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16 Apr 2015 In a year defined by international expansion and investments in new infrastructure to enhance operational efficiency, Gulftainer recorded robust growth across its entire terminal portfolio. Iain Rawlinson, Group Commercial Director of Gulftainer said: “The positive growth recorded by Gulftainer across its terminals globally underlines the confidence of our partners in our ability to meet their requirements efficiently. Our extensive network and technological expertise are the strengths that have enabled us to expand our footprint to new locations. We continuously invest in enhancing our infrastructure, thus boosting reliability, operational efficiency and productivity.” He added: “The growth in volume achieved throughout our terminals is strong testament to the expertise and dedication of our employees and the strong productivity levels we are able to achieve on a consistent basis. In the dynamic global trade routes linking Asia and Europe, our terminals today play an increasingly significant role. Even as we expand and grow our business, we also remain committed to the communities we serve in by creating new jobs and supporting the domestic economy.” In global markets, Gulftainer’s Saudi terminals recorded impressive growth with Northern Container Terminal accounting for 1.9 million TEUs, sustaining previous-year trends, while Jubail Container Terminal (JCT) noted a growth of 22 per cent to over 396,000 TEUs. The total volume at the Saudi terminals was over 2.29 million TEUs. Gulftainer’s Umm Qasr terminal also accomplished a significant growth of 46 per cent in 2014, while the Recife terminal in Brazil marked a growth in volume of 7 per cent. Gulftainer’s UAE terminals recorded a total volume of 3.8 million TEUs in line with the all-round growth in business. The company marked another significant milestone, with the Sharjah Container Terminal (SCT) surpassing 400,000 TEUs in annual throughput for the very first time. Operations at SCT were energised by the positive growth in global trade and the arrival of new services, such as UASC’s Gulf India Service (GIS1), which now connects Sharjah with Sohar in Oman, Mundra in India and Karachi in Pakistan. The addition of this service represented a significant development for Sharjah and boosted the national carrier’s volumes through SCT last year. The only fully fledged operational container terminal in the UAE located outside the Strait of Hormuz, Khorfakkan Container Terminal (KCT) has today emerged as one of the most important transshipment hubs for the Arabian Gulf, the Indian Sub-continent, the Gulf of Oman and the East African markets. Further strengthening the operations at KCT, Gulftainer has received and commissioned new state-of-the-art Ship to Shore (STS) and Rubber Tyred Gantry (RTG) cranes that will further increase overall performance and productivity. This enhanced infrastructure marks an investment of over US$60 million. Gulftainer has set an ambitious target to triple the volume over the next decade through organic growth across existing businesses, exploring green field opportunities and potential M&A activities.

This is a really simple way to provide high-availability with failover and load balancing to any Java backend using JDBC and Spring Boot .

Gulftainer, a privately owned, independent terminal operating and logistics company, marked another significant milestone with the Sharjah Container Terminal (SCT) surpassing 400,000 TEUs (Twenty Foot Equivalent Units) in annual throughput during 2014. SCT has again recorded double-digit growth compared to last year’s volumes. The achievement was reached with an impressive safety record under challenging conditions including space constraints. Iain Rawlinson, Group Commercial Director of Gulftainer said that the professional approach of Gulftainer’s management, along with consistently high productivity levels, was a driving force behind the Terminal’s success. “SCT has always marketed itself as ‘The Flexible Alternative’ and the individual attention we extend to our customers offers us an advantage over competitors.” The 400,000th unit was discharged from Mag Container Lines’ vessel, ‘Mag Success’, one of the Terminal’s regular callers, which considers Sharjah as her base port. Speaking on behalf of Mag Line’s CEO, BDM Jamal Saleh congratulated the Terminal for its achievement. He said: “The announcement today reflects how Gulftainer and MCL have grown together over the years and, in partnership, managed to reach this target. The continuous support, flexibility and excellent operational performance MCL receives from Gulftainer, both operationally and logistically, has contributed greatly to this achievement.” The milestone was achieved on the shift of Duty Superintendent Mehmood Malik, the longest serving employee at over 38 years at the Terminal and part of the team when the first TEU crossed the quay. Mehmood has witnessed several records and milestones and recalls handling 2,500 TEUs in 1976: “At that time we could not imagine reaching the levels of throughput we have today, so this is a very special moment for me.” SCT, which is managed and operated by Gulftainer on behalf of the Sharjah Port Authority, has the honour of being the site of the first container terminal in the Gulf, commenced operations in 1976. SCT is located in the heart of Sharjah and is an ideal gateway for import and export cargo with direct links throughout the Gulf, Asia, Europe, Americas and Africa. The strong performance of the Sharjah economy has supported the growth of many of SCT’s customers, enabling them to increase their throughput and contribute to a record year for the Terminal. The relationships built with our customers have been strengthened by the joint efforts of Gulftainer’s sales and marketing team and the high levels of service and operational efficiency at the terminal, “When looking at the Sharjah market, the dedicated team at SCT listen to and address the many requirements of our diverse and interesting customer base,” said Iain Rawlinson. SCT’s figures have been further boosted with the arrival of new services throughout the year, including UASC’s Gulf India Service (GIS1), which now connects Sharjah with Sohar in Oman, Mundra in India and Karachi in Pakistan, which has boosted in the national carrier’s volumes through SCT in November and December. Gulftainer’s current portfolio covers UAE operations in Khorfakkan Port and Port Khalid in Sharjah as well as activities at Umm Qasr in Iraq, Recife in Brazil, Jeddah and Jubail in Saudi Arabia and in Tripoli Port in Lebanon, which will be operational in April 2016. It also marked another milestone in 2014 with its expansion to the US by signing a long-term agreement to operate the container and multi-cargo terminal at Port Canaveral in Florida. With a current handling activity of over 6 million TEUs, the company has set an ambitious target to triple the volume over the next decade through organic growth across existing businesses, exploring green field opportunities and potential M&A activities.

continuing from my previous post about azure service bus, in this post i will share my learning about queues & messages. the focus of this post will be about some of the undocumented things i found as we implemented support for queues and messages in cloud portam . queues as mentioned in my previous post, queues is the simplest of the azure service bus service and kind of compares with azure storage queue service in the sense that it provides a unidirectional messaging infrastructure where a publisher publishes a message and the message is received by a receiver. there can be many receivers ready to receive the messages however one receiver can only receive a message. no two receivers can receive a single message simultaneously. now some learning about queues. queue name a queue name can be up to 260 characters in length and can contain letters, numbers, periods (.), hyphens (-), and underscores (_) . a queue name is case-insensitive. queue size when creating a queue, you must define the size of the queue. queue size could be one of the following values: 1 gb, 2 gb, 3 gb, 4 gb or 5 gb . a queue size can’t be changed once the queue is created. however if you create a “ partition enabled queue ” then service bus creates 16 partitions thus your queue size is automatically multiplied by 16 and your queue size becomes 16 gb, 32 gb, 48 gb, 64 gb or 80 gb depending on the size you selected (this confused me initially :)). queue properties a service bus queue has many properties. some of the properties can only be set during queue creation time while some of the properties can only be set if you are using “standard” tier of service bus. (above are the screenshots from cloud portam for creating a queue) status indicates the status of a queue – active or disabled . once a queue is disabled, it cannot send or receive messages. max delivery count (maxdeliverycount) indicates the maximum number of times a message can be delivered . once this count has exceeded, message will either be removed from the queue or dead-lettered. the way i understand it is this property is used to manage poison messages. if a message is not processed successfully by receivers for “x” number of times, just move it somewhere else for further inspection or remove it. message time to live (messagettl) indicates a time span for which a message will live inside a queue . if the message is not processed by that time, it will either be removed or dead-lettered. one interesting thing i noticed is that if you’re using “standard” tier, a message could live forever in a queue however in “basic” tier, a message can only live for a maximum of 14 days . lock duration (lockduration) indicates number of seconds for which a message will be locked by a receiver once it receives it so that no other receiver can receive that message . it essentially gives the receiver time to process the message. once this elapses, message will be available to be received by another receiver. maximum value for lock duration can be 5 minutes / 300 seconds . enable partitioning (enablepartitioning) indicates if the queue should be partitioned across multiple message brokers . as mentioned above, service bus automatically creates 16 partitions if this is enabled. this also results in maximum size of the queue increase by a factor of 16. this property can only be set during queue creation time . enable deadlettering (enabledeadlettering) indicates if the messages in the queue should be moved to dead-letter sub queue once they expire. if this property is not set, then the messages will be removed from the queue once they expire. enable batching (enablebatchedoperations) indicates if server-side batched operations are supported. this is used to improve the throughput of a queue as service bus holds the messages for up to 20ms before writing/deleting them in a batch. enable message ordering (supportordering) indicates if the queue supports ordering. requires duplicate detection (requiresduplicatedetection) indicates if the queue requires duplicate detection. this property can only be set during queue creation time and is only available for “standard” tier. enable express (enableexpress) indicates if the queue is an express queue. an express queue holds a message in memory temporarily before writing it to persistent storage. this property can only be set during queue creation time and is only available for “standard” tier. requires session (requiressession) indicates if the queue supports the concept of session. this property can only be set during queue creation time and is only available for “standard” tier. auto delete queue this property specifies a time period after which an idle queue should be deleted automatically by service bus . minimum period allowed is 5 minutes. this can only be set for “standard” tier . duplicate detection history time window (duplicatedetectionhistorytimewindow) defines the duration of the duplicate detection history. this can only be set for “standard” tier . forward messages to queue/topic (forwardto) you can use this property to automatically forward messages from a queue to another queue or topic. when setting this property, the queue/topic must exist in the account. this can only be set for “standard” tier . forward dead-lettered messages to queue/topic (forwarddeadletteredmessagesto) you can use this property to automatically forward dead-lettered message to another queue or topic. when setting this property, the queue/topic must exist in the account. user metadata (usermetadata) you can use this property to define any custom metadata for a queue. following table summarizes property applicability by tier and whether they are editable or not. property tier editable? size basic, standard no status basic, standard yes max delivery count basic, standard yes message time to live basic, standard yes lock duration basic, standard yes enable partitioning basic, standard no enable deadlettering basic, standard yes enable batching basic, standard yes enable message ordering basic, standard yes requires duplicate detection standard no enable express standard no require session standard no auto delete queue standard yes duplicate detection history time window standard yes forward messages to queue/topic standard yes forward dead-lettered messages to queue/topic basic, standard yes user metadata basic, standard yes to learn more about these properties, please see this link: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.servicebus.messaging.queuedescription.aspx . messages the way i see it, messages are the entities that contain information about the work a sender wants a receiver to do. as mentioned earlier, a sender sends a message to a queue and a receiver will receive the message. at any time, a message will be received by one and only one receiver. message processing there’re two ways by which a receiver will receive a message: peek and lock & receive and delete . peek and lock in peek and lock mode, the message is locked by the receiver for a duration specified by queue’s “ lock duration ” property or in other words under this mode a message is hidden from other receivers for a duration specified by lock duration. the receiver then would process the message and after that a receiver would mark the message as “ complete ” which essentially deletes the message from the queue. if the “lock duration” expires, other receivers will be able to fetch this message. receive and delete in receive and delete mode, once the message is received by a receiver it will be deleted from the queue automatically. if a receiver fails to process that message, then the message is lost forever. so unless you’re sure of receiver’s functionality that it will never fail or you don’t care if the message is processed successfully or not, use this mode cautiously. message composition a message in service bus consists of 3 things – message body, standard properties and custom properties. message body is the actual content of the message. there are some predefined properties of a message and those fall under standard properties. apart from that you can define custom properties on a message which are essentially a collection of name/value pairs. total size of a message is 256 kb. message properties now let’s take a look at some of the standard properties of a message that i found interesting. message id this is the identifier of a message. you can set it at the time of sending a message. because it is an identifier, one would assume that it needs to be unique but that’s not the case. different messages can have same message id. sequence number when a message is created, service bus assigns a number to a message. that number is stored in this property. please note that it is a read-only property. message time to live (message ttl) this is the time period for which a message will remain in the queue. if you recall, you can also define a default message time-to-live at queue level also. service bus actually picks the lower of the two values as message ttl. for example, if you have defined that a message will expire after 14 days at queue level but 5 minutes at the message level then the message will expire after 5 minutes. lock token whenever a message is received by a receiver in “ peek and lock ” mode, service bus returns a (lock) token that must be used to perform further operations (e.g. delete message or dead-letter message etc.) on that message. this token is valid for a duration specified by “ lock duration ” property. after the lock duration expires, the lock token becomes invalid and any attempt to use this token for performing any allowed operations will result in an error. once a lock token expires, a receiver must receive the message again. there are other properties as well which i have not included for the sake of brevity. for a complete list of properties, please see this link: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.servicebus.messaging.brokeredmessage_properties.aspx . summary that’s it for this post. in the next posts in this series, i will share my learning about topics and other service bus services. so stay tuned for that! again, if you think that i have provided some incorrect information, please let me know and i will fix them asap.

In 2015, the middleware world focuses on two buzzwords: Docker and Microservices. Software vendors still sell products such as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) or Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines. How is this related? Docker is a fascinating technology to deploy and distribute modules (middleware, applications, services) quickly and easily. Most people agree that Docker will change the future of software development in the next years. I will do another blog post about how Docker is related to TIBCO and how you can deploy and distribute Microservices with Docker and TIBCO products such as TIBCO EMS and BusinessWorks 6 easily. Microservices is NOT a technology, but a software architecture style. Many people say that Microservices kill the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) because Microservices use smart endpoints and dumb pipes. I had a talk at the Microservices Meetup in Munich in June 2015. Most attendees were surprised, why TIBCO shall be relevant for Microservices. I heard that question in several customer meetings, too. This was the main motivation for this talk. I want to share the slide deck and video recording of the talk with you… Abstract: Why use TIBCO for Microservices? Microservices are the next step after SOA: Services implement a limited set of functions. Services are developed, deployed and scaled independently. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery control deployments. This way you get shorter time to results and increased flexibility. Microservices have to be independent regarding build, deployment, data management and business domains. A solid Microservices design requires single responsibility, loose coupling and a decentralized architecture. A Microservice can to be closed or open to partners and public via APIs. This session discusses the requirements, best practices and challenges for creating a good Microservices architecture, and if this spells the end of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Key messages of the talk: Microservices = SOA done right Integration is key for success – the product name does not matter Real time event correlation is the game changer Slide Deck from Microservices Meetup in Munich, Germany Here is the slide deck: Microservices = Death of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)? from Kai Wähner Video Recording on Youtube The session was recorded (thanks to the guys from AutoScout24). Here is the Youtube upload: https://youtu.be/wMDHUTmUsKg Looking forward to your feedback… Is the ESB dead or not? If no, what kind of ESB (or better said in 2015: Service Delivery Platform) do you use? If yes, how to you implement “ESB features” in your projects? “Simple” REST services and server-code under the hood, or how else?

This days I’m reading about Microservices. The idea is great. Instead of building a monolithic script using one language/framowork. We create isolated services and we build our application using those services (speaking HTTP between services and application). That’s means we’ll have several microservices and we need to use them, and maybe sometimes change one service with another one. In this post I want to build one small container to handle those microservices. Similar idea than Dependency Injection Containers. As we’re going to speak HTTP, we need a HTTP client. We can build one using curl, but in PHP world we have Guzzle, a great HTTP client library. In fact Guzzle has something similar than the idea of this post: Guzzle services, but I want something more siple. Imagine we have different services: One Silex service (PHP + Silex) use Silex\Application; $app = new Application(); $app->get('/hello/{username}', function($username) { return "Hello {$username} from silex service"; }); $app->run(); Another PHP service. This one using Slim framework use Slim\Slim; $app = new Slim(); $app->get('/hello/:username', function ($username) { echo "Hello {$username} from slim service"; }); $app->run(); And finally one Python service using Flask framework from flask import Flask, jsonify app = Flask(__name__) @app.route('/hello/') def show_user_profile(username): return "Hello %s from flask service" % username if __name__ == "__main__": app.run(debug=True, host='0.0.0.0', port=5000) Now, with our simple container we can use one service or another use Symfony\Component\Config\FileLocator; use MSIC\Loader\YamlFileLoader; use MSIC\Container; $container = new Container(); $ymlLoader = new YamlFileLoader($container, new FileLocator(__DIR__)); $ymlLoader->load('container.yml'); echo $container->getService('flaskServer')->get('/hello/Gonzalo')->getBody() . "\n"; echo $container->getService('silexServer')->get('/hello/Gonzalo')->getBody() . "\n"; echo $container->getService('slimServer')->get('/hello/Gonzalo')->getBody() . "\n"; And that’s all. You can see the project in my github account.