Our friends at Newvem are at it again. They’ve just released an incredible infographic on Demystifying Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The new infographic demonstrates the size of Amazon’s cloud and reveals usage analysis including a deep dive on reserve instances.

And, since this comes from Newvem – the experts in usage analytics – it also provides recommendations for how to reduce costs and make your AWS cloud more efficient!

Dome9 secures AWS EC2 instances by providing automated and centralised security management, with on-demand secure access. Learn more at http://www.dome9.com/amazon-aws-ec2-security.

Here is an article published in MSPNews about Cloud Confusion. I think we have a long way to go educating people what Cloud is all about. The challenge is that there are many aspects of cloud computing such as backup and disaster recovery, saas. data storage to name a few. The driving factor for the […]

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“We have seen excellent strength in social networking and gaming apps, the growth has been phenomenal,” observed Cory Isaacson, CEO of CodeFutures Corporation, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Most consumers have no idea they are ‘playing in the cloud,’” Isaacson continued, “but that is where a majority of these apps are hosted – and very successfully so.”
Cloud Computing Journal: How fast will the last remaining barriers to enterprise-wide cloud adoption melt away – are secure public clouds feasible, for example, or only private ones?
Cory Isaacson: The barriers are evaporating quickly, but the database tier still remains a big issue. The reliability and performance need to improve so that enterprise customers feel comfortable trusting their environment to the cloud. Another factor that will help is using the cloud as a disaster recovery (DR) backup – that will be a smart strategy and a good early move for many enterprise organizations.

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If you know a bit about software and operating systems (OS), you’ve heard about “processes”. Modern operating systems, such as Linux or Windows, will run your software applications inside separate processes. This is an OS technique for isolating different software. For example you can make sure that whatever your web server is doing – it cannot touch the memory of your database server; and vice versa.
This sounds like a good thing for security, and it is. It is also essential for reliability and stability. Bugs in one software application will less often cause trouble in other software applications, even if they are running simultaneously in the same physical memory, due to being separated into different “processes”.

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Obtaining computing power from somewhere other than a privately owned data center or on-site room of servers is an increasingly big business. Gartner Research has predicted that, for the first time, the worldwide IT outsourcing market will surpass a whopping $250 billion in 2012, according to an article by eWEEK’s Chris Preimesberger.
IT platforms available through cloud services are an important factor in this growth.
“The fastest-growing segment within the worldwide ITO market is cloud compute services, which is part of the cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) segment. Cloud compute services are expected to grow 48.7 percent in 2012 to $5 billion, up from $3.4 billion in 2011,” Gartner wrote.

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Thinking cloud is thinking application-centric. Organizations utilize public cloud offerings because they want to focus on their revenue-generating applications rather than managing infrastructure. And from there we already can draw the significance of Application Performance Management (APM) in public cloud environments.
If we focus on our application, a focus on its performance is essential. Even more important than that is how our application’s performance is perceived by our users. To gain this insight, it is crucial to monitor our application’s performance from our users’ perspective; that’s where User Experience Management (UEM) comes into play.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Coraid Inc., a leading developer of Ethernet-based storage solutions, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Coraid redefines storage with its breakthrough line of EtherDrive and EtherCloud solutions. Coraid delivers scale-out performance, Ethernet simplicity, and an elastic storage architecture to handle massive data growth. Designed from the ground up for virtualization and cloud architectures, Coraid’s platform has been deployed by more than 1,500 customers worldwide.

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The data explosion is not new. It started hundreds of years ago with the invention of the printing press, followed by real-time communication via radio, television and mobile phones and culminating with the World Wide Web. The challenge now is to provide information fast. There are billions of people with billions of devices generating exabytes of data around the world. No one wants to wait for the data they need, particularly businesses. Storage technology now focuses on performance more than it does on capacity. Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Big Data have combined to make speed all-important. The ability to access exploding data faster is crucial to businesses. Reports and analysis must be available to decision makers instantly. In his General Session at Cloud Expo New York, Mike Schmitt, Director of Product Management and Marketing for WHIPTAIL, discusses how WHIPTAIL moves data at the speed of life.

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I started last week confused, and ended the week more confused than ever. The cloud computing industry is simply changing too quickly for me. As one industry CEO remarked to me in agreement, “the vendors are moving quickly, but the customers are moving slowly.”

The VMworld show held last week in San Francisco had an exhibition that took over the Moscone Convention Center’s full south hall. Keynotes were attended by what appeared to be about 5,000 people. It was frenetic.

But upon close inspection, the show seemed to be about vendors talking to vendors, conspiring, consolidating, and fearing what might be going on a few aisles over. There was this surface layer of customers wandering around, a secondary aspect of what seemed to be a very large industry talking to itself.

The biggest announcement came on the show’s first day when VMware said it would join the OpenStack alliance. It can’t be said at this point how this will work out. OpenStack has been criticized by some as too loosely structured, and the VMware announcement reinforces this point. On the other hand, loosey goosey means widely adopted, so maybe this announcement forbodes a future of embracing and extending open source within the enterprise a la Microsoft’s strategy to dominate the desktop a generation ago.

Later, I traveled to San Diego for the LinuxCon/CloudOpen conference. I saw Linus Torvalds himself roaming the halls, but did not hear him speak. This was an old-fashioned geekfest, with modest table-booths, lots of folks in t-shirts, and seriously technical presentations. Open-source proponents with whom I spoke uniformly described VMware as “the enemy.”

All of this is in the context of VMware selling perhaps $2 billion in software to a global IT industry of more than $4 trillion (including telco). We’ve only just begun, customers are still talking about whether to adopt cloud and thinking along now-ancient public/private/hybrid lines, while the industry is evolving like mad.

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Information Security and Risk has become a top concern of IT organizations and consumers alike. Concern about inadequate Info Security remains the #1 obstacle to greater adoption of Cloud Computing, according to Intel’s research. The rapid growth of Mobile and IP-connected Embedded devices, Cloud Computing, Social Networks, and “Consumerization of IT” is being met with, and in some cases contributing to, an escalating number and complexity of Cyber-threats. Tenants of the cloud need the ability to assess security standards, trust security implementations, and prove infrastructure compliance to auditors.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Steve Orrin, Sr. Security Architect & Principal Engineer at Intel, will describe technologies and capabilities that provide reporting on the configuration of the virtual infrastructure used by the customer VMs and tie this to a verifiable measurement of trust in the hardware and hypervisor. This allows customers to be sure the provider is following security best practices, can pass a regulatory audit, and be assured that the provider’s platforms are booting from a secure root of trust, protected from root-kits and other malware. He will also describe the hardware and software methods by which these measurements, configuration of the virtual infrastructure, and events reported by the infrastructure are used to generate dynamic and detailed compliance reports and enforce security policies.

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