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When is EC2 better choice than AWS Lambda

When we have alternative solutions available, the choice of a best solution essentially falls back to how effectively we can utilize that solution compared with others. How much value we can get out of the solution, this value in cloud computing will be money paid vs how much busy the resources are kept.

Lambda can scale from zero to 1000 or 3000 concurrent requests in seconds (depending on the region), and from there add an additional 500 concurrency every minute, without you having to add any metrics, monitoring, or logic. The costs scale down instantly when the load subsides, whereas your scaling-in on EC2 is usually gradual and conservative, so you end up with a lot of under-utilized instances during that time.

Cloud cost management life-cycle part1

Cloud Cost Management should be a series of steps which could be iterable (in other words “lifecycle”) instead of one-off work, because this activity needs to be done over time (and repeatedly) by looking at different components and aspects while carefully performing trade-offs between architecture and performance considerations.

Viewing costs by an Azure service can help you to better understand the parts of your infrastructure that cost the most.

Schedule non-essential instances to shut down overnight - why this is misleading?

Gartner estimates that organizations lacking any coherent plan for cloud cost management may be overspending by as much as 70 percent or more.

Though this is not a comprehensive use case list, let us walk through a few examples to understand where “schedulers” fit and which use case fit “application usage pattern based cost optimization”.

Azure SQL Database purchase options and cost savings

Cloud consumers should use proper cloud economic principles to reduce their costs and unwanted spending. There are a lot of database level fine tuning can be done to get the best performance out of the resources purchased. Apart from tuning, users need to pay attention towards reducing Idle resources or right sizing based on-demand.

Even with reserve capacity, vCore size flexibility option helps in scale up or down within a performance tier and region, without losing the reserved capacity benefit, based on Azure documentation. We strongly recommend users to take advantage of this by scaling down with in tier while resources are not in demand.

INVOKE Cloud recognized as NVTC Tech 100 Company for year 2019

“We are honored to be listed among some of the best and brightest innovators and competitors in the industry consecutively 2nd year” said Krishna, INVOKE Cloud's co-founder. “At INVOKE Cloud, we work with single goal, save more money for cloud consumers by reducing their hosting costs. We work hard and smart to fulfill this goal by introducing innovative solutions as part of INVOKE Cloud suite. It is an honor to be recognized for our commitment to cloud consumers.”

Amazon RedShift overview, pricing and cost optimization techniques

Data is everywhere! Data is key for nearly every business decision made and business success. It is not sufficient to have just the data. Great businesses use data effectively to make decisions.

In simple terms, data warehouse is nothing but a “specialized relation database”. In traditional on-premise setting, this is a combination of databases like SQL Servers and few analytical tools on top of these servers.

Azure Automation with runbooks- Why NOT enough to reduce Azure bill?

Companies who know about cloud economics use better tools to reduce Azure VM bill  and enjoy true benefit of cloud hosting.

Azure Automation comes with multiple challenges. Some are on technical implementation details like you need to learn how to configure Azure Run account, Log Analytics account and corresponding permissions/custom roles. Not only the configuration issues, the biggest limitation is "NO cross subscription VM management". Azure automation runbook solution at this point can manage VMs in same subscription (though the VMs can be across regions). We will cover these hurdles in separate a blog post soon. In this blog, I will focus on non-technical hurdles.

AWS Free tier - what is FREE and what is not

Is AWS Free tier really free? I am seeing a bill for a few dollars though I signed up for free tier, why? This is a frequently asked question on public forums like Reddit, Quora etc. which we will address in as detailed manner as possible in this post.

There are 3 main factors influencing the appropriate instance selection: Memory, CPU and Storage. AWS provides different categories of instances to support these.

Microsoft Azure security - how to use RBAC and least privileged access

Who is responsible for what (in terms of security) depends on the cloud service model you use (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS). With IaaS, the cloud service provider (example, Microsoft Azure Cloud) is responsible for the core infrastructure security, which includes storage, networking and compute (at least at the fabric level – the physical level).

Managing access to cloud resources is always your responsibility irrespective of whichever cloud service model you are using and Azure provides different tools like Network Security Groups, RBAC etc., to have proper access management controls. We can’t cover every possible approach here, so in this blog post we are limiting our discussion to Azure RBAC.

Azure performance data retrieval - step by step guide

Azure gaining cloud market sharing and lot of companies are migrating their applications to Azure Cloud. After migrating applications, first thing users look for is monitoring. How to monitor the resources being used?

Each of these steps can be performed using different tools. The tool you use determine how easy/complex this process is going to be. In this blog post, we used a combination of tools to get things done (we had few frustrating moments to get a few configurations done via Azure Portal, same configurations worked like a charm when executed through Azure PowerShell).

AWS RDS Cost savings using INVOKE Cloud - a case study

INVOKE Cloud team always explores ways to reduce cloud hosting costs. This time interestingly, one of our clients question was, "we are seeing unexpected RDS costs because RDS instances are staying in running status after a week, how can INVOKE application address this issue?"

"Amazon RDS is available on several database instance types" is key information related to the costs clients noticed. RDS is in simple words another EC2 instance with database server and related software installed and managed by AWS. Like any EC2 instance, software on these instances need to be kept up to date for security reasons.

AWS health checks - overview of our experience

Health checks are a way AWS users use “resource status monitoring” to verify their services like EC2 instances are running or not.

When Route 53 checks the health of an endpoint, it sends an HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP request to the IP address and port that you specified when you created the health check. For a health check to succeed, your security group must allow inbound traffic from the IP addresses that the Route 53 health checkers use. R53 has health checkers in locations around the world.

DevOps - What happened in 2018 and what is in store for 2019

Goal of this blog is, understanding what DevOps means, how teams implemented or experienced DevOps in 2018 and what is in store for 2019. The biggest issue while adopting any technology or framework is, creating own definitions or using them for the purposes which those are NOT designed for. Let us avoid this trap by doing a quick review on what DevOps and how it works, this will help us understand the blog content very well.

DevOps is combination of practice, tools and philosophy. Teams who adopt DevOps consists of complimentary skilled engineers who work across the entire application lifecycle. For example, people who are skilled in software development, testing, deployment and operations do develop a range of skills not limited to a single function.

INVOKE Cloud recognized as NVTC Tech 100 Company for year 2018

NVTC’s Tech 100 list includes some of the region’s top companies & individuals driving tech innovation in areas like Cloud, IoT, Big Data and Analytics etc., and leading growth in the Greater Washington Metropolitan area. Companies and individuals were nominated for consideration by independent parties and selected as winners by a judging committee.

Everything you need to know about issues with EC2 T2 instance not accessible and alternative solutions

AWS EC2 instances are one of the widely used resources available in AWS ecosystem. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2 ) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

Out of all types of EC2 instances, behaviour of T2 type instances are little bit tricky in terms of system functionality. When users launch T2 (standard) type of servers, AWS imposes certain restriction on available CPU. Because T2 types are supported in free tier and widely used by new users, understanding how this CPU credit allocations works and impacts your EC2 instance performance will make AWS users life easy in deploying correct type of applications on these instances during testing.

AWS EC2 Schedulers - not good enough tool to reduce AWS bill

Cloud runs on per second billing. When companies rent servers from AWS, they will get billed for every second (except for windows OS servers) they keep their EC2 instances up and running irrespective whether anyone access the applications hosted on them or not. AWS billing engine doesn’t care whether EC2 instance is being utilized 100% or idle. If it is in “running” state, it will be charged for compute hours.

Dictionary definition of a “schedule” is: Arrange or plan (an event) to take place at a particular time Last two words in the definition are very crucial. Top most issue with schedulers is, identifying “particular time”, in other words “schedule”. .

In dynamic and agile world, users do multitasking and access servers or applications on-demand need basis. Associating a schedule to anything which is need basis would severely limit the capabilities and effect outcomes.

AWS VPC Subnets – in Layperson’s Terms

AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is now the default scheme for running cloud VMs.

Your VPC can resemble a traditional on-premises network but with more automation and scale.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is the heart of AWS cloud hosting, yet a very complex concept to understand, especially for developers who have limited infrastructure operations experience. Developers are the most involved team members with cloud projects, yet have limited knowledge about infrastructure operations ((in the majority of cases).

originally published on Infoq

AWS EC2 Cost Savings - Why one solution does not fit all?

In a typical company using AWS EC2 for their cloud hosting, there will be different environments like production code running on few AWS EC2 instances, few others running QA tests, few more EC2 instances for DEV activity etc.,

These possible different deployment scenarios require different operating needs is the primary reason why we advise “one cost optimization solution” will not yield best possible optimization in cloud savings.

Combination of “Right Capacity Sizing” and “EC2 Reserved Instances (RI)” will help companies reduce waste on AWS EC2 spending. But, can these same principles be applied to other deployment environments like DEV, QA servers etc.,? BIG NO. WHY?

Curated list of cloud migration best practices

"On-premise vs Cloud", this is one of the first question every company/team who are exploring public could adoption would ask.

Available answers over internet for this question at this point are either dedicated to one topic (or) limited to few tips based on authors experience. Companies are in real need of a repository with this sort of information to make an informed decision about their cloud adoption. I am creating this page as repository to pool the information from experts. I feel that repository like this will tremendously benefit everyone.

Following are the topics I have in my mind. Feel free to suggest topics and respective differences in On-premise vs Cloud practices.

Amazon ec2 budget - how INVOKE can help it reduce

Recent RightScale study observed that around $10B was wasted on cloud spend and one of the top reason for this waste is leaving ec2 instances in running state when no one using them.

We tried solutions like ec2 schedulers. But, they are not optimal solutions to save on AWS instance costs. Why? Let us quickly check it.

In cloud computing era, where most of the resources are billed per second, leaving servers up & running when no one using them, will not help much with your AWS cloud bill and not best optimization.

How to Configure DNS with Route 53 and GoDaddy

f you are a website owner who bought a domain from GoDaddy (or some other registrar) and started exploring AWS to take advantage of the capabilities of cloud computing, one of the things you need to address will be: my application/website servers are hosted on AWS, so how can I integrate with the domain I bought from GoDaddy?

The easiest answer is to update your GoDaddy NS records to point to Amazon’s name servers. In this tutorial, we are going to look at how this setup works.

Note that we’ll be looking at GoDaddy so that we have a specific example, but this process will be very similar no matter where you bought your domain name.

financesonline.com reviewed INVOKE Cloud as TOP 500 IT management software

It is also an ideal platform for organizations that have compliance concerns. INVOKE Cloud takes DevOps to next level by making it TeamOps. Everyone with the permissions is able to bring up servers on-demand, not just developers.

INVOKE Cloud lets users bring up their cloud servers whenever they are down by simply typing in the application URL from anywhere using any browser. The software also provides configuration options to filter users and groups who can bring up the servers and applications on-demand.

Resource Availability: The Missing Piece of the Cloud DevOps Puzzle

Our guest blog on DevOps.com website.

In cloud DevOps, however, that may not be the case. Any cost-conscious organization may instruct developers to take infrastructure offline when it’s not needed (most of us know how developers manage infrastructure, so I am not going discuss much about it). But what about other stakeholders of the project? What if the QA team wants to manually test or validate something or product owners want to review something?

AWS Cloud pricing pitfalls

Most of us know that 3 key pieces of modern computing are: CPU, Memory (RAM & Hard Disk) and I/O. All cloud hosting providers price the usage of these key components (either hourly (or) minute (or) seconds based on provider). Let us explore how & what AWS price the usage of these components, for their cloud consumer.

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