Chris Tofts

One of the key principles of designing any high availability system is to make sure only vital apps or functions use it and everything else doesn't – sometimes referred to as KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). High availability or reliability is always technically challenging at whatever systems level it is achieved, be it hardware …

"In our country," Alice told the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, "you'd generally get to somewhere else – if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" the Queen replies. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get …

Managers of enterprise systems are being bombarded by messages touting the supposed benefits of cloud for cost reductions and greater IT “flexibility.” Bosses are pressured to, for instance, develop a hybrid solution of off- and on-premises systems: the difficult stuff is left in the company’s private cloud, and the rest …

Legacy, or technical debt – call it what you will – has always been a major challenge to techies looking to move forward and never more so than now, as you're being asked to shift data centre software to the cloud. Possibly the biggest challenge in dealing with legacy is identifying who “owned” an application when it was …