Nolio – Application Service Automation

Nolio Announces New Key Executives as Application-Centric Automation Market Accelerates

July 27th, 2009 by admin

Nolio, the leading innovator of Application Service Automation solutions, today announced key management additions as the application-centric automation market accelerates.

Doron Gerstel, co-founder and former President and CEO of Zend Technologies, joins Nolio as Chief Executive Officer. Nolio also today announced the appointment of Yuval Scarlat, formerly Senior Vice President of Products for Mercury Interactive, acquired by HP (NASDAQ: HPQ), to Chairman of the Board.

For more details, click here.

Tags: New hire news
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“Service Unavailable?” Servers normal. Now what?

July 20th, 2009 by admin

What happens when you get a service unavailable alert but all your server monitors show normal state? How can you respond to such an alert?

When discussing this with one of Nolio’s customers, a large online bank operation, they told me that in the past, in cases of a ’service unreachable’ alert with green servers, they didn’t really know what the source of the problem was. The first thing they would do when troubleshooting this type of problems is look into their monitoring system and check if there are problematic servers, but in most cases the issue is in the application layer, where some services or processes are stalled.

Next, they would start manually going into each server to try and figure out where the application failure was – a time-consuming task since they had over 350 servers to check! They would go into each application tier and simulate an application connectivity to the next relevant tier. They needed to know exactly which application tier on each server was connected to each of the other servers from the next tier. It was very complicated to go through dozens or hundreds of servers to find the problem, especially when the operations team was under heavy pressure to get things up and running.

These days, using Nolio, they have created an automated process that “travels” through their different application tiers and initiates connectivity to the next appropriate tier. For example: “go into all the web servers and open a web service (URL) located in the relevant application server that services that web server. Then go into all the application servers and query the relevant DB servers.” This way they test where the problems are so they can find them in minutes.

Nolio Automation Center enabled this customer to create an automated process that discovers where the problems are, but they still needed to go into each problematic server and reset the problematic service. They wanted to automate that as well, so they modified this process to fix this problem automatically.

The addition was very simple. All they needed to do was reset the next tier of service. For example: if the automation process has found that a web server cannot initiate a web service from its relevant application server, it resets the web service in the application server. So when the URL initiation action fails in the web server, the other action that resets the web service is triggered in the application server.

Time savings to this customer by using automation in their problem resolution process are dramatic. The overall time it took the customer to create such a process in Nolio was just 20 minutes. Now the time it takes them to solve this situation automatically is 5 minutes, over all 350 servers they have! Before they started using Nolio, the entire operations team usually spent 1.5 hours of hysteric work doing the same thing. Now this process is handled by just one person

What’s next? They are now integrating this process into their application monitoring system. They want it to be activated automatically when the ‘service unavailable alert’ is triggered. This is also very simple to do, since the Nolio system exposes a web service and command line APIs to enable that.

Once this is implemented, they will get an email from the Nolio system that the process was activated and finished successfully and then they can close the alert ticket within few minutes after it was triggered, without any manual work or team hysteria.

Post written by Alon Eizenman, CTO, Nolio

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Nolio Application Service Automation is a software platform for designing and executing automated application service workflows across the data center, enabling reliable, effective processes for the management of application change.

Tags: Service Unavailable Alert
Posted in Application service automation, Customer Success Stories | No Comments »

Application Management Automation for Modern Data Centers

July 6th, 2009 by admin

In a recent article titled “Ready to automate data center management?” James Urquhart points out that “few organizations had made the decision to systematically automate” data center management, and adds,”If you don’t have an automation pilot in your budget for this fiscal year, I would seriously recommend planning one for the next cycle. I would also strongly recommend that system administrators begin to think about how they would automate their jobs.”

I couldn’t agree more and would like to stress the importance of application service automation.

Modern data centers are very different from traditional data centers. The main challenge of modern data centers is not primarily the number of servers, it is the complexity of the multi-tier applications that run on those servers.

Deployment, changes and configurations, troubleshooting, recovery, expansion and other repeated processes on complex applications with multiple tiers, large numbers of servers, and specific dependencies between application components is challenging. Add to that the complexity of running applications on virtual or cloud environments.

Let me repeat: Modern data center applications are complex. Relying on error-prone manual and scripted processes to service and maintain data center applications often results in costly application downtime caused by human errors.

This is where new automation and management tools, such as Nolio’s, become useful.

In the high-stakes world of application availability, this is something your business cannot afford. Data center application service automation is the answer.

Tags: application management automation, Data center automation, virtual data centers
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Agile Automation: Automating The Agile Release Process

June 15th, 2009 by admin

Agile methods promote a process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, the rapid delivery of high-quality software, and responding to changing circumstances rather than strictly following a plan. Therefore, automation is key for the success of the Agile release process.

To make sure Agile projects run smoothly and rapidly, companies must automate all repetitive activities – such as installing new builds of complex, multi-tier, multi-server software. Automating application updates in development and QA environments accelerates the release process, increases flexibility and efficiency, and enables companies to keep the Agile promise of efficient, rapid delivery of high-quality software.

In an Agile environment, software requirements are constantly changing. The Agile promise of ensuring customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software means that software is delivered in less time, but each released build must still be fully tested. It’s obvious that in this type of environment, manual processes will fail. Manual processes can only work if your product is easy to deploy, such as a desktop application deployed on a single computer.

Automation of the Agile release process by Nolio enables companies to automate the deployment of testing labs and the updating of development environments several times a day. This allows developers and testers to always work with the latest build, even in complex application environments, which are constantly changing.

In the rapidly changing environment of the Agile release process, your business simply cannot afford slowing down or compromising product quality because of human errors, failures and downtime. Fully automating the Agile release process is the answer.

Tags: Agile, agile automation, agile release process
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Future Of Data Hosting Is In Cloud Computing

June 1st, 2009 by admin

Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has recently made some interesting predictions on the future of cloud computing.

Ozzie said that the future for companies’ data hosting will be in a combination of cloud computing and on-premise data centers. In his words, “at some point in time, every major enterprise, every company, every ISV is going to have some blend of software that runs on-premises and some that runs in the cloud, and everyone wants tools that they can use to in essence deploy some apps to part of their organization that might be in the cloud…”

We couldn’t agree more. Our vision is that in the future, every company will have some kind of environment in the cloud. As Daniel Lyons of Newsweek recently said, “People are going to be putting their information not into some device but into some service that lives in the sky.” Lyon added, “Pretty much everyone in the tech industry agrees it’s the future.” For companies, cloud computing makes a lot of sense because it’s cheaper: in some cases, it cuts a company’s costs in half.

Of course, organizations that move to the cloud will need tools to help them deploy and manage their cloud applications.

The layer IT will need to handle in the future is the Application layer: deploying, managing, maintaining and troubleshooting applications in the cloud. Existing automation tools are old and fit traditional data centers. They are system- and infrastructure- centric solutions, while there should be a shift to application-centric solutions that will enable effective and efficient automation.

Nolio is a vendor leading the charge on doing just that. As an innovator of Application Service Automation solutions for physical, virtual and cloud data centers, Nolio’s Application Service Automation is a software platform for designing and executing automated application service workflows across the data center, enabling reliable, effective processes for the deployment of applications in the cloud and for the management of application change.

Tags: application deployment, application management, Application service automation, cloud, Cloud Computing
Posted in Cloud Computing | No Comments »

Automating The Disaster Recovery Process

May 18th, 2009 by admin

We had an interesting discussion the other day with one of our customers, a very large SaaS organization. They presented to us the automation process they have created using Nolio for the recovery process of their main application.

Their situation was that in case of a communication problem or an application problem in their main Data Center, they needed to switch to their Disaster Recovery site so that the customers will keep working while they fix the problem in the main Data Center.

Without automation, they had about 50 minutes downtime to sync their Disaster Recovery site, make the application functioning as well as the main Data Center, and make the transfer transparent to their customers.

They made the decision to automate all their Disaster Recovery processes using Nolio, and as a result, they are now able to switch to the Disaster Recovery site in just 3 minutes.

They did a real-time test a few days before our discussion, and successfully presented two of the Nolio Disaster Recovery automation processes to their management team, switching their main application to the Disaster Recovery site and back to their main site. The results were remarkable. Even though the test was done during peak time, their customers did not feel the transition between the two Data Centers.

The customer’s main application resides on several dozens of servers in each data center they operate, and now the transfer of any Data Center to the Disaster Recovery data center is done in just 3 minutes. The best part: even their Help Desk people, which have very limited knowledge of their operation procedures, can shoot this automation process by themselves, in case of a major customer issue, after getting the approval to run this process.

During our discussion, the customers’ VP of Data Center Operations told us, “There is no way to perform such a transition between main Data Center and Disaster Recovery Data Center manually within a few minutes even when done by the most professional ops guys. What if this happens in the middle of the night and we need to recover from a major issue? In that case it takes us few hours until all the relevant ops guys are syncing together to fix the problem. It is one of the most critical risks for the business that is now handled very well with Nolio.”

They are now in a process to automate all their maintenance routine tasks and problem resolution tasks. All their deployment procedures and configuration changes, and most of their recovery procedure are already automated. Next they are planning to push the automation to their R&D and QA environments.

Post written by Alon Eizenman, CTO, Nolio.

Tags: Data center automation, disaster recovery, Disaster Recovery Automation, disaster recovery data center
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Streamline QA Operations With The Nolio Automation Center

May 4th, 2009 by admin

Today I’d like to show you how you can use the Nolio Automation Center in your QA lab to make your deployment easier and perform your tests faster.

When I joined Nolio a few months ago (I can’t believe it’s been 9 months already!) Eran, our CEO, showed me a brief demo of the Nolio Automation Center. He talked about the way the application can automate anything IT does on a regular basis, from deployment, through daily installment, to disaster recovery, and the list goes on and on.

I completely understood what he meant by saying how it can make the IT guy’s life much easier, but I was also thinking, “What about the people over at QA? They also need to do the same things!”

As you know, in QA, you get a new build from R&D on a regular basis (once a week, every other week, etc), and then you need to have some people spend a day or two (if everything goes well) installing and deploying it on the various architecture and operating systems.

We all know the feeling we get when R&D hands us the build at the end of the week, just when we want to go home… instead, we need to start uninstalling the servers, cleaning the database and re-installing the new build – when all we want to do is start the weekend!

As if this is not enough, after you have everything done, you need to run some tests on everything (from sanity to regressions) and only when this is over (if a new build didn’t show up already), you can actually do your work and test the new features, bug fixes etc.

Sounds familiar? Touching soft spots? Well, the Nolio Automation Center can really help reduce the time it takes QA to do all the things I’ve mentioned, and free up some extra time to finish the tasks they have planned (but, instead, had to fight the problems in the new build). If you put minimal effort into becoming familiar with the Nolio Automation Center, its useful actions and how it works, you can reduce this time from a few days to much (MUCH!) less.

What you need to do is design the process you want the Nolio server to perform on your machines (this process imitates the exact steps you do every time, so no extra thinking is needed), creating it using the really-easy-to-use building blocks related UI, and let our agents do the rest. It really is that simple.

Think of the next time you get a new build and all you have to do is run these 2 processes that you have already created:

1. “Clean Machines” process – the process that will prepare your machines for the new build.

2. “Install New Build’ process – the process that will deploy the given build on your server.

When these processes are finished, you will have more time to do the things you planned to do, and you will not have to explain to your team leader why half of your week was dedicated to installation and deployment.

Post written by Uri Scheiner.

Tags: QA operations; nolio automation center; automation center; automating QA
Posted in QA Automation | No Comments »

SaaS ISVs and Application Management Automation

April 19th, 2009 by admin

We are pleased to welcome back guest blogger Dani Shomron, a SAAS industry veteran. Dani has held development, management and executive roles in multiple verticles and geographies. He holds a BSc. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University and an MSc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Dani is an expert in SaaS Operations and ISVs transition from on-site to on-demand.

“When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about”. (Albert Einstein)

The trick is focusing on what you do best. This is a well known truism and it is the premise for SaaS. Beyond the cost savings - opex vs. capex and all that – the reason SaaS is such a successful model is that it allows the enterprise to focus on its competitive advantage and leave the rest to be handled by a competent service provider.

What is true for the enterprise should be true for the SaaS ISV. And if you look around, you will notice that most SaaS providers are also SaaS consumers. From CRM to Marketing generation, to financials, to you-name-it – SaaS companies are adopters of SaaS technology. (Of course most SaaS companies are even greater adopters of open source; hey, it’s free!).

Still, most on-demand providers are running their own data centers, the network, the servers, the storage, and I would dare to say, not excelling in that department. SaaS technologists are product people. Innovative, creative, not harnessed by process or procedure. The typical data center is a product of evolution gone haywire. You start up with a couple of servers, and slowly build up, slapping a switch here, a database there, buying a cheap router, until it becomes quite unmanageable. And they probably do not have the right staff to design and maintain the infrastructure.

SaaS companies are finding it hard to let go of their infrastructure assets, but more and more are realizing that they simply suck at the job. Especially if they are big enough for it to matter, but too small to do a good job.

Networking, hosting, storage and server management have become a commodity. And as such, shouldn’t you let someone else do the job?

Enter the managed service providers. They will take care of every tier that you will allow them access to. From hosting, to networking, servers, storage, database monitoring and management, and many are interested in taking over the application management, if you just let them. It is the next tier and probably most lucrative.

This is the point where the guy with the funny pajamas, pointed ears and the cape appears in a flash and says “enough!’

Nobody does it better than you (the SaaS ISV). Your application will never become a commodity. You built the app, you know it intimately, understand the domain and can react quickly when something goes awry.

You should build your operations team around application and domain expertise, not around networking or server configuration. And you should equip your ops team with the tools to monitor and manage the application. This includes instrumentation, end-user-experience monitoring and application management automation.

The domain of infrastructure management tools is so well developed, with so many solutions abound, that SaaS operations usually tend to invest there and not where it matters most – the application.

Tags: SaaS, Saas ISV, SaaS Operations
Posted in Application service automation, SaaS Operations | No Comments »

The SaaS Upgrade Nightmare

March 16th, 2009 by admin

We are pleased to welcome guest blogger Dani Shomron, a SAAS industry veteran. Dani has held development, management and executive roles in multiple verticles and geographies. He holds a BSc. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University and an MSc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Dani is an expert in SaaS Operations and ISVs transition from on-site to on-demand.

One of the biggest appeals of the SaaS model is that upgrades are seamless and transparent. You log off in the evening with one version and the next morning when you log in, voila! you have an upgraded version with all the bug fixes and new features.

What happens in the background is another story. Scary sometimes. A Midnight Summer’s Nightmare.

If you, a SaaS company, have your SLAs in place and adhere to them, your full upgrade windows (i.e. planned downtime) are probably few and far between. Some SLAs allow for a periodic one hour downtime with a week’s notification, but anything longer than one hour will require an earlier notification. You must ensure that the upgrade is performed within that window, or any minute beyond that will start counting against your SLAs. You do not want to extend that window unnecessarily, as your customers are counting on your 24X7 service.

Upon receiving the upgrade instructions from Engineering, you will need to start building a plan. Often, the plan will include dozens, or even hundreds of short steps, and complex dependencies. In order to ensure that the upgrade will be performed correctly and within the allotted time frame you should be able to answer the following questions:

• How long will it take the team to run the upgrade?
• What happens if you need to rollback?
• What is the point of no return, when you must rollback without violating the change window?

A mature SaaS operations group will likely have a Staging environment, closely mimicking production. The best way to go about planning and executing the upgrade is to perform the process on the Staging environment. You will need to carefully design the procedure and run it multiple times until you perfect the process, taking note of how long it takes and practicing the rollback.

This is a tedious process, treasured by engineers as much as they love deciphering undocumented legacy code. But it is essential to ensure success.

So you need to make the process as short as possible and measurable. If you had the tools to automate the procedure you could reduce the time of execution (and of the dry runs on Staging). You could know exactly how long it will take and have the needed repeatability. Repeatability cannot be overrated when encroaching upon the Holy of Holies, under the pressure of timetables and the short temper of the anxious COO/VP Ops.

Since upgrades are an integral part of a SaaS operation and one of the main causes of the gray hair, ulcers, I wanna go home factor, you would do yourself and your customers a great service if you had the tools to automate the entire process.

Tags: SaaS, SaaS Upgrade
Posted in Customer Success Stories, SaaS Operations | No Comments »

Why SaaS Operations Need Automation

March 9th, 2009 by admin

If I had a great idea for the next killer app (I have, actually) and if I had unlimited funds (I don’t, actually) I would have built the software as an on-demand offering.

I would have spent half my funds on building the operational support systems – provisioning, billing, retention policy, self-service, report generator, etc. The other half would be invested in building instrumentation, redundancy, automation, integration, application level monitoring, silent upgrades, customer notifications, and so on.

The rest of the money (you may wonder about my math, but hey, I’ve got unlimited funds) would go towards building the actual application.

Most SaaS vendors out there (and they are growing fast) have chosen the predictable path of building the application first, and worrying about serviceability later. This is the fastest way of getting to market with low costs. The next step is choosing some viable hosting solution and off we go, offering the world our ever better CRM.

Many months and dozens of customers later, reality hits with all the issues of servicing the software, rapid growth and dealing with labor intensive tasks that are the humdrum of daily life in a SaaS operation. Provisioning/de-provisioning, configuration changes, customized reports, and the most dreaded – upgrades, task the team as a whole, especially when the product is successful and the number of customers is growing daily.

It is not that SaaS executives, architects and engineers are lacking in any way. On the contrary, they are mostly smart, inventive, and creative and have a deep understanding of their customers’ needs in the specific domain. The problem is that they are product people, not service people. Practically none of them come from IT and cannot envision the life of a service operations engineer.

At this point, automation becomes crucial to the survival of the business.

Whether it is built into the next version (many architectures make this quite difficult) or done externally, automation is needed to reduce costs, physical labor, frustration and mainly, error-prone manual procedures. Repeatability, which is a derivative of automation, is also crucial.

Automation is needed across the board. Be it in setting up a new server, or building a new application instance. It could be a manual procedure regarding provisioning of application resources, or building a seamless upgrade procedure.

Outages happen. How quickly can you recover from a service disruption and ensure that the recovery does not create it own problems? Automation not only provides the routines for quick recovery, but instills a discipline of thinking out the necessary steps, discovering dependencies and planning ahead. An added benefit of automation is that it documents the process so you can go back and review the best and worst of your procedures.

In my next post I will take a closer look at the SaaS Upgrade Nightmare.

Click here to read more about Automation and Delegation.

Tags: automation, SaaS, SaaS Operations
Posted in SaaS Operations | 3 Comments »

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