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
iaas
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
In the enterprise cloud, it’s come down to AWS vs. Microsoft Azure
Have you watched the recent earnings reports lately? Amazon posted total revenue across all segments of $43.7 billion for the quarter. Amazon Web Services contributed just over 10 percent of that at $4.6 billion. If you’re keeping track, AWS’s revenue increased 41 percent from this time last year. That’s impressive growth, and right in line with the explosive growth of cloud computing in general. Then we have Microsoft, which posted total revenues of $24.5 billion. Although the company does not give specific numbers for Azure, the company’s “intelligent cloud” segment (more Azure) went up 13 percent to $6.9 billion over the last year, and the “productivity and business processes” segment (more Office 365) grew 28 percent to $8.2 billion.These numbers show that the growth of the public cloud IaaS market is concentrated around two providers: Amazon and Microsoft. The market is living up to the adage “success breeds … [Read more...] about In the enterprise cloud, it’s come down to AWS vs. Microsoft Azure
5 foolish reasons you’re not using Heroku
When I tell other CTOs and engineers that we rely heavily on Heroku to run our business, they invariably have the same reaction: Why? Why not AWS? Are you joking? Have you heard of Google Cloud? Are you an idiot?This happens without fail. With. Out. Fail. The argument usually goes something like this: Why pay more for a PaaS when you can build it yourself on Google or AWS—and have it just how you want it? To which I say: Poppycock. These people are missing the real benefits of PaaS, and perhaps some basic economic sense as well.We’ve been using Heroku extensively at Rainforest QA since early 2012 to run our automated QA testing service. We deploy almost everything in Heroku—for production, staging, and QA for most apps. It’s stable, it makes economic sense, and it precisely suits our needs.Here are the main arguments I hear against Heroku, and why I think they are (mostly) fallacious.#1. Heroku is NIH (Not Invented Here)If it’s not lovingly pieced together … [Read more...] about 5 foolish reasons you’re not using Heroku
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