Cloud Champ

DigitalChalk Rolls Out Enterprise e-Learning and Discounts

2011-12-19T13:26:00.002-05:00

Online training leader DigitalChalk introduces Enterprise features and shopping cart discount options in their latest release.

With over 2,000 client organizations and nearly 6,000 courses being offered, DigitalChalk has become the clear leader in Cloud-based e-learning

Asheville, NC (PRWEB) December 19, 2011

Online training software leader, DigitalChalk announced today it's release of the winter 2012 "Newton" edition to it's Cloud-based training software as a service (SaaS) platform. This latest release includes features for both the professional trainers selling courses online as well as the Enterprise accounts. Current Professional and Business account customers have full access to the shopping cart discount features. Enterprise accounts now have an advanced rules engine for course registration.

The discount features introduced for Professional and Business accounts include options for course providers to offer coupon codes, combination course bundles and even advanced user matching options. Matching options only allow discounts to apply if the user meets criteria such as an email domain or geographic location match. Training providers can also create registration codes for bulk sales to business clients.

With the introduction of Enterprise accounts, DigitalChalk now provides advanced course delivery, tracking and reporting features along with full single sign-on capabilities to integrate the Cloud-based training services into corporate networks. This release includes an advanced course registration rules engine that allows training managers to set up rules to assign training courses to audiences based on geography, user rules, user profile data or keyword matching.

"The Enterprise edition released this year has had significant traction for both current clients and new customers who need to rapidly roll out online courses" said Tony McCune, VP Sales. "Clients now routinely sign up, publish courses and deliver training to thousands or more employees in less than a month. With over 2,000 client organizations and nearly 6,000 courses being offered, DigitalChalk has become the clear leader in Cloud-based e-learning," said McCune.

About DigitalChalk
DigitalChalk was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Asheville, NC. The SaaS training platform is available on a per-delivery fee basis for training professionals selling courses or a per-user basis for Business and Enterprise accounts. DigitalChalk is a full-service e-learning platform with course authoring, delivery and reporting included. DigitalChalk is the first and only online platform to provide HDLearn technology for video streaming capabilities that include tracking, progress control and reporting in a video lesson.

Asheville Cloud Computing Day

2011-08-05T07:54:00.001-05:00

On August 10th, I will be speaking at an event in Asheville, North Carolina focused on Cloud Computing technology. If you are interested in learning about how you can use cloud computing in your business or seeing what the City of Asheville is doing with the technology, this event is free and open to the public. It is a very short mini-conference with a good line-up of speakers and we will also be hearing from Asheville's CIO, Jonathan Feldman. I hope to see you there!

City announces speaker lineup for Asheville Cloud Computing Day 2011

ASHEVILLE - The City of Asheville's Information Technology Services Department is sponsoring "Asheville Cloud Computing Day 2011", a mini-conference scheduled for 9 to 11:30 a.m. Aug. 10 in the Municipal Building (100 Court Plaza, 4th floor).

The event seeks to share cutting-edge ideas about cloud computing, a technology that promises to improve city government, as well as other organizations that adopt it.

The agenda and speaker lineup will include:

“Servers are Software: The Advantages of Cloud Architecture” - Joe Emison, VP, Research & Development, BuildFax.
“How Citizens Can Use Open Data To Create New City Services” - Trevor Lohrbeer, CEO, Lab Escape.
“Beyond the server: the rise of cloud-based desktops” - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, contributing editor, CBS News and ZDNet.
“The Playground of Today’s Tech Innovators: How Cloud Computing Changes The Game” - Troy Tolle, CTO, Digital Chalk.

RSVPs from members of the community interested in attending the event are appreciated, but not necessary. RSVPs or questions about the event may be directed to @avlcio on Twitter, or jfeldman@ashevillenc.gov.

For information about Asheville's Information Technology Services program, visit http://ashevillenc.gov/its.

Save Time with Custom Search in Chrome & Firefox

2011-02-20T14:13:00.000-05:00

I am a fan of anything that can simplify and quickly make my life easier, no matter how small that thing might be. This week one of our talented developers (@devewm) at DigitalChalk showed me something that will save me several minutes every single day. He introduced me to making your own custom searches in Chrome and Firefox. I wanted to share with you how it really simplified my day in hopes that you could apply it as well.
At DigitalChalk, we use Edgewall's Trac to for our development wiki and issue tracking system. Every single day, I will be talking with someone in sales, support, development or operations and will inevitably get asked to go and view a certain ticket by its ticket number. While it is simple to use the search field within Trac itself, it would be nice to just navigate straight to the ticket from the browser. This is where a custom search shined for me. You can take any known url and insert your search text right from the browser bar. I used this to setup a custom DigitalChalk Trac search that would take me straight to the ticket I was looking for saving me a click everytime.
Here is how you can set it up for yourself in Chrome:

Open Chrome Preferences

Click on the Manage Button next to the Search drop-down

In the Search Engines dialog, click on the + button in the bottom left hand corner. The important things here are the keyword and the URL. You will notice that I am using a keyword of "!trac". This is what I will type in the browser bar and it will take whatever text I put next and place it in the URL where I have specified "%s". In the case above, the "%s" is at the end of the URL and will correspond to the ticket number I would like to display.

After that, you are ready to use it. Just open up a new tab and type in your keyword.

Chrome will resolve the keyword to your Search and then you can type in your search term. After you press enter, you will be taken directly to the page that you were targeting.

On Firefox, the same feature exist, but it is buried a little differently. You can accomplish what you want to do with Bookmarks.

Under the "Bookmarks" menu item, go to "Show All Bookmarks"

In the Bookmarks dialog, right-click on the "Bookmarks Menu" and choose "New Folder..." (You don't have to do this step, but it is easier to keep track of your custom searches this way). I names my folder "Search Helpers".

Right-click on the folder you just created and choose "New Bookmark..."

You can fill out the form exactly as you did in Chrome

Use it the exact same way. Firefox will not autocomplete the keyword to your Search name, but it functions the same way.

I hope you can put this tip to good use and that it saves you some clicks along the way.

DigitalChalk with HDLearn Technology

2011-01-03T08:34:00.000-05:00

Today marks another release of DigitalChalk with an exciting update to our video capabilities. We have launched DigitalChalk with HDLearn® Technology today allowing you to encode and deliver your videos in extremely high quality. I first announced this capability when I spoke at the international cloud computing conference (ICICT 2010) in Cairo, Egypt last month and it was received with a great response. If you were not able to see it at that time, I am sure that you will enjoy seeing it now. We have completely changed the encoding and streaming capabilities of our site with this release, taking all of the worry about what do when building your courses away. You will no longer have to choose what profiles you want to deliver to your students. Now, when you upload a video to DigitalChalk, we automatically encode it into several different profiles without you having to choose. We also have added technology to ensure the best delivery possible to your students. We are now able to detect the speed of your students connection and make choices in real-time on what the best quality video is that they can consume regardless of their bandwidth. With our new Pro+ and Business+ packages, your upload limit has increased to 1GB and it includes a encoding profile that is HD 720p. DigitalChalk is the first on-demand training platform on the web that will allow you to deliver true 720p video to your students, and we are thrilled to see how you use it!

Alerts for EC2 through CloudWatch

2010-12-03T12:51:00.000-05:00

Monitoring your applications running on Amazon's EC2 platform just got easier. Today, Amazon announced the public availability of CloudWatch for EC2 with Alarms. Instead of having to poll and ask CloudWatch for the current status, you can actually have that information pushed to you instead. This is a much more efficient way to monitor you applications running in the Amazon cloud. Right now the only new alarm that is supported is for Amazon SNS, but this is a huge step forward. Before today, CloudWatch could still trigger an Auto Scaling policy, but with the addition of SNS the doors are really opening up. Using Amazon SNS, you can do almost any type of notification that you would like posting to HTTP/HTTPS, Email, JSON, or directly into SQS. This makes the service very flexible. You are able to monitor CPU Utilization, Average Disk Reads, Average Disk Writes and Network traffic in and out.
Amazon has also enabled a new monitoring tab in the EC2 management console that will allow you to look at the graphs for these elements on each of your EC2 instances. The data only goes back to the 2nd of December since it was just released today, but this will be extremely useful for a quick read on how your instances are performing.

Amazon is certainly hitting things on my wishlist this year. Now if they would only enable CloudWatch and Alarms for metrics on SQS! Hopefully this is just around the corner. You can read more about the new features and the pricing of CloudWatch on EC2 here.

Downloading EXE files from S3

2010-11-24T18:03:00.002-05:00

It is more than a little frustrating that Internet Explorer and Windows cannot do anything to match what the other major browsers and operating systems are doing, or so it seems. Internet Explorer has long been the browser that most developers hate to support. Today, I ran across something that wasn't HTML or CSS related but still caused issues on Windows using Internet Explorer.

As many of you know, I use Amazon Web Services to do much of my work and S3, Simple Storage Service, is a large part of what I work with. Today, I was made aware that someone could not download an EXE file from S3 onto their desktop. I tested it out, and it was fine for me. Classic developer response right? Turns out, it worked for me because I was using Chrome on my Mac. It didn't work quite right in Internet Explorer on Windows. The file would download, but it would not bring down the extension to the file. What I mean, is if the file was stored in S3 as "filename.exe", when it was downloaded to the Windows machine it would only be named "filename". I was encouraged by some people that I know to simply chalk it up to a security concern, and while I do not encourage anyone downloading random .exe files and installing them, I knew that this just couldn't be the case. As it turns out, Internet Explorer must be told the Content-Disposition of the file when it is an EXE or DLL. This is done in the headers when the file is requested. Luckily, S3 allows you to put metadata on a file that is passed down when the file is requested. To allow Internet Explorer to recognize and save the file with the .exe extension you will just need to add the Content-Disposition:attachment; filename=<filename.exe> header.

You can do this as metadata in S3 through the AWS console. Many of the software utilities that work with S3 also allow you to set this metadata programmatically when storing the objects.

I am used to all sorts of JavaScript, HTML, CSS problems when working with IE, but this one really threw me for a loop at first. I hope that this helps you.

DigitalChalk is a Gazelle

2010-11-19T16:45:00.000-05:00

It really has been a whirlwind of a morning. I woke up this morning and walked out the door to get a morning cup of coffee at the local Starbucks before heading into work. I grabbed the Wall Street Journal and started reading. That is when it really sank in. I was reading an article about my company DigitalChalk.com in the Wall Street Journal! This will be one of those days that you always remember when you look back at all of the things that happen as you start a company. It is certainly a highlight for me. This picture is one that I took sitting there near the fire reading the paper and enjoying my coffee.
I was interviewed by Mark Whitehouse about 2 weeks ago while I was walking down the street in San Francisco, a long ways from our headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina but right in the heart of tech startup country. He told me he was trying to do some research on why it was hard for startups right now to get adequate funding. I was excited to share with him about DigitalChalk and the success that we have been blessed with in some really hard economic times. Our growth this year has been better than it ever has and there is really no end in sight! As I described this to Mark, he told me over and over that we had all the markings of a great story as a Gazelle. I really like that analogy. Gazelles are extremely fast and nimble animals and if you had the opportunity to meet the team at DigitalChalk, I think it describes us completely. I get to work with some of the smartest people with the agility to change and go from 0 to 100 at anytime.
Reading through the article, and seeing some of the accomplishments in print in the Wall Street Journal is both exciting and humbling, but most of all, it makes me thankful for the passion and the dedication to all the people who make up the DigitalChalk team. This is something we can all look back on and be proud of.
Please check out the article: Shortage of Capital Costs Firm

DigitalChalk takes SCORM to the Amazon Cloud

2010-10-07T15:20:00.000-05:00

DigitalChalk, a learning management system serving the continuing education and professional training markets announces SCORM support on the Amazon Cloud.

Infinity Learning Solutions, the parent company of DigitalChalk announced today that they have successfully released the fall 2010 Aristotle 4 version with full SCORM 1.2 support. SCORM 1.2 compliant content is now available in all editions of DigitalChalk including Free, Pro, Business and School. DigitalChalk also added a checkpoint enhancement to the Chalkboard Editor, a browser based multimedia lesson studio that is included in DigitalChalk. The Checkpoint feature lets instructors insert interactive prompts and questions into a multimedia presentation through the browser.

"Introducing SCORM support to DigitalChalk significantly expands the options our clients have for reusing existing content as well as broadening the range of compatible authoring tools we support," said Tony McCune, VP of Sales at ILS. "DigitalChalk is the first subscription based LMS that we are aware of running in the Amazon Cloud."

"Hosting a SCORM compliant system in an advanced cloud computing platform such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) poses some unique challenges. SCORM uses communication specifications that were originally designed before the cloud was invented. We took a system with it’s own personality and wove the SCORM specification into it," said Troy Tolle, Chief Technology Officer of ILS. "The team accomplished the task in an innovative and highly scalable fashion. There was no impact to the thousands of organizations currently delivering courses on DigitalChalk today."

The SCORM specification was originally created by the US Department of Defense. Introducing SCORM into DigitalChalk helps address the growing demand from the US federal government for scalable software as a service (SaaS) learning management systems on the Apps.gov cloud infrastructure, which is modeled after the AWS system.

"Not only is DigitalChalk an industry leader in delivery of online training and continuing education, DigitalChalk is the first Learning Management System to build a SCORM compliant system in the cloud using Amazon Web Services that we are aware of," said Wes Hester, CEO of Foxhole Technologies, a VA based federal IT services company.

To learn more about DigitalChalk, visit www.DigitalChalk.com or call toll-free in the US at 877-321-2451. To learn more about Foxhole Technology and DigitalChalk in the Federal Market, please visit http://www.foxholetechnology.com/technology/cloud/digitalchalk.html. GSA Schedule 70: GS-35F-0569V
You can read more about the SCORM specification from Advanced Distributed Learning at www.adlnet.gov.

Creating a Maven Web Project in Eclipse

2010-08-09T15:33:00.000-05:00

My development platform of choice has been Eclipse for many years now and, more recently, I have really started to enjoy the library management that Maven provides me in development, testing and production. Although there are very nice plugins available for integrating Maven and Eclipse together, it is not always the most straight forward process to setup a WTP project in Eclipse that can utilize Maven. I have also found that since creating new projects is not something that we do on a daily or even monthly basis, it can easily become a trial and error episode chewing up a couple of hours of precious development time. I hope that walking through it here will help save you some time on your next project.
Let's assume a fresh install of Eclipse. I am using Eclipse 3.6 Helios for Java EE developers which you can download from eclipse.org. You will also need to download and extract Apache Tomcat 6. We will point to this Tomcat directory later when we go to test our project setup.

Our fresh install of Eclipse does not come with the necessary Maven plugins, so we will need to install them first. In Eclipse, navigate to your Help menu and select "Install New Software...".

In the top right hand corner, click on the "Add..." button and a dialog will appear that will allow you to add an new update site for the M2 Eclipse plugin. The Location is: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e . You can name the site anything that you like, but you will want it to reflect the name so that you will recognize it later if you come back to scan through your plugins. I have named mine M2Eclipse.

Clicking OK here will take you to a screen so that you can choose the pieces that you want to download. For this site, you only have one choice so it is easy. Check it and click finish and the plugin will start to install.

You will have to navigate and agree to the license. It will also ask you to restart eclipse after the install. You should go ahead and do this and return back to the "Install New Software..." screen after the restart. You will also need to install the M2 Eclipse Extras in the same way. The repository location for the extras is: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e-extras

This update site contains more than one item to install. You will not need to check the M2Eclipse Extensions Develop Support or the Project configurators for commonly used maven plugins. I do like to use Mylyn and the integration with CVS is nice to have, but they are not necessary. You can choose the ones that you feel you need for your development environment. The only one that you must pull down is the Maven Integration for WTP.

Clicking Finish here will take you through the license agreement again and then ask you to restart.

After restarting, let's continue by installing the Apache Tomcat runtime environment in Eclipse. Under Eclipse "Preferences..." navigate down to "Server > Runtime Environments". Click on "Add..." and select "Apache Tomcat v6.0" and click Next.

You will need to enter the Tomcat installation directory. This will be the directory where you extracted Tomcat. You can use "Browse..." to locate and populate that location.

We are now ready to create our Web project. Return to the Project Explorer in the Java EE perspective and choose File > New > Dynamic Web Project

Simply name your project and make sure that your Target runtime is set to Apache Tomcat 6.0 and your Dynamic web module version is 2.5

Click Next >

This screen will allow you to configure your folders for building the application. We are going to modify these folders to match the Maven hierarchy. This can be done later as well, but doing it now will avoid some copy and paste as well as some deleting cleanup. You will need to remove the "src" folder that is listed by default and add the following source folders:

src/main/java
src/main/resources
src/test/java
src/test/resources

You should also change the Default output folder to "target/classes"

Click Next >

We are also going to change the Web Module settings to match the Maven packaging. You will need to change the Content directory on this page from WebContent to "src/main/webapp".

Click Finish.

This completes the setup of the Dynamic Web Project. We now need to make it a Maven project as well. This can be done by right clicking on the project in the Project Explorer and choosing "Maven > Enable Dependency Management"

In this wizard, you will only need to change the Packaging to "war" instead of "jar". and click "Finish"

You should now see the POM editor in Eclipse. We need to add a compiler plugin for 1.6 that will help keep things building cleanly. Click on the Plugins tab at the bottom of the editor and then Click on "Add..." in the Plugins section at the top left. Search for the groupId of "org.apache.maven.plugins" and then choose the "maven-compiler-plugin" artifact from the list.

Click on OK and then navigate to the "pom.xml" tab in the editor. We need to add the configuration for 1.6 which we cannot do through the GUI. All that is needed is the configuration XML that is selected below.

Save and close the POM editor.

When that completes building, you may notice that the Java Runtime is giving you a warning in your "Markers" tab.

This can be remedied by changing your build path. You can right click on the project and select "Properties" and then change the build path JRE System Library to point to the 1.6 Execution Environment. If you do not have your Execution Environments set, you can simply click on the "Environments..." button on this dialog and point them to the JDK installation on your machine.

Clicking Finish here will rebuild the project and you should be error free in your Markers tab.

Now for some simple cleanup of your project. You can expand your project in the Project Explorer and navigate down to Web Resources > WEB-INF and delete the lib directory. We are going to let Maven and WTP work together to manage this.

You will also notice that you have a Classpath Dependency warning in your Markers tab. This is very important and will have to be addressed if you want your Maven managed dependencies to be available to your local test server.

Simply right click on the warning and choose the "Quick Fix" option.

Then you will be prompted with a popup explaining the suggested remedies to your problem. We need the classpath to be available to our server, so we need it to be added as a dependency. Choose that option and then click "Finish".

The setup is now complete. All that is left now is to test our new project and configuration. This is easily done by creating an index JSP in our webapp directory.

After saving the JSP, you can test your application by right clicking on the project and choosing "Run As > Run on Server"

Choose the Tomcat v6.0 Server and then click Finish. This will push your project to deploy on startup of that server and it will start the server.

When the startup is done, a browser window should appear in Eclipse with your index.jsp content displayed.

You are now off to the races on your new web project using Maven. All of the dependencies that you add to the pom file will be included in the classpath each time you start the server.

I hope that you found this useful. Let me know your experience.

New Open Source Cloud Platform

2010-07-21T08:14:00.001-05:00

Cloud services and platforms are popping up everywhere you turn and everyone is jumping onto the bandwagon it seems. I have even been asked by 2 startup companies that want to jump into the space if there are needs that still haven't been met with what is available now. This is a growing market and it is still in its very early stages, so there will always be room for more right now. Rackspace and NASA's announcement about OpenStack makes it a little easier to jump into the cloud software and infrastructure game. Rackspace is contributing some of its code under an Apache 2.0 licence to the open source community for the management of compute instances and storage. These seem like just initial starting points for contribution as they have also asked for other needs from the community. I would guess that we will see parallel offerings from OpenStack that mimic Amazon's AWS offerings since they are the largest player in this space. OpenStack's computing platform is currently scheduled to be available in an initial release state in October and the storage platform is expected in September. If you would like to dabble some before then, you can go and download the code at http://launchpad.net/openstack. There are projects there for the compute and storage platforms as well as projects for management from the web and from your favorite mobile device (iPhone, iPad, Android). Seeing another open source project in this space is a good thing. I hope that people don't immediately start trying to claim standards on cloud computing out of this project. I believe that it is still way to early to try to start standardizing everything. We start to kill the pace of innovation when standards are forced early. That being said, this will be a project to watch closely along with Eucalyptus and will be one to offer a great playground for ideas.

Cloud Computing ROI

2010-05-31T13:54:00.000-05:00

It was a very easy decision for me to start DigitalChalk on a cloud computing platform. The calculations were quick and easy 4 years ago with a small budget and a dream to build a global platform for training. We had to scale as we gained customers because we didn't have the immediate capital to buy everything up front. Today, I still spend time thinking of new ways to use the power of the cloud for our business and the ROI is still clear to me; but I have to say that it is something I get asked about every time I speak or talk to other people looking to take the plunge. I had the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Feldman, writer for Information Week, more than once over the past couple of weeks. He has put together a great study helping the CIO, CTO and individual business units navigate the "gotchas" and common questions when it comes to moving to the cloud. I was happy to see the report and I think it will help those of you looking to move or start some of your applications to the cloud. I encourage you to take a moment and read the report. It is an Analytics Report titled, Cloud ROI: Calculating Costs, Benefits, Returns and can be found here. Great job Jonathan! It is good to see all of this research in one place.

Juicy Ideas

2010-03-14T15:32:00.001-05:00

I have been hard at work with my team to help launch the Juicy Ideas Competition website. I am happy to say that it has been successfully launched as of last week and we are receiving signups for the competition. My company, DigitalChalk, is sponsoring a competition with AdvantageWest and will be sending the winning team to Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. The winning team will also receive 5 Android phones provided by Google.
The competition is a software competition that challenges college students to do something innovative and creative using data that will benefit their community. I know that we will see some very cool applications come out of this competition this year! If you would like to compete, or know someone that should, send them to the Juicy Ideas website at: http://juicyideas.com and have them register their team.
The video on the homepage was done by DigitalChalk's very own Jacob Absire and I love it. You can check it out on YouTube as well.

Creativity for Amazon's Cloud Computing Continues

2010-01-04T23:58:00.001-05:00

Amazon Web Services continues to move forward in innovative ways to get people to take advantage of their services. Two announcements last month enhance the EC2 service pricing and the Cloud Front delivery model. The availability of auction price instances (spot instances) in EC2 and the ability to do true Flash streaming from Cloud Front really put the squeeze on traditional hosting and edge delivery companies.
With the new Spot Instances in EC2 you can take advantage of the excess capacity that Amazon is not using at that time. Because that capacity changes as more instances are started, the price for those instances fluctuate. With good planning, this can be used to really save on cash. Over the past 20 days, the price of a Spot Instance has been less than 50% of the price of a regular priced instance much of the time. If you are considering using EC2 for some bursting tasks and quick turn around, I would look at the Spot Instances first. Because you set the price you want to pay and the price changes over time, your instance may be terminated if your price is less than the Amazon rate. For this reason, you must plan ahead when using them in a production situation. One good strategy here to lower your costs would be to purchase some Reserved Instances that will stay running and then start Spot Instances in peak situations. You can use the AWS API to see the current prices of the Spot Instances to know how to set your price at runtime. If you want to see the prices online and over time, you can use the AWS console or some other sites like Cloud Exchange. Because you cannot reserve Windows instances right now on Amazon, it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of the Spot Instances. As I write this, a small Windows instance is $0.12 an hour and you can have the same thing running as a Spot Instance for $0.042 an hour.

At about 1/3 the price of a standard small instance, it makes it very attractive to use the Spot Instances right now.

The announcement of streaming support from Cloud Front is also a great new addition. Delivering content to the end user from the closest data center helps improve performance. Until now, all that could be delivered was static content and progressive downloads. Streaming video from Cloud Front helps reduce your costs because only the viewed parts need to be delivered. It also does not store the file on the end user's machine. You can use Cloud Front to deliver videos in several formats, even H.264 allowing playback on the iPod and iPhone. Thank you Amazon!

Cloud Confusion and the DoD

2009-10-14T15:32:00.002-05:00

Last week the Department of Defense announced a new private cloud computing environment called RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment). This was an announcement that received a ton of attention in blogs and the circles of cloud computing advocates and naysayers. The frustrating thing about announcements and the ensuing arguments that take place afterward is that there are very few people that really understand what cloud computing is and all of the facets that are involved. The problem really stems from the over-use of the term "cloud computing" to cover what seems to be every application that runs in your browser. Just because you don't know where the actual server is located, or because it runs in your browser does not make something cloud computing. As soon as the announcement was made about RACE, the comparisons to Google came flying in. First of all, this is not even the right comparison. I am behind using cloud computing for government applications, but if we are going to compare the systems, let's at least compare them fairly. RACE is more of an IaaS cloud service and Google is both SaaS (GMail, Google Docs, etc) and PaaS (AppEngine). It seems more fairly compared to the single service of EC2 provided by Amazon. I would love to take a deep dive into RACE, but unfortunately, and as expected for security, it is only available to someone with a government card or clearance. What they do say on the website though is that provisioning after a request only takes 24 hours. Is that truly on demand computing? Call me spoiled being able to provision dozens of servers with a single web service request in 5 to 10 minutes, but that is what I expect from a system now that claims to be on-demand. This is a great direction and good start for DISA. It is very encouraging to see the activity in the government space around cloud computing. We really need to stop lumping every cloud computing service or offering under the single banner of Cloud Computing. People will continue to make their offerings sound better than others with unfair comparisons and statistics. A common language and standard is needed for fair comparison. Until then, let the spin go on!

Why Social is Successful

2009-09-07T14:44:00.001-05:00

Almost every time that I speak, I can count on being asked about where the internet is going and what technology will be the next "big thing". Obviously there are a ton of people that would capitalize on that if anyone could predict the future. Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and angel investors spend their days trying to decipher and figure out the answer to that question. It is clearly a tough question.I love technology and the constant curve of innovation that surrounds me at work everyday. With the new hot technologies being social applications, the whole world is getting a little smaller still. It is not surprising to me that applications such as Twitter and Facebook are so wildly popular. It does help that they are free, but the "freemium" model works like a catalyst. People generally don't sign up for something just because it is free, but because it is useful. These applications are successful because they are relational and they bring us into closer contact with one another. The internet a great warehouse of all sorts of information at your fingertips, but that only satisfies our curiosity and natural thirst for knowledge. Most people are looking for more meaningful relationships and someone that cares. The corporate website that only displays information and does not allow for a round trip of communication does not "get it" yet. That is the old way of doing business on the internet. Simply having a presence is not good enough. The internet has evolved to allow us what we really want: a conversation, and it will continue to move in that direction. The first generation of internet technology satiated our hunger for knowledge and now it is helping us connect with others in more meaningful ways. Social is sexy because that is how God made us. Just look at what the top search terms are on a daily basis: they are for people, celebrity figures, that we want to know about. It is really, a desire to get to know them better. It is the next best thing to a conversation. Dating sites have been wildly popular for years, and now, the feeling of instant connection with Facebook and Twitter are where we feel comfortable. We are able to connect with people we haven't seen in years and people we have never met. We can share our life experiences and our knowledge across all boundaries and all over the globe. The next technologies on the internet will bring us even closer and more connected. The written letter was and is an excellent form of communication, but it was made faster with the telegram, the telephone, and the cellphone - continually bringing us closer in relationships with greater and greater ease. I believe that internet technology will continue to do the same. Whether it allows us to take a course online from a renown instructor, get us just a little closer to our family, or connects us better with a business contact, social applications (done well) will continue to be successful. As to what it will be... well, let's talk about it on Twitter.

Azure verses Amazon AWS Pricing

2009-07-15T00:41:00.000-05:00

Microsoft released the pricing today for their cloud computing platform called Azure. The costs really look competitive when compared across the other platforms that are currently offered in the market. The breakdown is as follows:

Windows Azure

Compute = $0.12 / hour
Storage = $0.15 / GB stored / month
Storage Transactions = $0.01 / 10,000
Bandwidth = $0.10 IN / $0.15 OUT / GB

SQL Azure

Web Edition - Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99
Business Edition - Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99
Bandwidth = $0.10 IN / $0.15 OUT / GB

.Net Services

Messages = $0.15 / 100,000 message operations
Bandwidth = $0.10 IN / $0.15 OUT / GB

As you can see, they look fairly competitive to Amazons pricing in the different areas which can be found on the pages for EC2, S3 and SQS. It is very hard, if not impossible, to do a complete side-by-side comparison that covers all of what is offered and all of the different configurations and software stacks, but let's look at some of the basics to get an idea.

Let's first look at the storage services offered by the platforms since they are almost identical in function and feature. Azure's platform for storage is a flat $0.15 / GB / month and
$0.01 / 10,000 transactions. Data transfer across all of Azure's services is $0.10 IN and $0.15 OUT / GB. This makes the calculation for storage very simple on their part. S3 has a tiered pricing scheme which makes it a little more difficult to calculate, but does offer some cost saves when storing vast amounts of data. On light storage (1-50 TB) Amazon will charge $0.15 / GB for storage, $0.10 IN and $0.17 OUT / GB in bandwidth. Amazon divides the types of transactions in their pricing: $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST and LIST request and $0.01 per 10,000 GET (and other) request. This ultimately gives Azure the win on the low end for storage. As soon as you go over the 50 TB / month threshold for storage or transfer more than 10 TB of data OUT of storage however, Amazon wins in price on the growth. The more your store, the less it will cost you on Amazon, even going down to $0.12 / GB. The data transfer rates going out can get as low as $0.10 / GB OUT. Amazon also does not charge you for data transfer from S3 to EC2 (inside the cloud). It is not clear if the same holds true for Azure. So, if you have a lot of data, then Amazon will give you the better prices, but if you are light on data and traffic, then Azure has the best price. All that being said, it is important to note that Azure is severely limited during the preview period to 50 GB of storage. They could add tiered pricing in the future to compete with Amazon's pricing at larger volume.

Probably one of the most anticipated, but hardest thing to compare, was the pricing on the compute hours for Azure. This is extremely difficult for many reasons: Amazon offers a dozen different types of operating systems while Azure is the only environment. Amazon virtualizes the memory and cpu so you have the option of adding horsepower at added costs and Azure has not published any information about the underlying metrics of a computational unit. Azure takes care of all of the scaling and load balancing within the fabric and these are add on services that you must pay for with Amazon. Lastly there is an upper limit of 2000 VM hours right now on Azure during the preview period. With all that being considered, if you compare the lowest price Windows installation on Amazon at $0.125 / hour to the $0.12 / hour on Azure, then Azure wins on price ever so slightly. It is very hard to say how the "speed" compares on the two systems by virtual core and if this is even a fair price comparison, but it is the closest we can get for a comparison. When included the tiered pricing from Amazon for data transfer, which lowers the cost per GB as you go up, and include Amazon's costs for Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing then the waters start to get very muddy.

The easiest to compare is the messaging systems on both cloud offerings. Azure is offering 100,000 message operations for $0.15, plus the regular $0.10 IN and $0.15 OUT / GB. Amazon offers 100,000 message operations for $0.10, plus the Amazon tiered pricing for data. It is very likely that the majority of the messaging operations on these platforms will stay internal to their platform which takes the cost on Amazon for data virtually down to $0.00. In this case Amazon beats the Azure pricing by 1/3.

I was happy to see Microsoft release the pricing for Azure today as I have been anxious to see what the cost comparison would be. With pricing relatively close between the two, I would venture to say that Azures success will depend on its ease of use and streamlined single platform while Amazon will continue to thrive on its openness and plethora of options.

North Carolina and the Amazon Associates Program

2009-07-01T10:38:00.000-05:00

The North Carolina General Assembly has a mandate to balance the budget every year, which I can appreciate because at least it keeps us somewhat focused as a state. I guess I have a very hard time understanding how the General Assembly can try to get that money out of companies that are not even located within our state borders.
I am a member of the Amazon Associates program which will pay a small commission on products sold from simply advertising on your site. I have not made any significant amount of money from this, but there are several people in our state that do very well supplementing their income and even forming a small business out of concepts such as the Amazon Associates Program. The North Carolina General Assembly has now added to the budget that Amazon must pay the taxes on products sold through the program to North Carolina. Amazon's answer.... pull the plug and don't offer it anymore. I don't blame them. What services is North Carolina providing for them? They do not have any buildings here that our Fire Departments, Police Departments or Emergency services help protect. They don't have any cars or trucks that use our streets and highways. They do not have a physical presence here that consume any of the state provided services. Why should they pay taxes? What the General Assembly is doing is stifling small business and is really doing absolutely no good for the state. It only serves to drive companies away from our state. After passing a budget with this nonsense in it, why would Amazon even consider placing a facility here or locating a division here within North Carolina. The passage of this item buried in the middle of the budget has produced no additional revenue for North Carolina and only serves to drive business away and make its own citizens consider moving to neighboring states. Here is an excerpt from the email that I received from Amazon explaining the shut down of the program within North Carolina:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date.

If we are going to look for ways to balance the budget, let's make sure that we actually have the ability to collect money or cut the money from many of the wasteful programs already in place. Please don't drive business and people away.

CloudFront Added to AWS Console

2009-06-24T06:06:00.000-05:00

The Amazon Web Services management console has a new addition. A new tab appeared this morning at the top of the console at http://console.aws.amazon.com allowing you to manage your CloudFront distributions.

Using the console, you can choose to create a new distribution, select the bucket from within S3 and add up to 10 CNAME entries for the distribution. This functionality is convenient, but is not the functionality that I would have liked to see added to the console next as you have been able to do all of this with S3Fox for several months now. I was hoping to see the management functions for CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling to appear in the console. These should be available in the console this year I have been told, but it was wishful thinking to expect them this early in the year.

DigitalChalk at ASTD

2009-05-31T22:42:00.001-05:00

DigitalChalk is going to be giving away $300 over Twitter at the ASTD 2009 Conference in Washington DC this year. If you are at the conference and have a Twitter account, you can play. Watch crazy man Josh in this video...

I heard that they were at the White House yesterday and President Obama asked how he could play, but they sadly had to turn him down since he isn't going to be present at the conference. Oh well, maybe next time.

The goal of the game will be to figure out a word or phrase that will be on the back of a bunch of shirts running around the conference. If you want to be a live participant in the game, go see Josh and Tony at booth 1519 and make sure that you follow DigitalChalk's Twitter account http://twitter.com/digitalchalk . More information is available on Tony's blog.

In the Works at DigitalChalk

2009-05-27T11:06:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of exciting things happening at DigitalChalk right now. The development, operations, and quality teams are very hard at work on a new release of the product coming very soon. Code named "Einstein", this release is packed full of feature requests from our customers. While we wrap up the open tickets and complete QA, I thought I would start giving a sneak peak at some of the features that are going to be included by writing about them here in my blog over the next couple of weeks.

We have done a lot of work on the interface of DigitalChalk in the Einstein release. Immediately you will notice that we have changed the look to be much more streamlined.

We had a couple of goals in moving this direction. First of all, we really wanted to be able to provide much more information on a single page to the instructor or student. This is really a challenge because we needed to balance between a page that feels cluttered and has too much information and keeping it "too clean" where the information cannot be found on the same page without navigating away. It is also important to us that Einstein is compatible with a wide range of browsers. Those of you that have done any development at all on the web know what a pain that can be. Something that works in Internet Explorer will not work in Safari, and something that works in Firefox will not work in Internet Explorer and that isn't even taking into account all of the different versions of the browsers. Sometimes this feels like a loosing battle for a complicated site. Page rendering time has also been an area that we have devoted significant resources toward. We are seeing an improvement now of over 500% on some pages! I will be including more screenshots in the future of various parts of the site as I talk about specific changes. We are all very excited about the changes and can't wait to push them out to you.

Apple to Build Data Center in NC?

2009-05-25T11:02:00.002-05:00

News hit the street this weekend that Apple could be considering North Carolina as its next data center location. Just a couple of years ago Google selected Lenior, North Carolina as a location for a $600 million dollar data center and Apple may be joining them in the Tarheel state. The story is that the North Carolina legislature is offering large tax breaks to Apple in order to attract them to the area. I am happy to see that we are starting to think a little more about the types of jobs that will sustain the economy in the future. Computing power will always be needed and the demand for it is every growing. Technology will continue to drive much of the innovation that is occurring today and I welcome more of the support of that here in my home state. It has been sad to see the textile and furniture industry cause so much job loss and heartache as it has moved elsewhere and overseas, but it is time for us to look to the future and continue to reinvent ourselves. Another data center will drive more need for bandwidth and reliable power and will continue to draw more technology jobs this direction. It would thrill me to see North Carolina, especially Western North Carolina, become the Silicon Valley of the east. We are a long way from that now, but let's push forward and look ahead. Come on Apple, we are ready for you.

Amazon Import/Export

2009-05-21T16:21:00.000-05:00

After a recent talk that I gave on cloud computing, one of the attendees contacted me with some questions about the "safety" of the data and also wanted to talk about vendor lock-in. It is no secret that I am a fan of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform and so it followed that these questions all had to do with the way Amazon stores the data. While these are typical questions, today the second question became much easier to answer. Amazon Web Services announced the availability of AWS Import/Export. Quite simply, Amazon is offering its customers a very easy way to ship a disk of data to them and they will push it into S3 to your specifications or grab your data out of S3 and put it on the disk for you. This is very attractive because it can take days to actually move hundreds of GB on your office network into or out of S3 because of the simple limitations of bandwidth at the average workplace. I am not a fan of vendor lock-in and have thought long and hard how to avoid it. Any code that we write storing to and from Amazon's infrastructure is isolated enough so that we can switch it to another provider by reimplementing that single area. But, the fact still remains that it would take weeks to move all of our data and it would have to be done over an extended period of time. A strategy for this is to move data between two cloud providers instead of bringing it down locally and putting it back up. While moving over a backbone is still going to be faster, it will not be optimal. With AWS Import/Export you are one step closer. For $80.00 and $2.49 per hour, you can currently have all of the data on a disk pushed into Amazon's cloud and the export facility is coming soon. I commend Amazon for providing so many tools and conveniences.

Amazon Releases New Cloud Computing Services

2009-05-18T09:11:00.000-05:00

One of the big draws to the cloud is its ability to scale with your application. That has become much easier with Amazon Web Services today. Early this morning the Amazon Web Services team launched three new services: CloudWatch, Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing. Combining the use of these three services allows a user to configure and scale their application based upon information gathered by CloudWatch. These are important additions to the Amazon Web Services offerings because it helps take more of the coding and configuration work away from the developers and system administrators. This is a key benefit of cloud computing that AppEngine from Google and Azure from Microsoft have built in and they have kept completely transparent to the developer. While Amazon has not made it completely transparent with the release of these services, it is a great step and may be exactly the middle ground that is needed.
CloudWatch allows you to monitor CPU utilization, data transfer and disk usage, request rate and traffic to your EC2 instances. Based up on the information that CloudWatch gathers, you can set triggers that will look at that data over a time period and allow you to use the Auto Scaling to automatically add or remove EC2 instances to the specific group of machines working on a particular task. Finally the Elastic Load Balancing helps you distribute the traffic coming into your application to your EC2 instances. This is a welcome addition as it accomplishes fault tolerant load balancing for us without the cost of having to setup several HAProxy instances. So, even though we incur the costs of using the new Elastic Load Balancing Service, it quickly pays for itself because we are able to remove our own load balancing configuration on EC2. I am excited to see these new services finally go beta to the public and I am looking forward to more.

SpringSource Aquires Hyperic

2009-05-04T09:33:00.000-05:00

It certainly isn't as big of a story as Sun being acquired by Oracle, but it is worth noting. SpringSource has announced that they have acquired Hyperic. SpringSource is the company that is the driving force behind the Spring Framework which is arguably the most widely used open source Java framework in enterprise software today. Hyperic provides a software suite for monitoring applications and servers and they have recently been dabbling in providing some of these services for the cloud. The team up of these two vendors is especially interesting because they both offer some great services and tools in through open source. This partnership could really allow even more granular visibility into the Spring stack for monitoring. It will be interesting to watch and see if we start to see a move to OSGi component monitoring especially in the context of the SpringSource dm Server. I hope to see great things out of this and expect that there will be a lot of value there for the open source community. We should watch for more tools for monitoring applications in the cloud as well from this pair.

Tips on Using Amazon CloudFront

2009-04-19T20:29:00.004-05:00

If you are serving a lot of content with an audience that is spread out over the globe, then most likely you are in need of putting your content on a CDN (Content Delivery Network). There are a host of options for you such as LimeLight, BrightCove and Akamai to name a few, but I have found that Amazon offers much of the same functionality at a better price. Moving your static content to Amazon's CloudFront can really reduce the load on your servers and certainly enables you to serve your content from a place that is closer to the request. The best thing about it is that it is very very simple to do. There are some pieces of information that can really save you alot of time and energy if you are converting your site to serve content from CloudFront. Here are some things that were important to me and that I had to address when moving our site:

Speed

Faster delivery of all content from edge locations close to the request
Faster load time of a page in the browser

Ability to serve content over HTTP and HTTPS
Simple, straight-forward development

Speed
Amazon CloudFront allows you to manage the content in your S3 buckets and enable them for delivery from edge locations all over the world. To enable a bucket for CloudFront, it is a simple API call to create a Distribution. Once your Distribution is provisioned, which usually takes less than 15 seconds in my experience, you will be given a Distribution url which will look something like: http://abcd1234.cloudfront.net . This Distribution URL can be simply though of as another URL to that bucket in S3. For instance, if you have a bucket in S3 named "mys3bucket" and you create a Distribution for that bucket, which returned http://abcd1234.cloudfront.net, then you could reference that bucket as http://s3.amazonaws.com/mys3bucket/ or as http://abcd1234.cloudfront.net . The only difference between the two is that the CloudFront URL will be served from the location closest to the request and the content from that distribution can be served at 1,000 Megabits per second and even more if needed and requested. For the easy creation of your S3 Buckets and CloudFront distributions, I suggest using S3Fox for Firefox. With a simple right click on your bucket through S3Fox, you can create a new Distribuion in seconds.
Beyond just offering the serving of your content from an edge location at high throughput, CloudFront distributions have another advantage that can speedup the loading of your sites pages. Using a single Distribution, you can assign up to 10 CNAMEs to it. This can really make a large difference when serving content for a page. Most browsers block and only allow 2-4 parallel connections to a single host when loading content. Creating 10 CNAME entries all pointing to the same distribution allows the browser to make 10 times the parallel connections it could using a single entry. I would suggest Steve Souders book High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers for more tips on this.

HTTP and HTTPS Delivery
One of the drawbacks to CloudFront is that it does not support HTTPS delivery of the content. However, there is some good news here because S3 does support HTTPS. Because the content that you need to deliver over CloudFront sits in an S3 bucket, then you can also deliver that same content over HTTPS but you cannot take advantage of the edge locations. This is especially useful when you need to serve a secure site that has a bunch of images that you are already serving from CloudFront. If you try to serve those images over HTTPS, your users will get a security warning or no image at all because the browser will block it. So, when you need to serve those secure pages, simply switch your delivery URL to the S3 location instead. A word of advice here is to create your S3 bucket without using any '.'s. I know that this really messes with you if you want your URL to look like it is coming from your servers, but it will allow you to serve secure content from S3. The S3 bucket is served over HTTPS using a wildcarded certificate. This allows Amazon to serve your content using any prefix as long as it does not have any extra dots ('.'). If your bucket name is 'mys3bucket', then you can create a CNAME record that points 'mys3bucket' to mys3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com. Because the wildcarded SSL certificate is to *.s3.amazonaws.com, then you can serve your content from https://mys3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com. While this isn't the perfect solution, it is really nice for serving the same bucket content over HTTP or HTTPS.

Simple, Straight-Forward Development
I am not sure that building scalable applications is ever simple, but I am always looking for ways to make it extremely repeatative and simple for myself and other developers. Because we are using Java for most of our applications, the easiest way for me to do that was through a tag library. I included all of the logic for switching between the different CNAMES for CloudFront delivery and logic for detecting a secure connection and need to switch to straight S3 delivery right in the tag. There were some interesting details that were necessary to take full advantage of CloudFront. One was coming up with a hash scheme for a URL so that it could be cached in the browser and distributing the calls across the CNAMEs evenly. The second was to make sure that the tag was written so that it was at the request level instead of the page level. This helped ensure that even an included JSP would not cause a narrowing of the number of CNAMEs that I could use. This is the method in the tag that does most of the work

protected String getCDNUrl() {
   String result = null;
   if (((PageContext) getJspContext()).getRequest().isSecure()) { 
      result = getCDNSecureUrl();
   } else {
      result = getCDNUrls().get((1 <= getCDNCount()) ? Math.abs(getFile().hashCode()) % getCDNCount() : 0);
   }
   return result;
}

CloudFront has proven to be very useful to me. I hope with a few of these tips that you can improve the performance of your site. Please share your experience with me or any other tips that you might have!