Amazon Web Services is an amazing constellation of products, but it’s far from the only game in the cloud world. Microsoft realized long ago that the future of enterprise computing lies in the cloud and it has been investing heavily in owning a piece of this market. The number of products sitting under the Azure brand umbrella continues to grow and it has become hard to find something that Azure can’t do. In many cases, Azure is running right alongside the other cloud providers and in a few of the corners it’s inching into the lead. At the core of the business, Azure offers much of the same commodity products as everyone else. If you need a machine running a current version of Linux (yes, Linux!) or Windows, you can spin one up in a few clicks. If you have some data to store, Microsoft will squirrel away the bits just like everyone else.But once you move away from the basics, Microsoft’s corporate DNA starts to emerge. This is the company that built the … [Read more...] about 12 ways Azure beats AWS
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11 ways Google Cloud beats AWS
There’s no mistaking that Amazon Web Services is incredibly dominant in the cloud. The company has released so many products and created so many amazing tools that the marketplace has responded by rewarding AWS with an insanely high percentage of the world’s business.But that doesn’t mean that AWS is the only game in town. Google is running hard and creating cloud products from all of the expertise it used to build the dominant search engine. Google Cloud Platform is very competitive and in some respects might be said to be better.Better? Well, it’s hard to say that some cloud products are head-and-shoulders above others because the products themselves are often commodities. A machine running the current version of Ubuntu or a cloud storage bucket that stores a few gigabytes are about as interchangeable as sunny days in the desert.Still, the cloud companies are finding ways to differentiate themselves with extra features and, as is more often the case, slightly … [Read more...] about 11 ways Google Cloud beats AWS
Farewell, Frodo: Why we need trustworthy metadata to define our infrastructure
I have fond memories of when IT admins would give names to their servers, and even assign them unique personalities. It was a simpler time, before virtualization and the cloud made infrastructure exponentially more complex. My favorites were the The Lord of the Rings fans who named their servers after hobbits and elves; anything related to Bilbo and Frodo might be a web server, while Arwen and Legolas were databases. It was a fun way for IT admins to express themselves, but you had to know your Tolkien to understand the role a server might play.This model worked for small environments but doesn’t scale in the era of virtualization and the cloud. There are simply too many things to name, and you’re forced to pull out esoteric Tolkien references that only a supergeek would know.With the cloud, and specifically IaaS, many of us have abandoned the notion of naming or even uniquely identifying servers. It’s impossible at this scale, where workloads are spun up and torn … [Read more...] about Farewell, Frodo: Why we need trustworthy metadata to define our infrastructure
How to choose the right Microsoft Azure cloud VMs
Back when Microsoft first launched Azure’s virtual machines, there were only a handful of default server sizes you could use. The question you had to ask yourself then was a simple one: Is there a server that can support my workload? But now there’s an ever-growing list of different server sizes and server types, all targeted at different use cases. That’s changed the question. Now you must ask: Which one is the right one for me?In the beginning of the public cloud, the key factor was economies of scale. The first two or three generations used the same hardware across entire datacenters, giving massive price advantages but at the same time limiting the capabilities of the servers used to host infrastructure and platform as a service. The rise of the Open Compute Project, and its support by the main cloud vendors, changed things by giving those clouds common hardware standards that could support a wider range of functions without significantly adding costs.Today's … [Read more...] about How to choose the right Microsoft Azure cloud VMs
AWS cloud services features: A guide to the right tools for the job
Cloud services are moving from the initial “we’re doing it because everyone else is” state to a more cautious, planned migration, one where IT departments have done a careful assessment of their needs and determined what to move to the cloud and what will stay on-premises.Getting there takes some hard lessons. A study by IDG Research found that as much as 40 percent of workloads moved off the cloud and back to an on-premises setting. That’s because companies had the mistaken notion that they could move to the cloud and continue to operate like they could in their on-premises environment, when that is not the case.One defining element of the cloud is its elasticity. Its value is in burst capacity, giving customers a rapid increase in computing power or services access on short notice and then the ability to turn it off and no longer pay for it when they are done. But what cloud services are there to take such advantage of?To make that process easier, I have … [Read more...] about AWS cloud services features: A guide to the right tools for the job