5 Years of Building A Cloud: Interview With LivePerson Openstack Cloud Leader

Koby Holzer has 17 years of experience working with large infrastructure environments, with the last 4.5 of these at LivePerson as the director of cloud engineering, specifically focussing on Openstack. His past experience includes working with prominent Israeli telecom companies in the area of technological infrastructure. I have personally known Koby for the past few years, through discussing, lecturing and enjoying the great cloud and DevOps community in Israel.

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Interview With AWS Cloud Champion Peter Sankauskas

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

[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.
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How IronSource Scales Node.js with Docker to Support Millions of Daily Users

[GUEST POST] ironSource is the world leading platform for software discovery, distribution, delivery and monetization. The solution consists of four cores – installCore, mobileCore, displayCore, and mediaCore – that connect software developers and users across platforms and devices.

The infrastructure department’s responsibilities include handling data received from all of our platforms for our own data analysis and billing. On any given day, we receive tens or even hundreds of millions of events from desktop computers, mobile phones, and web browsers. Our system comprises hundreds of servers supporting more than 5,000 concurrent connections.

In this article I will describe how we at ironSource scales Node.js with Docker – automatically build, deploy and run a Node.js application within a docker container to production.

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What Cloud 2015 Holds: My Predictions and Hopes for Enterprises

2014: A Reflection

t_F091CD55-1AEA-52CA-98B9-FC2558B77CF72014 has been a pivotal year in the enterprise tech world. Enterprise IT has begun to fully understand the cloud, and the development of a mutual understanding has grown. The cloud is, in turn, adjusting more and more to the features and traditional needs of enterprise  IT.

My perspective on next year is guided mostly by experiences I had this year (2014) at the AWS re:Invent conference. This huge cloud festival was the platform from which AWS publicly introduced the cloud as a means for creating today’s enterprise data center. Whether for native cloud web-scale applications or for enterprises of all shapes and sizes, the cloud is considered to be today’s best way to increase efficiency as well as flexibility in any IT environment. It is important to note that market saturation is still not here, however it’s just a matter of time until the cloud is used by everyone, covering a significant portion of the world of IT.

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Interview with Michael Bolton: The Software Tester & the Unexpected

Michael Bolton is a thought leader in the world of software testing, with over two decades of experience in the computer industry testing, developing, managing, and writing about software. As an international consultant and testing trainer, Michael gives workshops and conference presentations about testing methodologies and perceptions that specialize in Rapid and Exploratory Software Testing. Learn more

We invited the reputable cloud blogger, Ofir Nachmani to interview Michael Bolton. See what unfolded below:

Ofir Nachmani: “My interview with Bolton was really unique. We started with a shallow discussion about the cloud, that quickly moved to a very interesting discussion about software testing. Michael provided enlightening insights into the role of an individual software tester, the outlook a tester should have when using load testing tools, and the relationship between a product owner and a tester. He also covered basic fundamentals, such as how to test “the unexpected”. Even if you’re not a developer or tester, the information below will most likely shed light on an industry that directly affects us all.”

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Cloud Videos: Migrating to Cloud Native with Microservices by Adrian Cockcroft

Adrian-Cockroft-bigOn Wednesday July 2nd, Adrian Cockcroft, from Battery Venture, lectured at an IGTCloud and IamOnDemand meetup. Prior to joining Battery, Adrian led Netflix’s migration to a large scale, highly available public cloud infrastructure and drove the cloud-native NetflixOSS platform to become open source as the Netflix cloud management platform. In a recent interview, the Netflix cloud pioneer answered a broad range of questions covering everything from his take on AWS development, DevOps vs NoOps, and the future of enterprise IT. If you  like to enjoy  “IamOnDemand Adrian’s experience” check out my personal interview with the cloud pioneerTake it from someone who knows; from cloud history to on point predictions, Adrian has the knowledge we could all learn from in the industry.

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50% on S3? AWS Helping Google Into the Game or Stopping the Cloud Race to Zero?

Screenshot_228One day after Google announced a substantial price reduction for their cloud services, Amazon announced their own dramatic price reduction on several AWS offerings. This move will reduce the revenues of one of Amazon’s most profitable services, the S3, by about 50%. What were the AWS leaders thinking just before Andy Jassy went on the SF summit stage?

This decision raises a few questions about Amazon’s market strategy. Why would a leading company willingly cut their successful stream of revenues so suddenly in light of a new competition? Aside from the profit loss, Will this move – stop the IaaS vendors’ race to zero? will it position GCP a notable player in the cloud arena, as AWS largest direct competitor.

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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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