Tuesday november 27, 28 & 30 Amazon Web Services will host "AWS re: Invent", their first global customer and partner conference in Las Vegas, USA. "AWS re: Invent" will feature deep technical content on popular cloud use cases, new AWS services, cloud migration best practices, architecting for scale, operating at high availability and making cloud … [Read more...]
Amazon RDS for Oracle: First Impressions
On Tuesday, Amazon announced availability of an Oracle version of their Relational Database Service (RDS). RDS is one of Amazon’s cloud services. You can think of it as ”database as a service.” Amazon provides a running database, storage, horsepower and a variety management tasks. And all you have to do is store you data in it. … [Read more...]
Determining optimal Amazon S3 transfer parallelism
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is a robust, inexpensive and highly-available internet data storage service. At Blue Gecko, we occasionally help our customers design and implement S3-based backup strategies. Compared to conventional off site tape vaulting services, the advantages of vaulting database and other backups to S3 are many. … [Read more...]
EC2 outage reactions showcase widespread ignorance regarding the cloud
Amazon EC2′s high-profile outage in the US East region has taught us a number of lessons. For many, the take-away has been a realization that cloud-based systems (like conventionally-hosted systems) can fail. Of course, we knew that, Amazon knew that, and serious companies who performed serious availability engineering before deploying to … [Read more...]
WHY AUTOMATION IS ESSENTIAL FOR EVERY SHOP
As physical infrastructure has changed over the years, management and configuration mechanisms have evolved as well. In the old days, large machines were managed by hand in many cases, by expert administrators who understood their configuration intimately. Then, as smaller machines were integrated into the enterprise, management-by-hand became … [Read more...]
Report from Oracle Openworld
Openworld 2010, despite the supposedly lagging economy, had record attendance again this year. No doubt this was the result of Oracle acquiring something like fourteen companies since last year, including Sun in 2009. The crowds were thick, divided about evenly between geeks in badly-fitting vendor t-shirts and slick sales-side hustlers with … [Read more...]
A Cloud over San Francisco for OpenWorld 2010
Oracle OpenWorld 2010 is just bursting with big cloud-related announcements this week. As I prepare to present on the Amazon cloud at OOW2010 on Thursday (http://bit.ly/aSKdIQ), I thought I would highlight two of the biggest cloud-related announcements of the week. Exalogic We all know about Exadata, Oracle’s hardware-based storage-optimized … [Read more...]
Blue Gecko implements Oracle E-Business Suite on EC2
Earlier this year, Blue Gecko designed and implemented an Oracle EC2 solution for Sage Manufacturing, an Oracle E-Business Suite customer. Download the white paper here, and read how Blue Gecko leveraged the flexible, cost-effective Amazon EC2 platform to improve Sage’s Oracle E-Business Suite infrastructure. Related Links: Oracle processor … [Read more...]
Database Cloud Security Webinar
Blue Gecko and Sentrigo are co-presenting a webinar on database security in the cloud. Jeremiah Wilton will present strategies for deploying databases in the cloud, and Andy Feit, Sentrigo’s VP of Marketing will present technical strategies for securing databases in the cloud. Don’t miss these two industry leaders discussing the future … [Read more...]
A CEO’s Guide to Amazon Web Services
What is Amazon Web Services? Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows you to add and remove computing services on demand. You pay for only what you use. There are no contracts and no fees other than usage charges. It works exactly like an electricity bill. When you need more servers, you add them. When you need more storage, you add it. When you … [Read more...]
Database security in the cloud
Here’s a great article on database security in the cloud published in eWeek by Slavik Markovich, founder of Sentrigo. The truth is, Slavik’s article has great advice for anyone considering hosting their application with any third-party provider. When you don’t own the infrastructure, you lose some control no matter how the … [Read more...]
SAWSUG meeting, April 27
The next Seattle Amazon Web Services User Group meeting is Tuesday, April 27. For more details, go to http://www.sawsug.com/. Related posts:SAWSUG meeting Blue Gecko will be attending SAWSUG June Meeting WWOUG April meeting sponsored by Blue Gecko … [Read more...]
Oracle Processor Licensing on Amazon EC2
Without completely copying everything our Oracle on EC2 Licensing page, I wanted to provide a quick overview of Oracle Processor licensing for EC2. Oracle can be licensed on Amazon EC2, but we have to translate processor use to core use to determine licensing costs. Where bare-metal processor licensing uses a CPU socket to define a processor, EC2 … [Read more...]
Introducing the Bluegecko MySQL Training AMI
I created the Bluegecko MySQL training AMI as a MySQL sandbox that folks could use to learn things about MySQL. I wanted the AMI to have MySQL 5.0, and a large collection of tools — for both tinkering and visualizing what is happening inside MySQL and on the system in general. I chose to host the AMI on a small instance since they’re … [Read more...]
Oracle Certification vs Oracle Support
At Collaborate this week, I received a lot of questions regarding support and certification for Oracle on Amazon Web Services. After unraveling a few of these questions, I realized that the difference between "certification" and "support" has become quite confused. I thought a quick explanation might help, because the difference is not really … [Read more...]