Expertise

Expertise and Flexibility for your Cloud Hosting Needs

Blueberry's Amazon Web Services (AWS) expertise can help your business reap the benefits of the AWS platform. With extensive experience in building serverless applications using AWS Lambda and expertise in migrating infrastructure to the cloud, Blueberry can provide cost-effective and scalable solutions for your business needs.

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Amazon Web Services

AWS Overview

Looking for experts in Amazon Web Services? Blueberry has the skills to build your serverless application.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a platform for cloud computing over the Web. AWS has a natural appeal for business projects, but has also been successfully used for applications in scientific and state contexts, some of which provide excellent demonstrations of what can be done in the cloud.

A noteworthy example of this is how Cycle Computing along with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) built a record-breaking 70,000 core cluster computer in AWS (using spot instances), in an attempt to simulate intensive hard drive workload. The University of Chicago has also been using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service to develop systems for genomics analysis, which has helped the agile development and running of production web services for science.

We’ll discuss the advantages to launching your core business systems on AWS below.

In our view Amazon has achieved and maintains a very strong vision for AWS. Unfortunately, this vision isn’t particularly well understood by the media, and Amazon is frequently misrepresented, particularly on the question of reliability and security.

Despite this there are some positive  signs that the tide is starting to turn in terms of public perception, mainly because of some high profile successes launched using AWS, with organisations ranging in size and type, from Netflix and Expedia to high street retailers such as Marks and Spencer.

Amazon Web Services – A Platform for Delivering Redundancy

AWS offers a range of potential benefits in cost, scalability, flexibility and reliability. Let’s look at each one in detail:

AWS Platform Features

Amazon provides two very compelling features – S3 and EBS. Both of these relate to the ways in which data is modelled, stored and accessed for AWS applications.

Issues With Amazon Web Services

Impressive as it is, AWS has not been without its issues, some of them widely reported in the press. In truth, many of these problems have been caused by external factors and poor design by users of the system, not the system itself, so in-house AWS issues now form a minority of cases.

Amazon had a number of system failures in 2015 – there was a big outage affecting the US East Coast data centre in September due to a DynamoDB event, and a security oversight that exposed the private healthcare records of over 1.5 million Americans, which was inadvertently made available through a contractor error, but could have been easily prevented with proper use of Amazon’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) service.

The reality is that other major companies are indeed affected by these issues – they just don’t get the media attention. The fact that some major sites failed doesn’t mean Amazon is badly designed – just that the people using it needed to make better use of the tools provided.

This is a key point about AWS. Concerns over reliability and security are some of the major myths that have been propagated within the media. The ability to design systems to cope with server failure and manage security processes are some  of the major selling points of the platform, but because the tools are complicated and perhaps overwhelming, so many development teams have failed to make effective use of them, and the service itself has ended up being poorly represented by people, in turn, misinterpreting these failures.

AWS with Blueberry

If you have a web application which will need to scale up to meet high demand – we have the skills to design that application to exploit the unique features of Amazon Web Services. Blueberry has used AWS Lambda many times for building serverless applications for clients wanting systems that can scale up or down perfectly at very low cost.

If you have internal servers and are interested in making use of the Amazon platform, we can help with migration of your infrastructure to Amazon as well as configuring redundancy. Many companies are opting to do this at the moment, as it can be an effective strategy for change management with regard to IT systems.

We can manage your Amazon hosting services in a way that will let you gain the most benefit from the utility. Cloud hosting helps businesses to become more dynamic, not just coping with unpredictable events, but actively promoting an adaptive culture.

Helping to exemplify these skills further is our own software product for AWS – Cloud Machine Manager (CMM), a tool developed as a result of our own experience with virtual machines. We often saw dramatically increased EC2 server’s bills for Instances we used for testing but then were not properly switched off – in effect remaining active but unused!

Our solution was to develop CMM, a tool which offers users an easy way to switch-off their EC2 servers via their desktop or smartphone device in real-time, resulting in savings up to 90% in some cases.

You can demo CMM for yourself here.

AWS Case Study

Blueberry is currently working with a major localisation company who are shifting their server hosting onto the Cloud using AWS. This is a typical example of the way in which many organisations are looking to utilise the AWS platform at the moment. The company has traditionally used their own physical hardware so are looking to minimise the resources required for maintaining it. By moving to the Cloud, the company can focus development resources on their systems and ultimately on their business processes.

Blueberry has carried out migration of a multiuser database application to AWS as part of this project. The importance of transferring such systems to the Cloud reliably and securely of course cannot be overstated, so working knowledge of the AWS platform is vital.

We are also in the process of implementing the redundancy plan for this company, a key element in gaining the most benefit from AWS. By taking a snapshot of the system servers and restoring them to the US region, we can deliver full reliability even if server failure occurs.

Having also implemented AWS infrastructure systems for a variety of smaller companies, Blueberry is well placed for development in the Cloud. Give us a call if you’d like to discuss the potential of AWS for your business.

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