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Cloud Testing: How to test on Cloud

2012-10-19T07:18:00.002-07:00

Unless you've been living under a rock you must already be knowing that 'Cloud Computing' has been making a lot of buzz over past couple of years -- whether it your peer meeting, a client interview, a demo POC session with a prospect, the recent Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Online Event on January 18, 2012 -- the talk about cloud is everywhere.

And why wouldn't it be? After all, if industry analysts and virtualization experts are to be believed then cloud based computing and business solutions are going to be the NEXT BIG thing of this decade.

So I guess it is only natural if you find yourself to be asking yourself questions like 'what is cloud testing?', 'how to test on cloud?', 'how can we use cloud to better our testing?', 'how does cloud impact how we used to test before?' etc.

However, since all these queries pose different questions, the answers to them would be unique. For starters, if you are looking for cloud testing, it simply means a testing environment that utilizes cloud infrastructure for performing software testing.

How to leverage Cloud to Transform Software Testing?

If you are someone who heavily use tools while testing then IBM (IBM Cloud) and Hewlett-Packard have already jumped into the market for software testing in the cloud. Thankfully, if done smartly, cloud based computing can prove to be a great value-addition for both software development and testing. The reason is simple -- the very nature of a cloud based infrastructure allows for great team collaboration.

As an added advantage, cloud based testing (as well as programming) environments are easy to setup (on-demand). In today's tight budgeted IT world, this can be a much bigger advantage than it appears at first. It is no secret that IT managers are operating under a very tight budgetary constraint and when it comes to testing phase, the budget is even smaller.

Traditional approaches to setting up a test environment involves high cost to setup multiple servers with various OS, hardware configuration, browser versions etc. And if you are going to simulate user activity from different geographic locations you will have to setup test servers with localized regional language OS, which in turn can add up to the cost. But using cloud based infrastructure, the team wouldn't have to setup expensive physical servers -- rather, setting up new testing environment will be fast and efficient and VMs (virtual machines) and test servers can be launched and decommissioned as needed.

On the other hand, as a tester you might also be required to one of those ever emerging cloud based SaaS applications that aim to cater to various large and small customer base, on-demand. If you are testing such a cloud based application then your challenges are double-fold. Because, testing all the layers - from your application to the cloud service provider - is something that as a tester you will have to become efficient in.

As a closing note, if you are a tester and if you are intrigued by all these buzz surrounding cloud testing, then here are 2 main reasons why you might consider trying it out -- Cloud based software testing infrastructure greatly helps in reducing capital expenditure and these testing setups are highly scalable , thus allowing your team to expand or decommission your test servers on-demand, as needed.

Tags: Software testing, IBM, Cloud Computing, Hewlett-Packard

Big Data To Drive $232 Billion In IT Spending Through 2016

2012-10-18T02:52:00.001-07:00

Big data will drive $232 billion in spending through 2016. It will directly or indirectly drive $96 billion of worldwide IT spending in 2012, and is forecast to drive $120 billion of IT spending in 2013.

Gartner Research published the results today. They draw several conclusions from their research:

Big data is not a distinct market. More so, data is everywhere, impacting business in any imaginable way. Its influx will force a change in products, practices and solutions. The change is so rapid that companies may have to retire early existing solutions that are not up to par.
In 2012, “IT spending driven by big data functional demands will total $28 billion.”Most of that will go toward adapting existing solutions to new demands driven by machine data, social data and the unpredictable velocity that comes with it.
Making big data something that has a functional use will drive $4.3 billion in software sales in 2012. The balance will go toward IT services such as outside experts and internal staff.
New spending will go toward social media, social network analysis and content analytics with up to 45% of new spending each year.
It will cost a significant amount in services to support big data efforts — as much as 20 times higher relative to software purchases. Peopel with the right skill sets are rare and in high demand.

That’s part of the story but the dynamics of memory, storage, and CPU capability provide context for what is happening in the market:

Memory doubled.
High speed and high-capacity networking technology pricing has decreased considerably.
Storage technology is moving from spinning disk to solid state disk and flash.
Enhanced CPU performance.

Storage management tops the list of sub-markets influenced by big data spending:

Big data technologies abound but customers need to consider how technologies will adapt over time. The Gartner report outlines how spending will initially grow due to the high need for services. People just don’t know how to get the value out of the data. Over time, the capabilities of the technology will decrease the need for services as practices standardize.

'Serverless': A New Concept - Thanks to Cloud Computing

2012-10-17T10:47:00.000-07:00

Cloud computing has simply removed a significant chunk of work around managing and provisioning services. The momentous rise of this technology has simply implied a shift in the future strategy of software and apps which are primarily occupied by servers.

The current scenario suggests that things are starting to change as more and more apps are moving into a serverless world. This seismic shift definitely will bring large implications for the creation and distribution of software applications.

The ‘Pre-Cloud’ Era:

Back then, developers where keen enough to think a lot about servers. They planned budgets, powered and housed them, and some even leased servers. Developers also had to consider cabling and cooling systems within their data centers.

But as years passed, things caught up into a drastic makeover. Developers finally realized the hardships in dealing and maintaining servers. As the allocation facilities began taking out many parts of the resources, detailed planning and preservation seemed pretty waste.

Enter the cloud:

In the last two years, the tech world has subjected to a huge shift in terms of computing. Trends like cloud and BYOD have taken their own stand. Questions such as "Why cloud?" or even "How cloud?" are no longer to be heard. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has delivered dramatic improvement on cost, agility, scalability and reliability.

With almost limitless amount of virtual machines available, developers are so pumped up that they can chose any operating system they wish to, load in their applications and even start profiting from them. Even launching hundreds of servers and coordinating is still far better when compared to what it was just six years ago.

Application in the “Cloud”:

The standalone applications built on Ruby, Rails, Python or any other Web app frameworks are giving way to a distributed system spread across a number of applications, processes and data stores. The concept on building a web app has changed. At present, it’s all about building apps that consist of loosely coupled components scattered across the cloud.

This trend has clearly outlined the fact that applications aren’t anymore server-based. At present, processing is increasingly taking place outside of an app framework. Assisting these processes are client apps and back-end data storages. In short, developers are on the verge of becoming serverless.

Thinking Serverless:

“Serverless” doesn’t mean servers are no longer involved. It means that developers no longer have to think much about them. A change in strategy is what we see, as service providers are increasingly taking the responsibility of managing servers, data stores and other infrastructural resources. This gives an increased advantage for developers as they no longer have to deal with additional physical commodities or limits.

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Soon You'll be able to store 10 TB of data on Finger-Nail sized Device

2012-10-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

A new discovery may open the way for the development of next generation data storage devices with capacities of up to 10 terabits (10 trillion bits) per square inch - vastly enhancing storage on much smaller data devices.

Imagine storing thousands of songs and high-resolution images on data devices no bigger than a fingernail.

An ultra-smooth surface may be the answer, according to a discovery by the researchers from Agency for Science, Technology and Research's (ASTAR) Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) and the National University of Singapore (NUS), reports the journal Nature reports.

The self-assembly technique is one of the simplest and cheapest high-volume methods for creating uniform, densely-packed nanostructures that could potentially help store data, according to an ASTAR statement.

However, attempts to employ self-assembly on different surface types, such as magnetic media used for data storage, have shown varying and erratic results to date. This phenomenon has continued to puzzle industry researchers and scientists globally.

Researchers from ASTAR have now solved this mystery and identified that the smoother the surface, the more efficient the self-assembly of nanostructures will be.

This breakthrough allows the method to be used on more surfaces and reduces the number of defects in an industrial setting. The more densely packed the structures are in a given area, the higher the amount of data that can be stored.

"A height close to 10 atoms, or 10 angstroms in technical terms, is all it takes to make or break self-assembly," said MSM Saifullah, one of the key researchers from ASTAR's IMRE who made the discovery. This is based on a root mean squared surface roughness of five angstrom.

A beautiful poem on Testing.

2012-10-14T06:21:00.001-07:00

Imagine there’s no testing
It’s easy if you try
No bugs below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the developers living for today

Imagine there’s no test cases
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to pass or fail
And no test reports too
Imagine all the developers living life in peace

You, you may say
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll bug us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no certification
I wonder if you can
No need for politics or money
A brotherhood of testers
Imagine all the testers sharing all as one

You, you may say
I’m a tester, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the testers will live as one

Gillmor Gang: Rocks In A Can

2012-10-13T10:19:00.001-07:00

The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — bemoan the political dregs of the finally-engaged election before working our way back into the tech waters we’d abandoned. It doesn’t seem like we’ve yet connected the social realtime moment with the issues of the day, preferring instead to count the tweets and let the media avoid the substance.

But just when all hope seems crushed in a sea of SuperPAC money and Jobs nostalgia, we finally remember what one of us said about imagining the future. In turn, we make the effort to ask the interesting questions, merge the technology and the business moment, and otherwise till the ground for the next wave of innovation. Bring on the Mini.

@stevegillmor, @borthwick, @dannysullivan, @kteare, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

via http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/16mzHymJHv8/

Entrepreneur: Bing vs. Google: Which Search Engine is Best?

2012-10-13T07:28:00.001-07:00

Microsoft's search engine claims users prefer it to Google. Here, we identify their strengths and weaknesses.

via http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/224639

Amazon Acknowledges Uneven Lighting On The Kindle Paperwhite

2012-10-13T06:57:00.001-07:00

The Kindle Paperwhite is an amazing ereader. It’s arguably the best on the market. But it’s not flawless. Some users, including several TechCrunch writers, noticed the lighting on their Paperwhite is not evenly spaced, resulting in odd, slightly distracting gaps at the bottom of the screen (see the pic).

Well, in a recent statement, Amazon stepped up to the plate and addressed this lighting issue as well as reaffirming the Paperwhite model has less storage than its predecessor and lacks text-to-speech. Even with these, let’s say design decisions, the Kindle Paperwhite is a fantastic ereader. As John states out in our official review, it’s a reader’s dream.

Full statement,

We want you to know…

Kindle Paperwhite is the best Kindle we’ve ever made by far, but there are certain limitations and changes from prior generations that we want you to know about.

Kindle Paperwhite does not have audio or Text-to-Speech. This makes the device smaller and lighter than it would otherwise be. Audio and an improved Text-to-Speech engine are supported on Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD.

Under certain lighting conditions, the illumination at the bottom of the screen from the built-in light is not perfectly even. See examples of how the screen looks in different lighting conditions. These variations are normal and are located primarily in the margin where text is not present. The illumination is more even than that created by a book light or lighted cover. The contrast, resolution and illumination of the Paperwhite display is a significant step-up from our prior generation.

The Kindle Paperwhite has 2 GB of storage. Some previous Kindle models had 4GB of storage. 2GB allows you to hold up to 1,100 books locally on your device. In addition, your entire Kindle library is stored for free in the Amazon cloud, and you can easily move books from the cloud onto your device.

Thank you, and we hope you enjoy Kindle Paperwhite.

- The Kindle Team

via http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/aX6mIRMK7Dc/

Forbes: UPDATE: SEC Inspector Javert Earns $1.8 Million Interest On $78,000 Judgment

2012-10-13T06:43:00.003-07:00

Starting from the Disco year of 1976 and running through 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that James L. Douglas a/k/a James L. Cooper had offered and sold over $7.5 million of purported oil and gas program interests in at least 45 limited and general partnerships to over 300 investors. Allegedly, Douglas

via http://www.forbes.com/sites/billsinger/2012/10/13/update-sec-inspector-javert-earns-1-8-million-interest-on-78000-judgment/

Entrepreneur: 3 Hidden Security Risks for WordPress Users

2012-10-13T06:43:00.001-07:00

The popular website development platform may be free, but it also is more vulnerable to hackers and other issues.

via http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224613

An Interview With Josh Bechtel, The Inventor Of The Bicymple

2012-10-13T05:34:00.001-07:00

There’s been quite a bit of disruption in bikes recently and the Bicymple is no exception. Designed by Josh Bechtel, the bike aims to be easy to ride, trouble free, and less expensive than traditional gear and chain models. You can check out a video here but we got a chance to talk with Josh a bit about his new design.

TC: What’s the impetus for this?

Josh: Ultimately, my passion for bicycles is the driving force behind the Bicymple. I’ve been riding bikes regularly since I was a child. I have more bikes than I care to admit to strangers on the web and people I’ve only just met. It’s a problem. I love cross country bikes, downhill bikes, road bikes, single speeds, fixies, cruisers, city bikes, clean bikes, rusty bikes, light bikes, heavy bikes…shall I go on? I think unicycles are great, too!

I built my first home-built bike back in the late 90′s. It was a traditional full suspension bike and I even successfully raced it. At the time, you could get away with that sort of thing, but as bike technology and building methods and materials advanced, it became tougher and tougher to compete in that way–especially for an average guy with a full time job and bills to pay. When the movement toward minimalist bikes came back around, it revitalized the bike builder in me and got me thinking about ways I could leave a mark, no matter how small it might be, in the world I am so passionate about. I started riding a single speed with a coaster brake that I had built up mostly out of used parts and it just made me so happy it got me thinking about how far one might be able to go in that direction. I started with a sketch of a standard bike and began crossing off parts one by one and addressing the problems created with each deletion until I ended up with a direct drive, freewheeling bike. From there, I felt like it might actually have become too simple. I felt it needed something else–a surprise in its back pocket–and the rear-steer was just the solution. I fully realize the contradiction this presents with the concept of simplicity and like the tension that creates.

TC: Is this the first bike of this particular type? I seem to remember seeing something like this before, but why this style and why now?

Josh: Yes and no. There have been swing bikes before, for certain, but they were all chain driven. There have been direct drive bikes before, too, but none (as far as I’m aware) had any lockout mechanism for the rear steering and they were all non-freewheeling and had smaller wheels, which severely limited their real-world practicality and left them in a purely “trick-bike” niche. I imagine most are familiar with the old penny farthing, too, and there are obvious connections there, too.

The bicymple might, however, bring these previous concepts together in a way that hasn’t been seen before. There seems to be a misconception out there on the web that I think that the established bicycle design is somehow lacking or insufficient, but that’s simply not the case. To me, that would be like thinking that anyone who ever picked up a paintbrush thought that Michelangelo just couldn’t hack it. I think that idea is a bit silly, really. The bicymple provides yet another outlet, another opportunity to accomplish the same goals as many other bikes, it just does it in a different way! Part of what makes life so great, in my mind, is diversity–and the bicycle world is a great example of this!

TC: What did you have to change to get it work properly? Is it really like a unicycle with another wheel? Something else?

Josh: At first glance, especially when you see someone riding it, it’s easy to see the similarities with a unicycle. Right away “the two-wheeled unicycle” became a nickname for it and the obvious oxymoron created by that name is pretty entertaining to me. It’s actually how I tend to explain it to those who haven’t seen it. The things that set it apart and make it special are obviously the rear steering, but also the fact that the rear steering can be locked out, allowing it to be ridden just like a regular bike. Many comments out there on the web overlook this key fact. It’s one of the subtle surprises that the bicymple has up its sleeve. The overdrive hub is another surprise. It is currently in development and has caught the attention of many in both the bicycle and unicycle communities. The classic thinking is that the only way to go faster with a direct coaxial drive is to increase the size of the wheel, which was the famous fatal flaw of the penny farthing. A few clever designs out there for unicycles have gotten around this but at quite a price. We’ll be able to accomplish the same goal at a price that should be quite affordable. It’s a compact, sealed, zero-service unit so you’ll never have to think about it–and it certainly won’t get your pants leg greasy!

TC: How much does it cost to build? How much was your prototype?

Josh: We’re not addressing dollar amounts until we’re able to offer an accurate

retail price.

TC: Bummer. When will you be ready to build some? Will you sell it via Kickstarter?

Josh: Our plan from the start has been to get an initial run built and provide them as test bikes to select bike shops. The incredible support and enthusiasm and sheer number of purchase requests from around the globe has made us consider a different approach. There is a very good chance we will be on Kickstarter in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for that. Crowdfunding is such a fantastic way for people to get their hands on products they never would have been able to before, so we’d be silly to not pursue that.

TC: What would you say to people who say it looks pretty goofy? Does it look as weird as those recumbent bikes?

Josh: I think it’s great if people think it looks goofy! I think it looks goofy too! It’s just not something many of us are accustomed to seeing. Ultimately, though, many, many people have expressed a great deal of interest and think it is a beautiful sort of goofy. From the first sketches, that’s how I felt about it. Wait, recumbent bikes look goofy?

TC: Have you ridden around on this in Bellingham? What do people think?

Josh: Oh yes, the bicymple has been out and about plenty. The reception has all been incredibly positive. I get yells from people across the street, from over fences and through windows, all curious and wanting to understand what it is they’re looking at. It is certainly eye-catching and incredibly unique. Those who are adventurous love the fact that the rear can be set loose to swing freely and really like the challenge it presents. Those less adventurous appreciate the ability to lock the steering out and pedal normally. I look forward to the bicymple getting in the hands of some really skilled trials riders to see the sorts of things they’re capable of doing with it–unicyclists, too! Thanks again, and let me know if you have any other questions!

via http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Wxa5Hiekx7w/

Content Marketing: How You Can Help Your Website

2012-10-13T04:24:00.009-07:00

http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Top-Draw-Blog-Outpost-Home-Base.016.016-590x442.jpg

The two biggest questions in business are the two biggest questions in website marketing:

How can I get more prospects (coming to my website)?

How can I get those (who come to my website) to buy, buy more and buy more often?

The answers to these questions are simple, but the possibilities to make these thing happen can seem daunting. Most people know that Search Engine Optimization can make huge strides in improving your:

Search Engine Ranking

Turning visitors into buyers (conversions)

Website Structure (reducing friction, attrition and annoyance)

Links and Link Building (credibility, authority)

These areas are well covered in any SEO plan. But there are things that you can do that can have an impact on many of the areas above. Content Marketing: What it really is. Content Marketing is the process of creating really useful material that caters to your buyers so they can

Make educated decisions about what you offer

Make the decision to buy your stuff more quickly

Buy more often and share your wares to those who may want to buy

This isn’t always easy for people, since it requires a complete rethinking of marketing. No longer can you simply blast and broadcast the merits of your product or service. You have to focus specifically on your prospects and give them exactly what they need to understand how theycan solve their problems. Sometimes that involves talking about your work, but more often, it doesn’t. This can be hard for sales-oriented minds to wrap their heads around. But it makes a huge difference in how you are viewed by your prospects and how much your name gets around. To get it right, content marketers look at sales, but they also look at

How to know what people want to read and how to adjust content so it caters to those desires

How to engage visitors to browse and share content

How to build a community of readers, followers, and social media ”friends”

How to build the brand outward, while staying true to brand values

How to educate their buyers

How to know who is going where by tracking their movements (or implementing a tracking mechanism first)

It seems like a very tall order, and at first glance it is! But like all things, it can start small and grow over time. Content Marketing Methods There are scores of platforms for generating and communicating content for prospects, and some of these methods are better than others for igniting relationships or deepening.

Email Newsletters

Landing Page Content

Business Blogs

Trade Publications

Video/Video blogging

Social Media

Tradeshow Datasheets

So how can content marketers expect to get it right?

The Outpost/Home Base Model One of the easiest ways to simplify your content marketing is to consider your website as the central point of engagement and conversion. Testimonials, client success stories and your company’s brand value all can be baked into your blog. Datasheets and specific documents can have their own resource pages for easy downloads and printing, and ongoing updates can be teasers in social media with articles on the blog. Updating your site with relevant, fresh content will keep people coming regularly, people who are ready to learn more or make a decision on what to buy. (It also pleases search engines hungry for authoritative sites and content to rank in your prospects’ searches.) Imagine that all of your really short content is being used to “tease” people somewhere. Social media, video blogs and even email newsletters bring prospects to your site to determine your offering. These platforms are like outposts — they are places for people out in the wilderness to gather and share it among their business friends, associates and social connections.

Bring It On Home Your website is your home base. it’s the central operation. Everyone should be able to get everything they expect to move forward with you, and all information they require to do so is there — easy to find and easy to share with their decision maker. Have your outposts lead to your home base. Bring people inward and provide them with what they need when they get there. Ask them what they want using short surveys, polls or general posts (on blogs and social media) with open-ended questions. People will “organically” read your “outpost content” and wander to your website. It’s a natural process, and all of us out there have gotten used to clicking links that take us to websites in that way. When the time is right, we buy. All of us. Using SEO methods is key to improving many aspects of your sales and marketing strategy. But don’t neglect the power of content marketing and giving your prospects the tools to make decisions based in the information you give them. You’ll be popular among your buyers, but more importantly, you’ll be relevant to future prospects. Good luck!

via Idris Fashan

15 Tips for Getting the Most From LinkedIn Groups

2012-10-13T04:24:00.007-07:00

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I spend a lot of time in LinkedIn groups and have learned a bit about maximizing their potential as conversation-starters. Here are 15 of my favorite tips. Please add your own as comments.

1. Ask Questions

The best way to provoke discussion on LinkedIn is to ask questions. Rather than sharing a link to an article, use it to kick off a discussion. For example, instead of posting a headline and a link to an article about cloud security, formulate it into a question:

“This article on Cloud Computing Path makes the case that the recent Dropbox security breach proves that the cloud is not yet secure enough for the enterprise. Do you agree?”

http://www.cloudcomputingpath.com/dropbox-security-breach-prove-that-cloud-is-not-secure/

2. Make it Personal

LinkedIn is the only major social network that doesn’t permit brands to interact as members. Only people can post content. With that in mind, make sure your posts have a personal tone. For example, instead of saying, “This webinar on the benefits of platform as a service has particular relevance to business partners,” try “This webinar on the benefits of platform as a service looks interesting. I hope you’ll join me there.”

3. Follow Up

This is very, very, very important. Don’t post a question and just walk away. When people do you the courtesy of responding, return the favor by responding to them or simply “Liking” their post. Remember that you started the conversation. That means you own it.

4. Fill Out Your Profile

When you contribute something interesting to the group, people will want to find out more about you. It’s disappointing when their click takes them to a skeletal profile page with no photo. It’s a lost opportunity for you, too, because you’re missing the chance to create a professional contact.

5. Use Active Voice

Why “facilitate the implementation of” when you can just “do?” Corporate speak doesn’t work in social channels because you communicate there as a person, not as an institution. Cleanse your prose of passive voice, buzzwords and superlatives. Write like you talk.

6. Keep Headlines Short and Avoid the Ellipses Of Death

LinkedIn gives you 120 characters for a headline, which is pretty generous. Headlines over 120 characters are truncated with an ellipsis (…). You want to avoid this because you’re forcing readers to click through to read the rest of the headline. The more clicks you require the more visitors you lose. The “Add more details” field gives you plenty of space to spread out.

7. There Are Three Parts Of Any LinkedIn Post. Use Them All

They are:

Headline – Keep it brief and use it to communicate basic information or arouse interest.

Add more details - Provide background and explanatory information. Tell people why you think this information is important.

Attach a link – Use this area to post links. Never include links in the headline. If you need to have more than one link in your post, use a URL shortening service (see below) and include it in the “Add more details” section.

For example, instead of writing a headline like “Can anyone recommend a useful eBook on cloud computing? I’m looking for something oriented toward professional developers that has recommendations for the major PaaS and/or IaaS solutions.” post the question as a headline and the second sentence in the “Add more details” section.

8. Think of the Benefit to Your Audience

Success in social channels is all about helping other people. Keep that in mind when composing a post. It’s not about you, it’s about them. For example:

Instead of “A Primer on PaaS,” try “This Paas Primer could be a great conversation-starter for your prospects.”

Instead of “Spot Market Pricing, New Services Fuel Amazon GovCloud Growth,” try “What You Need to Know about Amazon’s Government Strategy”

Use words like “you” and “I” a lot. This is a discussion, not a billboard.

9. Minimize Copy and Paste

Respect your readers’ time by minimizing pointless verbiage. Don’t just copy and paste the promotion from a webcast. Boil down the basic facts and tell the reader why you recommend it. The more you make your post a personal message from you, rather than a rehash of somebody else’s message, the more compelling it is.

10. Don’t Copy From Twitter

When I see hash tags in a headline, it tells me one thing: This person was too lazy to customize the message for me. The language we use on Twitter doesn’t fit well in the more generous confines of a LinkedIn or Facebook post. Rewrite the message for the network you’re using and the people you’re hoping to reach. Think of the context, too. Facebook is more playful than LinkedIn. The Sales Best Practices group on LinkedIn has a different membership than the Construction Professionals group.

11. Avoid Repetition

LinkedIn does you a favor by copying the first few words of any article that you post as a link. Don’t copy and paste those same words into your description field. You have 15 minutes to edit anything you post in a group, so check your work to make sure your description isn’t a carbon copy of the item to which you link.

12. Take Advantage of Polls

Polls are a basic tool you can use to solicit feedback. You can specify up to five answer choices and choose how long the poll runs. Try mixing it up; instead of posting a question, occasionally formulate the topic as a survey.

13. Use Trackable Links

It’s easy to measure the response to content you post. URL shortening services like Bit.ly and JotURL make it easy to shorten links and then track the number of clicks they generate. LinkedIn processes these short links just like regular URLs. You can also use Google URL Builder. It generates longer links, but they’re compatible with Google Analytics. You can also shorten those links with Bit.ly prior to posting them.

14. Be Provocative

I don’t recommend overusing this technique, but it’s fun to try from time to time. Instead of a descriptive headline, try one that piques curiosity. Here are a couple from the Sales Best Practices group:

Eat that Frog!

If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first. ~ Mark Twain

How do you start your day? Do you ‘eat that frog?’ Do you have a ritual that starts your morning?

Who’s ruining it for the rest of us?

The member goes on to ask why sales people continue to use spamming tactics that don’t work and give the whole profession a bad name.

15. Connect with Other Members

When you request a connection with another LinkedIn member, the service asks you to verify that you have an existing relationship. If you don’t, it denies the connection request. You can get around this by joining a group to which the other person already belongs and requesting the connection as a fellow member. Be aware that if your request is denied, LinkedIn won’t let you try this trick a second time.

via Paul Gillin

Twitter Tips: 6 Brand Building Uses For The RT

2012-10-13T04:24:00.005-07:00

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What’s the one thing more than 500 million Twitter accounts have in common? Love of the RT, of course! The retweet is more than a basic mechanism for engaging in conversation on Twitter – being retweeted is one of the thrills of participating in the micro-blogging platform.

Many Twitter users are able to leverage it as currency. In fact, we’ve noticed many retailers using retweets in their brand-building efforts. A cursory look at apparel brands on our Retail Social Juice Index over the last day or so reveals a number of opportunities retailers are seizing via the retweet, including influencer marketing.

1. Complement influencer marketing efforts

Lucky enough to have influencers tweeting about your brand? Retweet them. Not only does it flatter influencers when you take notice, but also it gives you extra mileage from the buzz they’re creating around the brand and its products. In these examples, @Anthropologie and @EileenFisher retweet fashion bloggers, and @GUESS retweets an associate editor from Allure Magazine.

2. Share lifestyle stories

Consumers are out there every day living with your products. What does your brand make possible in their lives? Use the retweet to curate story-rich, lifestyle content from your customers. Here are examples from @OrvisFlyFishing and @NewBalance:

3. Have fun

Remember that lots of people on social networks are there for leisure. Be playful. Be interesting. Curate content that’s just plain entertaining, like these retweets by @Saks and @JuicyCouture (this one also involves an influencer).

4. Talk with customers

Problem-solving is only one aspect of customer service. Much like the brands here – @VSPINK, @NeimanMarcus and @shopbop – your brand can interact with customers to encourage purchases and answer questions.

5. Publicize brand efforts

Instead of the brand delivering news of every effort directly, it can use the retweet to interact with brand news that already exists. @Stuart_Weitzman promotes a branded asset (a sort of thanks for the venue), @Aeropostale shares a photo of Olympic gymnast @McKaylaMaroney wearing anti-bullying bracelets and @Nordstrom accepts accolades from an advocacy group.

6. Showcase praise of employees

Influencers aren’t limited to bloggers and customers; all brands want good employees to be their ambassadors. Sharing positive feedback about stores and team members, like these retweets from @DSWShoeLovers and @JosABank_Brand, lets employees know they’re appreciated and tells consumers good things are happening offline.

So, six brand-building activities as easy as a RT? Absolutely! Then everyone must be doing it, right? Not really. While some brands reweet all day long (take a look at the streams for @CharlotteRusse and @Jockey), others don’t seem to take advantage.

We haven’t seen one RT all week from @ExpressLife, @AmericanApparel, @jcpenney and many others. Don’t follow their example: missed retweets are missed opportunities for brand-building. All that’s required is a solid brand voice and some good monitoring: Look for keywords, mentions and hashtags. Sample follower tweets. Curate tweets via tools like Twitter lists, which can organize your influencers and other resources.

via Carolee Sherwood

10 Original Ideas To Use Twitter To Promote Business

2012-10-13T04:24:00.003-07:00

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Today companies are not only using the traditional ways of marketing and promoting their products or services. But they are also spending immensely in new age advertising methods like, online promotions, website launch, promoting through social networking sites, broadcasting Medias and etc. Recently social media sites Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or etc. are used by all companies to promote their product or services. Twitter can be now used to promote business.

Various Ways Of Using Twitter To Promote Your Business

Business is not only about selling products and earning revenue from the sale. It is lot more than that. It is also about branding and sustaining in the market. Hence to know all about Twitter and how it can help in your business, just read below;

Grow Your Network: Use twitter to get new and potential customers for your product. Post tweets and attract readers so that they are interested about the business.

Build Brand: You can use the social platform to build individual brand. In this way your prospective clients will perceive you as a friendly personality who can be approached and discussed about the product or services frankly.

Share Advices Of Experts: You can arrange free workshops or seminars or discussion forums and encourage customers to retweet on the discussion. Share videos so that you develop one on one relation. Relationship building helps in branding as well.’

Offer Tips And Solutions: If you are in services and not into product sale. Do offer tips of solving problems. For example, if you are an insurance agent, write about why should someone plan his or finances or save money for emergency. Share useful ideas to grow strong relationship with your follower. They are then interested about the services and often invest in it as well

Employee Relation:Within the company you may write short tweets on the company’s page and communicate smoothly with your staff. No need to send bulk messages or mails. You can even save on telephonic expense by using twitter for your business.

Communicate About Special Deals And Campaigns: You can easily save money from advertisements and promote about your product services via tweets. Your flowers will soon know about the upcoming discounts and campaigns.

Customer Feedback: In a business you must understand what your customers feel after using your product or services. Thus twitter helps in such an effort. You can easily get your customer’s feedback and discuss with them if needed.

An Open Platform:It helps in communicating freely with the customers. Thus not only product feedback but while launching new product it helps a lot. You can introduce new product as per customers demand.

Building Brand Loyalty: In a business brand loyalty is very essential. It is through this social platform you can create brand image and if you successfully retain your followers they will become loyal to the brand.

Interact With Competitors: You can communicate with your customers and discuss in the forums. In this way you can grow in the market.

These are the various ways in which the twitter platform can help you in your business.

via Sirangi Kalpana

Inbound Marketing: Social Media Ideas for Small Businesses

2012-10-13T04:24:00.001-07:00

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Social media plays a huge role in the success (or failure) of most small businesses. Having great social media pages can be an unbelievably effective marketing tool. Social media is considered an example of inbound marketing – where the customer seeks out the business. Many people have seen the major effects that social media can have on their personal relationships. Who hasn’t had family members or friends go at it on Facebook? Unfortunately, the same can be true for businesses. Comments from consumers, both positive and negative, can garner lots of attention, and quickly. Customers actually seek out the social media pages of companies to post their thoughts, positive, negative, and everything in between.

Here are some ideas on social media do’s and don’ts when it comes to small businesses:

Do – post interactive content. Asking questions of your customer base and encouraging them to interact with you and their fellow customers is great. Even creating polls or quick games will keep people coming back to your social media posts over and over.

Do – make your pages visually interesting. This can be accomplished easily on most large social networks. Facebook now has timeline, which offers the ability to put up a large photo at the very top of your page. Twitter allows users to change their background. Some social media sites, such as Instagram or flickr, are based solely on photos.

Do – update often. The more people click on your page, the more people will be able to see your posts. We are not suggesting to bombard your customers with updates, but changing your status or tweeting meaningfully once or twice per day can be a great way to get people to see your posts. Also consider posting around the same time each day, that way customers will know when to look for your updates.

Do – post relevant information. Your customers probably don’t care what you and your dog ate for breakfast. Keep your posts short, sweet, and meaningful.

Don’t – automatically delete negative comments. Most people’s knee jerk reaction is to delete any negative comments on social media posts. But this is not always the most effective. Your company may gain a reputation for sweeping problems under the rug. Instead, ask the customer why they feel they were wronged and what the company can do to fix it. You may be surprised at how simple the solution is. And as a bonus, other users of your page will see that you did your best to remedy the problem.

Don’t – overload your page with information. Having a lot of great, basic information on your social media pages can be very helpful, especially as Facebook or Twitter pages can be your first hit on a search. But be mindful not to put so much information on your page that your customer becomes overwhelmed. If anything, you can always use a social media site to drive more traffic towards your full website.

Following some or all of these tips can help you and your small business to use your social media presence to its fullest. If customers seek you out, you want to make them glad that they did. Useful and pleasant social media can be a large part of this strategy.

via Megan Totka

How to Leverage Big Brands for Your Small Business

2012-10-12T14:37:00.001-07:00

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No man is an island, and no small business is either. As small business owners, we know that success requires reaching out to others. You can’t do it all on your own. At least… you can’t do it all on your own and be anywhere near sane by the end of the quarter.

When I say “reaching out to others,” I don’t just mean networking. What I’m really referring to is leveraging the big brands and power players in your industry through your company blog. By leveraging these brands, you’ll be able to boost your own reputation and solidify those leads you’re already working on.

A few pointers:

When You Talk the Talk, You Will Walk the Walk

When your blog audience sees you cover well-known, credible businesses, they automatically begin to view you in the same light. Check out how the Matchstic blog weighs in with opinions on what’s happening in the world of big business branding.

They’re a mid-size branding agency, but they regularly associate themselves with big brands through their blogs. Case in point: this recent post on Arby’s.

Talk the big brand talk, and your readers will naturally assume you walk the big brand walk.

Turn An Enormous Marketing Concept into a Bite Sized Point

Big brands make great examples in your blog posts. Because these brands are already well known, you don’t have to waste your words trying to convince readers that your point is legitimate.

In the previous example, Matchstic doesn’t have to waste time talking about the Arby’s company by explaining what they do and where they came from. Everyone already knows Arby’s is a legitimate business.

It’s easy for the blogger to jump right in to the meat of the story (no pun intended), and create a bite-sized takeaway. Okay, that pun was intentional.

Get Ready for the Re-Tweets

Big brands will help your small business blog get more social media attention. Which blog post is likely to get more shares?

“4 Lessons I Learned About Selling Clothes Online”

“4 Lessons From Target About Selling Clothes Online”

The second title, of course. I don’t know who you are; I know who Target is. That’s the blog post I’m going to read, and it’s the post I’m going to share.

However, spammers and spam robots think the same way. So, when you do share an article that drops big brand names, prepare for the fake Twitter followers and spammy comments. It’s not a big deal, but you should be aware.

Of course, you might even make contact with the company you mention. If you wrote a blog post about Target, you would definitely want to include an @Target when you tweet the article.

Don’t Be General. Get Specific.

This is always a good rule of thumb for blogging. However, it’s especially important when you’re talking about big businesses. Because you’re writing about a company that has tons of available information and examples, you have no excuse for not using it.

If you need the nitty-gritty financial info for your blog post/case study, head over to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission where EDGAR will become your friend. The more details you have, the stronger your content will be.

Don’t Take Competition Too Seriously

I know, I know, it’s business. But, really… don’t go out of your way to avoid mentioning a big brand or competitor if they have some content that can help you boost your own company’s reputation.

So, you sell jewelry and Tiffany’s sells jewelry? Everyone in the world knows about Tiffany’s. Not many people know about you. By linking to a Tiffany’s product page or some valuable piece of content the company’s written, you aren’t hurting yourself. If anything, you’re demonstrating to your readers that you care about providing valuable information more than anything else.

If You Can’t Say Something Nice…

Don’t say anything at all. There’s nothing wrong with blogging about what not to do. However, try to avoid picking out a specific company as your example. You never know what big brand competitor might be interested in buying your company in a couple of years.

Even if you have no plans of selling, picking on another company:

(a) Looks bad.

(b) Could come back to bite you.

There’s no telling what kind of distribution your post could end up getting.

How do you leverage big brands in your small business blog?

Internet Chatter Photo via Shutterstock

The post How to Leverage Big Brands for Your Small Business appeared first on Small Business Trends.

via Amie Marse

What My Father Taught Me about Being an Entrepreneur – Forbes

2012-10-12T14:27:00.001-07:00

My younger brother, Brent, and I are fifteen months apart. We grew up with a father obsessed with business and real estate. Any time we passed a lot for sale my dad would take his eyes off the road and wonder aloud if the parcel was a good buy. My mom had to remind him every time he had my brother or me in the car to pay attention and not let his eyes wander. He was constantly looking for the next “big deal” in Denver’s real estate market.

Other kids would play catch with their dad but not us. The only competitive sport in our house was Monopoly. My dad, brother and I would spend long weekends in marathon games at the kitchen table. Dad would coach each of us on how to best build an empire. He’d then go off to work on Monday morning and build his.

My dad was an entrepreneur. He started in the early 1960s as a salesman of western wear shirts and jeans. By the late 1960s he owned and ran a series of clothing manufacturers. I spent summers working in the factory and weekends selling “seconds” at the flea market. When I was old enough to drive, I’d come down to the factory after school for a few hours most days. By the time I was 18 years old I’d had a master class in entrepreneurial management.

The business lessons I learned from my dad still resonate with me today. Here are a few I’ve found most helpful in my own career as an entrepreneur:

1. Take responsibility. For my dad, it meant much more than taking responsibility for your own actions, it meant protecting those who work for you as well. He would never tell a customer that an employee mistake was the cause of some mix-up. He would call the customer and take responsibility for the error and the solution.

2. Walk around the floor. My father walked around his plant a couple times every day to check in with his employees. Not just the managers, but everyone he saw. He was interested in their lives, their families and their careers. The result was unheard of loyalty. He had employees who worked for him across multiple companies for over 30 years.

3. Use technology where you can to get an edge. My first exposure to a computer was an IBM System/360 installed at my father’s office for inventory and accounting. I was probably no more than 5 years old when I played my first game of tic-tac-toe against IBM. That moment started my lifelong interest in technology.

4. Have enough self-confidence to fail. My dad’s business was not always prosperous. There were incredible successes but there was also complete failure. After any setback, he remained positive, focused and committed to learning from the failure so that the next endeavor would succeed. Importantly, true to lesson number one, he never blamed others when failure occurred.

My brother and I are now both in our mid-forties and on our second joint startup (if you don’t count the snow shoveling business we had as kids). Almost two years ago we launched Inspirato, a private, luxury destination club, after leaving our first company, Exclusive Resorts, which we started together eight years earlier. We had the same teacher and the same lessons. But we apply those lessons in different ways—each of us complementing the other. The result is, I hope, something our dad would be proud of.

I don’t believe my dad ever set out to teach my brother and me anything about business. We learned by observation. My dad was so passionate about what he was doing it just rubbed off on the two of us through osmosis.

Norton Handler died three and a half years ago. His sudden passing left a big hole in our family. Everyday I miss talking with my dad. As we run our company, I hear him in the decisions we make and the culture we build.

via What My Father Taught Me about Being an Entrepreneur – Forbes.

via http://srkgupta.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/what-my-father-taught-me-about-being-an-entrepreneur-forbes/

Reverse Customer Service Strategy

2012-10-12T14:16:00.003-07:00

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I recently had a fascinating experience with my cellphone service provider that was a great example of reverse customer service. And it went a little something like this. . .

My children and I started experiencing call and text interruptions over a couple of days. These breaks in service were happening in my house. We’ve had this service for many years and have never had a problem like this.

Over a two day period I texted, visited and called the provider about this situation. Apparently they were working on a tower in my area and this was causing the problem. I mentioned to several people what I thought was a common sense customer service tactic that would have helped:

“Since you have all of our cell numbers, why not text us when you are going to be working on a tower? Then we’d know what was going on in the event we had reception issues.”

No one I spoke with thought it was a good idea. Frankly, I don’t think they understood what I was trying to tell them.

Guess what happened a day later?

I received a text message telling me I’d be receiving a text survey about the customer service I received.

Seriously?

They could use the text messaging feature to find out how my experience was with their customer service department but they couldn’t use it to keep me informed about the use of the product I was paying them for?

We Can Learn A Lot From This Experience

It shows that companies often spend more time thinking about what THEY need instead of what their CLIENTS need. That’s backwards. I know it may seem like they care when they want to be sure the customer service experience was good.

However, if they would focus on how their clients are experiencing the product or service they’d have fewer problems to handle.

Put Yourself In The Client’s Shoes

At the beginning, not at the problem stage:

What might they want to know?

What might they need to know?

What information do you have that if shared with them, would make their experience better or not bad?

I think we are trained to offer our product or service in its most basic form. Then we establish a system for dealing with issues when and if they arise. We consider ourselves stellar if we then add in a follow up to that customer service experience. See, we really care!

Hold the phone! If you really cared you’d make sure my experience with the product or service was stellar; not the follow up to the complaint.

You can work on this backwards and implement a strategy that will prevent the reverse customer service experience described above. Think about your own business. Think about any and all situations when clients called or emailed your customer service department:

What was their issue?

Was it something you were aware of?

Could you have avoided the call by sharing information?

If so, implement a communication strategy for reaching out to your clients. Don’t be afraid to tell them something if that knowledge will help them understand their experience. In all honesty, they’ll love you for thinking about them instead of yourself.

That is true customer service.

Upset Customer Photo via Shutterstock

The post Reverse Customer Service Strategy appeared first on Small Business Trends.

via http://smallbiztrends.com/2012/10/reverse-customer-service-strategy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SmallBusinessTrends+%28Small+Business+Trends%29

Got big JSON? BigQuery expands data import for large scale web apps

2012-10-12T14:16:00.001-07:00

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By Ryan Boyd, Developer Advocate

JSON is the data format of the web. JSON is used to power most modern websites, is a native format for many NoSQL databases hosting top web applications, and provides the primary data format in many REST APIs. Google BigQuery, our cloud service for ad-hoc analytics on big data, has now added support for JSON and the nested/repeated structure inherent in the data format.

JSON opens the door to a more object-oriented view of your data compared to CSV, the original data format supported by BigQuery. It removes the need for duplication of data required when you flatten records into CSV. Here are some examples of data you might find a JSON format useful for:

Log files, with multiple headers and other name-value pairs.

User session activities, with information about each activity occurring nested beneath the session record.

Sensor data, with variable attributes collected in each measurement.

Nested/repeated data support is one of our most requested features. And while BigQuery's underlying infrastructure supports it, we'd only enabled it in a limited fashion through M-Lab's test data. Today, however, developers can use JSON to get any nested/repeated data into and out of BigQuery.

For more information on importing JSON and nested/repeated data into BigQuery, check out the new guide in our documentation. You should also see the Dealing with Data section for details on the new querying syntax available for this type of data.

Improvements to Data Loading Pipeline

We’ve made it much easier to ingest data into BigQuery – up to 1TB of data per load job, with each file up to 100GB uncompressed JSON or CSV. We’ve also eliminated the 2 imports per minute rate limit, enabling you to submit all your ingestion jobs and let us handle the queuing as necessary. In a recent project I’ve been working on, import jobs for 3TB of data that previously took me 12 hours to run now take me only 36 minutes – a 20x improvement!

We’ve published a new Ingestion Cookbook that explains how to take advantage of these new limits.

We’re initiating a small trusted tester program aimed at making it easier to move your data from the App Engine Datastore to BigQuery for analysis. If you store a lot of data in Datastore and are also using BigQuery, we’d like to hear from you. Please sign up now to be considered for the trusted tester program.

Learn more this week

Michael Manoochehri, Siddartha Naidu and I are in London this week talking about BigQuery and these new features at the Strata big data conference. Ju-kay Kwek will also be talking about BigQuery at the Interop NYC conference tomorrow. Please stop by, say hi, and let us know what you’re doing with big data.

We’ll also be producing a Google Developers Live session from Campus London on Friday at 16:00 BST (15:00 GMT).

Ryan Boyd is a Developer Advocate, focused on big data. He's been at Google for 6 years and previously helped build out the Google Apps ISV ecosystem. He published his first book, "Getting Started with OAuth 2.0", with O'Reilly.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

via http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/10/got-big-json-bigquery-expands-data.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GDBcode+%28Google+Developers+Blog%29

More Funny Directions in Google Maps

2012-10-12T14:07:00.003-07:00

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Google Maps no longer recommends to swim across the Atlantic Ocean if you want to go from the United States to Europe. Google found a better way: "sail across the Pacific Ocean".

Google's directions from New York to Paris are quite straightforward: go to Seattle, then swim across Pacific to Hawaii, swim again to Asia where you are directed to drive through Asia and Europe to reach France. After only 519 hours you're supposed to reach the destination.

{ Thanks, Anon. }

via http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/10/more-funny-directions-in-google-maps.html

Too Many Google Results From a Single Site

2012-10-12T14:07:00.001-07:00

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I don't know about you, but there's a feature that ruined many of my Google search results pages. It's not that Google can't return relevant results, the problem is that Google tries to be clever and detects keywords that are associated with a site. If it finds one, Google will return a lot of results from that site. In fact, sometimes you'll have a hard time finding results from other domains.

Ever since its launch, Google promoted diversity and used host crowding to show "up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name". Sometimes Google displayed a link that restricted the results to that domain or subdomain, but users had to click it. Matt Cutts wrote in 2007 that "we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen".

Then Google introduced sitelinks and started to show more pages from a domain. Two years ago, a Google blog post announced that "for queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we'll now show more results from the relevant site". Since that announcement, host crowding was a thing of the past and Google started to include more and more results from a single domain.

I complained about this back in 2010 and mentioned that this feature could become annoying, but now it's much worse. Sometimes you can find queries that return mostly results from a domain. For example, when you search for [apple itunes] Google assumes that you want results from apple.com and starts to return a lot of irellevant pages. Sure, you can still find results from other domains, but 31 of the top 50 results are from apple.com.

If you search for [yahoo mail], Google returns a lot of uninteresting results from Yahoo's international sites, instead of including news articles, blog posts, reviews, tutorials.

Search for [berkeley college] and 26 of the top 50 results are from berkeley.edu. That's just too much. Having to constantly add to the query "-site:dominantresult.com" is annoying, not to mention that most Google users don't even know about search operators and shouldn't have to use them.

And this annoyance is not limited to navigational queries. What if you're not in India, search for [sony led] and Google's top 7 results are from Sony India? That's what happened when I disabled Google Instant and set Google to show 50 results per page.

Showing too many results from a domain is a bad idea because a search engine should offer information from multiple sources, while results should be relevant and comprehensive. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but Google forgot to make the information accessible.

Query	Domain	Number of results in top 50
imdb ratings	imdb.com	49
imdb ratings are broken	imdb.com	46
google play	google.com	31
playstation	playstation.com	28
wordpress	wordpress.org	28
samsung led display	samsung.com	27

via http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/10/too-many-google-results-from-single-site.html

What I want in a monitoring tool

2012-10-12T12:51:00.003-07:00

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I started a new job a few weeks ago, and I'm now at a point where I'm investigating monitoring options. At past jobs I used Nagios, which I know will work, but I would like to look into other more modern tools. I am aware that #monitoringsucks, and I am pretty sure people have hashed these topics before, but here are some of the things I want from a modern monitoring tool:

Ideally open source, of if not affordable per host per month pricing (we already signed up as a paying customer of Boundary for example)

Installation and configuration should be easily scriptable

- server installation, as well as addition/modification of clients should be easily automated so it can be done with Puppet/Chef
- API would be ideal

Robust notifications/alerting rules

- escalations
- service dependencies
- event handler scripts
- alerts based on subsets of hosts/services
- - for example alert me only when 2+ servers of the same type are down

Out-of-the-box plugins

- database-specific checks for example

Scalability

- the monitoring server shouldn't become a bottleneck as more clients are added
- - nagios is OK with 100-200 clients (with passive checks)
- hierarchy of servers should be supported
- agent-based clients

Reporting/dashboards

- Hosts/services status dashboards
- Downtime/outages dashboards
- Latency (for HTTP checks)

Resource graphing would be great

- but in my experience very few tools do both alerting and resource/metrics graphing well
- in the past I used Nagios for alerting and Ganglia/Graphite for graphing

Integration with other tools

- Send events to graphing tools (Graphite), alerting tools (PagerDuty), notification mechanisms (irc, Campfire), logging tools (Graylog2)

I also asked a question on Twitter about what monitoring tool people would recommend, and here are some of the tools mentioned in the replies:

Sensu

OpenNMS

Icinga

Zenoss

Riemann

Ganglia

Datadog

Several people told me to look into Sensu, and a quick browsing of the home page tells me it would be worth giving it a whirl. So I think I'll do that next. Stay tuned, and also please leave a comment if you know of other tools that might fit the profile I am looking for.

Update: more tools mentioned in comments or on Twitter after I posted a link to this blog post:

New Relic (which I am actually in the process of evaluating, having paid for 1 host)

Circonus

Zabbix

Server Density

Librato

Comostas

OpsView

Shinken

PRTG

NetXMS

Tracelytics

via http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-i-want-in-monitoring-tool.html

3 things to know when starting out with cloud computing

2012-10-12T12:51:00.001-07:00

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In the same vein as my previous post, I want to mention some of the basic but important things that someone starting out with cloud computing needs to know. Many times people see 'the cloud' as something magical, as the silver bullet that will solve all their scalability and performance problems. These people are in for a rude awakening if they don't pay attention to the following points.

Expect failure at any time

There are no guarantees in the cloud. Failures can and will happen, suddenly and mercilessly. Their frequency will increase as you increase the number of instances that you run in the cloud. It's a sickening feeling to realize that one of your database instances is gone, and there's not much you can do to bring it back. At that point, you need to rely on your disaster recovery plan (and you have a DR plan, don't you?) and either launch a new instance from scratch, or, in the case of a MySQL master server for example, promote a slave to a master. The silver lining in all this is that you need a disaster recovery plan anyway, even if you host your own servers in your own data center space. The cloud just makes failures happen more often, so it will test your DR plan more thoroughly. In a few months, you will be an expert at recovering from such failures, which is not a bad thing.

In fact, knowing that anything can fail in the cloud at any time forces you to architect your infrastructure such that you can recover from failures quickly. This is a worthy goal to have no matter where your infrastructure is hosted.

There's more to expecting failures at any time. You need a solid monitoring system to alert you that failures are happening. You need a solid configuration management system to spin up new instances of a given role quickly and with as little human intervention as possible. All these are great features to have in any infrastructure.

Automation is key

If you only have a handful of servers to manage, 'for' loops with ssh commands in a shell script can still seem like a good and progressive way of running tasks across the servers. This method breaks at scale. You need to use more industrial-grade configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef or CFEngine. The learning curve can be pretty steep for most of these tools, but it's worth investing your time in them.

Deploying automatically is not enough though. You also need ways to ensure that things have been deployed as expected, and that you haven't inadvertently introduced new bugs. Automated testing of your infrastructure is key. You can achieve this either by writing scripts that check to see if certain conditions have been met, or, even better, by adding those checks to your monitoring system. This way, your monitoring checks are your deployment unit tests.

If the cloud is a kingdom, its APIs are the crown jewels. You need to master those APIs in order to automate the launching and termination of cloud instances, as well as the creation and management of other resources (storage, load balancers, firewall rules). Libraries such as jclouds and libcloud help, but in many situations you need to fall back to the raw cloud provider API. Having a good handle on a scripting language (any decent scripting language will do) is very important.

Dashboards are essential

One of the reason, and maybe the main reason, that people use the cloud is that they want to scale their infrastructures horizontally. They want to be able to add new instances at every layer (web app, database, caching) in order to handle anything that their users throw at their web site. Simply monitoring those instances for failures is not enough. You also need to graph the resources that are consumed, and the metrics that are generated at all layers: hardware, operating system, application, business logic. Tools such as Graphite, Ganglia, Cacti, etc can be of great assistance. Even homegrown dashboards based on tools such as the Google Visualization API can be extremely useful (I wrote about this topic here).

One aspect of having these graphs and dashboards is that they are essential for capacity planning, by helping you in establishing correlations between traffic that hits your web site and resources that are consumed and that can become a bottleneck (such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, network bandwidth etc). If you run your database servers in the cloud for example, you will very quickly realize that disk I/O is your main bottleneck. You will be able to correlate high CPU wait numbers with slowness in your database, which reflects in slowness in your overall application. You will then know that if you reach a certain CPU wait threshold, it's time to either scale your database server farm horizontally (easier said than done especially if you do manual sharding), or vertically (which may not even be possible in the cloud, because you have pretty restrictive choices of server hardware).

As an aside: do not run your relational database servers in the cloud. Disk I/O is so bad, and relational databases are so hard to scale horizontally, that you will soon regret it. Distributed NoSQL databases such as Riak, Voldemort or HBase are a different matter, since they are designed from the ground up to scale horizontally. But for MySQL or PostgreSQL, go for bare metal servers hosted at a good data center.

One last thing about scaling horizontally is the myth of autoscaling. I've very rarely seen companies that are able to scale their infrastructure up and down based on traffic patterns. Many say they do it, but when you get down to it it's mostly a manual process. It's somewhat easier to scale it up, but scaling it down is a totally different matter. You need to worry at that point that resources that you are taking away from your infrastructure are properly accounted for. Let's say you terminate a web server instance behind a load balancer -- is the load balancer aware of the fact that it shouldn't send traffic to that instance any more?

Another aspect of having graphs and dashboards is to see how business metrics (such as sales per day, or people that abandoned their shopping carts, or payment transactions, etc.) are affected by bottlenecks in your infrastructure. This assumes that you do graph business metrics, which you should. Without dashboards, you are flying blind.

I could go on with more caveats about the cloud, but I think that these 3 topics are a good starting point. The interesting thing about all 3 topics though is that they apply to any infrastructure, not only to cloud-based ones. But the scale of the cloud puts these things into their proper perspective and forces you to think them through.

via http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2012/09/3-things-to-know-when-starting-out-with.html

The 7 Deadly Sins of Startups

2012-10-12T12:39:00.001-07:00

Not all of these are quite "deadly sins", but the "47 common mistakes of entrepreneurs" didn't quite have the same ring to it. Enjoy.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Startups

1) Lust: Be not easily lured by the fun, sexy market. [tweet]

2) Gluttony: Many ideas makes mayhem. More startups die from idea gluttony than starvation. [tweet]

3) Greed: Pure pursuit of profits is perilous. Pick a problem you're passionate about. [tweet]

4) Sloth: The lazy shall languish in obscurity. Toilers triumph. [tweet]

5) Wrath: Don't get angry with your competitors. Attack the problem instead. [tweet]

6) Envy: Do not copy others out of envy of their strategy. Be yourself. [tweet]

7) Pride: Hubris kills. Humility has a power all its own. [tweet]

Which of these "sins" are you committing? Any others you'd add to the list?

Sent to you by Rohitesh Gupta via Google Reader:

The 7 Deadly Sins of Startups

via OnStartups by Dharmesh Shah on 9/13/12

Not all of these are quite "deadly sins", but the "47 common mistakes of entrepreneurs" didn't quite have the same ring to it. Enjoy.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Startups

1) Lust: Be not easily lured by the fun, sexy market. [tweet]

2) Gluttony: Many ideas makes mayhem. More startups die from idea gluttony than starvation. [tweet]
3) Greed: Pure pursuit of profits is perilous. Pick a problem you're passionate about. [tweet]
4) Sloth: The lazy shall languish in obscurity. Toilers triumph. [tweet]
5) Wrath: Don't get angry with your competitors. Attack the problem instead. [tweet]
6) Envy: Do not copy others out of envy of their strategy. Be yourself. [tweet]
7) Pride: Hubris kills. Humility has a power all its own. [tweet]
Which of these "sins" are you committing? Any others you'd add to the list?

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Oh, and by the way, you should follow me on twitter: @dharmesh.

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