Amazon Web Services

antielvis

Decided to start watching the CBT Nuggets Amazon Web Services nuggets. It not only looks cool but I can see this having a profound effect on Information Technology, especially at the Small & Medium business level

Any experience using this? They have a certification set as well.

N2IT

Sounds pretty cool. Thanks for posting about this.

pram

Funny enough I just took this today and I was going to post about it.


I've been using AWS for about two years now. I've migrated 2 large websites to it and done a lot of design/implementation work. I think it's really cool and Amazon is lightyears ahead of the competition in their offerings.

Things like Auto Scaling and CloudFormation are the game changers IMO. They're enabling application designs that weren't possible before because of hardware constraints. With cloud-init and Puppet your servers can now become disposable cogs instead of things to actively maintain. It's a bit of a paradigm shift from the system administration perspective.




I didn't know they had a CBT Nugget! I mainly studied using the FAQ pages, and everything else was from experience. It's not a difficult test, but it does require you to know each product fairly well. That includes the more obscure things like IAM and their cloud applications (SQS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache)

Pretty much everything is on Amazon of course. Check out their documentation, FAQs, and white papers.

AWS Architecture Center
Documentation
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud FAQs

N2IT

Cheers very cool! Gratz on the pass

antielvis

Go to aws.amazon.com/free and sign up for an account. It'll ask you for a credit card, but you'll have the option for "free". There is a free service for certain servers but they contain nothing but a "RAM like" storage. If you power down, you lose everything. The capabilities of this are just freaking amazing. There are thousands of server like images so you can choose a fully configured linux server (LAMP). The scalability is just amazing. It's pay as you go so if you power down the server you don't pay for usage of it. The ability to scale up servers can be automated so if you say had..a massive influx of hits on your site, AWS spools up servers for you during your peak load period, then spools them down...you pay by the hour.

If you happen to be a developer or a student and need a lab? CHECK this out. You can spool up a simple or complex Linux or Windows farm..pay by the hour, power it down when done. How's 8 cents an hour sound?

Congrats on the pass Pram. I can see this being a very good certification to hold in the future & one could carve out a very lucractive consulting business doing this.

N2IT

AE thanks for the follow up. Great information this is pretty exciting stuff.

Sounds Good

How do you guys think AWS/GC (Google Cloud) will impact the virtualization trend in terms of virtualization engineers?

ptilsen

It will increase the demand for them. Cloud providers will need more of them, and larger organizations seeking to emulate public cloud providers will need more of them. Even the small/medium businesses sticking to fully or partially on-prem solutions are virtualizing more. Overall, virtualization is not a bad thing to specialize in, and the trend of using public clouds like AWS doesn't really change that much. At worst, it changes which company a virtualization engineer is most likely to work for.

antielvis

Thoughts on where this takes the industry, specifically the SMB market?

ptilsen

SMB is a funny market. Many SMBs are going to rely on strong generalists because they will still need versatile on-prem solutions. Even if they go off-prem, they need extremely fault-tolerant WAN access. It definitely does shift a lot of that generalist work to implementing cloud solutions, however. SBS is gone. Now you need to know Office 365, Azure, and federation if they're going hybrid. Most importantly, you need to do it cheaply. AWS doesn't really affect the SMB market as directly, however. SMBs aren't suddenly switching away from MS platforms en masse, and MS on AWS makes no sense at that level from a cost perspective. It's all on-prem, 365, Azure, or SAAS.

SMBs will grow more reliant on consultants and MSPs, however. Internal IT departments are going away for larger and larger companies. The "cloud," if you will, is becoming the MSP, even if in reality the MSP just acts as a go-between for the SAAS, PAAS, and IAAS solutions in many cases, and other vendors even for fully on-prem solutions. This was already the case in this market and would happen with or without a trend towards *AAS, where it ends up being more cost-effective and reliable, since a service provider can give out individual SMEs when needed that the SMB could never hire directly. MSP is the popular term, but one might call it ITAAS - IT as a service.

antielvis

Good point about SBS being gone because just a few years ago MS was encouraging people to get into the SBS/SMB marketplace. Suddenly the SBS product was disco'd & all things became cloud.

I set up AWS (the freebie one) and one of the things that I noticed was the remarkable price differential with Linux versus Windows. It made wonder how many business owners might ask "what is this Linux stuff and how can I get it because it's so cheap". Could the Cloud help kickstart Linux in the SMB market? And, because you'll be dealing with a more complex networking setup that requires redundancy, will we see more CISCO in the SMB market?

Managed IT was the buzzword when I left SMB IT. Companies offering the service were tired of the proverbial "brush fire" IT stuff. The push was to managed contracts & this type of Cloud Service has some real potential to do that. You could sell a service like this where you can nearly guarantee certain costs.

ITAAS +1. That is where we're going. Great post BTW.

ptilsen

AWS won't directly get SMBs onto an open-source platform, but it might get more MSPs to start providing and support open source platforms. A price-competitive AWS-based offering could certainly be made to compete with MS solutions. On top of that, many similar SAAS solutions have been open-source-based for years. These types of things are definitely getting more viable. However, the best overall experience and platform for the typical business, especially SMBs, continues to be Microsoft, IMO. It basically comes down to Windows and Office. The server-side stuff is good, but honestly the show-stopper is Office on Windows more than anything else. I just haven't seen any organization make a decent alternative, including Microsoft (Office on any other platform is limited at best).

It's definitely an interesting future ahead for the industry. AWS certainly makes a lot of services in general more viable, and Linux and UNIX will be the more common platform.

NightShade03

Due to AWS' backend many companies have popped up now offering PaaS as well. This seems to be helping a lot of SMBs because it really lowers the cost of entry to bring a web application online and scale out as they need it.