Alert ! We released a sample AMPS plug-in for ITRS Geneos 4.0 that can be used to build real time reporting and alerting based on customizable rules and thresholds. Many of our customers are already using ITRS Geneos to consume the rich monitoring information from multiple AMPS servers and other systems to provide a real time system-wide view of health metrics. We noted that many customers seemed to be writing their integration piece in their own way so we worked with ITRS to create a generic plug-in that can be used to capture the AMPS metrics by Geneos.   After working with ITRS on Geneos 4.0 support, we are pleased to announced that the AMPS-Geneos plug in is available at this public Github repo . 

Queues are the bread and butter of a good messaging system. AMPS provides a powerful queue system that is fast, resilient, and flexible, taking work from publishers and feeding them to consumers as fast as your network will allow.

The AMPS State-of-the-World (SOW) depends on being able to identify distinct updates to a message. AMPS does this by creating a SOW key for each message: subsequent updates that have the same key are updates to the same message. In many cases, it's convenient to have AMPS determine the SOW key for a message based on the contents of the message.

That's not the only way to get a SOW key, though. An explicit SOW key allows a publisher to specify the SOW key of a message at the time the message is published. AMPS does not try to interpret the data within the message to generate a SOW key, or to determine if the message is unique. Instead, AMPS relies only on the provided SOW key to determine the identity and uniqueness of the message. This can be useful for a variety of different purposes.

Does your network bandwidth ever feel like this congested freeway? Do you ever have a subscription that gets so many messages that it really cannot process them all? If you answered yes, why haven’t you tried using conflated subscriptions?

Conflated subscriptions help to reduce the bandwidth for a subscription and may reduce the processing resources required for that subscription as well. They work just like conflated topics, which are defined in the AMPS config, but with a couple of differences. The differences are you can set the conflation interval on a per subscription basis and you can subscribe to any topic, not just conflated topics. This is great if you have multiple subscriptions that may have different intervals in which they need to process data.

It’s 2017 and this is the year Gartner estimated more revenue will come from selling Solid State Drives (SSDs) than their slower, spinning, ancestral Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). [^registerarticle] To some, this seems like a no-brainer, but many experts believe the estimate is way off as HDDs continue to improve capacity, MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), performance, and price. As more enterprises adopt SSDs, there have been shortages in flash memory used in their construction, which has driven prices up and created supply chain delays. That’s why we’re here, to explore situations where you really need SSDs vs when something else may be good enough (or better!) for your use.

AMPS 5.2 has dropped and, like a new Beyonce album, it is so awesome it will probably break the internet. AMPS 5.2 comes with a mind bending amount of new functionality, but I would like to focus on a few key new functions that have been made available to your AMPS expressions.

Functions are like the backup singers of the AMPS world: they may not be what you hear first, but they sweeten the mix and you'd miss them if they weren't there.

60East customers often integrate their AMPS deployments with the wider ecosystem of cloud storage providers, text search and analysis platforms, and the Apache ecosystem of big data tools such as Spark and Hadoop. One common integration request is the ability to pull an AMPS message stream directly into Apache Flume so that messages can be easily routed to HBASE, Hive, Amazon S3 or Elastic Search for further analysis or processing.

In AMPS 5.2, we've introduced a new set of capabilities for modifying messages as they are published to AMPS: Message Preprocessing and Message Enrichment. Both features are configured in your AMPS configuration file, on the individual SOW Topics where you would like to use them. These new capabilities can streamline applications that need complex message flows, producing higher performance and easier administration.

60East Technologies is thrilled to launch the world’s most advanced online ASCII movie service, http://asciiflix.com. The first project of the new 60East Media Division, this new service leverages the precision and parallelism of 60East’s Advanced Message Processing System (AMPS), using the transaction log replay and State-of-the-World functionality to deliver the most advanced media experience ever seen by humankind.

AMPS 5.2 introduces a powerful new capability for subscribers to create custom aggregations and projections to AMPS SOW topics -- with no configuration necessary! We call this functionality Aggregated subscriptions. Aggregated subscriptions are like private views for an individual subscription. You no longer have to reconfigure and restart AMPS to test a different calculation, or add a full view for a subscriber that needs different data -- but only for a few days at the close of the month. When a subscriber has unique needs, aggregated subscriptions can give that subscriber a unique view.

In some applications, unique identifiers for objects change through the object's lifetime. It can be difficult to decide how to model this in systems where an identifier is necessary, such as topics in the AMPS State-of-the-World (SOW).

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. You have an AMPS SOW topic representing the state of orders in your business. You have a well tuned AMPS configuration, you have optimized your client applications and your network is at optimal capacity. You are processing millions of messages and everybody seems happy.