Why AWS re:Inforce? Because It’s Time!

Covering the world of cloud for more than a decade now, I’ve learned a simple thing: innovation should not and will not be focused too closely on security from the get-go. However, security cannot and should not be ignored as the cloud market matures and this is what we see here with the introduction of the 1st cloud security conference, AWS re:Inforce, taking place in Boston, June 25-26.

Back in the days when the market was still resistant to the public cloud, the discussion often centered around security of the environment and compliance. Public cloud opponents claimed that large enterprise and government organizations would not use the public cloud due to the risk of running sensitive workloads on a public facility. Now that the public cloud is a common go-to even for organizations with sensitive workloads, and AWS is the new IBM, this is no longer the case.
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The Subject Matter Expert (SME) Content Paradox and Pulling Teeth

When it comes to creating quality content assets for high-tech companies at scale, we have noticed the following paradox in the marketplace:

  • Writers know how to write but they don’t have hands-on, intimate knowledge of the technology.
  • The SME live and breathe the technology, but they don’t know how to effectively and engagingly write about it.

Of course there are exceptional individuals who are both knowledgeable and good writers but, let’s face it, they are few and far between—and, if you find one, worth his weight in gold.
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10 Things I Learned Shipping an Ancient Data Center to AWS (Part 1)

By John Fahl, IOD Expert
When we got to the consulting gig, they told us they wanted to do DevOps. They said they wanted to be like <insert “awesome streaming video provider” here>. What they had was several data centers filled with several servers using OSs older than 10 years (some even 20+ years old).
They also relied on some real relics like NIS (yup…this is still a thing …), had deep vendor lock-in, massive old, stagnant clusters, manually built applications (most having been created a decade earlier), and armies of contractors overseeing it all.
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Just a Few AWS Tricks I Learned on the Way

By John Fahl, IOD Expert
Once you work with AWS long enough, you realize it changes all the time.
Some things that were difficult last year are now easy.
Who remembers ELB IPs moving on you? Normally, when you use a CNAME (like you’re supposed to) it doesn’t matter, but I’ve moved a few apps that used hardcoded IPs in old applications. Now, you can just abandon the legacy ELB and use their NLB for that issue. NLB and ALB were big improvements over traditional ELB.
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