Review: eBook: Saas for Dummies

As i wrote some days ago, Oracle provided this book as free download:

Here my review:

The book starts with the chapter "recognizing modern business challenges and opportunities". The author comes up with things like "business transformation starts with digital transformation" or "businesses will need to rethink every element of their business". It contains a typical opening for this topic.

The next chapter has the title "Empowering Business Managers with SaaS Solutions". The focus here lies on how to use the cloud for your sales process. One short citation: "Robust  sales  cloud  solutions  are  so  much more  than  contact  lists,  schedules,  and sources of prospects." Another focus are the advantages for HR professionals to finding and retaining top talents with the help of SaaS. For further information the following link is provided:  www.oracle.com/goto/mit-tech-review

At page 35 of 68 chapter 3 starts. "Transforming you Business with SaaS". There are given some helpful links like "www.oracle.com/cloud/saas-scalability.html" or "www.oracle.com/cloudtco" and some others.

Chapter 4 ("Choosing Your Path to the Cloud") talks about building hybrid
environments and extending apps with social, mobile and process capabilites. I think without some additional links, this is much to short.

By far the best chapter is chapter 5: "Ten (or so) Important Questions to Ask you SaaS Provider". I will not reveal these questions (and answers) on this blog - but this is really helpful. Nevertheless the answers are sometime too short.

From page 57 up to 61 a glossary is provided.

My conclusion on this book: This is a really good quickstart into SaaS but not a deep dive into this topic. Thanks to Oracle to provide it as free download.

Microsoft Azure: First steps (create an account and logging in)

After doing a lot of things with amazon webserivces (AWS) i decided to take a look an Microsoft Azure.

Starting point is azure.microsoft.com

 

I just clicked on "Start free" and was asked to login with any already existing microsoft account (live.com, etc). In the registration process you have to provide a phone number for verification (by call or by message) and             then your credit card information. 

No worries, microsoft offers a start with 170$ credit:

After the registration you can attend to an online course,

 but i decided to move onto the portal:

And here we go:

 Looks like the settings manager from XFCE (a linux desktop manager) ;-)

I clicked on virtual machines and of course there are listed no machines but a big blue button for adding VMs.

 But this will be topic of another posting...

eBook: Saas for Dummies: free download from oracle.com

If you visited oracle.com today you hit the following landing page:

And if you are interested in that book, just hit the "get saas for dummies" button and after a few clicks, you have downloaded this ebook:

68 pages is not so much - i will try to read it and give a review in a later posting.

Java 11: JEP 318 Eplison / A No-Op Garbage Collector

This week i read about the new JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP) of Java 11.
One of my favourites is JEP 318:

The summary of this JEP says:

Develop a GC that handles memory allocation but does not implement any actual memory reclamation mechanism. Once the available Java heap is exhausted, the JVM will shut down.

For which scenario could this garbage collector be useful?

If you skip to the "motivations" at the JEP, i found the following very interesting:

Performance testing. Having a GC that does almost nothing is a useful tool to do differential performance analysis for other, real GCs. [...]

There are other points mentioned there which are also interesting, but this performance calibration is in my opinion one of the most important ones.

One other is important too:

Extremely short lived jobs. A short-lived job might rely on exiting quickly to free the resources (e.g. heap memory). In this case, accepting the GC cycle to futilely clean up the heap is a waste of time, because the heap would be freed on exit anyway. Note that the GC cycle might take a while, because it would depend on the amount of live data in the heap, which can be a lot.

This can be quite helpful for Oracle fn or for some special docker images, where a java funtion is called and after the execution the process is terminated.
Let's if this feature will get used in the future....