The Cloud creates jobs AND ideas!

Microsoft sponsored a study with IDC about job growth related to Cloud computing.  The headline - "Cloud Computing to create 14 Million New Jobs by 2015".

You can read the entire article here - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2012/mar12/03-05CloudComputingJobs.mspx

The article has a bit of sales in it - it does quote several partners and the VP of enterprise sales.  That aside it's an interesting take on something I believe in strongly - the power of Cloud Computing to enable creators to create in a way not previously possible!

Here at 2nd Watch we are very proud to be a part of this new job creation!  Since 2011 2nd Watch has created 15 new jobs in the Cloud Computing industry!

The Cloud is a technology industrialization that will help empower business owners in a way not before possible.  Let me give you a case study of something that was not feasible before Cloud Computing:

Here at 2nd Watch we are working on a number of utilities to make the Cloud easier to consume. One such utility requires very large datasets to be stored for each customer.  Our application stores 21 Million data points per month, and that is only for 10 customers.  In the old world of technology if I wanted to mass market an application at this scale I would need to buy and provision several servers and massive disk storage to keep up with the demand.

In this instance I estimate that I would have purchased $65-75,000 worth of equipment.  Forget depreciation and useful life - for a startup this is just money I don't have.  Today my almost Terabyte of storage costs me less than $10 per month, and I only pay for what I use.  My servers are several hundred dollars a month, and I can scale them up or down based on usage.

Big data problems are no longer big dollar problems.  This is a huge shift in an industry built around selling and consuming hardware.  This new wave of technology will spur the thinkers and doers in our society to create new and compelling business ideas that could not have existed before.

Welcome to the industrial age of technology.  I for one am looking forward to the opportunities this new world will bring!

-Kris

AWS Tip of the Month: Backup Server for less than $1 a month

AWS has a very neat way to backup your server with attached storage called EBS Snapshots.  This technology starts with a full snapshot of the entire volume and continues to do incremental snapshots based on the difference between the last snapshots.

Snap shotting is not a new technology, and many people use this in their on-premise environment to take snapshots of a virtual machine or specific disk for backup or copy purposes.

At AWS you cannot schedule these snapshots. You either have to call these via API or use the management console to do this.

Below is the high-level process to automate these snapshot backups at a particular time each day:

1. Build a t1.micro that has a script to run that calls the snapshot API for EBS for the volumes you want to backup.  Make sure this script runs on machine start up.
2. Setup an Auto-scale group to launch a server based on a schedule (we start ours at 3am and shut it off at 3:50 am).  This ensures time to kick off all the snapshot jobs - note: I do not have to run the server while they complete, only to kick off the snapshot and any pre-activities I need to accomplish before I can take my backup.
3. Check your snapshots to ensure they are occurring regularly and test them on a monthly or quarterly basis to ensure you can recover sufficiently in the case of an outage.

By doing this daily we have incurred the costs of our storage for snapshots and the $.02 an hour charge for our T1.micro - effectively $0.62 per month for a backup server.

-Kris

Radio Interview Recording

On Thursday I was interviewed on local business radio KSBN on the Spokane Entreprenuer Show. My friends Bill Kalivas and Catherine Greer hosted a 30 minute spot on our business and what it took to get things going.

Click here to listen to the recording of the show.

-Kris