Showing posts with label Shared. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shared. Show all posts

Monday 4 March 2013

Cloud Infographic : How Much Data is in the Cloud

 
With the majority of mid-sized businesses either already using cloud-based technologies or planning to make the move soon IT spending on cloud computing has grown by 25% in the last 5 years. With both the businesses using and the business creating cloud computing technology increases investment in just that there’s no reason to think it will do anything but grow.

How Much Data is in the Cloud Infographic by NextUC
How Much Data is in the Cloud – An infographic by the team at NextUC

Tuesday 5 February 2013

Can Tablets Take the Place of Teachers?

If children can learn to read, they can read to learn. That's the philosophy behind an experiment to find out if illiterate children can learn to read on their own with the help of a tablet.
 


Can Tablets Take the Place of Teachers?
Please Include Attribution to BachelorsDegreeOnline.com With This Graphic

Published under a free-to-use Creative Commons license.

Monday 4 February 2013

Infographi​c: The Future of Libraries

Did you know there are over 121,000 libraries in the U.S.? Americans rely on libraries for everything from books and magazines to digital media and internet access. Today's infographic is looking at the hi-tech challenges facing our libraries and how libraries are responding to new hi-tech demands.

 Some interesting data points :

  • There are over 121,000 libraries in America and 69% of Americans use libraries
  • 67% of libraries offer downloadable e-books and 28% lend out e-readers and mobile devices
  • 95% of libraries have some kind of online, social media presence
The Future of Libraries


Published this under a free-to-use Creative Commons license.

Infographic: How Can Data Mining & Analytics Enhance Education?


Can you imagine if your educational experience was personalized like your Netflix account? That's the goal behind data mining and analytics in education


How Can Data Mining & Analytics Enhance Education?


Published under a free-to-use Creative Commons license

Wednesday 3 October 2012

Get Started With Oracle Applications Now With Our New Test Drive Program


AWS has just launched Oracle Test Drive Labs.
The purpose of the Oracle Test Drive program is to provide customers with the ability to quickly and easily explore the benefits of using Oracle software on AWSserver infrastructure.
These labs have been developed by Oracle and AWS partners and are provided free of charge for educational and demonstration purposes.
Each Test Drive lab includes up to 5 hours of complimentary AWS server time to complete the lab, and you can return here and to try any or all of the Test drive Labs at any time, so feel free to experiment and explore!
Please note that there may be some pre-requisitesfor few labs. Kindly understand them, acquire the required accounts or softwares before proceeding with the labs.


For example, Oracle Secure Backup to S3 requires Oracle Technet (OTN) account.
The products vary from Oracle products for Database and Infrastructure, Oracle Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware.
We can select from nearly a dozen labs which include but are not limited to: 


  • Oracle Data Guard Disaster Recovery
  • Oracle Secure Backup to S3
  • Siebel on AWS


Read below post by Jeff for sample demo of back up Oracle database to AWS using the Oracle Secure Backup product.


One of the key advantages that customers and partners are telling us they really appreciate about AWS is its unique ability to cut down the time required to evaluate new software stacks. These "solution appliances" can now be easily deployed on AWS and evaluated by customers in hours or days, rather than in weeks or months, as is the norm with the previous generation of IT infrastructure.
With this in mind, AWS has teamed up with leading Oracle ecosystem partners on a new initiative called the Oracle Test Drive program.







AWS Week in Review - September 24th to September 28th, 2012

 
 
Let's take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:

Monday, September 24
Tuesday, September 25
Wednesday, September 26
Thursday, September 27
Friday, September 28


Sunday 30 September 2012

Big Data & The Cloud


A good presentation by Joe Ziegler at the 5th Elephant conference in Bangalore.


View to know WHY Cloud is Big Data's BEST FRIEND !



Eucalyptus - An Overview of On-premise IaaS and AWS


Presentation from AWS Worldwide Public Sector team's conference Building and Securing Applications in the Cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/campaigns/building-securing-applications-cloud/).



Friday 28 September 2012

Amazon RDS Now Supports SQL Server 2012

Want to try SQL Server 2012 ? Now dont invest in hardware and software. AWS RDS now supports SQL Server 2012 with easy to use interface and very affordable prices.

With added support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012, Amazon RDS customers can use the new features Microsoft has introduced as part of SQL Server 2012 including improvements to manageability, performance, programmability, and security.

Read more below extract from Jeff's Blog on the announcement :
The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports SQL Server 2012.You can now launch the Express, Web, and Standard Editions of this powerful database from the comfort of the AWS Management Console. SQL Server 2008 R2 is still available, as are multiple versions and editions of MySQL and Oracle Database.

If you are from the Microsoft world and haven't heard of RDS, here's the executive summary:

You can run the latest and greatest offering from Microsoft in a fully managed environment. RDS will install and patch the database, make backups, and detect and recover from failures. It will also provide you with a point-and-click environment to make it easy for you to scale your compute resources up and down as needed.

What's New?

SQL Server 2012 supports a number of new features including contained databases, columnstore indexes, sequences, and user-defined roles:

  • A contained database is isolated from other SQL Server databases including system databases such as "master." This isolation removes dependencies and simplifies the task of moving databases from one instance of SQL Server to another.
  • Columnstore indexes are used for data warehouse style queries. Used properly, they can greatly reduce memory consumption and I/O requests for large queries.
  • Sequences are counters that can be used in more than one table.
  • The new user-defined role management system allows users to create custom server roles.

Read the SQL Server What's New documentation to learn more about these and other features.

You can launch SQL Server 2012 from the AWS Management Console. First you select the edition that best meets your needs:




Then you fill in the details (SQL Server 2012 is version 11), and your DB Instance will be launched in a matter of minutes:




Yes, This is Cool!

You can now get started with SQL Server 2012 without having to invest in hardware or buying a license. If you are eligible for the AWS Free Usage Tier,  you can get started without spending a penny. You can launch a DB Instance, evaluate the product, do a trial migration of your data, and learn all about the new features at minimal cost. When the time comes to move your organization to SQL Server 2012, you'll already have experience using it in a real-world environment. 


For more information on what’s new in SQL Server 2012, please visit Microsoft’s SQL Server 2012 MSDN documentation.


To learn more about using RDS for SQL Server 2012, please visit the Amazon RDS for SQL Server detail page, AWS documentation and FAQs.

Get Started With the vCloud Service Evaluation Beta Today!


The Wait Is Over – Get Started With the vCloud Service Evaluation Beta Today!


Good news – the waitlist for the vCloud Service Evaluation Beta has been removed! This means that users can now sign up today and get a public vCloud account in 15 minutes or less.

Announced last month, the vCloud Service Evaluation provides a quick, easy and low-cost way for you to learn about the advantages of a vCloud though hands-on testing and experimentation. All you need to sign up is a credit card and you can get your own public vCloud up and running in minutes.

vmware vCloud service evaluation beta

The vCloud Service Evaluation has all the basics you need, including a catalog of useful VM templates, virtual networking, persistent storage, external IP addresses, firewalls, load balancers, the vCloud API, and more. A variety of pre-built content templates are also available (at no charge) through the vCloud Service Evaluation, including WordPress, Jommia!, Sugar CRM, LAMP stack, Windows Server, etc.

For a limited time, you can also use the promo code “VMworld50” for a $50 credit towards your vCloud environment.

Looking for support? Technical How-To Guides available on vCloud.VMware.com are perfect for new vCloud users looking for implementation assistance.


vmware vCloud service evaluation beta 


In addition, signing up for the vCloud Service Evaluation gives you access to the vCloud Service Evaluation Community, where users can ask questions and get answers directly from others in the vCloud community.


vmware vCloud service evaluation beta


Your own vCloud is just a few clicks away – sign up for the vCloud Service Evaluation Beta (don’t forget to use the promo code, “VMworld50”) and set up your own vCloud today!

Re-Blogged from VMware Blogs and yoyoclouds.com .

Thursday 27 September 2012

Elastic Detector : Elastic Vulnerability Assessment

 

SecludIT developed a new approach to vulnerability assessment by using the elasticity of IaaS: Elastic Vulnerability Assessment - EVA.
Elastic Detector is Secludit's fully automated security event detection tool for Amazon EC2. 
It helps administrators and users of Amazon EC2-based infrastructures to continuously identify holes on security groups and applications, thus dramatically reducing the risk of external and internal attacks. 
It is Delivered as SaaS or Virtual Appliance (currently only running on US East Region).
In contrary to existing tools, you don’t need to install any additional software, such as agents, and do not need to configure any monitors up-front.
If you want to know more about Elastic Detector, watch the video below or try the service for free under elastic-detector.secludit.com.


Wednesday 26 September 2012

Infographi​c: Young Profession​als & Risky Tech Behavior

Based on the 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology ReportBACKGROUNDCHECK.ORG have compiled an infographic taking a look at the risky tech-related behavior young professionals engage in (in terms of device and password management, extreme internet behavior, and lost or stolen devices).


Young Professionals & Risky Tech Behavior
From: BackgroundCheck.org

SOURCE
 

Infographic : Hypervisor Tug-of-War

 
We've described the battle between VMware and Microsoft as a hypervisor war going back as far as the first release of Microsoft Virtual Server. Unfortunately for Microsoft, that war was pretty ugly. On the one side, VMware had guns and cannons, and on the other side, Microsoft was throwing rocks. Ok, maybe it wasn't quite that bad, but you get the picture.
Fast forward and Microsoft has added a lot of weaponry with the introduction of Microsoft Hyper-V, the company's true hypervisor. And the Redmond giant's offering just keeps on getting better. But, so too does the ESX hypervisor from VMware. A virtual tug-of-war if you will.
Check out this latest Infographic coming from the folks at SolarWinds
Instead of depicting this as a hypervisor war, the InfoGraphic calls it the Hypervisor Tug-of-War.
The survey information clearly shows that VMware remains in control. However, there are some interesting data points in there as well.
  • Survey responders believe that VMware is far and away going to be the most trusted private cloud vendor, with a whopping 76.9%
  • However 76.1% believe Microsoft will close the functionality gap with VMware thanks to Hyper-V 3.0
  • While trying to break beyond the barrier of VM Stall, it sounds like 56.8% of key applications will be deployed on a private cloud next year, while 57.7% have already moved beyond the 40% mark of their datacenter being virtualized
  • 70% of end users still deploy more than one virtualization tool
And at the bottom, we see that VMware still commands a lead in the hypervisor tug-of-war.
 
 
 
Reblogged from VMBlog
Infographic by SolarWinds
 

Friday 21 September 2012

Pros and Cons of Hybrid Cloud

Benefits and Limitations of investing in a Hybrid Cloud


Pros and Cons of Hybrid cloud

SOURCE

Pros and Cons of Private Cloud

Benefits and Limitations of investing in a Private Cloud

Pros and Cons of Private Cloud

SOURCE

Pros and Cons of Public Cloud

Benefits and Limitations of investing in a Public Cloud

 

Pros and Cons of Public Cloud

SOURCE

Monday 10 September 2012

Building Highly Available, Scalable Web Properties with AWS

From the AWS Webinar Series: Building Highly Available, Scalable Web Properties with AWS 

A very nicely compiled webinar for understand various AWS Services and design principles.

This webinar recording focuses on basic properities for Building Highly Available, Scalable Web Applications on AWS Cloud.

These properties are:

  • Elasticity
  • Design for Failure
  • Loose Coupling
  • Security
  • Performance
 


Monday 27 August 2012

Infographic: Demystifying AWS - Revealing Behind the scenes usage

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the biggest public cloud around, yet what goes on behind the scenes remains a mystery.

Read on for a good Infographic by newvem blog !


"For heavy users, such as enterprise level CIOs, AWS’s “Reserved Instances” are a cost effective model to scale their cloud activity and benefit from the full service offering that Amazon provides.


The infographic is based on analysis made by our Reserved Instance Decision Making Tool. This advanced analytics tool can help enterprise CIOs to capture the added value and benefit by:
  • Ensuring that reserved instances meet cost and performance expectations.
  • Identifying consistent onOn-demand Demand usage that can be shifted to reserved Reserved instances.
  • Tracking Reserved Instance expiration dates and recommend actions for renewal and scale up and down.



SOURCE






 

Tuesday 21 August 2012

Amazon CloudSearch - Start Searching in One Hour for Less Than $100 / Month


Extract from Amazon Web Service Evangelist Jeff Barr's CloudSearch blog post for more information about how you can start searching in an hour for less than $100 a month...

Continuing along in our quest to give you the tools that you need to build ridiculously powerful web sites and applications in no time flat at the lowest possible cost, I'd like to introduce you to Amazon CloudSearch. If you have ever searched Amazon.com, you've already used the technology that underlies CloudSearch. You can now have a very powerful and scalable search system (indexing and retrieval) up and running in less than an hour.

You, sitting in your corporate cubicle, your coffee shop, or your dorm room, now have access to search technology at a very affordable price. You can start to take advantage of many years of Amazon R&D in the search space for just $0.12 per hour (I'll talk about pricing in depth later).


What is Search?

Search plays a major role in many web sites and other types of online applications. The basic model is seemingly simple. Think of your set of documents or your data collection as a book or a catalog, composed of a number of pages. You know that you can find the desired content quickly and efficiently by simply consulting the index.

Search does the same thing by indexing each document in a way that facilitates rapid retrieval. You enter some terms into a search box and the site responds (rather quickly if you use CloudSearch) with a list of pages that match the search terms.

As is the case with many things, this simple model masks a lot of complexity and might raise a lot of questions in your mind. For example:
  1. How efficient is the search? Did the search engine simply iterate through every page, looking for matches, or is there some sort of index?
  2. The search results were returned in the form of an ordered list. What factor(s) determined which documents were returned, and in what order (commonly known as ranking)? How are the results grouped?
  3. How forgiving or expansive was the search? Did a search for "dogs" return results for "dog?" Did it return results for "golden retriever," or "pet?"
  4. What kinds of complex searches or queries can be used? Does the result for "dog training" return the expected results. Can you search for "dog" in the Title field and "training" in the Description?
  5. How scalable is the search? What if there are millions or billions of pages? What if there are thousands of searches per hour? Is there enough storage space?
  6. What happens when new pages are added to the collection, or old pages are removed? How does this affect the search results?
  7. How can you efficiently navigate through and explore search results? Can you group and filter the search results in ways that take advantage of multiple named fields (often known as a faceted search).
Needless to say, things can get very complex very quickly. Even if you can write code to do some or all of this yourself, you still need to worry about the operational aspects. We know that scaling a search system is non-trivial. There are lots of moving parts, all of which must be designed, implemented, instantiated, scaled, monitored, and maintained. As you scale, algorithmic complexity often comes in to play; you soon learn that algorithms and techniques which were practical at the beginning aren't always practical at scale.


What is Amazon CloudSearch?

Amazon CloudSearch is a fully managed search service in the cloud. You can set it up and start processing queries in less than an hour, with automatic scaling for data and search traffic, all for less than $100 per month.

CloudSearch hides all of the complexity and all of the search infrastructure from you. You simply provide it with a set of documents and decide how you would like to incorporate search into your application.

You don't have to write your own indexing, query parsing, query processing, results handling, or any of that other stuff. You don't need to worry about running out of disk space or processing power, and you don't need to keep rewriting your code to add more features.

With CloudSearch, you can focus on your application layer. You upload your documents, CloudSearch indexes them, and you can build a search experience that is custom-tailored to the needs of your customers.


How Does it Work?

The Amazon CloudSearch model is really simple, but don't confuse simple, with simplistic -- there's a lot going on behind the scenes!

Here's all you need to do to get started (you can perform these operations from the AWS Management Console, the CloudSearch command line tools, or through the CloudSearch APIs):
  1. Create and configure a Search Domain. This is a data container and a related set of services. It exists within a particular Availability Zone of a single AWS Region (initially US East).
  2. Upload your documents. Documents can be uploaded as JSON or XML that conforms to our Search Document Format (SDF). Uploaded documents will typically be searchable within seconds.  You can, if you'd like, send data over an HTTPS connection to protect it while it is transit.
  3. Perform searches.
There are plenty of options and goodies, but that's all it takes to get started.

Amazon CloudSearch applies data updates continuously, so newly changed data becomes searchable in near real-time. Your index is stored in RAM to keep throughput high and to speed up document updates. You can also tell CloudSearch to re-index your documents; you'll need to do this after changing certain configuration options, such as stemming (converting variations of a word to a base word, such as "dogs" to "dog") or stop words (very common words that you don't want to index).
Amazon CloudSearch has a number of advanced search capabilities including faceting and fielded search:

Faceting allows you to categorize your results into sub-groups, which can be used as the basis for another search. You could search for "umbrellas" and use a facet to group the results by price, such as $1-$10, $10-$20, $20-$50, and so forth. CloudSearch will even return document counts for each sub-group.
Fielded searching allows you to search on a particular attribute of a document. You could locate movies in a particular genre or actor, or products within a certain price range.

 
Search Scaling
Behind the scenes, CloudSearch stores data and processes searches using search instances. Each instance has a finite amount of CPU power and RAM. As your data expands, CloudSearch will automatically launch additional search instances and/or scale to larger instance types. As your search traffic expands beyond the capacity of a single instance, CloudSearch will automatically launch additional instances and replicate the data to the new instance. If you have a lot of data and a high request rate, CloudSearch will automatically scale in both dimensions for you.

Amazon CloudSearch will automatically scale your search fleet up to a maximum of 50 search instances. We'll be increasing this limit over time; if you have an immediate need for more than 50 instances, please feel free to contact us and we'll be happy to help.

The net-net of all of this automation is that you don't need to worry about having enough storage capacity or processing power. CloudSearch will take care of it for you, and you'll pay only for what you use.

Pricing Model

The Amazon CloudSearch pricing model is straightforward:

You'll be billed based on the number of running search instances. There are three search instance sizes (Small, Large, and Extra Large) at prices ranging from $0.12 to $0.68 per hour (these are US East Region prices, since that's where we are launching CloudSearch).

There's a modest charge for each batch of uploaded data. If you change configuration options and need to re-index your data, you will be billed $0.98 for each Gigabyte of data in the search domain.
There's no charge for in-bound data transfer, data transfer out is billed at the usual AWS rates, and you can transfer data to and from your Amazon EC2 instances in the Region at no charge.

Advanced Searching

Like the other Amazon Web Services, CloudSearch allows you to get started with a modest effort and to add richness and complexity over time. You can easily implement advanced features such as faceted search, free text search, Boolean search expressions, customized relevance ranking, field-based sorting and searching, and text processing options such as stopwords, synonyms, and stemming.

CloudSearch Programming

You can interact with CloudSearch through the AWS Management Console, a complete set of Amazon CloudSearch APIs, and a set of command line tools. You can easily create, configure, and populate a search domain through the AWS Management Console.
Here's a tour, starting with the welcome screen:

Amazon CloudSearch
 
You start by creating a new Search Domain:

Amazon CloudSearch
 
You can then load some sample data. It can come from local files, an Amazon S3 bucket, or several other sources:

Amazon CloudSearch
 
Here's how you choose an S3 bucket (and an optional prefix to limit which documents will be indexed):

Amazon CloudSearch
 
You can also configure your initial set of index fields:

Amazon CloudSearch
 
You can also create access policies for the CloudSeach APIs:

Amazon CloudSearch
 
Your search domain will be initialized and ready to use within twenty minutes:

Amazon CloudSearch
 
Processing your documents is the final step in the initialization process:

Amazon CloudSearch
 
After your documents have been processed you can perform some test searches from the console:

Amazon CloudSearch
 
The CloudSearch console also provides you with full control over a number of indexing options including stopwords, stemming, and synonyms:



 
CloudSearch in Action
Some of our early customers have already deployed some applications powered by CloudSearch. Here's a sampling:
  • Search Technologies has used CloudSearch to index the Wikipedia (see the demo).
  • NewsRight is using CloudSearch to deliver search for news content, usage and rights information to over 1,000 publications.
  • ex.fm is using CloudSearch to power their social music discovery website.
  • CarDomain is powering search on their social networking website for car enthusiasts.
  • Sage Bionetworks is powering search on their data-driven collaborative biological research website.
  • Smugmug is using CloudSearch to deliver search on their website for over a billion photos.

SOURCE