Discussion Topic

Before you begin, research Linux services. After you have completed your research, choose two services that run on a Linux Operating System. Choose different services than your classmates have chosen and also different services from the one you chose in the Linux Virtualization and Containers discussion.

In your original post, answer the following about each of the services:

• What is the name of the service?
• How does the service work?
• How do you install that service?
• How do you configure that service?
• How do you secure that service?

Some of the earliest known examples of recorded information come from Mesopotamia, which roughly corresponds to modern-day Iraq, and date from around the middle of the fourth millennium BC. The writing is called cuneiform, which refers to the fact that marks were made in wet clay with a wedge-shaped stylus.

A particularly famous mathematical example of cuneiform is the clay tablet known as YBC 7289.

This tablet is inscribed with a set of numbers using the Babylonian sexagesimal (base-60) system. In this system, an angled symbol, <, represents the value 10 and a vertical symbol, |, represents the value 1. For example, the value 30 is written (roughly) like this: <<<. This value can be seen along the top-left edge of YBC 7289.

The markings across the center of YBC 7289 consist of four digits: |, <<||||, <<<<<|, and <. Historians have suggested that these markings represent an estimate of the length of the diagonal of a unit square, which has a true value of  (to eight decimal places). The decimal interpretation of the sexagesimal digits is, which is amazingly close to the true value, considering that YBC 7289 has been dated to around 1600 BC.

What we are going to do with this ancient clay tablet is to treat it as information that needs to be stored electronically

The choice of a clay tablet for recording the information on YBC 7289 was obviously a good one in terms of the durability of the storage medium. Very few electronic media today have an expected lifetime of several thousand years. However, electronic media do have many other advantages.

The most obvious advantage of an electronic medium is that it is very easy to make copies. The curators in charge of YBC 7289 would no doubt love to be able to make identical copies of such a precious artifact, but truly identical copies are only really possible for electronic information.

This leads us to the problem of how we produce an electronic record of the tablet YBC 7289. 

What data would be stored for this?

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 With the current day trend where customers’ product expectations are rapidly changing and everyone needs products that are really rich, fast and intuitive to use, the kinds of testing that are imperative are very different than a few years ago. With excellent internet bandwidth that is now available, products and applications are all scaling very well in their performance and this is something the customers are also expecting from the products they use. That said, such a fast and flawless implementation of products is not as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of challenges associated with meeting the product’s performance goals which include:
 

1. Increasing complexity of product architecture
2. Several interfaces that the product has with external systems and dependencies
3. Increased user base, leading to heavy load on the system
4. Performance goals undergoing a lot of change owing to competition in the market and demanding customers
5. Faster time to market for product release, which shrinks available time for performance testing
6. Shortage in availability of specialized testers for performance testing
7. Investment in performance testing infrastructure and tools, which are often very expensive and may become obsolete soon

If you see the above list, some of them are product and user specific challenges while some are test process challenges. The key to solving the product and user specific challenges is really around developing a robust performance test strategy and adequately testing the product for its performance before release. So, what we really need to be looking at is how to address the performance testing challenges; this forms the core of our discussion below.
 

Performance testing has long been in existence, however it has rightfully been given a lot of thought around specialization, domain centric testing, using the right infrastructure which mimics end user environment etc. only in the recent years. As product development technology advances with use of secured protocols, rich internet applications, service oriented architecture, web services etc. developing performance testing scripts has also become more complex. No longer will a regular “record and play” tool work across a major set of products by business it support services. There are a lot of very advanced performance testing tools that are entering the market from commercial players like HP, Microsoft, IBM which are constantly being enhanced to keep pace with the changing product technology. However, taking advantage of such tools does not come for free. These are all very expensive Commercial of the Shelf (COTS) tools, which you need to very carefully evaluate before investing. These might especially make sense for a product company to invest in, but not so much for a testing services company, because the services company is often required to use a tool that its clients have aligned their product with. On the other end of the spectrum, we have some excellent open source testing tools available for performance testing lately, which give the COTS a run for their money. A lot of companies, including product companies have started looking at such tools as good alternatives from a cost and feature standpoint, to use in their performance testing efforts. Jmeter is one such tool which a lot of companies are leveraging in the recent years. Again talking of trade-offs here, Jmeter is an open source tool available free of cost, easy for a tester to ramp up on, but is not comprehensive in its feature set, unlike the COTS. It has quite a few limitations around its reporting capabilities, which is a very important feature in performance testing, especially when the tester is handling large volumes of data. Also, this is data that the management and business teams are going to be interested in viewing, so a performance testing tool has to certainly offer very rich reporting functions.
 

This is where a company can draw its balance and decide to go with using an open source tool to take advantage of what it has to offer, but also invest in building reusable intellectual property (IP) on top of it, to address the tool’s limitations. Doing so, is beneficial for all entities involved as seen below:

1. Clients (Product companies) are able to get performance testing done at a cheaper cost without compromising on quality
2. Vendors (Test Service companies) are able to offer good value add services to their clients, differentiate themselves in the services market amongst their competition and also offer interesting out-of-project opportunities for their employees to work on building such core IP
3. 3.     Very challenging and interesting opportunities and thus good career path progression avenues are available for the employees of test services companies

Such reusable IP and frameworks often also serve as productivity enhancers – e.g. data generation, especially user data creation is quite an overhead in a performance testing effort compared to regular functional testing. If the performance testing tool that you choose does not offer good user data generation features out of the box, this is an area worth investing some time on upfront as it will save time both in the current test cycle as well as future cycles. Automating such time consuming and monotonous jobs, also frees up time for the tester to focus on more important areas such as performance benchmarking, system analysis, competitive data analysis etc. Also, to maximize the performance testing efforts, the product company should involve the performance testing team right in the early stages of product design. This will help the performance test team work in unison with the business team to understand end user’s performance expectations from the product under development; Understanding this will help the team chalk out “measurable” performance goals for the product and help the entire product development team understand these goals on the same page. Another benefit to such early involvement is the suggestions that the performance test team can provide on the product architecture from a performance angle (e.g. it could be the number of interfaces the product has, how certain web service calls are made, threshold values that are being set, production system configuration parameters etc.) which will help reduce the number of performance bugs in the test cycle. Such interactions between the developer and tester truly help build a quality product in the limited available release time.

Create a set of UML and Data Flow diagrams.
This is a required assignment, worth 170 points, and must be submitted by the due date.  Late assignments will not be accepted.
Details on the Project: Systems Diagrams Specifications v2.pdf
When references and citations are included, you must apply and use the basic citation styles of APA. Do not claim credit for the words, ideas, and concepts of others. 
Use in-text citation and list the reference on your supporting source following APA’s style and formatting. 
Do not copy and past information or concepts from the Internet and claim it as your work. It will be considered Plagiarism and you will receive zero for your work.
Submit your solution here.

Project Part 4: Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

Senior management at Health Network has decided they want a business impact analysis (BIA) that examines the company’s data center and a business continuity plan (BCP). Because of the importance of risk management to the organization, management has allocated all funds for both efforts. Your team has their full support, as well as permission to contact any of them directly for participation or inclusion in the BIA or BCP.

Winter storms on the East Coast have affected the ability of Health Network employees to reach the Arlington offices in a safe and timely manner. However, no BCP plan currently exists to address corporate operations. The Arlington office is the primary location for business units, such as Finance, Legal, and Customer Support. Some of the corporate systems, such as the payroll and accounting applications, are located only in the corporate offices. Each corporate location is able to access the other two, and remote virtual private network (VPN) exist between each production data center and the corporate locations.

The corporate systems are not currently being backed up and should be addressed in the new plan. The BCP should also include some details regarding how the BCP will be tested.

For this part of the project:

1. Research BIAs and BCPs.
2. Develop a draft BIA plan for the Health Network that focuses on the data center. The BIA should identify:
   1. Critical business functions
   2. Critical resources
   3. Maximum acceptable outage (MAO) and impact
   4. Recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)
3. Develop a draft BCP that could recover business operations while efforts are ongoing to restart previous operations. You may use or repurpose a BCP template you find online. Include a description of how you would test the plan.

Submission Requirements

• Format: Microsoft Word (or compatible)
• Font: Arial, size 12, double-space
• Citation style: Your school’s preferred style guide

Estimated length: 6–10 pages