Tag Archives: AWS

Hands On With EC2 and Microsoft Windows Server

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Get Some Free Hands-on with EC2 and Server 2012

This video provides some very good information on how to work with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.  It does have a good bit of Amazon propaganda at the beginning, but there is value for those who are unfamiliar with the platform.  You’ll learn about much of the EC2 functionality provided for Windows based products.  There are three videos in the series.  The first gives you an overview of the EC2 service.  The second provides a demo of provisioning a Windows Server using the EC2 platform.  Then the final video offers the viewer the opportunity to get some hands-on with EC2 by deploying a  Windows Server within Amazon Web Services (AWS).  The series is really not for beginners, but with some research a novice techie could perform the hands-on lab.  The video in this post is the second in the series.  To gain access to the lab, you’ll need to check the Amazon events site to see when the next training will be held.

Click here to access the Hands-on-Lab: Windows on AWS  New Tab training.

You’ll be able to register for the next scheduled hands-on with EC2 lab from this page.  If you have any question feel free to contact us!

Utilizing the Amazon Web Services API

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Amazon Web Services API – Easier To Use Than Expected

I found that many readers want to acquire information on PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings.  Admittedly, I too want to get the inside scoop.  While grovelling for info on Amazon Web Services, I ran into Michael Wittag’s article on Cloud Zone about using the AWS API to get things done.  This article was very straight forward and to the point.  It was an informative post as well.  It outlines four tools used to perform functions on AWS:  Web Management Console, Command Line Interface (CLI), Software Development Kits (SDKs), and Blueprints.  The Web Management Console is usually the first tool any AWS customer will work with.  The tool is very easy to use.  However, I feel that you’ll need to have a solid knowledge of datacenter concepts before you dive in.  Moving to the command line would be a normal progressing if you wanted to start automating tasks in your AWS environment.  With automation comes different methods to accomplish your tasks.  Software Development Kits will provide the avenue for creating scripts.  You would be surprised how many different software SDKs you can actually use to interact with the Amazon Web Services API.  Michael lists nine different supported SDKs that developers and administrators can use.  Lastly Blueprints can also be used to manage your environment or multiple environments.  Now here is where the excitement begins.  With Blueprints, you can automate the creation of systems, services and infrastructure in the cloud.  AWS also has Blueprints to help you with learning more about and using Lambda.  Check out the article and comment with your thoughts.  Also don’t overlook the additional resources at the end of this post.

 

Interacting With AWS to Turn System Diagrams Into Reality – DZone Cloud

The Cloud Zone is brought to you in partnership with Iron.io. Discover how Microservices have transformed the way developers are building and deploying applications in the era of modern cloud infrastructure. Generally speaking you can host any application on AWS. If you interact with AWS, you will always make calls to the API.

 

Additional resources to check out on this subject:

Gartner 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service

Amazon Web Services in Action

The Essentials of Digital Innovation

Amazon Web Services Lambda

The Benefits Of Cloud Services Adoption

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How Can Cloud Services Adoption Benefit Your Business?

Cloud based services are available in various forms and at different levels.  Just about anyone from a home consumer all the way up to a multinational corporation can purchase, or consume for free, cloud services.  But just like anything else, why should anyone use cloud services?  Is all the hype really substantive?  I would like to propose that cloud based services provide a benefit that is sometimes difficult to recognize.  I want to share with you exactly how businesses can benefit from cloud services adoption.

There are particular aspects of operating a business that that are vital to the revenue cycle. One of the them is uptime. Uptime is measured by the amount of time a businesses systems are accessible to customers. If your customers can’t access your systems to purchase goods or services, your business can’t make money. Cloud services can help to eliminate the negative impact downtime can have to your sales by increasing the number of available zones your business systems can operate in. Most cloud service vendors have zones across the world. This helps to provide constant availability. Which in turn, increases uptime.  How much would you be willing to pay for constant availability? More importantly, how much would it cost you to ensure that kind of availability for your business?

Another aspect of business operations that is a direct benefit of cloud services adoption is disaster recovery (DR).  A cloud service implementation could be used as part of an overall DR plan.  This plan could couple with a Continuity of Operations (COOP) plan.  Think of how have deploying some, or all of your IT infrastructure with a cloud service provider could solidify one or both of these plans.  Based on your business needs and decisions made concerning either your COOP or DR plan, a cloud based service could be a definite base camp.  Additionally,  think of how these types of business requirements would be met by implementing a comprehensive cloud strategy for you IT infrastructure.  How would you plan for a disaster or an outage that affects you continuity if your services already running in different parts of the world?  How much is having a COOP and DR plan that could literally be bullet proof worth to you?

I don’t want to forget the about the issue of security since it’s such a hot topic.  However, I think I’ll save it for a later post.  The fact is, many companies have there data and services with cloud service providers.  Based on my use of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services, security starts with the way you configure your accessible assets.  A complete understanding of your providers security model is the first goal to accomplish.  Then you can go from there.

Take some time to muddle over these ideas on cloud services adoption and let me know what you think.