Koyana introduces it’s new website.

Koyana’s website has been moved from Apple’s MobileMe to GoogleApp Engine. We’re using a combination of Java and Flex to provide more flexibility and control over content.

If you’re looking for old content we’ll be making it available in the next six weeks.

Koyana open-sources Basecamp-data importer

We’ve released code for a Basecamp data-importer as project Texa hosted on BitBucket. The importer is based on Grails. Texa imports your Basecamp account XML file and stores your information in a database you can configure.

We use Texa to create a database for customized project tracking and reporting applications written in Grails and Flex.

Rob MacGregor

Rackspace’s open cloud

Rackspace have made their cloud-servers controllable via an open-source API. Rackspace’s API allows programmable control of server configuration, deployment and control; and that includes re-imaging a server.

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/

What is Mission Critical?

So what is ‘Mission Critical’? The term gets used a lot and, frequently, confused. Here’s a clarification for the perplexed.

Mission Critical is describes something that your mission cannot succeed without. For example if you’re flying a plane your engines are mission critical. If you have an website that generates all your company revenue it’s mission critical.

Often mission critical is confused with two other terms; safety critical and high-availability. ‘Safety critical’ describes a system that, if it failed, would put lives at risk. Your car’s brakes, air-traffic control and are examples of safety critical systems.

High availability is used to denote systems that meet a designated level of operating continuity. For example your telephone system appears to run at all hours, day and night; also described as 24×7. In fact our telecommunications system has a high-availability of, at worst 99.999% uptime, equivalent to approximately five minutes of downtime per year. Many of the systems we use today have become high-availability systems, like ATMs, cable TV and web-sites. In general many businesses maintain some presence 24×7.

Although mission critical and high-availability systems can be useful, building them can incur extra costs. A wise step in creating any system is to identify only those components that are require to e mission critical and, possibly, high-availability.

They key to successful mission critical operations is understanding what your mission is; these questions can help:

What’s your mission?
What systems support your mission?
Which support systems are high-availability systems?

Take a look at your own software project and see how it measures-up against these questions.