The Weather Channel weathered its own storm of sorts when it experienced its highest traffic ever over the course of Hurricane Sandy.
The media company typically supports about 90 million Web and mobile users a month. During Sandy, that figure jumped to 450 million, nearly double its previous high for Web traffic.
Fortunately, The Weather Channel was prepared for the traffic surge, according to an article on NetworkWorld.com.
The company’s IT team had recently architected its real-time radar mapping. On typical days, the mapping system runs on about 20 instances, but during Sandy it scaled up to run on 175 nodes.
It’s a classic use-case for the cloud: Variable and unpredictable peak demand for Web services is outsourced to a public cloud provider. It would have required a major investment to spin up a system across the company’s on-premise and colocation environments to support the traffic load it experienced when Sandy ripped up the Eastern Seaboard, and then it would have likely gone mostly unused during other times. The alternative would have been not to have the compute horsepower to serve all the visitors to The Weather Channel’s platforms.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: One-Stop Shop for Cloud Computing
“We are a SaaS tool that helps engineers, developers, IT operators, etc., manage and monitor the performance of the production, web, mobile, and cloud applications,” noted Bill Hodak, Director of Product Marketing at New Relic, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Connecting Clouds as Easy as 1-2-3
Hybrid cloud models continue to outpace pure-public (and pure-private) models for most organizations. There’s value in being able to leverage the cloud for a variety of reasons from periodic, expanding compute resources to dev and test environments. Whatever the reason, hybrid models are here to stay.
One of the difficulties experienced in executing on such models, however, is connecting them to the corporate cloud or data center. Sure, the model is simple: simply deploy resources in the public cloud and leverage them as expandable compute from the private cloud/data center. But to do that requires a way to leverage them. You need to connect them together in such a way as to make those externally deployed resources appear to be part of the data center.
That’s where cloud bridges come in handy. Cloud bridges, as we’ve previously defined, integrate environments at the network layer – extending the operational domain into remote environments such as public cloud. Bridges are the “connective tissue” that is the basis for a hybrid cloud.
SYS-CON Announces 1st International Software Defined Networking Conference
SYS-CON Events announced today that the 1st International Software Defined Networking Conference will take place June 10-13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Software Defined Networking Conference is co-located with 12th Cloud Expo and 3rd Big Data Expo.
According to a recent report by Deloitte Consulting, firms using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can save,up to 50% on their networking bills. Since those bills currently add up to about 10-15% of IT budgets, that’s a huge amount of cost driven out of the business. That makes it very much the right new technology at the right time.
Put simply, SDN is the use of software to create networks that can be reconfigured quickly and centrally without the need for any costly or time-consuming adjustment of individual routers and switches.
More End-of-Year Predicting: 7 ‘Half-Baked Ideas’ on Where Cloud Will Take Us in 2013 and Beyond
As we mentioned earlier, there are a lot of people publishing lists of this and that for the year we’re about done with, and predicting what’s to come in 2013. As a followup to his first such list, Joe McKendrick at Forbes now offers us “7 ‘Half-Baked Ideas’ on Where Cloud Will Take Us in 2013 and Beyond“. My favorite: “Cloud increasingly recognized as a “green” enabler“. I’ve never bought into the notion that it’s not more energy efficient to depend on the massive scale that cloud data centers represent. Less travel, more energy-lean devices (mobile in particular), less built environment for offices, and fewer underutilized, energy-sucking servers sitting in small offices and departments.
Read the whole list and see which you think are more than “half-baked”.
That Time of the Year: Everyone Has a List and Predictions
It’s getting to be the time of year when the “lists of” come out, recalling the best (or worst, depending) of this and that, usually followed by pundit predictions for the coming year. Cloud Computing is no different so this particular form of holiday cheer is starting to appear. We’ll try to find and point to the ones worth spending some time with.
First up: Joe McKendrick at Forbes on “7 Predictions for Cloud Computing in 2013 that Make Perfect Sense“. Notice we’re no longer shackled to the nice round number 10. He found 7 so what’s what he offered us. They range from “More hosted private clouds” to “Cloud as a defining term fades“. I think maybe the most intriguing one was “Cloud and mobile becoming one“.
Read the post for the full list and all his reasoning and details.
Private Cloud… Really?
Surveys report that companies fear the Public Cloud. Sure enough there’s much to fear. Those of us who follow the media know how in a movie like Caddyshack even at a fancy private golf club an innocent little candy bar can result in a stampede of people desperate to exit the pool and a punch line depicting Bill Murray all decked out in a Hazmat suit. So if something like that can happen in a private club pool, imagine where a public pool event might lead? Fukushima comes to mind. Oh, wait, I’m sorry. Tokyo Electric was a Private company. Bad example.
Open SDN Reference Architecture for Cloud Developers
“Cloud service providers are drawn to Software Defined Networking for its technological, operational, and business benefits,” said Brad Casemore, Research Director, Data Center Networks at IDC, as Pica8 Inc. recently announced the industry’s first open SDN reference architecture.
“In offering integrated SDN components, Pica8 and other vendors are trying to make it easier for cloud providers to quickly test, validate, and deploy SDN for cloud-service delivery,” Casemore continued.
SYS-CON Launches SDN Journal
SYS-CON Media has launched SDN Journal on Ulitzer.com featuring over 300 original articles, news stories, features, and blog entries. Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to networking in which control is decoupled from hardware and given to a software application called a controller. In a software-defined network, a network administrator can shape traffic from a centralized control console without having to touch individual switches.
SDN Journal premier issue authors include Lori MacVittie, Bob Gourley, Dan MacVittie, Greg Schulz, Patrick Kerpan, Larry Carvalho, Maureen O’Gara, Dana Gardner, Adrian Bridgwater, BrianGracely, Brandon Hoff, Kapil Raval, Patrick Burke, Greg Ness, Keith Mayer, Bill Roth, and Gregor Petri.
Sound Off: IPSec versus SSL for Cloud Bridging
I asked this on Twitter as a general question after reviewing the results in the Completely Unscientific Hybrid Cloud Survey Results from Gartner DC 2012 and continued to wonder why IPSec VPN was specifically noted but SSL VPN was not. Certainly a VPN of some kind is a requirement, no argument there, but why IPSec? Why not SSL? Is there some bias against SSL or is it perhaps just that the presenter at the conference failed to offer it as an option?
Then I thought this is just one of many questions I’d like to hear more opinions on. Blogs are good for asking questions. Blogs are good at aggregating answers and opinions in one place. By golly, a blog is a good place to ask this question too!