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 cloud pushes the data center to re-invent itself within the new environment. It is a fact that, although the cloud is a pure revolution (at least in MHO), terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI are still valid in this new IT era. Thanks to industry leaders such as Salesforce.com that realize the notion of “API first”, vendors such Amazon cloud present new capabilities first through their APIs. In this way, the cloud operator platform enables development of its ecosystem.

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Guest Post: The Case for NoOps

No OpsSomething that amuses me is the fact that 80% of so-called “Introduction to AWS” stuff is mainly geared at EC2. While I don’t have any problem with it, I think they’re missing the main point in Cloud as a full stack platform, which is to manage more and maintain less.
Let me explain this further: I’m a huge fan of NoOps, even before the name was coined. What we’ve learnt from using AWS Services like S3, Dynamo, and the SNS/SQS Sisters, is that managers actually LOVE not having to consider additional servers to maintain. But how did we get to this point?

In the Beginning…

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5 Key Essentials of Cloud Workloads Migration

imageThe benefits of migrating workloads between different cloud providers or between private and public clouds can only truly be redeemed with an understanding of the cloud business model and cloud workload management. It seems that cloud adoption has reached the phase where advanced cloud users are creating their own hybrid solutions or migrating between clouds while striving to achieve interoperability values within their systems. This article aims to answer some of the questions that arise when managing cloud workloads.

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Secure Your Cloud Building Blocks: Overview and a Few Tips

AWS Cloud Security TipsThe cloud enables great agility and can reduce costs if used right. But does it also manage risk? In fact, the cloud contains the same traditional hosting risks as well as specific related risks to your production environment running on the cloud.
With IaaS dynamic environment you pay only for what you use enabling alignment with actual real-time demand. The cloud instance is a temporary resource that is created from a gold master image automatically and on demand. This basic cloud automation capability makes traditional patching redundant and fast provisioning extremely easy. It is an important consideration that changes some basic security deployment perceptions when moving from traditional infrastructure to the cloud.
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