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 attack can range from social engineering, viruses and trojans, network
sniffing, and even brute-force attacks. What makes an APT attack new and
different is that it is perpetrated by well-financed organizations that have
a specific goal to achieve. While the ordinary hacker will simply look for... (more)
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)
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 t... (more)
While all eyes were on Tampa, Fla. and Charlotte, N.C. these last two weeks
for the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, we had our eyes, and
monitors, on Twitter to see if and how these events impacted Twitter’s
website performance.
As is the case with most big news events today, people took to Twitter in a
big way for real-time information and broke some records in the process.
After the Republican National Convention (RNC) concluded last week, Twitter
reported that 4 million tweets were sent out in total about the RNC.
Following the conclusion of President Obama’s s... (more)
Could you imagine NASA sending a rocket into space without testing it first?
What about a racing team putting a brand new car on the track without taking
it for a few laps to test the handling and stability? It seems to me that
testing is inherent in every technical field — except for website
development that is.
Too often we see websites where it’s clear that design was the main
priority, while testing the site’s functionality and user experience was
just an afterthought. What you’re left with is a great looking website that
feels like it is being sent over the Internet via car... (more)
Sven Hammar is Co-Founder and CEO of Apica. In 2005, he had the vision of starting a new SaaS company focused on application testing and performance. Today, that concept is Apica, the third IT company I’ve helped found in my career.
Charles Araujo
Emily Jackson
Brendan Harding
