Hey all, I just wanted to take a moment to share with you that our first cloud-based product just went live! LabVIEW Web UI Builder is National Instruments’ first SaaS application. It’s actually free to use, go to ni.com and “Try It Now”, all you have to do is make an account. It’s a freemium model, so you can use it, save your code, run it, etc. all you want; we charge to get the “Build & Deploy” functionality that enables you to compile, download, and deploy the bundled app to an embedded device or whatnot.
Essentially it’s a Silverlight app (can be installed out of browser on your box or just launched off the site) that lets you graphically program test & measurement, control, and simulation type of programs. You can save your programs to the cloud or locally to your own machine. The programs can interact via Web services with anything, but in our case it’s especially interesting when they interact with data acquisition devices. There’s some sample programs on that page that show what can be done, though those are definitely tuned to engineers… We have apps internally that let you play frogger and duck hunt, or do the usual Web mashup kinds of things calling google maps apis. So feel free and try out some graphical programming!
Cool technology we used to do this:
- Amazon Web Services: EC2, SimpleDB, S3
- Both Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu)/Apache/Tomcat/Java/open source and Microsoft Windows/C#/.NET/Silverlight stacks
- Apache Zookeeper and our custom app PIE for system control and provisioning
- Stashboard for our public health dashboard
- Cloudkick for our system monitoring
- Postmark for transactional email sending
- Zendesk for our ops service desk
- AlertSite for site monitoring
- DNSMadeEasy for DNS
And it’s 100% DevOps powered. Our implementation team consists of developers and sysadmins, and we built the whole thing using an agile development methodology. All our systems are created by model-driven automation from assets and definitions in source control. We’ll post more about the specifics now that we’ve gotten version 1 done! (Of course, the next product is just about ready too…)
the agile admin 