Kin Lane on August 28th, 2010

Tweet I’m spending time going through RedHat’s Deltacloud set of cloud APIs.   They recently recently moved the project to the Apache Incubator and submitted it to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) . With the Deltacloud API you can start an instance on an internal cloud, then with the same code start another on Amazon [...]

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Continue reading about Deltacloud Universal Cloud API

Kin Lane on August 23rd, 2010

Tweet I am needing more programmatic control over my Amazon EC2 environment.  I am rebuilding all server instances on my Amazon Web Services network. I needed to reconfigure using EBS Volumes for file and data storage, and upgrade the operating systems and some applications while I’m at it. So I’m creating all new AMI as [...]

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Continue reading about Adding Methods to my Amazon EC2 Object

Kin Lane on August 16th, 2010

Tweet I am still processing a great post at High Scalability called, Scaling an AWS infrastructure – Tools and Patterns.  They cover several tools you can use to take advantage of Amazon’s Web Service and suggest an architectural model you should adopt for a scalable infrastructure in the cloud. They suggest the following tools for [...]

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Continue reading about Scaling Your Amazon Infrastructure

Tweet I was just refining a wiki page of various building blocks I use at Amazon Web Services.  I noticed it would make a great Internet Service Provider (ISP) package for someone who wanted to start an ISP, or even used as model for an existing ISP looking to migrate to cloud computing. These are [...]

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Continue reading about Internet Service Provider (ISP) at Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Kin Lane on July 27th, 2010

Tweet Once again I’m pushing the limits of what I”m allowed within an Amazon Web Services account.  I need more server instances and more reserved IP addresses.  So I have to go to the form(s) Amazon provides to: Request to Increase Amazon EC2 Instance Limit Request to Increase Elastic IP Address Limit They take about [...]

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Continue reading about Increased Amazon Usage

Kin Lane on July 24th, 2010

Tweet I am spending a lot of time lately writing and thinking about the future of cloud computing.  The need for raw cloud compute power is growing as a utility for every day business.    A handful of providers are leading the charge in cloud compute Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Amazon Web Services Rackspace Cloud [...]

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Continue reading about Regional Cloud Computer Centers

Tweet Last year I moved web site, database and email services for the SAP SAPPHIRE event to the Amazon Cloud.  We needed to scale our infrastructure dramatically to support the event for about 4 months out of the year.  This was our second year running the conference in the Amazon Cloud and we were able [...]

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Continue reading about Cloud Balancing with Global Server Load Balancer (GSLB)

Kin Lane on June 25th, 2010

Tweet I was just reading about CentriLogic’s new cloud hosting services. They store your data across data centers in Rochester NY, Buffalo NY, Toronto ON, and Mississauga, ON. With Amazon EC2 and cloudfront distributions you can deploy your data across United States, European, Hong Kong and Singapore, and Japan edge locations. Country-specific regulations governing privacy [...]

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Continue reading about Do You Know Where Your Data Is In The Cloud?

Kin Lane on June 16th, 2010

Tweet I’m increasing my usage of Amazon EBS volumes.  I tend to use objects I’ve written in PHP or ColdFusion for writing data to Amazon S3.  I haven’t historically used EBS volumes much, because data tends to be needed across multiple instances. I’m taking another look at them.  I’m going to use in a couple [...]

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Continue reading about Using Amazon EBS Volumes

Kin Lane on June 16th, 2010

Tweet I was working on the review of my small business IT infrastructure today, which includes our servers at Amazon EC2.  As I was looking at my “server role” definitions and the corresponding Amazon EC2 Security Groups I saw a new blog post come in from Amazon Web Services. They put together an overview of [...]

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Continue reading about Amazon Security Groups for EC2

Kin Lane on June 12th, 2010

Tweet I’m launching a new Amazon EC2 instance.   Its running Windows + PHP + MySQL.  Its a preset up instance AMI I have for harvesting data. Its setup with necessary harvest scripts with all my libraries setup just for pulling RSS, XML, and scraping HTML pages. I’m doing some research about how to grow my [...]

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Continue reading about Launching Amazon Instance for Research

Kin Lane on June 9th, 2010

Tweet Email is still the number one tool for managing events and communicating with attendees, speakers, and exhibitors.  Social network is definitely the future of the event communication, but until then email rules. Sending out call for papers, speaker, exhibitor, attendee invitations and other emails around a conference can require a well oiled email infrastructure [...]

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Continue reading about Running Your Event in the Cloud – Email

Kin Lane on June 9th, 2010

Tweet Hosting a web site for an event or conference can be costly.  Traffic to the web site spikes around email campaigns, call for papers, registration opening, before and during the event. Hosting providers that can handle the volume of traffic around events and conferences can be expensive.  The Amazon Cloud is an excellent place [...]

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Continue reading about Running Your Event in the Cloud – Site Hosting

Kin Lane on June 8th, 2010

Tweet I was reminded today that nothing is permanent in the cloud.  I accidentally terminated my primary database instance running on Amazon EC2.  319 databases, 100 GB of data running on SQL Server 2008. I was removing 2 decommissioned server instances, I selected both of them and clicked terminate.    About 60 seconds later I started [...]

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Continue reading about Impermanence and the Cloud

Kin Lane on June 6th, 2010

Tweet I have been in the Amazon Console all night scaling down infrastructure after 3 months of events and conferences. This year our Amazon spend was double during the event season. Last year I pushed what my budget would allow to achieve better performance, it paid off. This year I got the thumbs up to [...]

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Continue reading about Amazon Cloud Small Business Setup

Kin Lane on May 3rd, 2010

Tweet I’ve seen several post by Google that the speed of your web site now matters a great deal in the relevance of your site. Using site speed in web search ranking You and site performance, sitting in a tree… I recently gave up my personal co-location server rack I”ve had since 1999, including a [...]

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Continue reading about Speed of Your Web Site, Google and the Cloud

Kin Lane on April 5th, 2010

Tweet One of the reasons I blog is to provide a focus to my research and learning.   I use this research to help me revisit many of the technologies that I stay in tune with.  With many of the top cloud providers I like to step back and look at what they offer from time [...]

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Continue reading about A Fresh Look at What Amazon Brings to the Cloud

Kin Lane on February 12th, 2010

Tweet Amazon Web Services has added a new and more flexible way to manage an account.  They have added the ability for: Consolidated billing across multiple AWS accounts Volume pricing across more than one AWS account Way to track the cost of a project across an organization. The new billing feature lets you designate one [...]

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Continue reading about New Billing Structure for Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Tweet I strongly believe in the cloud, and more specifically in Amazon‘s approach to cloud computing.  I constantly battle people on my decision to use the cloud for my core IT infrastructure.  It allows me to scale my infrastructure as needed and gave a completely new face to my IT strategy and operations. I can [...]

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Continue reading about Email in the Amazon Cloud Part 6 – Restored Faith in the Clouds

Kin Lane on December 18th, 2009

Tweet I was really excited when I got this email response on my ticket from Amazon Web Services: We’ve reached out to the Amazon EC2 team and here are the next steps. In order for us to proceed, we’ll need to setup DNS PTR records for EIPs (incl xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) under your AWS account. Hence could [...]

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Continue reading about Email in the Amazon Cloud Part 5 – Reverse DNS