ANZ Pied Piper

Cloud Foundry has several High Availability features which are essential on an Enterprise application platform. We can classify them into two categories depending on at what level they are implemented. Elastic Runtime features. These are features that are implemented at the application instance level Availability Zones. Administrators can define multiple Availability Zones which typically correspond to chunks of the infrastructure that are independent from each other, such as different physical servers sitting on a separate racks with different power sources, etc. When you define an application with multiple instances, Cloud Foundry automatically distributes the app across the available Availability Zones. This ensures that if an AZ goes down either accidentally or during maintenance the app can keep running App instance fails. Diego sends "heartbeat" messages to the "Health Manager" component of the platform. If the "actual state" is different f...

I was recently at a presales event in Kuala Lumpur where they run my conference app (I will talk about the app in detail in a later post because it has played a key role in the Pied Piper program). One of my colleagues asked me about the backend the app uses. When I explained it was Redis he said that Redis doesn't have data persistent as is an in-memory database. There are two misconceptions about Redis: Redis uses key-value Redis is in-memory, therefore I can loose my data The first one is correct, but as we explained in the Redis article, the value side can be much more than just a "value", it can also take the form of a list, a set, a hash (which is essentially a dictionary) and more. So yes, you cannot do things a relational database can do, but with those 3 structures alone there are lots of use cases you can do ... and before I forget it is VERY fast. The second one is not true. When we looked at the different plans available in Pivotal Web Services (...