Why?

Because companies choose to use Cloud Services for the following reasons.
1. To urgently replace an existing backup solution.
2. Because some new urgent project demands a Cloud based solution.
3. To speedily boost or replace on premise servers.

All of these are time based demands and often they spawn a sudden launch into Cloud without serious consideration of how resources should be managed.

The common problems this creates include:

• No tagging
• No one knows why a server was built or if it can be deleted
• Lack of clear ownership
• Bills cannot be allocated properly
• Disagreement as to who owns the shared Cloud services
• Insecure solutions
• Inefficient solutions
• Inflexible designs

Insperitas can help you by:

Evaluating your whole Cloud infrastructure
Ensuring proper systems and processes to enforce best practices
(read more…)
Remediation of existing issues

But you don’t want or need to become dependent on Insperitas. And you probably wont be able to move immediately to meet best practices. A better solution might be for a consultant can come to your site (or work remotely) for 1  day a week to teach and guide your own employees to implement success.

Together let’s bring your costs back down to earth.

Call me  (+44 7932 678578) or fill in your details on our contact page and start moving towards a more cost effective Cloud engagement.

These good principles need to start from the top. “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” embodies the root of the question. Bosses should hire people they trust…and then trust them. This doesn’t just apply to developers. Once managers get this principle, Agile development follows smoothly.  Until managers get it, we will face this continual, painful, seismic fault, with occasional earthquakes and aftershocks felt on both sides of the divide. (With PMs invariably caught in the middle!)

Bosses should hire people they trust…and then trust them

This reaches back to the recruitment processes which are not designed to select the right people but focus on certificates. It reaches even further back into the education system that directs children toward certificate attainment. (Excellent TED talks on this https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud and http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity) We should, of course, 1^st teach children to care for other people and to respect them, and then teach them how to learn. Employees also need to do their part, being willing to be flexible with their role depending on what is needed at the time instead of sticking rigidly to an old job description.

So whilst I don’t disagree with teaching Agile (or Scrum, or any other agile development process) to development teams, I really believe that we need to start with teaching the philosophy and principles behind the Agile Manifesto.

“Are you asking me for money?’

Followed quickly by:

“Can you save me money?’

Of course the answer is:  It depends!  I would like to shout out “YOU’RE MISSING THE POINT” but that’s probably not helpful. Instead I decided to write this blog  “Saving Money with The Cloud”.

Most businesses I speak to face many pressures and the last thing on their mind is IT.  They are concerned about getting new business, managing staff, their premises costs, managing their current workload effectively… the list goes on.

So here are  FIVE reasons to think about your business and Cloud IT Solutions.

Continuity

Taking the most obvious reasons for spending on IT first, we need to talk about failure. What happens when it all goes wrong? You have data saved on your laptop or a local server and it breaks. Do you have a backup? Do you know how to access your backup? Will you be reliant on someone visiting your business to fix the problem? What will that cost?

We can level this up too… what happens when the company you rely on to supply your backup solution fails to deliver?  Do you want to wait until there is a disaster to find out if your solution is effective? Most companies seem to be happy to operate with this head in the sand approach. The truth is that backing up to Cloud is likely to be either a necessary extra expense (if you have no valuable backup solution today) or a cost saving (if your current backup solution is anywhere other than in The Cloud). So the answer here is  “Yes I can save you money.”

Growth

If you need to expand for any reason you should think Cloud. If you take on staff how will you communicate and share data? Do you need more space for more data?  The Cloud might be the cheapest option and will remove your need to spend cash on new hardware.

Money Management

Maybe this should be the number 1 reason to move to Cloud? With Cloud Services you pay for what you use. Its easy to budget. There are no unexpected bills. Any Cloud support costs should be 100% transparent with no surprises.

Security

The next thing we need to discuss is “Security”.  IT Security is such a massive topic, whole books are written about it and anything I write here could only gloss over one of the most important IT topics.   Suffice it to say that lots of small companies imagine that this is not an issue for them. Until you ask them what their competitors could do with their customer list… or what they could do with their competitors list of contacts. Security IS an issue for EVERYONE.

Some imagine that the least secure place for their data is on the cloud but I suggest you look at it this way: If I were to post your data where everyone can see it, such as on a billboard, what would we need to do with that data to keep it secure. Then answer is to encrypt it. Secrecy has come a long way since you were a child. We don’t just swap the letters around or write it in lemon juice. Very complex encryption techniques are available to all of us. By utilizing this technology we can choose precisely who should see what data whilst making it available easily.

We don’t just swap the letters around
or write it in lemon juice.

Improving your business

For some companies there is a clear benefit in improving their IT. Yes you can save money by introducing efficiency to your business. Good IT choices can drive better business decisions.  Even very small businesses should be tech-aware. Whether its digital marketing, a better website or sharing data with customers YOU can improve your business by making good IT choices.

For larger customers, adopting Cloud best practices can make you reach your market faster, change quicker and allow you to become more agile. Business growth is often driven by disrupting the status quo. Will you be disrupting or disrupted?

When the contact form is completed and you hit Send then your browser should collect your data and send it to AWS API Gateway. Then AWS Lambda will post that into S3.  If this doesn’t work well for your specific browser please let me know. You can still email  via your normal method to contact@insperitas.com.

Contact Page

For the contact form:   Thanks to Collins Abonghama  https://www.sitepoint.com/build-your-own-wordpress-contact-form-plugin-in-5-minutes/

For the lambda suggestions along with API Gateway I have to thank David Maple  https://www.codeengine.com/articles/process-form-aws-api-gateway-lambda/

For Form building I followed TGroshon at CodeHabitude https://codehabitude.com/2016/04/05/forms-to-emails-using-aws-lambda-api-gateway/ and also Matt West whose work is posted at https://blog.teamtreehouse.com/create-ajax-contact-form

Also I had some help from my good friend Tim Fuller https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-fuller-788a2421/ Since I am not a natural developer I needed considerable syntax troubleshooting help.

Of course I also need to thank all the people I have worked on Cloud Solutions with over the course of the past few years at HSBC, FlyBe and  Odeon. There are some great minds out there building some incredible solutions.

There are a number of trainers too at AWS, Google and RedHat who have helped enormously. Having run a number of training courses myself its easy to spot the professionalism.

Contact Page

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.

Contact Page

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.