The Challenge of Mixed Environments
Application performance monitoring (APM) vendor dynaTrace the other day released the results of a survey it sponsored looking at the impact of heterogeneous environments on application performance and stability.
Now it's hardly news that a dynaTrace-inspired survey might find that mixed environments can impair application robustness. After all, such situations would merit the use of (surprise!) sophisticated APM tools to detect, diagnose and address these problems. What is interesting is that .NET/Java interoperability was singled out by the most respondents (53.8 percent, to be exact) as an obstacle to effective performance management. Virtualization, service-oriented architectures (SOA), and to a lesser extent cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) were also cited.
What does it all mean? Well, dynaTrace thinks that the ongoing success of.NET development is in part to blame, as once-exclusive Java shops find themselves slinging both .NET and Java code. As the survey notes: "While exchanging data between Java and .NET platforms can be relatively simple, it is more difficult to understand the behavior of heterogeneous systems from an end user’s perspective."
These kinds of challenges aren't likely to go away, the survey release notes, as Microsoft continues to ply an ever more open course. Witness yesterday's release at the RSA Conference of Microsoft's U-Prove cryptographic technology CTP under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP).
Does the dynaTrace survey jibe with your experience, or have you been able to manage the challenge of maintaining scalability and performance in mixed Java/.NET application environments? Let me know!
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/03/2010