This week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) held its second annual re:Invent conference. For the past two days, Amazon has been announcing a wide variety of feature enhancements to existing services as well as publicizing new services. Even before these announcements, AWS was so far ahead of their competition in features, customers, and rate of innovation that comparing competitors’ offerings to AWS was almost comical.
TVP Category Archives
Network Virtualization: Not Just for the Service Provider
Many network virtualization products appear to be aimed at the top 10,000 customers worldwide, accounting for their price as well as their published product direction. While this is a limited and myopic view, many claim it is for the best, their reason being that network virtualization is only really needed by the very large networks. The more I think about this approach, the more I believe it is incorrect. Let us be frank here. Most networking today, within many different organizational sizes, is a hodgepodge of technologies designed to solve the same problem(s) over and over: how to get data quickly from point A to point B with minimum disruption to service.
Marketing Overload Has Taken Over
There has been tremendous growth in the cloud computing space, but that growth seems be in the shadows of a much larger marketing machine that is currently pushing the message of the cloud to the masses. Have we gotten to the point where marketing overload has taken over? Does this end up confusing the average non-technical person regarding what the cloud really is and what it really does?
PaaSLane: Ensure Your Software Will Run on AWS
Cloud Technology Partners has just released its new PaaSLane for AWS, a software solution that analyses codebases and pinpoints issues that would likely cause problems if the code were to be deployed to Amazon Web Services or other elastic environments.
Talking Immutable Infrastructure with Codeship
Yesterday I had a chat with the folks at Codeship, a continuous integration and continuous deployment platform. The topic of immutable infrastructure came up and was intriguing to me, so I thought I would write about it. So what is immutable infrastructure? The concept of immutable infrastructure is to never change your existing production servers. Instead, build new automated servers and destroy the old. This concept falls in line with the “fail forward” belief system of many modern-day DevOps evangelists who believe that tweaking servers or rolling back code from servers in highly distributed systems is too risky and causes more problems than it is worth.
Windows Azure Blob Hard Drive Import and Export
Microsoft seems to be in the news lately, not for anything new and groundbreaking, but for something it needed to do to stay competitive with other cloud services. First, as I wrote in a post last week, Microsoft has taken the Windows Azure HDInsight Hadoop service to general availability, and now Microsoft is offering its Azure customers the ability to import to and export from Azure using hard disks offline.