Lori MacVittie

Lori MacVittie is responsible for education and evangelism of application services available across F5’s entire product suite. Her role includes authorship of technical materials and participation in a number of community-based forums and industry standards organizations, among other efforts. MacVittie has extensive programming experience as an application architect, as well as network and systems development and administration expertise.

Prior to joining F5, MacVittie was an award-winning Senior Technology Editor at Network Computing Magazine, where she conducted product research and evaluation focused on integration with application and network architectures, and authored articles on a variety of topics aimed at IT professionals. Her most recent area of focus included SOA-related products and architectures.

She holds a B.S. in Information and Computing Science from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University.

Multi-Tenancy Requires More Than Just Isolating Customers

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Multi-tenancy encompasses the management of heterogeneous business, technical, delivery, and security models.

Last week, during what was certainly an invigorating if not agonizingly redundant debate regarding the value of public versus private cloud computing , it was suggested that perhaps if we’d just refer to “private cloud” computing as “single-tenant cloud” all would be well.

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Cloud Lets You Throw More Hardware at the Problem Faster

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Hidden deep within an article on scalability was a fascinating insight. Once you read it, it makes sense, but because cloud computing forces our attention to the logical (compute resources) rather than the physical (hardware) it’s easy to overlook.

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Why IT Needs to Take Control of Public Cloud Computing

Thursday, June 3, 2010

IT organizations that fail to provide guidance for and governance over public cloud computing usage will be unhappy with the results....

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Architectural Multi-tenancy

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Almost every definition of cloud, amongst the myriad definitions that exist, include the notion of multi-tenancy, a.k.a. the ability to isolate customer-specific traffic, data, and configuration of resources using the same software and interfaces. In the case of SaaS (Software as a Service) multi-tenancy is almost always achieved via a database and configuration, with isolation provided at the application layer. This form of multi-tenancy is the easiest to implement and is a well-understood model of isolation.

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Cloud Load Balancing Fu for Developers Helps Avoid Scaling Gotchas

Monday, May 17, 2010

If you don’t know how scaling services work in a cloud environment you may not like the results. One of the benefits of cloud computing, and in particular IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is that the infrastructure is, well, a service. It’s abstracted, and that means you don’t need to know a lot about the nitty-gritty details of how it works. Right? Well, mostly right.

Continue reading Cloud Load Balancing Fu for Developers Helps Avoid Scaling Gotchas.

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Is PaaS Just Outsourced Application Server Platforms?

Thursday, May 13, 2010

There’s a growing focus on PaaS (Platform as a Service), particularly as Microsoft has been rolling out Azure and VMware continues to push forward with its SpringSource acquisition. Amazon, though generally labeled as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is also a “player” with its SimpleDB and SQS (Simple Queue Service) and more recently, its SNS (Simple Notification Service). But there’s also Force.com, the SaaS (Software as a Service) giant Salesforce.com’s incarnation of a “platform” as well as Google’s App Engine.

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They're Called Black Boxes Not Invisible Boxes

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Infrastructure can be a black box only if its knobs and buttons are accessible. I spent hours at Interop last week listening to folks talk about “infrastructure.” It’s a hot topic, to be sure, especially as it relates to cloud computing.

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Virtual Infrastructure in Cloud Computing Just Passes the Buck

Thursday, April 29, 2010

There are many good reasons to go down the virtual infrastructure road. The illusion that it’s cheaper than dedicated hardware solutions is not one of them.

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The Other Hybrid Cloud Architecture

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Generally speaking when the term “hybrid” as an adjective to describe a cloud computing model it’s referring to the combining of a local data center with a distinct set of off-premise cloud computing resources. But there’s another way to look at “hybrid” cloud computing models that is certainly as relevant and perhaps makes more sense for adoptees of cloud computing for whom there simply is not enough choice and control over infrastructure solutions today.

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Amazon Makes the Cloud Sticky

Friday, April 16, 2010

Stateless applications may be the long term answer to scalability of applications in the cloud, but until then, we need a solution like sticky sessions (persistence). Amazon recently introduced “stickiness” to its ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) offering. I’ve written a bit about “stickiness” before so I won’t reiterate again but to say, “it’s about time.” Remember that most web applications today rely upon state (session) to store quite a bit of application and user specific data that’s necessary for the application to behave properly.

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