Particular Software Blog

Latest articles

• Fallacy #7: Transport cost is zero

  Written by David Boike on March 2, 2021

  

  Of course, there are upfront and ongoing costs associated with any computer network. The servers themselves, cabling, network switches, racks, load balancers, firewalls, power equipment, air handling, security, rent/mortgage, not to mention experienced staff to keep it all running smoothly, all come with a cost.

  Companies today have, for the most part, accepted this as just another cost of doing business in the modern world.

  With cloud-based server resources, this equation changes only slightly. Instead of paying for a lot of these things upfront, we instead lease them from the cloud providers. It may change how a company can represent these costs on a balance sheet, but overall, it’s the same concept.

  But, we also have to pay for bandwidth. In order to connect our data center to the rest of the world, we must exchange currency for the transport of our bits and bytes. In the cloud, we must pay this also, whether directly or as part of the cost of whichever service we’re using.

  Read more →

• Amazon SQS native integration and IAM policy management

  Written by Daniel Marbach, Laila Bougria, and Yves Goeleven on February 16, 2021

  

  The AmazonSQS transport in NServiceBus uses Amazon Simple Queue Service in conjunction with Amazon Simple Notification Service for a powerful queueing and publish/subscribe experience for AWS, whether using traditional hosting or in serverless scenarios with AWS Lambda. Version 5.3 of the Amazon SQS transport includes better support for native integration with external systems, as well as improvements to allow subscribing to many more event types than with the previous version of the transport and to make IAM policies much easier… Read more →

• Updates to PowerShell modules

  Written by Hadi Eskandari, Mauro Servienti, and Ramon Smits on February 2, 2021

  

  The PowerShell modules for NServiceBus and ServiceControl are lesser-known, but important, tools in the Particular Software toolbox. Both provide crucial support for automation when deploying NServiceBus endpoints and ServiceControl instances in DevOps workflows.

  We’ve updated the packages for both PowerShell modules to support PowerShell 5 and to make them easier to use.

  Read more →

• What's new in ServiceInsight 2.4

  Written by Hadi Eskandari and Mauro Servienti on January 26, 2021

  

  In this release of ServiceInsight, we’ve focused on productivity enhancements that will make ServiceInsight an even more valuable member of your distributed systems toolkit.

  ServiceInsight 2.4 adds the ability to have multiple ServiceControl connections active at one time, introduces a plug-in architecture for custom message viewers so that you can view the message body even if that message is compressed or encrypted, includes better controls for paging data, and better support for roaming profiles, among other minor feaures and bugfixes.

  You can download the latest version of ServiceInsight now, and then read on to find out about the various productivity improvements in this release.

  Read more →

• Autosave for your business

  Written by Tim Bussmann on January 19, 2021

  

  If you’re a long-time video game player like me, your muscle-memory vividly remembers the F5 key’s location on your keyboard. For everyone else: F5 is a common key-binding for “quicksave” in computer-games. And like many others, I learned how to use it the hard way. After spending hours sneaking through dungeons, battling orcs, and looting valuable treasures, some nasty troll made an unexpectedly quick end to my character. That’s when I would realize that I hadn’t saved my game for a very long time and had to start over. From that moment on, I’d save my game as often as I could, and F5 became my closest ally.

  Modern games now provide a built-in feature called autosave. These games save your progress automatically now and then so that you won’t lose all your progress—only a few minutes at worst. This might sound trivial and obvious, but it is a game-changer for player experience. The player can now focus on solving their mission rather than the mechanics of the game itself.

  Why are we talking about video games when we have important business (let’s say, selling video games) to do? Let me ask a different question: what if that nasty end boss doesn’t come in the form of a troll? What if the end boss is a network error, power outage, concurrency conflict, or even squirrels?

  Read more →

• Fallacy #6: There is one administrator

  Written by David Boike on January 6, 2021

  

  In small networks, it is sometimes possible to have one administrator. This is usually the developer who creates and deploys a small project. As a result, this developer has all of the information about this project readily available in their head and, if anything goes wrong, will know precisely what to do.

  I know quite a few developers and managers who talk about “bus theory” as a way to promote communication of critical knowledge. The central point is this: having only one person holding critical knowledge is dangerous because of what would happen if that person got run over by a bus. The term bus factor was coined to represent the number of people on your team who have to be hit by a bus before the project is in serious trouble.

  Read more →

• Updates in ServiceControl 4.13

  Written by Mike Minutillo and Szymon Pobiega on December 15, 2020

  

  ServiceControl is the nerve center of your distributed system, storing the data and providing the APIs that allow ServicePulse and ServiceInsight to function.

  In ServiceControl 4.13, we’ve made updates that make saga auditing more useful, provide better support for Azure Service Bus, simplify license management, and make it easier to keep ServiceControl up to date.

  Read more →

• Transactions with Azure Table Persistence

  Written by Daniel Marbach and Laila Bougria on December 8, 2020

  

  One of the major changes that have permeated organizations across the globe in the last decade is the use of cloud providers and the variety of services they offer. For data storage alone, Azure offers: Table Storage, CosmosDB, SQL Server, Blob Storage, and more. There are, of course, many advantages to these cloud services, like minimizing infrastructure management, and higher performance at a reasonable cost and it’s easy to accept these advantages in the face of the trade-offs, like giving… Read more →

• What's new in SQL Server Transport 6.2

  Written by Mauro Servienti, Tomek Masternak, and William Brander on December 1, 2020

  

  SQL Server Transport is one of our most popular transports. Customers often have deep proficiency with SQL and are able to use SQL Transport to add message queues to new or even legacy systems without needing to adopt (or get approval for) additional technology. This provides a glide path to begin using messaging, including all the advantages in loose coupling and reliability that come with it, and begin learning to design better software systems in a new way.

  SQL Server Transport version 6.2.0 adds a few important features to make building complex systems even easier.

  For extra secure systems, we’ve added support for SQL Server Always Encrypted so that messages can be encrypted so deeply that even SQL Server itself can’t read the messages without the correct keys. For scaled-out endpoints, you can now configure how the load balancing of batches is handled. We’ve also standardized the startup checks that endpoints do across all transaction modes.

  Read more →

• Improvements to monitoring in ServicePulse 1.27

  Written by Sergio Cordeiro and Sean Farmar on November 24, 2020

  

  ServicePulse keeps on growing its arsenal of monitoring tools to help you uncover problems in your system and help fix them.

  In ServicePulse 1.27 we decided to focus on the monitoring views of ServicePulse and make it easier to slice and dice information. We’ve also made some changes to message archiving. Keep reading to learn more about some highlights of what’s available to you now.

  Read more →