Seasonal Elasticity

No, we’re not talking about adjusting your waistband to accommodate multiple Christmas dinners!  If you are in Retail or do business with Retailers we’re talking about scaling your online server and data use according to the demands of your business.

Most businesses already do this and almost certainly your IT Team have already provisioned sufficient capacity to more than deal with the highest peaks of load that can be expected over a peak period like the run up to Christmas.   Its important to get this right. Your customers will appreciate that your services are reliable, and you’ll appreciate the peace of mind that comes from knowing whatever happens – you’re covered.  But where has this extra capacity come from?  Has it been sitting idle for the rest of the year?

Traditional hosting or private cloud infrastructure can mean significant capital expenditure for capacity that is only required for a few weeks a year.  It’ll also take up a lot of your IT Team’s time, constantly working to ensure the server provision can handle the peaks in demand for your online systems.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) enables companies just like yours to consume infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis whilst ensuring the capacity is there when you need it. Your usage simply scales up and down according to your requirements and you don’t pay for what you don’t use. Not to mention the flexibility that AWS can give you in an emergency- if you need to throw vertical scaling, horizontal scaling or IOPS at a problem you can do just that while you troubleshoot your application.  And with Cloudreach’s experience behind you, you can weather the storm.

You wouldn’t pay your utility bills based on the months with the highest usage. So why do many other successful organisations like yours pay for their data resources in this way? Probably because you haven’t talked to Cloudreach yet to find out the best way of utilising AWS online data services.

Stop stockpiling your data resource for a rainy day, talk to Cloudreach and start saving money now.

Another boring cloud event?

There are a handful of events throughout the year that purport to be THE leading cloud event of the calendar and the ‘one event you should not miss this year’.    While these are bold claims and there is a sameness to them all, IP EXPO 2013 (Oct 16th/17th at Earls Court 2, London) seems to be an attractive proposition this year.

The usual scores of vendors are well-represented from the very biggest global brands to the emerging niche players but the highlights for me are the Amazon Web Services Lab and the Citrix Mobility & Cloud Zone.

Amazon Web Services continues to be a key strategic vendor for our clients.   The rate of innovation, value for money and commercial model provided by AWS makes it a strong candidate for a range of projects ranging from Enterprise applications to complete datacentre migrations.   The old favourite use-cases of Test & Development and Disaster Recovery are now ubiquitous and the more alluring projects are around Data Analytics and Visualisation.   AWS are providing more than a dozen sessions on a range of topics presented by AWS Technical Architects and other experts - all in their own lab environment.  Great opportunity to ask those “Could I do this on AWS?” questions that you have had in the back of your mind…

The Citrix Mobility & Cloud Zone should be popular.   Citrix continues to develop winning products and services that overcome limitations of legacy applications and make IT more mobile and flexible.   If you haven’t had a good look at Citrix recently this could be time well-spent…

Cloud computing has significantly disrupted some of the contented vendors that have dominated markets like IT infrastructure for the last 20 years.  As 2014 planning approaches, now is the time to address your cloud strategy – understand the advancements and innovations in the Cloud and perhaps cut through the hype of ‘big data’ and understand what you can actually do today to visualise and analyse data that may be available to you without costing the earth.  

See how our global client-base has benefited, visit Cloudreach Stand G44 and let us help you define your Cloud Strategy.

Register now for IP Expo - http://www.ipexpo.co.uk/

10GB of Google Drive storage free, sign in from Quickoffice app on Android or iOS before Thursday!

Sign in to your Google Account from the new Quickoffice app for Android or iOS by Thursday September 26, 2013, and an extra 10GB of Google Drive storage will be added to your account for two years (look for it in the next few weeks). So don’t let your hardware or software differences get in the way of true collaboration -- download the new app and start working together today. 

For more information: http://googledrive.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/freeing-quickoffice-for-everyone.html

AWS Enterprise Summit 2013

At the AWS Enterprise Summit 2013 | London this week, Channel 4’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Bob Harris, stressed that companies need to ‘get out of the datacentre mentality’.   Harris was one of a rich panel of IT leaders speaking at the Summit aimed at the Enterprise space.

The range of use-cases and applications featured by the Enterprises participating at the Summit demonstrates that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is no longer limited to the Innovators and Early Adopters.   Enterprises are already today moving their data-centres to the cloud in their entirety as well as using AWS for production E-Commerce and ERP applications.

Another notable speaker was Matthew Graham-Hyde, CIO of Kantar and author of upcoming title “The Essential CIO” to be published later this year.   Graham-Hyde made the point that the use of AWS and other cloud technologies isn’t a technology conversation but a business conversation.

When asked what would you do differently if you could start again with AWS both speakers were emphatic in their response that they would go ‘deeper and faster than we have done’  and ‘go sooner” than they did - a strong recommendation bearing in mind that Channel 4 have been using AWS for 5 years already!

AWS are more than disruptive in this space with their policy of voluntarily offering price-reductions across the board to all of their customers no fewer than 37 times in the last 7 years!  Some progressive organisations like News UK have already moved one third of all their servers to the cloud and are steadily working on the rest.

AWS demonstrates its Enterprise Credentials

At Cloudreach we are proud to be a Gold Sponsor of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Enterprise Summit 2013 at the Grange St. Paul's Hotel on Tuesday September 17th.  The AWS Summits are extremely popular and are generally oversubscribed within days of opening the registration.  In a change to previous summits this event concentrates specifically on AWS use-cases  for the Enterprise rather than Developer or Start-up communities. 

The highlight of the last summit in April was Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer of Amazon Web Services. Werner’s fanaticism for AWS technology is only matched by his love of football as he extolled the virtues of AWS and Liverpool FC - big AWS users and Cloudreach customers themselves!  This time we have Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President of AWS; Stephen Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer and Yuri Misnik, Head of Solution Architects - which should provide a good mix of vision for the future and down-to-earth practicality of using AWS in an Enterprise environment.

What better way to cut through the hype and learn about what Enterprises are truly doing with AWS than to hear directly from clients using the services in production environments.   The Summit features eight different clients and their experiences of AWS, with Cloudreach counting half of the eight among our clients!  If you are lucky enough to be on the list of registered attendees you can hear about the full spectrum of use-cases from funkypigeon.com to Channel 4 to BP. Unfortunately places are limited and registration has been shut for some time so if you are not already on the list you will need to wait until next time or contact Cloudreach directly to talk about AWS for your organisation.  Don’t forget to contact us if you are interested in attending AWS Re-Invent 2013 in Las Vegas in November!

Cloudreach clients speaking at this week’s London AWS Enterprise Summit include:

Funkypigeon.com
Funkypigeon.com is a personalised card and gift site. Customers can enjoy not having to think about whose birthday it is each day and just get their reminder, order the card and the gift online and it’s done. Cloudreach worked with funkypigeon.com to migrate, optimise and manage the funkypigeon.com website 24/7 on Amazon Web Services.

Channel 4
Channel 4 is an Enterprise that needs no introduction.   As part of their ever- growing portfolio of online offerings Cloudreach are working with Channel4 to help optimise their extensive AWS estate.

BP
Cloudreach is working with Air BP - the specialised aviation division of BP, one of the world's major energy companies. They provide innovative and flexible solutions to meet the needs of hundreds of airports around the world and Cloudreach is helping Air BP to migrate a global enterprise application to AWS.

Kantar
Kantar is home to some of the world’s leading research, data and insight companies. As a Cloudreach customer we are working closely with Kantar on a range of AWS projects from Big Data analytics to datacentre migrations.

Whisky Web - Not a normal developer conference

I recently attended Whisky Web 2 - the second annual Whisky Web conference for web developers, held in Scotland. The second installment of Whisky Web was held on the 12th-13th of April at Airth Castle in Stirlingshire and in Edinburgh.

As a first-time conference-goer, I am sharing my experience of this new and exciting conference. The fact that I am happily writing this post in vim for a challenge, having never gone anywhere near command-line editors before, is a testament to the adventurous spirit that pervades the Whisky Web conference and all those involved in it.

In the middle of the week before Whisky Web, I was chatting in the pub with my co-worker Max Manders who is one of the organisers of the event. He was clearly very passionate about the conference that he has helped to create and excited to have brought our company on-board as a sponsor, alongside other big names such as Facebook and Adobe. I was keen to know more about the conference and was highly intrigued when I heard the words "whisky" and "castle". At that point I did not know that I would actually be attending Whisky Web.

The next day, back at work, I received an email from a co-worker giving me the news that my name had come out of a hat in a prize-draw. I had won a free ticket to Whisky Web! The free ticket had been awarded to Cloudreach in return for Cloudreach's sponsorship of the conference, and I had put my name into a hat the week before simply by replying to an email. I was extremely pleased with my good fortune and determined to make the most of the opportunity.

Friday 12th April, Day One

The opening keynote speech to Whisky Web was scheduled for 9am outside the Parliament Building in Edinburgh. After the keynote, we would travel by coach to Airth Castle.

The two most notable things about the keynote were that it was held outside (a thumbs up from me!), and also that it was within the shadow of Arthur's Seat - Edinburgh’s spectacular natural landmark. You really could not fail to miss the meeting point, even if you had already failed to notice the high concentration of geeks with their long hair and rucksacks.

I don't have long hair, but I certainly had my rucksack on as I strolled briskly down the ringroad around Arthur's Seat, taking in the sights of Holyrood park. Although it was already mid-April, Edinburgh seemed not to have noticed yet and it was a wintery and dull morning. Probably not the best day to hold a keynote speech outside.

Especially when the keynote speaker had cancelled! In the end that did not matter as the minor let-down was quickly forgotten during the creatively-improvised speech and the rest of the weekend. We were glad however once we were onboard the coach and heading towards Airth Castle.

I had already made friends with an easy-going German developer with long hair. I was already learning a lot about the development community, life in Germany and also myself as we exchanged experiences.

We arrived at Airth Castle and checked in to the hotel/spa where the conference talks would be held and where we would drink and sleep. The hotel was a blocky modern building which was located in the grounds of Airth Castle.

After a minor mis-adventure looking for my room, I was directed towards the castle itself and then it dawned on me that along with my free ticket i’d lucked into having a luxury suite inside Airth Castle! I immediately got completely lost in the unpredictable winding staircases and curved hallways. In fact I got lost every time I went inside that castle.

About two hours later I heard two words that would change my life as a developer: "vim adventures".

As a developer or regular unix user you roughly know what vim is. You even have to use it sometimes, but mostly that is because an application like git (exactly) has dropped you into vim in edit mode as its default editor of choice. Thus I had only ever learned one command in vim up to that point::q! (how to quit).

Vim Adventures is an adventure game that teaches you how to use vim by using vim commands as its controls. My introduction to it occurred early on in my second talk of the day, given by Rowan Merewood - who is a charismatic and fun-loving speaker with a fresh perspective on how we can be better developers. If you like puzzle games of the ilk of (to paraphrase Merewood) “The Legend of Zelda” and also a mild interest in what vim is and how to use it, you should visit http://vim-adventures.com without a moment's thought.

Rowan’s talk fired me up for the rest of Whisky Web and I was excited to realise that it would not be all jargon-filled, deeply-technical lectures and that I could expect to have a lot of fun.

Throughout the weekend I was repeatedly reminded of the idea that Whisky Web is as much about having fun and meeting like-minded people as learning cool new things. That evening we had the whisky tasting session, held in a function room on the ground floor of Airth Castle itself.

After freshening up, I left my hotel room and strolled down a winding staircase into the throng. As a big fan of whisky I was pleased to find myself being given advice by whisky experts on how to taste whisky and such. We were given some background information on the whisky we were tasting, and then they brought out the 18-year old single-malt Dewar’s whisky which blew us all away with its intensity. The whisky-tasting was hugely popular.

We enjoyed a brilliant five-course meal back in the hotel, at tables laid with cutlery all over the place. I found myself at a table of good chat and everybody had a great evening, until somebody flew a flying shark into the room and immediately got it stuck in the rafters of the building way above us! - How many drunk developers does it take to get a flying shark back down … ?

One of the things that characterised Whisky Web was the very high diversity of nationalities amongst the attendees - surprising considering this was only the second Whisky Web event and it reflects how much of the spirit of the community that Whisky Web gives off.

Saturday 13th April, Day Two

We left the fine environs of Airth Castle and jumped back in the coach for a trip back to Edinburgh. Amazingly, Whisky Web had booked out the Surgeon's Hall Museum in Edinburgh for the day's events.

We were given free reign to walk about and explore inbetween talks, of which there were eight in total - two at a time - so that we still had four hours of talks to listen to.

The talks on the second day were as fun and as varied as those on the first. From each talk I took away at least one tangible piece of information about a new tool or technique that I would later investigate or implement. In fact I still couldn't wait to get home on Sunday to start playing Vim Adventures!

After all the talks and the closing keynote, the evening was spent partying in the private upstairs room of the Ghillie Dhu pub in Edinburgh - a church that has been converted into a pub. A lot of free drinking was involved and we enjoyed a lively disco and live music. In all, a good way to round off Whisky Web. I felt that the organisers of Whisky Web had done a great job with their highly creative choice of venues for the event.

In Conclusion

I took away a lot from Whisky Web - from the talks, the many lively conversations and the people that I met. I discovered amazing new tools, new ways to think and do things and rekindled my excitement for the creativity and unique challenge of software development.

It was pointed out during the opening keynote that one of the principles of Whisky Web is to keep the number of attendees to a medium size (around 100), so that it would be possible to meet nearly everybody at the event and to feel a sense of shared experience. By the end of Whisy Web I felt that this nice idea had been well-borne out in reality.

Having never been to a conference before Whisky Web, I am now much more open-minded towards the concept. Even from a purely agnostic point of view, I can highly recommend Whisky Web to any developer as a worthwhile way to spend a couple of days and gain a fresh perspective. I absolutely intend to be a paying attendee to future installments!

CloudStack vs OpenStack

Kickin’ in the front seat

Sittin’ in the back seat

Gotta make my mind up

Which seat can I take? 

Rebecca Black, Friday

Two years ago, comparing OpenStack and CloudStack, Robert Paulson wrote that: “Cloud computing is very much like sex in high school. Everyone's talking about it and few people are actually doing it”.

It is 2013 and things have changed. Cloud computing moved from high school to Uni. Everyone’s doing it, but only few people are doing it in the right way (Cloudreach is amongst those few, of course).

Many fine articles can be found on the Internet which compare CloudStack, Openstack, and other private/hybrid cloud platforms. Most of them just go through feature lists from OpenStack and CloudStack websites, mention that there is more buzz around OpenStack, and conclude that both platforms are great and it is up to you to decide. So at the end of the day, techie guys still have to spend valuable time installing and evaluating both platforms.

This blogpost is an attempt to point out most notable differences between OpenStack and CloudStack which have attracted our attention. We start from obvious things like popularity and size of surrounding communities, move to more pleasurable features like VPNs and conclude that both platforms are fine. As a matter of fact, they are, trust me.