My Take on AWS re:Invent 2013: The Cloud Makes IT Cool

AWS reinvent Keynote by Werner VoglesThe AWS cloud is here to stay. That’s a fact that is not solely attributable to its famed CTO, Dr. Werner Vogel’s, charisma. It is rather due to AWS creating its own destiny for success. This is thanks to a couple factors in particular, namely, an ideal pace of innovation and a positive and highly innovative product and marketing atmosphere (aka evangelism).

There is no doubt that the cloud put Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, in the position to fill what used to be Apple’s shoes. What is interesting, though, is that he used those shoes to mosey on over to IT’s doorstep.

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AWS re:Invent 2013 Best of Show: The Winners

AWS reinvent the winnersThe AWS re:Invent floor this year was much more vibrant than last year. It included remarkable cloud products’ promotions made by the 189 conference sponsors, some of which only began their ventures one year ago. Naturally, the ‘experienced’ vendors made themselves known, with more lavish displays and a larger staff headcount, but that is to be expected.
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ScaleBase: The Cloud Native Database Scalability

scalebase-logo_mdI’ve been working in the cloud industry for nearly the past decade, and can say, without a doubt, that Database as a Service is one of the most interesting and challenging domains I’ve encountered.
In 2005, I ran a software developers team that provided LAMP Software as a Service for enterprises; therefore, I became very familiar with the challenges of carrying out MySQL work for large scale demand. These challenges are further augmented when dealing with web applications that have exponential transaction rates and concurrent user growth.
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Cloud Marketing, IBM Does it Wrong (personal letter attached)

IBM bus signs aws reinventThe 102 year old veteran IT company seems to have taken countless steps toward the development of CloudSmart, the IT giant’s proprietary cloud that, despite its large investments, has not demonstrated any sort of progress… until now, that is. In July, IBM upped its game by announcing its acquisition of Softlayer, an open cloud platform based on both Cloudstack and OpenStack. Although it is being perceived as an enterprise grade IaaS offering, it is still an immature cloud offering. Additionally, IBM cloud marketing guys have been taking the Steve Jobs approach to marketing (against IBM), circa 1984, belittling AWS in every way possible.  While IBM benefits greatly from its trusted name, to me, this strike seems a bit old and not relevant anymore, making me question where my trust actually lies.
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AWS re:Invent 2013 Top Best of Show

Do you have an amazing application or service on the verge of discovery?
AWS best of show
Be one of this year’s Best of Show at AWS re:Invent 2013!
`I am OnDemand` and `Business Disrupted`, two of the most celebrated blogs in the cloud industry today, will be nominating the most innovative and skillful developers, technical leaders, startups and established companies at the event. The 10 Best of Show will then have the honor of being featured in both of the blogs, reaping the countless benefits of their far reaching community channels.
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5 Recommended AWS re:Invent Breakout Sessions for Scalability and Optimization

reinvent logoI’m OnDemand is heading to Las Vegas for Amazon’s official cloud show – AWS re:Invent. In my honest opinion, the show is the most significant conference in the cloud and IT industries, and includes a number of fantastic educational sessions.  To navigate the sessions, Amazon has provided conference attendees with a great tool that helps them sort through more than 286 sessions (up from 150 last year).
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Dome9 Cloud Street View for AWS Security: The Exponential Cloud Growth Visualization

Dome9 Cloud ClarityConfidence is key when it comes to managing large IT systems. The tricky part is when a CIO tries to generate the trust and confidence of a company’s IT environment. Complete transparency is the answer. As you may recall, I’ve written about the need for transparency concerning Newvem’s services in the past. As the cloud industry market matures, the AWS cloud continues to grow at ground-breaking speeds, in addition to the usual individual cloud deployment. In either respect, transparency becomes an issue.
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#devopsdays TLV and TDD = Test Driven Dev

devopsdays logoLast two days were extremely interesting at the Devops Days Conference in Tel Aviv. It was impressive to see the amount of professionals that attend and the amazing energies that supported a great open space sessions and networking. The successful conference was initiated by the great Gigaspaces team led by the honorable (and a very good friend) Mr. Nati Shalom, CTO at Gigaspaces. You can also check these recorded sessions.
Following is just a quick taste of a great presentation done by @aviranm discussing Continuous Delivery at @wix

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Datapipe Acquires Newvem: My Take

newvem we analyze you optimize I began my journey in the world of cloud computing roughly about 9 years ago, leading cloud and SaaS products and development teams. Two years ago, as part of my position as Cloud Evangelist for Clicksoftware, I had the pleasure of meeting two progressive entrepreneurs, Zev Laderman and Ilan Naslavsky.  At that time, they had just begun developing cutting edge technology that supported AWS cloud users, optimizing usage and utilization. They had asked me to test this innovation, which was in its early alpha stage. So, being the optimistic and supportive early cloud adopter that I am, I immediately gave them the AWS keys (back then, you had only one option – the full right keys). Ilan, who came up with the idea, went over the AWS account Newvem’s analysis with me.  During his explanation, we came across a single Windows SQL EC2 instance that sat underutilized in the region of Japan.  Apparently, it had been running for nearly 5 months, resulting in approximately $6000 worth of Amazon operating costs. Eventually I managed to save around 40% of the AWS bill (tens of thousands of dollars).
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