royans

In a surprise move Amazon today released a bunch of new features to its cloudwatch service, some of which, till now, were provided by third party service providers. Basic Monitoring of Amazon EC2 instances at 5-minute intervals at no additional charge. Elastic Load Balancer Health Checks -Auto Scaling can now be instructed to automatically replace instances that have been deemed unhealthy by an Elastic Load Balancer. Alarms - You can now monitor Amazon CloudWatch metrics, with notification to the Amazon SNS topic of your choice when the metric falls outside of a defined range. Auto Scaling Suspend/Resume - You can now push a "big red button" in order to prevent scaling activities from being initiated. Auto Scaling Follow the Line -You can now use scheduled actions to perform scaling operations at particular points in time, creating a time-based scaling plan. Auto Scaling Policies - You now have more fine-grained control over the modifications

Found an interesting new open source project which I hadn’t heard about before. Kafka is a messaging system used by linkedin to serve as the foundation of their activity stream processing. Kafka is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system. It is designed to support the following Persistent messaging with O(1) disk structures that provide constant time performance even with many TB of stored messages. High-throughput: even with very modest hardware Kafka can support hundreds of thousands of messages per second. Explicit support for partitioning messages over Kafka servers and distributing consumption over a cluster of consumer machines while maintaining per-partition ordering semantics. Support for parallel data load into Hadoop. Kafka is aimed at providing a publish-subscribe solution that can handle all activity stream data and processing on a consumer-scale web site. This kind of activity (page views, searches, and other user actions) are a key ingredient in many of

One of the my problems with most cloud ROI worksheets is that they are heavily weighted for use-cases where resource usage is very bursty. But what if your resource requirements aren’t bursty ? And what if you have a use case where you have to maintain a small IT team to manage some on-site resources due to compliance and other issues ?  In his latest post , Richard shares his worksheet for everyone to play with.