Surviving in the Public IaaS Cloud Market

Post author:Ofir Nachmani
Post published:May 21, 2015
Post category:Blogs
Post comments:1 Comment

If we look at market growth rates and the concentration of power within a handful of providers, using the terminology coined by Geoffrey Moore, it could easily be argued that the public IaaS cloud market is in the tornado and approaching Main Street. Despite a lack of publicly available market share data, for many in the industry, it seems like a two or three-player race, with one clear “gorilla”: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In this article I will attempt to briefly characterize the competitive positioning of the key players in the public IaaS market, and highlight some of the alternative strategies used by other providers to carve their own niches. The question that needs to be kept in mind is, can anyone else survive in the face of the steep competition presented by the two or three American mega-clouds?
(more…)

Interview With AWS Cloud Champion Peter Sankauskas

Post author:Ofir Nachmani
Post published:April 30, 2015
Post category:Blogs Interviews
Post comments:0 Comments

Allow me to introduce a good friend, Peter Sankauskas, who I met through the AWS cloud community. Our level of cloud experience evolved with the expansion of the cloud, Amazon in particular, and we have both become prominent members of the AWS community. Having learned more about open source and development, I’d like to focus on the idea of using Netflix open source tools to generate great values to cloud users.

Peter is the Founder and CEO of CloudNative, a company known for its continuous deployment tools. He started CloudNative after consulting at Answers for AWS and building the same system multiple times. Peter has been using AWS for over 7 years, across many companies and has designed, implemented, and managed systems that remain performant, highly available, and scale during exponential growth.

He led the engineering team at Motally to become one of the finalists in the AWS Start up Challenge in 2009. He wrote the EC2 inventory plugin for Ansible, giving Ansible it’s first taste of AWS. In 2013, Peter won a NetflixOSS Cloud Prize for Best Usability Enhancement for his work on making the NetflixOSS Stack easier to get up and running.
(more…)

5 Key Benefits of Docker: CI, Version Control, Portability, Isolation and Security

Post author:IOD Team
Post published:April 24, 2015
Post category:Blogs Cloud Security Containers Docker
Post comments:2 Comments

Docker doesn’t need an introduction. It is one of the hottest open source projects that allows you to deploy your application inside containers, adding a layer of abstraction. In a seemingly constant state of maturation, the benefits of using Docker increase on a regular basis. In this post, instead of talking about what Docker is or how it works, I’ll outline the top five benefits of using the ever-growing platform.
(more…)

How Often Do Tech Blogs Post? FYI: TechCrunch Published 1,076 Articles in January

Post author:Ofir Nachmani
Post published:April 6, 2015
Post category:Blogs Content Creation
Post comments:1 Comment

The web is exploding with content and publications about the cloud and technology, which can make it challenging to garner attention for your own blog’s content. Consequently, we created Ideation, a tool that aggregates hundreds of thousands of articles from tech publishers ranging from giant tech blogs, such as TechCrunch, to small cloud startup blogs. All you do is search for a keyword(s) or topic, then Ideation automatically finds and ranks current related articles according to the amount of shares that they receive on social platforms. Ideation is comparable to BuzzSumo, but the big difference is that Ideation is free and is geared towards cloud technology-based content.
I asked our talented development team to provide some numbers about the articles that we’ve already aggregated to show you how often tech blogs and sites post and get an idea of how often you should, too.
(more…)

Calling All Tech Bloggers, Writers and Evangelists!

Post author:Ofir Nachmani
Post published:March 31, 2015
Post category:Blogs Freelancing
Post comments:0 Comments

IOD is growing and we’re looking for high quality, professional tech bloggers and writers to join the team!
Whether your forte is creative writing or on the more technical side, we’re looking for writers with varying degrees of expertise in a realm we like to call ‘creative technical writing’.
(more…)

I Love the Cloud: My Never-Ending Journey with AWS

Post author:IOD Team
Post published:March 24, 2015
Post category:AWS Blogs
Post comments:0 Comments

[GUEST POST] I started exploring the cloud computing world around 5 years ago, and I must admit that my initial understanding of the cloud was a disaster. At first, it was difficult to find a comprehensive definition, but I finally settled on one from the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST). It clearly defined the cloud’s attributes and models, and removed my doubts regarding what falls under the cloud umbrella. The experience that I had finding this definition made me realize that I wanted there to be an easier way for others to find it, as well. Therefore, I decided to create my own list of cloud guidelines. This was a turning point in my cloud journey, as it pushed me to teach many students and IT professionals about cloud computing.
Stumbling upon AWS is inevitable when discovering the cloud, and just as with the cloud, my first interaction with AWS was not simple, either. I remember the moment of “Eureka!” that came after I was finally able to launch an EC2 instance and deploy a simple application. Sometimes, I laugh at the sheer joy I experienced from such a small achievement, but I realize that this was a stepping stone in my AWS journey and my love for Amazon. I am now able to manage bigger AWS cloud infrastructures, and I’ve consulted for and successfully designed various Amazon projects. I’ve conducted sessions on how to scale applications and how to make scalable applications using Amazon.
I see that two things have remained steady over the past few years: continuous innovations at AWS and my love for AWS. AWS has always kept me motivated to learn new things with its consistent new offerings, and I’d like to share the reasons that I believe make it the immense influence on the cloud that it is today.
(more…)

5 Things You Should Know About Continuous Deployment…by the Man Who Coined the Term

Post author:Ofir Nachmani
Post published:March 20, 2015
Post category:Blogs DevOps
Post comments:0 Comments

Tech Guru Timothy Fitz on making the jump to Continuous Deployment, the buzz around DevOps, and why GitHub has set back Software Departments by 5-10 years…
BlazeMeter invited me to ask 5 key questions to Timothy Fitz – the man who coined and popularized Continuous Deployment. Here are the results:

How would you define continuous deployment and how is it different to continuous delivery?

Timothy Fitz: This is a great question that isn’t frequently asked, since it is often assumed that they both mean the same thing. Usually, when people refer to continuous delivery, they actually mean continuous deployment.
(more…)

The Butterfly Effect of Uncontrolled Cloud Operations Change

Post author:IOD Team
Post published:March 12, 2015
Post category:Blogs
Post comments:0 Comments

The rapid development of SaaS applications in the cloud means more and more people, features and open source applications are combining together into one huge platform. Due to the immediacy of software development, a major challenge for software vendors is to audit changes in their application environments, such as system configurations. The problem is that any `change performed at any stage of an operation can impact other areas of an application. This digital butterfly effect can be very detrimental in today’s fast-paced, on-demand environment. It becomes even more destructive when these changes can’t be found, due to inadequate tracking. Failure to track changes, can greatly affect a company’s revenues and success.

A Real-Life Story

A company with a large scale SaaS platform that provides to large e-commerce, quality buyers started seeing that their revenues dropped about 12% from the previous day. The DevOps team started checking all of the platform components and logs to check for malfunctions. After 12 exhausting hours, they started searching for changes that were made over the past 36 hours and roll back these changes. Eventually, they found out that one of the analyst experts made a change to one of the campaigns.
(more…)

The Hybrid Cloud Exposed! 3 Challenges – 3 Insights

Post author:Ofir Nachmani
Post published:March 11, 2015
Post category:Blogs
Post comments:1 Comment

Last week, I was invited by Leaseweb to take part in a panel discussion about the evolution of the hybrid cloud. Alongside me sat Robert van der Meulen (Cloud Manager, LeaseWeb), Avi Shalisman (CEO, MoovingON), and Anatoly Atamanov (Director IT Operations, MyThings). As a result of this panel discussion, I’d like to share some of the challenges that IT faces in this seemingly inevitable transition to a hybrid cloud model. Although many things have already been said about the topic, I still feel the need to define what it means (yes…again), as well as what it is not.
I see the hybrid cloud as a sub-section of multi-cloud deployment, meaning IT users use both internal (private cloud) and external (public cloud) environments. While this sounds pretty straightforward, I’ve come to understand that there is no real alignment in terms of the definition of the hybrid cloud. As mentioned above, this article will identify certain challenges that are faced when building a hybrid cloud. While these challenges may (still) keep IT teams from even wanting to begin building a hybrid cloud, the business side of many companies is increasingly moving towards using the public cloud.
There are several incentives of building a hybrid cloud. Some see the public cloud as an extension of their on-premises environment; some simply want to use the public cloud for everything outside of mission critical applications and data that is kept on their trustful on-premises environment for increased security. Regardless of what your incentive is, it’s important to be aware of possible challenges lurking ahead.
(more…)

The Ins and Outs of Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery (DR)

Post author:Ofir Nachmani
Post published:February 19, 2015
Post category:Blogs
Post comments:0 Comments

Outages are inevitable. As we’ve seen over the past few years, every major cloud vendor’s experienced at least one, and we can expect that they will again at some point in the future. As cloud consumers, we need to be able to use the cloud’s building blocks and unlimited resources (at least, in theory), and create service robustness and high availability. Yet, important issues, like SLAs, remain unclear when it comes to consuming resources and services from IaaS vendors.Today, more than ever, online software service vendors, have a lot to lose when their services suffer from performance degradation. They could lose significant amounts of revenue as a result of actual outages as well as diminished user loyalty. In this article, I will share baseline perceptions and methods of cloud-based DR.