Cloud

The Taloflow Instance Manager (Tim)

For years, modern workloads have shifted to the cloud, with AWS being the most popular. And although this shift has cut down operating costs significantly, millions, if not billions, of dollars still are wasted to maintain all those virtual instances—even when they are not in use.

Weekend Reading: Cloud

The cloud has become synonymous with all things data storage. It additionally equates to the many web-centric services accessing that same back-end data storage, but the term also has evolved to mean so much more. This weekend join us as we explore the cloud. CloudWatch Is of the Devil, but I Must Use It by Corey Quinn Let's talk about Amazon CloudWatch.

CloudWatch Is of the Devil, but I Must Use It

Let's talk about Amazon CloudWatch. For those fortunate enough to not be stuck in the weeds of Amazon Web Services (AWS), CloudWatch is, and I quote from the official AWS description, "a monitoring and management service built for developers, system operators, site reliability engineers (SRE), and IT managers." This is all well and good, except for the part where there isn't a single named constituency who enjoys working with the product. Allow me to dispense some monitoring heresy.

As Cloud Computing Providers Post Record Profits, One Company Wants to Make Them Obsolete

Could the world's idle computers make the $200 billion cloud computing industry obsolete? In the final years of the Obama administration, it seemed that the world was witnessing the emergence of an odd alliance between the largest establishment tech companies and the traditionally anti-establishment community of independent techies. The highest profile case involved Apple and other major corporations siding with civil rights organizations to advocate against weakening device encryption on behalf of law enforcement, and it it led to a hope that these companies were finally seeing the profit potential in having secure, satisfied customers. That hope has now evaporated in the face of continuous betrayals of user trust, and rather than take it lying down, tech users are looking into alternative solutions that put them in control.

Nextcloud 13: How to Get Started and Why You Should

Nextcloud could be the first step toward replacing proprietary services like Dropbox and Skype. In its simplest form, the Nextcloud server is "just" a personal, free software alternative to services like Dropbox or iCloud. You can set it up so your files are always accessible via the internet, from wherever you are, and share them with your friends. However, Nextcloud can do so much more.

Everything You Need to Know about the Cloud and Cloud Computing, Part II: Using the Cloud

How to get started with AWS, install Apache, create an EFS volume and much more. The cloud is here to stay, regardless of how you access data day to day. Whether you are uploading and sharing new photos with friends in your social-media account or updating documents and spreadsheets alongside your peers in your office or school, chances are you're connecting to the cloud in some form or another.

Simple Cloud Hardening

Apply a few basic hardening principles to secure your cloud environment. I've written about simple server-hardening techniques in the past. Those articles were inspired in part by the Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks book I was writing at the time, and the idea was to distill the many different hardening steps you might want to perform on a server into a few simple steps that everyone should do. In this article, I take the same approach only with a specific focus on hardening cloud infrastructure. I'm most familiar with AWS, so my hardening steps are geared toward that platform and use AWS terminology (such as Security Groups and VPC), but as I'm not a fan of vendor lock-in, I try to include steps that are general enough that you should be able to adapt them to other providers.

FOSS Project Spotlight: CloudMapper, an AWS Visualization Tool

Duo Security has released CloudMapper, an open-source tool for visualizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environments. When working with AWS, it's common to have a number of separate accounts run by different teams for different projects. Gaining an understanding of how those accounts are configured is best accomplished by visually displaying the resources of the account and how these resources can communicate. This complements a traditional asset inventory.

Neuranet's Flexitive

The new Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Standard Ad Unit Portfolio's support for flexible ads is intended to improve the ad experience for users and boost revenue potential for advertisers.

Datamation's "Leading Big Data Companies" Report

The Big Data market is in a period of remarkable transition. If keeping tabs on this dynamic sector is in your wheelhouse, Datamation has made your homework easier by developing "Leading Big Data Companies", a report that provides "a snapshot of a market sector in transition".