At my day job we have load balanced web servers which talk to load balanced app servers via web services (and lately WCF). At any given time, we have 4-6 different teams that have the ability to add new web sites or services or consume existing services. We probably have about 20-30 different web applications and corresponding services.
Unfortunately, given that we have no centralized control over this due to competing priorities, org structures, project timelines, financial buckets, etc., it is quite a mess. We have a variety of services that are reused, but a bunch that are specific to a front-end.
Ideally we would have better control over this situation, and we are trying to get control over it, but that is taking a while. One thing we would like to do is find out more about what all of the inter-relationships between web sites and the app servers.
I have used Reflector to find dependencies among assemblies, but would like to be able to see the traffic patterns between services.
What are the options for trying to map out web service relationships? For the most part, we are mainly talking about internal services (web to app, app to app, batch to app, etc.). Off the top of my head, I can think of two ways to approach it:
Analyze assemblies for any web references. The drawback here is that not everything is a web reference and I'm not sure how WCF connections are listed. However, this would at least be a start for finding 80% of the connections. Does anyone know of any tools that can do that analysis? Like I said, I've used Reflector for assembly references but can't find anything for web references.
Possibly tap into IIS and passively monitor the traffic coming in and out and somehow figure out what is being called and where from. We are looking at enterprise tools that could help but it would be a while before they are implemented (and cost a lot). But is there anything out there that could help out quickly and cheaply? One tool in particular (AmberPoint) can tap into IIS on the servers and monitor inbound and outbound traffic, adds a little special sauce and begin to build a map of the traffic. Very nice, but costs a bundle.
I know, I know, how the heck did you get into this mess in the first place? Beats me, just trying to help us get control of it and get out of it.
Thanks,
Matt
The easiest way is to look through the logs, but if that doesn't include the referrer than you may also want to monitor what is going out from your web to the app server. You can use tools like Wireshark or Microsoft Network Monitor to see this traffic.
The other "solution" and I use this loosely is to bind a specific web server to app server and then run through a bundle and see what it is hitting on the app server. You could probably do this in a test environment to lesson the effects on the users of the site.
You need a service registry (UDDI??)... If you had a means to catalog these services and their consumers, it would make this job of dependency discovery a lot easier. That is not an easy solution, though. It takes time and documentation to get a catalog in place.
I think the quickest solution would be to query your IIS logs and find source URLs which originate from your own servers. You would at least be able to track down which servers your consumers are coming from.
Also, if you already have some kind of authentication mechanism in place, you could trace who is using a particular service based on login.
You are right about AmberPoint. There are other tools that catalog the service traffic and provide reports showing what is happening to your services. Systinet, SOA Software and Actional also has a products similar to Amberpoint but Amberpoint has a free-ware version, I believe.
Related
I would be starting ft in one company, where i was been told that the application is developed using 'Sas' and 'salesforce'. What is the difference between two?
And which are recommended online resource which I can use to learn more about it.
SAS is software for statistical analysis. If your company/job description doesn't look like working with large sets of data & complex reporting that's probably not it.
They probably mean SaaS (Software as a Service) model, also known as "the cloud", cloud computing etc. You write the program (or use / modify existing one) but you don't buy servers, worry about network connection, electricity costs, load balancing (spikes in traffic will not cause your website to go down). Many apps operate in this model. Microsoft's Azure cloud (or even online wersions of MS Office). There's Siebel Oracle on Demand CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP I think also has SaaS offering...
It's a big topic, I'm simplifying a lot here. And then there are Platform as a Service things too (PaaS) where they give you "just" the hosting etc but no base application to build on top of. You write everything you need from scratch and upload it. Think Heroku or Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Salesforce is "just" one more SaaS application. You start with base application & database, similar to all other clients in the world. You can install plugins to it (some free, some paid), configure it yourself, write custom code if your functionality is too complex... You can do a lot with just clicks & drag & drop but if you need to code stuff then JavaScript (for client-side) and Apex (for server-side) will be your friend. Apex is bit similar to Java.
Where to start... Trailhead is good source of self-paced trainings. You can sign up for a free Salesforce Developer Edition (has almost all features as the paid one but limited storage space), try to pass some courses... Or in SF help&training there should be tons of videos (actually in that link whole left menu "getting started with salesforce" might be good).
Is it possible to open a website,like facebook.com for example, on an amazon web service?
My objective is to automate a certain task in a game and to do so without having to be online on my computer. The point is to spend less time on that game, but to not be left behind on the progress. (I'm building a bot to automate the daily tasks there, just need to know if i can now leave everything running on amazon)
Another project i want to do is to automate access to my email account and perform certain tasks depending on the emails i receive.
You get the point, i tried searching on google but i only find results about creating or hosting your own website in there and not about accessing existing websites and using automation in them.
It sounds like what you want is a virtual private server - basically a computer in the cloud that you control and is always on.
AWS have a service called LightSail for this kind of purpose. Under the hood lightsail just uses EC2, but lightsail takes away a lot of the options and configuration to provide a simpler 'click and go' kind of service.
Once you have a server you can schedule regular tasks. Depending on the complexity of your needs, you could look at using Cron as a scheduler and curl for you http requests.
For the specifics of any project you have I would suggest opening a new question with details of what you are trying to do, the reading you have done, and examples of any code you have tried.
I have created a django app that contains c++ for some of the views as well as a java library. How would I deploy this app? What kind of hosting service allows for multiple languages? I have looked at EC2, GAE, and several platforms (like heroku) but I can't seem to find a definitive solution.
I have never deployed anything to the web so a simple explanation would be much appreciated.
PaaS stuff is probably not your best bet. If you want the scalability and associated buzzwords(muh 99.9999999999% availability because my servers are hosted in a parallel dimension without electrical storms, power outages, hurricanes, earthquakes, or nuclear holocausts) that comes with hosting your application on a huge web company's platform, check out IaaS(Infrastructure as a service) systems like Google's Compute Engine or AWS. With these you just get a virtual server (or servers), running your Linux distro of choice, and you can install and run whatever you please on them without being constrained to a specific platform like App Engine or Heroku(where you have to basically write your app to specifically run on that platform). If you plan on consuming a ton of bandwidth/resources from the get-go, you will almost certainly get a better deal using a dedicated server(s) from a small company.
Interested in what specifically you are executing C++ for in a Django view. Image/video processing?
Well. Deployment is not really something where a simple explanation helps much.
First I would check what the requirements to the operating system are (compilers, dependencies,…). That will maybe reduce the options quickly.
I guess that with a setup containing C++ & Java artifacts, the usual PaaS (GaE, Heroku,…) offerings will not be sufficient because they define the stack. And a mixture of Python/C++/Java is rather uncommon I'd say.
Choosing an IaaS offering (EC2, …) may be an option. There you can run your whole self-defined stack and have the possibility of easier scaling.
Hosting the application on your own server(s) is also always possible. Check your data protection regulations to find out if it's not even a requirement.
There are a lot of ways to get the Django application to run. The Django documentation has some information about deployment. If you have certain special requirements, uwsgi may be a good application server.
You may also want a web server in front of the application. Possibilities range from using uwsgi's built-in http server or using e.g. Nginx with uwsgi.
All in all every component of the whole "deployment" has hundereds of bells and whistels and it's not easy to give advice without knowing specific requirements and properties of the system itself. You'll also probably need a database you have to deploy.
But before deploying it to the web, it's also important to have a solid build process to assemble all the parts. And not only on the development machine. With three languages involved this should be the first step solve. If it easily and automagically deploys in a development environment, moving it to a server is easier.
Right now the website is running locally and I'm still working on it.
While doing this I also have to make it visible to a specific group of users as I need their feedback in order to add/change features, etc.
I've tried to find a free web hosting without any luck (see dependencies).
I was thinking to create a VPN but then I will have to use my PC as a host for a virtual machine which is by far not what I'm looking for.
Therefore, my questions are:
1. Which is the best way to achieve this (website visibility for TESTING) fast and easy?
2. If a dedicated web host is the best solution, please point me to an easy-to-use and cheap one. What I've tried so far: elastichosts, alwasydata, stackable, 1FreeHosting and probably others I don't remember right now. For a reason or another I couldn't use none of the above.
Another aspect to be considered: I want this only for simple testing and I don't need a lot of server resources. Also the traffic will be very low as there are only 5 testers. That's why I wouldn't pay too much for it. I will probably need this temporary web hosting for 2-3 months.
Dependencies:
- as the website uses mezzanine, for the moment I only need mezzanine's dependencies.
Thanks in advance!
You can always just setup port forwarding on your router. This would allow your testers direct access to your app. Though this might give your PC more exposure than you want.
Heroku has a free tier.
In your non free options, an instance at linode costs $20/month, but requires some setup. Rackspace has similar options in their cloud servers line. Both are no contract servers.
My blogpost covers gracefully deploying a Mezzanine site. The monthly hosting cost is nothing compared to the cost of a slow, painful deployment process.
An EC2 micro-instance right now costs as little as ~US$3.50/month. I create and destroy staging servers on EC2 servers for testing and sharing with others.
I have a web-based interface for handing invoices, customer records and other transaction records which interacts currently with a database of all the aforementioned stored upon the same machine. As you can imagine, this is quite a simple set-up consisting of a web-app (PHP) and a database (MySQL). However, the ideal scenario is to keep the records on the machine they are currently on (easy) and move the web-app to another server within the same network (again, easy) ... but in addition, provide facilities on a public-facing website for managing accounts by customers and so forth. The problem is this - the public-facing web server is located in a completely separate location as it is a dedicated server provided by a well-known ISP.
What would be the best way to enable the records to be accessible from this other server whilst ensuring that all communications are secure. Speed is not a huge factor, although any outages on either side should be handled gracefully. Initially my thoughts went towards web services (XML-RPC/SOAP/Hessian), but these options seem to present difficulties (security being the main one, overcomplexity as well).
The web-app must remain PHP-based. The public-facing site is likely to be PHP-based as well, although Python (likely using Django) is another option. The introduction of any other technologies (Java etc) is not a problem, although it is preferred if they be Linux-friendly (so .NET would not be the best fit here).
Apologies if this question is somewhat verbose and vague. I am testing the water somewhat in regards to this kind of problem. Any advice or suggestions gratefully received.
I've done something similar. You can expose a web service to the internet that will do the database access, but requests to the service must match a strong hashed and salted password (which will be secured on the ISP's server in the DMZ.)
Either this or some sort of public/private key encryption scheme.
OK, this might seem a bit silly, but what if you just used mysql replication?
Instead of using all sorts of fancy web services, just have a master sql server on one machine, then have it replicate to another server that holds the slave sql server as well as the web app