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The benefits of migrating workloads between different cloud providers or between private and public clouds can only truly be redeemed with an understanding of the cloud business model and cloud workload management. It seems that cloud adoption has reached the phase where advanced cloud users are creating their own hybrid solutions or migrating between clouds while striving to achieve interoperability values within their systems. This article aims to answer some of the questions that arise when managing cloud workloads.

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In this introductory video to Microsoft Azure, expert Haishi Bai reviews some of the fundamental concepts in Windows Azure Cloud Services, including Cloud Service, roles, scaling options, and more. He creates a website template in order to demonstrate how to scale a web service using multiple instances and walks through the process of publishing the service to Windows Azure to see it run on the cloud!

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In this video, Microsoft Azure expert Haishi Bai walks through the Windows Azure Management Portal to manage cloud services using the web UI. He explains how to verify that instances and load balancers are functioning properly, how to use custom settings to enable reconfiguration on the fly, how to update and deploy cloud services to Microsoft Azure, and more. Think of this tutorial as the Microsoft Cloud simplified!

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It’s gotten easy to publish web applications to the cloud, but the last thing you want to do is establish unique authentication schemes for each one. At some point, your users will be stuck with a mountain of passwords, or, end up reusing passwords everywhere. Not good. Instead, what about extending your existing corporate identity directory to the cloud for all applications to use? Fortunately, Microsoft Active Directory can be extended to support authentication/authorization for web applications deployed in ANY cloud platform. In this post, I’ll show you how to configure Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to authenticate the users of a Node.js application hosted in Windows Azure Web Sites and deployed via Dropbox.

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In part one I described the AWS EBS snapshot mechanism. In this part I will drill deeper on how to calculate the EBS snapshot cost. I  will show how to be able to do a rough estimation or even to perform an accurate cost analysis using monitoring tools.

Rough estimation

In order to estimate how large your EBS snapshots will be, you need to know how much your volumes are changing. One way would be to guesstimate,we can use a simple thumb rule that is often used in- backup planning: A typical data volume of a production server changes about 3% a day. Let’s try and calculate the cost. Assuming a 1TB EBS volume, that is 70% full at first. We take snapshots and keep them for 30 days. So, the first full will be taking 700GB (70% of 1TB). For the incremental snapshots we can multiply 30 (days) by 30GB (3% of 1TB) and we reach 900GB. Add them together and we reach about 1.6TB of total snapshot storage. AWS compresses the snapshots when they are stored in S3.

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Availability and Uptime Management is one of five components in the ITIL Service Delivery area. It is responsible for ensuring application systems are up and available for use according to the service criticality and the defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Your uptime management team should analyze your online business availability requirements and ensure that optimized, cost-effective contingency plans are put in place and tested on a regular basis to ensure an online robust service that meets the business needs. For example, Internet ecommerce systems may have almost zero recovery RTO (Recovery Time Objective) in comparison to less critical, non-customer-facing applications where even a few days of recovery can be provisioned on a less expensive cloud infrastructure with limited redundancy capabilities.

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Understanding the ‘shared responsibility model’ is one of the most important keys for getting to the cloud and staying there.  Successful ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) cloud adoption cases can be likened to a stool with three legs -

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Considering the current high demand of infrastructure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) upgrade the infrastructure and corresponding EC2 services regularly on a continual basis, with many patches and upgrades being applied to instances transparently. Some updates require a short instance reboot in order to apply the above mentioned updates. AWS EC2 has a functionality called monitor events, which provides visibility into the timing of the planned reboots. With the help of the above mentioned functionality, the user can use the scheduled events to manage reboots on their own before the scheduled update window.

The present guide demonstrates how to view the scheduled event. You can take actions, such as stop / reboot the instance against a planned action. You can also refer the maintenance guide.

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Newvem is proud to announce the launch of our newest offering – Newvem Cloud Care.  This is a free service that actively triages urgent issues and diagnoses cost, risk, and governance irregularities. Additionally, Cloud Care tracks key cloud vitals such as costs and assets in order to help DevOps, IT Managers, CIOs, CTOs, and Finance departments get the most out of their AWS resources.

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Puppet is IT automation software that helps systems administrators to provision, configure, and manage their infrastructure.  According to their website, sys admins can use Puppet to easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage change, scaling from 10s of servers to 1000s, on-premise or in the cloud.

Following is a step-by-step guide explaining how to install a Puppet Server with the Puppet Dashboard, compliments of Emind Systems.

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