Last month RightScale surveyed technical professionals across a broad cross-section of organizations about their adoption of cloud computing. The 625 respondents range from technical executives to practitioners, and represent organizations of varying sizes across many industries. Their answers to our survey questions provide a comprehensive perspective on the state of the cloud today.
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RightScale State of the Cloud 2013: A New Industry Survey
RightScale Compute 2013 Preview: How RightScale Architects Its Own Databases
Want a peek behind the scenes at how RightScale builds the tools that help organizations deploy and manage applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds? I’m RightScale’s chief architect, and at RightScale Compute 2013 I’ll be sharing that information in a session on Building RightScale’s Globally Distributed Datastore, where you can learn how we use both relational and NoSQL databases to provide a scalable, distributed, and highly available service around the world.
Posted in Cloud Management
Tagged Cloud Management, RightScale
Deploy Windows Azure VMs with RightScale for Rapid Testing and Validation
With Microsoft’s announcement today of the general availability of its IaaS solutions, it’s only appropriate that we press on and get technical with how to use Windows Azure within your dev/test workflow. In my article on how to Integrate Windows Azure IaaS with RightScale to Improve Your SDLC, I talked about strategy for DevOps shops for improving development and test cycles, shared some insights into where to think about your process, and gave some pointers toward tools that can help you. The next step is to tune up your well-oiled software development lifecycle (SDLC). I’ll show you how you can reduce your wait times for testing and improve your continuous deployment process using MSBuild and RightScale.
Posted in Cloud Management, Microsoft
Tagged RightScale, Windows Azure
RightScale Compute Preview: Tips for Cloud Proof-of-Concept Projects
Proof-of-concept projects are an important step in the path to the cloud for many organizations. Such projects allow you to gain experience, test ideas, and deepen your understanding of the issues and potential pitfalls of cloud computing. At RightScale Compute, I’ll be leading a session that walks you through the process of selecting and implementing a cloud proof-of-concept.
Posted in RightScale Conference
Tagged User Conference
RightScale Compute Preview: PCI-Compliant Apps in the Public Cloud
PCI compliance in the public cloud is a growing topic of concern and interest. Some people claim one can be a PCI-compliant merchant using a public IaaS cloud, while others say that’s impossible. I am a former Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) and have participated in multiple PCI working groups, and I’m firmly in the former camp. PCI compliance in the cloud is possible, but the hardest part is knowing what you need to do and what you have to rely on your partners to do. In a session at the upcoming RightScale Compute 2013 conference, I’ll discuss foundational principles and mindsets for PCI compliance, how to determine system/application scope and requirement applicability, and how to meet top-level PCI DSS (Data Security Standard) requirements in the public IaaS cloud.
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Posted in RightScale Conference
Tagged RightScale Compute, User Conference
A Cloud Beginner Manages OpenStack with RightScale
OpenStack.org blogger Victoria Martínez de la Cruz recently tested RightScale as a solution for managing her OpenStack development environment. We asked Victoria to share her experience.
Last year I began working as a feature developer for OpenStack, the open source cloud computing project founded by Rackspace and NASA. In my work I develop and test new features of OpenStack on different versions of OpenStack itself, and using different operating systems. As a developer, your work environment should be as close as possible to the environment in which your code will be deployed so that you can to get to know the code, improve it, implement new features, and check how things behave. However, after nearly three months, I found myself juggling an incredible mess of various clouds implemented in different ways across multiple operating systems. I realized that I was spending too much time managing the environment and not enough time working on my code.
I went looking for tools to organize my deployments and improve my productivity, and came across RightScale, a comprehensive cloud management solution designed to monitor and manage cloud deployments. Since RightScale supports OpenStack, I decided to see how it could fit my needs. I learned that RightScale not only supports OpenStack but also recommends the Rackspace Private Cloud reference architecture for OpenStack.
Posted in Cloud Management
RightScale Compute Preview: Plan Cloud Costs Now, Save Money Later
As the co-founder and product manager of PlanForCloud, I have talked to hundreds of people about their cloud costs. They are confused by the complex cloud provider pricing strategies that make it hard to understand where the majority of their cloud infrastructure costs are going and even harder to optimize their cloud costs.
It’s time to change that! At RightScale Compute 2013 I’m leading a three-hour workshop on cloud cost budgeting. My goal is for you to walk away with information and tools you can use right away to better understand and plan for your cloud costs.
Posted in Cloud Costs, PlanForCloud, RightScale Conference
Tagged Cloud Computing, RightScale Compute, User Conference
A Faster, More Powerful RightScale Dashboard
In recent months we’ve refreshed three sections of the RightScale dashboard: Last September, we released a UI for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Queue Service (SQS), and in February we released updated UIs for AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and Simple Storage Service (S3). You can access the new sections by selecting their respective pages from the Clouds menu and clicking the “Try it out” button in the purple notification bar. The new beta interfaces are not only a significant improvement compared to our previous UIs, but also represent a new approach to our UI framework that will enhance future RightScale development.
Posted in Cloud Management
Tagged Cloud Management, Dashboard, RightScale
How to Replace the Cloud: No Fooling
It’s April Fools’ Day, and alas, we don’t have a plausible tale about how we’ve managed to harness neutrinos to create warp-speed inter-cloud communications, or a clever new technique that uses recursive virtualization to run an entire cloud on a single server. No, we don’t have a fake product or news release to spring upon the gullible among you — but we do have a real story about how to replace the cloud.
Posted in Cloud Management
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AWS CloudHSM: Why You’ll Want It and What to Watch Out For
Security has been one of the top challenges in every survey on cloud computing in the last five years. Yet public cloud providers have continued to beef up their security offerings, and not everyone realizes how far providers have come in providing tools that enable customers to follow security best practices. This week AWS took a giant step forward to address a major cloud security challenge with the release of CloudHSM, a cloud-based hardware security module. This game-changing appliance empowers public cloud users to easily implement a level of cryptographic security formerly available only to those using private clouds or hosted environments.
Posted in AWS, Cloud Management, Security
Tagged AWS, Cloud Computing, Security
