I always monitor schedules of the most interesting IT events. Exactly at the moment when I saw that a Big Data Week will be held in Moscow, I decided that I must be there. By the way, the topics of the sessions sounded really appealing!

The conference was held in the Danilovskaya Manufacture business center located on the bank of the Moskva River, in a nice area not far from a busy center of Moscow. I had a subtle feeling that this place reminds me of London. This part of the city was free of usual Moscow haste and the hundreds-year-old red brick buildings that used to be a weaving factory long ago created a special leisurely vibe.

The event was held in the office of the Rambler-Afisha company. In the dimmed light of the “crystal balls,” the participants eagerly discussed the upcoming presentations.

The “Big Week” lasted for three days. As always, the first day started with introduction speech from the organizers. They greeted everybody who came to the conference despite of the terrible weather outside.

Then, Alexey Filanovsky, Oracle, carried out a “Hadoop Ecosystem” workshop. First, he covered some basic notions such as the main principles of HDFS, peculiarities of MapReduce, methods of data input/output to/from a Hadoop cluster and, after that, he dwelled on more sophisticated issues. In total, Alexey demonstrated four presentations that highlighted different aspects of working with Hadoop.

I was very much looking forward to the second day, because the three teleconf sessions from the Silicon Valley companies were scheduled for Friday.

Alex Varshavsky, Talksum, overviewed a tool that allows for almost real-time processing of input data. He demonstrated how the system can filter, alert, aggregate, correlate, and enrich data streams to solve the hot big data problem of three V’s.

In his presentation “Evolution of Architecture for Exponential Growth”, Konstantin Shvachko, a Chief Architect at WANdisco (previously a Hadoop developer at eBay and Yahoo), told about the main challenges the team faced when data started to increase and explained how those issues were overcome. Although it was just a teleconference and we were divided by many miles, thanks to this session I felt like a part of Hadoop history.

The day ended with a presentation “Impala: A Modern SQL Engine for Hadoop” by Justin Erickson (Cloudera). He spoke on Impala architecture and implementation, compared this solution against Apache Hive and some other data warehouses. However, he didn’t answer the hottest question: when Impala will be released.

The final day of the “Week” was very informative. Dmitry Fedoruk from Google Ireland revealed one of the secrets of how Google AdWords works. He told about Photon which is a fault-tolerant and scalable solution for joining of continuous data streams. It sounded like real magic.

To be honest, I was not too much impressed by the presentation from IBM. Although some ideas were not bad, the speaker was a bit too much focused on problems of large enterprises, in which employees at the lowest level don’t know what the top managers do.

Then Evgeniy Polyakov, Yandex, spoke about some cases of data storage. Although I could only partially agree with some points, I would give this session 10 scores for brilliant examples and artistic presentation.

Former colleagues at Rambler Anton Gorokhov and Pavel Mezentsev delivered a compelling session on how the company developed a personalization service to make advertising and news more targeted. They told about the used data analysis methods and demonstrated how they were implemented. It took 35 man-months to teach the system detect who (a man/female, their age, preferences, etc.) visits a Web site right at the moment. So, big data—big work!

After some presentations “Using Hadoop with Mail.ru” by Aleksey Romanenko and Maksim Lapan, Mail.ru Group, I reassessed this Web resource. Like some others in the IT community I used to think that the company’s services are merely entertaining and are not really interesting. In reality, it turned out that a lot of experienced professionals are working at the company and they are the early adopters of many cutting-edge technologies. So, Maksim demonstrated a very interesting session on how to optimize HBase.

I would like to thank all the event managers who invited such interesting speakers. Such events are a good opportunity to pick up some new ideas and to learn from the experienced colleagues.

1. AWS is affordable

Over the last couple of years, the cost of AWS has been plummeting. You need to understand that the price you pay for a cloud consists of multiple components. Users often try to multiply the cost of instances by the number of hours used. Unfortunately, doing this does not give you an idea of how much the service costs. To understand, how much you will be paying for your cloud, you should calculate not only the price of cloud computing itself but also the cost of internet traffic and storage. You should also determine, if you need a certain guaranteed bandwidth and an amount of memory larger than that installed on standard instances, etc. In total, throughout the seven years from the moment the cloud service had been launched, its price has fallen by over 2500%.

2. You can pay ten times less for the same AWS resources

If used correctly, AWS can provide considerable computing resources at a much lower cost than it may seem at first glance. For example, if you buy a Reserved Instance as a base node (or a base set of nodes) and use the right type of architecture that will enable your application to process tasks using Spot Instances, the cost of cloud ownership can be reduced drastically. At the same time, 71% of users still use the Instance On-demand model.

3. There are different cloud computing strategies

You can either keep the entire project on Amazon or use Amazon as the public section of your hybrid cloud. For instance, it is reasonable to use a private cloud-based data center for storing critical and sensitive data used by your application, while peak loads that happen during certain days and hours can be processed externally by AWS. This strategy is used to cope with high loads by Zynga, NASA, and many others.

4. There might be downtime even in cloud

Despite the fact that cloud architectures have taken the ease of horizontal scaling and infrastructure reliability to a new level, machines do fail, from time to time. For instance, in 2012, one of Amazon’s data centers remained unavailable for two days. As a result, many popular services, including Instagram, were affected.

By the way, do you know what stands behind the digits you see in Amazon’s service availability warranty that says the service will be available 99.95% of the year? In fact, this means there might be up to 18 hours of downtime throughout a year. However, this is a relatively small issue that can be completely avoided. If you make use of Amazon’s geographically dispersed data centers and if your application has the right type of architecture, your new service may operate without any downtime at all.

5. Successful companies are already using AWS

Large, successful companies, including Foursquare, Quora, Netflix, Dropbox, Airbnb, Zynga, Reddit, and many others, have already been using Amazon’s cloud services for quite a while. By the way, Instagram also uses AWS.

For those who are still considering pros and cons, our advice is: adopt the cloud as soon as possible, there is no point in waiting.

In addition, such Altoros’s customers as ePocket Solutions AS, Watch & Trade ltd., Io Genetic AS, IT4you AS, and Locus Logistics AS provided positive feedback and confirmed great quality of the projects delivered by the company.

Profound expertise of the employees is one of the key requirements to a gold partnership applicant. Altoros’s engineers have proved their skills by successfully passing a number of Microsoft exams, including Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS), Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD), Microsoft Certified Applications Developer (MCAD), Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD), and many other.

On February 22, the participants could attend a free workshop organized by RailsBridge, a non-for-profit organization that contributes into diversity of Ruby community. This organization helps groups of people that are underrepresented in the community to master Ruby to build a well-balanced Ruby world. Juan Pablo was invited as a mentor to share his rich experience.

This time the workshop was targeted at ladies. The only way for a guy to get there was—to bring a woman, who wants to learn Ruby. “When we started, most of the ladies could not write any single line of Ruby code”, Juan Pablo said, “but by the end of the day, together we have managed to develop a Ruby on Rails-based application, test it, and deploy it to Heroku. Pretty impressive”!

Juan Pablo liked the idea of such educating events so much that he decided to organize something of that kind in Argentina. As usually, the end of the event was celebrated with beers, clinking to Ruby prosperity.

Altoros could not stand aside and joined the Ruby wave. Juan Pablo Genovese, a passionate Ruby developer who has been working with this language since 2006, left Altoros’s office in Argentina and rushed to the City of Angels. He had a rather intense schedule, since he was in on all the three days, contributing as a coach and a speaker.

Juan Pablo came up with the session “Where is my scalable API?” in which he dwelled on reducing cloud infrastructure costs through using Goliath, a non-blocking Web server.

According to the feedback received from the audience, about 98% of the people present didn’t know about Goliath and Juan Pablo was educating them.

L.A. Ruby conference is also notable for people, who come to share their experience and pick up a couple of fresh ideas. “I got to meet and talk to Jim Weinrich, Ron Evans, Corey Haines and more BIG Ruby guys. I was kind of nervous when I saw them in the crowd, but well… I was there and I wasn’t going to back down”, Juan Pablo said.

Stay tuned to learn what you might miss, if you didn’t attend the workshops that were organized on February 21-22.

Nicolas Rotta

For three months, the offices grew from two senior developers to 11 highly-qualified senior and mid-level Ruby specialists.

The Argentinian development center focuses mainly on Ruby-based projects. Ruby simplicity and elegance, along with the well-established traditions of Ruby development and the mature community in this country, guarantee profound expertise in project implementation using this language.

Nicolas Rotta is the Director of Operations at Altoros’s office in Buenos Aires. He holds a Master Degree in Information Technology of Carnegie Mellon University and is certified as a systems security and a business-oriented specialist.

Manuel Garcia

Manuel Garcia Manuel Garcia is the Director of Operations at Altoros’s office in Santa Fe. He got his Engineering Degree at Universidad Tecnológica Nacional and is a certified SCRUM Master. Being a Product and Project Manager with +15 years of Software Development experience, Manuel also is an agile methodologies evangelist.

Nicolas and Manuel cooperate closely with the customers throughout the full product lifecycle and help to:

• gather and prioritize requirements
• draw up the product vision and main features
• manage and distribute development tasks
• control project milestones and deadline
• coordinate work of software development, marketing, quality assurance, etc. specialists

To discuss how your project can be implemented with Ruby, call our offices in Argentina:

Buenos Aires: + 54 (11) 32209675
Santa Fe: +54 (911) 63527080

When preparing its Hadoop offering, Joyent turned to Altoros to get independent evaluation of their system. The results showed that virtual Hadoop clusters can provide mare-metal performance with nearly a three times faster disk input/output speed compared to similarly-sized infrastructure.

As for SkyTap, they assume that companies that already use Hadoop in their private data centers may require scaling out for a certain period of time to solve some particular tasks. In this case, it would be easy to do with extra capacities of a virtualized Hadoop cluster.

Read more about other providers of cloud-based Hadoop clusters in the full version of the article in Network World.

The event was dedicated to new approaches, opinions, and ideas on how to deal with ever growing amounts of data. The sessions presented by the speakers covered different aspect of the problem. In the morning, the attendees focused on the future of the big data concept, discussed perspectives, and dwelled on the issue of “How Big Data will “Cross the Chasm” from experimentation to mainstream.”

After a short break the event continued with a panel discussion about big data analytics, its advantages, bottlenecks, ways of implementation, and real-life examples.

Special attention was given to broad opportunities and challenges that big data generates for business intelligence and machine learning projects. There even were provided 10 efficient strategies on how to deal efficiently with such amounts of data and not to become overwhelmed with it.

Big data tools and methods become widely used to solve practical problems in life science. This fact is confirmed by a new type of sessions presented at the event. Jim Adler from Inome spoke about “Building the Information Genome—the Graph of How We All Fit Together” and Dr. Yan Chow followed with “Big Data in Health Care.”

Altoros’s experience in implementation of big data computing, analytics, and storage solutions attracted a lot of visitors to the company’s stand.

However, skeptics argued that it would be hardly possible to create a Flash-based app that would be competitive to native Objective-C apps. And even though it would be developed one day, it will not be accepted by the Apple App Store. In this post, I’ll show an example of an entertainment app that I developed in my spare time using Adobe AIR 3.5. It is already published in iTunes, Google play, and on Facebook. You can download the application to test its performance, usability, and, eventually, get pleasure:

• iTunes
• Google play
• Facebook

The application allows users to play with pics that were already uploaded to a device or have been just taken with its camera. With a tap of their finger, users can smudge images to make them look funny. After that, the amusing “masterpieces” can be shared with everybody on Facebook.

To develop this application, the following default AIR SDK features and Flex components were used:

• horizontal lists, buttons, mobile views, work with images
• work with image galleries and CameraRoll
• work with the frontend and backend camera
• work with files
• work with different DPI and screens of different devices
• Integration with Facebook API

So, by implementing this app I meant to show that cross-platform applications created with AIR exist not only in Adobe’s presentations. This framework enables developers to write the code once and then migrate a ready application to Android, iOS, or Blackberry with minimum corrections. It considerably reduces development time and costs, since one Flash/Flex developer can replace a team of Android, iOS, or Blackberry specialists.

Watch this video to share the best moments with those lucky guys who attended Hackby 2013.

One of the peculiarities of a hackathon is that it’s not merely for developers. People who have managerial or marketing skills were also welcome. At the beginning of the day those who came to the event with an idea of a software product, were given one minute to present the idea and inspire participants to join their teams. After that all participants networked in the hall to staff teams with all the required specialists, developers, designers, quality assurance engineers, etc.

When all organizational routines were over, 24 hours of drive, fun, and codding began.

Experienced mentors and facilitators helped the younger colleagues to shape the brainstormed ideas and shared some useful tips on their implementation.

The panel selected the winning projects in the following categories:

• The best Ruby/Rails project
• The best socially-oriented Android app
• The best mobile app
• The best PHP or Java project
• The best iOS app
• The best Windows Azure-based project
• The best project implemented with Couchbase Server
• The best project implemented with Jelastic
• The best big data project

The people’s choice award was given to the most interesting project selected by the audience.

See more photos from the hackathon in Facebook.

The event was organized by Altoros.

Sponsorship was provided by HTC, VolcanoSoft, Intetics, Flexis, VRP Cloud.

Technical partners: Windows Azure, velcom, D-Link, Jelastic, Couchbase, New Relic.

During the interview, Renat described what Altoros does, gave some examples of how Altoros works, and told about how the company helps their clients to deal with Big Data and the Cloud initiatives. You may watch the full interview below.

Apart from the interview, Renat also had a chance to participate in the exclusive Q&A session with Jeremy Geelan, as well. We’ve already mentioned this in one of our previous posts.

Time passed sweepingly through all the sprints, Scrum-meetings, iterations, code review, and parties, as if weeks of studies fused into a single stream of events. Our former students still have a lot to learn, but the information we managed to squeeze in our students’ heads will soon turn into real experience and professionalism.

The graduation has been celebrated with Ruby AntiParty—a symbolic initiation of newly created developers in the Ruby world.

Furthermore, we have prepared a new educational project, a resource named “I am a Rubyist”, which was developed by the students as part of the training program. It is an open source platform for all Ruby geeks to communicate and share their ideas. The resource is coming very soon. Just stay tuned for the official announcement.

Let’s welcome again our graduates! The next RubyGardens course is coming.

The Altoros’s R&D engineers evaluated two out-of-the-box ways of processing big data with Hadoop on Windows Azure—Hive querying and JavaScript implementations—and compared their performance.

For the research, we created eight types of queries in both languages and measured how fast they were processed. Since we wanted to test how the system would handle big data, we downloaded information on US Air Carrier Flight Delays from Windows Azure Marketplace and generated a data set of 9.15 GB.

The article reveals how additional grouping parameters of the query and type of an arithmetic operation affect the throughput. It also shows the dependency between the number of MapReduce tasks and the speed of calculations. In addition, the paper contains conclusions on how the HDFS block size (8 MB, 64 MB, and 256 MB) influences performance. You’ll find two tables and three graphs with the findings.

Find out the results of the evaluation in NetworkWorld.

Read the full version of the research in the White Paper.

Michael’s presentation was dedicated to the cloud and the ways it affects today’s business. It was named “The Cloud Imperative”, which, according to Michael, implied thinking seriously about how one could use the potential of the resources, provided by the cloud, in making the world better.

Today the cloud affects our life, indeed, making real the things that were impossible some ten years ago, though most of us don’t even think of it. But look at some examples given by Michael.

Thanks to cloud computing, NASA is able to show us other worlds. The images taken in the space are processed in the cloud and delivered through the public web, so anyone can see them. Bio-science uses the cloud in the fields of gene sequencing, drug discovery, etc., all the data being computed in the cloud. And let’s take social services run on cloud architectures, like Facebook or Twitter that power global communication and let people do things that change their lives (Michael recalled the Arab Spring as a very illustrative example of that power).

To make it clear what the cloud really is, Michael gave a sort overview of the origin and the development of this notion, and explained how the cloud became a new word in business, opening ample opportunities and incredible flexibility. He mentioned a great number of companies that use the cloud and the solutions that were created atop this infrastructure. Among them there small start-ups, as well as the biggest multinational businesses.

The speaker dwelld in more detail on two examples. One of them is about a plugin for Facebook that allowed to create videos from photos, adding music to videos, sending it to other FB users, etc. The company behind the plugin ran about 60 servers, but after the launch of the solution, the amount of users grew immensely. The company had to buy and start 3000 servers in a very short period of time. Without the cloud computing the business couldn’t have done this, they couldn’t logistically have the servers delivered, configured, organized, and so on.

Apart from the fact that all the mentioned companies used the cloud, they, as Michael noted, shared a particular experimental approach to business. An agility approach, as Michael called it. And there’s no wonder, because the main thing about the cloud is agility. This means that the cloud allows companies to steadily develop their business, smoothly and timely increasing their powers and resources.

Yes, cloud computing is about the resources. The cloud “provides resources in an agile manner for all of us to take advantage of, at cost that is quite affordable and achievable to us.” And with the cloud these resources are almost infinite.

To conclude the presentation, Michael called everyone to “Think about the new aspirational ideas you can bring to life, think about the potential such resources give us, and about our obligation or responsibility to use them to make the life better.”

Among the speakers were the most notable players in the Cloud field. The event featured a great number of technical sessions, strategic sessions, industry keynotes, and discussions aimed at a detailed overview of the Cloud in terms of business, economy and technology.

Renat Khasanshyn, CEO of Altoros Systems, was one of the participants of the Expo and had a chance to take part in the exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. You may learn more about the session, following this link: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2427596

Furthermore, Renat had also a video interview with Jeremy Geelan, where they discussed the ways Altoros works and helps its customers deal with Big Data and Cloud initiatives. You may watch the video following this link: http://blog.altoros.com/altoros-founders-interview-with-cloud-expo-conference-chair-jeremy-geelan.html

This was made possible with the help of Adobe AIR, a cross-platform runtime that allows for building RIAs that can be run either as browser apps, or desktop, or mobile, and support numerous operating systems.

This Zynga’s move affected the game impressively. Since October, when Ruby Blast was made cross-platform, there was a surge in the number of the game active players, according to the graph provided in an article at insidesocialgames.com, which currently counts 2.3 million.

“Porting a Flash game to a mobile application with Adobe AIR helped Zynga to increase their audience twofold and without having a lot to do. The great thing about AIR is that you don’t have to rewrite applications to run them across different platforms,” says Valery Pesetski, the Head of Flex Development at Altoros and the leader of a local Adobe User Group. “AIR runtime enables developers to take RIAs out of browser borders, making them look and work as native desktop or mobile apps. It helps to reach a wider audience and shortens the development time, as you don’t have to write different pieces of code for different versions of an app.”

Valery has a profound experience in Flex development. Being a part of our development team, he contributed into many Altoros’ Flex projects, including cross-platform development with AIR, as well.

In 2012, the number of NoSQL products reached 120-plus and the figure is still growing. That variety makes it difficult to select the best tool for a particular case. Database vendors usually measure productivity of their products with custom hardware and software settings designed to demonstrate the advantages of their solutions.

As R&D engineers at Altoros Systems Inc., a big data specialist, we were inspired by Yahoo’s endeavors and decided to add some effort of our own. This article is our vendor-independent analysis of NoSQL databases, based on performance measured under different system workloads. It’s an unbiased research to complement the work done by the folks at Yahoo.

Using Amazon virtual machines to ensure verifiable results and research transparency, we have analyzed and evaluated the following NoSQL solutions:

We also tested MySQL Cluster and sharded MySQL, taking them as benchmarks.

The aim of this investigation is to determine the best use cases for different NoSQL products.

Read about the results of the investigation in the article on NetworkWorld.

You may view the full investigation by following this link.

Michael Brandmaier

Managing Director Switzerland
michael.brandmaier@altoros.com
+41 44 383 78 83

Michael Brandmaier joined Altoros as a Managing Director in Switzerland. “Many customers feel more comfortable when they can come to our office and discuss a project or get more details about the company’s experience in person”, Michael says, “Communication with customers and project management are my key responsibilities there.” As a software architect and team lead, Michael has strong experience in both—software development and managing international projects. His work history includes such companies as Accenture AG, ACE Information Technology AG, and CURA Business Solutions AG and projects for such leaders in the financial industry as Raiffeisen Bank, Zürcher Kantonalbank, UBS, Credit Suisse, Swiss Re and SIX.

Michael Brandmaier’s main responsibilities include:

• Communication with customers and demonstration of Altoros’s expertise
• Discussing a project, making estimates and selecting development methodologies
• Building a dedicated team and launching the project
• Project supervision
• Presentation and delivery of the project to the customer
• Negotiation of partnership terms

Watch this video and you will learn how this solution can help you to leverage the advantages of cloud computing platforms and deal with three different types of tasks:

• design applications appropriate for cloud environments
• automate the operation of these apps
• provide control

Also, you’ll hear how to engage in RightScale and get information on how to get “a kind of trusted expertise” from the company before you finally decide to move your applications or load to the cloud environment.

The Altoros’s guys actively participated in the lightning talks and workshops, and shared the solutions for some challenging tasks with other community members.

That is why we love Ruby so much!

You can see more photos by RubyConf Argentina there.

The company’s Founder and Chairman, Renat Khasanshyn presented the results of the research that included performance assessment of such NoSQL databases as MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase Server 2.0. He demonstrated how these databases deal with different types of loads and presented the throughput they showed on the average hardware. Altoros was excited to deliver a session along with such market leaders as NetApp, VMware, Cloudera, Cisco, Datameer, Citrix, eBay, Google, GoGrid, Intel Corporation, Eucalyptus Systems, Apache CloudStack, and many other world-known experts.

Everybody could visit Altoros’s stand to ask in person how the research was conducted, what settings we used, and eventually, learn what database we can recommend for a particular use case.

The research will soon be published in one of the IT magazines.

In his session Renat highlighted that all NoSQL vendors say their databases are fast and scalable, but this is not really helpful for end users. They want to know how a particular database will manage with different types of workloads. To reveal the truth, three popular NoSQL products were compared: MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase Server 2.0. The analysis was made using the YCSB framework and the performance was tested on Amazon virtual machines. The results of the comparison were presented in graphs.

Renat Khasanshyn, CEO, Altoros Systems, Inc.

As usual, when sessions were over the participants had the possibility to mingle and network to discuss the most interesting parts of the day, comment sessions, and exchange their real-world experience.

During two days, the participants enjoyed the following sessions:

• Processing big data with Windows Azure by Aleksey Bokov, Microsoft Russia
• High-performance computing cloud point of view by Aleksey Ragozin, Deutsche Bank
• Eucalyptus history and main features by Sergey Yaroshko and Aleksey Makarevich, Altoros
• Big JVM and garbage collection by Aleksey Ragozin, Deutsche Bank
• Data processing with Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon AWS use cases by Sergey Sverchkov, Altoros
• Fast Hadoop cluster deployment with RightScale by Vitaly Sedelnik, Altoros
• What is data science? by Andrey Palees, Altoros
• Automatic selection of trading strategies by Sofia Teut, NILITIS

Big Data Dive became a good opportunity for all attendees to learn from experience of other experts who work daily on high load projects. Organized by Belarus Java User Group and Altoros, the event was supported by the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform. Attended by approximately 50 people, it was also streamed online at the community Web site.

Belarus, Minsk—Altoros has signed an agreement with the Research Institute for Applied Problems of Mathematics and Informatics of the Belarusian State University to cooperate in data mining and business analysis projects. Altoros will be able to employ solid scientific knowledge of the Institute and get access to a pool of highly-qualified mathematicians. The Research Institute inherited the best traditions and approaches of the classical school of mathematics recognized worldwide. Together the organizations will be able to develop systems that will help people analyze trends and make optimal decisions.

In the modern world, businesses have to communicate daily with numerous partners and deal with data generated within the companies and information obtained from customers, suppliers, and other external sources. Since departments are only able to process data which is directly relevant to their activities, the majority of facts remain useless. As a result, companies have rich data but lack for meaningful information.

Data mining is an analytical process that helps companies and organizations to get complex picture of all operations, activities, and information flows and reveal systematic relations between objects. This properly structured data helps managers to make knowledge-driven decisions, predict the most possible scenarios, and eventually gain additional revenue. The essence of this sophisticated approach is in searching for the dependencies between events and facts that do not seem to be related. For example, it’s possible to forecast how the revenue of the retailer will change if the government passes a new law on taxes. Data mining is widely used across numerous industries and fields including, finance, health care, commerce, education, telecommunications, etc., to enhance working efficiency.

Nowadays, there’re many solutions that can help people to collect information from various sources. Although, when all data is aggregated in a company’s warehouse, it becomes clear that the main challenge is to process massive data sets. There are few specialists worldwide that are able to create systems that can discover knowledge in millions of incoherent facts and records. Such projects require both strong mathematical skills for creation of models and hands-on experience in implementation of such algorithms. In cooperation with Research Institute for Applied Problems of Mathematics and Informatics, Altoros will be able to make a fundamental research of existing data mining models and test their efficiency in different cases.

In general, the analysis of Big Data starts with selecting a subset of records that will represent the main features of a large number of variables. Then, a mathematical model that is appropriate for this type of data is built. Selecting the effective algorithm or its creation from scratch is a very time-consuming process that demands professional skills in both mathematics and IT. When the model is chosen and tested on a small selection of records, it’s applied to the entire database. The result of this process is an artificial intelligence system that can be used to make decisions in conditions of lack of certainty, create customer-oriented messages, predict future changes and adjust a business strategy in advance.

About the companies:

Altoros is a global software acceleration specialist that focuses on development of high-load enterprise systems, business analysis and data visualization solutions using cutting edge technologies, including NoSQL and Cloud.

Research institute for applied problems of mathematics and informatics focuses on solving practical tasks using scientific approaches. The institute has real-life experience in Big Data analysis and artificial intelligence. Their experience also includes statistical analysis, mathematical modeling, and information security.

Aarhus, Denmark—the first CloudCamp in Denmark featuring both Cloud and NoSQL-related topics will take place on Tuesday, October 2, 2012. Traditionally, CloudCamp will be held as a part of GOTO Copenhagen, which is a conference for software developers, IT architects, and project managers. As a result of the information explosion, many projects require using NoSQL and Cloud in tandem. Experts will share their first-hand experience in implementation of projects involving both NoSQL and cloud computing. You’ll hear the following 5-minute lightning talks:

• “Big Data, Big Complexity – Why?” by Atchik-Realtime
• “Cloud – When the hype is over!” by IBM, based on the results of their survey conducted on 600 Danish customers to analyze cloud popularity in Denmark
• “Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities” by Roberto V. Zicari, Prof., Doctor of Engineering, Goethe University Frankfurt. The presentation describes how Big Data tool-box can help to solve social problems, such as  preventing/predicting natural catastrophes.

The list of speakers is not full and new topics will be added soon.

“Many companies have already understood the advantages cloud computing can bring to their business: reduced costs, scalability, and high availability of resources, Kim Jonassen says. However, very few companies worldwide have actually deployed cloud infrastructures. People are talking about cloud but are very reluctant to use it. Why is it so? What prevents businesses from using this advanced technology? We decided to organize a CloudCamp to find answers to these questions and learn from those who have managed to implement cloud in real life”.

According to Kim, traditional for the CloudCamp topics such as SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS will be discussed. But in a world driven by social networks, Web 2.0-based applications, business intelligence, and data analytics solutions, companies need fast data access, almost instant query processing, and a possibility to store an unlimited number of records. NoSQL databases and distributed computing tools are good at dealing with such tasks, Kim explains. That is why big data and cloud solutions are frequently used together. So, it’s important to discuss how to use these technologies to achieve better results.

The CloudCamp is a participant-driven unconference format that is widespread around the world. Over 350 successful unconference events have been held over the last four years and this popularity is explained by a special relaxed learning atmosphere and high audience involvement. The participants are free to select the topics they want to discuss and ask any questions. The event is a good opportunity to learn unbiased expert opinions and network with cloud users, consultants, and vendors.

CloudCamp Schedule, 2nd of October 2012:

• 17:00 – Welcome & Introductions
• 17:10 – Lightning Talks:
• 18:00 – Unpanel
• 18:45 – Break / Information on Breakout sessions
• 19:00 – Breakout Sessions Round 1
• 19:25 – Breakout Sessions Round 2
• 19:50 – Wrap-up.
• 20:00 – 24:00  Afterparty/beers at a local secret location

This will be the fourth CloudCamp organized by Altoros in Denmark. Previous events in Silkeborg, Copenhagen, and Aarhus got positive feedback from cloud admirers.

About the Organizers:

Altoros is a global software acceleration specialist that focuses on development of high-load enterprise systems, business analysis and data visualization solutions using cutting edge technologies, including NoSQL and Cloud. Learn more on Altoros Denmark.

Couchbase is the result of a successful merge of Membase and Couchone. In this interview, you will discover what database type Couchbase will become after the 2.0 release and will learn what programming language was chosen to increase performance of the product. In addition, Bob revealed what improvements are being made to overcome the greatest disadvantage of Couchbase.

Bob Wiederhold, President and Chief Executive Officer, Couchbase. The source: Tek-tips.nethawk.net.

That was also useful that Bob tried to differentiate the current NoSQL market and emphasized two main groups of products according to their functions: real-time operational and batch-oriented analytics solutions. In the full version of the article you’ll see what databases belong to each group and what tasks they help to solve. Also you’ll see a table showing Bob’s predictions on the role and market niche size of the most popular database types.

Read the full version of the interview!

In this video, Vitaly M. Golomb, Founder, Chairman & CEO of Keen Systems, Inc, recollects how he realized the need to shift the printing service to Web in 2008. He mentions three factors that make Keen’s products so successful and handy for users.

Keen is one of the companies “500 Startups” has invested in and in 2012, they got the InterTech Award for its innovative cloud-based Web-to-print solution.

You’re welcome to watch the presentation.

NoSQL Now! is a conference dedicated to NoSQL technologies (Not Only SQL). The main aim of the event is to provide objective information on various database types (column stores, key-value stores, XML and object databases, graph databases and triple stores, document stores) and cover the possible areas of their implementation. The main focus of the conference is database performance issues, Big Data analytics, and database reliability, availability, and scalability.

Also, you’ll discover the variety of NoSQL types and understand why all of them exist at the same time. You will see the main principles of NoSQL databases and reveal their best use cases. When a new technology appears in the market, soon the community predicts the replacement of the old solutions by the new ones. Listen to Bob Wiederhold’s opinion about what to expect in the field of distributed databases in the near future and what’s meant by a new “more prominent model”.

Couchbase is a privately held company with the headquarters in Mountain View, California and the development offices around the world. They created a Couchbase Server, an open-source NoSQL database for serving data-intensive, rapidly growing, powerful Web applications in the modern virtualized or cloud environment. Altoros helped Couchbase to create a product that is now deployed by AOL, Deutsche Post, NTT Docomo, Salesforce.com, Starbucks, Zynga, and other world’s leaders.

• IaaS starts dominating the market of cloud solutions.
• The number of cloud providers increases giving better choice of partners to implement cloud.
• More companies choose cloud infrastructure and other types of cloud services as a strategic tool for improving their business’ efficiency.

Watch this video to learn why customers are in the advantageous position now, what you should pay special attention to when you want to move to cloud, and how it helps you to manage your daily tasks better.

“One of the reasons why companies are reluctant to partner with remote teams is that they are worried about the communication barriers and weak control over project progress,” Tommy Hansen says. “I know this because I’ve worked as a Project Manager before and owned IT4you, so I often needed developers who would bring my ideas to life. This experience gave me deep understanding of the typical problems that other companies face when they delegate work on a project to others. This is why we have offices in different parts of the world, so that customers can communicate with us locally.”
“We are native speaking Norwegians, so, when we negotiate or start up a project, customers from Scandinavian countries can contact us directly and, we will then communicate their requirements to our team. We can also participate in all conversations regarding the project to clarify any details at any stage, if needed. This helps to avoid any misunderstanding and misinterpreting of the requirements.”

“Another issue is that sometimes a company doesn’t have anybody with proper technical background in their office to explain precisely what they need. Tommy Hansen can work at a company’s office and communicate with the staff and executives and then contact the development team to explain exactly what the customer need. We can take on all organizational aspects.”

Before choosing a company for partnership a customer wants to be sure that they make the right decision. Both Tommy Hansen and John-Eirik Falch will be glad to answer all your questions, provide information on Altoros’s experience in different areas, and discuss any terms.

You are welcome to contact Tommy Hansen and John-Eirik Falch on the following matters:

Choosing the appropriate cloud platform, however, can be difficult. They all have pros and cons. So, when a customer asked me and my colleagues at Altoros Systems, a software product development company, what would be the best cloud platform for his project and why, we decided to take a deep look at the most notable systems available, compare their capabilities, and summarize the findings in a product-by-product table. We tested CloudStack, Eucalyptus, vCloud Director and OpenStack.

The goal of this unbiased comparison is to help you align your business requirements with the capabilities of a particular cloud system and – finally – select the best-fit product. Read the full text of the article on NetworkWorld.

Description

Nayatek Datosphere is an integrated platform that provides content archiving, indexing, search, and storage management for electronically stored information within an organization.

Nayatek Content Archiving Pros

• Datosphere’s content archiving functionality can improve system performance and help organizations optimize their servers by reducing the burden and the potential for data loss and system downtime.
• The service features federated, redundant, or disaster-recovery archive storage topology and data-neutral architecture—a true content archiving platform that is not committed to any particular type of data. This ensures that organizations can evolve and adapt to new ESI (electronically stored information) formats, changes in legal requirements, and the impact of compliance.
• Datosphere’s open storage layer provides organizations with a wide range of storage options, allowing them to work with standard storage devices, protocols and scenarios that best fit the needs of an organization, including local storage, DAS, SAN, NAS, CAS, iSCSI, and other devices via NFS/CIFS.
• The federated nature of Datosphere provides the ability to select multiple independent storage devices that could be scattered over the network and see them as one larger virtual federated storage pool. This grid-based federated storage helps companies achieve location-independence by abstracting the physical location of the data.

Nayatek Cons

The main Nayatek Content Archiving platform’s drawback is that it supports e-mail archiving only for MS Exchange. For Linux users this means the requirement to install Exchange-compatible clients.

Datosphere provides support of standard file system interfaces only (CIFS/NFS), while REST (Representational State Transfer) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) APIs are not supported. This drawback can be essential for archiving data to the cloud storage.

Nayatek Recommended Use

Nayatek Content Archiving will suite companies that deal with large volumes of data, such as big enterprises, social media networks, as well as banking, finance, government, healthcare, and education organizations. The service’s flexible retention policies allow it to be utilized by different types of businesses for setting and enforcing data retention. In addition, Datosphere’s ability to combine physical servers and virtual machines can enable even the smallest companies to implement redundant storage and provide effective disaster recovery.

We decided to join Dave Nielsen’s initiative and helped him to organize a BigData Camp, a pre-event that took place a day before the Hadoop Summit started.

On June 12^th, 2012, at the beginning of the camp, Renat Khasanshyn and Sergey Bushik made a lightning talk on “Making Hadoop & Cassandra work together”. They demonstrated the results that can be achieved when these products are applied together in one project. The New-generation Energy Management System, which they showed as example, was designed by Altoros’s engineers to ensure energy usage control. It had to record consumption data from devices and appliances located in 1,000 houses and add 50,000 records to the database every 15 seconds.

Having real experience in implementing data-intensive projects, our guys had something to say to the community and presented the following breakout sessions:

• “Benchmark tests of NoSQL databases and how to choose the right one”, Renat Khasanshyn
• “Machine learning: using Hadoop capabilities in data analysis”, Ksenia Romanuk
• “Comparison of Hadoop platform distributives”, Vadim Truksha

After the sessions, the participants discussed burning questions during the panel session. Renat Khasanshyn, Founder and Chairman of Altoros, was glad to help Hadoop and NoSQL advocates to find solutions to the challenges they encountered in their work.

Soon, two days of the exciting conference were over and to wrap it up on June 14^th, Scaling Your Hadoopers event was organized. It was an informal networking dinner where the employers from leading companies, such as Sears (MetaScale), Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, Cloudera, HortonWorks, and some others could discuss how to find great Hadoop talents and create favorable conditions for their productive work.

Akiban Server is an open-source database that enables getting access to NewSQL documents and at the same time preserving the existing SQL architecture. During the development of this solution more than 50,000 standard queries that slowdown the performance were analyzed. A table-grouping principle that was put into the basis of the solution helps to tackle these issues and accelerate the processing of queries.

The Webinar informed on:

• how NewSQL paradigm helps to increase business efficiency
• how to make SQL solutions more flexible and scalable without changing or rewriting the architecture
• the main principles of Akiban Server that enable accelerating SQL systems performance
• real use cases of table-grouping method

If you’re interested in NewSQL technologies, you can always find the latest updates on NewSQL events hold in Silicon Valley on NewSQL Meetup Group.

Jan-Terje Nordlien

CEO, Altoros Norge AS

Two years have passed since Altoros opened new offices in Oslo and Porsgrunn, Norway. Jan-Terje Nordlien, CEO of Altoros Norge AS, states that during that time the company has achieved over 60% growth.

The employment limits and delays make it difficult for Norwegian companies to find the right people to join the projects. It’s extremely complicated to replace an underperforming team member, which means that the company has to be 110% sure, that a selected candidate will fit well. Altoros’s flexible staffing strategy helps to speed up hiring process and enables to add new members to the team within hours.

Altoros Norge AS is officially registered in Norway and operates in compliance with the legislation of the country. The contracts are transparent and are based on the laws of Norway.  A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is an essential part of our work, which ensures full protection of your intellectual property rights. Customers like it that the local team speaks Norwegian and they can submit the project requirements in their native language.

You’re welcome to learn more about our Norwegian office or contact Jan-Terje Nordlien, CEO of Altoros Norge AS.

In this interview, Jarl Spandow, CEO of the ePocket Group, explains what makes this product so popular on the Norwegian market. He reveals the key principles of ePocket’s mission, explains what helps the company understand people’s wishes, shares some secrets on how to make software affordable for a great number of users. You will learn how to make a successful product and grow in the international market.

Wherever you were sitting, at any corner of the site, you could enjoy the presentations and now you can do the same reading this post at your office or home.

The sessions are available on the Internet:

1. Approaching Web Application Deployment in 2012 Lee Hambley (Gamburg, Germany)
2. Modular web applications with Netzke Denis Gorin (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
3. Nacked Technologies Sergey Sergyenko (Minsk, Belarus)
4. Continuations in Ruby Anton Vasiljev  (Minsk, Belarus)
5. Riak − Highly Available Key-Value Store Vladislav Gorodetsky (Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine)
6. Getting Started with Couchbase and Ruby Sergey Avseev  (Minsk, Belarus)
7. Adaptation of the semantic network model to the traditional ORM interfaces (based on Spira и ActiveModel) Vyacheslav Kravchenko (Minsk, Belarus)
8. CloudFoundry–Ruby open-source cloud platform Aleksey Klyuchnikov (Minsk, Belarus)
9. Open Source: contributing is not a burden Sergey Nartymov (Minsk, Belarus)
10. The LVEE Engine Pavel Chebotarev (Minsk, Belarus)
11. Using IronWorker efficiently Andrey Dyagel (Brest, Belarus)
12. Real-life experience of using NoSQL data storage Andrey Novikov (Minsk, Belarus)

Lee Hambley talks about Web applications deployment

Apart from traditional lightning talks and unpanel expert discussions, all attendees were involved in fascinating entertainment activities. That was time of their life for passionate football players, volleyball fans, and even brave archery novices.

In everyday life you are used to tackle all argues in an amicable way while on the open air you could show who is actually right on a sumo tatami. You might think these guys lack some grace, but believe it’s not easy to move in this “uniform”.

If you weren’t there that day then you didn’t try a mini-tramp, play badminton, and catch a Frisbee.

Those who thought that their talent is not limited by Ruby expertise showed their literature gift. You definitely know the game “write the end”, when you’re supposed to finish a saying. Smile reading the winning variant. “Lambda and proc picked into a bar... Got some drinks. Started conflicting. Lambda got out of control and proc got out of the bar.”

The party continued with BBQ, beers, and a popular music band show.

We hoped that the participants would like the event and we were happy to read a feedback from Lee Hambley. When he returned home, he posted a long detailed article dedicated to Ruby Open Air in his blog. He shared his general impressions about Belarus, recollected the event itself, gave some travel tips, and much more.

“Go To Belarus. If you can’t go, hire their engineers. You will quite possibly be changing someone’s life. It’s a nation full of driven, passionate, friendly, curious and intelligent people; hire them to work remotely, as freelancers or via Altoros, or a similar company. Invite them to work whilst visiting your company in your home country; the chance to practice speaking native English whilst on location, and the quality of work you will receive is a win for both sides,” Lee Hambley wrote.

The event was organized by Belarus Ruby on Rails User Group and Altoros.

Alexey started with an overview of the most popular mobile platforms, describing their shares in the market. He proceeded by observing five types of tools that can be used for building cross-platform applications, including: JavaScript libraries, wrappers around Web applications, native code transformers, frameworks, and Adobe Air tools. Furthermore, Alexey compared the pros and cons of different types of cross-platform development tools.

Below, you may view the full presentation by Alexey:

Description

Application delivery controllers were developed in response to a need to improve the performance and reliability of traditional Web applications, but they have moved on significantly from simple hardware devices that were load-balancing TCP connections. Zeus Traffic Manager is an application delivery controller for managing bandwidth. This tool controls application traffic, while inspecting, transforming, and routing requests as it load-balances them across the application infrastructure.

Zeus Traffic Manager Pros

• Zeus Traffic Manager enables application acceleration, traffic prioritization, and bandwidth usage control to mitigate the effect of flash floods. It also features such capabilities, as TCP offload, traffic buffering, concurrency control, and HTTP optimizations. Zeus Traffic Manager helps to offload compute-intensive tasks, and its integrated HTTP content caching reduces the load on system infrastructure.
• Zeus Traffic Manager can be deployed in the manner that best suits business needs: as software for Linux or Solaris servers, as a Virtual Appliance for many Virtualization platforms (VMware Virtual Infrastructure, VMware vSphere, XenServer, and OracleVM), and on any supported Cloud infrastructure platform (including Rackspace Cloud, Joyent, and Amazon EC2).
• Zeus Traffic Manager features different administration and diagnostics interfaces, including the Web-based administration interface, SOAP, and Command Line APIs.
• Zeus Traffic Manager can give greater control over managing application traffic with Zeus TrafficScript. It’s a simple scripting language, built right into the core of Zeus Traffic Manager. It gives finer control over how individual requests are optimized, routed, and transformed, enabling traffic management rules to be created using Java™ extensions.
• Optional features of this platform include real-time analytics (which provide deep insight into application traffic, supports operational staff while diagnosing problems and anomalies, and helps QA and development staff in understanding how clients interact with their applications), application firewall module (which adds a full Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Web application firewall for complete and scalable application protection), and application auto-scaling (which interacts with virtualization and cloud platforms to control how an application is resourced in response to load and performance).

Zeus Traffic Manager Cons

The challenges one may face using Zeus Traffic Manager include customization of traffic management policies and requirements to have necessary knowledge on networking, particular programming languages, and monitoring extensions. This problem is, however, common to a number of other traffic management and monitoring tools, as well. So, you just need to bear that in mind.s

Zeus Traffic Manager Recommended Use

Zues Traffic Manager can be utilized to work with high-loaded content-enabled applications (CRM, BPM, ECM, CMS) and composite content platforms. Content management systems, social networks, information access services, engagement and collaboration systems, and publishing services may also find this solution especially useful.

The following lightning talks were included in the agenda:

• “Cloud Computing — looking below the waterline” by Jesper R. Stormholt from Google. The speaker dwelled on using public clouds and the quick wins this service gives to business. The analyst shared Google’s observations of cloud computing impact on business processes and even corporate culture.
• “PaaS — Why-when-how and maybe why not?” by Henrik Hasselbalch from IBM. Henrik Hasselbalch presented the viewpoint of many IBM’s customers towards Platform-as-a-Service versus IaaS and SaaS, and explained why it seems an efficient alternative to them. He shared his thoughts on future development of hybrid clouds.
• “Cryptography — a wonder cure for cloud security?” by Jakob I. Pagter from Alexandra Institute. In this session the speaker analyzed whether it is safe to rely fully on cryptography to ensure protection in the cloud.
• “Designing an IaaS cloud” by Alex Bligh from Flexiant. This presentation was dedicated to special features and challenges that may arise while creating an IaaS cloud.
• “Team development in the cloud: utilizing an IaaS public cloud for continuous integration” by Lars Kruse from Praqma. The presentation was based on the experience the team got while they configured the unique lab-and test environments in the KVM-based public cloud.

“Danish IT community likes CloudCamps because they give freedom to talk and discuss what you’re really interested in,” Kim Jonassen, a Country Manager of Altoros in Denmark, said.

The event was so successful that Kim brought this “unconference” meeting to Silkeborg Valley.

The event featured a number of tracks on a variety of topics, including, cloud computing, Big Data, mobile technologies, software architecture design, security issues, Agile process, and many others. Kim Jonassen, a Country Manager of Altoros in Denmark, was a coordinator of the NoSQL track and presented the agenda.

Alexey Karpik, Web Platform Developer at Altoros, was invited as a guest speaker to present a session “Cross-Platform Tools: Build once and Run Everywhere”. The presentation provides an overview and analysis of tools and frameworks that are available in the market.

Sergey Bushik, Senior R&D Engineer at Altoros spoke at the Solution track and gave a session “Evaluating NoSQL performance: time for benchmarking”. The presentation is based on the research of NoSQL databases Sergey conducted. He analyzed features and peculiarities of different NoSQL products using the same environment to avoid any bias.

This presentation got a very positive feedback and many attendees visited Altoros’s stand to learn the details of Sergey’s research. “People feel baffled,” Sergey said, “The variety of NoSQL products is too overwhelming and people get lost in them. The lack of objective reviews makes the problem worse. People want a “silver bullet” and asked us to help them choose.”

“NoSQL Knockout” session—a panel discussion that featured the representatives of the world’s leading NoSQL vendors—was organized for the first time. Here, all the participants could talk to the vendors directly and ask any topical NoSQL-related questions. For example, when some bugs will be fixed, some functionality added, or what performance results were achieved in reality.

On Thursday, Altoros organized a free CloudCamp, where Big Data and Cloud discussions continued.

The event focuses on community engagement, which enables checking the motivation, revealing personal traits, and interacting to candidates face-to-face, rather than examining their CVs.

Altoros has already helped many start-ups to grow into mature projects. The team enjoyed the atmosphere, communicated to colleagues, and picked up lots of fresh ideas.

I found out that there are quite a lot of ways to create animated objects with HTML5. Although, this technology still doesn’t enable designing sophisticated animation for mobile devices, just some animated objects can be created. To implement animation with HTML5, the following methods can be used:

• CSS3
• DOM (Document Object Model)
• Canvas
• SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)

It should be mentioned that the suggested methods are not universal and may not be supported by or run on the same on mobile devices.

For example, Android Web browsers don’t support SVG format, thus, the banners converted with Gliffy will not play on Android devices.

The same is true about a banner converted with Swiffy.
CSS3 can be played both on Android and iOS and, although, the performance leaves much to be desired, still we’re considering mobile devices and they shouldn’t be compared to desktop hardware.

Then I dwelled on porting a Flash game to “canvas”. If the game is played on desktop, then HTML5 performs the same as Flash, but when it’s launched on iPad, it evidently lacks speed. You can compere 2 versions of the game there:

• Alpha HTML5
• Alpha Flash

Surely, a game ported to HTML5 can be optimized, but in my opinion, it’s a bit more costly than simply compiling it to a native app using Adobe AIR. Furthermore, with stage3d support the application will fly!

What can be done if the company has a game portal with multiple Flash games and the traffic from mobile tablets increases? Redirecting users to Apple store for downloading and app there and losing some of the visitors you are definitely not considering, especially when your company needs to retain existing users besides gaining new. The developers of this portal faced such an issue and they shared their strategies of overcoming it at FITC Amsterdam 2012. They opted for HTML5 games and compared the performance of the application built with canvas and DOM.

• Touch Test canvas
• Touch Test DOM

It was revealed that the DOM based games perform better. You can follow the following links to see the examples of their games:

• KidsPlatformer
• CBBCPlatformer

I’d like to attract your attention to the fact that these games have controls. Unlike building native apps, we can’t create a virtual joystick with HTML5. Some browsers start scrolling the game and, as you see, using a keyboard for navigation is unhandy.

To sum up, at the moment using CSS3 for animation and DOM for games seem to be the most convenient cross-platform HTML5 solutions.

I asked Adobe’s representatives about considering the mentioned technologies and they explained that if it’s already possible to build an app with HTML5, then it’s better to do it using HTML5, although this technology doesn’t currently provide broad capabilities. According to Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe’s speaker, for many years, Flash dominated RIA development, but this technology is proprietary and belongs to a single owner which is a limitation. Nowadays Adobe has to adjust to the more democratic Web and partner with such companies as Google, Apple, Microsoft, W3C and Webkit. As for Flash, now, the sphere of its implementation is narrowed mostly to Gaming & Premium video. This technology will be also used for other purposes but they will not take top priority for the company.

The talent Fair helped ambitious Ruby developers to reveal new perspectives, talk face-to-face with the potential employers, and learn about the companies’ news and future plans directly from the representatives.

The relaxed atmosphere of the bar favored to a more natural and productive dialog. The employers were able to speak with the candidates and pre-select a list of developers they would like to join their team.

During the event all participants were able to enjoy gourmet sandwiches, free beers and cocktails. The fair was ended with amazing piano music.

We’re grateful to all sponsors who helped us make this event happen!

72 sessions covered the variety of topics, including unknown things that can be done with Ruby, productivity, security, tools and frameworks, refactoring methods, mobile Web, making projects international through localization, and many others.

As usual, the event included time for “unconference” discussions and Lightning Talks that enabled the participants to exchange ideas with a relaxed vibe.

The Lightning talks limited by ten minutes allowed for presenting a variety of sessions on database as a service, including Amazon RDS, SQL Azure, Database.com, Xeround, FathomDB. Some stand-alone products functionality was also covered and best use cases were provided.

The event featured the following speakers and panelists:

• Blake Connell, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, VMware
• Dr John R Busch, CTO, Founder, Chairman of the Board, Schooner, Inc.
• Alexey Kobozev, Chief Architect, Xeround, Inc.
• Cory Isaacson, CEO, CodeFutures Corporation
• Leif Walsh, Engineer, Tokutek, Inc.
• Ori Herrnstadt, Co-Founder and CTO, Akiban Technologies, Inc.
• Robert Geiger, VP, Engineering, TransLattice, Inc.
• Sergei Tsarev, CTO and Founder, Clustrix, Inc.

Kim Jonassen, the Managing Director at Altoros Denmark, gave an interview to a Danish daily newspaper in which he recollected the facts from the company’s way to success in Denmark and commented the decision to join Silkeborg Valley. You can read the article here.

Description

Server Density is a service that enables users to analyze CPU load, memory, processes, disk usage, network traffic, and other metrics across a variety of servers. It can be utilized for monitoring Apache status (requests per second, idle and busy workers), disk space (used, free, percent of capacity for each volume), IIS requests per second, MongoDB status (connections, op counters, memory, index counters and asserts), MySQL status (connections, slow queries, slave seconds behind master), network traffic(received/transmitted), Nginx status (requests per second, current connections), RabbitMQ status (connections, consumers, messages, messages unacknowledged, messages uncommitted, memory), and SQL Server—lots of metrics!

Server Density Pros

• Server Density is easy to install and doesn’t require advanced configuration. Server Density’s agent can be configured in seconds and is supported by Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
• Server Density’s dashboard is able to auto-refresh itself and to present the latest monitored values for each of its target servers.
• The visual display options of Server Density ease the monitoring of both physical and virtual servers.
• Server Density is also available for iPhone.
• The service offers various plans and may be deployed either as a fully managed hosted service or self-hosted on off-site servers. In the hosted mode, the monitoring agent needs to be able to communicate with the master servers. Data is only sent one way: from the monitored server to the master servers—over a standard HTTP port 80. There is also an option to use SSL, which requires the 443 port to be open. Alternatively, the self-hosted option of running Server Density entirely behind your own network can also be purchased.

Server Density Cons

• As a Linux-based hardware monitoring tool, Server Density provides challenges for Windows administrators.
• You have to write your own custom plug-ins, in case you need to measure certain performance metrics that your monitoring tool does not support.
• Though Server Density can help you find out when servers are overworked (so that an administrator can tweak settings or add capacity), it lacks appropriate mechanisms for automatically load balancing application traffic and managing bandwidth.

Server Density Recommended Use

The Server Density agent can suit start-ups and small companies that need to monitor multiple servers and quickly react to system downtimes or overloads.

This blog post will focus on Scout Monitoring—the service for managing server and application performance and analyzing Cloud needs.

Description

Scout is a hosted monitoring service for managing server and application performance. The Ruby-based solution enables tracking of server resources and the ability to alert its users via e-mail, SMS, or RSS. It combines a flexible plug-in system with a hosted service. From a user’s perspective, there is just one technical component: the Scout Agent, which is a small Ruby program distributed as a Ruby gem. A cron job runs the Scout agent every few minutes, while it collects performance metrics from your system. Those metrics are then sent back to scoutapp.com via secure HTTP. The agent neither opens up ports, nor accepts any incoming connections; it communicates outwardly only, and only over regular HTTP port 80. On the server side, Scout is built on a pretty standard open-source stack: Ruby, MySQL, RRDTool, Apache, and Linux. Scout’s server side component is a traditional Web application. This is where users create their accounts, view alerts, configure trigger thresholds, browse graphs, etc.

Scout Pros

• Scout Monitoring offers a number of advantages for businesses, as well as allows developers to build their own modules to customize monitoring arrangements and track specific metrics. Scout can monitor CPU load, disk usage, MySQL performance and slow queries, I/O stats on any number of devices, Apache status, Nginx, EC2 Cloudwatch, and more.
• Scout can be extended by additional Ruby plug-ins, such as those already available for monitoring Ruby on Rails, Phusion Passenger, and others.
• Scout’s open source component stack—very robust and mature—provides with competitive prices, enough to cover licensing costs.
• Finally, Scout features separating the data collection mechanism (Sinatra) from the end-user site (Rails). Scoutapp.com can be updated with zero interference to data collection. From an operational standpoint, this means that all updates can be pushed without affecting business-critical data collection mechanisms.

Scout Cons

The challenges one faces when monitoring the Cloud include observing multiple hosts or the necessity to gain Ruby skills in case one encounters Ruby applications. There are also mandatory requirements for hosted monitoring; in particular, the executional environment (Ruby), which is required to be installed on any system node a user wishes to monitor. However, specific to Scout, it has not been much of a problem, because Ruby is increasingly commonplace and many Linux distributions already have Ruby installed. If Ruby is not already installed, it is just an “apt-get” or a “yum install” away.

Scout Recommended Use

Scout application is designed for companies that need to monitor and analyze multiple performance metrics of mostly Ruby applications and servers.

The spacious room could hardly seat all the attendees who are passionate about cloud computing. The conference featured leading engineers from Microsoft Russia, Fujitsu Technology Solutions, Ciklum, HP who shared their experience in working with particular cloud systems, defined the problems they faced, explained how they overcame them, and highlighted the benefits they got from using cloud solutions.

Dave says, cloud computing is OSSM (awesome), which stands for on-demand, self-service, scalable, and measurable. We do agree with him!

More and more questions appeared on the white boards for unpanel discussion. Thanks to the open format of the conference, the participants were free to ask about everything. They selected the topics they wanted to be discussed and wrote down the questions for the experts.

Some participants took a chance to talk to Dave Nielsen (whose “alternative name” is Mr. Cloud), who willingly shared his opinion on cloud trends, perspectives, some good practices, and successful cases.

During the Breakout Sessions, the participants could get additional information on the issues that still seemed unclear to them. The unconference format helps to break the barrier between the speakers and attendants and encourages a more fruitful cooperation.

We’re there! You might already know these guys .

When all the sessions were over, questions were answered, and ideas were discussed, the after-party started. Why not to try the image of a brave boxer if everything you need for it is just a console and good company around.

The band set the mood and everybody could demonstrate a dancing talent. Or the lack of it . Anyway it was funny.

Can you imagine a developer who doesn’t like beer? We have failed as well, so traditional beer time became a vital part of the event.

Finally, the sponsors of the event presented a photo camera to the winner of the lottery.

The first CloudCamp in Eastern Europe proved that informal communication and the possibility to talk to experts face-to-face leads to more efficient knowledge transfer.

We’ve been working on multiple mobile projects for Jurasoft AG and Paul Camacho was so amazed by the results we’ve achieved that he agreed to participate in our video and share his impressions about working with us. The short video demonstrates two versions of an iPad Adobe AIR application. The first one was developed by our customer and the second one was refactored by Altoros’s Flash/Flex development team.

Seeing is believing. Let’s watch!

Providing verifiable customer references was one of the obligatory requirements on the way to obtaining Silver status. That was probably the easiest stage for us. Our deep understanding of our customers’ goals and needs helped us to achieve very positive feedback. This accomplishment demonstrates that we’re a reliable partner and “The new status also shows our customers our commitment to producing quality” said Renat Khasanshyn, CEO of Altoros.

Description

Jungle Disk is an online backup and recovery tool that stores data on Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files. The use of Jungle Disk can improve security and prevent data loss, protect user files against loss, theft, viruses, and natural disasters.

Jungle Disk Pros

• One of the advantages of Jungle Disk is its high availability provided by multiple servers across the world.
• The solution is extremely flexible, since this software is available for both Windows and Mac OS, having the same functionality across both platforms.
• It is worth to mention the software’s single license that allows a user to install and use it on all of her/his computers at no additional charge.
• Another advantage is the simplicity of the Jungle Disk installation process and further setup. Once the Jungle Disk Simply Backup software is installed, the first step will be to enter Jungle Disk account credentials into the software.After logging in with credentials, you will need to create an online disk where all of your data will be stored. During the next step, the user will configure the automatic backup functionality.
• The server-grade automatic backup feature allows users to easily backup their critical data to the cloud in a set‐it-and-forget‐it fashion.
• Jungle Disk has solid security concerns to backing up and storing user files, so far as it encrypts user data with AES-256 encryption—a government and industry standard that is one of the most well-studied and most secure encryption algorithms available. Jungle Disk uses a unique key for each file and constructs the key using an HMAC file that helps protect against certain attacks. You will learn about the master key that is based on a password you choose, known only to you and not stored with Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk Cons

One of the main drawbacks of Jungle Disk—and this is also true for all backup products and services developed to operate in a Cloud environment—is that the choice of cloud providers to be used is commonly limited to only a few providers. As a result, this can be unacceptable for software solutions already hosted on a different cloud platform.

Jungle Disk Recommended Use

Jungle Disk can be attractive for small businesses that are not able to afford massive backup solutions. It is primarily designed for users who want to easily backup their critical files for protection or restore data that is lost or corrupted.

Description

Splunk Log Aggregation is a logging, monitoring, analytics, and reporting tool that enables system administrators to index, search, alert, and report on performance data from applications, servers, and network devices. In real time, it provides unique visibility across your entire IT infrastructure from a single location. Splunk stores crawled data in a searchable repository and can generate graphs, SQL reports, and alerts. It is intended to assist system administrators in identifying patterns and the diagnosis of a problem. Log files can be correlated across systems and software components, which can help administrators uncover the cause of system failures.

Splunk Pros

• Splunk possesses a customizable search engine, which is intuitive to administer, and the ability to train its parsing engine.
• Nowadays, there is an enormous amount of live data from your IT systems that system administrators and other people in your company have to monitor every day. Doing that is time-consuming, stressful, and often a real challenge. To overcome this, Splunk gives system administrators a single interface to search, report, and alert on all IT data, across the entire IT infrastructure. Splunk can be applied to any unstructured data and used to analyze events, such as Web analytics, telecom call records, earthquake data, and so on. Search results can be assembled into larger and more familiar concepts or groups, such as “IP Addresses” or “Failed Transactions.” Furthermore, Splunk can process data from just about any source, including files, directories, ports, and scripts on local or remote machines, and keep track of changes to them as they happen.
• Another powerful feature of Splunk’s data crawler is the ability to define and extract custom fields from the event data. Splunk’s search application has its own search language, similar to Google’s, which allows users to search by expression, AND-OR logic, and to exclude terms, etc. In addition to that, the Splunk search language implements the “pipe” concept, allowing users to apply operations, such as sorting, filtering, and grouping, to intermediate search results and pass them to the next operation. The Splunk Report building tool can accept search engine output and create graphs of different types: bar, pie, XY axis plots, etc.

Splunk Cons

• Users, however, have reported some challenges that were faced during the implementation of real-world Cloud deployment projects. They included database clustering, Cloud Provider coupling, as well as the potential cost escalation.
• There are also limitations on types of source data that logging/monitoring tools (including Splunk) can process and the necessity to carefully check your logging software configuration. Although a regular PC should be enough to get started, there should be mentioned other requirements for deploying monitoring tools in the cloud effectively, such as a high-performance dedicated server for each of the tool’s components. In some cases, licenses issued for personal usage can possess certain limitations, making them inadequate for getting the necessary level of visibility, compared with offerings for large organizations.

Splunk Recommended Use

Splunk is a recommended solution for making a search through logs much simpler and easier to do, particularly when your IT infrastructure produces a huge amount of similar log data. Having saved searches for common problems can be invaluable in identifying problems; it enables users to finding a cause very quickly, which could be very important in real-time applications.

As a Head of Flex Development Department at Altoros, I regularly deal with our customers. There’s a question that I’ve been asked quite often recently, which is how to port Flash animation, interactive maps, or banners on customers’ Web pages to iOS using HTML5 and arrange all this at a minimal cost. HTML5 is the technology that makes it possible to play animation on iOS devices . So, I’ve conducted a research in which I tried three ways that enable porting Flash objects to iPad and iPhone using HTML5 and presented the results that I achieved in a session “How to convert Flash to HTML5″ at Adobe Flash Platform User Group. To demonstrate the differences between Flash, HTML5, and native apps and identify the best tool for a particular purpose, I’ve designed three variants of one game. The first one was a common Flash version that required Flash Player to run. The second one was converted to HTML5 and was demonstrated using desktop browser and then iPad to show the performance differences. And a final version was ported to a native application with the help of Adobe AIR runtime.

You can try HTML5 and Flash versions of the game here:

Alpha Rocket HTML5
Alpha Rocket Flash

My colleague Pavel Blagov, a Developer at Altoros, continued a topic of cross-platform development and presented an overview of PhoneGap, an open-source mobile development framework that supports seven mobile platforms. He dwelled on two modes of building applications with it and emphasized the limitations he faced while using this tool. Pavel made some performance tests and compared the speed of command processing using PhoneGap and a native code.

To involve the attendees into presentations and encourage them to participate in questions and answers session, the organizers announced some Adobe-labeled prizes. When the event was over, the proud winners carried Adobe souvenirs and started sharing their guesses about the next meeting.