Red Hat’s JON 3.0 Boosts End-to-End JBoss Manageability for Physical, Virtual, Cloud 
Red Hat is shipping an update to JBoss Operations Network with new features for end-to-end management of applications and services across physical, virtual and cloud resources. IDN speaks with Red Hat execs about JON 3.0’s upgrades for enterprise-wide operations and management.
Red Hat is shipping an update to JBoss Operations Network with new features for end-to-end management of applications and services across physical, virtual and cloud resources. JON 3.0 aims to build on JBoss’ success with departmental appdevs and become more attractive to IT execs responsible for enterprise-wide operations and management tasks.
JON 3.0 offers a single point of control to deploy, manage and monitor JBoss Enterprise Middleware, applications and services end-to-end across all environments, Alan Santos, a product manager for Red Hat’s JBoss unit, told IDN.
As an example, JON 3.0 provides detailed metrics about application performance and availability. In addition, if SLAs aren’t being met, JON 3.0 allows IT managers to detect, view and respond to the problem by spinning up new instances or connecting to or expanding a cluster as needed, he said.
“It’s all about the recognition that continual management of a company’s production environment is getting more complicated and yet is even more crucial to the business,” Santos said.
To address this dual mandate for reliability and simplicity, JON’s latest version provides IT ops tools to:
- provision middleware and applications,
- manage middleware resources across the entire application lifecycle and
- monitor applications for SLAs, performance and availability
“Among our core appdev audience, JBoss has been very successful, even against the big [middleware] guys like IBM, Oracle and so on. That’s because we’re simpler to use, and we can be counted on by that community to meet their needs,” Santos said. “We want JON 3.0 to carry on that momentum to the whole enterprise and let IT operations managers know that JBoss can meet their needs also, no matter whether they use physical, virtualization, cloud or any combination.”
Alan Santos, Product Manager, JBoss
In one example of meeting a growing IT ops pain point, JON 3.0 added features to respond to the huge adoption of virtualization. “We’ve already seen a ton of our customers adopt virtualization, so JON 3.0 helps IT deal with the fact they are no longer managing just a monolithic application or stack. Today, it’s about being able to handle instances and services that combine together to deliver an [application function],” Santos said.
Another notable JON 3.0 upgrade Santos said, is “drift management,” which helps better manage configuration drift, as well as find and reduce issues with performance and availability caused by unplanned (or undesired) config changes. This feature provides IT a complete audit trail, along with the ability to track the impact of changes. Where needed, it also lets IT easily revert changes and go back to earlier versions, Santos told IDN.
Other JON 3.0 additions include:
- Responsive provisioning and configuration To enable users to automatically execute provisioning and configuration scripts in response to monitoring alerts
- More ease of use These design features include a simplified and consistent layout, improved dashboard customization and a more responsive UI
- Enhancements to JBoss provisioning To enable users to deploy applications to a group of one or more JBoss servers
- Apache mod_cluster plug-in To add support for managing mod_cluster-based server clusters for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2.x and 5.1.x
The latest JON updates are also aimed at helping JBoss carry the momentum and loyalty it has captured over the years among departmental devs and project leads, and go to the next step with the IT officials at the corporate or enterprise level, Santos added.
Even though many high-level IT executives may be running hundreds or more JBoss [instances], they don’t know much about JBoss, so those projects are won by the larger middleware or management firms, Santos said. JON 3.0 looks to attract the attention of enterprise-wide IT managers with its new end-to-end features, as well as by taking the cost and complexity out of management and maintenance costs, he added.
