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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

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

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 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

cloud.ca is a Citrix Ready verified regional IaaS, meaning that it is trusted to enhance Citrix solutions for cloud infrastructure and end-user compute workloads. As such, we were invited to demo our platform at Citrix Synergy a couple of weeks ago in Orlando, FL. In this video, our CEO, Ian Rae explains certain key functionalities of cloud.ca, as well as shows off its user friendly UI and reporting features. Take a tour of Ninja Software to see how our virtual private clouds allow for segregated resources for specific usage including production, dev test, end-user compute and web... Continued

Earlier this month a CloudOps team attended Citrix Synergy in Orlando, FL. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a three day event for Citrix partners and customers focused on enterprise mobility, not to mention a great place to network and have a bit of fun. As a gold partner, we have attended this event many times but this was our first year as a sponsor in the cloud infrastructure pavilion. We were there to promote cloud.ca, a Citrix Ready Canadian IaaS, that can support end-user compute workloads. We had lots of attendees come by our booth to learn about how... Continued

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. Cloud is an operational model I suggest we agree to use the NIST definition for cloud computing. Adopting the technology is not enough. Cloud technology needs to be adopted in a way that allows the users to self-serve. At cloud.ca, we... Continued

Learn about the benefits of our Canadian cloud infrastructure in this webinar. A short demo is also included to illustrate the self-service aspects of our Infrastructure as a Service.  Continued

The cloud is a powerful tool for business. Many company leaders are still debating whether or not to even use the cloud, without envisioning how the cloud can shape their long term strategy.  This article aims to help resolve this debate by identifying the different stages of the cloud and the objectives that are attainable with each one. The first phase of cloud use is Optimization. During this period, a company uses the cloud to incrementally improve their internal operations as well as their customer facing value propositions.  Currently, this is the stage that many companies are still... Continued

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