Category Archives: Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services, Cloud & IT Management, Consulting, Google Apps

Cloudreach Says Businesses Don’t Maximize Cloud Investment, They Can Help

To help businesses maximize their investment in cloud technologies, Cloudreach has today launched an Innovation Services program. Starting with Google Apps, this consultancy-based service helps business cloud users consistently review how they’re using Google Apps, make the best of the tools they have and adopting new services from Google as they are released.  Cloudreach will work with new and existing users to help them adopt and benefit from all of the services Google Apps offers as opposed to just the familiar tools – going beyond the familiarity of Gmail, contacts and calendar to other Enterprise functionality and even the less well known Google Maps and Geospatial data management tools.  By working with Cloudreach businesses can ensure they extract maximum value from the cloud-based services and avoid needlessly making costly investments elsewhere, all while enabling a culture of collaboration and giving end-users the flexible tools and features they demand.

Failing to exploit public cloud services thoroughly is proving costly for cloud users, says Cloudreach. As the adoption of public cloud services soars, businesses have the opportunity to realize vast benefits, such as reduced costs and improved efficiency, but many are only scratching the surface by not reviewing and not looking beyond the more familiar tools, says the cloud computing consultancy.

“It’s not just about driving innovation within business, but also about optimizing all the services you use. In the world of using public cloud, one drives the other, so it’s important that businesses remain focused on getting the most on both counts,” comments Pontus Noren, co-founder and CEO, Cloudreach. “The cloud is a great thing, and the reality is it just keeps getting better as more developments are made by Google Apps and Amazon Web Services. This ongoing evolution is only good news for businesses – as long as they continually review to ensure they harness these developments.”

Amazon AWS, Amazon Elastic Transcoder, Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services, AWS Management Console, Tools, Transcoding, Video

AWS Elastic Transcoder Converts Videos Easily for Pennies a Minute

Amazon has announced a new service designed to make transcoding video for use on multiple devices a snap, without having to deal with an EC2 instance or transcoding software. Controlled via the Management Console and using S3 buckets, or via APIs for developer use, Elaastic Transcoder uses presets to eliminate trial-and-error and guesswork.

“Amazon Elastic Transcoder manages all aspects of the transcoding process for you transparently and automatically. There’s no need to administer software, scale hardware, tune performance, or otherwise manage transcoding infrastructure. You simply create a transcoding “job” specifying the location of your source video and how you want it transcoded. Amazon Elastic Transcoder also provides transcoding presets for popular output formats, which means that you don’t need to guess about which settings work best on particular devices. All these features are available via service APIs and the AWS Management Console.”

Amazon Elastic Transcoder supports transcoding into H.264 video and AAC audio in an MP4 container, and supports most common media formats for input including H.264, AAC, MP4, MPEG-2, FLV, 3GP and AVI.

Full details available at the AWS Blog.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, Backup, Google, Guest Post

To Cloud, or Not: Getting Started

Guest Post by Gina Smith

Many small business owners are still apprehensive about utilizing cloud options. While it can be a big step, there are significant long-term benefits to utilizing this expanding innovation, including:

  • Enhanced Security – Cloud providers go to great lengths to protect client data, often implementing security protocols which are much more advanced than those on most “hard” networks.
  • Emergency Backup – No need to worry in the event of a fire, earthquake, flood, storm or other natural disaster. Your data and files are safe and being backed up in the “cloud”.
  • Remote Access – You and your employees can gain access to company data at anytime from anywhere in the world.
  • Easily Upgrade or Replace Computers – Quickly and painlessly replace obsolete or faulty computers by connecting the new machine(s) and remotely accessing and/or transferring any data needed directly from the cloud!

Once a business decides to take that step into the “cloud”, many get “stuck” trying to figure out which options will work best for their needs. Amazon is considered by many to be a pioneer in the world of so-called “remote computing” services. And now, Internet giant Google has thrown its hat into the game, launching their “Google Cloud” platform earlier this year.

Amazon AWS (Advanced Web Services)

Amazon was one of the first companies to develop a remote access/cloud computing product catered to the general public. They still offer the most extensive options for both users and developers. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is attractive to many companies because they offer “pay-as-you-go” programs with no upfront expenses or long-term commitments required. Amazon Simple Storage (S3) is also very flexible, offering storage options in different regions around the world. Some companies choose to store their data in a lower priced region to reduce storage costs or in a region different from where their company is located for disaster recovery purposes. Amazon still offers the most versatile services and options. Some claim their system can be difficult to learn initially, but fairly easy to get around once you get the hang of it.

Google Cloud Services

There is no doubt that Google has made a permanent mark in history. The Internet giant has revolutionized our lives and made a significant impact on modern society. The company’s launch of their Google Cloud Platform got people who had previously discounted the cloud to seriously begin considering it again. Why? Well, it’s simple. Google has already developed applications which people are comfortable with and familiar. This, of course, makes the entire thought of cloud conversion and eventual emersion much less intimidating. Google’s cloud platform is still in its early stages and does not offer quite the flexibility and options as Amazon AWS – yet. Their data centers are secure and well managed, and their interface and applications are fairly easy to learn and navigate.

GoogleAppsAndroid
GoogleAppsiOS
GoogleMobile

While this article offers a good general overview of each system, it is always advisable to conduct your own research to determine which provider will best suit your needs. Both Amazon AWS and Google Cloud provide reliable, secure, dependable, cost-saving options for businesses. Also consider utilizing companies specializing in cloud management and backup, such as www.spanning.com. And, as your business grows and your cloud use increases, don’t forget that Cloudyn can use their Cloud Intelligence and other advanced tools to analyze your usage. They can be a tremendous asset in helping manage and optimizing your data costs.

Gina Smith writes freelance articles for magazines, online outlets and publications.Smith covers the latest topics in the business, golf, tourism, technology and entertainment industries.

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Web Services, AWS Data Pipeline, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Business Processes, Workflow

New AWS Pipeline Tool Aims to Make Effective Use of Your Business Data

AWS Pipeline Diagram

Amazon’s new AWS Data Pipeline product “will help you move, sort, filter, reformat, analyze, and report on  data in order to make use of it in a scalable fashion. ” You can now automate the movement and processing of any amount of data using data-driven workflows and built-in dependency checking.

A Pipeline is composed of a set of data sources, preconditions, destinations, processing steps, and an operational schedule, all definied in a Pipeline Definition.

The definition specifies where the data comes from, what to do with it, and where to store it. You can create a Pipeline Definition in the AWS Management Console or externally, in text form.

Read more.


Amazon, Amazon AWS, Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services, Reduced Redundancy Storage, Storage

Yet Another Round of AWS Storage Price Cuts

Timed for announcement at AWS re:Invent, and nicely juxtaposed against this week’s similar storage price cuts by Google, Amazon has trimmed S3 and EBS prices.

They’ve reduced the price of Amazon S3 storage by 24-28% in the US Standard Region, and made similar price reductions in all nine regions worldwide  as well as reducing the price of Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS). Here are the new prices for Standard Storage in the US Standard Region:

Tier Old Price
(GB / month)		 New Price Change
First 1 TB / month $0.125 $0.095 24%
Next 49 TB $0.110 $0.080 27%
Next 450 TB $0.095 $0.070 26%
Next 500 TB $0.090 $0.065 28%
Next 4000 TB $0.080 $0.060 25%
Over 5000 TB $0.055 $0.055 No change

The new prices are listed on the Amazon S3 pricing announcement page. The new prices take effect on December 1, 2012 and will be applied automatically.

Amazon also reduced the per-gigabyte storage cost for EBS snapshots, again world-wide. Here are the new prices:

Region Old Price
(GB / month)		 New Price Change
US East (N. Virginia) $0.125 $0.095 24%
US West (Oregon) $0.125 $0.095 24%
US West (Northern California) $0.140 $0.105 25%
EU (Ireland) $0.125 $0.095 24%
Asia Pacific (Singapore) $0.125 $0.095 24%
Asia Pacific (Tokyo) $0.130 $0.100 23%
Asia Pacific (Sydney) $0.140 $0.105 25%
South America (Sao Paulo) $0.170 $0.130 24%


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Load Balancing

F5 Adds BIG-IP Solutions for Amazon Web Services

F5 Networks, Inc. today introduced a BIG-IP® virtual edition for AWS, which leverages F5’s complete portfolio of BIG-IP products for the AWS cloud. This announcement addresses organizations’ escalating demand to extend their data center and applications to AWS, maintaining enterprise-class reliability, scale, security, and performance. F5’s new AWS offering is also the featured attraction at the company’s booth (#506) at the AWS re: Invent conference at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, November 27–29.

“Enterprise customers have come to rely on BIG-IP’s strategic awareness that provides important information on how applications, resources, and users interact in order to successfully deliver applications,” said Siva Mandalam, Director of Product Management and Product Marketing, Cloud and Virtualization Solutions at F5. “Since BIG-IP for AWS will have equivalent features to physical BIG-IP devices, customers can apply the same level of control for their applications in AWS. With BIG-IP running in enterprise data centers and on AWS, customers can establish secure tunnels, burst to the cloud, and control the application from end to end.”

The BIG-IP solution for AWS includes options for traffic management, global server load balancing, application firewall, web application acceleration, and other advanced application delivery functions. With the new F5 offering:

  • F5 ADN services operate seamlessly in the cloud – BIG-IP
    virtual editions are being made available to a growing number of
    customers seeking to leverage cloud offerings. Availability for AWS
    expands on F5’s broad support for virtualized and cloud environments
    based on vSphere, Hyper-V, Xen, and KVM.
  • Enterprises can confidently take advantage of cloud resources –
    AWS customers can easily add F5’s market-leading availability,
    optimization, and security services to support cloud and hybrid
    deployment models.
  • IT teams are able to easily scale application environments –
    Production and lab versions of BIG-IP virtual editions for AWS enable
    IT teams to move smoothly from testing and development into production
    to support essential business applications. Customers can leverage
    their existing BIG-IP configuration and policies and apply them to
    BIG-IP running on AWS.

Supporting Facts and Quotes

  • F5 has the greatest market share for the advanced application delivery
    controller (ADC) market, deployed within the enterprise and service
    providers markets. According to Gartner, Inc., F5 has 59.1% market
    share based on Q2 2012 worldwide revenue.1
  • F5’s initial product offering will use the AWS “bring your own
    license” (BYOL) model, which allows customers to buy perpetual
    licenses from F5 and then apply these licenses to instances running in
    AWS. To evaluate or purchase BIG-IP software modules, customers should
    contact their local
    F5 sales office.

“As enterprises consider which applications to move to the cloud, many customers have asked for the same advanced application control they have in their local data centers,” said Terry Wise, Head of Worldwide Partner Ecosystem at Amazon Web Services. “The BIG-IP solution for AWS enables enterprises to quickly move complex applications to AWS while maintaining high levels of service at a lower overall cost.”

“Enterprises want the flexibility and scale of cloud services, yet they can struggle with application complexity and sufficient control,” said Rohit Mehra, VP of Network Infrastructure at IDC. “The challenge lies in easily expanding IT’s service portfolio with cloud and hybrid capabilities while keeping the applications fast, secure, and available. BIG-IP’s native availability inside Amazon Web Services allows enterprises to deeply embed a strategic awareness of how applications behave in cloud adoption scenarios.”

To learn more about how F5 enables organizations to realize the full potential of cloud computing, visit F5 (booth #506) at the AWS re: Invent conference. During the event, Siva Mandalam from F5 will deliver a presentation focused on “Optimizing Enterprise Applications and User Access in the Cloud” at 1 p.m. PT on Wednesday, November 28.

 

 


Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, Research

Cloud Service Deal Stats Show Rapid Growth, Tripling Since 2010

Our friends at Cloudreach asked today if we had seen the Information Services Group’s recent report that said global IT services deals with a Cloud computing element have tripled since 2010 The report, which looks at more than 24,000 contract records, shows the number of IT deals featuring Cloud have doubled from nine per cent in 2010 to 27 per cent in 2012.It also suggests that private Cloud does not fully realise Cloud’s promise, whereas public Cloud offers great economies of scale.

Pontus Noren, director and co-founder of Cloudreach, a Google Apps and Amazon Web Services reseller, also commented, “This report demonstrates how Cloud computing is living up to the hype – it is one of the only areas in IT that is rapidly growing. Cloud’s continual growth can only be good for the global economy because it allows them to concentrate on core business activities, leaving behind traditional IT set-ups that involve purchasing and managing equipment, which can prove expensive and time consuming.

“I see future growth being unstoppable for Cloud computing. I have heard suggestions that in five years time, 50 per cent of emails will be cloud-based, whereas today that figure is just two per cent. A twenty five fold increase in five years is just explosive.

“It is also encouraging to see that public Cloud is preferred over private, as it offers a much more scalable and flexible solution.Largely unlimited data storage and universal access makes public Cloud an ideal option for many businesses, such as those with offices at more than one location, a mobile workforce, limited IT resources or rapidly evolving IT requirements. Firms can increase or decrease capacity as they need, and only pay for what they use.”


Amazon AWS, Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services, amazonglacier, CloudBerry Lab, Glacier, Storage

CloudBerry Explorer Adds Amazon Glacier Support

CloudBerry Lab today released CloudBerry Explorer v.3.6, an application that allows users to manage files in Amazon S3 just as they would on their local computers.

In the new release CloudBerry S3 Explorer comes with support for Amazon Glacier, the recently introduced extremely low-cost storage.

From the new release CloudBerry S3 Explorer users can access and manage Amazon Glacier storage. Users can create vaults, move data to vaults and request to download them back to their computer. Users can create vaults in any of the available AWS regions.

Amazon Glacier is supported by both versions of CloudBerry Explorer: Freeware and PRO. Freeware version offers basic storage management capabilities such as browsing, creating, and deleting files, archives, vaults and uploading content from your PC to Glacier storage and vice versa. CloudBerry Explorer Freeware is available for download at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/free

PRO version offers some advanced features over Freeware version. It costs $39.99 per license and available for download at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/pro


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Eureka, Load Balancing, Multitier architecture, Netflix, Open Source, Tools

Netflix Open Sources its Eureka Load Balancing Tool for AWS

Netflix has moved its Eureka mid-tier load-balancing tool, formerly known as the Netflix Discovery Service, to open source.Eureka Architecture Diagram

From the Netflix announcement of the move:

Eureka is a REST based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers. We call this service, the Eureka Server. Eureka also comes with a java-based client component, the Eureka Client, which makes interactions with the service much easier. The client also has a built-in load balancer that does basic round-robin load balancing. At Netflix, a much more sophisticated load balancer wraps Eureka to provide weighted load balancing based on several factors like traffic, resource usage, error conditions etc to provide superior resiliency. We have previously referred to Eureka as the Netflix discovery service.


Amazon AWS, Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Cloud & IT Management, Cloud Storage, CloudBerry Lab, Microsoft Windows, Rackspace, Storage

Cloud Migrator Transfers Files between Amazon S3, Azure, Rackspace

CloudBerry Lab today announced the beta version of its new CloudBerry Cloud Migrator service that allows users to transfer files from one cloud storage to another. The service supports data migration between Amazon S3, Windows Azure Blob Storage, Rackspace Cloud Files and FTP servers.

Cloud Migrator service by CloudBerry Lab is a web application that lets users transfer their files across different cloud storage services without installing any additional software. All copy operations executes inside a cloud and managed through the web interface.

The service allows users to copy files between different locations or accounts within one cloud storage provider as well as between different. It’s a perfect solution to painlessly migrate data from one Amazon S3 bucket to another or from Amazon S3 to Azure Blob Storage or Rackspace Cloud Files and vice versa.

Finally, Cloud Migrator supports FTP so it can also be used to easily copy/move files from an FTP server to any of the supported cloud storage accounts with no need to implement complicated scripts.

In the Cloud Migrator future releases, the new low-cost Glacier storage by Amazon AWS will be added to the list of supported cloud storage accounts.

CloudBerry Cloud Migrator is available at http://sync.cloudberrylab.com/