Consulting Chronicles

Last year we created a system called « call for paper », which allows anyone to propose their session and be part of the official program! Its success was made apparent through over 50 proposed sessions and nearly 20 callbacks! Once again this year, we invite you to propose your session, with the deadline set on the 4th of March, 2013: Do you have a biography, a session title and resume, and a high-definition picture? Are you an opinion leader, a referent on one or…

This is the END.   We created an iPad app for Keytrade Bank, and we just launched it!, You can download it here. Please contact us if you what to talk with us about this reference & our expertise!   Mixed feelings: happiness because it’s really a major achievement, nostalgia because we really loved building this app and now we are just slightly nervous as we hope users will love to consult their accounts, transfer money and trade using the Keytrade app as much as we enjoyed…

I had a job opportunity recently to work as an SOA architect, on SOA projects, in the SOA team of a consulting company. As many companies still make it their marketing, at OCTO we get annoyed with the negative effect of SOA term usage in lots of situations. Such situations include confusing marketing purposes, global IT strategy of a company, or SOA compliant architectures of many kinds. These approximations tend to hide weaknesses behind this term. We rather prefer to discuss on concrete solutions with respect to customer…

After applying as much as possible the DevOps principles for more than a year on the run of a highly business critical project of one of our customers, here are some golden rules we eventually found out and tried to stick with. Items are here presented from an Ops perspective.

Through this post I would like to share with you the continuous delivery chain that we’ve successfully set up. My point is to describe the whole chain (from the Svn check in to the feedback loop to get the deployment status) and highlight some tricks that we discovered. In our context, we cannot speak about Continuous Delivery without addressing the DevOps approach that we clearly have in our teams. This approach gives the opportunity to share our needs and exchange points of views between the…

As the Apache Hadoop ecosystem grows while its core matures, there are now several companies providing business-class Hadoop distribution and services. While EMC, after it acquires Greenplum, seem the biggest player other companies such as Cloudera or MapR are also competing. This article introduces Datastax Brisk, an innovative Hadoop distribution that leverage Apache Hive data warehouse infrastructure on top of an HDFS-compatible storage layer, based on Cassandra. Brisk try to reconcile real-time applications with low-latency requirement (OLTP) and big data analytics (OLAP) in one system.…

It's been a while since we last blogged about Apache Cassandra. Let's catch up with the new features available from version 0.7+.

I'm starting today a new series of articles called Classical Issues. In it, I'll address, one after the other, classical issues encountered through my software engineering years. This first article is targeted to demystify computing and give some best practices for an enterprise application. By enterprise application, we mean an application working on things like money, prices and quantities. It will be in two parts. This one is about explaining the root of the problem. The second one will show how to handle it in…