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

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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EC2 Virtualization Options and the Move from PV to HVM

aws icon ec2aws icon ec2aws ec2 cloud[Guest Post by Uri Wolloch, Co-Founder and CTO at N2Ws]

This article discusses the recent change that has taken place with AWS EC2 virtualization options. We will look into AWS’ virtualization backend and what it means for AWS users in general and N2WS, in particular. For a bit of background, up until recently, the AWS cloud supported a virtualization type called Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) for Windows instances as well as ParaVirtualization (PV) for Linux instances. While these are both Xen technologies, they are slightly different. PV requires an added layer of software (i.e. kernel) between the designated hardware and virtual machines, and HVM runs directly on hardware and can make use of special hardware extensions.

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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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The Purely Public Cloud Deployment: The Perceived Risk

In this post series, I will raise some basic questions and will delve deeply into this topic to debate the common resistance to what I call “pure cloud deployment”.
Let’s begin with a leading question: Can’t the hybrid economy model live within the public cloud? From the enormous number of conversations with top cloud thought leaders, CIOs, startups, and the like, it seems that the answer is YES. 
The Pure Public Cloud
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Amazon, Microsoft and Google: The Cloud Leading Trio

The Cloud Leading TrioFollowing several discussions with fellow bloggers and industry executives, I found it quite fitting that the natural cloud leaders are the top software and web giants: Google, Microsoft and Amazon. While Amazon’s AWS is The public cloud today Google recently reported that it is doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, in order to expand its cloud technology team and engineers. Over two years prior to these Google’s expansion news, Microsoft reported that 90% of its R&D investment was earmarked for cloud technology. Last month they finally announced that Windows Azure Cloud Services now support auto-scaling. For these reasons and more, the following points will strengthen the trivial perception that cloud technologies should and will prosper in the hands of this software giant trio.
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The Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application

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A while back, I was starting up an EC2 instance on the AWS cloud when it entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment efforts we’d made (installation and service configuration) over two weeks just went down the drain. So we called support. The support rep redirected us to his team leader who simply told us that, as indicated in the SLA, we had to abide by the shared responsibility model and they were not liable for our loss.
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Newvem's April Webinar

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Dear IAmOnDemand reader, I would like to personally  invite you to join an interesting webinar that will take place this  Wednesday, April 3rd. 

As part of my job at Newvem, I have assembled a power-house panel of some of the top thought-leaders in cloud computing to discuss the importance of a healthy cloud, focusing on cost efficiency, risk tolerance, and resource optimization.
Moderated by my great cloud colleague Patrick Pushor, CTO and founder of  CloudChronicle.com, panelists include –

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My 5 Enterprise Cloud Predictions for 2013

imageI believe that this is the year when the enterprise will find its way to the cloud.
The mega Internet sites and applications are the new era enterprises. These will become the role models for the traditional enterprise. IT needs remain the same with regards to scale, security, SLA, etc. However, the traditional enterprise CIO has already set the goal for next year: 100% efficiency.
The traditional CIO understands that in order to achieve that goal, IT will need to start and do cloud, make sure that IT resources are utilized right, and that his teams move fast.

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Cloud Security Management – Overview and Challenges

What’s your first priority cloud security concern ?
From an attacker’s perspective, cloud providers aggregate access to many victims’ data into a single point of entry. As the cloud environments become more and more popular, they will increasingly become the focus of attacks. Some organizations think that liability can be outsourced, but no, it cannot! This presentation will answer questions such as what are the key security challenges for new cloud comers. What are the options and how you can start with a safe cloud deployment?
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Amazon Outage: Is it a Story of a Conspiracy? – Chapter 2

In April 2011, when Amazon’s cloud s east region failed. I posted the first chapter of theAmazon Cloud Outage Conspiracy – it was already very clear that the cloud will fail again and here it is… Chapter 2

Let’s first try to understand Amazon’s explanation for this outage.

“At approximately 8:44PM PDT, there was a cable fault in the high voltage Utility power distribution system. Two Utility substations that feed the impacted Availability Zone went offline, causing the entire Availability Zone to fail over to generator power. All EC2 instances and EBS volumes successfully transferred to back-up generator power.”

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