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08 02, 2021

A tech perspective on what cloud truly is

By |Categories: Cloud Migration|Tags: |

We on-boarded a new guy recently. He called himself a blank canvas but we know that this is not true. However, it brings us back to explaining the basics. One of the most basic questions turns out to be quite deceiving. What is Cloud?

One of our coworkers shared an article on Cloud Flair, which explains that Cloud is about two basic things: not owning your own hardware and virtualization. Next, they bring in all the buzz words: IAAS, PAAS and SAAS to end up with FAAS. Running everything As-A-Service, Infrastructure, Platform and Service to end Functions. Nice, we have all

03 12, 2020

How to deal with cloud databases and network latency

By |Categories: Best Practices, Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: , |

“We moved our database into the cloud and it was terrible”. Or wasn’t it?

When we started moving a large database into the cloud we drafted a migration scenario to minimize the downtime. Migrating from one type of database to another one is seldom an easy game. Combine this with the fact the there was a lot of data to be shipped and you can understand the raw complexity.

We managed to set up an incremental process that on the first run would take several days, the second run about a day and then

25 11, 2020

To Cloud or not to Cloud

By |Categories: Cloud Migration|Tags: |

When it comes to the infrastructure we are living interesting times. Big cloud providers are fighting to get a piece of the cake and make it as big as possible by bolting additional services to it. The process of mergers and acquisitions has been going on for a number of years and now that BigTech is trying to corner the market we will see more consolidation.

We estimate the end result to be a handful of players trying to focus on specific areas and gain as much market share as possible. For example, IBM focuses on AI & NLP, Google on

19 10, 2020

How to build a secure proof-of-concept cloud web application

By |Categories: Best Practices, Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: , , |

In previous posts, we developed an application which uses IBM Tone Analyzer to analyze a given text and return tone scoring per sentence, then we improved it into an app which evaluates the content of a web page.

In this post, we will focus on security and logging. They are often considered irrelevant when it comes to proof-of-concept building to return like a boomerang when building a production-ready application. The framework we used for developing the web app provides some general security options that can easily be implemented. Addressing them from the beginning will help us prevent later security issues.

Always

15 10, 2020

How to Build a Cloud Foundry Application: Evaluating Content from an URL

By |Categories: Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: , |

In previous posts, we developed a small web application that runs in the IBM Cloud, then we transformed it into an application that analyses given text and returns tone scoring per sentence. As the app output was rather rude, we also improved its look and feel.

Now let’s consider the situations when someone would like to evaluate the content of a web page. We will further enhance the application to evaluate the content of a web page from a given URL instead of analyzing copy-pasted text. Obviously, after all the hard work we’ve done, it would be great

07 10, 2020

Total Cost of Ownership Comparison Pre and Post IBM Cloud Migration

By |Categories: Case Studies, Cloud Migration|Tags: , |

In a previous post we presented a cloud migration success story focusing on the challenges and the benefits of migrating in the cloud a project infrastructure which was hosted on a legacy Data Center that was going to be decommissioned.

Now we’ll take a closer look at the total cost of running the project on premises versus running it in the IBM Cloud.

Cloud TCO comparison pre and post cloud migration

TCO for running the project infrastructure on premises

To calculate the TCO for running the infrastructure on premises, we audited the existing infrastructure. It

02 10, 2020

How to Improve the Look and Feel of a Cloud Foundry Application

By |Categories: Best Practices, Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: , |

In previous posts, we developed a small web application that runs in the cloud then we transformed it into an application that analyses given text and returns tone scoring per sentence. As we’ve been focusing on the functionality, the extended application was returning a rude output.

With most people judging a web app based on its look and feel, we’ll turn our bare application into something more presentable.

For this, we will use bootstrap as a CSS base and Perl HTML::Template to improve the overall readability of the code.

1. Build the Page Library

We’ll start by building a small library that

29 09, 2020

How to Extend a Basic Cloud Foundry Application

By |Categories: Best Practices, Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: , |

In this article, we will extend the simple “Hello World” routine that we created last week to more formal use. The cloud comes with many features, so we picked one that is called “Tone Analyzer”.

The Tone Analyzer service leverages cognitive linguistic analysis to identify the tone of input content enabling users to refine and improve communications.

We will use this cloud service to transform our basic “Hello World” application into an application that analyzes given text and returns tone scoring per sentence.

Let’s find out how to extend our basic application to use the Tone Analyzer.

Getting the IBM Cloud “Tone

24 09, 2020

Cloud Migration Success Story

By |Categories: Case Studies, Cloud Migration|Tags: |

The Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) is the central repository for validated trademarks for the purpose of protecting brands in Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) new Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) program.

The Trademark Database (TMDB) is the central database of validated brands with the services to registries and Registrars about their validated marks. There is only one TMDB in the Trademark Clearinghouse Global System that concentrates the information about the “verified” Trademark records from the different TMCH Validation systems and organizations.

In the context of the projects’ infrastructure being hosted on a legacy Data Center that was going to be decommissioned (old infrastructure),

21 09, 2020

How to Build a Basic Cloud Foundry Application

By |Categories: Best Practices, Cloud Migration, How to|Tags: , |

In this blog series, we will develop a small web application that runs in the IBM Cloud. We will be using an old fashion way called rapid application development and an old framework called Plack, a Perl-based web service.

The purpose is twofold.  It demonstrates that traditional style environments can be used to build cloud applications and it also allows us to build a proof of concept in virtually no time.

Let’s get our hands dirty…

Hello world

So here is your basic application that does the usual.

#! /usr/bin/perl

use Plack::Builder;
use Plack::Response;
use strict;

sub main {
my $env

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