Data In and Out of the Hybrid Cloud

The continued adoption, and accleration of interest, of cloud computing has creating an interesting problem for the large enterprise. Most large enterprises have existing private network and intranets. As parts of the organization begin to adopt public and private clouds, there is a challenge of moving data in and out of these clouds.

Data movement is more challenging for a number of reasons including security and network accessability. For example, you can usually can't walk up to these clouds and load a tape or hard drive. And badwidth is often times more restricted than that between internal networks. Appliations you have running in your private network may not be able to talk directly to the cloude without going through web services or other new networking schemes.

Then there is the question of cost. When does a business decide it is time to bring back data from the cloud? There is a point where keeping certain data in the cloud could become cost prohibative. While the cost of cloude computing and storage is always going down and newer services popup up all the time (like Amazon Glacier for example), this issue is not going away.

Also for Big Data type computation and data storage, at what point is keeping your data running in an Amazone EMR or stored in S3 beceome prohibatively expensive? All these questions are important for organizations to understand as the adoption of cloud computing and Big Data analytics accelerate. There is no simple answer of ourse, but it is important for organizations to consider these questions with both from an IT and financal perspective.

Databases are Cool Again

It is definitely interesting what is happening in the database space these days. It is good to see the NoSQL and NewSQL folks spark a fire under the traditional relational vendors. This is the only way to inspire innovation both in the commercial and open source space. To a large extended, the establishted relational player were slow to jump on the cloud and even to this day they are not moving as aggressively as they need to in order to reclaim the cloud database market from the NoSQL and NewSQL upstarts.

Fundamentally, the scale-out capabilities of traditional RDBMS engine still don't hit the sweet spot developers and cloud operations people need these days. I do expect the market will consolidate somewhat in the next several years as there are just too many players at the moment, especially on the NoSQL side. But I expect there to remain a large selection of NoSQL engines over time, as many of the NoSQL players target specialized areas so it is definitely not a one size fits all like it has historically been with relational database. For example, many of the NoSQL engines have made deliberate enginering trade-offs in their products such as in their storage models, consistency, replication, aggregation capabilities, and scale-out…etc. For example, if you need a NoSQL with strong aggregation functions you might choose MongoDB but if you need something that scales out writes and data center replication you might go with Cassandra. So, in the long-term I do not see a single NoSQL that can rule them all.

Cloud Job Scheduler on EC2

Grand Logic is pleased to announced a new release of our JobServer Cloud edition product. JobServer Cloud edition allows our customers to access and use the powerful job scheduling, job processing, workflow and SOA messaging features available in JobServer from a cloud environment. JobServer now supports deployments on Amazon EC2, allowing our customers to lower their IT costs and free themselves to focus on their core applications. If you are using EC2 to host your applications, and you are in need of a job scheduling and processing solution, then JobServer is a perfect choice.

JobServer Cloud delivers all the same great features and capabilities found in our core JobServer software and can now be hosted in the clouds. This frees customers from the IT burden of buying and maintaining hardware and installing and managing their own IT environment for JobServer. With the cloud edition of JobServer, you are freed from dealing with upgrades and managing maintenance tasks and dealing with hardware issues. We can add more job processing capacity, quickly, as you need it. You just need to focus on building and deploying your jobs and java Tasklets. We will ensure that your JobServer environment is well maintained, managed and backed up and running efficiently. We will alert you if we notice performance issues or slow running jobs and processes or if more capacity is needed. Daily and weekly reports are delivered that provide detailed job scheduling and processing statistics. Contact our support team to get setup with a fully managed instance of JobServer.

With our fully managed JobServer Cloud solution, there is no hardware or software to install! With JobServer Cloud, your environment will be deployed and run from the Amazon cloud with secure connectivity to your private network using Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). You can access your JobServer instance securely to run and manage your jobs and apps with full access to your private corporate network. Many customers also need their JobServer environment to connect and access local IT systems and services within their private corporate network. With Amazon's VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) we can securely bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and your JobServer Cloud environment. Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated JobServer compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include their JobServer resources that are in the Amazon cloud.

If you want to install and manage your own JobServer instances, then download JobServer today and install on your EC2 environment to start scheduling and processing jobs. Start with one EC2 instance or scale JobServer to run on hundreds of EC2 instances. JobServer scales easily and effectively on EC2 to allow you to run thousands of jobs. JobServer can scale to meet your needs by taking full advantage of your Amazon cloud environment.

About Grand Logic
Grand Logic is dedicated to delivering software solutions to its customers that help them automate their business and manage their processes. Grand Logic delivers automation software and specializes in mobile and web products and solutions that streamline business.