Cloud Computing Info

I am writing a book about Amazon AWS and the tools that work with it. It does a deep dive into the various services offered by AWS followed by a deep dive in the tools available to work with those services. I cover the EC2 command line tools, ElasticFox, Cloud Studio, RightScale, S3 Browser and S3 Organizer. I also provide a brief explanation of RDP, SSH and PuTTY.

The book, Cloud Computing with Amazon AWS, is subtitled A Database Geeks Guide to Amazon Web Services.

I am very close to finishing the book and I am looking for some people to read the draft and provide feedback.

People frequently ask me about cloud examples and success stories. Of course, the biggest success story has to be Animoto on RightScale.

On April 14, 2008, Animoto launched a Facebook plugin for their Rails application where users create music videos with photos and music of their choice. Its instant popularity forced them to scale up the number of application and worker servers at an unprecendented rate in just a few days. They were also able to easily scale down their deployment after the initial traffic spike was over.

I ran across this cloud computing dashboard a few days ago. It’s a service from Hyperic, a company that sells monitoring and performance software.

The dashboard lets you view the general health of various AWS and GAE features.

You can drill in on the various services by clicking the available links. For example, you can get more details on EC2.

EC2 status is determined by how long it takes to start a small instance.

S3 also has additional information. A graph mode:

And a table mode:

There’s plenty of additional information for the other features of AWS and for the GAE features.

While the information does not tell you everything about YOUR usage, it is a nice tool for general use.

IBM offers a SaaS Specialty partner program that provides resources, technical enablement and marketing support to its partners. IBM also offers hardware, software and infrastructure technologies to help its Business Partners deliver secure and scaleable cloud services. In addition, Business Partners gain access to over 40 worldwide IBM Innovation Centers, providing them with technical support and expertise for helping them test, build and optimize cloud services based on open platforms.

Fortent is a global specialist in anti-money laundering and regulatory compliance. Since 1993 they have served 26 of the world’s 30 largest financial institutions.

A couple of days ago, I asked, “Does Flexiscale Still Exist?” Apparently it does. I got an email this morning from the Sales Manager at xcalibre, Jacqui Petrie. He said they are still in business and realize that the web site needs to be updated. New customer signups are currently frozen while they look at expanding and stabilizing the platform.

They expect to be open for new business after the New Year. Stay tuned as I plan to sign up and give them a run through as soon as I am able.

LewisC