Deep Art of Scaling for Cloud Environments, Part 2
In Part One of our two-part series on scaling for cloud environments, we looked at some of important factors for scaling and best practices for code storage. Let’s continue the discussion. Auto Scaling for Next-Generation Applications There are a few very good-looking cloud hosting service providers that provide the features mentioned in Part One: AWS, […]
Deep Art of Scaling for Cloud Environments, Part 1
The number of resources to scale an application are abundant, but every application has its own challenges to scale successfully, and the solution to this problem doesn’t come handy. This two-part article focuses on the best approaches to build a scalable application, software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, mobile app, or WordPress-, Drupal- or Magento-based website. The scope […]
Taming 2 Cloud App Performance Enemies
Whenever you hear the words “the network’s slow today,” or, even worse, “the network’s down,” you know somebody miscalculated. It may have been the person who decided to buy the wrong hardware, or maybe the one who signed up the wrong telecom provider. Often, that slowdown or outage was the result of somebody underestimating server […]
Best Practices for User Management Models in AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) gives organizations the flexibility of using several different methods for managing user accounts. In this article, we will take a look at some of the best user account management practices and their potential pros and cons. The Ins and Outs of AWS Accounts AWS accounts provide comprehensive access to resources created […]
Multi-Cloud: The Danger of Data Lock-In
Enterprises rarely think about cloud portability issues before transferring large amounts of data onto a cloud service provider such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. They were likely to ask questions on usage by other players in the industry (“the herd effect”) as well as the reliability of the cloud service and […]
Backup and Recovery for Distributed Databases
Over the past five years, applications have undergone a paradigm shift. They now require more agility, scalability and availability. The key trends in this era are driven by the use of social platforms, mobile devices and software as a service (SaaS). Being able to ingest large amounts of data from various sources and process that data in […]
Big DevOps: Too Slow to Win?
There’s DevOps. And then there’s Big DevOps. DevOps is a set of disciplines that accelerates time-to-value for digital deliverables. It is being embraced by all kinds of companies, from pure-play digital market disrupters to mainstream corporates trying to maintain competitive parity with their mobile apps. Big DevOps is something else entirely. Big DevOps resembles mainstream […]
Fog Computing Meets Cloud Computing, and the Forecast Is Sunny
Fog computing is more than just cloud computing meeting edge networks, but for practitioners more interested in results than in new buzzwords, the question is whether fog’s IoT promise deliver real-time data storage, processing and analysis. One thing all new technologies share is the lack of a consensus on what exactly defines the technology. Ask […]
DevOps Chat: Panzura’s Cloud-Based File System Gives DevOps Big Savings
Have you heard of Panzura? If not, you are probably not alone. The company is relatively new to the DevOps market. But it’s not some new startup that grabbed some VC money by using DevOps as a buzzword: Panzura has been around for years, perfecting its cloud-based file system that can deliver eye-popping results in […]
How to Avoid Trouble when Deploying Apps to Multiple Clouds
Deployment is where Dev meets Ops. The glue that binds the two is orchestration, which places operations guidelines in the application itself. Here’s how to avoid trouble when deploying your apps to multiple clouds. Things move faster when your infrastructure is the cloud. Applications go from concept to production in hours rather than weeks or […]
Cloud Computing in 2016 and Beyond
Few activities are more perilous than predicting the future of the tech industry. That goes double for cloud computing forecasts. Yet, with thoughtful deliberation and the appropriate amount of caution, you can get a fairly accurate read on what’s to come in the increasingly competitive cloud services market. Here’s a quick look at several trends […]
Cloud Security Tips: How to Prevent Hackers from Breaching Your Cloud
Recent data system breaches at Oracle and Sage reminds us all that the continuous threat of criminal hacking of cloud security systems is not abating. Rather, it’s becoming routine. Business managers, lawmakers and computing professionals must understand the motivation behind this activity if they want to protect business interests and thwart attacks effectively. Perhaps the […]
The Cost of Rework when Developing for OpenStack Clouds
According to the 2016 State of DevOps Report by Puppet and DORA, the mean time to recover when a service incident occurs ranges from less than one hour for high IT performers to less than one day for medium and low IT performers. Put that in a real-world scenario: your OpenStack application and the data […]
Hybrid Cloud: How to Avoid Twice the Problems
Regardless of how enthusiastically you embrace the cloud, unless you’re a brand new business, you have already have an infrastructure running your applications. Odds are, you’re either renting space in one or more data centers. Or maybe long ago you reached the tipping point and built a data center or two of your own. Regardless, […]
The Maturing OpenStack Cloud: Just Do it
We’ve been thinking about the maturing cloud a lot lately. In fact, we’re participating in a panel discussion on the topic at the upcoming OpenStack East in August in New York. As we’ve spoken with OpenStack users and vendors throughout the world we’re hearing a common theme about the maturation of OpenStack clouds—the results seldom […]
Reinventing Monitoring for Private, Hybrid Clouds
Monitoring of systems, networks and applications has been around since the inception of computing. However, in the last five years there have been dramatic changes and innovations in the computing, networking and applications development landscapes. For instance, infrastructure is shared and allocated dynamically—often by continuous automation. Server virtualization by VMware and dynamic resource scheduling (DRS) […]
DevOps: The (Absolutely Critical) Cloud Enabler
A couple weeks ago, I gave a talk titled, “DevOps: The Cloud Enabler” at a conference. As I was putting together some requisite materials previewing my session, I made a few mistakes. (Yes, I’ll readily admit it.) I used the words “should” and “can” and “consider.” Instead, the words “must” or “not optional” or “operationally […]
MongoDB Atlas: One Giant Leap, But More Steps Needed
Atlas, holding up your databases in the cloud. I’m not sure if that’s what MongoDB was going for, but I personally like the analogy. At MongoDB World’16, MongoDB announced Atlas, a database-as-a-service offering (in the cloud) of the company’s popular open-source NoSQL database. Rather than dealing with the complexities of setting up, provisioning and configuring […]
Financial Drivers for Cloud Migration in Enterprise
Clouds are a vast pool of usable and manageable virtualized means such as development platforms, hardware and services. These assets can be animatedly reconfigured to adjust to a flexible load, which helps in the optimal utilization of resources. Your enterprise breathes through IT—to keep your business moving forward, you must modernize and be more flexible […]
Building the Search Engine Users Expect
The search experience most of us are familiar with is Google’s. The company has raised the expectations of search, conditioning us to its level of user experience. However, most websites and mobile applications still don’t offer this kind of advanced search. Here are three things to consider to keep the search experience on your company […]
Why a Dev/Test Cloud Is Not Optional
How do you create a private Dev/Test cloud to standardize processes, tooling and environments across teams? Recently, I participated in an online panel on the subject of, “Creating an Internal Dev/Test Cloud,” as part of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), a series of community panels about agile, continuous delivery and DevOps. Continuous Discussions is a community initiative […]
The 3 Compliance Questions to Ask
As companies move to cloud, they require more certainty around export compliance. Of the many complexities associated with cloud computing, export compliance laws arguably are some of the thorniest. From a legal and technical perspective, the export compliance laws currently on the books—as they vary from country to country—can make even the savviest and most […]
Why Legacy Backup Solutions Aren’t Ideal for OpenStack
Our team has recently returned from the OpenStack Summit in Austin. While there were many hot topics, we discovered people fell within two camps when it comes to backup and recovery: those who understand why a native OpenStack solution is required, and those who question why legacy backup and recovery won’t fit the bill. I […]