Read up on the latest news
at cloud.ca

5 Ways to Make Your Cloud Application as Unbreakable as Wolverine

Wolverine is one of the most awesome superheroes in the Marvel Universe. It’s not because of his fierceness, the fact that he’s Canadian, or the fact that he has indestructible metal claws coming out of his fists. It’s because no matter what happens to him, no matter what harm he endures, he has a healing factor that lets him come back and continue to fight, time and time again. Wolverine can push bullets out from his wounds to heal, or regenerate from an atomic blast if he has to. He is the ultimate example of resilience and a metaphor for what you want in a cloud application — a... Continued

What Amazon’s Recent Service Disruption Means for Cloud Computing

Image credit: XKCD What happened? Amazon Web Services experienced a service disruption for 8 hours and 33 minutes on Sunday, September 20, 2015, from 2:19 AM PDT to 10:52 AM PDT. The outage, which affected its US-EAST–1 North Virginia location, began with a network disruption that significantly increased error rates on Amazon’s DynamoDB (NoSQL database) service. This led to a cascade whereby some 37 other AWS services would begin to falter and show increased error rates for API requests. Among these were the AWS SQS (Simple Queue Service), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), CloudWatch (resource... Continued

What Amazon’s Recent Service Disruption Means for Cloud Computing

Image credit: XKCD What happened? Amazon Web Services experienced a service disruption for 8 hours and 33 minutes on Sunday, September 20, 2015, from 2:19 AM PDT to 10:52 AM PDT. The outage, which affected its US-EAST–1 North Virginia location, began with a network disruption that significantly increased error rates on Amazon’s DynamoDB (NoSQL database) service. This led to a cascade whereby some 37 other AWS services would begin to falter and show increased error rates for API requests. Among these were the AWS SQS (Simple Queue Service), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), CloudWatch (resource... Continued

Renewable Energy for
Canada’s IaaS Cloud

Renewable energy has been the hot topic in the cloud industry lately. Data centres for big players like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google require a lot of power, and I mean a LOT of power. One data centre consumes the equivalent energy of about 25,000 homes per year. Data centres are major sources of energy consumption and there is growing pressure on companies to be more socially responsible and to operate sustainably. The essence of cloud computing is environmentally friendly; it allows businesses to use and pay for the right amount of IT resources at the right time, rather... Continued

Three Reasons to Use a Regional Cloud IaaS

!CloudOps has been helping companies leverage the power of cloud services for nearly as long as cloud services have been around. We were early adopters and evangelists of AWS and open source cloud technologies such as OpenStack, CloudStack and Docker. We understood the value of API-driven, self-service scalable infrastructure, and so did our customers. However, as the industry matured, we kept getting the same question: can I do this in Canada? For many years the answer was a resounding “no”.  And so we built cloud.ca, a regional IaaS and leading contender in the next wave of cloud... Continued

Jurisdiction Matters; Cloud IaaS Threatened in Europe and Thrives in Canada

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. Many of our clients want to use  both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and cloud.ca, depending on which customers (American or non-American) they are serving. We believe Canada is a great location for... Continued

New Architectures in a Cloudy World

Cloud computing is a victim of its own success. For one thing, cloud advocates have promised so much—worry-free, turnkey IT that just works— that the reality is bound to disappoint. Worse, clouds seem immune to tough economic times, so nearly every technology company is wrapping itself in a cloud mantle, and every dynamic website is claiming it’s a cloud. We don’t want to get bogged down in definitions, but any discussion of clouds requires a clear understanding of three things: Cloud technology versus a cloud business model. Infrastructure-, platform-, and software-as-a-service... Continued