Cloud Computing

Information on different Key Value stores

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:55:12 +0000

In my previous blog on “Key Value stores: Usefulness in Cloud environment” I have mentioned the advantages and the scenarios where Key value stores can be useful. There are various Key value stores available over internet which differs from each other in some or other ways. So you need to decide on which to go for depending on your requirement.

Handling certificates for Azure management API calls

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:25:28 +0000

I had a very tough time in one of my projects where we were using the Azure management API from a web application (deployed in Azure cloud). Before this project, we had successfully used these APIs in a windows based application but this is first time we were using in a web application. And apparently had a good amount of learning in a very new dimension.

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Accessing CouchDB for Data Storage and Retrieval

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:43:18 +0000

Cloud Databases are an emerging type of non relational databases which do not follow relational algebra and are generally key-value oriented systems which are used for storing internet scale data and provide easy programmatic access. Databases like Amazon SimpleDB, Cassandra from Facebook and Apache CouchDB and many others falls in the category of non relational databases and has been widely used in large consumer based applications and are quite popular.

Accessing Hadoop DFS for Data Storage and Retrieval

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:30:41 +0000

Distributed File Systems (DFS) are a new type of file systems which provides some extra features over normal file systems and are used for storing and sharing files across wide area network and provide easy programmatic access.

SaaS makes financial accounting easier

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:34:06 +0000

It’s been so much talked and written about technical benefits of Cloud computing. I thought of looking at it from financial accounting point of view. Comparing the traditional IT expenses with Cloud computing expenses especially SaaS model, might give a different picture of the income statement. Before I go ahead and try putting forward my interpretation, want to make a disclaimer that I am no way finance or accounting expert, this is just a plain interpretation of what I understood. Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

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Key Value stores: Usefulness in Cloud environment

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:14:16 +0000

Cloud Databases are a new type of non relational (key-value oriented) databases which are used for storing internet scale data and provide easy programmatic access. Databases like Amazon SimpleDB, Apache CouchDB, Project Voldemort and many others falls in the category of non relational databases and has been widely used and are quite popular.

Security Issues with the Cloud

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:27:30 +0000

Despite all the hype surrounding the cloud, enterprise customers are still reluctant to get their hands wet. The reason… security. Industry verticals like Banking and capital markets, Defense and other high risk projects give far more weight age to security and fail safety than marginal reduction in capital expenditure. Undiscovered security holes, which lie hidden inherently in the OS for decades, may cause much higher damage when the whole system is exposed to the brute force hacking power of the public internet.

MYOC - Offload compute intensive tasks on Azure using the Offline Processing pattern

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:59:41 +0000

In this post on the MYOC cloud development series, I will share an offline processing design pattern where certain computation tasks are offloaded to another execution task using queues and that can help reducing the overall processing time of online transactions. This is a very useful pattern to use, if you plan to build highly scalable and compute intensive application on the web today. This patterns is also used by many popular websites. Here I will demonstrate how we've used this pattern to help reduce the poll creation time.

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Hybrid Clouds: Business Imperatives

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:25:23 +0000

What could possibly be some of the business imperatives for hybrid cloud adoption by enterprises? In my opinion one of foremost imperatives is the taxation laws to be enacted by governmnets that are based on corporate emissions. Considering the fact that a significant percentage of the carbon footprint includes emissions from the datacenters, government regulations to bring down corporate emissions could act as a trigger for multiple organizations to share hosting resources within the same data-center. It is in these contexts that we may see more of hybrid cloud model perhaps taking shape.

Cloud Bursts: Reality versus Hype!!I

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:37:04 +0000

The taxonomy of cloud computing consisting of private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds is by now well established in the cloud computing literature and discussion forums. Inspite of the fact that proponents of cloud computing are gung-ho about associated technologies such as cloud burst -- the technology that ultimately helps realize hybrid clouds, Gartner predicts that businesses will use private clouds as of now. Even Forrestor backed private cloud in its report earlier this year. Does that mean the end of technologies associated with cloud burst? In my opinion it is not!!! While it is true that we may be witnessing a slowdown in hybrid cloud adoption, yet I believe that enterprises will be amenable towards adopting the cloud burst technology in the coming days. As different lines of business within an organization continues to invest in building their own private clouds, we will witness a scenario where an enterprise has multiple private clouds. The private clouds could belong to different lines of business or it could belong to one line of business possibly spread across multiple geographies. Typically, the private cloud of a particular business line on one hand can remain under-utilized for a major fraction of the time and on the other hand a short surge in demand could result in over-utilized servers and reduced quality of services even though spare capacity is available in the private cloud belonging to the other business line. Using cloud burst technologies, it possible to create a shared and yet private cloud. Each of the different LOBs has a dedicated cloud so that the applications belonging to a particular LOB runs only in its cloud under normal circumstances. Though discrete, these clouds form a shared virtual infrastructure so that an application in an overloaded cloud can procure the computing resources from an under-loaded cloud. That means, during overload situations, an application requiring more computing resources can procure these resources from a cloud different from its current host cloud. Both these cloud, however belong to the same organization; albeit different lines of business. Scenarios such as this are likely to be more common in future and can be termed as internal cloud bursts. As enterprises adopt cloud technologies organizations are going to witness internal cloud burst more frequently than external cloud burst where applications move to an external cloud provider’s environment such as Amazon, Mosso or Rackspace when faced with scarcity of resources.

Shifting Gears: ISV Cloud On-boarding

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:29:02 +0000

Last couple of months; I had several exciting opportunities to interact with large ISVs in formulating the business strategies, technology strategies & GTM strategies to align and adopt cloud computing trends. I noticed that the ISVs are shifting the gears: the drivers are many, major one being the recent economic slowdown puts lot of growth & price pressures for ISVs as enterprises are conservative on IT spend. Also, the recent technology innovation trend – cloud computing – brings value in terms of cost efficiency and business agility.

Dallas – Information as a Service

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:24:02 +0000

We are witnessing information explosion over the internet, tons of information is getting accumulated in. However, we still struggle to get the “Accurate and Authentic Data”. Have you ever needed the zip code of a city, route to reach a place, dining menu of restaurants, weather forecast and history, crime rates in a specific area of city? This list just goes on. How do we get this data? Search this information on our favorite search engines and rest in peace when we find it!! But, do we really know whether the data which we got is really accurate?! It could be stale, misleading or just plain inaccurate!! Why can’t you get information as easily as you can get a size 40 Creamy white Louis Philippe shirt or maybe a striking green 8 GB IPOD shuffle; because INFORMATION is not commodity yet!!

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MYOC - Telephony with Twilio to Vote

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:23:05 +0000

MYOC (Make Your Opinion Count) – an online poll application hosted on Microsoft Azure, uses Twilio to make it easier for people to participate in the online polls. Twilio is telephony in the cloud which exposes RESTful APIs to build scalable voice applications. It supports both inbound and outbound telephony calls. Pricing is developer friendly with pay-as-you-go model.

MYOC uses Twilio in two ways –
1. Poll creator can place a call for participant to caste his/her vote
2. A participant can dial-in for a particular poll to caste his/her vote

Let’s see what all it takes to use twilio in MYOC to call a participant and accept his/her vote or to handle an incoming call to cast a vote.

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Infosys on-boarding ISV's on the cloud - 2

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:29:30 +0000

In this blog, I will continue the discussion on a possible migration scenario of migrating existing ISV application to Azure. If you haven’t read my previous blog on this topic, then you can go here...

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Points to notice while migrating data from traditional database to Azure SQL

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:37:18 +0000

Generally when it comes to migrating heavy data from one SQL server to another, among others following approaches are widely used:

1. Using SSIS package

2. And using BCP.

One needs to keep in mind a few points for the fruitful migration without any anomaly.

For one of our project we used SSIS package for migrating data but hit upon a few glitches in the course of our task.

Find more info here