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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

Different people have different security needs, but everybody agrees that having more security options is a good thing. Two-factor authentication (2FA), also called two-step verification, is one such option that is becoming more prevalent these days. Its purpose is simple: add an extra layer of security to the login process of your application (in our case, cloud.ca’s web console). This is achieved by combining something you know (your password) with something you have (a code generated by an application on your smartphone), hence the term two-factor. Fortunately, you don’t need a... 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

Since the dawn of computing, there has always been a tension between centralized computing and computing at the edge. Mainframes were centrally managed, but as processing became cheaper; they gave way to minicomputers and servers.  One reason for this was the high cost of bandwidth—as Microsoft’s Jim Gray once remarked, “compared to the cost of moving bits around, everything else is free.” So companies ran those servers near end users. This proximity came at a cost, however. The companies bought packaged software, which they tailored to their own needs and ran themselves. That caused... Continued