The Prophecy of Meraki
I like to prognosticate around the end of the year, but sometimes the signs (omens) just can’t wait. I am referring of course to the Prophecy of Meraki, or Cisco’s Wi-Fi from the clouds. I’ve always liked Meraki, I think the concept makes a lot of sense. But it’s over. Meraki is unlikely to see 2015. [...]
The Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application
A while back, I was starting up an EC2 instance on the AWS cloud when it entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment efforts we’d made (installation and service configuration) over two weeks just went down the drain. So we called support. The support rep redirected us to his team leader who simply [...]
Enterprise Grade Cloud Enabled by the Ecosystem
While investing in building new data centers all over the world and creating the management overlay in order to be able to sell their hardware, IaaS operators are also relying on their ecosystem to support the evolving enterprises that go to the cloud (e.g. the “Enterprise Grade Cloud”). API First – The move to the [...]
You Can’t Automate Your Way to the Cloud
When racing to execute a ‘cloud’ strategy, it can be very tempting for IT organizations to try and automate their way to the cloud. A key benefit of the cloud is operational efficiency. We know that humans are error prone and costly, which makes automation such an enticing solution. Add to this the fact that [...]
Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Public Cloud Race Just Yet
Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may [...]
Enterprises Are Climbing Aboard the Cloud Disruption Train
Saving money is nothing compared to beating your competitors to market with a better product. This is the revelation that’s rapidly taking hold in the enterprise CIO’s office. Until very recently, most enterprise IT leaders would tell you that their primary goal in moving to cloud computing was related to cost reduction, primarily through server [...]
Best of Breed versus Polyglot Revisited
If you feel that PaaS is a new-age devops/application management tool, like any management tool user or vendor, you’ll want maximum breadth of coverage. Nobody wants multiple monitoring, backup, deployment or configuration management solutions for each platform or application in their environment. Heterogeneous breadth coverage with the ever elusive “single pane of glass” is the [...]
Using Route 53 in Amazon Web Services
Sometimes you just need a little DNS to get you through your day. This is an 18 minute video that goes through the configuration of Route 53 both at Dreamhost (my service provider) and Amazon Web Services. The setup is fairly straight forward with little to no hitches when setting up the system. The main [...]
Understanding Amazon Web Services Cloud Watch
Sometimes making an alarm is the best thing you can do for yourself when working with Amazon Web Services. Sometimes things can go wrong with your cloud computing installation, and it would be a great idea to know what is happening with your cloud systems. We simply cannot have the console open 24X7 to monitor [...]
Creating a CloudFront Distribution in Amazon Web Services
Creating a CloudFront distribution is fairly straight forward. You just need to know if you want to do streaming data or download data, and have your items in an S3 bucket already. CloudFront is a very cool way of setting up a cheap Content Distribution Network using Amazon Web services. This video goes through the [...]
On Robustness And Resiliency – Part 1
When you talk about cloud computing with the enterprises and tell them how cloud requires a different approach to designing applications, I get the biggest pushback from them. Since most of the large enterprises are used to the idea that expensive and powerful hardware that seldom fails is the only way to build robustness into [...]
Using Amazon Web Services IAM
Using Amazon Web Services IAM IAM (Identity and Access Management) from Amazon Web Services is a tool to create users, groups, roles and permissions. This is a 10 minute video on how to use IAM (Identity and Access Management) services to provision users and groups within the Amazon Web Services infrastructure. IAM is a blunt [...]
Using Route 53 Amazon’s DNS Service for the Cloud
Using Route 53 Amazon’s DNS Service for the Cloud Route 53 is Amazon’s answer to a high availability and scalable DNS (Domain Name System) web based service. While there is no DaaS (Domains as a Service) in the formal cloud nomenclature it makes sense to have a globally distributed Domain Name Service that can work [...]
HP’s Cloud: The Giant Ship Lost its Way
HP stands still, not taking the initiatives and real risks expected of a true industry leader. At the Discover conference, I learned why some companies don’t last and why this IT giant is at risk of losing in this new era IT battle.
Cloud Computing and Distributed Computing, Something is Broken
First off, I’m going to start off with some definitions to clarify things for this conversation. Cloud Computing, in general, has been perverted to mean almost anything available for sale today in technology. It’s rhetorically stupid. But we all still use the term to some degree. Going back to cloud computing at the core, we’re [...]
