Are microservices the cure for the ague of monolithic applications, or do they bring their own problems with them that monolithic architectures have circumvented? Are they capable of delivering applications that are easier to maintain and develop? How can they avoid the failings of service-oriented architectures? Once more, Robert Sheldon gets to the heart of the technical issues.… Read more
Was the marketing hook 'The Internet of Things' conjured up before the technical definition? Are we being persuaded to spend money on fending off yet another fantasy tsunami of data? Already, we have televisions that listen to, and report, your conversations; so are we facing the Science Fiction future of gadgets that report where you go, who you visit and what medications you take? As Robert Sheldon says; "It's big, almost too big to get your arms around"… Read more
Containers promise to make applications more portable and efficient. The technology, originally based on Linux's cgroups, provides a way of running several applications as modular, platform-agnostic packages in isolation on the same server. Docker's open-source approach to containers has dominated the market, and Microsoft is producing its own equivalent Windows system. What next? Will Containers replace VMS? Robert Sheldon investigates.… Read more
SQL-based distributed Cloud Relational databases aren't new, but Amazon's Aurora offers an alternative to SQL Azure, and, being MySQL-compatible, provides the obvious route to the cloud for hosted LAMP web applications. Is this of interest to the rest of us? Rob Sheldon investigates.… Read more
Identities, the 'accounts' by which Cloud and Web users identify themselves, are tricky to manage, and tiresome for the users. Cloud services such as Office 365 have their main use in large organisations and so there have to be easy ways for system administrators to maintain them. Microsoft provide three alternative strategies; Cloud identities, Synced identities and federated identities. What is the differences between them, and which should you choose? … Read more
There was a time that data seemed part of the application that maintained and used it. Now, there is increasing demand to deliver data through platform-agnostic open-standard APIs so it can be consumed in a variety of ways, whether refined, aggregated, or combined with additional information. Are we heading towards a shared understanding of applications as data-providers, feeding other services such as BI, or even in the right circumstances, publishing it?… Read more
There is a growing assumption that Cloud file-storage services represent an ideal way of backing up files. It seems a compelling idea because it is so easy and seems secure. The truth is, as always, more complicated. There is more to any backup strategy than just cloud storag… Read more
The public perception is that, when something is deleted, it no longer exists. IT in general prefers the fuzzier idea of the trashcan, where the deleted compromising documents can blow around a digital landfill site for years. The Cloud takes this further, and so the data you serve up to the cloud can be stored out there indefinitely, no matter how hard to try to delete it. Rob Sheldon investigates, and finds the cloud a worryingly public place.… Read more
The 'Community Cloud' sounds, on first impression, like marketing-speak for some untried novelty, but in fact it is already around, and working well for governments and healthcare in particular. Bob Sheldon investigates, and is encouraged to find groups of organisations who have cooperated to create secure and resilient cloud-based services.… Read more
Should you be planning to move from Exchange to Office 365? If so, why? What sort of license should you get, and should you use cloud identities or federated identities for your users? Jaap starts a series of articles with an overview of the advantages, and a simple explanation of the options in subscriptions and licenses for Office 365.… Read more
With Amazon Web Services, you might find that a large Amazon Machine Image (AMI) as with over 1 TB, taken as a snapshot can take two days or more. If so, it is time to change your backup strategy and manage your EBS volumes as efficiently as possib… Read more
Simple-Talk's Melanie Townsend sits down with Red Gate's Matt Lee to talk about their newest adventure in cloud-based monitoring for SQL Server: migrating their popular SQL Monitor tool to run as a hosted service on Amazon's cloud platform, AWS… Read more
AWS's DNS service, called Route 53, is a reliable and cost effective service for managing your domain. It has a simple RESTful API for managing them in the command-line.… Read more
Virtualization certainly has advantages, but using a private cloud means a lot of configuration, troubleshooting, and management; and you still get CPU, memory, and disk space constraints. Private Cloud feels more like traditional hosting than the silver bullet one is led to expect.… Read more
Because cloud services are so easy to deploy and scale-up, it is easy to start racking up unexpectedly high bills. There are plenty of ways of keeping costs down, but don't assume that Cloud services are necessarily a cheap option. It depends on how well you control costs… Read more
Jeff Foster, a Software Engineer on Red Gate's SQL Source Control product, has recently begun investigating the use of Amazon's EC2 to run engine tests We asked him why and how.
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OpenStack is an open-source cloud platform based on Linux. It aims to allow organisations to run cloud services on standard hardware, with interoperability between cloud services such as Amazon AWS.… Read more
Dynamo is a fast and scalable proprietary key-value structured storage system that gives the features of both simple databases and distributed hash tables (DHTs), running on SSD storage to provide other Amazon services such as S3. It it not ACID-compliant ore relational but is great for doing analysis on large amounts of simple data… Read more
In the Cloud, services come in the form of Software (SaaS), Infrastructure (IaaS) and platform (PaaS). when moving a service to the cloud, IaaS and PaaS provide two different service models and provisioning steps of solutions. A PaaS providers has more responsibility for your solution than an IAAS provider. wherase an IaaS solutionmay offer more flexibility at lower level. Wely Lau explains.… Read more
Cloud platforms such as Heroku, AppEngine, PHPFog and Pagoda Box are ideal for companies who just want to focus on providing applications without the distractions of infrastructure management. Both Pagoda and PHPFog are particularly suited to PHP-based applications using the LAMP stack… Read more
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