NoSQL solutions are all the buzz these days. Today’s dataset volumes often exceed what a relational database can consume and process in a timely manner causing companies to turn to NoSQL solutions. The challenge with NoSQL databases is that they can be complex to manage and maintain and only a limited number of people have experience working with them in a production environment. Redis is a very popular key value store database that many... Read More
Vendor Spotlight: Cloud Broker vendor Jamcracker
Jamcracker was founded back in 1999 when ASPs (Application Service Providers) where popular. At that time they were a managed service provider who served up various software solutions to enterprises from a central location. Enterprises who did not want to host and manage various software packages would look to Jamcracker to aggregate and provide those services for them. Fast forward to the current decade and ASPs have been replaced with SaaS,... Read More
RESTful Services: The key to cloud computing
As companies start embracing cloud computing, architects and developers must start thinking differently to take full advantage of what the cloud has to offer. Cloud computing promises agility, high scalability, and speed to market. In order to reap those benefits, a deep understanding of distributed systems, RESTful services, and ACID vs BASE transactions is critical. In this post I’ll take my best shot at explaining how to do REST right... Read More
Disaster recovery strategies in the cloud
Cloud computing allows us to build systems faster and cheaper than ever before. There are countless stories of companies building solutions that were unfeasible and practically impossible in the old days of purchasing servers and managing datacenters. But don’t be fooled, there are no silver bullets. When it comes to uptime and resiliency it still comes down to good old architecture and planning. This post will focus on different... Read More
7 lessons learned from an early adopter of the cloud
Cloud computing has come a long way since I first swiped a credit card on AWS in 2008 and started building a platform from scratch in the cloud. Back then cloud services were not mature and many of today’s SaaS and PaaS solutions that assist in building cloud based solutions did not exist. Back in 2008 we built everything from scratch and there were few success stories to learn from. Long story short, we made a ton of mistakes and learned... Read More
Building a cloud service? Here are some things to consider.
There are a lot of things to consider when shifting from on-premise software products to cloud based services. Here is a short summarized list of topics to consider when building SaaS or PaaS based solutions in the cloud. It is not a complete list. My goal is to provide a list of “areas of concern” as guidance. Companies looking to build cloud services should take a deep dive into each area. Areas of Concern Security Research... Read More
SLAs and compliance in the cloud
SLAs for an application or service built in the cloud is the combination of: SLAs from the cloud vendors (ex: AWS, Azure, Heroku, etc.) SLAs from the apps built on top of the cloud vendors Cloud Vendor SLAs and compliance I analyzed the SLAs of some of the top cloud service providers and was surprised about what I found. For most well established IaaS and PaaS providers, SLAs ranged from 99.9% to 100%. One major PaaS solution, Heroku, does not... Read More
Design Strategies for Cloud Computing
Whether building a startup from the ground up or helping a fortune 100 company, I typically break down cloud design into a number of categories. I have written several blog posts about these different categories and felt it would be helpful to consolidate them all on a single blog post. Many of these posts are previews into individual chapters from my book that will be released near the end of 2013. If there are categories you want me to write... Read More
Monitoring strategies in the cloud
I wrote in a previous post called Cloud computing’s impact on operating models how the elastic cloud model requires more engineering than the package and ship software model. The elastic cloud model also requires a more advanced monitoring strategy since the cloud service provider is providing a real-time 24×7 autoscaling solution to its customers. With shipped software, the customer is responsible for monitoring the infrastructure and... Read More
State of Open Stack
I am simply sharing this presentation about Open Stack by Randy Bias just in case any of my readers have not seen it. There is not much to add since Randy covers it all in the slides. The only thing I’ll say is if you are going private cloud and you are not thinking Open Stack, you might want to look at some of the numbers in this presentation. State of the Stack April 2013 from Cloudscaling, Inc. Thanks to Randy for this great wealth... Read More
