Waterloo Codefest Special Offer

All new signups from the Kitchener-Waterloo are will receive $50 account credit during the hours of Codefest (3)In celebration of this upcoming weekend’s Waterloo Codefest, we are offering $50 credit to new signups from Kitchener/Waterloo during the 36 hour hackathon. We are hoping that the Waterloo Codefest will inspire some innovation and we would like to think that this credit can give some runway to develop the bright ideas that come out of the weekend.

If you haven’t heard, Cloud-A is proudly sponsoring Waterloo Codefest and our very own Geoff Sullivan will be attending and judging the event.

About Waterloo Codefest

When: This 36-hour hackathon will take place Oct. 24 and 25, 2015

Where: Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), 67 Erb St., West, Waterloo

The hackathon will begin at 7 a.m. on Oct. 24 and end at 7 p.m. on Oct. 25, after which there will be an awards ceremony for the top three applications developed.

How do I register?

Register online using Dev Post.

Participation is free; sign up either by yourself or with a team of up to four members.

For more information on Waterloo Codefest check out the following links:

City of Waterloo – Waterloo Codefest

Waterloo Codefest Devpost page

 

Cloud Object Storage Survey

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Hello Bulk Storage users! Our partner CloudBerry Lab is offering a free license of their CloudBerry Explorer PRO to any Cloud-A Bulk Storage user who fills out the 9 questions in the link below. Please note that this data will be shared with CloudBerry Lab for market research purposes, so take this into consideration prior to submitting your responses.

We will be submitting responses to CloudBerry Lab at the end of everyday and they will be sending out the licenses to your email address.

This offer expires October 27th, 2015

Take the Survey!

 

Data Residency, Sovereignty and the Safe Harbor Sham

This past Tuesday it was announced that the American ‘Safe Harbor’ compliance has been ruled invalid by the EU’s highest courts – a ruling that is unappealable. Safe Harbor was the standard for data privacy in the US as well as Europe, but was shot down after it was proven that European data stored by American companies could be accessed and surveilled by spy agencies like the NSA.

This is the second high profile, precedent setting case where data residency has been a majorly concerning subject matter. Last year, Microsoft was ordered to hand over data residing in an Irish data centre. It was determined in court that US cloud computing companies, like Microsoft Google and Amazon Web Services, must turn over private information when served with a valid search warrant from US law enforcement agencies, even if that data resides in data centres outside of the US.

We feel that this is an extremely relevant piece of news for our customer base considering that many of our users have data residency concerns.

Here are two main considerations for keeping your data out of reach of wondering eyes:

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Announcing Cloud-A Managed Security Services

Managed-Security-Services1-396x196A few months back we released our Web Application Security Survey and were amazed at the amount of participation we had – it was the single greatest amount of feedback we have ever received at one time, which helped us realize that security is a very important topic for our users that has been unaddressed. From this data we were able to determine two main things. Either developers:

A) Don’t have confidence in their own security measures and procedures

B) Don’t have the time to spend implementing security best practises

While we were not entirely surprised with the results of the survey, it helped us realize that there was a gap in our user’s understanding of the Cloud-A security partnership model, and there was a gap in our offering to help our users better secure their environments on Cloud-A.

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Hadoop <3's Bulk Storage

We have touched on Hadoop before in our blog, first announcing our partnership with Hortonworks, back in February of 2014, and more recently on our Big Data Solutions Page. Hadoop is a powerful open source framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models, making it an excellent Big Data tool. Hadoop can benefit from the operational efficiencies of Cloud-A’s elastic, API driven infrastructure-as-a-service – and it is a growing use case among our users.

There are many aspects of our compute that lend themselves to successful Hadoop deployments on Cloud-A, like our Big Data High Memory® and Big Data High Compute® instance flavours that provide the scale and power for the biggest jobs, but there are other elements of Cloud-A infrastructure-a-service that make it an ideal host for Hadoop Big Data solutions.

Let’s take a look at how you can leverage Cloud-A Bulk Storage, our object storage product, as a reliable, scalable and cost-effective Big Data repository for your Hadoop platform.

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Our eBook Review of “Migrating to Cloud Native Application Architectures”

We like to think of ourselves as thought leaders in the cloud space, but sometimes some people have already said it best. This is certainly the case with the eBook “Migrating to Cloud Native Application Architectures” written by Matt Stine of Pivotal.

The 51 page eBook, introduces and outlines the concept of modern application architecture that is “cloud aware,” and enables organizations to ship better, faster and more robust software.

The book is organized into three parts, The Rise of Cloud-Native, Changes Needed and the Migration Cookbook. The first section of the book explains the “why” of migrating to cloud-native architectures, as well as the unique characteristics of cloud-native application architectures. The section introduces new concepts and buzzwords like the Twelve-Factor App and Microservices utilizing Containerization, which we have covered in in detail on our own blog.

The “Changes Needed” section of the book discussed the required cultural, organizational and technical changes required to adopt this new methodology of application architecture. The section introduces the importance of moving from siloed IT resources to a DevOps methodology to enhance communication and collaboration through software development, quality assurance, database administration, system administration, IT operations, release management and project management. Stine also explains the importance of embracing a Continuous Delivery model to ship better software more efficiently.

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Introducing the Bulk Storage Content Delivery Network

worldYou may or may not have noticed that we have quietly launched brand new functionality to our Bulk Storage product. We are very happy to announce that you can now access your Bulk Storage files faster than ever before with the public BETA launch of our new Bulk Storage Content Delivery Network (CDN.)

Our Cloud CDN technology was built from the ground up to deliver your content most efficiently from anywhere. Bulk Storage content served through the blkstr.ca network is propagated intelligently to edge nodes for blazing fast downloads of media, large static files, or dynamic content.

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MongoDB NoSQL database on Cloud-A

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Cloud-A provides a flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure platform to allow users to select the right tool for each job. Cloud-A has recently announced its technology partnership with MongoDB, to provide a supported, scalable NoSQL solution for Cloud-A users.

MongoDB is a next generation database for modern application architecture that accelerates time-to-market with less resources, reduces risk for mission-critical deployments all with a lower total cost of ownership when compared to other NoSQL databases.

This whitepaper outlines 

  • Introduction to NoSQL Databases
  • Benefits of NoSQL Databases
  • MongoDB Use Cases
  • MongoDB on Cloud-A
  • Best practices

 

Signup to receive Cloud-A whitepapers in your inbox!

Download Whitepaper

Cloud-A Becomes MongoDB Technology Partner

We are happy to announce that Cloud-A is now a MongoDB technology partner. MongoDB is the world’s fastest growing database ecosystem,  and we are excited to be a part of it!

This new partnership helps allow our users to build better solutions on Cloud-A infrastructure with the tools they want. Deployed where and how they want.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, MongoDB is a NoSQL database for today’s applications, enabling users to:

  • Leverage data and technology to maximize competitive advantage
  • Reduce risk for mission-critical deployments
  • Accelerate time-to-value
  • Dramatically lower total cost of ownership

MongoDB works particularly well for Big Data and operational intelligence solutions, product data management, mobile app backends, IoT (Internet of Things) apps and Content Management Systems (CMS) due to its agility, scalability and performance.

Stay Tuned!

Stay tuned for more information on how our partnership with MongoDB will benefit you! Be on the lookout for a Whitepaper and some technical blog posts to enable successful MongoDB deployments on Cloud-A.

Cloud 66 vs. Heroku – A Detailed Comparison & Business Case

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With the Canadian dollar on the decline and the high cost of popular US-based PaaS providers like Heroku, we are finding that more and more Canadian based SaaS providers, agency development shops and IT departments are on the lookout for an alternative solution that provide similar functionality at a lower cost.

You do not have to look very far. It is no secret that we are huge fans of our partner, Cloud 66. Cloud 66 provides full stack container management-as-a-service. What does this mean? Cloud 66 is DevOps-as-a-service and it provides you with everything you need to deploy, scale and protect your applications on a number of approved public clouds, including Cloud-A.

Let’s take a look at how Cloud 66 + Cloud-A stacks up against Heroku.

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