Engine Yard Differentiates through Control and Choice
I kind of feel sorry for Engine Yard sometime – once seen as one of the two best-known Platform as a Service offerings (alongside Heroku), the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce kind of reduced Engine Yard’s visibility. The subsequent release of Cloud Foundry, and the significant uptake it has had in the marketplace have further [...]
Chartio Supporting Salesforce–Pretty for the Enterprise
Two themes I often talk about are specific functionality from specialist vendors and delivering enterprise solutions in new and friendly ways. A good example of this I came across recently was from small company Chartio. Chartio, a Y Combinator company, touts itself as the best interface for data. Essentially it allows organizations to take data [...]
Box Answers IT Concerns–Deeper Security Option Roll Out
Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about Dropbox releasing an entire swathe of new security functionality that sees it firmly mark itself as entering the corporate market and responding to the needs of IT. As I said at the time, Dropbox has long signaled an intention to move up the food chain. In [...]
Vote on OpenStack Summit Speaking Submissions
(Note: Deadline is Monday, February 25.) On April 15, a record crowd of as many as 2,500 people will descend on the Oregon Convention Center in Portland for what will be the largest gathering of OpenStack developers, users, media and analysts in the project’s three year history. Cloudscaling will be there, as will others who’ve [...]
StitchLabs–Solving SMBs Inventory Woes
Many readers know that outside of technology, I own a business that manufactures apparel and other products and sells them both online and through retail outlets. Having been involved in that business for 17 or so years, I’ve had first-hand experience of just how difficult it is to run a tightly integrated operation with e-commerce, [...]
Top Five Challenges Facing Enterprise Application Developers
Several common themes have emerged from discussions with a broad array of enterprise developers. In this post, I’ll share some of what I’ve been hearing. I would love to get your feedback. 1) Cloud Apps are Hard to Get Right – While abstraction of infrastructure has helped agility and application management, it doesn’t make it [...]
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 [...]
Mandiant and APT1 cyber warfare espionage
Hey wait, if we have screen video of hackers doing their work, doesn’t that mean we penetrated the hackers methods, processes, and other information resources? Sometimes I don’t think we are thinking clearly enough, as the fear mongering escalates for cyber warfare, and how we are all going to go through an electronic pearl harbour, [...]
Executive Order: Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity
Heck, we wouldn’t be bloggers, and we wouldn’t care about our industry, cloud or information security if we didn’t spend time reading this executive order and seeing what hidden neat treats there are in there. Overall I am impressed with this executive order as it looks like someone actually thought about it in the first [...]
Who is to blame when a SAP Payroll Project Fails
There have been several high profile SAP Payroll failures over the past few years in the United States at places such as the State of California, National Grid, Kentucky Government, City of Portland, LA School District, City of San Diego, California Judicial Council, Marin County and an epic train wreck happening down under at Queensland [...]
The Truth About Lock In
Last week I was invited to speak at a Microsoft conference in Redmond about building cloud applications for portability across clouds and infrastructure. In my presentation, I approached the issue of application portability from the enterprise perspective. This means that developers generally are not choosing servers, clouds or other infrastructure components. Developers focus on building [...]
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 [...]
Does it matter if you are popular on LinkedIn?
I am sure that some of us have gotten these really cool e-mails from Linkedin lately helping us put some kind of context around our relative popularity on the internet, or at least on the LinkedIn system. The problem is that being popular on LinkedIn does not matter to me at all. Sure the infographic [...]
Dropbox Listens to the Criticism–Starts to Mature Corporate Product
I’ve been a harsh critic of Dropbox in the past – mostly because I feel they lack maturity – both as a company and as a product – and this lack of maturity is a real risk for enterprise customers using their product. It seems Dropbox has been listening to the criticism that myself and [...]
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 [...]
