Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a valuable concept and practice embraced by DevOps, but it is fairly abstract for many IT operators and technology executives. It requires the leveraging of agile infrastructure (IaaS) that can be orchestrated using RESTful APIs, like cloud.ca and AWS. IaC is often mistakenly considered part of configuration management provided by tools like Chef, Ansible, Puppet and SaltStack.
When moving applications to regional IaaS clouds, we recommend customers evaluate their cloud provider’s network. Here are some things to look for that will help when evaluating an IaaS provider’s network to ensure the performance, availability, and service delivery of your web application.
Image credit: Jessica Borutski
Recent European Union data protection regulation is pushing clouds back to the new world.
10 ms away from the Patriot Act
Many of the early adopters of our Canadian IaaS, cloud.ca, were organizations that write software and want to run it inside Canadian legal jurisdiction because they or their customers prefer Canada's laws for data protection and data privacy.
CloudOps is often asked to provide proposals for organizations migrating to cloud IaaS from their local or self-managed physical servers by people very experienced with virtualization, SANs and dedicated servers. Questions frequently come up about what level of RAID we use in cloud storage and how long it takes to increase the storage amount available to a server. There is also concern with using network storage, as it is perceived to be slower.
Previously, I blogged about differences between hosting and cloud on cloudops.com. To continue with the theme of contrasting Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud to things that are often confused with cloud, in this post I will compare IaaS cloud to virtualization. First off, SaaS can run on cloud, but is not cloud. I am strictly referring to an IaaS cloud.
Getting IT wrong is stressful. Cost savings are leading CFOs to consider moving to the public cloud, but the real value of cloud comes from the business agility it enables.
