Identifying Workloads for the Cloud

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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

Getting Started with IAM Roles for EC2 Instances

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps you securely control access to Amazon Web Services and your account resources. IAM can also keep your account credentials private. With IAM, you can create multiple IAM users under the umbrella of your AWS account or enable temporary access through identity federation with your corporate directory. In some cases, you can also enable access to resources across AWS accounts.

Without IAM, however, you must either create multiple AWS accounts—each with its own billing and subscriptions to AWS products—or your employees must share the security credentials of a single AWS account. In addition, without IAM, you cannot control the tasks a particular user or system can do and what AWS resources they might use.

 

 

AWS has recently launched IAM Roles for EC2 Instances. A role is an entity that has a set of permissions that can be assumed by another entity. Use roles to enable applications running on your Amazon EC2 instances to securely access your AWS resources.You grant a specific set of permissions to a role, use the role to launch an EC2 instance, and let EC2 automatically handle AWS credential management for your applications that run on Amazon EC2. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to create a role and to grant permissions to the role.

 

 

IAM roles for Amazon EC2 provide:

  

• AWS access keys for applications running on Amazon EC2 instances
• Automatic rotation of the AWS access keys on the Amazon EC2 instance
• Granular permissions for applications running on Amazon EC2 instances that make requests to your AWS services

  

The below video demonstrates basic workflow of:

 

 

 

For more help, refer the AWS documentation for IAM here.

 

For other AWS Documentations, please refer to the quick links provided in the Blogger's right-side panel.

 

 

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.







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