Showing posts with label Cloud Computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cloud Computing. Show all posts

Thursday 30 August 2012

Going to the Cloud - Cloud in Education

A very good Infographic that looks at how schools and colleges are adopting 'the cloud' and how Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, and Google are responding with their respective cloud suites for educators.

Going to the Cloud

From: OnlineColleges.net

SOURCE


 

Wednesday 29 August 2012

What's new in VMware vSphere 5.1

Today VMware announced vSphere 5.1. This posting will give an overview of the most interesting new features.

vSphere 5.1 will be available September 11 2012 !!


Some highlights are as follows:

  • Paul Maritz steps down as CEO after leading the company for 4 years. His successor is Pat Gelsinger
  • VMware is focused on building the architecture for Cloud Computing which is called the Software Defined Datacenter
  • vCloud Suite is announced, consisting of:
    • vSphere
    • vCloud Director
    • vCloud Networking and Security
    • Site Recovery Manager
    • vCenter Operations Manager
    • vFabric Application Director
    • vCloud API’s
    • vCloud Connector
    • vCenter Orchestrator

  • vSphere 5.1 is announced
  • vCloud Director 5.1 is announced
  • vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 is announced
  • vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1 is announced
  • vRAM is no more! VMware will use a priced per CPU model
  • Cloud Ops, a new operating model for IT
  • Monster VMs will get bigger: 64 virtual CPUs and 1 million IOPS...per VM
  • Enhanced vMotion: Live migration without the need of shared storage!
  • New virtualized storage options
  • Create secure and logical networks using the new vCloud Networking & Security suite and VXLAN
  • vSphere 5.1 contains a full featured browser based vSphere Client, the Web Client
  • The vCloud Director interface is now vSphere Web Client style
  • The vSphere Web Client now offers great extensibility options for 3rd party vendors
  • Use vFabric Application Director for deploying complex applications
  • Existing vSphere Enterprise Plus customers will get a free upgrade to the vCloud Suite
  • VMware recently acquired Nicira, a company that virtualizes networking


  • More detailed information on all these announcements follow below:

    VMware changed the features in the vSphere editions. The features below all are available now in Standard Edition as well.


    Tuesday 28 August 2012

    Identifying Workloads for the Cloud

    Superb Information by Rightscale... Read on...


    Identifying workloads to move to the cloud can be tricky. You have dozens or hundreds of apps running in your organization, and now that you’ve seen the operational efficiencies and agility available to you in the cloud, you’re tempted to move as many of them to the cloud as quickly as possible. As you’ll see in the examples below, cloud computing is indeed a good fit for many common workloads.

    I firmly believe that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud is for every organization, but not for every application. The reality is that some applications just aren’t a good fit for the ephemeral and dynamic environment of the cloud. Still others have very specific environmental requirements that make them ill suited. Read on as I explore more about what you should consider before earmarking a workload for the cloud.


    3 Quick Criteria for a Good Fit

    While each application is unique, and it’s important to apply your own lens when evaluating your cloud strategy, there are some rules of thumb that should help identify applications that are winning choices for cloud:

    Unpredictable load or potential for explosive growth: Whenever your app is public facing, it has the potential to be wildly popular. Social games, eCommerce sites, blogs and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products fall into this category. If you release the next Farmville™ and your traffic spikes, you can scale up and down in the cloud according to demand, avoiding a “success disaster” and never over-provisioning your infrastructure.

    Partial utilization: When traffic fluctuates – say with daily cycles of playing or shopping, or with occasional, compute-intensive batch processing – you can spin up extra servers in the cloud during the peaks and spin them down afterwards.

    Easy parallelization: Applications like media streaming can be scaled horizontally and are generally a good use case for the cloud, because they scale out rather than up.
    Finally, keep in mind the ideal of cloud computing as a way of using multiple resource pools – public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, your internal data center – not choosing one over the others. RightScale lets you see and manage all of them through one interface with a single set of tools and best practices.

    3 Ideal Cloud Workloads

    INFOGRAPHIC- Is The Future Of Cloud Computing Open Source? A Few Things To Consider


    Companies are embracing cloud computing solutions because of their flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness, and those who have successfully integrated the cloud into their infrastructure have found it quite economic. They can expand and contract, and add and remove services as per requirement, giving them a lot of control over the resources being used and the funds being spent on those resources. This highly controllable environment not only cuts the costs of services, but also saves funds that are spent on the infrastructure of the company.


    Replacement of Personal Computers with Personal Clouds


    Cloud computing is not only becoming popular in business, but also among individual consumers. With the passage of time, personal computers are being replaced by personal clouds, and more and more companies are offering personal cloud services. People prefer to store their images, videos and documents online, both as a backup and to make them secure. Storing data on personal clouds makes it available anytime, anywhere. You just need a computing device and an Internet connection, and you can access all your photos, videos and documents.


    Stability, Scalability and Reliability of Open-Source Software


    Open-source software is becoming popular on an enterprise level because of its stability, scalability and reliability. Companies love to use open-source technologies because they are highly customizable, secure, reliable and accountable. With proprietary software, we are highly dependent on the software company for its development and support. But for open-source, we can find huge support from developers across the world, and we can tweak it according to our needs. Just hire a team of developers, and there you go.



    Lessons Learned from Linux and Android


    Monday 27 August 2012

    Infographic : Evolution of Computer Languages

    All the cloud applications you use on the Internet today are written in a specific computer language. What you see as a nice icon on the front end looks like a bunch of code on the back end. It’s interesting to see where computer languages started and how they have evolved over time. There are now a series of computer languages to choose from and billions lines of code. Check out the infographic below to see the computer language timeline and read some fun facts about code along the way.







    SOURCE




    Sunday 19 August 2012

    yoyoclouds: The Cloud Revolution

    The Cloud Revolution Cloud computing spending will account for 25% of annual IT expenditure growth by 2012 and nearly a third of the growth the following year. 

     “The battle for Cloud dominance is heating up, with the release of Office 365, it will be very interesting to see where the next big play comes from.”


    Read more here.

    Thursday 28 June 2012

    Learn All About the Amazon Simple Workflow Service - Two New Videos


    Another great new post by Jeff, the voice may not be that great, but the visual is good...:

    The Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF) is used to power highly scalable distributed systems at NASA (case study), Sage Bionetworks (case study), and a number of our other customers.

    In order to help you to better understand SWF, Balan Subramanian, SWF Product Manager, hosted an hour-long webinar:



    Maxim Fateev, AWS Principal Engineer, spent another hour discussing the Flow Framework:



    SOURCE

    yoyoclouds: Cloud Infographic: The Future Of The Cloud

    yoyoclouds: Cloud Infographic: The Future Of The Cloud: Cloud Infographic: The Future Of The Cloud The Future Of The Cloud As barriers to entry lower and the benefits increase, an increasing amount of corporations are choosing to make cloud based solutions a part of their operating model. ...

    Friday 22 June 2012

    Zoho Creator


    Many people use Zoho’s huge suite of free, online applications, which is competitive with Google Docs. What lots of folks don’t realize, though, is that Zoho’s core is completely open source — a shining example of how SaaS solutions can work in harmony with open source. You can find many details on how Zoho deploys open-source tools in this interview

    What is Zoho Creator?

    Zoho Creator is an easy-to-use platform that lets you build custom business applications on your own, online.





    Tuesday 5 June 2012

    InfoWorld : Cloud Monitoring

    As the monitoring software vendors debate just how much to bridge the gap between test software and the working system, the lines will continue to blur as they automate the responses to the tests. The monitoring system is morphing into a management system. The most common change is adding or subtracting servers as the load changes. If the tests show that response times are slowing, the test systems can trigger the creation of new servers from the cloud without waiting for an administrator to make a decision.

    Download the pdf here : AST-0061733_Cloud_Monitoring



    Sponsor: Boundary

    SOURCE

    Wednesday 30 May 2012

    AWS EBS-Backed Instance Backup &Restore

    Starting with the 2009-10-31 API, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a new type of Amazon Machine Image(AMI) that stores its root device as an Amazon Elastic Block Store(EBS) volume. They refer to these AMIs as Amazon EBS-backed. When an instance of this type of AMI launches, an Amazon EBS volume is created from the associated snapshot, and that volume becomes the root device. You can create an AMI that uses an Amazon EBS volume as its root device with Windows or Linux/UNIX operating systems.

    These instances can be easily backed-up. You can modify the original instance to suit your particular needs and then save it as an EBS-backed AMI. Hence, if in future you need the the modified version of instance, you can simply launch multiple new instances from the backed-up AMI and are ready to-go.

    Following are the steps to be performed for backup/restoring of AWS EBS instance into/from an AWS AMI. Also brief steps for deletion of AMI backup are noted for reference


    EBS-instance to EBS-backed AMI

    • Go to AWS Management Console and in the My Instances Pane, select the instance which has to be backed up.
    • Right click the instance and select option Create Image (EBS AMI).

    • In the Create Image dialog box, give proper AMI Name and Description. Click on Create This Image button.
     

    • The image creation will be in progress. This will take sometime depending upon the number & size of volumes attached to the instance. Click on View pending image link. It will take you to the AMIs pane.

    • The AMI will be in pending state. It is important to note that this AMI is private to the account and not available for AWS public use.
     
    • If you select Snapshots from the Navigation Pane, then you can see that EBS volumes attached to the instance will be backed up as too.

    • Once the backup is done, the AMI will be in available state.
     


    Restore from backup AMI into instance


    In case, the running instance needs to be restored, use the latest backup AMI. To launch an instance from this AMI, right-click the AMI and select Launch Instance option. The Launch Instance Wizard will be displayed, perform the usual configurations and a new instance will be created containing all the data & configurations done before backup.


    Delete AMI & Snapshots:

    • To delete any AMI, Right-click it and select De-register AMI.

    • Remember, deleting AMI doesn’t delete the EBS volume snapshots. Click on Snapshots from Navigation pane, search & select the snapshot(s) to be deleted. Right-click on the snapshot(s) and select delete snapshot option.
     


    References:


     

    Tuesday 22 May 2012

    Amazon CloudSearch-Information Retrieval as a Service

    The idea of using computers to search for relevant pieces of information was popularized in the article “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush in 1945.
    As We May Think predicted (to some extent) many kinds of technology invented after its publication, including hypertext, personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia: “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”
    According to Wikipedia, Information retrieval (IR) is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web. There is overlap in the usage of the terms data retrieval, document retrieval, information retrieval, and text retrieval, but each also has its own body of literature, theory, praxis, and technologies.
    Purpose of Information Retrieval: To find the desired content quickly and efficiently by simply consulting the index.
    “News & Announcements” section in AWS Newsletter brings new surprise in terms of Amazon’s offering and the way they are expanding the domain every month. AWS users are not surprised about the surprise they are getting but its more in terms of what kind of offering will be targeted by Amazon remains surprise. In April 2012 AWS has come up with new offering that is Amazon CloudSearch.
    Amazon CloudSearch offers a way to integrate search into websites and applications, whether they’re customer-facing or for use behind the corporate firewall. It’s the same search technology that’s available at Amazon.com.
    Amazon CloudSearch is a fully-managed search service in the cloud that allows customers to easily integrate fast and highly scalable search functionality into their applications. Amazon CloudSearch effortlessly scales as the amount of searchable data increases or as the query rate changes, and developers can change search parameters, fine tune search relevance, and apply new settings at any time without having to upload the data again.
    http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/cloudsearch/CloudSearchScaling.png
    http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/cloudsearch/CloudSearchScaling.png
    According to Amazon Web Services Blog,
    “CloudSearch hides all of the complexity and all of the search infrastructure from you. You simply provide it with a set of documents and decide how you would like to incorporate search into your application.
    You don’t have to write your own indexing, query parsing, query processing, results handling, or any of that other stuff. You don’t need to worry about running out of disk space or processing power, and you don’t need to keep rewriting your code to add more features.
    With CloudSearch, you can focus on your application layer. You upload your documents, CloudSearch indexes them, and you can build a search experience that is custom-tailored to the needs of your customers.”

    Architecture

    Configuration Service: The configuration service enables you to create and configure search domains. Each domain encapsulates a collection of data you want to search.
    • Indexing Option specifies the field to include it is index
    • Text Options, to avoid words during indexing
    • Rank Expressions to determine how search results are ranked.
    Document Service: to make changes to a domain’s searchable data.
    Search Service: The search service handles search requests for a domain.

    Features

    Benefits

    • Offloads administrative burden of operating and scaling a search platform
    • No need to worry about hardware provisioning, data partitioning, or software patches; it will be taken care by service provider
    • Pay-as-you-go pricing with no up-front expenses

    Pricing Dimensions

    • Search instances
    • Document batch uploads
    • Index Documents requests
    • Data transfer

    Pricing

    Search Instance Type
    US East Region
    Small Search Instance
    $0.12 per hour
    Large Search Instance
    $0.48 per hour
    Extra Large Search Instance
    $0.68 per hour

    Video Tutorials

    Introducing Amazon CloudSearch
    To see a summary of Amazon CloudSearch features, please watch this video.
    Introducing Amazon CloudSearch
    Building a Search Application Using Amazon CloudSearch
    To see how to use Amazon CloudSearch to develop a search application, including uploading and indexing a large public data set, setting up index fields, customizing ranking, and embedding search in a sample application, please watch this video.
    Building a Search Application Using Amazon CloudSearch


    SOURCE : Amazon CloudSearch-Information Retrieval as a Service.