How to Start Big Data with Apache Spark

It is worth getting familiar with Apache Spark because it a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing and...

16 September 2016 15 min read

Platform as a Service

Robert Sheldon in Platform as a Service

Windows Containers and Docker

Windows Server 2016 features support for containers. These are not Linux-based, but containers that run on Windows and run Windows...

04 July 2016 11 min read

Robert Sheldon

The Logical Data Warehouse – Towards a Single View of All the Data

What is wrong with the Enterprise Data Warehouse? Quite a lot, it seems. By taking the narrow view that the...

09 November 2015 14 min read

Robert Sheldon

OpenStack: The Good and Not-So-Good Bits

OpenStack holds a great deal of promise as a cloud platform built on open standards, and has support from the...

03 September 2015 15 min read

Robert Sheldon

An Introduction to the OpenPOWER Foundation

In a bid to challenge Intel's dominance of high performance computing environments, IBM have introduced OpenPOWER, a flexible open-source framework...

03 August 2015 12 min read

Robert Sheldon

Microservices in Promise and Practice

Are microservices the cure for the ague of monolithic applications, or do they bring their own problems with them that...

13 April 2015 18 min read

Robert Sheldon

The Internet of Things: A New World Order?

Was the marketing hook 'The Internet of Things' conjured up before the technical definition? Are we being persuaded to spend...

10 March 2015 15 min read

Robert Sheldon

Application Containers For Cloud Computing

Containers promise to make applications more portable and efficient. The technology, originally based on Linux's cgroups, provides a way of...

11 February 2015 12 min read

AWS

Robert Sheldon in AWS

Amazon’s Aurora: A Distributed SQL Database Alternative For MySQL Applications

SQL-based distributed Cloud Relational databases aren't new, but Amazon's Aurora offers an alternative to SQL Azure, and, being MySQL-compatible, provides...

15 January 2015 13 min read

Jaap Wesselius

Cloud Identities versus Federated Identities in Office 365

Identities, the 'accounts' by which Cloud and Web users identify themselves, are tricky to manage, and tiresome for the users....

01 December 2014 8 min read

Robert Sheldon

Data as a Service: The Next "As a Service" Wave?

There was a time that data seemed part of the application that maintained and used it. Now, there is increasing...

19 November 2014 15 min read

Robert Sheldon

Stop Relying on Cloud File Stores as a Backup Strategy

There is a growing assumption that Cloud file-storage services represent an ideal way of backing up files. It seems a...

22 October 2014 17 min read

Robert Sheldon

Deleting Files in the Cloud

The public perception is that, when something is deleted, it no longer exists. IT in general prefers the fuzzier idea...

23 September 2014 15 min read

Robert Sheldon

The Community Cloud

The 'Community Cloud' sounds, on first impression, like marketing-speak for some untried novelty, but in fact it is already around,...

27 August 2014 15 min read

Jaap Wesselius

Office 365 Essentials – Subscriptions and Licenses

Should you be planning to move from Exchange to Office 365? If so, why? What sort of license should you...

08 August 2014 10 min read

Ming Lee

Amazon Web Services and managing our EBS volumes effectively

With Amazon Web Services, you might find that a large Amazon Machine Image (AMI) as with over 1 TB, taken...

19 September 2012 8 min read

A Cloudy Place

SQL Monitor Hosted: keeping an eye on your servers from the cloud

Simple-Talk's Melanie Townsend sits down with Red Gate's Matt Lee to talk about their newest adventure in cloud-based monitoring for...

12 September 2012 9 min read

Shameer

Introduction to Route 53

AWS's DNS service, called Route 53, is a reliable and cost effective service for managing your domain. It has a...

28 June 2012 6 min read

Jason Nappi

A private cloud that isn't really a cloud at all

Virtualization certainly has advantages, but using a private cloud means a lot of configuration, troubleshooting, and management; and you still...

29 May 2012 5 min read

Ming Lee

What do you mean the cloud isn't free?

Because cloud services are so easy to deploy and scale-up, it is easy to start racking up unexpectedly high bills....

04 May 2012 9 min read