Month: April 2023

International Girls in ICT Day: Meet Elif!

Published on by Priya Khaira-Hanks
Topics: Fish Food, Giving Back

Today, (April 27) is International Girls in ICT Day! This is an annual event designed to celebrate women exploring and pursuing careers in Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

The theme this year is ‘Digital Skills for Life’, so we spoke to one of the Girls in ICT at Payara, Elif, a Junior Service Engineer. She told us about her passion for ICT and her career path.

We hope her story can help encourage other young women to pursue ICT careers and pick up their own digital skills. If you are a young woman interested in a career in ICT, make sure you sign up for job alerts with Payara, to be the first to hear about our remote work graduate scheme.

Continue reading “International Girls in ICT Day: Meet Elif!”

Challenges

With over 100 APIs connecting systems and integrating with customer applications, having a stable solution with support is critical. DPD considered hiring extra support staff but struggled to find someone with the skillset to do the work. When their team were unable to find resolutions to problems using GlassFish, DPD decided to seek another solution that also had support. Because Payara Server was derived from GlassFish, the transition to the Payara Platform was an easy one to make.

Solution: Payara Enterprise 10×5 Support

DPD migrated to Payara Server, an open source application server originally developed as a fork and drop-in replacement for GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. Some of their APIs and critical applications needed extra work to function properly once migrated to Payara Server, but Payara Support Engineers quickly resolved the issues with same day response time for support requests. Using Payara Enterprise saved DPD from hiring additional support staff while providing DPD with the quick support and stable environment they need.

Same Day Support Response with Quick Resolution

“Using Payara Enterprise support enables us to get our APIs more stable and we feel more confident in the service we provide to our customers,” said Stefan Ajderev, IT Infrastructure and Security Manager at DPD. “We would highly recommend Payara and Payara support. Monthly patches are very helpful, having the option to update is helpful in case of critical issues. It’s stable and NO problems.”

Results: No Need to Hire Extra Support Staff and Faster Issue Response

Relying on Payara Enterprise Support eliminates the need to hire additional support staff while receiving faster resolution to issues. Their customer experience is drastically improved, while issue resolution for DPD’s in-house team is no longer consuming time better spent focused on continuing to revolutionize the parcel delivery industry,

Challenges

Hermes needed to operate their proprietary application, Hermes Advanced, in the cloud and in a stable environment, but their licensing agreement with WebSphere ruled out that option. They first migrated to GlassFish but needed support for the application server. As Hermes mother company, Otto runs their apps on Payara Server Enterprise 4 with great results; they decided to migrate from GlassFish to Payara Server 4.

“Payara is different from WebSphere in that Websphere is an all-in-one package that costs a lot of money and takes care of some things for the customer that Payara doesn’t. So, Payara users have to take care of some things that you don’t have to with WebSphere – but as a result, you have more insight into what is going on. It was a learning process at first, but the included Migration & Project Support was very helpful in overcoming these learning challenges,” said Thomas Paulsen, Project Coordinator.

Solution: Payara Enterprise with Migration & Project Support During Migration and Payara Enterprise with 24×7 support in Production Environment

During the migration, Hermes discovered that some of the features included with WebSphere that just automatically worked for them would require slightly more input from their development team to work on the Payara Platform. They enlisted Payara Enterprise with the Migration & Project Support option and found the migration process painless, and found they preferred having more insight into the configuration of Payara Server versus having less visibility of how things worked when using WebSphere.

They were also looking for improved monitoring metrics and requested and received a new feature to monitor their application server with Prometheus. Hermes migrated to Payara Server 4 and went into production 100 days earlier than planned with Migration & Project Support assistance and has transitioned to using Payara Enterprise with 24×7 support for their production environment.

Results: 30% Faster Performance and Reduced Expenses in the Cloud

Due to migrating to Payara Server 4 and moving their operations into the German T-Systems pen Telecom Cloud, Hermes reports a 30% increase in performance speed, fewer problems overall, and a significant reduction of operating costs. Hermes also finds the Payara Platform user interface for admin GUI much easier to use than WebSphere.They are looking forward to using Payara Server 5 admin GUI’s new features when they upgrade from Payara Server 4 to Payara Server 5 later this year.

Challenges

iTAC started using Oracle GlassFish 2.1 in 2008. In time, the company started experiencing problems in some areas of the application server (e.g., security updates), with customers of iTAC requesting fixes. Unfortunately, the fixes were not available in GlassFish Open Source Edition. Considering the critical nature of iTAC’s product, the company decided to address the increasing risks.

Migrating to Oracle Glassfish 4.x meant that iTAC would be losing the commercial support optionsince Oracle decided to discontinue their support starting with that version. That’s when the company decided to switch – since January 2016, iTAC is running its TAC.MES.Suite in production on Payara Server.

Solution

iTAC was keen to use an open source application server;however, they also needed an option to use professional support – this was no longer available from Oracle. When reviewing other application servers and comparing them to Payara Server Enterprise, iTAC saw a huge gap in terms of other products’ compatibility between their open source and commercially supported versions, which was not the case for Payara Server Enterprise.

As long-term GlassFish users, iTAC appreciated the many similarities between Payara Server and GlassFish, making the migration process more straightforward. On top of that, iTAC was very satisfied with Payara Engineers’ high-level of Java EE expertise. Many of iTAC’s customers use the iTAC.MES.Suite, which is running on Payara Server Enterprise in high volume production environments. To satisfy compliance requirements, often mandated by OEMs, production equipment is typically tightly integrated into the MES infrastructure. As a result, the complete MES infrastructure must guarantee high availability, robustness, and high performance. iTAC’s SLAs guarantee 2-hour reaction time in case of a software issue; those requirements can be achieved now that Payara Enterprise is in place.

Results

With Payara Enterprise, iTAC can now offer the application server to its customers under the name iTAC.AppServer. The great advantage for iTAC’s customers is that they no longer have to buy support for their application server from a separate provider. Instead, they can simply call iTAC support regardless of the root cause of a failure. All application server-related issues are then transferred to and resolved by the Payara’s engineers through iTAC’s Payara Enterprise contract.

iTAC must have all its customers under the same level of support and this can now be achieved with Payara Enterprise.

The key benefits of using Payara Enterprise for iTAC are:

  • Swift reaction time for support tickets raised
  • All issues resolved quickly and smoothly
  • The Customer Hub support portal is easy to use
  • iTAC is confident that they can get a quick resolution for potential bugs and issues in their production environment from support included with Payara Enterprise

Challenges

Appriss was in the process of migrating from GlassFish 3 to GlassFish 4. However, during the migration process they encountered a problem which they could not resolve, and it prevented them from successfully migrating. Around the same time, Oracle had announced an end to commercial support for GlassFish, and Appriss was relying on the open source community for assistance and their own, in-house expertise.

Payara’s team was able to get several “showstopper” issues resolved and successfully migrate all of Appriss production GlassFish applications and services to Payara Server.

Screensharing sessions with Payara Enterprise support engineers proved very beneficial. On several occasions this approach was used to allow Payara support engineers to work with Appriss engineers to reproduce and troubleshoot issues in their environment, which was found to be very productive.

Appriss was able to take advantage of Payara’s flexible options and pricing for multiple server environments and clusters. They found Payara Enterprise with Migration and Project Support a great, lower-cost way to get support during the development process before moving to production. Appriss was able to work with Payara to identify and resolve several issues during their migration process before migrating their production environment to Payara.

Appriss also found the Customer Hub support portal a great benefit as it allowed them to log in and see at-a-glance any open issues, track status and the activity on open items.

Results

Appriss has been able to successfully migrate all applications that were on GlassFish 3 to Payara Server Enterprise. This was a key objective and a critical component in a data center migration project.

Appriss has now deployed several of their critical customer facing web applications on Payara Server. Additionally, their core data collection network and notification platform also rely on services that are deployed to Payara Server.

The included support with Payara Enterprise was very responsive and provided quick access to patches and fixes. This was critical for Appriss, as a business they need to be able to respond quickly to any issues they encounter.

Challenges

Zellis’ in-house IT teams work together to create, test, and manage applications for customers. Eventually, technical issues exceeded the skillset and knowledge of the in-house team, and their time for training team members was limited. They couldn’t pinpoint where the root causes of issues were, and their customers could not access the HR and payroll services. Before obtaining a Payara Enterprise contract, Zellis reached out for help through the Payara community. Even before becoming a Payara Enterprise customer, Zellis received assistance from the support team, analyzing logs on the Payara side to pinpoint where the problems were. Zellis needed Payara Platform environment experts for further troubleshooting and issue resolution to ensure availability of their services to customers.

Solution: Payara Enterprise with the 10×5 Support Option

Zellis previously developed its HR and payroll software on GlassFish. When GlassFish no longer met their needs, they migrated to Payara Server Community Edition; an open source application server initially developed as a fork and drop-in replacement for GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. Payara® Accelerator consultancy services helped with the migration from GlassFish to Payara Server. As their in-house team issue resolution time took too long and their use of Payara Server without support resulted in service outages to their customers, Zellis obtained a Payara Enterprise contract. They chose the included 10×5 support option to increase their service availability and speed up issue resolution time.

Same-Day Support Response with Resolutions in Hours, Not Days

“The support team is very efficient in lending a hand,” said Ed Roast, Technical Service Desk manager at Zellis. “Even when the cause is unknown and may not be Payara related, they will help review logs and work alongside us in our investigations. There is never any ‘it’s not us’ mentality, they work with us to find a solution.”

After becoming a Payara Enterprise customer, Zellis had access to support provided directly from Payara Engineers for faster resolution times of issues. Zellis experiences same-day-responses to their support requests, often within one to two hours. Support issue resolution a resulting from having Payara Enterprise has decreased from several days to a matter of hours. Payara Engineers often continue working beyond regular office hours to provide responses to Zellis and allow the team to continue their investigations first thing the following morning.

Results: Zellis Offers 24/7 Availability of HR and Payroll Software, Faster Issue Response

Relying on Payara Enterprise and the included support services enables Zellis to provide 24/7 availability of their HR and payroll software to customers. Their customer experience is drastically improved, while issue resolution for Zellis’ in-house team is no longer frustrating or consuming time that is better spent focused directly on their business activities.

The Zellis team finds the quick response and resolution times, friendly, helpful staff, and desktop screen sharing contribute to a quality support solution that keeps their systems running with 100% availability.

Challenges: The Initial Move to Payara Server

Rakuten Card faced difficulties with its previous application server’s critical pending CVE bugs, memory leaks and sporadic errors without proper explanation in a stack trace. The expensive commercial support was too slow, and patches released introduced worsened security holes. Rakuten Card were looking for a support team who were well versed in Java based frameworks and could communicate in technical terminology while resolving issues.

Moving to Payara Server Enterprise solved these issues, by providing monthly releases, bug fixes and patches, security improvements, and support directly from engineers within the Jakarta EE (Java EE) community. Responses were quick and the Payara Team could communicate in Japanese – which was vital for Rakuten Card.

Becoming Cloud-Native

In October 2019, Rakuten Card decided to move from a bare-metal server – a physical server dedicated to a single tenant – to a cloud-native architecture. It made deployment of its public web application 100% cloud-native in less than a year. The biggest change when moving from a monolithic environment was having to reconfigure Java options for the container framework. For example, Java’s Garbage Collections logs, revealing potential improvements to the code, needed to be disabled completely, as the cloud-based monitoring would take care of stuck threads and containers

Solution: How Payara Enterprise helped Rakuten Card Migrate to a Container Platform

Payara Platform is designed for seamless integration with cloud services and tools, to help developers manage and automate operation. Both Payara Server Enterprise and Payara Micro Enterprise help in creating containers with a lower footprint. Rakuten Card found this made cloud-native deployment low maintenance and highly portable. The Payara Platform works the same across any environment, with Rakuten Card praising the fact that no additional work was needed on the application code in order to migrate to a container platform.

Another key security benefit was the fact that the Payara Platform integrates with Docker, offering a standard set of Docker images through the support repository to build signed container images.

Results

In the three years since moving to Payara Server Enterprise, Rakuten Card hasn’t faced a single production issue. All queries are resolved and thoroughly followed-up before an issue is generated. This is a huge improvement compared to its previous provider, with whom it faced an issue at least once a month.

Rakuten Card has also not had a single service stop since migrating, which used to  be a regular occurrence.

Arshal Ameen, Senior Architect, Rakuten Credit Card, shared Rakuten’s experience:

“Payara is the de-facto middleware at Rakuten Card. We’ve found it wonderful to use, even for new hires – with Payara leveraging developers’ existing skill sets so no retraining is required.”

 

Rakuten Card found that Payara Server Enterprise minimised business impact with no application server issues – including during the cloud migration and after becoming 100% cloud-native. Rakuten Card experienced additional benefits using Payara Server Enterprise, including:

  • Reduced resource footprint
  • Faster deployment
  • Better performance
  • Easily scalable architecture
  • Great reliability

Through code samples and demos provided by the Payara Team, the Rakuten Card team improved their knowledge on best practices for usage and implementation.

Challenges

Hyperwallet’s team of developers implemented Payara Server on their own and knew their use of the robust application server could be optimized for improved performance. They didn’t have any issues at the time, but Hyperwallet was interested in proactively looking at their configuration of Payara Server to reduce risks of future problems or downtime and wanted the experts at Payara to look at their environment to see what could be improved.

Solution

Hyperwallet obtained Payara Enterprise and requested a configuration review offered through Payara Accelerator consulting services. Payara Accelerator is only available to Payara Enterprise customers. An Accelerator consultant conducted the configuration review consisting of over 70 checks of Hyperwallet’s installation, packaging, application deployment, JVM options, and availability. Payara discovered 17 areas that need adjustments to improve efficiency, stability and performance.

Results

While Hyperwallet had taught themselves to install and use Payara Server to host their global application successfully, the configuration review found about 25% of the items checked should be fixed and improved. With the configuration review report provided by Payara, Hyperwallet can implement the suggested changes to ensure they maintain a stable, high performing solution for their customers.

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