Setting domain wide signatures for google mail

Using Google Apps Script and Google docs

While Google mail’s compliance footers are great for legal compliance, Google currently don’t offer an easy way to set signatures for all your users that are based on user specific variables. I had a quick look at the existing offerings but I also noticed that due to the openness of Google’s APIs it's easy to pull data from a Google spreadsheet and push out the signatures to users across a domain. Giving us:

• Centrally managed user data in a simple spreadsheet 
• A legal compliance footer enforced on all outbound emails 
• A quickly customisable signature with contact details that can be edited/updated by users (no more waiting for IT to update your contact details) 

As Google Apps Script doesn't connect to the Google email settings API directly, this also makes use of Google Apps Script's support of oauth to securely authenticate from Google Apps Script to the Google email settings API. This post includes setup instructions and an overview of how it works, if you just want the code feel free to skip to the end...

The Cloud = High Performance Computing

The cloud is a perfectly fitting platform for solving many high-performance computational problems. It may be actually cheaper and may offer faster return of results than traditional clusters, for both occasional tasks and periodic use.

For a number of years, science and analytics users have been using clusters for high-performance computing in areas such as bioinformatics, climate science, financial market predictions, data mining, finite element modelling etc. Companies working with vast amounts of data, such as Google, Yahoo! and Facebook, use vast dedicated clusters to crawl, index and search websites.

Dedicated Company Clusters.  

Often a company will own it’s own dedicated cluster for high-performance computations. The utilisation will likely be below 100% most of the time as the cluster needs to be scaled for peak demand, e.g. overnight analyses. The cluster will likely rapidly become business-critical, and it may become difficult or prohibitive to schedule longer maintenance shutdowns: hence the cluster may become running on outdated software. If the cluster has been growing in ad-hoc fashion from very small, there will occur a critical point, when any further growth requires disruptive hardware infrastructure upgrade and software re-configuration or upgrade i.e. a long shutdown. This may actually not be an option or carry an unacceptable risk.

Shared institutional clusters

In the case of a shared cluster (such as UK’s HECToR) the end users will likely face availability challenges:

• There may not be enough task slots in the job pool for “surge” needs
• Job queues may cause the job to wait for a few days

• Often departments will need to watch monthly cluster utilisation quotas or face temporary black-listing for the job pool

Clusters Are Finite and Don’t Grow On Demand
Given the exponential nature of growth of data that we process, our needs (e.g. an experiment in Next Generation Sequencing) may simply outgrow the pace with which the clusters keep pace.

The Cloud Alternative
For those who feel constrained by the above problems, Amazon Web Services offer a viable HPC alternative:

• AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) brings on-demand instances
• The recently (late 2010) introduced AWS Cluster Compute Instances are high-performance instances running inside a high-speed, low-latency sub-network
• For loosely coupled, easily parallelised problems, AWS Elastic Map Reduce is the offering of Hadoop (version 0.20.2), Hive and Pig as a service (well integrated into the rest of AWS stack such as the S3 storage).
• For tightly coupled problems, Message Passing Interface, OpenMP and similar technologies will benefit from fast network
• For analysis requiring a central, clustered, database, MySQL is offered as a service called AWS Relational Database Service (RDS), with Oracle DB announced as next

The Downside of The Cloud Approach: The Data Localisation Challenge (& Solutions). The fact that customer’s data (potentially in vast amounts) need to get to AWS over public Internet, is a limiting factor. Often the customer’s own network may be the actual bottleneck. There are 2 considerations to make:

• Many NP-complete problems are actually above the rule-of-thumb break-even point for moving data over slow link vs. available CPU power (1 byte / 100,000 CPU cycles)
• Often the actual “big data” are the reference datasets that are mostly static (e.g. in bioinformatics, reference genomes). AWS contains a number of public datasets already. For others, it may make sense to send the first batch of data for upload to AWS on a physical medium by post, although later only apply incremental changes.

Martin Kochan
Cloud Developer
Cloudreach

Cloudreach Vs Google Vs Amazon Web Services

On the track of course!

Here's what happened when the Cloudreach team and a few budding racers from Google and Amazon met on the racing circuit.

Cloudreach Technical Director and Co-Founder, James Monico won everything. We all suspect he'd been having secret lessons in the run up to it. We couldn't see him for dust....or should that be a cloud? Nevermind, that was a bad joke.

The Cloudreach Annual Nora Batty Convention

There were no losers...apart from those who didn't win!

Cloud Computing - The New Rock and Roll

So a new year has begun and its out with the old and in with the new. Well for the most part. It was during my post-Christmas clean-up yesterday that I found myself furtively slipping X-Factor’s latest offering into the lonely depths of my bottom CD drawer. Another act, another fad. Yet, they are called today’s Rockstars. Surely, such a term should be saved for the Bowies and REMs of this world, demonstrating resilience and evolution through the years, sticking it out when the going was tough and long before the recognition, hype and groupies set it? Well at least there is a rightful new chart-topper in the world of Business Intelligence and whats more, this one is here to stay. 

A recent study by Cisco IBSG(1), estimated that 12% of enterprise workload will run in the cloud by 2013 and that the cost-savings from using cloud services will benefit the UK economy alone to the tune of 30 Billion Euros (2) over the next five years. Yet, there was no Simon Cowell back in the 60’s when the earliest hint of utility computing fell on the deaf ears of a technologically primitive world. Only in the 90’s amidst the clang of Blur and Oasis was it that a major record label of the IT world, Amazon, signed up to the idea and put cloud computing to the wider audience with the launch of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002. The rest is history and roll on five years to find even Google and IBM amongst the fans in the front row with their offerings of Google Apps(3) and IBM Smart Business Development and Test(4). 

The fact is, cloud computing has been around for a while and only now with years of sound iterative development and millions of trusted users, has the Hype finally set in. With the immediate forecast being a year-on-year growth rate of 43% (5), cloud computing’s fan-base is set to increase relentlessly. And boy is it going to be some show.

(1)
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/wp/sp/Service_Providers_as_Cloud_Providers_IBSG.pdf

(2)
http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/35321/Cloud-to-benefit-UK-economy-by-30-billion-Euros

(3)
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

(4)
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/igs/cloud-development/

(5)
http://www.newinnovationsguide.com/Cloud.html


Fabien Flight
Senior Engineer - Cloudreach

Hello World!

Hello World!

Welcome to the Cloudreach blog, where you will find insight, comment and opinion on all matters related to cloud technology.

We are proud of our knowledge of Google Apps and Amazon Web Services in particular, and in the spirit of community aim to share some of our learnings in the hope that one day we can go on a journey together.

As one of the oldest Google Enterprise and AWS partners we have seen it, done it, and collected many a t-shirt along the way, and it is this experience that we hope will prompt you to subscribe to this blog for future updates.

Unless you have unplugged all the cables, and live in a Faraday cage you cannot have missed the hype surrounding cloud computing. We urge you to cut through the chaff to see those companies that are genuinely innovating and bringing something new to the table that fundamentally changes the way that business is done. We are one such company!

Over that last 10-years corporate processes and knowledge have been pushed into web apps, in order to ease administration. Pushing the server component outside the organisation is the next logical step in simplifying things even further.

This blog is written and maintained by the technical team at Cloudreach who sit on the crest of the cloud technology wave. As trusted consultants we work on a wide range of IT technologies with companies in pretty much every business sector. This experience gives us knowledge that is useful to our customer community and the concerned public in general, and with appropriate consent we release articles and insights that result from these engagements. In line with our values of openness, we ask engineers to write articles regularly as part of their daily bread. We also warmly invite you to comment on the articles that are posted in order to improve the quality of the information that is written here for the benefit of all.

Looking forward to blogging together.

James Monico

Cloudreach Technical Director