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Showing posts from September, 2016

AWS EBS storage balancing size versus throughput

One of my teams is rolling out a new application in AWS on EC2 instances where the operating system runs on an EBS drive. We selected one of the M3 machines that came with SSDs.  The application makes moderate use of disk I/O.  Our benchmarks were pretty disappointing. It turns out we really didn't understand what kind of I/O we had requested and where we had actually put our data. The Root Drive The root drive on an EC2 instance can be SSDs or Magnetic based on the type of machine selected. All additional mounted/persistent disk drives on that machine will probably be of the same type.  This is an SSD but it is a network drive.   EBS disks IOPS and MB/S are provisioned exactly as described in the EC2 documentation.  The most common GP2 SSDs have a burst IOPS limit and a sustained IOPS limit. They also have a maximum MB/S transfer rate.  Both the sustained IOPS limit and the maximum transfer rate are affected by the size of the provisioned disk.   Larger disks can sustain

An Environment for Every Season

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Video Presentation This is really talking about different types of software environments and how they are used during the various phases of software development, integration, and support.   Environments are the touchpoints between your system and other teams operating on their cycles and timelines. They configuration tuning points where control is incrementally applied or where access is restricted based on the sensitivity of the data in that environment and its distance from production or development. System Complexity The number of system environments (sandboxes) required depends on your system complexity, your tolerance for defects, your level of Ops and DevOps automation, and the needs of other systems that yours integrates with. This diagram shows a couple application components that integrate with 4 different partner teams and 3 data stores.  Each partner team has its own release cycle and testing needs. We aim for loose testing coupling but that is often impossible eith

The Cloud is an Opportunity

"Excellence is a continuous process and not an accident" A hybrid cloud is just an offsite data center if you migrate your applications and processes as is . This Topic on Video Cloud as an Opportunity Life in the Cloud Should Be Different  Opportunity to bake in policies and practices Full automation is possible and required to feed continuous processes Continual building and destruction of infrastructure is desirable over stale configurations Dynamic and on-demand capacity is available and should be leveraged It is easy to isolate teams, applications and partner firms using built in tools. Resiliency must be part design and not an afterthought. A cloud migration is an opportunity to bake in  policies and practices that were impossible in your previous environments.   It is an opportunity to leverage cloud vendor provided security, automation and pre-built services in a way that increases your team's capabilities.  The cloud lets you automate your i