adam bien's blog

We are a group of Java expert middleware engineers with a passion for building large scale production Java infrastructure that delivers on Scalability, Performance, High Availability, Security and Operational manageability through dev ops principles. We help our customers during development with technical architecture, performance engineering, production configuration transition through to operations. We provide advice on deployment, operational management and finally this is all underpinned with 24/7 remote operational support and administration. We cover the whole range of Java middleware from application servers through to Data Grids and SOA infrastructure across a range of vendors and open source products.

We've had a long history helping customers to use GlassFish in production environments. In fact my first ever conference speech in California was at Sun's CommunityOne conference on Monitoring and Tuning GlassFish back in 2009, so we go back a long way. We were Sun partners back then, promoting GlassFish, and our now Oracle Gold Partners. We have a number of customers we support on GlassFish and we also run the London GlassFish User group. With the announcement from Oracle we are now gearing up our effort to build up the community of contributors on the core GlassFish source to ensure a good response when bugs and patches are needed.

What is C2B2's Commercial GlassFish support? What will a customer get for the money?

We provide 24/7 operational support to customers deploying GlassFish in production. If they have any problems with their GlassFish production infrastructure or the application they have built running on top of Glassfish, they can call us and one of our expert GlassFish engineers will help them by remotely logging in or screen sharing with them to triage, diagnose and fix the problem. If we discover that the problem is the result of an underlying bug in GlassFish we will work in the GlassFish community to create a fix and ensure any fixes are contributed back to the core source. We have standard SLAs for response times with Priority 1 incidents responded to within an hour 24/7. For our Gold and Platinum customers we also provide a pool of remote administration hours that customers can use to task our engineers to assist in deployments, performance tuning, production configuration and other consultancy tasks. For larger customers our support is unlimited so we just agree a single monthly fee and don't count cores, JVMs or anything silly of that nature so you can scale out happily without incurring more cost.

We are working with a number of customers using GlassFish in projects at various versions. Recently we've been working with some customers in the US using GlassFish for payment processing , for hosting sporting events and for SAAS. In the UK we've been working with customers using GlassFish for big data analytics, SAAS and Online gaming. There's a lot of interest in GlassFish, it's a great polished, open source application server.

We provide the same operational support across a lot of Java middleware from RedHat, Oracle, Hazelcast, IBM and open source and often provide support for mixed environments. We also provide general consultancy services on Java middleware. One of the interesting areas we find is moving into hybrid cloud environments and the elasticity they bring for test and development as well as for customers that have bursty work loads. Areas where cloud excels, so we've been doing a lot of work on auto-upscaling clusters in response to load.

The London GlassFish community is a Meetup group http://www.meetup.com/GlassFish-User-Group/ open to anybody interested in GlassFish and JavaEE. Our aim is to get like-minded people in a room once every couple of months in London and invite in interesting speakers, like yourself, to discuss their experiences with GlassFish in particular and JavaEE in general. With GlassFish becoming a truly open-source project just like Tomcat we will widen this out to build a community of people here in the UK interested in contributing to the GlassFish project and we hope we can become a unified voice in the UK through which we can drive things with Oracle. We've already had a good response from the GlassFish evangelists like Reza Rahman and Bruno Borges and we hope that through the GUG we can deepen that involvement. Finally as well as speaking we are hoping to run hack days and bug days to hack, fix and contribute to the GlassFish source. If all the people that love GlassFish and JavaEE band together we can help GlassFish thrive as open source. If you look at Tomcat, there is no single source of commercial support and it is definitely not dead, it is the most popular application server out there!

If you / your company also provides commercial support for GlassFish and you would like to be interviewed on this blog, just drop me an email or comment.