Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Redhat Cloud Forms takes a bite into Cloud and Configuration Management

The latest Cloud Forms from Redhat targets the easy use of AWS Cloud Formation and OpenStack Heat templates import, customization, creation, deployment.

It offers a service catalog of Cloud resources setups including load balancers, servers and more.

It also makes it easier to customize your Cloud templates by offering forms and variables per the templates you pick.

Then it triggers Ansible Tower for in depth deployment and configuration management of your instances.

The Cloud Management portal shows you your Cloud components, instances, operating systems and applications including general Linux and Windows as well.

Sounds perfect?

Maybe it sounds like an enterprise vendor trying to grab it all..and maybe this time this vendor actually makes it..

I still would like to see TerraForm there as well..

Anyway there’s the video

Crazy Idea: Duolc, StretchOS and what Gazzilion Apps Really want [!OpenStack]

Yes, I am a DevOps, Big Data, Security kind of guy and I use Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and OpenStack, as well as other smaller players. But I like to take a new diverse, contrarian look at stuff the Cloud community seem to have kind of pre-determined agreement.

I am sitting at the OpenStack conference and learning about the cool news ways it can give you an edge. I believe that Open Source and OpenStack is at the heart of getting an edge. You need mature, fully supported vendor based platforms. But you also need at some points to move fast, faster, fastest. At that edge point Open Source and Open Stack are the tools you want to use.Those “free” toys, do have a cost spent in learning curves, education, cultural change and efforts to workaround cases of immaturity. When they mature, they join your base tool set as other new roughly edged opportunities arise.

However, looking at Cloud platforms, it is clear what they ask for are applications that can be spread across many computing nodes. Most of the current applications enterprises use are not set for the cloud.

While everyone in the Cloud Community is expecting the Enterprise to re-write or convert their applications to the cloud, Enterprises naturally just want the job done.

What the “Legacy” applications want is “Duolc” (“Cloud” spelled in reverse) deployed on “StretchOS”.

So “StretchOS“, a term I just made up, should be able to group a bunch of resources and make it so it behaves as a unified single operating system running on a single computer. The CPU, Memory, Disk and Network resources will be highly available and processes will be able to be served on any of the computing resources.

I am not aware of someone developing something such as “StretchOS”, but looking at the vast amount of applications that could immediately and effortlessly benefit of such a solution should attract a close look of entrepreneurs. This could be a cross-gap solution until most of the apps become cloud-enabled.

Now, as I dumped this crazy concept on your desk, I can go back to my Cloud deployments..

Microsoft’s Cloud Platform System (CPS) vs. the World (VMware EVO:Rails and Amazon)

More bigs news from Microsoft – Microsoft’s Cloud Platform System (CPS) –  (I call it Azure Cloud “Private Edition”) –  a joint announcement from Microsoft and Dell, which offers a bundle including Dell Racks with expandble computing, storage and networking, running a private Azure cloud (on premise) that should look and work the same as Microsoft’s public Azure offering.

You can create multiple tenants to represent different groups, organizations or sub-companies and lauch Windows and Linux instances. You can expand the hardware to support hundreds or thousands of VMs.

In continuation for its future Docker based Windows containers support for Windows Server and Azure, it looks like Microsoft is on a roll. This time, looks like its Cloud Platform System offering goes head to head with VMware’s EVO:Rail offering, announced just few weeks ago in the VMware World 2014 conference. This is also an in-direct competition with Amazon’s offerings, which could have a hit-run with customers massively using Microsoft’s technologies.

This might also be a nice fresh innovative-direction for Dell, and certainly shows it is working hard to create new interesting offertings, which makes you wonder, what else is coming next.

Now its time to look deeper into the new system, maybe try and download the Windows Azure Pack and see how it can be used on your current hardware

What do you think?

Amazon Cloud Drive is out in the wild (Details and Risks)

Amazon has finally released its Dropbox / Google Drive / SkyDrive “killer”

Listen to this postClick here to listen to this post: 

It lets you save files to Amazon storage systems right on your Windows or Mac desktop, through a local folder that gets synced automatically.

Few notes:

  1. The first 5GB of storage are free, and then you start paying.
  2. It is separate from the usual Amazon S3 storage.
  3. No sharing through links exists yet, but I expect it will be added in the future
  4. Check the terms and conditions of use…looks like they allow Amazon disclose what you put there rather easily…

Another question that becomes prevalent is “How should we address the variety of cloud storage systems running all on our desktops?”

  1. Stick to just one? (That’s my choice for now…)
  2. Split across several?
  3. Use Apps that consolidate all Cloud Drives into a single unit and get into the same risks which RAID 0 has (one disk is gone, and our data is a mess…)

All this tightly coupled web accessible, cloud based, desktop integrated content highlights a relevant security risk factor: Attacks which could penetrate through one end (say through web URL exploitation tactics) and end up much easier in the other side (desktop or other user’s desktops).

Amazon Cloud Drive is a 61.8MB download (!) and you can get it right here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000796931

Will you use Amazon Cloud Drive? How?

Yet another cloud provider spill over (Azure) and the Missing Cloud Sync Feature


This Friday February 22 at 12:44 PM PST, Microsoft reported a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS traffic due to an expired SSL certificate. They added “Customers may experience intermittent failures during this period. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.”

This is yet another collapse of a major cloud provider, IT Professionals and businesses are becoming dependent on.

While each cloud provider has its own high availability solutions, and dedicated staff to assist resolve issues, as quickly as possible, it is becoming more aparent, that major downtime is bound to happen to all of them.

Yet, it seems everyone is ignoring the “pink elephant” roaming across our delicate glass data center.

If massive cloud provider downtime is bound to happen – what is the killer app?

I’d say its the one that continously syncs your data and apps across more than one cloud provider, so you can switch from one cloud provider to the other, based on their availability.

Call it ADN (CDN = Content Delivery Network, and ADN would be Application Delivery Network).

Do you agree?

Who should be the provider of ADN then?