When it comes to traditional retail, price is everything. Whether selling through bricks and mortar stores or online markets, vendors of physical goods define success in terms of the amount of money derived from each individual sale versus the cost of goods and extra expenditures. If you are selling in the Cloud, selling virtual or digital goods, you focus the bulk of your effort on driving traffic to your site and converting visitors into buyers. Whether you’re selling content like videos, online games, or software and services through subscriptions, in the virtual cloud commerce world your digital inventory has no relationship to sales volume. The warehouse is always empty as your goods are virtual, electronic. Because of this, every increase in sales you can make from your traffic goes right to your bottom line.
Important step with cloud adoption is to manage quick cycles of learning and improvement of the cloud environment. The following presentation brought you by Amazon AWS guys contains great amount of slides including best practices and examples for Continuous Deployment, Optimization and Integration.
In this article I describe how we created a redundant PostgreSQL database on the Amazon cloud using EBS snapshots as backups to deploy a PostgreSQL DB server DR mobile application for one of our customers.
PostgreSQL 9.1 includes new capabilities for asynchronous fast replication syncing between master and slaves. The master server streams new data to the current available slave. This version includes great improvements that generated significant fast WAL (Write Ahead Log) processing, which generates replication and fast launching capabilities for the slave servers.
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The cloud presents many security management challenges. Ensuring compliance, identity management, and other security best practices can be a challenging task. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is one of the tools that can be used to mitigate the risks associated with these challenges. In this article, I will discuss a few of the high points of IAM, including the different options and limitations that this AWS service brings together with its fascinating capabilities.
Many cloud computing users strive to apply security best practices to their cloud computing strategies. One of the best components that Amazon offers to manage security in their cloud computing service is their IAM mechanism, which allows an account owner to create users and manage their permissions within an AWS account.
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Can a cloud vendor Lock-in be good for anyone? Yes, when they are backed up by exceptional successful service delivery.
I’ve talked a lot about vendor lock-in in my previous post - The Devastating Cloud Lock-in on KnowYourCloud resources channel, so I decided to end this round up in a positive way – finally, lock-in can mean something good for both the cloud service provider and the cloud customer.
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The following presentation describe briefly how to start with DynamoDB to support PHP sessions. Check out the full article – PHP Sessions with a DynamoDB Backend, includes why to move to DynamoDB (AWS Cloud Scalable and Consistently performing NoSql as a service) and additional important considerations.
PHP Sessions with a DynamoDB Backend
The problem
When scaling an application, session sharing across multiple web servers is one of the first issues that need to be tackled. This issue is a bit more complex in autoscaling setups in the cloud where application servers are added or removed from the load balancer as traffic and load increases or decreases.
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Although more and more cloud newcomers are grasping the essence of the cloud, the challenges are still great. EU or US “cloud regulations” with regard to security and privacy is still a popular topic of discussion in the cloud social sphere. NIST, a US government research organization, with its cloud program is one of leaders in pushing to define the cloud with its “right rules” supported by relevant standards.
“Cloud computing can and does mean different things to different people. The common characteristics most interpretations share are on-demand scalability of highly available and reliable pooled computing resources, secure access to metered services from nearly anywhere, and displacement of data and services from inside to outside the organization. While aspects of these characteristics have been realized to a certain extent, cloud computing remains a work in progress. This publication provides an overview of the security and privacy challenges pertinent to public cloud computing and points out considerations organizations should take when outsourcing data, applications, and infrastructure to a public cloud environment”
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On LinkedIn there’s a discussion where the group members were asked to tell about the biggest challenge facing cloud and SaaS 2021. The thread includes more than 782 comments – and it seems that most of the comments are about the SLA, security and control.
I really don’t understand why security and service levels are big concerns. Yes, they are both important – but both should be fulfilled by the cloud as well as by the traditional outsourcing provider. I would add that it’s even more important for the cloud providers than their consumers. They face great risks if they don’t meet and maintain the required security and SLA. As we all know, it’s about being aware of risks and securing the proper data.
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