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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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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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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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ClickSoftware – Great Case of an AWS Cloud Adoption: Part 1, Operations

imageOver the last year I had endless conversations with companies that strive to adopt the cloud – specifically the Amazon cloud. Of those I met, I can say that ClickSoftware is one of the leading traditional ISVs that managed to adopt the cloud. The Amazon cloud is with no doubt the most advanced cloud computing facility, leading the market. In my previous job I was involved in the ClickSoftware cloud initiative, from decision making with regards to Amazon cloud all the way to taking the initial steps to educate and support the company’s different parties in providing an On-Demand SaaS offering.
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The IaaS Management Market: Evolution, Vendors and More

A lot has already been said about the false cloud use where the IaaS platform utilized as an hosting extension of the IT organization’s data center and not taking advantage of the elasticity benefits to generate a cost effective and scalable IT operation. Using the public IaaS whether it is Amazon, Rackspace or any other vendor means using a highly dynamic environment which presents an increasing complexity hence loss of control. Checking the list below I can say that cloud (including all its layers IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) control basically contains the same aspects as the good old system management.

What is “System management” ?
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Private Cloud Interview with Mr. Joe Weinman


As the founder of Cloudonomics.com, Joe Weinman is one of the most known cloud computing evangelists in the world. Weinman researches the economics of the cloud. Among other cloud aspects he examines, he also relates to the cloud financial operational costs together with its buisness benefits. Following I Am OnDemand last posts summarizing and discussing several Cloudonomics researches, we asked Mr. Weinman to meet for a brief discussion. Last week I had the honor to interview him for about an hour and hear his clouds’ perceptions and vision.
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Hybrid Cloudonomics – Part 2


The first part of Weinman’s lecture discussing the basic “go to the cloud” and demonstrating cloud environments’ loads of different corporations’ web applications. In this part we will bring 6 scenarios presented by Weinman, each includes a brief analysis and proof of its cost and benefits.

First lets start with several assumptions and definitions:
> > > 5 Basic assumptions Pay-per-use capacity model:

  1. Paid on use – Paid for when used and not paid for when not used.
  2. No depend on time – The cost for such capacity is fixed. It does not depend on the time or use of the request.
  3. Fixed unit cost – The unit cost for on-demand or dedicated capacity does not depend on the quantity of resources requested (you don’t get discount for renting 100 rooms for the same time).
  4. No other costs – There are no additional relevant costs needed for the analysis.
  5. No delay – All demand served without any delay.

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