Tuesday, February 24, 2015

2015-02-24 Tuesday - Seattle AWS Architects and Engineers meetup

Tonight I attended a presentation organized by the Seattle AWS Architects and Engineers meetup group:
http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-AWS-Architects-Engineers/events/219822234/

Rob Cummings (Operations Group Manager, with Nordstrom) discussed the AWS adoption within the Nordstrom enterprise - and the organizational change management and cultural shifts involved.


Sunday, February 15, 2015

2015-02-15 Sunday - Sony VAIO VPCF23BFX/B SSD Upgrade

Last night I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my Sony VAIO VPCF23BFX/B laptop with an SSD.  The Sony support site was less than useless...

As part of my research, I relied on the SSD section of Tom's Guide - and in particular, the recent article: Best SSDs for the Money, January 2015

My existing OEM HDD was a 640GB, 7200 RPM, Toshiba HDD2E81 MK6461GSY

I decided to go with a Patriot Ignite 480GB SATA 3 2.5 (7mm height) Solid State Drive-With Transfer Speeds of Up-To 560 MB/s read, 545 MB/s write. For simple convenience, I decided to get my unit at a local Fry's Electronics...although Amazon's price today would have been a bit better ($199.99).




The Patriot 960GB SSD was also a consideration ($547.99) - but as this laptop may become a secondary machine later this year - I'm looking at this as an interim experiment.

For cloning the original HDD, I decided to go with the Corsair SSD Hard Drive Cloning Kit (listed for $22.69 on Amazon today)




Removing the HDD was a simple process of removing the 8 screws:

  • [2] screws securing the HDD drive bay plate (on the bottom of the laptop)
  • [2] securing the HDD caddy
  • [4] securing the HDD to the caddy


For those unsure of just how to replace the HDD in their laptop, these two articles [link #1, link #2] may be of interest.

During the cloning process, I selected the advanced option to perform verification - which may have significantly increased the time it took to clone the HDD drive (~2.5 hours).

Overall, this was a painless exercise, and I am very pleased with the speed improvements. Booting Windows now seems to take about 25 seconds, and after login - my system is ready for work within 3-5 seconds (previously, with the HDD, this start-up phase... might take several minutes).

Another option I may consider in the future - a 2nd HDD SSD caddy using the laptop's optical drive bay

Sunday, February 01, 2015

2015-02-01 Sunday - Microservices

The Seattle Java Users Group (Seajug) mailing list recently included a link that may be of interest to folks who wish to learn more about microservices...
http://blog.arkency.com/2014/07/microservices-72-resources/

And, you may be interested in reading the article by Martin Fowler and James Lewis (from March 25, 2014)
http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

While attending QCon and Strange Loop conferences last year, I noted microservices were certainly garnering a large percentage of mind-share in the various scheduled sessions...

In my own consulting work, I have recently started working with a new client that uses RESTful services exclusively in their architecture (no classical Service Bus) - and most of which I would certainly consider classifying as microservices. This is quite a change from my last two client engagements (over the last 5 years) - who were strong adopters of the classical Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) - with heavyweight canonical message models.


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