New Stuff at EC2
Dear Amazon,
If you need a higher ed evangelist, call me. I will take the job.
Yours,
Mike
Amazon announced some new changes to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) product today. You can read more about there here but I wanted to highlight a few of the things I see as important.
1. EC2 is now out of beta.
2. There is now an SLA at EC2
3. Windows servers are now available
4. Microsoft SQL server is now available
5. Amazon will soon release a management console
6. They are going to release new load balancing, automatic scaling and monitoring services.
Let’s look at a few of these.
SLA
The SLA is big. I think that’s one of the reasons CIO in IHE’s are hesistant to move to services like these - they didn’t have iron-clad guarantees of uptime and availability. The SLA states each region (right now there’s one, but more are coming) will have 99.95% availability. Five nines it is not, but close.
AWS Management Console
Having a central spot to manage not only EC2 but S3 is GIGANTIC. I can’t stress how clutch this is. Let’s take EC2 as an example. You can manage your instances via a command line, but that’s a pain sometimes. You can use browser plug-ins like ElasticFox but they may not be developed or supported in the future, or tomorrow. If you have a lot of money, you can use a service like RightScale. RightScale does a lot of this stuff, but it’s expensive. Amazon building there own may be the killer app that will take this mainstream, especially if its web-based and easy to use.
Load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services
Again, these tools will make managing your cloud services at Amazon much easier and more user-friendly. Details on these items are scant at the moment, but hopefully they won’t be kept from us much longer.
The other interesting bit of cloud news today is that Rackspace has purchased JungleDisk as well as Slicehost. I’ve been JungleDisk for awhile now and have been very happy with it. JungleDisk manages and automates your backups to Amazon’s S3. JungleDisk will allow users to stay with S3, but I imagine they will also give users the option of using one of Rackspace’s services as well. Stay tuned.
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Getting out of your comfort zone
I’ve been trying to challenge myself lately to learn new things.
It’s easy to get too comfortable and keep doing the same things, stuff like using the same font in a graphic, the same CSS on a site, recycling the same code because it’s easy. It’s hard to make something new or re-design something. It takes time, which we never have enough of, and effort.
I’ve dipping my toes into the world of jQuery lately. Everyone I talk to and blogs I read rave about how great it is. I’m learning and trying to think of spots where it might make sense to use a technology like this.
But I’m trying to learn stuff outside of work time too. Until about four weeks ago, I had never been on a motorcycle. In Pennsylvania, you can take a free course where they will teach you to ride. You spend a couple hours in a classroom and two Sunday mornings on a motorcycle.
It was a total blast. We never left the parking lot we trained in, but learning something new was fun and exiting. I’ve gotten outside my comfort zone and I’m now legally licensed to ride a motorcycle in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. A win-win, no doubt.
Note: I don’t have a motorcycle and have no plans to own one. Every time I mention riding my wife and mother make a face. I think, however, I’d look pretty nice riding around campus on this (in green).
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Goal Setting Via Postcard
As part of the IT Managers session back in September, one of the sessions talked about goal setting and prioritization. One of the activities had attendees writing down some goals and things to think about on note cards. When we finished, we put the cards in an envelope and addressed them to ourselves. We returned them with the promise they’d be sent to us at some point.
This morning, my cards arrived, a little more then a month later. I put 2 cards in my envelope - one saying “bring some thunder,” which I hope I’ve done, and the other was some ideas of how to best communicate ideas with upper management.
I’ve tried to do a better job of that lately. I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded, but this card activity was a great way to be reminded about a goal or idea and serve as motivation to complete the task if you haven’t.
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