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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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AWS Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing computer resources for the application hosted on AWS. The present guide demonstrates how to configure Auto Scaling to scale based on a schedule. Auto Scaling is ideally suited for an application where there is a requirement for scalability.

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.

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Windows Azure provides the IaaS offering to host or run the user’s applications with virtual machines. A virtual machine is a server, which the user can access, control or manage as per the requirement and is created from the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD). The guide demonstrates how to detach a data disk from a Linux virtual machine and delete it from the storage in Windows 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.

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AWS Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing computer resources for the application hosted on AWS. Auto Scaling is ideally suited for an application where there is a requirement for scalability.

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.

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AWS Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing compute resources for the application hosted on Amazon AWS cloud. Auto Scaling ensures that the number of Amazon EC2 instances increases seamlessly when the demand escalates for maintaining the application performance, and decreases automatically when the demand declines for minimizing the costs. This guide demonstrates how to configure Auto Scaling to scale manually with a fixed number of instances.

AWS does not provide an AWS Management console for Auto Scaling. Thus, all the operations should be performed through CLI or AWS APIs. 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.

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Windows Azure Web Sites offer a really nice and easy way to host applications written in a variety of languages. It also supports a variety of ways to push code, including Git, GitHub, Team Foundation Service, Codeplex, and Dropbox. For simplicity sake (and because I hadn’t tried it yet), I chose to deploy via Dropbox.

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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 my journey through the cloud I often come across great new initiatives. The interesting fact is that although the cloud is a pure revolution terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI remain valid, new methodologies and techniques are presented to support them in the cloud.

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AWS Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing computer resources for the application hosted on AWS. The user can achieve Auto Scaling in different ways, such as maintaining the number of healthy instances or adding/ removing instances based on demand. The present guide demonstrates how to create, view or delete an Auto Scaling configuration.

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Scaling is one of the most important factors for Cloud Services. It allows the user to optimize the cost by providing resources only when required. Amazon Cloud Auto Scaling provides horizontal scaling by automatically adding or removing the computer resources for the application hosted on AWS. The changes are on demand based on the triggers configured by the user.

Consider the following scenario: when the user’s web application is hosted on AWS and there is a sudden increase of traffic to that website. If the user fails to scale up based on the need, the application may fail or give a slow response. If the user has configured parameters such that AWS adds more application resources (EC2 Instances) when the traffic increases the application will continue to respond with the same performance as before.

The present guide demonstrates how to install Auto Scaling CLI on a Windows machine.

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