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Lesson 2: Using Cloud or Embracing Cloud

Continuing with the analogy of electricity, if your company decided to build a new motor or machine that would be driven by electricity you would likely build it to utilize the service that is commonly available. ie. 230 Volts, Single Phase, Alternating Current. You might choose something different if you had a particular need but it would be unusual to specify some random voltage just because you can. Also if you had multiple electricity suppliers are available you MAY not want ton tie yourself to a specific provider unless there is a clear benefit.

So it is with Cloud Computing. If we think of Cloud as simply a bunch of servers off site then we are missing 95% of the benefits. we could just lift and shift our existing server estate and provision it from a Cloud Service Provider but that is unimaginative and prosaic.

The right approach is “embrace” Cloud. This will necessitate a complete change of mind set within your current IT world!

One reason for this is that Cloud Services are charged for by the minute or by the hour (depending on some basic choices) and therefore you should only build EXACTLY what you need to consume. Most servers only operate at a small fraction of their capacity for most of a day. Traditional server estates are designed to be much larger than needed to be able to cope with spikes in demand. Cloud Servers should be stopped when they are not being used and therefore you wont need to pay for them.  It wouldn’t make sense to have someone on standby to start and stop machines when needed either. So therefore all Cloud Services SHOULD be consumed programmatically!

Once we have taken that important leap in understanding we are well on the way to EMBRACING rather than USING Cloud. In my next post I will get to IaC to describe why this is such a BIG THING. 🙂

 

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Lesson 1: What is Cloud

Today I am going to start my Cloud 101 blog posts. In this section I will cover all the main Cloud questions so, in time, this site should become a repository of all basic Cloud lessons. I will include links to important upcoming events and also show you where free beneficial online training can be found.

So to start at the beginning: What Is Cloud?

Using the term Cloud to refer to computing services really took off in 2006 as Amazon started to sell access to the computing power that they used to manage the Amazon.com market-place. Google followed suit two years later with Google App Engine. It essentially refers to the practice of providing computer resources that  are consumed over the internet. Commonly these resources are Compute and Storage resources but can  (and will) be expanded to cover almost all IT Technical Services.

A good analogy is electricity. Very few companies today would find it necessary to to generate their own electricity. Rather it is a service that they consume. It is cheaper and easier to let experts handle power generation and deliver it to your door, to be consumed by your company, paid for in units as you use them.

There are some important definitions that we will cover later that will explain some of the differences between different flavours and styles of Cloud Computing such as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Also we will cover Hybrid Cloud Public Cloud and Private Cloud to see if we can understand which of these will be most beneficial for you.

Next See “Using Cloud or Embracing Cloud” as this will help you understand some of the reasons why you should ensure that you and your company are properly engaged with the Cloud world.

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welcome to insperitas

welcome to the insperitas unhackable website. 🙂

It isn’t the first unhackable site by any means and to get here I followed the advice of many who have been before me. I’ll get around to some credits another time.

This site is hosted on Amazon S3 but written in WordPress.

I wanted to host a static website  on S3 because S3 is quick and cheap. Quick is important if you don’t want to irritate your customers. Cheap is important always. One of the real benefits of embracing Cloud is that you should only pay for what you need. Static pages on S3 are also pretty secure and much more secure than native WordPress.

I chose to use WordPress because I am NOT a web designer. (I can point you in the direction of some excellent web designers if that’s what you are looking for.) As WordPress is ubiquitous and was used to build about 1/4 of all websites across the world I thought I might find plenty of good themes and lots of support. In the end I chose to use only the latest theme but published support has been very helpful.

So this is how my website works.

  1. Its hosted on S3
  2. I use Terraform to build an EC2 instance using a bitnami base build
  3. I auto – run scripts to download a backup of my site.
  4. At this point I have a running WordPress  instance that I can edit, add blogs etc. I usually compose offline in advance so that blog uploading is more of a copy and paste.
  5. Then , when I am done for the day,  I use httrack to take a copy of the updated site.
  6. I gzip the site
  7. I use S3cmd to upload the files to S3.
  8. I take a backup of the site and use S3cmd to copy that to S3 too.
  9. Then (and this is the important part) I destroy the virtual machine.

To many out there this will seem crazy and I agree, it’s not a way that many will want to emulate. But my goal is not to host a website, but to be able to illustrate:

  1. Good Cloud practice
  2. That static sites are ideal in many circumstances
  3. An entirely cattle based approach to CMS
  4. … and some other things I haven’t quite got round to yet.

So whats next? Well I will be adding some more blogs about Cloud Strategy and implementation over the next few weeks. That will keep me pretty busy.

The site is a little ugly and bare so it will need some improvements.

I will also be writing a Cloud 101 so if there are references in here that don’t make sense or you are a Cloud beginner, I will have something useful here in the near future.

In the future I hope to use to Lambda collect and display comments (you will notice that at this time you can’t comment. If you want to contact me you can now leave a message on our contact page.

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why the weird name?

ah, well.. it’s a long story.

If you read the welcome to insperitas blog  you will understand why I wanted to build this site. I want to help companies (large or small) to embrace Cloud instead of simply using Cloud. (This might seem a like question of semantics but I can assure you that it isn’t!)

When I was choosing a domain name I heard that some new physical clouds had been named and decided to investigate to see if any of those were cool enough. I quickly decided on  “asperitas” but these enterprising people had beaten me to it.  https://asperitas.com/  They seem to be doing something pretty exciting with datacentre cooling.

So I decided to mix it up a bit and wrap together inspire and asperitas as “inspiring Cloud solutions” is pretty much what we do.

I considered going for .io but you would need to buy .com anyway as a protection and .com has the useful advantage of the <CTRL> <RTN> shortcut in most browsers.

i hope that we have some interesting content here for you over the next few weeks.