Posts for "Cloud"

If I were a large tech company that missed the disruption in the cloud, I’d be looking for a fast way to make my business relevant again. The obvious solution is to leverage my size and brand to launch new products that are valued by my customers. Unfortunately the

My mind has been distracted of late by the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s hard to think about The Cloud when The Force is back in my life. So for this week’s review, you’ll have to bear with me as I update you in

There are few companies that should be better positioned to own the cloud than Google. Google was building planet-scaling cloud infrastructure while most of the rest of us were still excited about our type 1 hypervisors. But over the last several years, Google has executed its cloud business as though

I attended Structure 2015 this week, the conference formerly sponsored by Gigaom before their untimely demise this summer. Due to the popularity of this and the two other conferences they sponsored, a small team scrambled to create a new business entity that could carry the conferences forward. This team did

It’s good to be back in Boston after spending the last few days at re:Invent 2015. While the event was a great success for Amazon and its partners / customers, the increase in attendees from 12K last year to over 19K this year made this re:Invent much more

Identity & Access Management (IAM) remains today one of my favorite services from Amazon Web Services. It’s sort of a Swiss army knife for security, with a tool for almost every challenge you encounter. But I recently encountered one challenge I struggled to solve with IAM: managing read only

A few weeks ago one of my engineers sent around a link to the project JAWS, an open source framework for building server-less applications using JavaScript and Lambda. While at first glance it might seem as though it’s just another interesting cloud project, for me it signified something else:

I recently presented to a group of enterprise IT executives on the state of the public cloud. To my surprise I met business professionals who actually thought the public cloud was not going to have a big impact on their industry. I swiped my phone for a moment to confirm

I came into the software world in the middle of the great operating system war, which pitted IBM, Microsoft, and other minor players against each other for dominance over the server operating system. The war was short but fierce, leaving Microsoft and Windows NT/3.1 in control of the

Day 3 for me started with an early breakfast. Serving breakfast to 13K+ people is a logistical feat made even more impressive when you see the scale of the dining facility. The hall is a gigantic warehouse-sized space on the lower floor of the Venetian whose far sides are hard

Day 2 at re:Invent is wrapping up, and what a crazy day it was. The day started with the first of the two big keynote announcements. Andy Jassy, the SVP who heads AWS, was the standard speaker for the kickoff re:Invent keynote. Andy was actually the person who

I flew out Monday night on the 8 PM JetBlue flight to Vegas for re:Invent. I wasn’t the sole passenger headed to the conference, and met people from a variety of local companies on the plane, including Acquia, Fiksu, MathWorks, Constant Contact, ThreatStack, CloudTP, Mobiquity, CloudHealth and more.

I spent Tuesday at the Google Cloud Platform Live event in San Francisco. This is Google's equivalent of AWS re:Invent, which is scheduled by odd coincidence the week before Amazon's cloud conference. ;) The event started at 9 AM and ran through 5:30 PM, ending with an afterparty at

I've been meaning all week to do my usual post-mortem on the quarterly Amazon earnings call, but something kept getting in the way. Over a cup of tea this morning I did a quick read through the SEC filing. The overall earnings were disappointing, with revenues of $20.58B instead

Google announced support for the GCP equivalent of the AWS consolidated bill this Friday. This feature substantially simplifies the complexity of managing billing across multiple projects, allowing you to consolidate the billing and usage statements from all projects into a single bucket. Attached is a simple Ruby script to allow

I’d like to let you know about a unique one-time opportunity. Starting today I’m making available for sale a few reserved instances from my personal cloud collection. The items include antique and previously owned m1.small and m1.large reservations that are in mint condition and fully enabled

I will confess: I both admire and respect Amazon. If all they ever achieved was to be my go-to online store and stream TV / movies to my house, I’d be a big fan. I also appreciate their near maniacal focus on the customer, their organizational productivity at scale, the

Since its release in 2009, Amazon’s Relational Database (RDS) service has grown substantially in both features and reliability. In addition to the much anticipated launch of Postgres last year, AWS added support for critical new instance types (e.g. T2s, R3s) while continuing to expand its existing services (e.

Several years ago I joined a company that was in the middle of a frantic architectural transition that prioritized speed over cost. During my first few months I watched our Amazon Web Services bill creep from $100K per month to over $350K. While at first our CEO was accepting of

As cloud cost allocation becomes mainstream, there are two distinct models that have emerged: tag-based and resource-based cost allocation. While both models have the potential to meet the needs of an organization, the differences warrants a deeper understanding in order to select the right solution for you. This article will

Cost allocation is a well understood accounting practice in IT organizations. But finding the right solution to support your business needs presents some significant challenges. In this article we will explain the key differences that make cloud cost allocation reporting complex. We will review the available options, and outline requirements

Reserved instances allow you to make a one-time payment to Amazon in return for a discount on your compute costs. The rationale for reserved pricing is simple: by getting customers to commit to the usage of specific infrastructure, Amazon can better manage their capacity, and therefore pass these savings on

I've been noticing a steady uptick in the interest in Amazon CloudFront recently, driven by what appears to be a commoditization in the CDN market. This market shift is opening up an opportunity for less feature rich / more cost effective offerings to compete with the premium services such as Akamai.

I recently noticed several bloggers announcing a dramatic slip in the Amazon cloud business based on a drop in revenue of the infamous Other category. While deducing AWS revenue from changes to the Other category is an inexact science, it is the best we have until Amazon choose to break

I had mentioned in What To Do In Response To Code Spaces the importance of locking down your service-based IAM users to least privilege access. For example, if a service pushes a backup to S3, its IAM privileges should be scoped to write-only for the specified bucket. If a service