Netflix Offers More Open Source Goodness with Asgard Cloud Deployment Tool

Posted by on Jun 27, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Neflix announced it was open sourcing yet another of its IT management tools. This time it’s Asgard, a web-based cloud management tool designed for deploying massive cloud code projects on Amazon Web Services. Netflix released the project this week to GitHub and offered it under the Apache 2.0 open source license. They invited anyone to fork the project and make improvements to it. As an IT pro, you have to love the Netflix largess. Joe Sondow, and engineer at Netflix, explained the company’s rationale in open sourcing these tools: “Asgard has been one of the primary tools...

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Instagram Vs.1940s Census Data – Web Site Traffic Spike Showdown

Posted by on Apr 9, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Last week we had a unique opportunity to observe two web sites experiencing traffic spikes.  One came through with flying colors planning for the spike and handling it with aplomb. The other one crashed and burned under heavy traffic pressure. The site that crashed? The long-awaited 1940s census data site. The site that planned well: Instagram. Let’s look at this tale of two spikes starting with the positive story first. Last week Instagram, the photo sharing site, launched Instagram for Android. According to an LA Times article, Instagram boasts 30 million iOS users and had an Android...

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Amazon Proves Cloud Competition Good for IT

Posted by on Mar 16, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Last week Amazon Web Services announced that it was dropping its prices. According to a post on ZDNet, this was the 19th time in 6 years that Amazon agreed to drop its prices and it’s another case of the price of technology services going down — a trend that has to make any cash-strapped IT executive smile. It’s probably a big contributing factor as well as to why Amazon is the number one cloud service provider in the world. How big? Very big. According to a post on GigaOm, analyst Huan Liu from Accenture estimates that the Amazon Elastic Cloud service encompasses an...

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Time to Run IT Like a Business

Posted by on Feb 20, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

On Friday, I wrote a post called Why Private Clouds Makes Sense for IT. The idea is that by creating an online service catalogue you can operate IT like a cost center, but that means you have to run your department like a real business complete with service agreements. Christopher O’Malley writing on Computerworld earlier this month made the argument that most IT departments weren’t service oriented enough to even call what you provide services: “Unfortunately, despite all this talk, corporate IT is still not very service-oriented at all.  In fact, in some ways, it is the...

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Why Private Clouds Make Sense for IT

Posted by on Feb 17, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

My colleague George V. Hulme has a post today over on Cloud Commons with the amusing title, Private Cloud Haters – The Game is on Like Donkey Kong. While the title may be fun, the subject matter is very serious and private clouds actually make a lot of sense — just as much as public ones do — and for similar reasons. In his post, Hulme waxed about why there are so many cloud haters, then described the way game maker Zynga mixes the private and public cloud. “Zynga’s goal, as stated in GigaOM was to launch new games into the public cloud, where workloads may be spiky...

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