In this blog post, I take the new AWS FSx Storage Gateway for a test spin together with a set of Active Directory DNS Geo-Location policies for a seamless namespace for clients that attach to the gateway. Meaning I only want to tell my clients to attach to a single name (i.e. fsx1.spikebiz.com) no matter … Read more
AWS IoT Environment Startup/Shutdown One of the easiest ways to save money on your AWS EC2 costs especially for development environments is to only run them when there is active development and then shut them down when they are not in use. There are a number of great articles on how to do automatic scheduling … Read more
Python, Lambda, Layers & Rain Even though I’ve spent years architecting infrastructure, there are times I do miss software development. Not to date myself too much, but yes it was mostly in FORTRAN on a DEC/VAX, IBM/3270 Assembler code with a smattering of VB.Net and C++ later down the road. In case your wondering, yes, … Read more
In my latest Hands On series, I take a look at Parallels RAS version 17.1 deployed on AWS infrastructure. I have been following this product since the acquision of 2X (which you will still find references to scattered in some of the executables) by Parallels. For a good portion of my career, I focused on … Read more
In my previous post (Hands On: N2WS Backup & Recovery) I took a look a some features of V3.1 of N2WS Backup & Recovery. I did show some of the nice features of the product, but I failed to really highlight the most important feature of the product: Recovery! Anyone can backup, but the real … Read more
In this hands on series I take a spin with V3.1 of N2WS Backup & Recovery. You might ask, “Why do I need protection in the cloud, the cloud is already protected, right?”. One of my favorite quotes of all time: Everything fails, all the time – Dr. Werner Vogels As I architect cloud solutions, … Read more
I was recently given a problem set that involved the long term storage of Microsoft SQL backup files on AWS that should be stored using a “Write Once Read Many” (WORM) type of scenario. Backup Requirements: The backup storage requirements were given as these: Backups should be retained and immutable for a total of 5 … Read more
Setting up single sign-on (SSO) can be a confusing task. I’ve done it many times over the years with a number of SaaS providers and each one seems to be just a little bit different. In a previous post (Hands On: CloudEndure SharePoint Migration) I went through the basics of the CloudEndure console using just … Read more
A very common cloud workload is a Microsoft Windows File Server. The fantastic thing about the cloud is there is no shortage of options to fulfill this requirement, but which solution to choose? In this post, I’ll take a look at three different options and look at the price and performance of each as it … Read more
For most of my extracurricular cloud adventures, I subsist on AWS credits. I try to stay within the free tier as much as possible, but sometimes that is just not practical. I want to do everything I can to stretch the credit dollars as far as I can. You could say I’m cheap, but I … Read more