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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel. In this episode I speak with Nelson Nahum, CEO and founder of Zadara Storage. We talk about: What does Zadara Storage do and how do you use OpenStack? How easy or difficult have you found it to keep up with the changing APIs across releases, especially in the early days of OpenStack? What should OpenStack users do to keep up What challenges have you had with using OpenStack? What do you think of RedHat’s acquisition of Inktank, creators of storage provider Ceph that is popular in OpenStack deployments? What lessons have you learned from your experience operating several large scale OpenStack deployments? How can we get an OpenStack Summit to happen in Israel? Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 11: Nelson Nahum of Zadara Storage Subscribe to this podcast series

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel. In this episode I speak with Yaron Haviv, VP of Datacenter and Storage Solutions at Mellanox. We talk about: Why is OpenStack interesting for Mellanox today? What lessons are being learned by Mellanox’s customers using OpenStack? What are you doing to leverage your lessons learned from customer and internal use? What is the scale of OpenStack use and skills within Mellanox? What are Mellanox customers doing with OpenStack, and how are you helping them? Why is OpenStack important to Mellanox for the future? When and why did you know that OpenStack was worthy of serious consideration? What will you present about at the upcoming OpenStack Israel event? What advice would you give someone just starting to get familiar with OpenStack? Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 10: Yaron Haviv of Mellanox Subscribe to this podcast series

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel. In this episode I speak with Ken Pepple, CTO of Solinea and author of Deploying OpenStack. We talk about: What does Solinea do? How does OpenStack compare to other infrastructure cloud software on the market, such as CloudStack, vCloud, and Eucalyptus? What types of customers are using CloudStack vs. OpenStack, and for what? What are CloudStack and OpenStack deployments making money on? What has attracted customers to OpenStack in the past and now with Icehouse? What is the focus of the Icehouse release, and how will it help enterprises? What kinds of Hadoop solutions are happening that integrate OpenStack? What happens during the two to three months of a pilot infrastructure cloud project? What is the difference between an OpenStack distro and an OpenStack services offering? What are the two main challenges facing the Israel OpenStack community? Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 9: Ken Pepple of Solinea Subscribe to this podcast series

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel. In this episode I speak with Florian Haas of Hastexo. We talk about: OpenStack Icehouse and breaking out of IaaS Trove Data Storage API Typical challenges to building highly available OpenStack services. Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 8: Florian Haas of Hastexo Subscribe to this podcast series

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel. In this episode I speak with Nati Shalom, CTO of Gigaspaces. We talk about: General update on the upcoming OpenStack Icehouse release Recent Gigaspaces Cloudify 2.7 updates Upcoming Cloudify 3.0 additions Call for Papers for the upcoming OpenStack Israel Event June 2014. Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 7: Nati Shalom of Gigaspaces Subscribe to this podcast series

As you’ve probably heard, Amazon Web Services reduced their on-demand cloud prices significantly last week. You’d think customers would be happy across the board, but that’s not the case. Here’s why, and what will happen as a result. As discussed previously, AWS customers translate their capacity planning into Reserved Instance purchases, based on the relative savings these RIs provide over on-demand prices. But, when on-demand prices are reduced without a corresponding reduction in the instance-hour price for RIs - as happened last week - the RI breakeven point shifts and upsets the optimal RI coverage calculus. AWS customers who purchased RIs before the price reduction can find themselves stuck with inventory that now costs more per hour, in amortized terms, than the cost if they had not purchased the RI. I have several clients in this situation, and none are very happy about it. ...

Last week both Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services reduced their prices for cloud computing services significantly to comparable levels, and both now offer significant discounts for long-term usage. Yet, though the two cloud services may seem similar, their radically different long-term pricing models reveal just how different these cloud offerings really are. Whose responsibility is capacity planning? The core difference between GCP and AWS is in capacity planning: Whose responsibility is it? In AWS, the customer owns their own capacity planning. If the customer can accurately predict their needs for the long term, they can purchase Reserved Instances and save significantly as compared to the on-demand cost. Whereas in GCE, Google owns the capacity planning. GCE customers are granted a Sustained Use discount at the end of the month for resources that were active for a significant portion of the month. The GCE customer might track their expected vs. actual costs and be pleasantly surprised when their bill at the end of the month is lower than expected, but the GCE customer cannot a priori translate their capacity planning prowess into reduced costs. ...

These are the three crucial ingredients to making sure your software organization drives overall business growth. Keep the R in R&D “R&D” stands for “Research and Development.” Growth requires both research - exploring the unknown to discover new insights - and development - building the product or service. Unfortunately, in many companies the R&D department is focused solely on the latter: the organization tends to be devoted to developing products, and scarcely ever explores new technologies. Make sure your R&D organization is accountable not only for delivering your product, but also for devising new ways to satisfy customers. ...

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel. In this episode I welcome back Samuel Bercovici of Radware, and we talk about how to contribute to OpenStack. Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 6: Welcoming Back Samuel Bercovici of Radware Subscribe to this podcast series

We used to go through so much trouble to manipulate Amazon Web Services resources from the command-line. There were separate AWS command-line tools for each service, and each needed to be downloaded and had unique configuration, and each had its own unique output format. Eric Hammond wrote in detail about this. With the new awscli tool by Mitch Garnaat (of python boto fame) and his team at AWS, we have a single tool that does it all, uniformly, and can be simply configured. Thanks, Amazon! ...