tools such as Docker, Vagrant, Chef, Puppet and Ansible were on my radar for a while. So finally some time to dive into
One of the clients that I’m working for discovered a problem with a SOAP web service querying an LDAP. The service could contain a ‘*’ in plain text in possibly different fields in the message. When the service is called it uses the ‘*’ as a
We were implementing a bulk-data transfer from SAP into an Oracle database. Easily upwards of 15 000 materials were being uploaded to the database via a stored procedure (company policy). Normally we like this approach because it decouples PI from the database’s underlying table structure, but
While re-reading the Microservices article by Martin Fowler, I was triggered by the following footnote #7: We can’t resist mentioning Jim Webber’s statement that ESB stands for “Egregious Spaghetti Box”. I viewed the presentation – from 2008 – in which Jim Webber and Martin Fowler
“Micro Services” is a new buzzword in world of IT architects. As it talks about application components communicating over a network and contains “services”, it probably has something to do with SOA and integration. So I had to look into it. Let’s bulletize the description
As an integration consultant I work almost daily with XML messages. In my opinion in order to work efficiently with XML you need to have XML schemas. XML schemas makes it possible to validate your messages (including those hard to find typo’s in mappings), they
Impressions of the first day of the Websphere Technical University 2014 in DüsseldorfThe Websphere Technical University and Digital Experience conference is held in Düsseldorf from the 28th of october till the 31st. With over 16 rooms for each timeslot there is something to each person’s
When running a lot of assets or a small footprint, memory consumption becomes a problem. Luckily the webMethods IS logs the memory usage in the stats logs (for those that don’t have more advanced monitoring like jmx). However these log files contain the usage as
Last Monday I taught the SAI workshop “Integratie: van EAI over SOA tot Cloud”. I explained that there are many technical web services standards (WS-*). But that there is little attention from software vendors for the standardization of the functional side of web services. There are few standard XML schema
IBM publishes loads of free Redbooks. But for the IBM BPM solution, there is another great – and free – source of information. i8c colleague Jef pointed me to the free book of Neil Kolban. Neil Kolban is an IBM employee who gathers all there is to know about IBM BPM and publishes
