Sven Hammar

For the past few years, our friends at VMblog.com have run an annual prediction series forecasting the trends most likely to drive adoption of cloud and virtualization technologies in the upcoming year. This is the second year in a row that they’ve invited me to contribute, and I thought long and hard about the assignment. After a deep gaze into my crystal ball, a deliberate shuffle of the tarot cards, and much careful contemplation, I settled on six major predictions, six changes to how solution providers and organizations will approach performance management in 2013. Some of these predictions I’ve already alluded to here on the Apica blog, but I also included a few we haven’t yet discussed. VMblog.com published my post a few weeks ago, and they were kind enough to let me share it with you here as well. So read on for my post, “2013: The year of application optimi... (more)

Lessons Learned from the Amazon Web Services Outage

On Monday, Amazon Web Services — the leading provider of cloud services — suffered an outage, and as a result, a long list of well-known and popular websites went dark. According to Amazon’s Service Health Dashboard, the outage started out as degraded performance of a small number of Elastic Bloc Store (EBS) storage units in the US-EAST-1 Region, then evolved to include problems with the Relational Database Service and Elastic Beanstalk as well. WEBSITE DOWN: AWS outage takes down Reddit and other popular sites The only surprising thing about this AWS outage was that anyone was sur... (more)

New Amazon Web Services data center in Sydney added to Apica Agent Network

Earlier this week, Amazon added a brand new Amazon Web Services (AWS) Region to its Global Infrastructure. The Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, as it is being called, offers important benefits to organizations operating in this area. Companies can run their cloud-based applications through the new AWS data center to reduce latency and other performance issues for local users without having to own and operate their own costly infrastructure. The new AWS Region is great news for Apica customers as well, who can now use the Amazon Cloud to test and monitor their websites and application... (more)

Load Testing to Detect Advanced Persistent Threats

I’ve written before about how capacity planning and load testing tools can help companies prepare for a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, but we’ve begun to see a new class of attacks emerge, called Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), whose aim is much more sinister than a slow response time or “page not found” error. What is an Advanced Persistent Threat? The intentions behind APT are all about espionage — not just state-sponsored espionage but also extensive and well-organized industrial espionage. APT is not about any particular technology or technique. The actual a... (more)

Apica named one of the fastest growing technology companies

FAST TRACK: Apica named one of the fastest growing companies by the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA Great news! For the second year in a row, Apica has been ranked on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 as one of the fastest growing technology companies in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). We’ve been working diligently over the past year to add new partners; expand our geographic footprint; deliver even more comprehensive cloud, web, and mobile performance monitoring and testing solutions; and all around improve service delivery for our customers worldwide. And all... (more)