I must first say congratulations to the Red Hat IT department! They did a wonderful job with the conversion to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.3! Next, a little history for the uninitiated.
Red Hat's IT department has built many applications that are used in the day-to-day operations of Red Hat. Prior to the JBoss acquistion, they used a lot of standalone Tomcat, with some in-house customizations I am told. Of course, like a lot of IT shops, these applications grew organically based on need, and there really wasn't an organization dedicated to creating a standard infrastructure and architecture for all applications. Recently, a new architecture organization was born, and led by Matt Hicks. This organization is the one responsible for pulling together a standard infrastructure and architecture for existing as well as new application efforts within Red Hat. This is a wonderful development from the middle-ware divisions perspective, as it gives us a partner to work with internally. It has also spawned a completely new open source project around virtualization and provisioning that is quite impressive! You can see the resulting Genome project at:
Genome
With that, Red Hat IT has moved all the customer facing web applications from the old Tomcat infrastructure to the new JBoss EAP 4.3 infrastructure. With this move, they now have a completely standard infrastructure and architecture that can be replicated through the Genome work in a moments notice. So, what were some of the benefits?
Well, first, they are leveraging the clustering capabilities within JBoss EAP, and have a highly-available deployment, that also scales very well across the cluster. Second, they were able to achieve significant performance improvements. They have been able to reduce the hardware that these applications were running on by 50%, and still have more head room for growth than under the old Tomcat infrastructure. This makes for an incredible savings in hardware, power and cooling costs!
I would also like to give a special thanks to the project lead, Chris Duryee. Having worked in IT departments over the course of the first 21 years of my career, and I can really appreciate all the hard work, and diligence these types of conversions take!
Of course, this is not the end of the story for Red Hat's IT, but just the beginning. In the future, they will also be leveraging our Enterprise SOA platform, and we look forward to the amazing results of that effort!
Congratulations to the entire team!
Red Hat's IT department has built many applications that are used in the day-to-day operations of Red Hat. Prior to the JBoss acquistion, they used a lot of standalone Tomcat, with some in-house customizations I am told. Of course, like a lot of IT shops, these applications grew organically based on need, and there really wasn't an organization dedicated to creating a standard infrastructure and architecture for all applications. Recently, a new architecture organization was born, and led by Matt Hicks. This organization is the one responsible for pulling together a standard infrastructure and architecture for existing as well as new application efforts within Red Hat. This is a wonderful development from the middle-ware divisions perspective, as it gives us a partner to work with internally. It has also spawned a completely new open source project around virtualization and provisioning that is quite impressive! You can see the resulting Genome project at:
Genome
With that, Red Hat IT has moved all the customer facing web applications from the old Tomcat infrastructure to the new JBoss EAP 4.3 infrastructure. With this move, they now have a completely standard infrastructure and architecture that can be replicated through the Genome work in a moments notice. So, what were some of the benefits?
Well, first, they are leveraging the clustering capabilities within JBoss EAP, and have a highly-available deployment, that also scales very well across the cluster. Second, they were able to achieve significant performance improvements. They have been able to reduce the hardware that these applications were running on by 50%, and still have more head room for growth than under the old Tomcat infrastructure. This makes for an incredible savings in hardware, power and cooling costs!
I would also like to give a special thanks to the project lead, Chris Duryee. Having worked in IT departments over the course of the first 21 years of my career, and I can really appreciate all the hard work, and diligence these types of conversions take!
Of course, this is not the end of the story for Red Hat's IT, but just the beginning. In the future, they will also be leveraging our Enterprise SOA platform, and we look forward to the amazing results of that effort!
Congratulations to the entire team!
2 comments:
Jboss uses Tomcat as its web container so not sure how the performance could have been improved? It might be earlier RH might be running on old Tomcat version and JBoss EAP 4.3 bundles latest version of Tomcat.
Our internal Tomcat has changes to it to integrate it into our infrastructure, like deployment and clustering, so its not completely the same, even if it was the same version.
Besides the changes to Tomcat itself, the applications are now using our Transaction engine, database connection pooling, and other infrastructure, that was different in the standalone Tomcat infrastructure.
I don't have specific details yet on exactly where the differences in performance originate from, but I hope to have more details from our IT department later.
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