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We are thrilled to announce the launch of Newvem Cloud Operations Optimization for Windows Azure. This latest offering empowers Windows Azure users with straight forward visibility into their cloud inventory and usage, enabling better decision making, minimalizing operational exposures, and aligning cloud operations with business objectives.

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.

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In this post, I will show you how to clean up unused Amazon EBS Volumes and Snapshots.

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).

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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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Newvem’s Utilization Heat Map enables you to visualize your 30-day cloud usage by hour, region, business activity, and more in a single glance.

Did you know that more than 15% of clouds are underutilized? That’s more than $30M of the $200M in EC2 spend that Newvem has analyzed over the past year! Such a waste but it can be easily remedied with Cloud Utilization Heat Maps!

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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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The cloud enables great agility and can reduce costs if used right. But does it also manage risk? In fact, the cloud contains the same traditional hosting risks as well as specific related risks to your production environment running on the cloud. With IaaS dynamic environment you pay only for what you use enabling alignment with actual real-time demand. The cloud instance is a temporary resource that is created from a gold master image automatically and on demand. This basic cloud automation capability makes traditional patching redundant and fast provisioning extremely easy. It is an important consideration that changes some basic security deployment perceptions when moving from traditional infrastructure to the cloud.

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If you’re on the Amazon cloud, then you’ve probably already noticed that the AWS bill you receive is exceedingly complex. If you haven’t already switched, than perhaps stories from peers have scared you off. With the complexity of the consumption-based bill, your cloud costs can get out of hand and you may not understand why.

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Deploying your applications on the cloud can have amazing benefits but only if it’s done right. There are key operational and IT processes that your organization will need to agree upon in order to make the most of your cloud. This presentation by Eucalyptus Systems, “7 Steps to Enterprise Cloud Heaven”, outlines what you need to know to deploy a private cloud.

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Cloud service disruptions may happen. For example, during the past December, AWS had an ELB problem in us-east-1.

This service disruptions was not a huge concern for us, since the system was in staging phase and there was no traffic. However, we took this opportunity to learn and prepare ourselves. I’m sparing you the learning shenanigans, so you can follow and implement the solution without waiting for the next outage to happen.

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Application deployment automation solutions are key when hosting an application in the cloud. The combination of release automation and the IaaS resources abstraction layer allows you to easily migrate your application to any common cloud provider.

Automation shouldn’t be adopted solely in order to move to the cloud. It has many benefits above and beyond this need. Increasingly popular movements such as Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and DevOps fully support automation as a method to achieve continuous delivery. Organizations today have to keep up with a high rate of releases in complex environments. Automating application deployments and infrastructure provisioning is what makes it possible. Some IT professionals even take DevOps a step further to NoOps.

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