Musings of Rodos

Hello World of AWS API with Ruby

2013-01-31T00:18:00.000+11:00

After years of writing Perl I need to start learning Ruby. The most comprehensive SDK for Amazon Web Services (AWS) looks to be the Ruby SDK. It even contains interfaces for the new Elastic Transcoder service released overnight.

It is pleasing to find just how little it takes to create a "Hello AWS" style Ruby program. For my first test I decide that listing out my S3 buckets would be sufficient.

Here are four simple steps to get you started.

Step 1. Get Ruby on your machine.

Well of course you are using a recent Mac and Ruby is already installed. To confirm

machine:~ rodos$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2012-02-08 patchlevel 358) [universal-darwin12.0]
machine:~ rodos$

Step 2. Install the AWS Ruby SDK

This is a simple command

machine:~ rodos$ sudo gem install aws-sdk
Password:

Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed uuidtools-2.1.3
Successfully installed nokogiri-1.5.6
Successfully installed json-1.7.6
Successfully installed aws-sdk-1.8.1.1
4 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for uuidtools-2.1.3...
Installing ri documentation for nokogiri-1.5.6...
No definition for parse_memory
No definition for parse_file
No definition for parse_with
No definition for get_options
No definition for set_options
Installing ri documentation for json-1.7.6...
Installing ri documentation for aws-sdk-1.8.1.1...
Installing RDoc documentation for uuidtools-2.1.3...
Installing RDoc documentation for nokogiri-1.5.6...
No definition for parse_memory
No definition for parse_file
No definition for parse_with
No definition for get_options
No definition for set_options
Installing RDoc documentation for json-1.7.6...
Installing RDoc documentation for aws-sdk-1.8.1.1...
machine:~ rodos$

Step 3. Create your .rb file with the code.

Create a file with the text below. I named my file "hello-aws.rb". Of course I still use vi for some silly reason to write code! You could always try pico or one of those fancy graphical text editors, even Xcode.

# List you S3 buckets

require 'rubygems'
require 'yaml'
require 'aws-sdk'

AWS.config(
:access_key_id => 'your.access.key.here',
:secret_access_key => 'your.secret.here')

s3 = AWS::S3.new

s3.buckets.each do |bucket|
puts bucket.name
end

Don't forget to enter your access key and secret for your account.

Step 4. Execute your file.

You can now run your code and watch it list your buckets.

machine:~ rodos$ ruby s3list.rb
rodos.singapore.bucket1
rodos.singapore.bucket2
rodos.sydney.bucket1
machine:~ rodos$

There you go, it lists all of my buckets. From here it is developing your knowledge of the AWS SDK for Ruby alongside general Ruby programming skills. As I write some interesting code, I will share my experiences here.

Why don't you go and try your first automation of the Cloud with AWS and Ruby! Its fun and easy.

Rodos

P.S. It is a bad idea to leave your account access key and secret locked away in your code file. I have done it here to show a complete working example in a single file.

AWS re:Invent 2012 session index and links

2013-01-28T18:00:00.002+11:00

It is great that the sessions from Amazon re:Invent 2012 have been made publicly available. The video recordings are on YouTube and the slides are on SlideShare.

Typically I want to search for a session based on the description, the speaker or maybe a company, then quickly view the content. Without a index that links all the sources this can be painful. So for my benefit and especially yours, below is a list of the sessions, speakers, session description and the link to the YouTube and SlideShare content.

Enjoy.

Rodos

P.S. Any errors in the links please post in the comments.

ARC201 - AWS Database Tier Architecture Best Practices by Matt Tavis - Solutions Architect - AWS, Siva Raghupathy - Enterprise Solutions Architect - AWS
AWS provides a rich database environment comprising of a wide selection of In-memory data stores, SQL & NoSQL databases, Search, and Data Warehousing technologies. Plus there are many storage options such as EBS, EC2 Instance Storage, HDFS, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier etc. with different performance and durability characteristics. AWS Solutions architects have helped a wide variety of customers build successful database solutions on AWS. In this presentation we'll outline various database and storage options and discuss AWS DB Architecture Patterns & Best Practices. You will be able to learn how to architect your database tier by using the right database and storage technologies to achieve the required functionality, performance, availability and durability - at the right cost.
ARC202 - Architecting for High Availability & Multi-Availability Zones on AWS by Attila Narin - Sr Manager, Solutions Architecture - AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a platform that is ideally suited for building highly available systems, enabling you to build reliable, affordable, fault-tolerant systems that operate with a minimal amount of human interaction. This session covers many of the high-availability and fault-tolerance concepts and features of the various services that you can use to build highly reliable and highly available applications in the AWS Cloud: architectures involving multiple Availability Zones, including EC2 best practices and RDS Multi-AZ deployments; loosely coupled and self-healing systems involving SQS and Auto Scaling; networking best practices for high availability, including Elastic IP addresses, load balancing, and DNS; leveraging services that inherently are built with high-availability and fault tolerance in mind, including S3, Elastic Beanstalk and more.
ARC203 - Highly Available Architecture at Netflix by Adrian Cockcroft - Director of Architecture, Cloud Systems - Netflix
This talk describes a set of architectural patterns that support highly available services that are also scalable, low cost, low latency and allow agile continuous deployment development practices. The building blocks for these patterns have been released at netflix.github.com as open source projects for others to use.
ARC204 - AWS Infrastructure Automation by Chris Munns - Solutions Architect - AWS, Paul Duffy - Sr. Manager, Solutions Architecture - AWS
So, youve got your solution deployed and have so many things to managenow what? Come to this session to learn how you can scale operations with solutions deployed in the AWS cloud. We take a look at services like AWS CloudFormation and tools like Chef and Puppet. See an overview of these services and tools, and we show you how they might be used in real-life scenarios and how you might incorporate these services and tools into your own environment.
ARC205 - Building Web-Scale Applications With AWS by James Hamilton - Vice President & Distinguished Engineer - AWS, Simon Elisha - Principal Solution Architect - AWS
As both new and established businesses work to increase their customer numbers, revenue and relevance to the market they are working to deliver software that scales larger than ever before. The challenge of being the "victim of your own success" be it from viral marketing, social media or simply dramatic uptake of a new service; is something that troubles the minds of CIOs and Engineers alike. This session will focus on ways to avoid creating "technical debt" during initial development, and will share well established practices and approaches to building applications that can tolerate and revel in the challenges of scaling to "web scale". Working through a range of architectural dimensions, patterns and pithy examples attendees will leave this session with useful ideas on how to design new applications, as well as the "retro-fitting" that can be done to existing applications to enable them to scale on AWS.
ARC206 - Extend Your Existing Data Center to the Cloud with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud by Steve Morad - Solutions Architect - AWS
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is fast becoming the networking option of choice for enterprise and government customers because it provides a powerful set of virtual networking capabilities. VPC allows you to isolate, control, connect, and empower your systems at the network level. Learn the common architectural patterns for building virtual networks in the cloud, interconnecting your virtual and physical networks, and securing your AWS cloud environment. Come learn about the extensive set of features specific to VPC that you should know about before your next cloud deployment.
ARC301 - Intro to Chaos Monkey & the Simian Army by Ariel Tseitlin - Director, Cloud Solutions - Netflix
Join the product and cloud computing leaders of Netflix to discuss why and how the company moved to Amazon Web Services. From early experiments for media transcoding, to building the operational skills to optimize costs and the creation of the Simian Army, this session guides business leaders through real world examples of evaluating and adopting cloud computing.
ARC302 - AWS Cloud Design Patterns (CDP) by Ken Tamagawa - Sr. Manager, Solution Architecture - AWS, Akio Katayama - Solutions Architect - AWS
AWS Cloud Design Patterns (a.k.a. CDP) are generally repeatable solutions to commonly occurring problems in cloud architecting. In this session, we introduce CDP and explain how you can apply CDPs in practical scenarios such as photo sharing, e-commerce, and web site campaigns.
ARC303 - Dissecting an Internet-Scale Application by Paul Duffy - Sr. Manager, Solutions Architecture - AWS, Umesh Sampat - Solutions Architect - AWS , Peter-Mark Verwoerd - Solutions Architect - AWS
In this session, we take an Internet-scale application built on AWS and dissect it. We start by looking at the problem we want to solve and finish with a design. We walk through the various architectural decisions taken for each tier and explain our choices for appropriate AWS services and building blocks to ensure the security, scale, availability and reliability of the application. In addition to learning about the architecture of the application, you see demos along the way.
ARC304 - Solutions in Action by David Rocamora - VP DevOps - Control Group , Ben Cochran - Sr. Software Architect - Autodesk , Jeremy Przygode - CEO - Stratalux, Brian Besterman - MD, Chief Information Officer & Co-Founder - Pronia Medical Systems
You've had a chance to hear from AWS Solutions Architects about how you might architect a solution which would run in the AWS cloud and learned how you might better scale your operations. Come to this session if you'd like to hear some real-world stories from customers such as Autodesk and Pronia and partners such as Control Group and Stratalux. You'll learn how Autodesk has used the AWS cloud to revolutionize the architecture of their solutions to meet their customers' needs and from Stratalux you'll see some pragmatic real world examples for increasing operational efficiency. You'll also hear how Pronia worked with Control Group to deploy a HIPAA compliant application on AWS.
BDT101 - Big Data with Amazon Elastic MapReduce by Peter Sirota - Sr. Manager, Software Development - AWS, Steve Mardenfeld - Data Engineer - Etsy , Jim Blomo - Engineering Manager - Data Mining - Yelp
Big data technologies let you work with any velocity, volume, or variety of data in a highly productive environment. This session seeks to answer questions such as "what is big data," "how can I use unstructured data," and "how can I integrate data collections from different sources" using Hadoop with Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Join general manager of EMR, Peter Sirota, on a journey through real-world use cases of data-driven discovery.
BDT102 - Algorithms, Machines, and Crowdsourcing by Michael Brown - CTO - Comscore , Sharon Chiarella - Vice President - AWS
In this session, join the Vice President of Mechanical Turk to explore how businesses are marrying human judgment with distributed data processing, improving accuracy of Big Data analytics without sacrificing efficiency or scalability. Well highlight real world examples and introduce Mike Brown, CTO of Comscore, to discuss how the combination technologies such as Hadoop and Mechanical Turk are driving large scale systems to cleanse and categorizes business critical data from unstructured and inconsistent data sources.
BDT201 - AWS Data Pipeline: A Guided Tour by Kathryn Shih - Sr. Product Manager - AWS
In this session, we'll review the features and architecture of the new AWS Data Pipeline service and explain how you can use it to better manage your data-driven workloads. We'll then go over a few examples of setting up and provisioning a pipeline in the system.
BDT202 - The Hadoop Ecosystem by Ted Dunning - Architect - MapR , Jon Einkauf - Sr. Product Manager - AWS , Ronen Schwartz - VP Products B2B Data Exchange, VP Marketing Ultra Messaging - Informatica
The Hadoop ecosystem is blossoming. In this session, learn how to take advantage of tools such as Mesos, Spark, Shark and Mahout on Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Senior Product Manager, Jon Einkauf, discusses the optimizations which make Hadoop sing on EMR, and describes how to use different Hadoop distributions and tools such as Hbase and Hparser with your big data analytics pipelines.
BDT203 - Accelerating Research: Spotlight on Science by Deepak Singh - Principal Product Manager - AWS, Chris Dagdigian - Co-Founder, Principal Consultant - Bio Team , Steve Litster - Global Lead for Scientific Computing - Novartis , Michael DeAngelo - Deputy CIO - State of WA
Learn more about AWS, for science! In this session well introduce some of the world changing research being carried out on the AWS Cloud, including computer science, biology, astronomy and high energy physics. Join leaders in the field to hear more about how cloud computing is accelerating research.
BDT204 - Awesome Applications of Open Data by Matt Wood - Product Manager - AWS, Lisa Green - Director - Common Crawl , Ravi K Madduri - Fellow, Computation Institute - Globus Online , Matthew Berk - Founder & CEO - Lucky Oyster, Inc.
Dive into the world of big data as we discuss how open, public datasets can be harnessed using the AWS cloud. With a lot of large data collections (such as the 1000 Genomes Project and the Common Crawl), join this session to find out how you can process billions of web pages and trillions of genes to find new insights into society.
BDT205 - Solving Big Problems with Big Data by David A Patterson - Pardee Professor of Computer Science - AMP Lab, UC Berkeley
The problem of big data is not only that it is capacious, but that it is also heterogeneous, dirty, and growing even faster than the improvement in disk capacity. One challenge is then to derive value by answering ad hoc questions in a timely fashion that justifies the preservation of big data. A group of us from databases, machine learning, networking, and systems just started a new lab at University of California, Berkeley, to tackle this challenge. The AMPLab is working at the intersection of three trends: statistical machine learning (Algorithms), cloud computing (Machines), and crowdsourcing (People). One of the driving applications for the AMP Lab is cancer genomics. Over the next several years, gene-sequencing technologies will begin to make their way into medicine, offering the most complex tests available. This advance brings a new type of data with tremendous promise to help elucidate physiological and pathological functions within the body, as well as to make more informed d
BDT206 - A Seismic Shift in Education by Steven Halliwell - Education & S/L Gov't Director - AWS, Bill Howe - Director of Research, Scalable Data Analytics, eScience Institute - UW, Anant Agarwal - President - EdX , Michael L. Chasen - President and CEO - Blackboard
Join some of the education pioneers who are using cloud computing to drive new methods of delivery and evaluation across the world. Well discuss how the AWS cloud has helped students from all disciplines learn more, faster, using the innovative programs and technologies. Join this session to learn more from EdX, Blackboard and the University of Washington on how the cloud is accelerating modern education and research.
BDT207 - Big Data and the US Presidential Campaign by Miles Ward - Solutions Architect - AWS, Harper Reed - CTO - Obama For America, Leo Zhadanovsky - Director of Systems Engineering - Democratic National Committee, Brian Holcomb - DevOps Engineer - Obama For America, Jay Edwards - Lead Database Engineer - Obama For America, JP Schneider - DevOps Engineer - Obama For America, Scott VanDenPlas - Lead Dev Ops - Obama For America, Ben Hagen - Security Engineer - Obama For America
Obama For America, the organization behind Barack Obamas successful campaign for re-election as President of the United States, designed, built, deployed and now dismantled an election-winning technology system which heavily leveraged Amazon Web Services. Join us to meet the OFA "TECH" team, core members of the visionary group that delivered the applications, analytics, and DevOps tools that made such a big impact. We'll discuss the unique data system "Narwhal" at the center of this operation, their forward-minded use of SQS, RDS, and DynamoDB, and cloud power tools like Auto-Scaling, Asgard, CloudOpt, and New Relic that helped them deliver on election day.
BDT301 - High Performance Computing in the Cloud by Matt Wood - Product Manager - AWS, Dave Fellows - CTO - Green Button , Michael Driscoll - CEO - Metamarkets
Join Matt Wood to discuss the story of high performance computing on Amazon Web Services, from an introduction to EC2 Cluster Compute Instances all the way to tips and tricks, like optimizing your code for the Intel Xeon processor E5 family. We'll welcome guest speakers on stage to discuss real world case studies on driving more teraflops for your applications.
BDT302 - Enterprise HPC in the Cloud: Fortune 500 Use Cases by Jason Stowe - CEO - Cycle Computing , Steve Litster - Global Lead for Scientific Computing - Novartis , Robert Nordlund - Assistant Vice President - The Hartford, Amitabh Shukla - Director of Software and Computer Engineering - Life Technologies, David Chang - Assistant Vice President, Risk Management Actuary - Pacific Life Insurance Company, Kurt Prenger - IT Senior Analyst - Johnson & Johnson, Taylor Hamilton - ITLDP Analyst - Johnson & Johnson
This talk will describe the use of utility supercomputers to solve real world problems for Genentech, Novartis, Schrodinger, and many others in Life Science, Finance, Manufacturing, Energy, and Insurance. We will talk about the latest and greatest workloads that are helping push industries forward through the insights gained from big data and high performance computing, as well as a look at what's coming next.
BDT303 - Data Science with Elastic MapReduce by Kurt Brown - Director, Data Science & Engineering Platform - Netflix
In this talk, we dive into the Netflix Data Science & Engineering architecture. Not just the what, but also the why. Some key topics include the big data technologies we leverage (Cassandra, Hadoop, Pig + Python, and Hive), our use of Amazon S3 as our central data hub, our use of multiple persistent Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) clusters, how we leverage the elasticity of AWS, our data science as a service approach, how we make our hybrid AWS / data center setup work well, and more.
BDT304 - Big Data Masterclass by Peter Sirota - Sr. Manager, Software Development - AWS, Pradeep Ananthapadmanadhan - CTO - Vivaki , Rick Farnell - Co-Founder & President - Think Big Analytics
Learn how engineers at startups and larger enterprises use data to drive greater insight into their operations, customers, and business in this lively discussion of big data techniques and tools. From Hadoop to data warehouses, this panel discusses the tools, techniques, tips, and tricks for building data driven teams and delivering cost optimization at scale.
BDT305 - Transforming Big Data with Spark and Shark by Michael Franklin - Siebel Professor of Computer Science - UC Berkeley , Matei Zaharia - PhD Student, AMP Lab, UC Berkeley - UC Berkeley
The Berkeley AMPLab is developing a new open source data analysis software stack by deeply integrating machine learning and data analytics at scale (Algorithms), cloud and cluster computing (Machines) and crowdsourcing (People) to make sense of massive data. Current application efforts focus on cancer genomics, real-time traffic prediction, and collaborative analytics for mobile devices. In this talk, we present an overview of this stack and demonstrate key components: Spark and Shark.
CPN101 - Revving up Your Application by Deepak Singh - Principal Product Manager - AWS
Amazon EC2 offers a broad array of instance types that provide customers with a varying set of resources for their applications. From the diminutive Micro instance to the powerful Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large instance, AKA "The Beast", customers are presented with a number of options for deploying their applications. This talk dives into the various Amazon EC2 instance families and walks through a variety of use cases that demonstrate the capabilities and ideal use cases for different instance types. You should leave with enough information to understand how to choose the instance type most appropriate to meet the requirements of your applications.
CPN102 - Your First Week with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud by David Brown - Sr. Manager, Software Development - AWS
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It gives you complete control over your computing resources how you can run your applications in the AWS Cloud. In this session, we explore the fundamentals of Amazon EC2, providing you with all that you need to begin deploying your applications to the cloud. Come prepared with your Amazon EC2 questions and have them answered in this session!
CPN202 - Run More for Less by Dave Ward - Sr. Manager, Amazon EC2 Pricing Services - AWS
Amazon EC2 provides you several pricing options that can help you significantly reduce your overall AWS bill, including On-Demand Instances, Spot Instances, Reserved Instances, and the Reserved Instance Marketplace. This session covers high-level architectures and when to use and not to use each of the pricing models for components of those architectures. We walk through several customer examples to illustrate when to use each pricing option. Additionally, we walk through tools that may be useful to determine when to use each pricing model. This session is aimed at technically savvy managers and engineers who need to reduce their cloud spending.
CPN203 - Saving with EC2 Spot Instances by Dave Ward - Sr. Manager, Amazon EC2 Pricing Services - AWS, Lynwood Bishop - President - MapLarge , Nigel Duffy - CTO - Numerate , Nimrod Hoofien - SVP of Engineering - Ooyala , Chris Doherty - Tech Lead, Video Ingestion & Processing - Ooyala
In this session, we provide an quick overview of how some customers leverage Spot Instances. Join us as we hear from Spot Instance customers, including Ooyala, Numerate, and MapLarge, about how they got started, how they architect for the potential of interruption, how they maximize their savings using Spot, and what best practices they have learned. These customers also provide a high-level architectural overview their Spot solutions including media encoding (Ooyala), drug research (Numerate), and analytics (MapLarge). This session is aimed at customers interested in learning how to maximize their savings using Spot Instances. Come with your questions and get ready to be amazed at how easy it is to save on your Amazon EC2 bill.
CPN204 - Windows on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud by Tom Rizzo - General Manager, Windows EC2, AWS Windows Business - AWS
If you are interested in learning more about how you can use Windows technologies in the AWS environment, this session is for you! We explore running Microsoft Windows and Windows-based workloads on AWS. We focus on the key topics that will help you get started on Windows to expert topics like building applications using .NET and Visual Studio and everything in-between. Filled with tons of demos, this session shows you firsthand how you can use Windows to bridge your on-premises network with AWS and quickly deploy enterprise workloads such as Exchange Server, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and Windows ISV applications. Come prepared with all your Windows questions and get them answered at the session!
CPN205 - Zero to Millions of Requests by Khawaja Shams - Software Engineer - NASA , Spencer Dillard - Sr. Product Manager - AWS , Brett George - Engineering Applications Software Engineer - NASA
Regardless of the size of your application, you need to ensure it is scalable and highly available. You want a simple, cost-effective solution that makes it easy to securely run your site on the Amazon EC2 platform. This session starts with an overview of Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), its key features, and how to get started. Learn how ELB can fit into your application architecture and best practices for managing load balancers in EC2. NASA / JPL presents a real world example of how ELB enabled millions of users to view the Curiosity Mars rover landing.
CPN206 - Learning From the Masters by Deepak Singh - Principal Product Manager - AWS, Adrian Cockcroft - Director of Architecture, Cloud Systems - Netflix , Peter Esposito - Systems Manager - USTA , Steve Litster - Global Lead for Scientific Computing - Novartis
Please join us for a conversation with Adrian Cockroft (Netflix), Pete Esposito (USTA) and Stephen Litster (Novartis) as they share insights into their organizations journey to the cloud. You will learn more about lessons they have learned from successes and failures as they made Amazon EC2 a component of their IT infrastructure. Find out how Netflix scales their infrastructure and enables teams to innovate, how the USTA made its journey to the cloud, and how Novartis takes advantage of the elasticity and scale of Amazon EC2 to find new drug targets.
CPN207 - Virtual Networking in the Cloud by Eric Schultze - Principal Product Manager - AWS, Steve Morad - Solutions Architect - AWS
Take Amazon EC2 to the next level and create a virtual network in the AWS cloud using our API-defined networking solutions. Learn how to create networks that closely resemble those used in a traditional data center, enhance your knowledge of elastic network interfaces and multiple IP addresses for EC2 instances, and learn how to leverage egress filtering and network ACLs for an additional layer of security for your network. In addition to discussing virtual network security appliances, internal load balancing, and site to site VPN connectivity, we also discuss the past, present, and future for Amazon virtual networking.
CPN208 - Failures at Scale and How to Ignore Them by James Hamilton - Vice President & Distinguished Engineer - AWS
At scale, rare and unexpected events will happen. Things eventually will go wrong. This talk dives into what can go wrong at scale and how to architect applications to ride through disaster obliviously. Well talk about AWS infrastructure design including Regions and Availability Zones and show how applications can be written and operated to best exploit this industry-unique infrastructure redundancy model. Believing that experience is one of the best teachers, we will go through some of the more interesting and educational industry post mortems including some experienced at AWS to motivate these application design decisions and show how they can mitigate the damage of the truly unexpected.
CPN209 - Your Amazon Linux AMI by Max Spevack - Manager, Linux Kernel & Operating Systems - AWS
If you are a Linux user in Amazon EC2, this is a session you want to attend. Join us for a discussion related to the Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Leave the session with an understanding of why the Amazon Linux AMI exists, how its packages and repositories are composed, and information about its rolling release cycle and security updates. Additionally, we discuss the niche that the Amazon Linux AMI fills in the larger Linux-in-EC2 space. Come with your questions, feedback, and requests related to the Amazon Linux AMI.
CPN210 - Defining an Enterprise Cloud Strategy by George Reese - CTO - Enstratus
Few terms are more confusing than the term "cloud." While we've moved beyond the age of "defining the cloud," there's still a significant amount of confusion in understanding the role of the public cloud in an enterprise IT infrastructure. This presentation defines the elements of a mature enterprise cloud computing strategy that includes all components of a hybrid cloud, how to build out an integrated public/private infrastructure, and strategies for when and where to deploy new systems, and when it makes sense to migrate existing systems.
CPN211 - My Data Center Has Walls that Move by Deepak Singh - Principal Product Manager - AWS
How do you think about computing resources in a world where you can launch and terminate computational capacity in minutes? Amazon EC2 provides a powerful platform to access vast computational resources at the click of a button or a simple API call. It is also very different from operating your own data center or having to managed fix assets in a co-location facility. This talk walks you through examples of how the cloud enables more efficient capacity planning, provides guidance in how developers and organizations can manage thousands of instances efficiently, and highlights tools that make it easy for you to plan your capacity needs, even when those needs might require you to provision the equivalent of a small data center at short notice.
CPN301 - The Best Amazon EC2 Features You Never Knew About by Deepak Singh - Principal Product Manager - AWS, Miles Ward - Solutions Architect - AWS, Scott VanDenPlas - Lead Dev Ops - Obama For America
You might think you make Amazon EC2 dance to the strokes of your keyboard and bend to the will of a mouse click. If you think you know everything about Amazon EC2, think again. Learn some advanced EC2 tricks that will save you time, money and development effort. Secure your automation, scale naturally with ease, flexibly redistribute load and GO FAST!
CPN401 - Packet Plumbing in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud by Kevin Miller - Software Development Manager - AWS
In this session, we put on our network tool belt and explore the depths of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds API-defined networking! Learn how to isolate and fix networking problems; we cover such things as instance routing tables, Elastic Network Interfaces, VPC subnets and route tables, network ACLs, security groups, route propagation, and remote connectivity via VPN and Direct Connect. Join as we discover how to build and troubleshoot VPC networks meeting complex requirements, and pick up ideas for some unexpected things you can do. This session is aimed at engineers that understand the fundamentals of VPC networking and are looking for a deeper dive of how VPC engineers diagnose network problems.
DAT101 - Understanding AWS Database Options by Sundar Raghavan - General Manager - AWS, Andy Skalet - CTO and Co-Founder - BrandVerity , Jay Edwards - Lead Database Engineer - Obama For America, Kimo Rosenbaum - Senior Systems Administrator - Edmodo
When you're handling big data in the modern world, you will come to a point where you can't just pick a one size fits all approach anymore. However, to get the results you want, you also dont have to spend big money on fire breathing hardware, or expensive software. AWS offers a beautiful array of open and commercial database choices, from do-it-yourself to fully managed services which handle scaling, and gives you powerful tools to choose the right architecture. You could choose from MySQL, RDS, Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra, ElastiCache, Redis, and SimpleDB, and our customers use them for different use cases. Each has different strengths, and this session highlights when you would want to choose each, with examples of how we use each to solve our big data challenges and why we made those decisions. We profile the some of the choices available to you - MySQL, RDS, Elasticache, Redis, Cassandra, MongoDB and DynamoDB and three customer case studies on RDS, ElastiCache and DynamoDB.
DAT102 - Introduction to Amazon DynamoDB by Dave Lang - Sr. Product Manager, Amazon DynamoDB - AWS, Eric Nadalin - Co-Founder & CTO - Nexmo, Eddie Dingels - Lead Software Engineer - Earth Networks
Learn why Amazon DynamoDB is the fastest-growing service in AWS history. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service that lets you scale from one to hundreds of thousands of I/Os per second (and beyond) with the push of a button. It's designed to give you scalability and high performance with minimal administration and enables you to scale your app while keeping costs down. You also learn about the services design principles, its history, and about how some of our customers are using DynamoDB in their applications.
DAT103 - Amazon Redshift: Amazon's New Data Warehousing Service by Anurag Gupta - Director, Database Engines - AWS
Amazon Redshift is a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Starting today, you can sign up for an invitation to the limited preview of the service. Come to our session for an overview of the service, how it delivers fast query performance on data sets ranging from hundreds of gigabytes to a petabyte or more, and its pricing.
DAT201 - Migrating Databases to AWS by Grant McAlister - Senior Principal Engineer - AWS, Rodney Grilli - Solution Architect - College Board
In this session, learn how to move your existing database applications to the cloud. We cover the best practices for planning your migrations, moving your data over, sizing your AWS deployment appropriately, and minimizing downtime. You also hear from some of our customers who have successfully migrated their applications about the techniques they used and the reasons they moved onto the cloud.
DAT202 - Optimizing your Cassandra Database on AWS by Gregg Ulrich - Manager, Cassandra DevOps - Netflix , Ruslan Meshenberg - Director, Platform Engineering - Netflix
For a service like Netflix, data is crucial. In this session, the Director of Cloud Platform Engineering at Netflix details how they chose and leveraged Cassandra, a highly-available and scalable open source key/value store. In this presentation they discuss why they chose Cassandra, the tools and processes they developed to quickly and safely move data into AWS without sacrificing availability or performance, and best practices that help Cassandra work well in AWS.
DAT203 - Optimizing Your MongoDB Database on AWS by Miles Ward - Solutions Architect - AWS, Jared Rosoff - Director of Product Marketing - 10gen
MongoDB is one of the fastest growing NoSQL workloads on AWS due to its simplicity and scalability, and recent product additions by the AWS team have only improved those traits. Join us for a deep-dive on MongoDB best practices, including installation, configuration, orchestration, performance, and durability optimization, as well as operational management using tools from AWS and 10gen.
DAT301 - Accelerating Amazon Relational Database Service Performance with Amazon ElastiCache by Rahul Pathak - Sr. Product Manager - AWS, Ori Zaltzman - Founder & CTO - Gogobot.com, Khaled Alquaddoomi - SVP of Technology - HealthGuru
Learn how you can use Amazon ElastiCache to easily deploy a Memcached-compatible, in-memory caching system to speed up your application performance. We show you how to use ElastiCache to improve your application latency and reduce the load on your database servers. We'll also show you how to build a caching layer that is easy to manage and scale as your application grows.
DAT302 - Under the Covers of Amazon DynamoDB by Matt Wood - Product Manager - AWS, Michael Laing - Systems Architect - New York Times , Andrew Canaday - Lead Software Engineer - New York Times
Learn about the thought and decisions that went into designing and building DynamoDB. We'll talk about its roots and how we can deliver the performance and throughput you enjoy today. Well also show you how to model data, maintain maximum throughput, and drive analytics against the data with DynamoDB. Finally, you'll hear from some of our customers on how they've built large-scale applications on DynamoDB and about the lessons they've learned along the way.
DAT303 - Amazon Relational Database Service Best Practices by Grant McAlister - Senior Principal Engineer - AWS, Eli White - Founding Partner & CTO - mojoLive
Learn how to set up, operate, and scale mission critical MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server database deployments using Amazon RDS. Grant McAlister, our senior principal engineer, shares best practices for deploying mission critical systems on Amazon RDS. We show you how to architect for security, durability, and high availability. You also learn how easy it is to scale your compute capacity, storage, and the IOPS associated with your database. Finally, some of our customers share what they've learned about building scalable applications on RDS.
ENT101 - Embracing the Cloud by Yury Izrailevsky - Vice President, Cloud Computing and Platform Engineering - Netflix , Neil Hunt - Chief Product Officer - Netflix
Join the product and cloud computing leaders of Netflix to discuss why and how the company moved to Amazon Web Services. From early experiments for media transcoding, to building the operational skills to optimize costs and the creation of the Simian Army, this session guides business leaders through real world examples of evaluating and adopting cloud computing.
ENT102 - Application Rationalization by Michael Gephart - Business Development Manager - AWS, Srikanth Geddada - Head - Public Cloud Infrastructure - Wipro, Erica Eatmon - Strategic Initiatives Leader - McGraw Hill, Harsha Rao - Principle - Booz Allen Hamilton, Oliver Alvarez - Lead Enterprise Security Architect - International Finance Corporation
Understanding the requirements and dependencies of your existing applications is an important component of a successful migration to Amazon Web Services. In this session, hear best practices from customers in rationalizing your applications to understand the easiest path to migrate and take advantage of the on-demand, elastic infrastructure of the AWS Cloud.
ENT103 - Making the Case for Cloud by Markku Lepisto - Principal, Cloud Computing - Nokia , Jinesh Varia - Manager, AWS Evangelism - AWS, Jay Chakrapani - VP & General Manager, Digital - McGraw Hill
In this session, AWS technology evangelist Jinesh Varia discusses common best practices for adopting cloud computing in your business. Tap into the shared learning of hundreds of thousands of customers, as we talk about how to create the right technical and business policies for adopting the cloud, migration hints and tips, and how to develop employees skills around the cloud computing ecosystem. This session includes customer examples from McGraw Hill and Nokia Siemens on how they successfully grew their usage of cloud computing while staying agile and keeping costs low.
ENT201 - How Much Can You Save with the Cloud? by Dan Rogers - Head of Global Demand Gen - AWS, Vladimir Mitevski - Vice President, Product Management Core Services - Thomson Reuters , Kris Bliesner - CEO & Co-Founder - 2nd Watch
There isnt an IT department out there that isnt under pressure to reduce costs. For thousands of enterprises, the AWS cloud has become part of that lower cost strategy. But how much could you really save with AWS? Where will those savings come from, and how does shifting to a model where you pay only for what you use impact your IT spend? In this session, we are joined by Kris Bliesner, chief executive officer of 2nd Watch, who have successfully helped over one hundred organizations reduce their IT costs. We share detailed best practices on how to calculate detailed apples-to-apples comparisons, how to build the models, and where to look to identify the biggest cost saving opportunities. We are also joined by Vladimir Mitevski, Vice President Product Management Core Services at Thomson Reuters who will walk through by line item how and where their actual operating and capital expenses changed when they migrated to the cloud, so you can learn from their experiences, and take home some
ENT202 - 69% and Falling: Lowering the TCO of Enterprise Apps by Ralph K. Treitz - CEO & Co-Founder - VMS
In this presentation, Ralph Treitz from enterprise consulting legend, VMS AG, dives deep into a detailed cost analysis of running SAP on AWS using best practices from more than 2600 environments. If you want to know more about understanding the components of TCO models for enterprise software (including SAP), this is the session for you.
ENT203 - Integrating On-Premise Resources by Paul Ortiz - Principal Architect - Apollo Group , Ryan Shuttleworth - Technical Evangelist - AWS
The general purpose computing and storage environment of Amazon Web Services integrates perfectly into your existing ecosystem. Join customers who have taken advantage of this environment in parallel to their on-premise infrastructure to hear tales, tips, and tricks of best practices of integrating AWS with existing resources securely using services such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Storage Gateway.
ENT204 - From Science Fiction to Reality: NASA's journey into the Cloud by Tom Soderstrom - IT Chief Technology Officer - NASA , Khawaja Shams - Software Engineer - NASA
This talk describes how cloud computing is now used for everything that JPL does, including the mission to Mars and beyond. We describe JPL's journey from prototyping to full operational status on mission critical systems, including what parts of the AWS Cloud JPL uses. The speakers provide practical lessons learned and recommendations on how to bring everyone along on the journey.
ENT205 - Drinking our own Champagne: Amazon.com's Adoption of AWS by Laura Grit - Principal Technical Program Manager - AWS
Amazon retail websites around the world run on AWS, affording us greater control over capacity, performance, and availability than we have ever had in the past. In this session, we explain how we managed the process of migrating the worlds largest e-commerce sites to the cloud and operationally the benefits we get daily from using AWS technology.
ENT206 - Introduction to Benchmarking with AWS by Robert Barnes - Director of Benchmarking - AWS
Whether you are building a new application or migrating an existing application, benchmarking can help you establish a baseline of your application's ability to support business requirements. The cloud is transforming benchmarking as it is not only scalable but also cost-effective to conduct benchmark experiments. In this session, Robert Barnes the Director of Benchmarking at AWS will give you an overview of benchmarking in the cloud and discuss a framework for benchmarking. He will discuss 3 ways to use benchmarks to answer specific capacity and performance questions and also share some examples of mistakes that people make when conducting their own benchmark tests or when consuming 3rd party benchmarking reports. This session is targeted at those who are looking for high-level guidance on how benchmarking can help your business. For a more in-depth practical review of my recommended tests join me at ENT 303 A practical guide to benchmarking with AWS.
ENT301 - Enterprise IT Customer Panel by Dan Rogers - Head of Global Demand Gen - AWS, Bharat Shyam - CIO - State of Washington , Troy Otillio - Cloud Strategist - Intuit , Darren Person - CTO, Chief Architect & Online Media Executive - Elsevier , Sean Perry - Chief Information Officer - Robert Half International
In this session you will hear IT leaders of some of the most innovative and dynamic enterprises, answer the most burning topics that we are all dealing with today: What is the right mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure for your company? How can you get clear visibility into all the cloud solutions being implemented today by your distributed development teams? How should you think about budgeting and billing in a world of utility, monthly usage charges versus upfront capital expenses? How can cloud infrastructure unleash new models of IT innovation? What is the role of IT as we transition to cloud computing?
ENT302 - Evaluating and Deploying Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint Server on AWS by Tom Rizzo - General Manager, Windows EC2, AWS Windows Business - AWS
Have you wondered about migrating your on-premises Windows Server, Active Directory, Exchange Server or SharePoint Server deployment to AWS? Looking for the best way to get started? This session will step you through the evaluation steps you should take in looking at migrating your Microsoft workloads to AWS. Well do a deep dive into the architecture, performance, availability and functionality running these workloads on AWS. Well also explore using value added services in AWS to extend your Microsoft workloads from both an IT Pro and Developer standpoint. Finally, well look at how to integrate your on-premises deployments with AWS so you can continue to run some workloads on-premises and others in AWS. This session is full of demos and come armed with all your questions about running Microsoft workloads on AWS.
ENT303 - A Practical Guide to Benchmarking with AWS by Robert Barnes - Director of Benchmarking - AWS
Benchmarking not only helps identify areas of concern and bottlenecks, but also acts as the foundation for future productivity improvements. In this session, Robert Barnes the Director of Benchmarking at AWS will provide practical tips and examples of conducting benchmarks of AWS compute, storage, network and application services AWS. Using specific examples, he will provide helpful hints and tips on how to configure and execute benchmarks tests for evaluating your application's performance so you can enhance application performance over time with AWS. This session provides more detailed operational tips, for a more general overview of why to benchmark and how to use benchmarks, join me at ENT 206 Introduction to Benchmarking at AWS"
ENT401 - Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Applications in the AWS Cloud by Larry Hill - Business Development Manager - Full 360
Oracle Hyperion applications - Essbase, Planning and Financial Management (Consolidation) - are the most widely-used financial analytic applications in the world. They all experience extreme peaks in usage, primarily during period-end close. Few corporate IT operations provision enough server capacity to provide good response time to Finance Departments during these close periods, which tends to make a challenging time even more difficult. Because of these factors, Hyperion applications are ideally suited for cloud computing in an enterprise setting. Join Larry Hill from Full 360 to discuss his firms deep experience with the benefits and best practices related to this or key workload running in the Amazon cloud.
GMG203 - Meteor Entertainment by Sarah Novotny - CIO - Meteor Entertainment
Game developers need to spend their time building new games and features, not managing infrastructure. Meteor Entertainment has learned how-to minimize the time they spend managing infrastructure by automating deployments, monitoring systems through log analysis, and by making their data tier easy to scale. Attend this session to hear all about Meteors best-practices.
GMG204 - TinyCo by Gabi Ghimis - Product Manager - TinyCo
TinyCo is a game studio that powers and monetizes hit titles such as Tiny Village and Tiny Pets. In this session they will share their best practices for developing engaging titles that work across mobile platforms. TinyCo has learned how-to scale their AWS app servers and databases to handle viral demand, and they will talk about what they learned while they were developing their gaming platform and code libraries. Additionally, TinyCo was successful marketing and monetizing their game with the Amazon Appstore and Kindle Fire, and they will explain how-to integrate with Amazons in-app purchasing service.
GMG301 - Developing Mobile Games in the Cloud by Patrick Prendergast - Business Development Manager - AWS
The convergence of social gaming and mobile has changed the game for social game developers combining old and new challenges. Many mobile social game developers are leveraging AWS for their backend infrastructure because it allows them to execute in the face of these challenges. How can you reduce deployment time from weeks to hours? How can you build a back-end that can serve 10 users or 10,000,000 without failing or paying for what youre not using? Come learn from us how to architect your mobile social game on AWS and change the game of mobile social deployment in your favor.
GMG302 - Scaling Social Games with Ubisoft by Read Maloney - Product Manager - AWS, Tsvetan Petkov - Online Architect - Ubisoft
Game success leads to rapid and unpredictable growth, and high-levels of read and write traffic can make scaling games even more difficult. In this session Ubisoft and AWS cover the architectural best practices for building scalable apps and the best ways to adjust your app if it begins to slow down. This session mainly focuses on scaling databases, and we focus on the following technologies: Couchbase, Cassandra, MySQL, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DyanmoDB.
MBL101 - Distributing Apps through Kindle Fire and the Amazon Appstore for Android by Aaron Rubenson - Director - AWS
Interested in offering your apps and games to Amazon customers? Learn how to grow your mobile app or gaming business by offering your app to millions of Amazon and Kindle Fire customers. This talk will provide an overview of selling your app on Amazon and resources to help you engage customers and monetize, including an overview of the GameCircle and In-App Purchasing APIs. Plus, hear tips for building relationships with Amazon customers and creating the killer app for Kindle Fire by optimizing your mobile apps and games for Kindle Fire tablets.
MBL202 - One-Click Mobile Cloud Services Using AWS by Matthew Schmulen - Lead Solutions Engineer - Appcelerator
Create awesome mobile apps for iPhone and Android using the new integration of AWS Mobile SDK with Appcelerators Titanium Platform. Tap into more than 5,000 native APIs to create cross-platform mobile apps using a single JavaScript code base. Also, take advantage of Appcelerator Cloud Services, including more than 20 of the most high-demand mobile back-end services like push notification, photo sharing, and check-ins - a superior alternative to Microsofts Azure Mobile Services, running on AWS and supporting iOS/Android.
MBL203 - Building a Mobile Application Platform on AWS by Ilya Sukhar - Founder - Parse.com
Get under the hood with Parse.coms founder to see how they used AWS to build their mobile Platform as a Service. In this session, you learn how Parse is using a variety of AWS services including Amazon EC2, S3, ELB, EBS and Route53 to build data storage, push, and easy upload services for mobile developers.
MBL204 - Enhancing Quality & Performance for Vonage Mobile VOIP and Messaging Application using AWS by Guy Fighel - Director of Research & Development - Vonage
Mobile communication applications have become a growing trend in the last few years. They allow users to build global virtual communities, reducing the need for the classic carrier while using alternative data channels like WiFi or 4G. Such applications offer phone call features, interactive chats, SMS messages, video, and more for free or a very low cost. Companies are being challenged daily to provide best in class, high quality, over-the-top communication applications. In this session, we discuss the challenges in building a global quality network. We present how Vonage built a Mobile Global architecture using Amazon EC2, developed geo-location algorithms for optimal routing, and implemented iPhone/Android AWS SDKs for secure attachments storage using Amazon S3.
MBL205 - Monetizing Your App on Kindle Fire: In-App Purchasing Made Easy by Mekka Okereke - Manager, Software Development - AWS
The Amazon In-App Purchasing API makes it easy for you to offer digital content and subscriptions such as in-game currency, expansion packs, upgrades, magazine issues and more for purchase within your apps. Within minutes you can be up and running, ready to give millions of Amazon customers the ability to purchase engaging digital content using their Amazon 1-Click settings. Discover how in-app purchasing can help you monetize your apps on Kindle Fire and learn how to integrate the Amazon In-App Purchasing API into your mobile apps.
MBL301 - Data Persistence to Amazon DynamoDB for Mobile Apps by Bob Kinney - Mobile SDE at AWS - AWS
Object modeling is a common practice in mobile applications. We present two methods for modeling objects backed by Amazon DynamoDB, the AWS Persistence Framework for Core Data and DynamoDBMapper. We cover the benefits and limitations of these two solutions and demonstrate sample applications built with both technologies.
MBL302 - Solving Common Mobile Use Cases with the AWS Mobile SDKs by Bob Kinney - Mobile SDE at AWS - AWS, Glenn Dierkes - Software Development Manager - AWS
The AWS Mobile SDKs can be used to build thick-client architecture apps for iOS and Android devices. An overview of the SDKs will be presented as well as demos and code for storing data in Amazon S3 and sending emails via Amazon SES. You will also learn how to manage AWS credentials in a mobile environment.
MBL303 - Scalable Mobile and Web Apps by Kingsley Wood - APAC Business Development Manager - AWS, Aritra Ghosh Dastidar - Software Engineer - Intuit
AWS offers an array of products and services to handle the unprecedented volumes of traffic, enormous user numbers and vast amounts of data being experienced by a successful mobile app that takes off. Learn how with new found agility and amazingly low time to market, these must-know best practices and techniques in the rapidly evolving and highly demanding mobile landscape can ensure success. Featuring Intuit's txtWeb architecture as a case study.
MED101 - Introduction to Amazon CloudFront by Mark Ramberg - Media Strategy and Business Development - AWS, Brian Kaiser - CTO - HUDL
End users expect to be able to view media content anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery used to distribute content to end users around the globe with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments. In this session, learn what a content delivery network (CDN) such as Amazon CloudFront is and how it works, the benefits it provides, common challenges and needs, performance, pricing, and examples of how customers are using CloudFront.
MED201 - Media Ingest and Storage Solutions with AWS by Joe Lyons - Manager, Global Storage Business Development - AWS, Alan Schaaf - Founder & CEO - Imgur
In this session we will discuss the numerous ways to ingest data into AWS including options such as physical media import & direct connect. We also talk about policy-based Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) in the cloud, total cost of ownership, the importance of storage durability, and the infinite scalability of Amazon S3. Also, the founder of photo-share sensation IMGUR, Alan Schaaf, speaks about their migration to AWS.
MED202 - Netflix by Kevin McEntee - Vice President, Digital Supply Chain - Netflix
Netflix designed a massive scale cloud based media transcoding system from scratch for processing professionally produced studio content(to meet the unique scale and time constraints of our business). We bucked the common industry trend of vertical scaling and, instead, designed a horizontally scaled elastic system using AWS to meet the unique scale and time constraints of our business. Come hear how we designed this system, how it continues to get less expensive for Netflix, and how AWS represents a transformative opportunity in the wider media owning industry.
MED203 - Scalable Media Processing with AWS by Usman Shakeel - Solutions Architect - AWS
This session walks through approaches for large-scale media processing scenarios. We cover hybrid and cloud-based transcoding, file transfer, media preparation, and media management. We expect attendees to come away with an understanding of best practices for architecting and deploying hybrid and cloud-based systems for media processing.
MED204 - High Performance Content Delivery by Alex Dunlap - Senior Manager, Amazon Web Services - AWS, Andy Rosenbaum - Director of Development - Earth Networks
In this hands-on session, we demonstrate how you can use Amazon CloudFront to help architect your site to deliver both static and dynamic content (portions of your site that change for each end-user). We walk through how you can configure multiple origin servers for your Amazon CloudFront distribution providing you the flexibility to keep your content in different origin locations without the need to create multiple distributions or manage multiple domain names on your website. We also show you how you can use query string parameters to help customize your web pages for each viewer and how you can configure multiple cache behaviors for your download distribution based on URL patterns on your website.
MED301 - Is My CDN Performing? by Nathan Dye - Software Development Manager - AWS, Jeff Miccolis - Engineering - MapBox
This presentation provides practical guidance using external agent-based measurements and real user monitoring techniques. We review common content delivery network (CDN) architectures and how they relate to performance measurement. Finally, we walk through real-world CDN performance monitoring implementations used by MapBox, Amazon.com, and Amazon CloudFront.
MED303 - Addressing Security in Media Workflows by Usman Shakeel - Solutions Architect - AWS, Heidi Kujawa - CEO - KODE Compliance
Are your media assets secure? For media companies, security is paramount. Few things can more directly impact your companys bottom line. As the move to store, process and distribute digital media via the cloud continues, it is imperative to examine the relevant security implications of a multi-tenant public cloud environment. This talk is intended to answer questions around securely storing, processing, distributing and archiving digital media assets on the AWS environment. AWS also enables customers to achieve compliance with the MPAA security best practices with minimal effort. Learn how AWS complies with the MPAA security best practices and how media companies can leverage that for their media workloads.
RMG202 - Rainmakers: How Netflix Operates Clouds for Maximum Freedom and Agility by Jeremy Edberg - Reliability Architect - Netflix
In this session, learn how Netflix has embraced DevOps and leveraged all that Amazon has to offer to allow our developers maximum freedom and agility.
RMG203 - Cloud Infrastructure and Application Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch by Derek Pai - Sr. Product Manager, Monitoring - AWS, Darren Lee - Sr. Quantitative Engineer - Bizo , Henry Hahn - Sr. Product Manager - AWS
Amazon CloudWatch provides AWS customers the monitoring platform for keeping tabs on their cloud infrastructure and applications. In this session, we show you how to use CloudWatch to monitor vital operational resource data such as EC2 Instance CPU Utilization, ELB Request Counts, RDS Read Throughput and much more. Learn how to configure CloudWatch Alarms to alert you any time services are operating outside of ranges you define. Finally, see how you can monitor applications on your EC2 instances or outside of AWS.
RMG204 - Optimizing Costs with AWS by Coburn Watson - Manager, Cloud Performance Engineering - Netflix
Find out how Netflix, one of the largest, most well-known and satisfied AWS customers, develop and run their applications efficiently on AWS. A member of the Netflix Cloud Performance Engineering team outlines the Netflix common-sense approach to effectively managing AWS usage costs while giving the engineers unconstrained operational freedom.
RMG205 - Decoding Your AWS Bill by Matt Leonard - Manager, Tech Program Management - AWS, Ranjit Prabhu - Sr. Manager, Software Development - AWS
AWS billing has many features to help you manage and control your costs in the AWS cloud. In this session, we walk through the mechanics of AWS bill computation focusing on consolidated billing, detailed billing reports, programmatic access, cost allocation, billing alerts, and IAM access. We provide an overview of these features and demo how they are used in your own account setup.
RMG206 - Introduction to AWS Elastic Beanstalk by David McArthur - Software Development Engineer - AWS, Saad Ladki - Sr. Product Manager - AWS
Are you looking to build the next viral Facebook application or mobile game? Are you worried about the viral growth of your web application? Are you tired of managing servers and installing software? This session introduces AWS Elastic Beanstalk, the easiest way to deploy and manage web applications on AWS. Well show you how you can write your application and let Elastic Beanstalk do the rest.
RMG207 - Introduction to AWS CloudFormation by Avinash Jaisinghani - Software Development Manager - AWS, Chris Whitaker - Senior Software Development Manager - AWS
AWS CloudFormation makes it easy to deploy and manage the lifecycle of applications running in AWS. This session walks through an end-to-end scenario, creating a stack with a set of AWS resources and deploying the application files and packages. Once deployed well walk through how you can change the stack to reflect operational changes or application requirements and finally use CloudFormer to create a CloudFormation template from AWS resources already running in your environment.
SEC101 - A Guided Tour of AWS Identity and Access Management by Jim Scharf - Director - AWS
Learn what AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) technologies are available for you to manage users and their access to your AWS environment. We present a high level discussion of the benefits and functionality IAM provides to control secure access to your AWS environment. We discuss how you can manage users and their permissions when using IAM, how roles makes it simpler for you delegate access, and how to use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to require additional proof of identity.
SEC102 - Security and Compliance in the AWS Cloud by Chad Woolf - AWS Compliance Leader - AWS
To properly evaluate cloud computing services, there are several industry resources to manage cloud provider security, risk, and compliance. This session discusses AWS collateral you can use to accomplish this and allow you to build an environment that can conform to a wide range of compliance and security requirements. If youre already using AWS and need to perform an audit on your cloud assets, this session demonstrates a feasible validation approach that works for AWS.
SEC201 - Security Panel by Jason Chan - Cloud Security Architect - Netflix , Khawaja Shams - Software Engineer - NASA , Andrew Doane - Director, Systems - AWS, Rahul Sharma - Founder and VPE - Averail
Learn from fellow customers, including Jason Chan of Netflix, Khawaja Shams of NASA, and Rahul Sharma of Averail, who have leveraged the AWS secure platform to build business critical applications and services. During this panel discussion, our panelists share their experiences utilizing the AWS platform to operate some of the worlds largest and most critical applications.
SEC202 - Federal Government Compliance Best Practices by CJ Moses - GM, Government Cloud Services - AWS
Federal Agencies seeking a secure and compliant cloud platform have migrated to AWS GovCloud (US). Dont miss this session as CJ Moses, general manager of Government Cloud Solutions for AWS, will share his insights into government compliance in the cloud and how your agency can utilize AWS GovCloud to host and process your agencies Critical Unclassified Information (CUI), including data requiring compliance with International Traffic In Arms Regulation (ITAR) and Export Administration Regulations (EAR). CJs background with both the FBI and the Department of Defense, as well as his work with AWS Public Sector customers, allows him the ability to share a unique perspective derived from experiences on both sides of todays compliance issues. CJ also announces, for the first time, the availability of many new services and features within GovCloud (US).
SEC203 - AWS Security for Microsoft Shops by Miles Ward - Solutions Architect - AWS, Tom Stickle - Sr. Manager, Solution Architecture - AWS
Attend this session to learn best practices for advancing your security posture to include cloud-based deployments of Windows and Windows-based applications. We will put some of the more complex AWS security controls into a more Windows-centric context. Expect deep dives on federation between AWS Identity and Access Management and Active Directory, Routing, Security Groups and Network ACL's in Virtual Private Cloud, leveraging HOSM authentication from IIS applications, and direct guidance for Sharepoint and Exchange workloads.
SEC206 - Security OF the AWS Cloud by Stephen Schmidt - Chief Info Security Officer - AWS
Security must be the number one priority for any cloud provider and thats no different for Amazon Web Services. Stephen Schmidt, vice president and chief information officer for AWS, will share his insights into cloud security and how AWS meets the needs of todays IT security challenges. Stephen, with his background with the FBI and his work with AWS customers in the government and space exploration, research, and financial services organizations, shares an industry perspective thats unique and invaluable for todays IT decision makers. At the conclusion of this session, Stephen also provides a brief summary of the other sessions available to you in the security track.
SEC301 - Security IN the AWS Cloud by Max Ramsay - Principal Security Solutions Architect - AWS
There are so many different thoughts about how to secure your applications running in AWS that it can be confusing to know where to start. In this session, we cover tips, tricks, and emerging best practices for securing your applications. We discuss topics ranging from how to configure your AWS resources to options for logging and intrusion detection. Discover that running your applications in AWS gives you a great head start.
SEC302 - Delegating Access to Your AWS Environment by Jeff Wierer - Sr. Product Manager - AWS
At times you may have a need to provide external entities access to resources within your AWS account. You may have users within your enterprise that want to access AWS resources without having to remember a new username and password. Alternatively, you may be creating a cloud-backed application that is used by millions of mobile users. Or you have multiple AWS accounts that you want to share resources across. Regardless of the scenario, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides a number of ways you can securely and flexibly provide delegated access to your AWS resources. Come learn how to best take advantage of these options in your AWS environment.
SEC303 - Top 10 Identity and Access Management Best Practices by Anders Samuelsson - Technical Program Manager - AWS
Learn about best practices on how to secure your AWS environment with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). We discuss how you best create access policies, manage security credentials (i.e., access keys, password, Multi Factor Authentication devices, etc.), how to set up least privilege, minimizing the use of your root account, and more.
SEC304 - Building Security from Scratch in AWS by Alex Stamos - CTO - IT Sec Partners
Ask any two cloud "experts" about whether you can trust cloud providers for running your security sensitive systems and you'll likely get three opinions. When our group of security experts turned to the task of building a robust, reliable, and secure infrastructure, we chose to disregard the conventional wisdom, ignore the FUD, and design controls that allow us to confidently build on AWS, Salesforce, and other cloud providers. This talk walks you through the steps necessary to build a trustworthy cloud infrastructure. We outline how you can deconstruct your security needs into specific technical goals, map those goals onto controls that are available in the cloud, and discuss what risks need to be accepted while others are mitigated. The talk includes detailed discussion of cryptographic, network and logical controls, and is best enjoyed by those with advanced knowledge of AWS.
SPR101 - The Future of Cloud Security (Presented by Intel) by Jason Waxman - General Manager - Intel
Direct engagement with enterprise end users and industry partners like Amazon Web Services has helped Intel define its vision for future cloud infrastructure. In this session, Jason Waxman, Intel's Cloud Infrastructure Group GM, will share the basis for Intel's vision, the five pillars of future cloud infrastructure and the collaboration between Intel & AWS.
SPR201 - Recursive Clouds: Building Platforms on Platforms (Presented by Twilio) by Jeff Lawson - Co-Founder & CEO - Twilio
The economic and technological implications of elastic infrastructure are rippling through every layer of enterprise software delivery. Starting at the hardware layer, the Cloud is enabling new platform infrastructure business models that fundamentally change the pricing and delivery of software applications. Jeff will explore the way the Cloud is disrupting industry after industry by enabling platforms upon platforms of flexible, pay as you go, virtualized infrastructure.
SPR202 - The Convergence of IaaS and PaaS (Presented by RightScale) by Thorsten von Eicken - Founder & CTO - Rightscale
In the six years since AWS launched, pundits have categorized cloud offerings into IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. However, the lines between thes categories have started to blur. As IaaS solutions offer more platform and application services, this traditional view is becoming outdated. In this talk, you will learn about the shift to a new world of cloud services, where companies can pick and choose from a menu of options and assemble a solution that fits their needs. Find out how to architect your solutions to leverage a wide variety of cloud services and get a glimpse into what it means for your customers and your business.
SPR203 - Cloud Security is a Shared Responsibility (Presented by Trend Micro) by Allan Macphee - Sr. Product Manager - Trend Micro
Securing workloads in the cloud is a shared responsibility between you and your cloud service provider. With an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, such as AWS, the service provider is responsible for securing the underlying hosting infrastructure, but businesses are expected to secure their virtual machines and their applications and data built on top of it. But what security controls are required? And can traditional security tools be applied to cloud environments? This presentation answers these questions and provides guidance on what security controls are needed to protect your cloud workloads. We also highlight the features and services that make AWS a trusted partner in securing your cloud environment.
SPR204 - Securing Your Cloud Across Your On-Premise and AWS Instances (Presented by Trend Micro) by Dave Asprey - VP Cloud Security - Trend Micro
Public cloud adoption is a natural progression from virtualized data centers and on-premise deployments. For most businesses, workloads will reside in both their data centers and in public clouds, resulting in mixed environments. This presentation introduces the new security management and policy framework required to support these environments. Consistent security policy enforcement is needed regardless of VM location with additional security controls applied when VMs migrate to the public cloud. And this security should be implemented through automatic provisioning and enforcement to support the elastic nature of public clouds. Examples will be given on how this security can be deployed in an AWS environment.
SPR205 - Privileged Identity and Access Management (Presented by Xceedium) by Ken Ammon - Chief Strategy Officer - Xceedium
Xceedium discusses best practices for protecting your infrastructure from the risks that privileged users and credentials pose to systems and data in cloud-only and hybrid architectures. Topics include: privileged user and account risks, applying AWS security best practices to the "customer side" of the shared security equation (from the hypervisor up), how Xsuite Cloud mitigates the privileged user risks for both AWS-only or hybrid architectures with infrastructure across cloud and traditional data centers (including unified policy management), how Xsuite Cloud's deep AWS integration adds: 1) additional protection for the AWS Management Console, 2) auto discovery and provisioning for highly elastic environments, and how can Xsuite help control access when it is scripts, not individual users, doing management console like functions using AWS APIs.
SPR206 - Bridging the Desktop to the Cloud (Presented by Citrix) by Joe Vaccaro - Director, Product Management - Desktop and Apps Group - Citrix, Peder Ulander - Vice President of Product Marketing - Citrix
The datacenter is rapidly evolving and cloud services are leading the transformation towards IT-as-a-Service. In order to meet the growing demands of employees, IT is turning to desktop virtualization and cloud computing to empower workers with anytime, anywhere access to their desktop, apps, and data on any device. However, is it possible to enable desktops as a service from the cloud? In this session, you'll learn how enterprises and service providers can transform key workloads including Windows desktops and apps as an IT delivered service on AWS. You'll get insight into the technical details and cloud architecture required to provide the orchestration, self-service, elasticity, and flexibility necessary to deliver desktops and apps as a true cloud service.
SPR207 - Your Enterprise Network and AWS (Presented by Citrix) by Morgan Gerhart - Director - Citrix
Citrix and Amazon Web Services together enable enterprises to optimize the delivery of cloud-based applications. Maximizing the availability and performance of these application workloads requires that you eliminate disparities between AWS and your on-premise data center. Recent AWS enhancements now make it possible to deploy the same network services that power your own data center, such as application delivery and load balancing, directly into an AWS environment. It's time to learn how Citrix NetScaler VPX virtual appliances make AWS a seamless extension of your enterprise network infrastructure. In this session you will learn: The best way to seamlessly connect AWS and your enterprise network; the advantages of using virtual appliances to build a common set of network services spanning your data center and AWS; how to leverage advanced availability, acceleration, visibility and control capabilities to provide a seamless network experience; and how the right network infrastructur
SPR208 - Hitting Your Cloud's Usage Sweet Spot (Presented by Newvem) by Eric Hammond - Internet Startup Technologist - Alestic.com, Shane Meyers - Operations Engineer - SmugMug, Andrew Kenney - VP of Platform Engineering - Acquia, Chemi Katz - VP of Technical Operations - DoubleVerify, Inc, Dan Feld - VP of Sales - Newvem
Join Newvems All-Star panel of AWS expert users as they discuss their experiences, insights, and best practices on how usage analytics can save a ton of money, make your CIO and CFO really happy, and ensure business performance. Learn how usage analytics can enable you to accomplish optimal resource usage across your cloud adoption/deployment life-cycle: deterministic planning, right sizing, elasticity, compliance, and cost effectiveness.
SPR209 - On Demand IT with Cloud360 (Presented by Cognizant) by Ramesh Panuganty - Managing Director, Cloud360 Solutions - Cognizant
In this new age of IT, say goodbye to siloed, monolithic application environments, operations, and governance. Embrace the dynamic, agile application environments, and future-proof your virtual data centers. As businesses strive to tackle unrelenting information growth, increasing customer demands, cost pressures, and complex application environments, embrace an unprecedented ability to manage every aspect of your services; quality, SLAs, performance, and compliance from the operations, governance, and cost perspective. Through this session, discover how to use the service management and service governance layers to automate and manage your application environments. Learn how to apply strategic points of control in your organization and deploy automation and intelligencewhether in provisioning new application resources, migrating data, adjusting capacity, supporting new hypervisor, securing resources, or integrating AWS cloud into your operations. Understand how Cognizant's Clou
SPR210 - How Zumba Delivers Superior Application Performance to Distributors & Customers Around the Globe (Presented by New Relic) by Chris Kelly - Developer / Evangelist - New Relic, Douglas Jarquin - Technical Operations Manager - Zumba
Introduction: Chris Kelly, New Relic; Speaker: Douglas Jarquin, Technical Operations Manager, Zumba. Zumba is one of the largest branded fitness programs in the world, with more than 12 million weekly class participants, in over 140,000 locations, across more than 150 countries. Zumba uses New Relics PHP agent to help them deliver the scalability, superior performance, and mobile access for both their B2B and B2C customers around the globe. With over 1 million unique visitors and 35 million total visitors each month, features like Real User Monitoring, Server Monitoring, and App Map help the IT team monitor and tune performance in every Zumba location. In this session Douglas Jarquin, Zumba Technical Operations Manager, discusses how he keeps the application and technical infrastructure that are critical to Zumbas business results running at peak performance, his approach to ongoing performance management, and how the team uses New Relic to help prioritize their performance workload
SPR211 - Enterprise in Motion: Convergence of The Big 4 (Presented by Wipro) by Atul Sood - General Manager and Global Practice Head, Integrated Cloud Services - Wipro Technologies
In todays fast paced and challenging business environment, IT priorities are increasingly being integrated with Business Strategy. Technology is powering business innovation and establishing a culture of agility. Social and Mobility have led the way to a connected planet and this bears relevance across industries undergoing rapid transformation. Hear from Wipro on how you can harness the power of the Social, Analytics, Mobility on public cloud to create an Enterprise in Motion!
SPR212 - Conquering Challenges to Company Wide Cloud Adoption @Adobe (Presented by Cloudability) by Tim Prendergast - Senior SaaS Infrastructure Architect - Adobe Cloud Services
The convergence of company and cloud happens at more than just the engineering/ops tier. Without good processes and communication, cloud can quickly become a four-letter word in your company. Cloudability has invited the Adobe Cloud Services Team to show you how they work with finance, operations, engineering, and legal teams to ensure that everyone loves the cloud as much as they do.
SPR213 - Leverage the Cloud with Mapping and Geographic Data (Presented by Esri) by Marwa Mabrouk - ArcGIS Server Product Manager - Esri
The cloud has opened new capabilities for location analytics. If youre already using the cloud, how can you leverage those capabilities? In this session, we cover how location analytics' need for processing power and storage capacity has put the cloud to use. We also discuss how users who want to leverage location analytics can get started in the AWS cloud today.
SPR214 - Enterprise Grade, Secure Big Data Analytics (Presented by Intel) by Greg Khairallah - Business Development Manager for Big Data - Intel
Analysts predict that enterprises who embrace extreme information management architectures that deliver real time, actionable analytics will outperform competitors by 25%. This requires mastery of not only Hadoop software data analysis & processing paradigms- it requires focus on access control, data compliance, interoperability with cloud, and optimized hardware infrastructure across storage, network, and compute processing. Intel is a key contributor to the enablement of Apache Hadoop and is focused on delivering optimizations that span a whole Big Data deployment from hardware to software. This session will focus on the software and hardware engineering efforts to bring security, performance and stability to the cloud ecosystem.
SPR215 - Limitless IT: Control for the unbounded datacenter (Presented by BMC) by Kia Behnia - Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer - BMC
While many large enterprises are embracing Amazon Web Services for the promise of unlimited capacity, flexibility, and reduced capital expenditure, IT departments are just starting to engage and manage AWS as a strategic vendor. In order to accelerate adoption of AWS, IT needs a clear strategy that extends their existing operations, controls, and governance models to enterprise workloads running on AWS. Working with AWS, BMC Software is delivering the technology and process changes that enable enterprise IT to embrace AWS while maintaining the oversight their business requires. In this session, Kia Behnia, chief technology officer of BMC Software, explores the balance of running IT in traditional data centers and running in AWS. Kia discusses how you can unlock value for your business with AWS, and how you can address the management challenges of provisioning, billing, change management, and monitoring in mixed AWS and on-premise IT environments.
SPR216 - Migrating a Large SAP Landscape to the Amazon Cloud by Joe Coyle - North American Chief Technology Officer - Capgemini
A real life case study of migrating existing global SAP instances from a traditional datacenter infrastructure to the Amazon Web Services Cloud. This presentation will cover the business case, how the planning was executed, major challenges and how to navigate them, and how we adapted SAP to a consumption based Cloud environment. We will also cover how we performed Heterogeneous system copies to the Cloud. Finally we will cover the Capgemini Cloud Framework used and how we tackled the Legal and Audit implications of the migration.
SPR217 - Real World Privileged Identity, Security and Operational Experiences Panel (Presented by Xceedium) by Craig Sutherland - Principal Engineer - Booz Allen Hamilton, Balaji Balakrishnan - CISO - International Finance Corporation, John Suit - VP of Product Management - Xceedium, Sri Vasireddy - Chief Cloud Officer - 8KMiles.com, Slawek Ligier - CTO and Corporate VP of WW Product Development - SafeNet
Xceedium and guests discuss real world privileged identity, security and operational experiences when building or migrating applications to the AWS Cloud.Topics: 1) What did you perceive as the key risks before you started? What are the actual risks?; 2) How are the models/approaches to IT operations, Managing Privileged Identities/Accounts, and Security different?; 3) What did you do well? What would you do differently if starting over again? 4) Thoughts on managing/securing across hybrid cloud/data center architectures?
SPR219 - Manage for Peak Performance with AWS (Presented by RightScale) by Brian Adler - Senior Professional Services Architect - RightScale
The possibilities are endless with AWS. You can spin up more servers than you ever imagined across the globe and across your organization. But how will you manage all your AWS usage, especially as it continues to grow? How will you ensure that your deployments on AWS are rock-solid? In this session we will discuss and demonstrate how to use RightScale cloud management to: Bullet-proof your application: how to structure a build and deploy methodology across AWS regions. Well demo how to replicate configurations across EC2 availability zones to enable disaster recovery. Automate and organize: well show you how to automate redundant tasks so you can organize, clone, and deploy entire systems efficiently. Forecast cloud costs: well demo our new tool that gives you the ability to model deployments and usage patterns with AWS.This session will be presented by Brian Adler, RightScale Senior Services Architect. RightScale customers, Coupa and Pearson, will join the
SPR220 - Portability and Content Management When Moving from On-Premise to AWS (Presented by Red Hat) by Todd Sanders - Director, Software Engineering - Red Hat
In this session attendees will learn about open source software solutions sponsored by Red Hat that help to create a framework for distributed cloud services, focusing initially on content and entitlement (CaaS and EaaS, respectively) of Red Hat Subscriptions. Utilizing PKI for authorization and authentication, the audience will learn about technologies that are creating the plumbing and laying the groundwork which will allow for more ubiquitous and pervasive use of their Red Hat Subscriptions both on-premise and on AWS, while addressing the business, operational and technical issues that such subscription movements can entail. There will be a live demonstration and technology preview showing Red Hat's new content management solution running inside of Amazon EC2.
SPR221 - Learn How Enterprises Can Manage their AWS Cloud Services with CA Automation Suite for Clouds Powered by Amazon Web Services (Presented by CA) by Jeff Williams - Principal Product Manager, Alliance Solutions, Cloud Management - CA Technologies
Enterprises are looking to effectively consume and manage Amazon cloud based services. CA Automation Suite for Clouds incorporates the full benefits of CA Service Catalog interface combined automation connectors to enable AWS services into an enterprise service delivery and support platform. The enterprise grade solution provides administrative and governance for the entire Amazon cloud lifecycle which includes; aggregating existing machine images to a single Amazon account, building standard corporate machine images, publishing services, managing request approval, service provisioning (via AWS CloudFormation APIs), access provisioning, and image de-provisioning. Join our session to learn how CA Technologies management tools can provision and manage AWS compute services in an enterprise environment to establish standards, reduce cost, enable service delivery and improve service support.
SPR301 - Optimizing Enterprise Applications and User Access in the Cloud (Presented by F5 Networks) by Siva Mandalam - Product Management Executive Director for Cloud, Virtualization and Management - F5 Networks
Are you interested in delivering enterprise or enterprise class applications and user access and various workloads like SharePoint on AWS? This session gives you an overview of issues surrounding application delivery in Cloud, and presents a number of architectural options for workloads in AWS. The session also discusses approaches to architecting networks that can dramatically simplify deployment and ongoing management or applications, particularly as they migrate to AWS from another cloud or they operate in active/passive deployment clouds for business continuity. The session includes guidance on deployment through examples, and presentation of reference architectures, tools and strategies for delivering and security applications on AWS.
SPR302 - Migrating to the Cloud Without Breaking Compliance (Presented by SafeNet) by Slawek Ligier - CTO and Corporate VP of WW Product Development - SafeNet
Organizations who have locked down compliance in the traditional data center are now struggling with how to migrate to the cloud with compliance intact. Ownership and liability, lack of transparency from the cloud provider, an almost complete absolution of liability in contracts, and lack of clear guidance on required controls have been creating confusion in cloud migrations. Plainly put, regulatory compliance is typically enabled through a combination of certified infrastructures, and protection and control of PAN data and the same principles apply whether youre in the Data Center and in the Cloud. In this presentation, we guide you through understanding audit scope, selecting the right infrastructure, and preparing you with whats in store - from a new class of privileged users to shared responsibility and contract implications. We also arm you with checklist for enforcing and enabling controls that will ensure critical protection and compliance of your data no matter where it
STG201 - Understanding AWS Storage Options by Joe Lyons - Manager, Global Storage Business Development - AWS
AWS provides multiple storage options to meet your varying needs. We provide an overview of how AWS storage services can be used to support application development and delivery, backup, archive, disaster recovery, and virtualized compute.
STG202 - Parmigiano, a Monastery, Love and Faith: Technical Lessons on how to do Backup and Disaster Recovery in the Cloud by Simone Brunozzi - AWS Evangelist - AWS, Augusto Rosa - Manager, Server Operations - Shaw Media
IT systems provide tremendous value, and maintaining data integrity and guaranteeing business continuity is of utmost importance for any organization. However, in today's world, those systems have grown in complexity and cost, while the business demands IT agility and lower costs. In this talk, AWS technology evangelist, Simone Brunozzi, joined by AWS customers, will explore how organizations should approach backup and disaster recovery, and how these two aspects can be implemented in the cloud to improve efficiency and flexibility. The talk starts with general concepts, and then dives into technical details, culminating in real customer examples that showcase some tips and tricks and the benefits of a cloud-based approach.
STG203 - Cloud Storage War Stories: From the front lines of some of the biggest battles by Stephanie Cuthbertson - Sr Manager, Product Management - AWS, Don MacAskill - Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek - SmugMug , Peter Esposito - Systems Manager - USTA , Greg Arnette - Founder & CTO - Sonian , Jeff Kimsey - Head of U.S. Product Management - Global Data Products NASDAQ OMX , James Petts - Manager Database Automation - Amazon.com
Here is your chance to learn from others' front line experiences in building game changing cloud storage implementations. We've put together a panel of battle-hardened cloud storage customers. They've gone through, over, and around obstacles to come out smarter, faster, better. They've been where you are and theyre going to share their challenges and their lessons learned with their cloud storage implementations, how they've learned to leverage AWS as their vendor, and their future plans for using the latest storage services and features.
STG204 - Using AWS Storage Gateway by Arun Sundaram - Sr. Product Manager - AWS
Organizations are increasingly looking to cloud storage to address many of their corporate IT use cases, but prefer to do so in a way that minimizes the impact to their existing on-premises applications. This presentation provides an overview of AWS Storage Gateway, a service that connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage for seamless integration between on-premises IT environments and AWSs storage infrastructure. The presentation covers the key use cases of the service, discusses how AWS Storage Gateway works, and provides guidance on getting started.
STG205 - Amazon S3: Reduce costs, save time, and better protect your data by Khawaja Shams - Software Engineer - NASA , Dan Winn - Sr Manager, Software Development - AWS
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offers an expanding set of capabilities for protecting and managing data, as well as hosting content. We'll cover the breadth of the service's features and show you how you can take advantage of them.
STG301 - Using Amazon Elastic Block Store by Miles Ward - Solutions Architect - AWS, Steve Newman - Scalyr - Cloud Engineer, JP Schneider - DevOps Engineer - Obama For America
This session will walk through best practices on architecting Amazon EBS for high performance workloads.
STG302 - Archive in the Cloud with Amazon Glacier by Mark Seigle - Software Dev Manager - AWS
Archive in the cloud explores the rapidly growing amount of infrequently accessed (or "cold") data being stored by enterprises, and how IT organizations can use the cloud to dramatically reduce the cost of storing that data while improving durability. The talk gives a technical overview of Amazon Glacier, including coding samples, and tips and tricks for data indexing and reducing cost.
STG303 - Building Scalable Applications on Amazon Simple Storage Service by Jim Sorenson - Principal Engineer - AWS
Want to build an application that requires minimal up-front investment, and will seamlessly scale from hundreds to millions of users? Amazon S3 is a powerful building block that can enable you to focus your time on the value and functionality of your application, rather than the challenges of scaling it. In this session we'll cover techniques to best take advantage of the platform. We'll discuss structuring your key naming convention to maximize consistency of performance, as well as ways to optimize your upload and download throughput. We'll learn how to eliminate proxies between your application and Amazon S3, and use the platform for your logging needs. Finally, we'll cover simple techniques for efficiently managing the billions of objects your highly scaled application may accumulate.
STP101 - What Can You Do With $100? by Josiah Carlson - Chief Architect and Co-Founder - ChowNow , Jason Gurwin - Co-Founder - PushPins , Kevin Gibbon - Co-Founder & CEO - SmartAisles , Jeff Barr - Technical Evangelist - AWS
This panel, led by Senior AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr, shares their build-with-no-cash experiences. Find out how these companies creatively built prototypes on AWS to secure slots in top accelerators and/or investment from top firms. From efficient use of engineering resources, to fully leveraging AWS to remain agile, scale as needed, and even pivot with little or no infrastructure cost.
STP102 - Ahead in the Clouds by Don MacAskill - Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Geek - SmugMug
Session Information coming soon.
STP201 - Efficiency at Scale by Ammon Bartram - Co-Founder - Socialcam , Guillaume Luccisano - Co-Founder & VP of Engineering - Socialcam
In May of 2012, Socialcam exploded, gaining tens of millions of new users in just a few weeks. At the time, the service ran on 15 servers in a co-location facility in San Francisco. To meet new user traffic demands and continue to deliver maximum user satisfaction, Socialcam made the move to cloud services. With only two engineers and a constant barrage of users, there was limited time for technical transition, but Socialcam endured with no significant downtime. In this technical session, Socialcam co-founders Guillaume Luccisano and Ammon Bartram talk about their experience scaling Socialcam. They present the challenges they encountered, how they addressed them, and the technologies they used in the process. They focus particularly on how they used Amazon services in conjunction with their own hardware to keep Socialcam active with no significant downtime and no costly system redesign.
STP202 - Driving to Success: Fueling Growth and Innovation by Bob Van Nortwick - Business Development Manager - Venture Capital and Startups - AWS, Meir Morgenstern - Co-Founder and VP of Engineering & Operations - CloudOn , Sam Parnell - CTO - Bleacher Report , Gregarious Narain - Co-Founder & CTO - Chute, Jack Murgia - Senior DevOps Engineer - Edmodo, Robert Kotredes - Head of Engineering - TinyCo
This cutting edge panel explores the approaches of companies managing rapid customer adoption and innovation cycles. Many of these companies are at the forefront or in the middle of explosive growth curves- they are continuing to innovate as a vehicle for accelerating that growth. These companies will share how they were able grow quickly, maintain market advantage and in some cases position themselves for acquisition. You will learn from the scoop from the inside- what these companies experienced and how they were able to leverage AWS to capitalize on growth and push innovation without compromising customer experience or breaking the bank.
STP204 - Pinterest Pins AWS! Running Lean on AWS Once You've Made It by Ryan Park - Operations Engineer - Pinterest
When youre starting out, its not worth putting a lot of effort into optimizing your costs; you should put your time into growing your business. But as your infrastructure grows, it becomes worthwhile to optimize your use of AWS resources. Ryan Park from Pinterests technical operations team presents how they have optimized their infrastructure costs as their site has exploded in popularity.
STP205 - Making it Big Without Breaking the Bank by Jim Blomo - Engineering Manager - Data Mining - Yelp , Ray Bradford - Investment Partner - Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Gregory Scallan - Chief Architect - Flipboard
Join Ray Bradford from Kleiner Perkins in a frank discussion with Yelp Engineering Manager Jim Blomo, and Flipboard Chief Architect Greg Scallan , as they explore how they are optimizing their costs with AWS, and how they think about owning vs. renting hardware as they grow. Ray will also share observations and trends on how successful VC funded companies think about IT costs and the right things to be spending money on.
STP301 - Building in the Cloud Best Practices by Sarah Novotny - CIO - Meteor Entertainment , Ralph Gootee - CTO - PlanGrid , Joe Ziegler - Technology Evangelist - AWS, Bill Platt - Sr. VP of Operations - Engine Yard , Kate Matsudaira - VP of Engineering - Decide , Adam D'Amico - Director of Technical Operations - Okta
Amazon Web Services are fundamentally changing the way organizations are building new applications and services by enabling them to focus on their customers needs, and not on the underlying infrastructure and technology. Organizations are dramatically accelerating their agility and time to market, enabling developers to rapidly deliver new applications and then quickly iterate based on customer and market response. Businesses no longer have to focus on scaling databases, the unique challenges of big data and the complexities of highly available global applications and instead invest directly in building their market offerings. This panel will speak to the best practices for creating applications on AWS from decision makers of companies who have successfully built enterprises on top of AWS and are benefiting from the advantages of running in the cloud.
STP302 - Top Venture Capitalists Discuss Investing in the App and Cloud Economy by Ann Winblad - Managing Director - Hummer Winblad Venture Partners , Michael Skok - Partner - North Bridge Venture Partners , Brad Steele - Business Development Manager - AWS, Matt Mcllwan - Managing Director - Madrona, Matthew Miller - Partner - Sequoia Capital
This panel of top venture capitalists discusses how their investment thesis and strategies have evolved over the past several years in light of rapid and low cost development cycles made possible by the cloud. They share insights into how they evaluate investments in various vertical markets and stages, what metrics they use to monitor progress and success of their portfolio companies, provide advice and best practices to entrepreneurs looking to raise capital, and share what they see on the cloud horizon that will change the world. This panel is moderated by Brad Steele of Amazon Web Services.
SVC101 - Building Search into Your App by Jon Handler - CloudSearch Solutions Architect - AWS, Matt Norton - Director of Application Development - Public Broadcasting Service
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. In this session, we cover the basics of search and search engines. We take an introductory look at CloudSearch along with a deep dive showing how to build a CloudSearch-based web application.
SVC103 - The Whys and Hows of Integrating Amazon Simple Email Service into your Product or Website by Chris Wheeler - Sr. Technical Program Manager - AWS, Rohan Deshpande - Software Development Engineer - AWS, James LaPlaine - Vice President, Technology Operations - AOL
If you're already building your website our application on AWS, using Amazon SES is a quick and cost-effective way to send your email. This session will talk about what Amazon SES is and why you would want to use it. Then we will dig into the most common ways our customers use Amazon SES with their current systems and give you the tools you need to do the same.
SVC104 - AWS Marketplace by David Zipkin - Sr. Manager, AWS Marketplace - AWS, Barry Russell - Sr. Manager, AWS Marketplace - AWS, Paul Wallace - Director, Product Marketing, Stingray Business Unit - Riverbed Technology, Misha Govshteyn - Co-Founder & Vice President of Emerging Products - Alert Logic
AWS Marketplace is an online store that helps customers find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services they need to build products and run their businesses. Visitors to the marketplace can use AWS Marketplaces 1-Click deployment to quickly launch pre-configured software and pay only for what they use, by the hour or month. AWS handles billing and payments, and software charges appear on customers AWS bill. The first half of this session talks about what AWS Marketplace offers to AWS customers buying software and the second half of this session discusses why AWS Marketplace is a great place to sell software.
SVC105 - AWS Messaging by Jon Turow - Sr. Product Manager - AWS, Clay Magouyrk - Software Development Engineer - AWS
Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS are important systems for sending, managing, and queuing system notifications. This session details the fundamentals on how to use these services, demonstrates the value for application developers, and covers some common use cases and customers where they have solved a critical business problem.
SVC201 - Distributing Work in the Cloud with Amazon by Rick Sears - Software Development Manager - AWS
Applications today can span on-site and off-site environments, as well as across multiple compute resources in the cloud. Come learn how to simplify your applications state management, asynchronous tasks and work distribution with Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF). During this session, you will learn how to use the SWF Flow Framework to define your application logic in workflows that are managed at high-scale and with fault-tolerance by Amazon SWF.
SVC202 - Scaling Your Application by Andrew Kerr - Principal Engineer - Fluid.com , Andrew Guldman - VP of Product Engineering - Fluid.com , Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec - Director, EC2 Compute - AWS
Dealing with scale and concurrency in todays web and mobile services can require complex business logic in your application. To achieve high scale in the cloud, often developers have to coordinate and track state for steps in application processes distributed across remote data centers. Come to this session to learn how Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF) manages and coordinates your application sequences in workflows by our AWS pay-as-you-go service. We will walk through real-world examples of customers who are basing their high-scale, fault-tolerant applications on Simple Workflow today.
TLS301 - Deploying to the AWS Cloud with Visual Studio by Norm Johanson - Software Development Engineer - AWS, Steve Roberts - Software Development Engineer - AWS
The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio contains many features to help you deploy and maintain your applications in the AWS cloud. In this session, learn how easy it is to deploy and manage your SQL Server powered ASP.NET application from the IDE and command-line tools using AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon RDS. The session also includes some discussion of automated deployment with continuous integration build systems.
TLS302 - Being Productive with the AWS SDK for Java by Jason Fulghum - Software Development Engineer - AWS
The AWS SDK for Java includes several higher level APIs that make working with AWS simpler. Learn more about higher level APIs such as TransferManager, which allows developers to easily manage asynchronous uploads and downloads from Amazon S3; the AWS DynamoDB Object Persistence Layer, which allows developers to annotate their Java classes to specify how the SDK should map them to AWS DynamoDB tables when they are saved and loaded; and other higher level APIs such as the Amazon Simple Email Service JavaMail provider.
TLS303 - How to Deploy Python Applications on Elastic Beanstalk by James Saryerwinnie - Software Development Engineer - AWS
Learn how to configure, deploy and scale a Python application running on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. This talk uses two samples, a simple url shortening API built using Flask, and an image processing app built using Django, to demonstrate how to quickly get up and running on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. In addition to learning best practices, the talk covers performance tweaks, and options for scalable data storage including S3, DynamoDB and RDS.
TLS304 - Getting Productive with the AWS SDK for Ruby by Trevor Rowe - Software Development Engineer - SDK and Tools - AWS
Learn best practices for using the AWS SDK for Ruby, including configuration, logging, debugging, consuming high and low level interfaces, collections, memoization, Rails integrations, AWS::Record and more.
TLS305 - Using Amazon DynamoDB Effectively with the AWS SDK for PHP by Jeremy Lindblom - PHP Software Engineer - AWS, Michael Dowling - Software Development Engineer - AWS
Learn how to work with Amazon DynamoDB using the AWS SDK for PHP. Attendees learn about the AWS SDK for PHP including how to install and configure the SDK and how to perform operations with DynamoDB. Advanced discussion topics include tips for effective DynamoDB usage, request batching, performance tuning, configuring event listeners, and setting up the included DynamoDB session handler for session storage.
TLS306 - Develop, Deploy and Debug with Eclipse and the AWS SDK for Java by Zach Musgrave - Software Development Engineer - AWS
The AWS SDK for Java and the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse enable developers to easily manage AWS resources, quickly build web scale Java applications that interact with AWS services, and deploy those applications to the AWS platform. In this session, learn what functionality the AWS SDK for Java and the AWS Toolkit provide, see common usage scenarios with the AWS SDK for Java, and discover how to use the management, deployment, and debugging capabilities in the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse.

What is the meaning of "Cloud for the Enterprise"?

2013-01-21T12:23:00.001+11:00

What is the meaning of “Cloud for the Enterprise”, or its synonym “Enterprise Cloud”? The terms is used often, mostly as a throw away phrase. What is different about Cloud Computing which is “Enterprise” in nature, and that which is not? The phrase also comes up frequently in the discussions around “Enterprise Cloud adoption”.

This has been a topic that I have been wrestling with in the back of my mind over the last month, probably due to me starting my new role at Amazon Web Services this past week, specifically to work within the Enterprise customers. Therefore over the break I have really been considering, what on earth is “Cloud for the Enterprise”?

In thinking “Cloud for the Enterprise” there are three areas that we need to consider. Who is the enterprise, what are their applications and what are their requirements.

Who is the Enterprise?

What do we mean when we are referring to the Enterprise?

The term Enterprise can sometimes refer to simply being commercial in nature. For example you will often hear people discussing services such as DropBox being for consumers. Where as alternative services, such as Huddle or Syncplicty, are characterized as being for the Enterprise. Likewise some companies also have different editions or service levels of their Cloud services. For example Crashplan have consumer, business and enterprise editions.

In our understanding then we need to acknowledge firstly that the phrase is referring to Cloud services which are targeted to business use and not the consumer space.

Next the term Enterprise can often refer to the size of the business, where size either equates to the number of employees or the dollar value of turnover. Typical the business sizes are broken into categories of Small, Medium and Enterprise. Often the Small and Medium are joined to form a category Small-Medium Business (SMB) or Small-Medium Enterprise (SME). Whilst there are no standard on the splits especially across countries, typically if you have less than 500 employees you are a SME. These cutoffs are the stuff that Sales people loose sleep over as they have a big impact on their territories. If you are interested to know the number of businesses of different employee sizes in the US, they can easily be found in the census data tables.

Therefore in our understanding we want to acknowledge that we are discussing large scale entities. Yes, small and medium enterprises can and are consumers of Cloud services, however I believe when we hear the term “Cloud for the Enterprise” we are not discussing them.

To summarize our first area; when we discuss “Cloud for the Enterprise” we are discussing:

Business rather than consumer based services.
Where that business is large, typically 500 or more employees.

What are Enterprise applications?

The second area that we should be thinking about in “Cloud for the Enterprise” is Enterprise applications or Enterprise software. Often when the phrase is used, it is attempting to make a distinction in the nature of the application workloads. I believe that the reference is to the breadth and the nature of Enterprise applications.

First, breadth.

In the business world there is usually a differentiation when things become “Enterprise” in nature. Anecdotally the most obvious is that the price tag has extra zeros on the end. I think that Mark McDonald stated what this means really well.

People talk about the ‘enterprise’ all the time, particularly in IT. There are enterprise solutions, enterprise architecture, enterprise portals, enterprise security, etc. In this context the term enterprise is more often meant to mean all encompassing, across business units or geographies, the whole of our business operations.

This breadth aspect of the “Enterprise” attribute, particularly in IT is very helpful. We know that there is great adoption of Cloud services within businesses that are Enterprise in size. Many of these deployments have not been concerned with finding Cloud services that are labeled as Enterprise in nature. We have all heard the stories of Cloud deployments that were skunk works funded through a corporate credit card. Likewise there have been significant deployments which have been blessed by or even driven by IT, but they have remained as isolated deployments, special projects, or have been given approval to live outside of the normal regime.

My perception is that when we are discussing “Cloud for the Enterprise” we are also talking about deployments and solutions that are broad. Where the usage is the normal rather than the unknown or the exception. Where the use case runs across the breadth of the business and not for isolated solutions.

Second, nature.

Enterprise applications are software that is used to run the business rather than software used by an individual. So whilst a user might use Microsoft Excel to track and manage business functions it is not typically viewed as an Enterprise “application”. A helpful definition from Wikipedia is

Enterprise application software is application software that performs business functions such as order processing, procurement, production scheduling, customer information management, energy management, and accounting. It is typically hosted on servers and provides simultaneous services to a large number of users, typically over a computer network. This is in contrast to a single-user application that is executed on a user's personal computer and serves only one user at a time.

Given the nature of these systems they are usually large and complex, much of the business process is integrated and intertwined to the application. It is typically expensive and time consuming to implement or change from one application to another. These are the critical application that the whole business relies on to generate its revenue and service its customers.

Many Enterprise applications, due to their legacy have certain architectures. Often these architectures are very different from the new paradigm that is Cloud computing. Traditional Enterprise applications are often (but not always):

Scale up rather than scale out
Have specific requirements in hardware and software compatibility
Mandate specific and consistent performance from underlying infrastructure
Are intolerant of failure in any underlying infrastructure and rely on the high availability of all components

It is a hyper exaggeration but a characterization could be made that modern Cloud applications are scale out, distributed systems built on Open Source Operating Systems and software, such as Linux. Enterprise applications on the other hand, are scale up, monolithic systems built on proprietary Operating Systems and software such as that from Microsoft or Oracle.

Enterprise applications, even leaving aside the way they are architected, are often sitting in a different class from others within the business. These are your “bet the business” workloads.

To summarize our second area; when we discuss “Cloud for the Enterprise” we are discussing:

Where the solution has breadth and depth across the business rather than being an exception.
Critical application that the whole business relies on to generate its revenue and service its customers.
Often the applications are based on a traditional rather than cloud architecture.

What are the requirements of an Enterprise?

The third area of consideration is that of Enterprise requirements. Because we are dealing with much larger businesses and the workloads are critical in nature the requirements placed on the service are different.

Requirements are an area where there will be great variation across different businesses and different applications. Even without introducing Cloud computing into the mix there is great variance in business maturity, execution and industry regulation. For example a business in the financial services industry is more regulated and manages data of greater sensitivity and risk, than a business in the media industry.

However there will be requirements that are shared across Enterprise solutions. The list of requirements below outlines my starting thoughts, but I am sure these will grow as others provide some valuable insight.

Enterprise requirements for Cloud, include:

Data sovereignty - there will be more concern over the geographical storage of data.
Private networking – whilst many may interface to the public Internet there will be a dominance of deployment onto private networks, integrated with corporate wide area networks.
Authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) - with more staff and larger deployments sophisticated access controls and tracking is required, often integrated to existing systems.
Security – including third party certifications, which validate procedures and policies that the Cloud provider claims to be operating.
Detailed billing - which can also be interfaced for analysis and chargeback.
Reference cases and best practices - a propensity to not be the first at adoption and that best practices and deployment guidelines are readily available.
Support services - that can sustain the service levels the Enterprise is required to deliver to the business for the applications.
Maturity in feature set - as the use cases are border and diversity across the business needs to accommodate the greatest amount of consolidation.
Application vendor support - where the Cloud provider and vendor have worked together to test functionality and that cross company support arrangements are in place to resolve incidents in a timely manner.
Maturity of the Cloud provider - that is of sufficient size to engage with large business and meet their unique needs.

Conclusion

Ultimately it will be customers to define for the industry what “Cloud for the Enterprise” means. As Cloud practitioners and as an industry we should be clear in our usage of terms and what they mean. We should not be Enterprise Cloud Washing, taking any Cloud and throwing an “Enterprise” label on it. When we are discussing Cloud for the Enterprise, we want to know what that generally means, as well as what it does not mean. Most importantly we want to understand what might make it different.

“Cloud for the Enterprise” is for large business, for those strategic services that support the key functions of the business operations. The service will deliver to the requirements demanded by these entities and workloads.

Appreciate your comments and contribution.

Rodos

P.S. As always, remember the views expressed are my own person ones and do not assert the view of my current or past employers.

P.P.S. This is my starting position. I don’t think I have locked it all down yet. Over the next weeks I expect to have some great conversations with some really smart people at work who I am sure will have some golden nuggets on the topic. Just like a meeting I had many years ago with Kunjal Trivedi whilst he was at Cisco; his insight in Cloud way back then gave me many epiphany moments, which I milked for insight for years. Also there was some discussion of this topic on a recent SpeakingInTech podcast.

Architecture effects cost

2012-10-30T18:55:00.001+11:00

"Architecture effects cost", thats a simple and somewhat obvious statement. Those of us who architect systems know that there are outcomes for the design decisions that are made. Often there are tradeoffs and no environment lives in a world where money is unlimited. Well okay the unlimited funds projects probably do exist somewhere, but I have not had the pleasure of working in one of those environments in my career.

The concept of architecture effecting costs is a key element when you are architecting for Cloud solutions. One of the reasons this is key, is that your ongoing costs have a greater potential to be variable. This is a good thing, one of the benefits of moving to Cloud models is the elastic nature and you want your applications to be right sized and running efficiently both technically but also financially.

There are two considerations when thinking about costs for Cloud.

First there is the selection cost. As an example, if you were using Amazon S3 there are two durability options available, one is lower durability and also lower cost. If you have scratch data or data that can be regenerated you might simply choose to use the less expensive storage.

Second is then understanding your elastic cost, based on your predicted demand. Based on your forecast demand, what will your peak and average expenditure be over time? What size of cheque are you signing up to if you implement your selected solution?

An example of this crossed my mind this last week as a read a blog post from VMware on their vFabric blog. It was entitled "ROBLOX: RabbitMQ, Hybrid Clouds, and 1 Billion Page Views/Month".

Don't be distracted by the 1 billion number. Its an interesting article on how the application architecture for this company needed to be changed as they started to scale out. The example was an AWS customer and in order to speed up their service they introduced a message queue to decouple the synchronous relationship between the web services and the back-end services (as you do). Here is a pertinent bit of text.

To dive deeper, ROBLOX implemented RabbitMQ to help deal with the volume of database requests and slow response times. The queue is managing 15 million requests a day. The example scenario is when there is an update to the ROBLOX catalog content, which needs to update the search index. Before RabbitMQ, the web server would have to wait for an update to complete. Now, the loosely coupled architecture allows the web server to update the message queue, not the database, and move on (technically, the update is enqueued and picked up by the consumers). At some point, the message is picked up by a service that updates their search platform index.

Wonderful stuff. But but it hit me, why bother implementing RabbitMQ? It does not sound like they were using a lot of its sophisticated functions, surely they could have used the AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS). Thats when the "architect for cost" mantra kicked in. 15 million requests a day, that does not seam like much but lets see what that would cost for SQS. SQS is $0.01 per 10,000 requests and there are no data charges if the transfer is within a single region. Thats $15 a day which is reasonable. Thats about $465 a month. Thats about the same prices as a full license over a year potentially for RabbitMQ (or you could use the free version) but that is now a fixed cost and you have to factor in the cost for running the server to execute it along with the effort to maintain it (no cheating on the hidden costs). Looks like others have pondered this SQS vs RabbitMQ question as well (1, 2). However this is just an example of the point which jumped out this week.

So when architecting for Cloud, don't forget "architecture effects costs". With a Cloud there is not only the selection cost but also consider your elastic cost.

Rodos

Secure Multi-Tenancy

2012-10-17T19:22:00.002+11:00

Edward Haletky (blog) once asked me what I thought secure multi-tenancy was in relation to Cloud Computing. I am willing to admit that at first I gave an answer reminiscent of a Ronald Reagan quote.

Due to the painful memory of this event the actual definition of what security multi-tenancy is has always had my attention. I work with a lot of vendors and despite what their marketing and sales people declare their understanding of this topic is wide ranging in maturity and reality. Just as there is Cloud washing there is a lot of secure multi-tenancy washing going on.

This week I actually had to sit down and document in a paper what secure multi-tenancy is. How would we know when it had been achieved?

Of course one usually starts such an activity with Wikipedia and Google, just like my children do for their school work.

Given how much you hear this phrase these days its a surprise that there is no clear and concise definition out there. One of the earlier ones is from the Cisco Validated Design that they produced with Netapp. It states

... the capability to provide secure isolation while still delivering the management and flexibility benefits of shared resources. Both private and public cloud providers must enable all customer data, communication, and application environments to be securely separated, protected, and isolated from other tenants. The separation must be so complete and secure that the tenants have no visibility of each other.

That is reasonable but personally I did not feel it catered as a measure of success. So I sad down and tried to summarise what I have learnt and have been implementing over the last few years.

Secure multi-tenancy ensures that for a shared service:

No tenant can determine the existence or identity of any other tenant.
No tenant can access the data in motion (network) of any other tenant.
No tenant can access the data at rest (storage) of any other tenant.
No tenant can perform an operation that might deny service to another tenant.
Each tenant may have a configuration which should not be limited by any other tenant's existence or configuration. For example in naming or addressing.
Where a resource (compute, storage or network) is decommissioned from a tenant the resources shall be cleared of all data and configuration information.

I have tried to keep it as succinct as possible. The last item regarding the clearing of all data and configuration is most familiar to people as the "dirty disk" problem. You could consider that this item is a duplication of the 3rd point, that no data of one tenant can be accessed by that of any other. Yet people tend to forget about the residual information of both configuration or information that may remain thus introducing vulnerabilities. Thanks to my colleague Jarek for contributing this 6th item to my original list.

Do you consider the environments that you use meet all of this criteria? Does this criteria cover the required elements or does it cover to much? Appreciate your comments.

Rodos

Drobo Update - My experience of a failed disk drive

2012-10-10T20:48:00.001+11:00

Back in November 2009, thats 3 years ago, I did a post about Drobo. What made this interesting was that it included a video of my then 12 year old son doing the unboxing and deployment of the device.

Well 3 years later a lot has changed. My son Tim is more of a geek than I am and a heck of a lot taller, and the range of Drobo hardware has changed. However the Drobo box has been faithfully running those last three years without incident. That is until last week when it suffered a drive failure.

When I originally installed the Drobo I put in 3 x 1TB drives. Then after about two years, as usage started to increase, I picked up another 2TB drive to insert into the remaining slot. No config required, just inserted the drive and let it do its thing. Thats the benefit of BeyondRAID.

Last week at work I get a text from Tim.

The drobo lights are flashing green then red, its got about 480g free. I dont have the drobo dashboard but if you tel me which drobo it is I can get it and see what it says.

Of course I remember, unlike Tim, that there is the indicator light cheat sheet on the back of the front cover. I ring Tim and he reads out what the lights mean.

The chart reveals the problem, the new 2TB drive has failed and a rebuild is occurring on the remaining 3 drives. Thats good. We have not lost any data, the unit is still operating, we can read and write data. The only change is that the available free space on the unit has reduced, as indicated by the blue lights on the front.

After quite a few hours, Tim and I start to get impatient about the rebuild time. I of course am expecting the rebuild to take a while, I know that even in big enterprise storage arrays this can take a while and that the older Gen2 Drobo that we have is does not have much grunt in its processing power.

To try and determine the time I browse a few sites on the Internet to read what others have experienced. It was a little disturbing to read so many horror stories about peoples rebuild times, sometimes its weeks and other stories of their units failing. Sounded a little ominous so we installed the Drobo Dashboard onto the Mac Mini it was now connected to in order to determine the rebuild time.

The estimate for the rebuild was another 30 or so hours and it had probably been running around 12 hours already. We went to bed thinking we had a long wait ahead. In the end the rebuild finished ahead of schedule and probably took around the 24 hour mark. For the age of the device and the fact that we lost the largest drive in a box and that was reasonably utilised, I think that is a reasonable time.

Turned out that the drive that failed was still under warranty (thank you serial numbers) but we figured we might as well go and get another 2TB drive and get back some free space, when the RMA arrives we can swap out one of the smaller drives with the larger one and get some new space.

After a fun trip to a computer store we slotted in the new drive. The crazy thing was that within under a minute the indicator lights started flashing again and one of the original 1TB drives was showing red, another failed drive. I have no idea if it was good or bad luck! But the drive was certainly failed. The rebuild was much faster this time.

A day or so later we found a spare 1TB hard drive in the study and threw it in the slot of the failed drive. All great. We are now back to where we were, plenty of space and redundancy. Here is the current state.

Now once that 2TB drive returns from the RMA we will still swap out one of the original drives.

So whats my thoughts on the Drobo after 3 years and experiencing a real life drive failure?

Everything works as advertised.
The setup was easy, we experienced that 3 years ago.
When a drive failed it was great that everything continued to operate as normal, we could still read and write data as we wanted.
It was great that it did not matter if we had the Drobo Dashboard software up to date or even installed, the unit took care of everything itself.
The rebuild after a failure did take time, but in our experience that time was reasonable and as it did not really on the computer, and that we could still utilise the device, the only thing inconvenienced was our patience.
Even thought the unit is starting to age, the software and firmware updates are still available.
Never trust a single device. All of data that is critical such as family photos, but also general data we would be inconvenient to loose is also backed up to the Cloud using CrashPlan. I don't care how highly available a storage unit is, it is not backup if its your primary copy! That is one concept I think a few of those people complaining about their Drobo experiences need to take heed of.

There is sometime attractive about technology that is so smart it can make things so simple to use.

Rodos

IDWS - Come hang out with the storage geeks

2012-10-05T08:45:00.001+10:00

If you are in Sydney next Tuesday (9th of October) come hang out with the storage and information systems geeks.

IDWS, or Information & Data World Symposium is on and a great place to catch up with vendors and providers, share experience with colleagues and industry, and of course learn new things.

Here is the blurb

A comprehensive technical symposium designed for data management professionals and IT practitioners to broaden their knowledge into all facets of building and maintaining their information infrastructures.

The symposium will be educational and technical, targeted to all IT levels from CIOs to the skilled staff responsible for managing and protecting their companies greatest asset, it's data.

Be engrossed as key industry players battle it out against each other at the 'Great Debate'. Throw in live tweets and feeds from the floor including voting and see who will be crowned champion on a range of key topics.

The symposium will feature a Technical Lab for vendors to demonstrate real information infrastructure solutions as well as technical workshops to suit all delegates.

This one-day event will cover Big Data Analytics, Cloud Storage & Services, Infrastructure Convergence, Data Management & Protection, Storage Security, Virtualisation and a lot more.

Registration is free, head to http://www.idws.com.au/ to learn more and register.

See you there.

Rodos

P.S. As you know I am a Board Member of SNIA who are part of this event.

Crashplan gets Australia based service

2012-09-01T13:09:00.001+10:00

Crashplan from Code42 is one of those services that are so great that I just tell everyone about it. You never have a problem recommending something that has worked so well for yourself and that you know others will really benefit from.

I have always recommended crashplan to colleagues, friends and family for many reasons.

It is free if you want to do local backup or backup to a friend.
Their optional Cloud backup destination is all you can eat and competitively priced.
You can backup to multiple locations with different data sets, which is a key feature.
It's very secure when backing up locally or remotely.
It's automated and just works, set and forget.
You can access the files you have backed up via an iPad app.
I have tried other services and they were not as good.

So I was really please when at VMworld this week I ran into the CrashPlan stand.

On the stand was their chief marketing officer and he happened to mention that they were launching an Australian based presence for their service. My accent must have given away that I was Australian, go figure.

Here is what their press release says about it

"We've always had a strong customer base in Australia. Now, with the opening of our Australian office, we’re positioned to serve this fast-growing market much more effectively," commented Matthew Dornquast, co-founder and CEO, Code 42 Software. "In addition, having a local data centre means we can deliver even better performance for our cloud backup customers located across the entire Asia-Pacific region."
The new data centre will provide state-of-the-art, cloud-based backup services to Australian users of Code 42‘s CrashPlan products:
• CrashPlan+ - the award-winning computer backup solution for home users.
• CrashPlan PRO - the innovative backup system for small and mid-sized businesses.
• CrashPlan PROe - the world's most advanced backup and disaster-recovery solution for enterprises.
A local data centre also enables Code 42 to extend its popular U.S. “seeding” option to Australian customers. With this option, Australian customers have the option of shipping their initial backup to Code 42 where it’s then loaded directly onto CrashPlan servers. “This approach is extremely beneficial because it can save our customers a lot of time, especially those with large initial backups or where bandwidth is limited,” Dornquast explained.

Latency always adds some overhead to these network applications so having an Australian presence is going to help all of us Australian users. Plus the ability to send them you're data for seeding is great for those with slow Internet links.

However, if you are already a happy customer, like myself, you will continue to use the US servers, for the moment at least. Only new Australian customers will use the new site. According to the person I spoke to they are working on the process for moving existing customers on shore and their was no timeframe for when this might be done by. Definetely something we need to all encourage them to do. I don't want to start a new service and have to push my 0.5TB back again plus loose all of my regions and deleted files.

So if you were looking for a backup service for your personal machine, you have even more reason to give Crashplan a look!

Rodos

P.S. I will have to see if I can go visit their Australian office and interview their local staff to find out more about their environment. I should also write up my best tips for using Crashplan.

Posted with Blogsy

BigData. So what?

2012-06-05T10:52:00.001+10:00

Sometimes it takes a bus trip to connect the dots. In my case today these were BigData and a Wired Magazine article.

We have all been hearing a lot about big data lately. If a vendor has little to say, or possibly said everything they can, about Cloud then they just search and replace the marketing materials with the phrase "Big Data". We are not at the stage where McDonalds has decided to replace the BigMac with the BigData burger so the consumer world is safe for the moment, but most CIOs are probably getting their in tray full of promotions and case studies.

Whilst I get big data and see its value, I have personally struggled with the realities of execution. We have been reading about the increasing demand of developers skilled in Hadoop and I have a college who is a CCIE, got into Cloud and is now chasing the Hadoop angle. But to me BigData itself brought no real shift in ability to execute here. It might be cheaper and easier to store and process big data these days, but the insights have always been a human effort. the human effort to develop the analytics takes intellect and scale. There was the rub, not all humans have the same intellect and humans don't scale in the specialist areas. I have a friend who works for Oracle in demand planning. His is real smart at building data mining for global companies that need to forecast all sorts of whacky things. Yet he is very specialised and uses some real high end software. The gap between those people with big data, and those who can do something with it, has always irked me.

So today I am on the bus reading Wired on my iPad, as you do, and read an article "Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story than a Human Reporter?". Have a scan thru the article but the premise is that given large amounts of statistical data companies such as Narrative Science and turn it into a news story that is very insightful. They started out doing this with children's baseball games. Feed in the play by play data and it generates a story such as

Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona was led by a flawless day at the dish by Hunter Sundre, who went 2-2 against Boys Ranch pitching. Sundre singled in the third inning and tripled in the fourth inning … Friona piled up the steals, swiping eight bags in all …

Baseball, financial markets, they can do some amazing stuff. Many companies are actually using machines to find insights and produce prose. As mentioned

Once Narrative Science had mastered the art of telling sports and finance stories, the company realized that it could produce much more than journalism. Indeed, anyone who needed to translate and explain large sets of data could benefit from its services. Requests poured in from people who were buried in spreadsheets and charts. It turned out that those people would pay to convert all that confusing information into a couple of readable paragraphs that hit the key points.

and

And the subject matter keeps getting more diverse. Narrative Science was hired by a fast-food company to write a monthly report for its franchise operators that analyzes sales figures, compares them to regional peers, and suggests particular menu items to push. What’s more, the low cost of transforming data into stories makes it practical to write even for an audience of one. Narrative Science is looking into producing personalized 401(k) financial reports and synopses of World of Warcraft sessions—players could get a recap after a big raid that would read as if an embedded journalist had accompanied their guild. “The Internet generates more numbers than anything that we’ve ever seen. And this is a company that turns numbers into words,” says former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt, who sits on Narrative Science’s board. “Narrative Science needs to exist. The journalism might be only the sizzle—the steak might be management reports.”

This is where the dots connected and I became a lot more relaxed about big data. Here we have the birth of what can start to give reality to big data capture and processing. Whether you view it as AI, clever algorithms or plain ole automation does not matter. Looking forward you can see how companies can cheaply and easily generate business insights from the data they collect.

Until these analytic services mature you might want to brush up on your hadoop skills, but in the future you might just start getting more emails from a automated account like the following.

"Rodos, yesterday there was a flood of traffic on the fibre channel network that was generated from workloads in the Melbourne IaaS availability zone. Looks like this was mostly from a specific customer and I also picked up that their Unified Communications workloads in the UCaaS nodes in Singapore peaked. The company in question just listed on the stock exchange in Hong Kong and forecast interest in their services, if it continues at the rate, will cause increased workload that will take the Melbourne availability zone B to 90% capacity. Last time zone B hit 88% capacity (Sept 2014) SLAs for 2 customers were broken. Just a heads up, regards Siri".

VFD2 - Xangati

2012-02-24T19:44:00.000+11:00

Third and last on the first day of Virtualisation Field Day #2 was Xangati.

There was great food presented before the start of the session, ice-cream and a variety of bacon in different flavours. The idea was not to mix them (hey they do weird things with food in America) but to provide choice. The bacon was very well received by the delegates. For some reason bacon is very popular.

Jagan Jagannathan, the founder and CTO grabbed the whiteboard pen and started to explain things. It worth repeating (and it gets repeated a lot), this is exactly the type of engagement and insight that delegates at TFDs respect and value. You can tell the difference. The room is quiet, the questions and interruptions are minimal, people listen intensity. I have seen this again and again at these days. It staggers me how some vendors do it and succeed and other ignore the advise and struggle. In a similar way, Xangati provided a list to each person of who was present, their names, titles and twitter handles. When you are writing up notes and posting on twitter, this easy access to info is so very helpful. You would think that the PR people at Xangati had not only read the advise given them (http://techfieldday.com/sponsors/presenting-engineers/) but they actually attempted to put it into practice!

I was engaged with what was being presented and ended up not taking many notes.

Some of the interesting things discussed was how in the performance monitoring world you have triage vs postmortem. For triage you need real time, at this minute information, anything older than that and its not as useful. Older data such as five minutes later, thats used for postmortem analysis.

One of the key things that Xangati does is take all of the incoming data and process/analyse it in memory, rather than writing it to a database for analysis. This allows them to give very timely and detailed information in their UI and alarming. The interface has a slider and you can wind back the clock a little and see what was just happening prior to now. You can also record the detailed real time information you are looking at for later analysis. This recording links in with their alerting. That is when an alert is created it records the associated real time info for that short time period so you can see what was happening. Of course the data, is also written to database in a summarised form for later analysis. This uses a reporting interface that is not as nice or as interactive as the real time interface. I would like to see the two much more similar, its feels a little strange to have them so different. However given that they work of different data models and server different purposes you can see the reasons why.

They have self calculating thresholds but you can create your own.

Xangati have been doing a lot in the VDI monitoring space but they were keen to point out that they are not a VDI monitoring company, they do straight virtualistion too. I think they don't like being tarred to much with the pure VDI brush.

The do have some great VDI features though. If you are looking into desktop performance you can launch into a WMI viewer as well as a PCoIP or Citrix HDX viewer to see a lot more detail about whats going on inside the desktop and the display protocols. They even have a neat feature where and end user can self service a recording of their performance for a help desk to analyse. The user can go to a form and request a recording for their environment, it records the previous 1 minute before the submission. Thats nice.

Here is a look a the demo environment I interacted with.

Where there are reports that have sub elements (such as a protocol list) you can drill down to those. At first I thought the reports were not interactive, but I was wrong about that and shown the error of my ways.

It was a good session. I certainly got the impression that for real time performance trouble shooting Xangati is a real player worth investigating. I did not get enough of a chance to look at the product or discuss with them its suitability as an comprehensive monitoring solution. I think there are a few things that an overall monitoring solution requires that I did not see in the product, for example inventory data. Maybe a more in-depth look at the features and functions would help nut this out more. Hard to do in our limited time. They do have the free version which is popular and evils are available, so its easy to check these out for yourself.

Well its been a long day, lots to see and think about. Looking forward some brief sleep before another day of it all tomorrow.

Rodos

P.S. Note that I am at this event at the invite of GestaltIT and that flights and expenses are provided. There is also the occasional swag gift from the vendors. However I write what I want, and only if I feel like it. I write nice things and critical things when I feel it is warranted.

VFD2 - Zerto

2012-02-24T19:04:00.000+11:00

The second vendor for day 1 of Virtualisation Tech Field Day #2 was Zerto.

The session was held back at the hotel. The camera crew did not come back and this event was not broadcast over the Internet. To be honest I was a little confused about the what you can say, and what you can't say, discussion. There was going to be mention of some things which are coming out in the next version as well as some customer names. Both of these might be things that should not be in the public domain until appropriate. To be honest, this is difficult as a blogger and I thought there was some "understanding" with these events that everything was public, no NDAs. Whilst I respect a vendor wants to keep things private whilst balancing giving us the greatest insights and information, it makes it really difficult for me to navigate what I can and can't write about. So if I make a bad mistake treading that line I am sure someone will let me know in the morning and I will be editing this post very fast.

Our presenting were Gil Levonai who is the VP Marketing and Products and Oded Kedem, CTO & Co-founder. So we were really getting things from the experts.

Zerto do disaster recovery solutions for the VMware environment. Their target customers are the Enterprise and now the Service or Cloud providers. Having spent quite a few years working in the DR and recently the Cloud space I was very keen to hear what Zerto had to say.

Here is my summary notes for the session.

The founders were also the founders of Kashya Inc which was sold to EMC. After being sold to EMC Kashya turned into RecoverPoint which is one of the mainstream replication technologies for Continuous Data Protection (CDP) based DR today.
They are more after the Enterprise market and not the SMB players. I have no idea what their pricing is like, I wonder if their pricing matches that market segmentation?
Replication of a workload can be of a number of scenarios. One is between internal sites within the same Enterprise. Alternatively you can go from within an Enterprise to an external Cloud provider. There is a third use case (which is very similar to the first) where a Cloud provide could us Zerto to replicate between their internal sites.
The fundamental principal for Zerto is moving the replication from the storage layer up to the hypervisor without loosing functionality. Essentially it is a CDP product in the nature of RecoverPoint or FalconStore Continuous Data Protector, but rather than being done at the storage or fabric layer it utilises the VMware SCSI Filter Driver (as detailed by Texiwill) to get up and close to the Virtual Machine. This means that Zerto can be totally agnostic to the physical storage that might be being used which is a great feature. This is important in the Cloud realm were the consumer and the provider might be running very different storage systems.
The goal of Zerto is to still keeping all of the Enterprise class functions such as consistency groups, point in time recovery, low RPOs and RTOs. The only obvious high end feature that I saw was lacking was synchronous replication. This question was asked and Gil responded that they felt that this was not really that much of a requirement these days and synchronous might not be required. I think their is still a case of needing synchronous but Zerto just does not seam to be wanting to go after it, which is fair enough.

There are two components (shown above). The Zerto Virtual Manager that sits with vCenter. This is the only thing that you interact with. It is provided as a windows package that you need to deploy on a server and it integrates to vCenter as a plugin.
Then there is the Zerto Virtual Replication Appliance (Linux based) which is required on each host. This is deployed by the manager.
Some of the features of Zerto are :

Replication from anything to anything, its not reliant on any hardware layers, just VMware
Its highly scalable, being software based
It has an RPO in seconds, near sync (but not sync)
It has bandwidth optimisation and WAN resiliency. Built in WAN compression and throttling.
Built-in CDP which is journal based.
It is policy based and understands consistency groups. You can set CDP timelines for retention in a intelligent way.
If it gets behind and can't keep up it will drop from a send every write mode to a block change algorithm and drop writes in order to catch up. This catchup mode is only used if the replication can't keep up for some reason (lack of bandwidth, higher priority servers to be replicated. What I would like to see is for this to be a feature you can turn on. So rather than CDP you can pick a number of points in time that you want and writes between these are not replicated. This would emulate what occurs with SAN snapshots. Yes its not as protection but for lower tier workloads you might want to save the bandwidth, you can match what you might be doing with SAN snapshots but can do it across vendor. Gil did not think this was a great idea but I think their is real merit to it, but I would, being my idea.

Often people want to replicate the same workload to multiple sites. Sometime the same machine two different sites from the primary one (call this A to B and A to C), or from the primary to a secondary site and then a replication from the secondary site to a third site (A to B to C). You can't do either of these modes at the moment but watch this space.
There is a concept of Virtual protection groups. VM and VMDK level consistency groups. This is very important for some applications which need to have data synchronised across multiple disks or across systems, its great to see this supported.
Support for VMotion, Storage VMotion, HA, vApp.
There are check points in the CDP stream every few second and you can set a time for doing a special VSS check point. This is excellent.
Its vApp awareness is very good. If you add a VM to a vApp it will start replicating it. It also knows things like startup order within the vApp and retains that information for recovery at the other site. This is better then VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM).
You can denote a volume as swap or scratch so its not replicated. It does replicate it once, just so it has the disk to be able to mount up to the OS. Once once replicated it does not send any writes made to the disk. This way you get a valid disk that will mount fine at the destination with the initial swap or scratch state. This is a great feature.
They will be able to pre-seed the destination disk at the other site to speed up the synchronisation, a big need in the DR space when you are dealing of very large amounts of bandwidth down restricted bandwidth pipes.
There is no need for a shadow VM at the destination site. They are created on recovery or failover. At the failover the VMs are created and disks connected to it.
Failback is supported.
Test failover is provided and it can have read write capability. Replication continues to run while the test recovery is taking place (you always need to be protected). The test can't run longer than your CDP journal size. The test recovery is very efficient in storage size as it sources the reads from the replica journal and it does not have to create a full copy of the disk, so only your writes to the test copy take up additional space.
For the recovery migration you can do a move instead of a failover which does a shutdown of the VM first to give constancy.
For the failover you can choose the network to connect each nic to at the other site. You can specify different NICs for actual failover versus a test failover. It can also re-ip address the machine if required.
Support the Nexus 1KV but as port groups. I don't think it can orchestrate network creation on the N1K.
Pre and post recovery scripts can be configured to run, so you can script actions to want ever you want, such as updating DNS entires etc.
Now the really really really nice thing is that you can destine to a VMware vCloud implementation. When you target to a vCloud you select which of your available organisation VDCs you want to recover to. Then, when you are selecting you networking, it presents the organisational Networks as your choices. Very nice. A demo was done or doing a failover to a VCD environment and it worked very nicely. I was quite impressed. I discussed with Oded how all of the provider side was handled, the multi-tennacy, security etc, just about everything had been covered an quickly explained. This showed to me that this stuff is very real and they have thought about this a lot. I see a lot of potential solutions for this that might work in a Enterprise space but that have no chance in the service provider space, but from what I could see I think Zerto gets it.
When you need to do a failover , what happens if the source site no longer exists. Well you go to the vCenter on the destination site and do it their. This is a problem in the Cloud space as the customers are not going to have access to the vCenter, only the provider. Today the provider is going to have to do the recovery for you if you your site is gone. Their is an API for the provider to use with their own portal. Ultimately Zerto are saying they will provide a stand alone interface to do this function.

I really enjoyed the presentation for Gil and Oded. Not to many slides, a great demo, lots of explanation and really showing of what was unique about their offering. I am looking forward to learning more about what they are doing and in seeing their functionality grow, I think they have many things right in this new hybrid Cloud world.

Rodos

VFD2 - Symantec

2012-02-24T11:02:00.002+11:00

First vendor off the rank at Virtualisation Field Day # 2 was Symantec. It was an early start as we were having breakfast there.

It was an interesting start as things took a while to get organised and the opening question was, who uses backup. Given you have a room full of top virtualisation bloggers I figure they can all be dangerous on the topic of backup. We also hear that Symantec is the #1 in VMware backup and they have been working with VMware for 12 years now. GSX and ESX were released to market in 2001 so they must have been there right from the very first day.

First up was NetBackup.

George Winter, Technical Product Manager, presented on NetBackup.

Some general notes, assume these relate to NetBack but some refer to Symantec products in general.

They don't support VCB anymore as of the current version.
On the topic of passing off VMware snapshotting to the array, they don't do anything today but in the next release (by end of 2012) this will be provided through something called Replication Director.
They have their own VSS provider for application quiescence which you can use to replace the VMware one. This is free of charge and included in the distribution.
We spent a while looking at dedupe and the different ways that you can do it with Symantec products. You have all sorts of ways of doing this from source based in the agent to hardware appliances that can replicated to each other across sites.
In regards to the lifecycle of retention policies you can have local copies, replicate to another site using depuce and might even also destine a copy to "the Cloud". There was little detail about what "the Cloud" means apart from a list of providers that are supported such as Nirvanix, AT&T, Rackspace or Amazon. No details were provided to on the protocols that are supported, I am sure that can be sourced in the product information. Data destined to the Cloud is encrypted and the keys are stored on the local media server. In destining to Clouds it supports cataloging, expiring and full control of data that might be destined there.
They have an accelerator client that rather than doing source based dedupe do a changed block technique so they only send a small amount of data without the load of source dedupe. Symantec claim they are the only people that do this and its new in the latest 7.5 release.
For VMDK backups the files are cataloged at ingestion so when you need to do a file level restore you can search for where that file might be, you don't need to know which VM or VMDK it might have been in in the first place. When data is being stored, the files and their mapped blocks are recorded. So at restore time for a file they only need to pull the blocks for the file back in, you don't have to restore the entire VMDK which saves a lot of time, space etc.
Integration with vCenter. Backup events can be sent to the vCenter events for a VM and custom attributes can be updated with date of last backup etc. There is no plugin available but there is one coming but no details provided on this.

There were some specific topics that sparked my interest.

vCloud Director

I am keeping my eye out for things around vCloud Director over the two days. Mike Laverick got the vCloud question in before I got the chance, asking what their NetBackup support was. They don't have anything today but have been working on it since it was first released. The good news is that this work is about to released this year. It always hard to get details about products that are not released but I tried to dig some sort of feature list out. It was revealed that there would be support for per tenant restore and it sounded like the tenant would be able to do this themselves. Going to be very interesting to see what features and functions this is going to really have. This should get some real attention as over the next 12 months I believe we are going to see many vendors start releasing support for vCloud Director.

VMware Intelligent policy (VIP).

One of the challenges about backup in a dynamic virtual environment is the effort to apply your policies to your workloads. To ease this pain VIP give you VMware protection on auto-pilot. It is an alternative method of selecting machines where new and moved VM's are automatically detected and protected. You specify a criteria which might match a particular VM which is based on 30 vCenter based definitions. These definitions can include things such as vApp details or even custom attributes. Its designed to help in the dynamic environments with have VMotion, Storage VMotion, DRS and Storage DRS. When you have this "rule based" matching one thing I am always concerned about is the hierarchy of rules as it can be very easy to have multiple rules that might match a machine. If multiple rules match it will apply both and do multiple backup of the machine. You can't set a hierarchy so have things like a default and then have an override for a more specific rule. I think this would be a great feature and suspect there might even be a way to do it, it might just have been my interoperation of the answer.

Another element of VIP is apply thresholds. One issue in vSphere backup environments is that your backup load can effect the performance of production by causing an impactful load on elements of your infrastructure. NetBackup can "automatically balance backups" across entire vSphere environment (fibre or network), physical location (host, Datastore or cluster) or logical attributes (vCenter Folder, resource pool, attribute).

Resource limits to throttle the number of backups which execute concurrently can be set based on elements such as vCenter, snapshots, cluster, esxserver and lots of different datastore elements. So for example you can set a resource limit such as no more than 1 active backup per datastore with no more than 2 active backups per ESX. A problems is that this is a global setting and that its fixed. It does not interact with the metrics from vSphere so it does not adjust and its for everything. I can see that you might want different values for different parts of your environment and for it to adjust based on load. This is the first release of this functionality so we should see this functionality build out in future versions.

Next we had the Backup exec guys.

Kelly Smith & Gareth Fraser-King

Some general notes

Specific packaged solutions for virtualised solutions, targeted to the SMB.
Showed the new GUI (pictures below) which will be released next month. Looks very slick with lots of wizards.
You can visually/graphically see the stages of protection for a workload. For example the backup, followed by the replication etc. When you go back and look at the machine you see the types of jobs associated with the machine, what they do and when they are scheduled. It gives you a workflow centric view.
Symantec are adding a backup option which can be destined to a Cloud provider (partnered with Doyenz.com) at which you can do a restore in the event of a disaster. I really would have liked to see this demo'd.

Here are some other thoughts from the session.

So why two backup products? We hear for example about the fact that there is no vSphere plugin for NetBackup but their is for BackupExec. Yes we know that there are historical factors, but if Symantec were to start again, why for technical reasons would you create two products? Its hard to summarise the answer as the conversation went around a little (maybe watch the video) but essentially their answers was because there are two markets, the big enterprise and the SMB to medium enterprise. Creating products, licensing and features sets that go across that entire spectrum of use cases is to hard, Symantec felt they really needed to have products target to the two different markets. I understand this argument, but as the audience are IT technical people, it would have been nice to hear about the technical aspects behind this. Maybe something about scaling catalog databases and how its hard to create a scaled down version or something. I did not really get why they needed two products (apart from history). However it was discussed that there are many techniques that are use by both products such as a lot of the dedupe functions.

In regards to the execution to be honest I would have expected something a little more polished from a vendor such as Symantec. We spent a bit of time learning 101 about VMware backups, but given that the audience are bloggers and specialists of Virtualisation, this could probably be considered assumed knowledge. Maybe this was included for the remote audience, as the sessions were being recorded and broadcast. The format was also looking at some quite simple customer use cases, which I did not feel added much to explaining the value of Symantec products over other vendors. Also some of the explanations were inaccurate, such as talking about redo logs. Once we got into some of the cool things that Symantec do, and what they are doing different to others, it got a lot more interesting. Also we can be a prickly bunch so you need to know how to do objection handle really well. I noticed this improved during the morning.

Lastly a presenter needs to be flexible in their delivery. The NetBackup team insisted on finishing their slides and talking through the last 5 so fast no one could really listen to what was being said. We had very little time from the BackupExec team who I think had some really interesting stuff and way to long on NetBackup. I think the imbalance did not help Symantec overall.

Thanks to Symantec. It was a really interesting morning and we learnt a few things.

Rodos

Virtualization Field Day #2 / Silicon Valley- pre event

2012-02-22T17:13:00.000+11:00

Well I have escaped from the wet and dreary shores of Sydney to spend some time geeking it up with the crew for the Virtualization Field Day #2. Having been to one of these events before I know just how much hard work and fun it can be. Its so great to hang out with people so smart in their field, plus to hear direct from the best people within the presenting vendors.

The activities start Wednesday night with a get together dinner. Thursday and Friday are all of the vendor presentations. I arrived this last Sunday to do a few days work of meeting before the event. Of course I had to do a bit of the usual Silicon Valley shop hop around some of the favourite haunts for all things geek.

One place I went today, that I had never thought of before, was to Apple HQ. Here is some guy who was wearing a suit, who wears a suit in the valley, only me!

Who's the stiff in the suit!

The cool thing is that there is a company store there. Its not like an Apple store. It has a lot more Apple merchandise. It also has a t-shirt that can only be purchased from the Apple campus store. Of course I had to get one.

Apple Company Store

Of course I also had to do a trip to Fry's and pick up something. Ended up getting a 4 port 1G switch for the home office. I am sick of 100Mb transfer speed between me and the Drobo storage device (which hangs off a Mac mini). Also some of those nice little pop up speakers for use in hotel rooms etc. This is on top of the other stuff I pre-shipped to my hotel, none of which has arrive yet. I pre shipped a bunch of t-shirts from ThinkGeek for the kids and a SSD drive for me.

One place I have never been to here in the US is In-N-Out burger. My American friends rave about it. So I had to check it out.

The back wall of In-N-Out burger, the view from the car park.

I had to go the whole hog and get a burger, fries and a shake. I am told the way to order your burger is "animal" style, which means it comes with (I think) sautéed onions and chilli. The person I was with sort of made a mistake and somehow also ordered their fries done "animal" style. Can you believe it, they actually do that. Here is what it looks like.

After eating mostly healthy food for about a year it was great to chow down on great fast food. This stuff is fresh, you have to wait for it to be cooked. The fries are cut from whole potatoes just before they are cooked. However my stomach rebelled about half an hour later, the temple had been defiled! But was worth it. Repeat after me, "In-N-Out is occasional food!".

But what is going to be really fun this week is hanging out with the old friends plus some new people at the field day. The attendees this year are Edward Haletky, Bill Hill, Mike Laverick, Dwayne Lessner, Scott Lowe, Roger Lund, Robert Novak, David Owen, Brandon Riley, Todd Scalzott, Rick Schlander and Chris Wahl. Some real who's who of virtualisation thinkers.

The vendors this event are interesting, we have Symantec, Zerto, Xangati, PureStorage, Truebit.tv and Pivot3. Some big names their, some interesting new ones and great to see that I will get to hear the thoughtful words of Mr Backup himself, aka Mr W. Curtis Preston again.

The only vendor I will call out specifically as sparking some very high interest from me pre event is Zerto. They have DR capabilities with full integration to VMware vCloud Director. As I deal daily with one of the leading deployments of vCloud Director in the service provider space this really gets my brain juices flowing. There is big interest in this topic and I am really keen to see exactly what these guys have. I want to separate the hype from the reality and really hope that the reality is an exciting story.

You can see the details of the whole event over at the Field Day site http://techfieldday.com/, the links page really gives you all the resources you need. The sessions will be broadcast online and you can follow the tweet stream via the hashtag #VFD2.

More updates as the events unfold.

Rodos

Don't get fired over the cloud

2012-01-09T17:40:00.004+11:00

An actual paper magazine arrived via snail mail today, Datacenter Dynamics Focus. Of course it was the August/September issue so those snails are really slow these days. I was flipping through the pages and the article "Don't get fired over the Cloud" caught my attention.

The premise of the article is probably summed up by this section entitle "The Danger in Change".

But here’s the rub: “You will be fired as a CIO if you don’t know where things are running. You will be fired if something goes down and you don’t know about it. If you are a CIO and some of your apps are running on Amazon and you don’t know about it then your costs are running out of control. If they are running a mission-critical app and it gets breached, you will get fired.”

Much of this comes down to service management and security. “Those horizontals must traverse this fragmented world of choice. Service management in the New World Order changes dramatically,” Karolczak says. “In the Cloud you had better know which applications are in the Cloud and which cloud they sit on. One of the delusions of the Cloud is that you have unlimited bursts of separation. But you can’t, in most situations, separate the apps from the Cloud.”

Really, is this a little bit of Cloud washing? Could we not say "Don't get fired over stupidity" rather than over Cloud? Why target out Cloud? If your app goes down it does not matter if its running internally or externally, thats an implementation thing. If your SLA is that it can't go down and you don't implement it in a way that achieves that then your are in trouble, Cloud or not. The costs running out of control is nothing that new either, we have being living with virtual sprawl within the data centre for a few years and the hidden cost impacts it can create.

The statement is valid thought that "much of this comes down to service management". Thats really the point here. If you are not managing your environment, whatever it is, then thats where these issues can creep in and give you pain.

What the CIO needs to be focusing, in order to not get fired, are two things as they adopt Cloud.

First, is the integration into the service management infrastructure as the article mentioned. In order to adopt Cloud services a review of your SM implementation will be required. For example you might need to work through your ITIL practices ensuring that you have a method of delivering each function. Some functions might be undertaken by the provider and this should be documented. You will end up getting into the details such as what additional CI records you will need in your CMDB to track services which reside within various Cloud providers.

Second, is educating your technical teams on Cloud architectures and implementations. Cloud might be existing technologies integrated and sold in a different way but there is a lot to learn about how to best utilise various providers Cloud services. IT teams have had years of practice at building and operating technologies in a manner that will not get them fired. However I often see a lot of assumptions and miss understanding of how various Cloud services work which result in implementation gaps that do have the potential to get you fired. IT teams need to skill up through training or hiring.

Of course there is nothing new under the sun here, as IT professionals we have been dealing with these issues as information technology has evolved over the decades. Just think about our journey through virtualization over the last 5 years. Virtualization effected many of these areas as well, but these days you are more likely to get fired for not virtualising.

Rodos

Jobs on the early days of the Web, sounds like Cloud

2011-10-15T17:33:00.001+11:00

Wired put out a special electronic issue which pulled together many of their previous articles about Steve Jobs.

One article was from 1996 when Steve was at NeXT. The hardware side had failed and they were focusing on Software, in particular around the web and object based programming. At this point in our history, the web was only a few years old. (As a side not the first HTTP server was created on a NeXT box.)

Jobs said a really interesting thing ...

The Web reminds me of the early days of the PC industry. No one really knows anything. There are no experts. All the experts have been wrong. There's a tremendous open possibility to the whole thing. And it hasn't been confined, or defined, in too many ways. That's wonderful!
There is a phrase in Buddhism, "Beginners mind." It's wonderful to have a beginner's mind.

I thought that was a really interesting comment and made me think of the current Cloud space. Cloud is so new and exciting and there is a tremendous open possibility to the whole thing. We are a few years in but its early days. There are no experts and it's only through a beginners mind that we might get some insight and true innovation.

Rodos

Prepaid SIM for US roaming for your iPad

2011-09-05T14:57:00.004+10:00

Having just purchased an iPad and been at VMworld in Las Vegas I figured I should write up how to get your iPad working with a US carrier.

I did some research before I went and there was a lot of complicated information about getting SIM cards, signing up plans etc.

Here is what I did.

Jumped into a cab. Ask driver where is the nearest AT&T store.
Walk into AT&T store, hold iPad out in front of me and ask person behind the counter "I want to get this on the internet with a pre-paid SIM".
The lovely assistant (photo below) replied, "No problem Sir".
She took my iPad, ejected my existing SIM, inserted a new AT&T one and waited for the activation screen to appear.
Followed the online activation screen entering my credit card details for my Australian credit card (they recommended not using an AMEX as it can have issues with the region check). I selected a plan of 2G for 30 days for $25 USD.
It started working.

Over the week I used 490Mb of data, way below the 2G I purchase. This was such an easy and fast process. There were about 3 other people in the store at the same time as me doing exactly the same thing. They even did nice things like tape my existing SIM card to the AT&T SIM caddy so I would not loose it and could easily store it.

Forget what you read on the Internet, its dead easy to get your iPad 3G service running in the US.

UPDATE 14/Sept : By default the plan does an Auto Renew so after the month it gives you another month. Before you leave bring up the service plan option and turn the auto renew off. If you forget to do this simply ring 1-800-331-0500 and ask them to turn it off. It took me less than 2 minutes to get onto an operate and have this completed.

They mentioned that after 60 days the account will de-activate but that the SIM card is still good. So if when you return to the US you put the SIM in, you can bring up the service account information, re-enter your credit card details and be underway, no need to revisit an AT&T store. I will keep my SIM and try that on my next trip.

Rodos

VMworld 2011 Keynote

2011-09-03T02:25:00.001+10:00

Some of the best bits from VMworld are the keynotes. The first was by Paul Maritz, the CEO. Here are my notes from the presentation. You can view the video of it on the Internet. Paul is not the most dynamic speaker, he is no Chambers on that front. However is is recognised as one of, if not the, smartest.

Last year there was the tipping point of more new apps being deployed on Virtualisation over physical. This year its now more virtualized across the entire installed base! More than half of anything is import for an industry.
1 virtual machine is deployed every six seconds, more than 20 million VMs across the globe. There are more VMs in flight with vmotion than there are airplanes in flight. More than 800k admins, 68k vcps and done with the support of the application vendors.

Is the cloud just timesharing rediscovered? It's about three profound things. It's the next major interation in the consumerisation of IT.

It's the canonical applications that define the generation of computing. In the mainframe era it was book keeping. It the late 80s it moved to the consumer world. New users through personal computing, the GUI, Intel architecture and the relational db. This allowed a new set if applications, client server, the Internet. CRM and non real time analytics.

With the Cloud we will see a new set of applications and the industry will change. Billions of new users and devices coming into play. Three years ago most devices connected to the net were PCs. In three years it will be less than twenty percent will be PCs. HTML5 might have a big impact.
The Relational Database can't cope with this new world. We need customized information in real time, for the facebook consumer of today.

How do we go forward from here? Let's ring fence off the mainframe. But what do we do with the client server world and migrate it to the new Cloud era.

How do we make it more efficient to run those apps we can't walk away from. Then what do we do about the renewal of applications.

Apps were built around real paper or what was paper on the screen. We need application renewal.

Lastly users are expecting to see everything on a new set of devices that can't be controlled by IT, whatever device they have in their hand.

How do we allow infrastructure renewal for those client server apps. To get operational efficiency. Virt can do this in a non disruptive way which is why it has been so successful. We can't just make more operational tasks but rather create more automated efficiency.

They had to have overlapping development efforts to release a new release of vSphere each year. Twice as many man hours in Q&A than development. This is like building hardware and has the same importance. First time Paul has seen a major bit of software be released on time with all it's original function set.

The new version is starting to do with this operational automation. Storage load balancing and tiering, automated host provisioning. The new version results in great scale, resiliency and automation.

A new schedule of how releases will be done. Not just vSphere but all the elements to deliver functionality, such as security, disaster recovery and Cloud portals. New versions of SRM, Operations, vShield and Director.

There are many service providers one delivering Cloud with Director. Plus virtual clouds such as NYSE. The vCloud Data Center program has expanded. A subset is clubbing together to give a world wide available cloud, global connect.

New virtual storage appliance for the SMB to get advanced features.
VMware GO to be expanded with things like patch management.
Application renew is the big effort in front of us. The new apps will be done by those under 35. Last 5 to 8 years developers have resulted against complexity and have new environments and fabrics. Let's give them those on the same underlying fabric. They are not interested in the low level details, more of a PaaS. They are willing to give up some control.

VMware are putting these elements under vFabric. Keys off Spring and now starts to include data, with the acquisition of Gem. A scale out in memory database.

Now SQLfire which brings an easier programming model with the scalable nature of GemFire.

Data Director will manage the task of administration of these databases. It can do backup and all those things. It's vSphere aware. They have taken Postgress and optimized it's memory management for a virtual environment and it can get much better density.

Cloud Foundry is about how apps will be built in the future, those new modern programming frameworks. It's open source and the community has been extending it. It's designed to be portable across clouds. There is a danger of going back to the lack of application portability, the Cloud should not be like this. What will be the new cloaking layer between hardware and the cloud? This needs to run from the provider down to the developers desktop. Developing a version for a memory stick.

Lastly we need to give a way to give people access to the applications that they need, continuing to invest in VMware View and releasing View 5.0. There will be more clients available.

PCs are not the only device any more. The PC can't belong to just one person any more. Horizon is about association of functions to people and not a specific device. But you now need to map people's activities to a device. Such as giving a user a virtual phone.

The PC was about automating the white colar worker experience of 1975. Xerox PAC started it and apple and Microsoft took up. The new workers and not using documents, they are streaming, filtering, they are not from the folder and document world.

What about the 50 percent which are not virtualized? Got to tackle the mission critical applications. That's what vSphere5 was about. Then start to work on those new applications and new way of doing things.

End of presentation.

Rodos

HP Cloud advisors

2011-08-31T12:40:00.001+10:00

Got invited to a panel at VMworld of HP CTO and Cloud advisor, thanks Calvin. I was not sure what to expect or what they would say but it sounded like fun, I love a bit of cloud talk.

Here are the notes I took. They might be easy to get out of context so post in comments if I got anything wrong. The room was noisy and it was very hard to hear.

I was impressed by some of the good analogies that the guys used in answering the questions. Especially the one that al the server vendors have access to the same components and tech but some vendors servers are better than others. That's a good insight not only for HP but for all of us, it's what you do with what you have that counts.

Also you have to like a bunch of guys who wear lab coats!

Q. HP and openstack.

A. We are the number one partner with VMware and Microsoft and others and we do that by partnering well. We are involved in the open stack initiative and helping that community. Of course VMware offer their software on other hardware. Each of the hypervisor environments have different value propositions.

Q.is HP going to develop software for object storage?
A. No.
Q. Integration with different Cloud providers but what about with different Hypervisors.
A. today we support VMware and HyperV plus ( missed )

A. How will HP store my apps
Q. Cloud storage today has generally been for static data. Cloud 1.0. The change we are going to see and difference is going to come from solid state devices which have different characteristics. Apps are going to get faster. As storage moves into the server layer then it can get faster and in the cloud we will be able to provide apps for non static data.

Q. How will you reduce the cost of SSD.
A. Volume, volume, volume and that is what HP does well. Research on new things like memrister might change SSD, but it's five years out from changing things.

Q. How will HP differentiate themselves from other Cloud providers.
A. You can take a pile of parts and throw them together to build a Cloud but performance sucks. HP can provide and integrated solution that does network, storage, servers plus the software. One vendor. This is part of our value prop. It's the applications which create value, not the blinking lights. HP has industry knowledge and can assist with the business process too. You have this flexibility when working with HP. Look at servers, the vendors all have access to the same components, it's how they are put together that adds value, that's what HP can do for Cloud. Just deploying a virtual machine is such a small part of what's required.

Q. Will HP stand up it's own Cloud?
A. We are already a public cloud provider in the apps space and will continue to do so. ( missed name of this service ) HP can't own the industry on this, it's to big so we will work with others and do things to. For example we work with a pile of hosters are msps and HP is a large msp, we are used to this.

Q. With the ease of provisioning in the cloud what safeguards will be in place from doing stupid things.
A. Sounds like how the unix guys used to talk about the windows guys. It's hard to get it down to being simple but nothing is going to be fool proof. What we do is based around policy models and rules which can provide many safe guards. Because of the soup to nuts elements HP can make things easier.

Q. What comes after cloud? Are the models of hybrid etc all there is? Will everything move to the Internet?

A. we have an abundance of data from these news sensors, an abundance of compute and lots of networking to move it around. Attention span has not changed. Analyzing and making sense of all this through these resources is what comes next. Jobs will evolve and we will not be mucking around with some of the primitives we do today. Just like a pilot is having their job automated, getting attention of the pilot is important and we will see lots of research on this as computer technology becomes more automated.
It's going to take a very long time for things to move to the cloud, there is a lot still to do, yes technology will change

DR to the Cloud with SRM

2011-08-30T07:55:00.001+10:00

I went to two sessions this morning on DR to the Cloud.

I think the first thing you could say about these sessions is that they were named a little wrong. They should have been about DR to "managed service provider" or "hosting company". There might have been a bit of Cloud washing going on here. There were certainly elements of clouds and this is a developing space of which we are at the start if the journey, but I think the topics may be a little "over sold" in their wording.

So what were my notes?

SRM will evolve to be application or vApp aware rather than it's VM centric nature of today.
Today SRM is all about protecting a machine in site A in another site B. In the future there will be more sites involved, protecting works in one site to multiple sites. For example you might protect a machine to your internal second site plus an external Cloud provider.
VMware are working on creating layer two connectivity between multiple sites. This combined with VMotion across sites will allow some interesting DR scenarios. In my opinion this will be helpful for disaster avoidance.
The goad is to be able to intermix vSphere and vCloud Director as either sources or destinations of DR.
There is the use case of DR to the cloud as well as DR off the cloud.
The plan is their would be a plugin for your vSphere Client that would do all the work of setting up DR to a Cloud provider. I imagine this would be like the vCloud Connector plugin.
The attributes that are proposed for this future state of software are; VM level protection granularity, multi-tenancy, self serviceability, storage agnostic, vm portability, role based management, scalability, extensibility, simplified deployment and management, security and RAS (reliability, serviceability and availability).
Hosting.com described their use of SRM 5 to provide Cloud DR. From what I could see this looked like an implementation of SRM on top of a vSphere implementation that had a Cloud front end. They have their portal for consuming virtual machines in a Cloud manner. By adding SRM underneath and then using the SRM APIs to control it from their portal they are able to give DR functions to users. This shows what can be done when you build your own world and don't use vCloud Director. The service is in Beta.
A question was asked from the audience about when SRM and vCloud Director would be integrated or compatible. The answer was that thus was in the roadmap but no detail. I suspect this person was like a lot in the audience was wondering about this given the title of the session.
In the service provider session a number of organizations got up and spoke about their DR solutions and how they were integrating in SRM. There was a lot of managed services wrapped around these. Lots of array based replication, customer specific ESX clusters and other such non-Cloud scenarios. There is certainly some great solutions out there and the providers are working hard with what they have.

What was my take away from two hours of presentation of SRM and Cloud. Essentially we are not there yet. Yes there are some DR solutions and some providers will even let you use SRM. The true cloud experience DR from your own infrastructure into a VMware based Cloud is there in parts but there is still portions of string and sticky tape holding all together. Actually that is probably not fair, it makes them sound unstable. What we don't have is the simplicity that we have with SRM today.

The question is, how long will it take for VMware and the providers to get there. I suspect 12 months, problem is we are greedy and want it all TODAY!

Rodos

P.S. Slowly getting used to Blogsy on the iPad to write this stuff up. Doing straight content is a lot easier than pulling things in from multiple places.

vCloud Global Connect

2011-08-30T06:53:00.001+10:00

There were announcements out today about the new VMware Global Connect.
The announcement and blog detail out a relationship between a number of the vCloud Data Center providers.

VMware and its partners will accelerate the journey to the enterprise hybrid cloud with:

Global Connect – Multiple service providers, multiple geographies; a single global cloud
First introduced in August 2010, VMware vCloud Datacenter Services are enterprise-class public clouds built on VMware cloud infrastructure, including VMware vSphere®, VMware vShield™ and VMware vCloud Director™. Certified by VMware and offering globally consistent management and security, this network of service providers is expected to span 25 datacenters in 13 countries by the end of 2011. Today VMware and its partners are introducing Global Connect, an optional feature of the vCloud Datacenter service that will allow customers to use cloud services from multiple providers across geographies as if they are a single, virtual cloud. Bluelock, SingTel and Softbank Telecomare expected to be the first providers to offer Global Connect services.

For multinational customers that require high performance (low-latency), highly available cloud computing local to the countries where they operate, Global Connect will give them an easier way to address compliance with international regulations for data privacy, locality and confidentiality. Customers will work directly with their local vCloud Datacenter service provider, who orchestrates service delivery internationally with Global Connect, allowing customers to seamlessly leverage services from connected providers with a single contract and “single pane of glass” management across clouds using vCloud Connector.

You can see the reasoning behind this alliance. Amazon has their availability zones, but what if there is not one where you want it, how do VMware complete with this "feature" when it's something that is part of implementation and not the software so to speak. This expansion of the vCloud Data Center program gives customers the ability to access multiple clouds with assurance over comparability and service levels with the simplicity of a single entity.

You can see the service providers extending and becoming part of this. After all the telcos already do this on roaming and a lot of the organizations already have joint hosting agreements to cover regions where they do not have coverage. This maturity is collaboration can be brought to bear on Cloud services.

I think this is great for customers as well as being a good move by VMware and it's partners.

Rodos

P.S. Disclaimer, I work for a subsidiary of SingTel which is one of the member companies. Personal blog and views of course.

Alumni Lounge

2011-08-30T06:19:00.001+10:00

Hanging at the Alumni lounge at VMworld. After five years you would think that my status would be sorted but each year I always seam to have to queue to get the status applied. Not to worry, the registration people are very nice.

Cant see any food in here, just some water. I think last year there were some snacks. Their is quiet, power outlets and comfy chairs. A good place to hang to do some blogging before the solutions exchange opens later this afternoon.

Rodos

IE9 and VMware vCloud Director

2011-08-16T09:28:00.001+10:00

A quick note as people are starting to use IE9.

Currently vCloud Director (remote console plug-in) does not support IE9, the vCloud Director website should work with the appropriate Flash plugin, but the VMRC (console) is not expected to work. Support for IE9 is a feature request VMware are looking at for a future release of vCloud Director. Personally I am keen for Safari support too.

You can find the list of supported browser versions on various OS versions starting on page 18 of the install guide. Note that the Users Guide for VCD is less helpful as the phrase "At least Internet Explorer 7" which might lead you to think that IE9 works.

Rodos

Is VMware the new Tall Poppy?

2011-08-10T08:51:00.006+10:00

Here in Australia we have this phrase called "The Tall Poppy Syndrome". It is the "social phenomenon in which people of genuine merit are resented, attacked, cut down, or criticised because their talents or achievements elevate them above or distinguish them from their peers."

Seeing a bit of the fallout of the VMware licensing for v5 I wondered if VMware were the new Microsoft and we felt that they just needed to be brought down a peg or two.

My view is that part of this is due to a cultural change in how Virtualization is used within organizations today. Back in the day VMware was used to remove other costs within a project, it helped drive the ROI. Due to consolidation, which was it's big use case, every dollar you spent on VMware licenses was saving you many other dollars on physical hardware. We would drive every cent out of that physical hardware but the VMware portion looked like good value for money.

In today's world we have moved onto new models. We have seen "virtual first" become standard (certainly in my region) and VMware be a standard base cost for doing IT. At the same time we have seen the base hypervisor become a commodity item. Therefore the hypervisor has become like all the other elements of a solution, people need to squeeze every spare cent out of it, just like their storage, networking and compute hardware. VMware has entered main stream and is being treated accordingly by consumers.

Yet to stay leader of the pack and continue to deliver the eco system of products and tools around the base hypervisor VMware need to recoup their costs and they are going to price accordingly.

My take on the pricing backlash is this is more about VMware being treated just like all the other products and vendors in the stack. The glory days of consolidation savings are over, it's now the new norm. Time to refresh the value prop and get used to the backlash no matter what they do, just like Microsoft.

Rodos

P.S. First post from my new iPad. Maybe this might get me posting more.

There is some way to go

2011-06-03T09:20:00.004+10:00

A quick little rant on an article I read this morning, "Interview: Wadeson opens up on Government IT". The lead of the article describes who Wadeson is

The Australian Government's longest-serving, most influential CIO reveals all on his retirement.

John Wadeson, one of the longest-serving CIOs in the Australian Government, will retire on September 9 after 40 years of public service.

The day he started, Bill McMahon was Australia’s Prime Minister. He’ll finish up just after his 61st birthday, and midway through one of the largest IT challenges an Australian Government agency has ever faced.

Given that Wadeson is no light weight so I was really interested to his comments on Cloud. They were brief;

Wadeson has followed with interest discussions on cloud computing in government, but feels it offers little to advance Centrelink – and now Department of Human Services.

“No one is ready to put customer data offshore,” he noted. “Not yet. It won’t happen in my time.

“The trouble is that you split our architecture and then nothing connects,” he said.

“Our staff want it all to work in a whole system that integrates. So there’s not a lot in it, for us.”

Really. They are certainly brief statements and he may have said a lot more and often people can be quoted out of context ... but even so.

Do we still need to live with the perception that utilising Cloud means to "put customer data offshore"? Sure, Australia does not yet have the diversity and scale of Cloud services that exist in other countries but there are services and more are being delivered every month.

Why does Cloud adoption mean you "split ... architecture and then nothing connects"? With the growing capability of hybrid models, storage tiering and other architectures there is no split or loss of connection. How Cloud utilisation results in not having "whole" or "integrated" systems is a wonder. Is the perception that Enterprise Architecture and Cloud are incompatible?

The only way I can may any sense of this is that the definition of Cloud being referred to is a narrow alignment with specific and standalone SaaS offerings, for example the adoption of Google Mail to replace or augment a departments existing mail systems. But Cloud is so much more than that!

Is this really the depth of innovative thinking that exists within IT leadership in this country? Maybe its a good thing that Mr Wadeson is retiring in September. If Cloud is not going to happen "in my time" at least that time is short!

This speaks to show just how much work there is to do in education, discussion and working through the models and use cases for the ever increasing expanse of what Cloud means and what Cloud can deliver.

Rodos

P.S. The views expressed as usual are my own and my own madness and not related to anything or anyone else.

UPDATE : Here is a video from ZDNet with John that's interesting to watch.

Where it all began, 1994

2011-05-23T20:53:00.005+10:00

Just had to share the crazy stuff I just found.

Here is the text of a web page I created in 1994 when I was first starting to use this thing called the Internet. Its a scream!

Remember when you cared if your serial card had a 16550 uart for less interrupts? The computers at work had 2G disk drives, luxury. Remember having a PPP account to connect to the net? What about when windows did not come with a TCP/IP stack and you had to go and pay for one! What about recommending that people look into this thing called Linux.

For those from Australia, that DEC Alpha machine which was connected to the net only via email was set up by none other than Simon Hackett, founder of Internode.

Looking back at the site I had all these tips, technical notes and FAQs on the technology that I worked on. Obviously the seed to a future blogging career.

How technology has changed (but my spelling has not improved).

Enjoy this blast from the past. I hope it brings back some memories of your own!

My stuff!
Hardware
Internet software
Creating my pages
Providers of PPP connections in Sydney, Australia
Test your browser
There is a lot of software and hardware that I have come accross, especialy when it comes to surfing the net, so here is bit of a description of what I have and how I use it.
Hardware
At home I am running a 486DX2-66 with 8mb of RAM, an Adaptec SCSI with a 512Mb SCSI drive and a NEC 3Xi SCSI CD-ROM drive. For communications I use a QuickComm Spirit II modem that does 14.4K. A while ago I used a serial board with 16550 uarts for extra speed and less interupts but it seams to have died so I am back to the 8250. Still haning around is my old 386SX-16 with 4mb of RAM and a 80mb drive. Its so slow it drives you nuts, especially in windows, however I did run Linux (click to hear Linus Torvalds prounance it) on it for a few months and was able to get ghostview, a postscript viewer to run under x-windows on it, not bad for such a dud machine, of course I had a 16mb swap partition. If you are interested in unix at home you should give Linux a try.
In the office I use a variety of machines. There is a DEC VAX 4000/60 running OpenVMS with 24mb of RAM and about 2.1Gb of disk, the DEC Alpha running OpenVMS with 80mb of RAM and about 2Gb of disk and a HP running HP-UX with 64Mb RAM and 1Gb disk space. They all have huge workstation screens which I love to work on and are all networked (TCP/IP). The Alpha is connected to the Internet by mail only.
Internet software
These days I am really into the Word Wide Web (the WEB or W3) and have lots of utilities and software etc to do this. My connection to the net comes from Magnadata who provide PPP and shell accounts. Its around AUS$40 a month for PPP access. The good thing about their charging is its not time baed but transmission size. Therefore I can stay connected and not worry about how long it takes me to read something or if I am FTPing something from the US I don't care how slow the link is. The monthly charge incluses 20mb and each extra mb isa dollar or something.
On my PC I run PC/TCP from FTP Software Inc. and use their PPP connection. It loads as a VBX for Windows but I am not sure I have it installed right and think there still might be a TSR floating around somewhere. Its very good and its dialer program which you use to make the serial connection is simple.
On top of all TCP/IP I then run lots of client programs, the most important of which is my W3 browser, Virtual Library/CyberWeb of WWW Development. I create my images by capturing them from other pages or pieces of software with Paint Shop Pro.
Creating my pages
Like a lot of people as soon as I started using the W3 I had an urge to create my own documents; after all who can resist the idea of having your ideas accessable by anyone in the world, what a medium! My first page was a simple home page that I placed on my providers server in Hong Kong (where I was living at the time). This linked to another page which had information on my son Samuel with his picture. Once these were created I started to place my URL into the signature of my home page and have done so ever since.
Today I am a little more experienced but few things have changed. All of my pages are created locally on my PC and I use the file: URL to load them, therefore they all load very fast, hense the number of images in my pages. To write them I simply use a text editor SuperPAD that comes as an example with MS Visual C++, it's basically notepad but has an MDI interface. I have tried HoTMetal bySoftQuad Inc. and HTML Assistant by Howard Harawiz but find that they really don't make the creation of a page any easier. I just write in the editor and then frequently load it into Following is the dialog for my conversion program.

Rodos