Reading for the weekend: materials on working with the cloud and organization of IT infrastructure

We have collected 20 articles on how the cloud helps developers and system administrators to work. Under the cut - how to plan the amount of virtual capacity, reviews of cloud IDE and recommendations for setting up test environments.


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Cloud for developers and admins

• The training stand for admins: how the cloud will help - We tell you what sysadmin skills a virtual infrastructure will help to train. From the assembly of test layouts for transferring a project from paper to metal to migrating applications from one IT system to another.

• What opportunities .NET Core gives developers - In this article we talk about why transferring an application from one OS (Windows, macOS, Linux) to another. The reasons are: different development speed, technology maturity and developer experience. Also we will tell about the capabilities of the tool developed specifically for creating multiplatform programs - .NET Core.

• Why equip a programmer's workplace in the cloud - On tasks related to the development of applications that individual programmers and teams would be easier to solve in the cloud. Inside, there are arguments in favor of a virtual workplace and a number of use cases: how to organize work spaces for a group of developers and update any system without interruptions in its work.

• The cost of the cloud: one day in the life of two development teams - This article was written by Elliot Forbes, a software architect at JP Morgan and the author of the books “ Learning Multi-Threading with Python ” and “ Introduction to Cloud Application Development ”. In it, he assesses the quality of development of a scalable service based on on-premise infrastructure and in the public cloud. Elliott considers the following criteria: the cost of infrastructure, service resilience to failures in the data center, the level of data security and speed of development.

• We program in the cloud: a review of popular IDE - Analysis of the pros and cons of the most popular cloud IDE. It includes: Koding, Cloud 9, Nitrous and Codenvy. For all IDE there are small video reviews. There is a similar review, “sharpened” for backenders : which of the IDE-tools is suitable for a quick start, which one can run even on a toaster, and which one is not bad for teamwork. For all development environments, there is a small "where to start" guide.

• Storage Manager Evolution: Cloud Administrator - An article on how to “adapt” a system administrator to work in a cloud environment or retrain as a Big Data Specialist or automation engineer.

• How to deploy a home cloud: a four-part tutorial - The author spent more than fifty hours to prepare a fairly comprehensive reference for new Linux users on how to get started with Debian , create their own LAMP and deploy a cloud service on a home PC from scratch. You will learn how to get around the most popular "rakes" that you can step on when updating your home cloud.

Data centers and IT infrastructure

• How is the data center and what is needed for its work? - This material will tell you what tasks are solved and how the individual elements of the physical data center are arranged: the building, power supply and air conditioning systems, fire extinguishing, etc. Consider why only batteries cannot be used for power supply and what can and can not put out the fire in the data center.

• Variants of the organization of IT infrastructure: in the office, data center and cloud - Consider the needs of organizations in terms of IT infrastructure. When to choose a server from a regular office PC, when - a small data center in a separate room, and when to apply for computing power to a cloud provider.

• How Popular are Clouds — Scale Study Results — An overview of the results of a RightScale survey conducted among thousands of IT professionals from a wide range of fields: education, business, healthcare, and software development. The task of the study was to find out how many companies use cloud technologies and what difficulties they face. The article also contains several tips for optimizing the cost of cloud services.

• How an OS for power grids will increase the energy efficiency of data centers - The article describes the software-defined electricity (SDE) approach proposed by the 3DFS community of scientists, developers and entrepreneurs. Read about how SDE optimizes power consumption and what this technology means for data centers. Last year, this decision won the Breakthrough Awards award from the magazine Popular Mechanics, and at Forbes called it "the most significant discovery in the field of energy efficiency since the discoveries of Nikola Tesla."

• How a life support system on Mars helps the data center work - An article about how “Martian” fuel cell electric generators work and why a dozen major American IT companies use them not in space missions, but here on Earth .

• Colony graphs: cloud visualization - Material tells how to generate colony graphs for your computing system using several commands on the command line. Graphs allow you to identify anomalies in the operation of servers, or simply observe the "life" of the cloud in miniature.

Cloud experience

• Pizza and the cloud: an interview with a client 1cloud - This is an interview with the head of the company TaxoPizza Stanislav Bobryshev. He will share how a virtual server in the cloud helped them solve the problem of accessibility of corporate services and protect themselves from power outages.

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• Where does a startup place an IT infrastructure? - Our review of options for locating IT infrastructure: your server, server for rent and the cloud. We are talking about the pros and cons of each approach, compare prices. The article will be useful for startups and small and medium businesses.

• Cloud Capacity Planning: Engineer View - System Engineer Patrick McKenzie, who works on IT infrastructure scaling, offered a step-by-step guide for cloud capacity planning: from choosing an architecture to performing load testing. The article is “spiced up” with a number of other useful tips: how to spend less on infrastructure, and how to build capacity for the implementation of large projects.

• Cloud Migration Cases: Netflix, Pinterest and Symantec - How Netflix, Pinterest and Symantec migrated their infrastructure to the cloud. This material is not a story about “successful success”, but the personal experience of world corporations. Pinterest representatives will remember how a startup had to split into two camps — opponents and supporters of the cloud (and why the latter won). Netflix will share the experiences of the cloud pioneers, and Symantec will tell you how to convince people to introduce new technologies in companies that are more than 30 years old.

• Why BMW is betting on the cloud - If you believe Forbes , autonomous cars will become a familiar thing by 2020. Automakers are preparing for change in different ways: in BMW, for example, put on the cloud. Cloud technology helps the automaker to update software on all machines at once. What other benefits BMW found in the cloud, tell this article.

• Guide: how to migrate applications from one cloud to another - The author of the material - developer Sanjay R (Sanjay R) from Tophatter - shares his personal experience of moving a standard Ruby on Rails application from a cloud of one provider to a cloud of another (in a walkthrough format). Sanjay will also share a list of DNS and SSL problems with the transfer and how to solve them.

Some more of our digests:

• Materials for acquaintance with IaaS, events from the field of information security and regulation in IT
• Selection of materials on virtual infrastructure, information security and trends in the IaaS market
• Cloud Digest: about technologies, SSL certificates and IaaS provider operation