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12 Public Cloud Benefits and Features You Should Know

September 17, 2015 by 5 Comments

20150311_114235The last few years I spent a quite a bit of time talking about public clouds. When I published my cloud computing book, public clouds were mostly still believed to be a hype. Availability, security, persistence of data, and much much more was questioned.

Today only few IT professionals are stuck with this old school thinking. The major public clouds are a superset of what is provided by a classical data centers.

What features would you check for when looking at a potential cloud provider? Does your data center offer every feature and service listed below?

  1. All IT in the cloud is software. There is an API for everything. The whole data center is a set of APIs. This includes load balancers, servers, storage, databases, application servers, API gateways, firewalls, storage, etc.
  2. Short term capacity is very cheap.
  3. Since capacity is cheap, typically you don’t update or redeploy in the cloud, instead you spin up new immutable servers.
  4. Changing your hardware costs nothing. If you find out or assume that your application will run better on high-CPU instances instead of high-memory instances you can simply swap.
  5. Availability comes with no extra cost. You can place two instances in two fully redundant data centers for the same cost as placing two instances in the same data center.
  6. Also parallelism comes with no extra cost. Using 1000 instances for 1h costs as much as using 1 instance for 1000 hours. You’ve got a massively parallel supercomputer at your hands.
  7. You save the time for capacity planning since capacity is available on demand.
  8. Capacity planning still makes sense for predicting future costs.
  9. Procurement happens within seconds or minutes.
  10. You don’t pay for unused resources. Scaling down reduces your costs.
  11. You can put IT resources close to the customer location where they are needed since the public cloud will be globally available.
  12. Cost for resources in the cloud used to drop by around 30% every year. Long term projects with constant resource usage will cost less every year.

You care to disagree?

Filed Under: oracle Tagged With: , , , ,

Amazon / Oracle Cloud Workshops: Mission Completed

July 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I am just back from a successful, long and intensive trip to Australia. If you are waiting for a reply to an email there is a good chance you will get it soon now.

I delivered an  Amazon and Oracle public cloud workshop series on behalf of AUSOUG, based on my cloud computing book: 6 cities, 6 workshops of 4 h each, almost 200 attendees, hands-on, live development in the cloud (WebLogic with 61 GB heap deployed live on 3 continents, cloud storage, auto scaling, transformation of a classical Java EE app in the cloud), 16 flights (including a 1 week trip to the outback, flying 2,5 h north of Perth and driving 2200 km for shooting the cover image for my upcoming WebLogic 12c: Advanced Recipes book).

Check out the flattering reviews for the event.

 

 

thanks to everybody who attended!

 

Filed Under: amazon, CloudComputing, oracle Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 Autoscaling

June 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

 

How many blog posts have you read that were written on a ferry? Well this is post makes it one more. Live from famous Manly ferry since I am currently offering a number of Amazon and Oracle Cloud Computing Workshops in Australia.

Elasticity is a key criteria for cloud computing. Autoscaling is automated elasticity. Interesting enough is widely unknown how this will be implemented on the Oracle Public Cloud for the Java Service.

Autoscaling on AWS can only be configured with lengthy commands from the command line but not from the web cased AWS console. Getting all the parameters right can be tricky, so here is one of the easiest examples and a hands-on screen cast using it:

 

 


as-create-launch-config surfLaunch --region ap-southeast-1 --key access --image-id ami-b83374ea --instance-type t1.micro
as-create-auto-scaling-group surfScale --launch-configuration surfLaunch --region ap-southeast-1 -availability-zones ap-southeast-1a,ap-southeast-1b --min-size 2 --max-size 4
as-describe-auto-scaling-groups --headers --region ap-southeast-1

as-describe-auto-scaling-instances --headers --region ap-southeast-1
as-put-scaling-policy ScaleDown -auto-scaling-group surfScale --adjustment=-1 --type ChangeInCapacity --region ap-southeast-1
as-put-scaling-policy ScaleUp -auto-scaling-group surfScale --adjustment=+1 --type ChangeInCapacity --region ap-southeast-1

 

as-execute-policy ScaleUp --auto-scaling-group surfScale --region ap-southeast-1

as-describe-scaling-activities -g surfScale --region ap-southeast-1 --show-long

 

as-execute-policy ScaleUp --auto-scaling-group surfScale --region ap-southeast-1

 

mon-put-metric-alarm HighCPUAlarm --comparison-operator GreaterThanThreshold --evaluation-periods 1 --metric-name CPUUtilization --namespace "AWS/EC2" --period 600 --statistic Average --threshold 80 --alarm-actions "XXX" --dimensions "AutoScalingGroupName=surfScale" --region ap-southeast-1

 

mon-put-metric-alarm LowCPUAlarm --comparison-operator LessThanThreshold --evaluation-periods 1 --metric-name CPUUtilization --namespace "AWS/EC2" --period 600 --statistic Average --threshold 20 --alarm-actions "XXX" --dimensions "AutoScalingGroupName=surfScale" --region ap-southeast-1

 

REMOVE ALL:

as-update-auto-scaling-group surfScale --min-size 0 --max-size 0 --region ap-southeast-1
as-delete-auto-scaling-group surfScale --region ap-southeast-1

as-delete-launch-config surfLaunch --region ap-southeast-1

 

The comments section is open now for your suggestions how this will be done with the Oracle Public Cloud.

Filed Under: amazon Tagged With: , , ,

AWS Cloud: Use Same Access Key in Different Regions (or in All Regions)

May 25, 2012 by 1 Comment

In the Amazon cloud you require an access key to connect to your instances. This key is can be generated when you create your first instance. It’s then downloaded to your client and you specify it when connecting to the instance. Typically you need one key per AWS region.

However, you can use the same key also for different or all regions. You have to connect to a running instance and then copy it from the instance’s authorized_key file under .ssh/and import it as a key pair in the new region as shown in the following video.

Filed Under: amazon Tagged With: , , ,

Artikel: Oracle WebLogic Server und Fusion Middleware in der Cloud

October 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

German only. Heute exklusiv auf deutsch ein Artikel den ich für das DOAG Magazin im Früjahr 2011 geschrieben habe:
Download: Oracle Fusion Middleware und WebLogic Server in der Cloud (PDF)

  • Cloud Dienste oder Fusion Middleware Features?
  • Was zeichnet eine echte Cloud aus?
  • Architektur Blueprint für die AWS Cloud und Java EE Anwendungen.

Teile des Artikels sowie zahlreiche Grafiken sind aus meinem “Middleware and Cloud Computing” entommen. Viel Spaß beim Lesen!

 

large tornado over the road (3D rendring)

Filed Under: oracle, publishing Tagged With: , , , , ,
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