Built for the Enterprise

Azure offers a natural extension to enterprise IT operations by allowing them to relieve IT resources and prevent bottlenecks.  With this powerful solution, enterprises can respond quickly to market needs with Microsoft’s enterprise-grade reliability. Public Cloud adoption in the enterprise centers on the developers need to provision servers to address the enterprises IT needs as well as meet new demands.

Cost is not the driver- the driver is time and the ability to get to market as fast as possible to meet business opportunities and quickly respond to emerging competitive markets. The issue is being able to unleash current bottlenecks of resource provisioning and to scale computing resources out of the enterprise and into public clouds. Today with Windows Azure, enterprises can relieve themselves from having to figure out their IT future capacity plans as they are able to scale out into the Azure Public Cloud as an extension of their on-premise data center.

Once the enterprise’s new public cloud capacity usage is measured, the enterprise can confidently choose the workloads that can be moved back to its data centers where these can be managed with higher SLAs and control. Microsoft serves the enterprise best by being able to meet both sides of the cloud equation.

Move Workloads between Windows Azure Public Cloud and the Datacenter

Scaling resources from Enterprises to Azure, Newvem helps users get a handle on workloads that are unleashed on Azure to ensure users know where, when and how resources are being used and if they are meeting business needs and expectations.  Providing users visibility and transparency into their resources and how they are being used ensures smooth scaling of resources from the enterprise.

Newvem is the first analytics and optimization solution for the Windows Azure cloud and is currently available as a free Beta offering. Create Your Free Account Now!

Take advantage of Newvem Analytics for Azure to:

• Visualize Azure resources usage and trends
• Associate business activities with cloud usage
• Minimalize operational exposure and potential waste
• Leverage expert crowd sourced knowledge and best practices

With Newvem Analytics, you can easily visualize Azure baseline usage, vitals, and trends so you can forecast trends and see your baseline across VMs, applications and environments. You can align cloud usage with your business needs based on the consumption patterns (including recurring peaks, trends and bursts, and consistency of hourly usage) for specific business activities identified by Newvem. This transparency enables you to easily visualize your cloud’s costs, risks, and assets. Minimalize operational exposure and potential waste with recommendations to improve your compute and store decisions determined by an analysis of your overall resource usage. Additionally Newvem community experts for Azure enable users to leverage expert crowd sourced knowledge and best practices through an ever-growing library of how-to guides, FAQs, and articles. Check out our Windows Azure Cloud knowledge Center.

Video: Newvem For Azure – Costs & Assets Overview 

Newvem is the first analytics and optimization solution for the Windows Azure cloud and is currently available as a free Beta offering. Create Your Free Account Now!

About the Author

Keywords: Newvem, Microsoft Azure, Windows Azure, Azure Cloud, Azure Public Cloud, Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Getting started with MS Azure, Azure usgae, Announcements, Enterprise Cloud, Cloud Resources Visibility

DotNetNuke is a well known web content management platform (CMS), which is used widely for building professional websites containing dynamic and interactive content. It offers a user friendly menu-driven interface, which helps to easily create feature rich websites. First, the user should commence by building a starter’s site with default settings on DotNetNuke. After the user logins to the Windows Azure Management portal, the following screen will be presented.

1. Login to your Azure Management portal and click on “WEBSITES”. Next, select “CREATE A WEBSITE”.

2. Click on “FROM GALLERY” to create a website.

3. Select “.DotNetNuke Community Edition” from the available list and click on “Next”.

4. The user is required to configure the “Site Settings” for the above mentioned CMS. The site settings require the following parameters:

• Enter URL: This will be the web address for the user’s site
• Select a database: This is required to store the data for the user’s website

Select a region: Azure offers various regions. Select the region where the website is to be launched or the one closest to the user and click on “Next”.

5. The dialog will ask the user to “Create New Data Base” page. Enter the name and the region and click on “Next”.

6. As soon as the user clicks on “Complete”, a message will be displayed stating that the site has been successfully deployed.

7. Browse the newly created website using http://test12345555.azurewebsites.net to test if the site has been deployed correctly. Here, test12345555 is the URL provided in step#4.

Check the following short video:

For more information, visit the Windows Azure Features Page.

Keywords: Microsoft Azure, Windows Azure, Azure Cloud, Azure Public Cloud, Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Virtual Hard Disk, High Performance Computing, Azure VM, Azure Images Gallery, Azure VHD, Azure Virtual Hard Drive, Azure VHD, Azure VM, Getting started with MS Azure, DotNetNuke

The following questions will be discussed next week on a webinar Managing Cloud Workloads: Back to Basics with Joe Weinman of Cloudonomics. These aims to answer some of the questions arise on that matter:

Q1: What is a cloud workload and cloud workload management?

A cloud workload is dependent on the cloud layer (i.e. infrastructure, compute unit, storage unit, etc.). In infrastructure the workload is the compute or storage units that are being utilized by the cloud consumer during a period of time. In PaaS, the workload refers to the software stack processing efforts while in SaaS it refers to the usage and demand habits of the end user or system. One method of measuring workload throughput is by analyzing the utilization efficiency. Cloud workload management requires an understanding of resource demand in order to ensure efficient capacity utilization at all times. Additionally, it means having the visibility and tools to utilize fixed capacity for steady demand as well as the ability to burst on-demand peaks while aiming for ideal throughput of IT and cloud resources.

Newvem’s Cloud Capacity Utilization Heat Map gives a visual picture into your AWS cloud’s capacity and utilization. This dynamic and easy view enables AWS users to identify fixed vs. variable capacity, make better capacity planning decisions, and spot usage which could be better economically served over fixed capacity computing platforms (i.e. Reserved Instances, hybrid, or private clouds).

“Tracking AWS usage over multiple regions, especially outside of the United States, can be very challenging.  The utilization heat map helps us to improve our capacity planning across regions, something we couldn’t otherwise do.” – Chemi Katz, VP Technology, Double Verify

Learn More

Q2: What are the cloud consumer’s considerations for switching between clouds?

Having had this conversation multiple times, I’ve discovered that there are many considerations that need to be kept in mind when contemplating switching between clouds. Workload migration, whether it is between private and public clouds or between cloud vendors, should be driven by the business values gained by the cloud user – reduced costs, enhanced security, improved availability, or decreased vendor lock-in. Workload migration automation, or workload transportation rules, must be established based on full transparency of the dynamic cloud environment. Today, there is a rising debate on the feasibility of workload transportation between cloud vendors.

Figure 2: Newvem Utilization Heatmap (Click to Enlarge)

Q3: How does the perspective of the workload differ between the cloud vendor and its consumer?

From the vendor’s perspective, the cloud workload refers to the physical machine compute units that are utilized in a period of time (second, minute, hour). It is the vendor’s goal to eliminate idle physical capacity. Alternatively, the consumer’s workload refers to his/her utilization of the cloud compute utility in order to meet demand and terminate idle capacity. Essentially, both sides are aligned with the need to be efficient and to ensure that capacity meets demand while maintaining maximum throughput of resources at all times. A good example of this is Amazon Cloud spot instances that incentivize users to use lower priced resources at peak times and thus maximize the AWS underlying physical compute resources utilization.

“…the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), a global member-led organization, has brought together hundreds of end user enterprise IT organizations to work together in an attempt to drive broad scale requirements for the enterprise-ready cloud. The group recently announced the release of a new POC (Proof-of-Concept) paper developed to determine where the virtual machine (VM) industry currently stands in meeting interoperability requirements outlined in an ODCA VM interoperability usage model.” Resource: Forbes.com“

Q5: What’s the degree of cloud vendor lock-in?

Cloud vendor lock-in is a significant consideration when adopting a specific cloud vendor or platform. Vendor lock-in is dependent on assumed costs of switching clouds. Taking that into consideration, the discussion should compare traditional data center “lock-in” with public or private cloud vendor “lock-in”. Based on this, it seems that public cloud consumers prefer not to be locked-in simply because there is no initial hardware investment. Heavy reliance on proprietary APIs, however, can create greater lock-in that drives costs up and undermines the savings that can be achieved through portability and technical efficiency.  Past experiences and the new cloud perception has led experienced IT leaders to better measure their vendor’s lock-in level. Vendors that don’t lock-in their customers may be perceived as a better option for organizations that are considering cross-cloud deployment.

Q4: What is Interoperability? Are there Cloud standards?

Cloud interoperability is the ability to use the same tools, process, and compute images on a variety of computing providers and platforms. For the ability to migrate cloud workloads between environments or between clouds there must be common concepts across the board, all the way to the actual API standards that enable and facilitate cloud integrations.

Download the Whitepaper PDF: Managing Cloud Workloads – Newvem

Register now for this exciting (FREE) event that will be held on Thursday, May 16th, 2013 at 12pm EST.

About the Author

Ofir Nachmani, Cloud Computing Evangelist, Blogger and Lecturer at IAmOnDemand.com. Ofir has extensive experience helping ISV companies with cloud adoption and management. Today, Ofir is a Senior Vice President and Chief Evangelist at Newvem. Prior to this Ofir led ClickSoftware’s On-Demand initiative and established the company cloud offering. He also held several positions at Zarathustra – SaaS development, including the company CEO.

Keywords: cloud computing, Cloud utilization, Cloud Workloads Management, Cloud Management, Newvem, Cloud Computing Webinars,  Cloud migration, Cloud Vendor lock-in, AWS Amazon Cloud, Cloud enablemnet, Cloud Capacity, PaaS, SaaS, IaaS, Cloud Portability, Interoperability, Cloud costs, Security

This article was cross posted on cloudave

This is worth doing as quite a collection can build up over time and Amazon Web Services has limits on the number of volumes and snapshots you can store; these limits can be increased, but you have to make a Request to Increase the Amazon EBS Volume Limit.

What are EBS Volumes?

Volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices, with user supplied device names and a block device interface. You can create a file system on top of Amazon EBS volumes, or use them in any other way you would use a block device (like a hard drive).

What are Snapshots?

Snapshots are a point-in-time of a volume, which are persisted to Amazon S3. These snapshots can be used as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes, and protect data for long-term durability. The same snapshot can be used to instantiate as many volumes as you wish. These snapshots can be copied across AWS regions, making it easier to leverage multiple AWS regions for geographical expansion, data center migration and disaster recovery.

[Stay on top you AWS Cloud. Newvem actively tracks and presents cost and asset usage trends over daily, weekly, monthly, and month-to-date time periods - Learn more]

Getting started

Create an Amazon Linux instance and upload your EC2 private key and EC2 certificate and then set them.

export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=pk-QWERTYUIOP.pem
export EC2_CERT=cert-QWERTYUIOP.pem

EBS Volumes available to remove

Use this command to get list of all the volumes available to remove.

ec2-describe-volumes --region eu-west-1 | grep available | awk '{print $2}' | tr '\n' ' '

All Snapshots

Use this command to get a list of all snapshots.

ec2-describe-snapshots --region eu-west-1 | grep SNAPSHOT | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq

All Snapshots in Use

Use this command to list all snapshots in use.

ec2-describe-images --region eu-west-1 | grep BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq

All Snapshots Not in Use by AMI’s

Use this command to list all snapshots not associated with an AMI.

// all snapshots not associated with an AMI
comm -23 <(echo $(ec2-describe-snapshots --region eu-west-1 | grep SNAPSHOT | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq) | tr ' ' '\n') <(echo $(ec2-describe-images --region eu-west-1 | grep BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq) | tr ' ' '\n') | tr '\n' ' '

Warning - KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING BEFORE RUNNING THE FOLLOWING COMMANDS

How to Delete all Unattached EBS Volumes

Use this command to delete all volumes which are unattached.

// delete all volumes which are unattached
ec2-delete-volume --region eu-west-1 $(ec2-describe-volumes --region eu-west-1 | grep available | awk '{print $2}' | tr '\n' ' ')

How to Delete all Unused Snapshots

Use this command to delete all snapshots not in use.

// run as a single command
for s in $(comm -23 <(echo $(ec2-describe-snapshots --region eu-west-1 | grep SNAPSHOT | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq) | tr ' ' '\n') <(echo $(ec2-describe-images --region eu-west-1 | grep BLOCKDEVICEMAPPING | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq) | tr ' ' '\n') | tr '\n' ' ')
do
echo Deleting snapshot $s
ec2-delete-snapshot --region eu-west-1 $s
done

I take no responsibility nor blame if something goes wrong.

Good Luck!

Robert.

Originally posted here - http://www.robertsindall.co.uk/blog/how-to-clean-up-amazon-ebs-volumes-and-snapshots/

Keywords: Amazon Web Services, AWS, Amazon EBS, EBS Volume, AWS EC2, EC2 instances, Cloud Computing, AWS Console, EBS Snapshots, Amazon S3, AWS Regions, AWS AMI, Cloud Automation, Cloud Cost, idle capctiy

Newvem is the leader in cloud operations optimization, having tracked more than $200,000,000 in AWS EC2 spend.  Offering a business view into the AWS cloud, Newvem actively analyzes cloud usage in order to provide clear visibility into costs.  Newvem optimizes cloud operations by revealing and offering solutions to cloud irregularities related to cost, security, utilization, and availability.  Newvem was founded in 2011 and received $4M in Series A funding with participation from Greylock, Innovation Endeavors, and Index Ventures.

Zev Laderman, Co-founder and CEO of Newvem, sold his previous startup Aduva to Sun Microsystems in 2006 and since then has been a big Israeli angel investor.

Some of the other esteemed companies to make the list include:

• Waze – A navigation app that crowd-sources traffic reports
• Wix – Free and low-cost websites that allow anyone to make beautiful websites
• BillGuard – Protecting consumers against fraudulent credit card charges
• GetTaxi – A taxi-hailing app that allows you to pay for the ride via your phone
• Fiverr – A marketplace where people can buy and sell products and services for as little as $5

Check out the Business Insider article to see what other Israeli innovators made the cut.

In addition to providing visibility to AWS cloud costs, risks, and assets, Newvem is proactively helping cloud users to improve their cloud operation with the Newvem Community, crowd-sourcing expert knowledge to bring you how-to guides, articles, and tutorials covering all aspects of cloud computing. The AWS community forum features open support discussions and is one of the most important venues for AWS cloud community interaction. And a monthly webinar series brings the industry’s top experts to present unbiased information in their fields of expertise. Our upcoming webinar will feature Joe Weinman, author and founder of Cloudonomics, to discuss Managing Cloud Workloads.

Get started today with a free Newvem account: www.newvem.com

About the Author

Keywords: Azure Cloud, MS Azure Cloud, Windows Azure Cloud, Azure Websites, Getting Started with Azure, Azure VM, Azure VHD, Azure Virtual Network, Windows Azure portal, Azure Cloud Services

AWS does not provide an AWS Management console for Auto Scaling. Thus, all the operations should be performed through CLI or API. When the user wants to configure Auto Scaling for their resources, it is required to follow certain steps. The first step is to create a launch configuration, which defines resources, such as the AMI, EBS or Instance Type or detailed monitoring to be added by Auto Scaling.

The second step is to create an Auto Scaling group.

The third and final step is to plan for adding/removing the computer resources.

The user has the following three options with Auto Scaling to plan the action:

a. Maintain a fixed number of instances.

b. Scale up or down based on the demand.

c. Scale up or down on a schedule.

One of the main usages of Auto Scaling is to provide horizontal scaling based on a schedule. The user may be aware that during certain particular period of the day the application may have an increased load as compared to other time: e.g. Every Thursday there is a deal offer from the company and the web traffic is more during that period. The user can configure Auto Scaling to scale up in response to the predictable changes, which is similar to pro-active scaling. Thus, the user does not wait for some event to occur, but alternatively scales up at a pre-defined time.

To configure Auto Scaling at a pre-defined time, the user is required to configure the scheduled action (learn more - 9 Guidelines for Scheduling AWS EC2 Instances). The action will tell Auto Scaling to scale up in future at a defined time. The scaling action requires details, such as the time, maximum, minimum, and desired capacity. Auto Scaling will update the Auto Scaling group configuration with a new maximum, minimum, and desired capacity.

Auto Scaling supports only the future date and time. The expected format is “YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ” in UTC/GMT time zone only. Auto Scaling allows the user to create a scaling action for recurring events also. The recurring action takes values in the Unix cron syntax format.

1. Download and install the Auto Scaling CLI.

2. Verify the existing launch configuration with the following command:

as-describe-launch-configs --region us-west-2

3. Verify the Auto Scaling group and the instances with the following command:

as-describe-auto-scaling-groups <Group name> --headers --region us-west-2

4. The user can create a one time schedule to scale up or down using the following command:

as-put-scheduled-update-group-action <Action Name> --auto-scaling-group <Group Name>--start-time "YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ" --desired-capacity < New Desired Capacity>

5. If the user wants to scale up, the higher desired capacity should be provided.

If the user wants to scale down, the lower desired capacity should be provided.

6. Check whether the actions have been configured correctly with the following command:

as-describe-scheduled-actions <Action Name> --headers –region <region name>

7. Auto Scaling will start adding the new resources on the defined time, as specified in step#5.

8. Further, at the specified time (in this case after 5 mins from scaling up) the scaling down activity will commence. This will remove the additional resources and bring the desired capacity, as configured in the action.

9. The above mentioned actions configure Auto Scaling to scale up and scale down only at a specified time and as a one time action. If the user wants to plan a regular scaling action, Auto Scaling provides commands to configure the recurring action.

The command to configure the recurring action is:

as-put-scheduled-update-group-action <Action Name> --auto-scaling-group <Group Name> --recurrence <schedule in cron format> --desired-capacity <desired capacity>

The schedule for recurrence is specified in the cron format. Auto Scaling does not allow to schedule in the past. In the screen given below, the user has configured action to run at 6 AM, on the 1st day of Jan (1), March (3) and June (6).

10. The user can check the action with the command: as-describe-scheduled-actions, as explained in step#6.

11. Once a scheduled event has occurred it will be automatically deleted. To delete the existing scheduled event run the following command:

As-delete-scheduled-action <Action Name> --auto-scaling-group <Auto Scaling Group Name> --region <Region Name>

Related Article: 9 Guidelines for Scheduling AWS EC2 Instances

Keywords: Amazon web services, Amazon AWS console, Amazon AWS instances, EC2 Service, Amazon cloud computing, EC2 EBS, EC2 CPU Utilization, AWS Infrastructure Elasticity, Amazon EC2 capacity, Cloud Monitoring, CloudWatch, API, CLI tools, AWS Auto Scaling, AWS AMI, AWS Region, AWS Automation, AWS Configuration, AWS Instance Type

Keywords: Azure Cloud, MS Azure Cloud, Windows Azure Cloud, Azure Websites, How-to Guide, Azure VM, Azure VHD, Azure Virtual Network, SQL Azure, Windows Azure portal, Azure Cloud Management,

• Windows Azure Operating System
• SQL Azure Relational Database
• Windows Azure Platform App Platform

Check out this video to get a better understanding of the cloud offerings available as part of the Microsoft Azure suite for cloud services.

For more information, visit the Windows Azure Features Page.

Keywords: Azure Cloud, MS Azure Cloud, Windows Azure Cloud, Azure Websites, How-to Guide, Azure VM, Azure VHD, Azure Virtual Network, SQL Azure

The virtual machine in Azure offers various kinds of disks, such as an OS disk, a local temporary disk or a data disk. The data disk is an optional disk, which is similar to a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD). Azure allows creating a blank disk in the Azure cloud as well as importing the local data disk to Azure. Windows Azure allows attaching or detaching a data disk any time to an Azure cloud VM. However, there is a cap for attaching the maximum number of disks based on the VM size.

When a disk is detached from the VM, it is not automatically deleted from the storage. This disk can be reused and attached to the same or another VM. In a Linux machine, where the data disk is mounted to the VM, it is required to unmount it first before detaching.

1. Create a Linux virtual machine with Windows Azure and attach a blank data disk.

2. Connect to the Linux instance and check the mounted devices with the command “df -h”. Run the command “sudo umount /dev/sdc” to unmount the data disk attached to vm as /dev/sdc. Verify that the device is unmounted with the command “df –h” or “ls dev/sd*”.

3. In the Windows Azure portal, go to virtual machines. Click on the Linux virtual machine for which the disk has been removed in step#2.

4. Both the disks are displayed in the disks section: the default OS disk as well as the data disk unmounted in step#2. Select the data disk to be detached and click on “Detach Disk” from the toolbar.

5. Select the name of the disk to be detached in the dialog box and proceed.

6. The disk detachment is in progress. The user can check the progress status by clicking on the activity icon in the right side bottom toolbar (Marked below with ‘1 and activity icon’).

7. The data disk after detachment is not displayed in the disk listing. It only displays the data disk.

8. After detachment, the data disk will not be deleted automatically. It will still be available in the storage. Thus, it can again be attached to the same or some other instance.

9. The detached data disk will be displayed in the virtual machine when the user selects the disks from the portal. It is now not attached to any instance.

10. To delete the data disk, select the disk and click on “Delete associated disk”.

11. Windows Azure will ask for a confirmation before deleting the disk.

12. On confirmation, deletion of the disk will commence and be in progress.

13. After the disk has been deleted it will not be available in the virtual machines disk list.

Keywords: Microsoft Azure, Windows Azure, Azure Cloud, Azure Public Cloud, Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Virtual Hard Disk, High Performance Computing, Azure VM, Azure Images Gallery, Azure VHD, Azure Virtual Hard Drive, Azure VHD, Azure VM, Getting started with MS Azure