Technical Blog

In mid-December 2019, Rackspace released CloudHealth for all Fanatical Support® for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.

Systems, Applications and Products (SAP) products help companies manage their financials, logistics, human resources, and other business areas. SAP started as a mainframe-based, financial software package in 1973. It entered the client/server world in 1992 and began running in many operating systems and databases. In 2004, SAP became SAP Enterprise Resource Planning Central Component (ERP/ECC). It is estimated that more than 34% of all global transactions interact with SAP software at some point. More than 425,000 businesses use SAP and 80% of SAP's customer base is in the Small to Medium-sized Business (SMB) sector.

One of the questions I get asked a lot by my customers is “How can I get the most out of my Office 365 subscription?” My answer is always “Start using Microsoft® Teams!”

Working in technical support comes with its own unique set of challenges and opportunities, but it also means that we get the satisfaction of remaining at the forefront of technical change as things move so rapidly and new hosting services and products change seemingly quicker than a new iPhone can be released.

This blog describes the SAP® Plant Connectivity (PCo) services and management tools that enable you to integrate with SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII) to create the following elements:

• Connectors
• Communication paths between control systems
• Control devices
• Files
• Historians
• Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) sockets

Rackspace sponsored the 2019 Google Cloud Platform (GCP®) Summits in Stockholm and Amsterdam and challenged the attendees to a game of Kubertetris.

This blog explains SAP® Web Dispatcher, its features, and how to use it.

The new monitoring feature of the Central Management Console (CMC) allows administrators to monitor the usage and health of the SAP® BusinessObjects (BO) system.

This blog describes some of the benefits of strategic supply chain optimization.

No matter how good our code is, if we cannot test it properly, it is a tedious task to modify or enhance it. This situation results in problems for both users and developers.

The thirteen tips to take tech tests

Yes I can speak Cloud...I learned it from a book.

This post offers a small taste of Dutch history but, more importantly, an overview of how to user Azure DevOps to create a CI Pipeline for Hugo!

Business productivity software is continuously evolving and collaboration tools, such as email and document management delivered by Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms such as Microsoft Office 365, are becoming more common.

SAP® Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C) is a cloud-based solution for effectively managing customer sales, customer service, marketing activities, and customer relationships. SAP C4C is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for sales and services.

A proxy server is a computer system that sits between the client that requests a web document and the target server (another computer system) that serves the document. In its simplest form, a proxy server facilitates communication between the client and the target server without modifying requests or replies.

The NetScaler Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is a Citrix® Systems core networking product. ADC improves the delivery speed and quality of applications for an end user. The product helps business customers perform tasks such as traffic optimization, L4-L7 load balancing, and web app acceleration while maintaining data security.

Originally published by TriCore: November 7, 2017

Microsoft® introduced the idea of self-service business intelligence (BI) back in 2009, announcing Power Pivot for Microsoft Excel® 2010. After several years, Microsoft released version 1 of Power BI®, but the user experience wasn't great. Microsoft collected feedback from end users and crafted a newer version of Power BI that became popular. This blog provides an introduction to this tool.

NetScaler® Application Delivery Controller (ADC), Citrix® Systems' core networking product, is a tool that improves the delivery speed and quality of applications to an end user. This blog describes how to upgrade, by using the command line interface (cli), the software on NetScaler appliances that are configured in a high-availability setup.

This blog explains how the Google® Distance Matrix API can be incorporated with Oracle® E-business Suite (EBS) and can be used to determine the distance between two physical locations.

The GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) is a complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC4880, also known as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). GPG, also known as GnuPG, is a command line tool with features for easy integration with other applications.

Most companies that exchange sensitive data, such as payment details, employee information, and so on over the internet, use PGP encryption to transfer files securely between two systems. This blog introduces GPG, why you should use file encryption, and what are the steps involved in both file encryption and decryption.

Originally published by TriCore: October 18, 2017

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we covered some strategies for resolving common issues with Oracle® Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). In Part 2, we share two additional tips about how to customize the logo and banner text in OBIEE.

Originally published by TriCore: May 11, 2017

There are many Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) solutions available for organizational single sign-on (SSO) and user management, including Oracle® Internet Directory (OID), Microsoft® Active Directory (AD), and many other systems. When you have multiple implementations, it can be difficult to manage and use them all. In this blog post, you'll learn how to create a view that you can use to manage all of your enterprise's LDAP implementations.

One of the key points in supporting our customers is to make sure they have a smooth month-end closing process. Many people have issues that lead to a delay in their monthly close. Often, the issues causing these delays are not identifiable and are hidden behind the scenes. To overcome this situation, we have an application monitoring process that helps unearth these hidden problems and allows us to proactively address these even before it comes to our customers’ notice.

Originally published by TriCore: August 2, 2016

In Part 1 of this two-part blog post series, we cover two issues that you might run into while working with Oracle® Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) and how to resolve them.

Originally published by Tricore: April 20, 2017

SQL Server 2016 introduced three new principal security features: Always Encrypted, dynamic data masking, and row level security.

This blog introduces the dynamic data masking (DDM) feature.

Are you considering an upgrade to a more modern version of SQL Server? Are you choosing between SQL Server 2016 or SQL Server 2017? If so, then my advice is to upgrade to SQL Server 2017 as I explain in this post.

The release of SQL Server technology provides lots of interesting new features for SQL administrators and developers to ponder. The Community Technology Preview (CTP) 2.0 for SQL Server vNext (generally called SQL Server 2017) is no exception. Many updates have been implemented in the existing features and services of the application. In this blog post, I discuss what is new in the database engine of SQL Server 2017 from a database administrator (DBA) perspective.

Originally published by TriCore: January 17, 2017

This blog post discusses why Oracle® Enterprise Manager 13c (OEM 13c) users might want to consider rolling back to version 12c, and how to make the transition successful.

Originally published by TriCore: April 4, 2017

This blog post aims to help Oracle® Data Integrator (ODI) designers, administrators, and system teams address performance bottlenecks in ODI execution plans. Following the steps outlined here will result in a speedier experience for your end users.

Originally published by TriCore: November 22, 2017

A virtual tape library (VTL) is a data storage virtualization technology that's typically used for backups and recovery. A VTL presents a storage component, which is usually hard disk storage, as tape libraries or tape drives for use with existing backup software.

This blog describes best practices for the implementation architecture of the web client authentication solutions for QlikView®.

Originally published by Tricore: June 26, 2017

In this blog post, we review common issues that database administrators (DBAs) might run into when working with Oracle® Enterprise Manager (OEM) 12c Management Agents. We hope this information helps you fix these problems quickly and keep your Oracle targets well-monitored.

You may be asked to migrate multiple Internet Information Server (IIS) sites from on-site to the Cloud, but migrating individual sites is a long and daunting task. This blog discusses simplifying the process.

Originally published by TriCore: March 27, 2017

If you're considering migrating your email systems to Microsoft® Office 365®, there are a variety of migration methods. The best fit depends on your requirements. This blog post covers factors you should consider when choosing an email migration method.

Popularity Trends is a feature in SharePoint Server 2013 that enhances search and web analytics services by offering a ready-to-use solution.

This blog post shows you how to generate an Array Diagnostic Utility (ADU) report on an Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) server that is running VMware® ESXi™ version 5.x or 6.x. The information in this blog helps you to determine whether the ADU is installed. If it is not installed, you can use the steps provided in this blog to install it.

Originally published by Tricore: Sep 21, 2017

Planning Analytics integrates business planning, performance measurement, and operational data to enable companies to optimize business effectiveness and customer interaction regardless of geography or structure. Planning Analytics provides immediate visibility into data, accountability within a collaborative process, and a consistent view of information.

The traditional supply-chain management processes with on-site IT applications are rapidly moving to the modern supply-chain cloud infrastructure. This blog covers the characteristics and benefits of the modern supply chain management in detail.

Modern browsers have APIs called querySelector and querySelectorAll. They find one or more elements matching a CSS selector. I'm assuming basic familiarity with CSS selectors: how you select elements, classes and ids. If you haven't used them, the Mozilla Developer Network has an excellent introduction.

Running a successful developer workshop (aka tutorial) is really difficult. I've attended enough workshops that have gone poorly to know that for a fact. Participating in such a workshop can be very frustrating and a huge turn off for whatever technology is being presented. That translates directly into losing developer mindshare. I think we, as an industry, can do a better job of running developer workshops.

When we, at Rackspace were working on a data visualization dashboard which uses AngularJS framework, we needed to abort requests. Fortunately, AngularJS has amazing built in services of which $http and $resource helped us make these XHR(Ajax) requests much simpler. There are many resources to figure out which might be better for your use case. I’m going to describe how I implemented aborts in $resource and $http in an unified way which increased the performance and showed correct data.

If you're a big PostgreSQL fan like I am, you may have heard of a tool called WAL-E. Originally developed by Heroku, WAL-E is a tool for efficiently sending PostgreSQL's WAL (Write Ahead Log) to the cloud. In addition to Heroku, WAL-E is now used by many companies with large PostgreSQL deployments, including Instagram.

Let's unpack what that means. If you've ever set up replication with PostgreSQL you're probably familiar with the WAL. Essentially there are two parts to replication and backup in PostgreSQL, the "base backup" and the WAL. Base backups are a copy of your database files that can be taken while the database is running. You might create base backups every night, for example. The WAL is where PostgreSQL writes each and every transaction, as they happen. When you run normal replication, the leader will send its log file to the followers as it writes it.

Instead of just using a simple socket to communicate, WAL-E sends these base backups and WAL files across the internet with the help of a cloud object store, like Cloudfiles (or any OpenStack Swift deployment). This gives you the advantage that, in addition to just being replication, you have a durable backup of your database for disaster recovery. Further, you have effectively infinite read scalability from the archives, you can keep adding more followers without putting more stress on the leader.

With the help of WAL-E's primary author, Daniel Farina, we recently added support for OpenStack Swift to it. It's not yet in a final release, but if you're interested in checking it out, read on!

One of the more pressing needs in the world of open source software is the need for decent documentation. That covers a lot of territory; from well-commented code (yeah… right) to API guides to the rare – some say mythical – user guide.

It's that last one, the user guide, that is often either not created or – perhaps worse – created as an afterthought by a developer whose writing skills are better aligned with Javascript than [Strunk][1]. When I joined the Developer Relations Group at Rackspace in July (be sure to check out the [Rackspace Developer Center][2] if you haven't already), I immediately decided to create a user guide for the [OpenStack SDK for Microsoft .NET][3]. While creating that document, I realized that many developers don't have a passion for writing documentation. Fair enough – I've never watched Game of Thrones. So, as a former sportswriter and an active coder (C# is my poison, mobile apps my passion), I have come up with a list of guidelines to help you craft a Pulitzer-worthy user guide. These suggestions (11 of them, yup, my list goes to 11!) were not developed through any sort of scientific process; rather, they are the result of more years of experience than I care to admit.

The hardest part about using new technology is knowing where to begin. Spending hours sifting through blog posts and documentation to set up a server environment is often enough to extinguish the excitement about a new framework or application. By the same token, it is frustrating to deploy hosting architecture when you are excited to see how your latest code will perform. And no one likes having to do the same things over and over to create consistent testing, staging and production environments.

Deploying your application to the cloud requires expertise in both system administration and development; often, people have expertise in some areas while having gaps in others. The Rackspace Deployments service was created so we could collect this information and expertise in machine and human readable format and use it to automatically and consistently deploy hosting configurations, frameworks and applications and alleviate some of this stress.

I am part of a team (along with Bruce Stringer and Jason Swindle) working on an internal application called Graffiti, which provides an easy way for front-line Rackers to record interactions with customers and provide valuable data with each interaction. It also creates a much simpler way for leads to be passed from the front line to the IB sales team here in SMB cloud.

We knew from the start that we wanted this to be an agile cloud application that utilizes all the things a cloud should be. We had some limitations which meant we had to home grow a few solutions. Since this is an internal application, we could not rely on third-party solutions for off loading workloads. We also had to be careful with our security practices, of course. We ended up going with a configuration that utilizes our internal nova solution for hosting in Cloud Servers. The downside to this is that we have no automated backups, no load balancers and no Cloud Files - much to my dismay.

Agile. Scrum. Extreme programming. RAD. Lean. These terms all represent a departure from the traditional Waterfall development process in favor of a more rapid, iterative approach to application development. For companies with large-scale web applications, there are significant benefits to the agile methodology, but it also presents significant challenges.

When every minute of downtime represents significant lost revenue and increased support costs, it stands to reason that application support should be just as agile as application development. Among other things, this means tearing down l ong-standing walls between teams, and getting all business units working together toward common goals.

Chad Lung is a software engineer on the Rackspace Cloud Integration team and is the maintainer of Atom Hopper. Be sure to check out his personal blog at http://www.giantflyingsaucer.com/blog/ and follow @chadlung on Twitter.

I recently wrote an article introducing Repose, which is a sponsored open-source project that is built to scale for the cloud. Repose is used within Rackspace as a a key element of our internal OpenStack.