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

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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Dear Google, Your Cloud Is Great, but..Here Is a Little Feedback

Dear Google, Your Cloud Is Great, but..Here Is a Little Feedback

gcplogoAs a developer with fifteen years of experience in IT, I’ve dedicated the past five years to working with the cloud. I’ve been involved with cloud services from AWS cloud (since 2010) and Azure. A bit over nine months ago, I started working almost exclusively with Google Cloud (GCD) and Google Compute Engine as part of a consulting project I led. The project involved building a backend for a high performance web application. At first, the customer thought to use their own data center, which I discouraged. Then, Google approached them and offered a package that included free support and better pricing for their services, which the customer agreed to take.
I’ve been working on this project for a few months now and in many ways, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has been great to work with. However, it’s the first time that I’ve seen such great challenges compared to my experience working with other clouds. It feels like these challenges stem from Google’s isolated development culture, with their “my way or the highway” approach. In this article I would like to address these thoughts and provide you with a few suggestions.
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Surviving in the Public IaaS Cloud Market

Surviving in the Public IaaS Cloud Market

bezoswernerIf we look at market growth rates and the concentration of power within a handful of providers, using the terminology coined by Geoffrey Moore, it could easily be argued that the public IaaS cloud market is in the tornado and approaching Main Street. Despite a lack of publicly available market share data, for many in the industry, it seems like a two or three-player race, with one clear “gorilla”: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In this article I will attempt to briefly characterize the competitive positioning of the key players in the public IaaS market, and highlight some of the alternative strategies used by other providers to carve their own niches. The question that needs to be kept in mind is, can anyone else survive in the face of the steep competition presented by the two or three American mega-clouds?
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How Often Do Tech Blogs Post? FYI: TechCrunch Published 1,076 Articles in January

How Often Do Tech Blogs Post? FYI: TechCrunch Published 1,076 Articles in January

The web is exploding with content and publications about the cloud and technology, which can make it challenging to garner attention for your own blog’s content. Consequently, we created Ideation, a tool that aggregates hundreds of thousands of articles from tech publishers ranging from giant tech blogs, such as TechCrunch, to small cloud startup blogs. All you do is search for a keyword(s) or topic, then Ideation automatically finds and ranks current related articles according to the amount of shares that they receive on social platforms. Ideation is comparable to BuzzSumo, but the big difference is that Ideation is free and is geared towards cloud technology-based content.
I asked our talented development team to provide some numbers about the articles that we’ve already aggregated to show you how often tech blogs and sites post and get an idea of how often you should, too.
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The Butterfly Effect of Uncontrolled Cloud Operations Change

The Butterfly Effect of Uncontrolled Cloud Operations Change

The rapid development of SaaS applications in the cloud means more and more people, features and open source applications are combining together into one huge platform. Due to the immediacy of software development, a major challenge for software vendors is to audit changes in their application environments, such as system configurations. The problem is that any `change performed at any stage of an operation can impact other areas of an application. This digital butterfly effect can be very detrimental in today’s fast-paced, on-demand environment. It becomes even more destructive when these changes can’t be found, due to inadequate tracking. Failure to track changes, can greatly affect a company’s revenues and success.

A Real-Life Story

A company with a large scale SaaS platform that provides to large e-commerce, quality buyers started seeing that their revenues dropped about 12% from the previous day. The DevOps team started checking all of the platform components and logs to check for malfunctions. After 12 exhausting hours, they started searching for changes that were made over the past 36 hours and roll back these changes. Eventually, they found out that one of the analyst experts made a change to one of the campaigns.
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The Ins and Outs of Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery (DR)

The Ins and Outs of Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery (DR)

Cloud DROutages are inevitable. As we’ve seen over the past few years, every major cloud vendor’s experienced at least one, and we can expect that they will again at some point in the future. As cloud consumers, we need to be able to use the cloud’s building blocks and unlimited resources (at least, in theory), and create service robustness and high availability. Yet, important issues, like SLAs, remain unclear when it comes to consuming resources and services from IaaS vendors.Today, more than ever, online software service vendors, have a lot to lose when their services suffer from performance degradation. They could lose significant amounts of revenue as a result of actual outages as well as diminished user loyalty. In this article, I will share baseline perceptions and methods of cloud-based DR.

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Ideation on Demand: Listen to Your Cloud Community

Cloud content ideationI have been responsible for editing and publishing over 1,200 articles in the realm of cloud computing over the last two years. Besides creating articles, at IamOnDemand (IOD), we also review trending topics, cultivate relevant ideas, and select the right headlines for articles we create. Just like every organization that wants to grow fast while enhancing its service, products and customer satisfaction, we are constantly on the lookout for creative methods and innovative technologies that support robust and quality delivery.

One of the main challenges in content writing is finding a healthy way to integrate innovative and unique ideas into an already existing and ever-fluctuating market. You may have spent hours or even weeks writing an amazing article, only to discover that no one read it once it was published. Maybe people overlooked it; maybe they clicked on its title and left the page after reading two sentences. Ultimately, the post did not achieve the user engagement that you had hoped for, leaving you with an 80% bounce rate.

Curious? check out IOD Ideation or just keep on reading.

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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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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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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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