Author: joe0

The future of cloud computing relative to becoming a monopoly

In early days of Cloud computing, media frequently probed and disputed the viability of cloud computing. And not so long ago, in 2009, even the most famous futurists were skeptical. Jamais Cascio, who listed as one of the 2009 Top 100 Global Thinkers said, “I have to admit it: I’m not a huge fan of the cloud computing concept.”(Fast Company, 2009). However, not even a decade later, the positive impact of cloud computing can no longer be disputed. With that, a new concern comes to view, the likelihood of Cloud computing becoming a monopolized technology. This article is a brief look at the current landscape of cloud computing relative to becoming a monopoly. [Read more…]

SaaS Emailing – Short review of SendGrid Email Service

In 2015, the worldwide SaaS market was valued at approximately US $80 billion. According to Forbes magazine, “by 2020, it will grow by estimated 69% to become over $130-billion-dollar industry” (Forbes.com, 2017). The incredibly fast rate at which SaaS adoption grows is primarily the result of a very positive attitude towards ‘software as a service’ model among businesses of all sizes. The following post introduces one of such SaaS technologies, called ‘SendGrid Email.’ [Read more…]

The State of CrowdSourcing in Canada

The CrowdSourcing model allows the internet masses to partake in any profit or non-profit idea, such as solving problems (crowdsolving), finding lost items (crowdsourcing), or become a source of funds to startup businesses (crowdfunding). The following short ‘work-in-progress’ article looks at the history and growth of crowdsourcing and assesses the value of crowdsourcing in Canada. [Read more…]

Shell script to automatically remove old AWS Lightsail snapshots (and retain a specific number of backups)

In the first post, I have explained how to schedule nightly backups of Amazon Lightsail Instance by leveraging AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). In this post, I’ll show you how to create a bash file that can be scheduled to remove old AWS Lightsail snapshots and retain only a specific number of snapshots in your account.

[Read more…]

Cloud Computing – Cost vs. Agility (The economic and business benefits of using the cloud)

The following post talks about the current trend of transitioning to cloud infrastructures, in which majority of businesses favor agility offered by the cloud service solutions instead of true costs benefits associated with moving to the cloud. Peter Drucker, an educator, and management consultant once stated: “Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you do not have enough of it, you are out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you are really missing something.” (AZQuotes, 2017).
[Read more…]

Cloud-based Application Design for Availability and Reliability

According to Amazon’s guide to Cloud Best Practices (2017), “If you design for failure, nothing will fail.”. The recommendation given is to “Be a pessimist when designing architectures in the cloud; assume things will fail. In other words, always design, implement and deploy for automated recovery from failure.”

Jinesh Varia, Lead Technology Evangelist at Amazon AWS, took it further by specifying a total of 12 design patterns (best practices) that all businesses should consider when designing highly available and reliable cloud applications (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Building Powerful Web Applications in the AWS Cloud (Varia, 2011). [Read more…]

Open Cloud Management Platforms: Apache CloudStack & HP Helion Eucalyptus

Two of the most popular cloud management platforms from the open-source space are OpenStack and OpenNebula. Both of them provide an open source scalable software platform that allows cloud service vendors and enterprises to provision and orchestrate large deployments of virtual machines, as well as manage and control networking, processing and storage resources in a data center. Both also offer a web based dashboard, as well as command line and API services to better control all of the interrelated components, in IaaS private cloud. However, even though OpenStack and OpenNebula are certainly among the most recognized open source cloud management platforms, in this post I introduce two other CMPs that in my opinion deserve to be explored, namely the CloudStack and Eucalyptus open cloud management platforms.  [Read more…]