Thursday, May 12, 2011

Corporate Summit at Amity University


Sapient was invited to participate in a corporate summit organized by Amity University (www.amity.edu) at Noida, India on 05th May 2011. The purpose of the summit was to enable students and faculties to interact with industry experts and learn about emerging trends, innovations & technologies in the IT industry. The main topics discussed were - Virtualization & Cloud Computing, Digital Marketing & e-Commerce, Network & Cyber Security.

The summit kicked off with key notes from dignitaries and board members of the University. Major General K.J Singh officially opened the summit with his speech. He reiterated the valuable mission of Shri Ashok Chauhan, founder of Amity University, stating the importance of higher education and infrastructure for students to help them achieve the best in life.

The first session was on Virtualization, Cloud Computing & Storage. Speakers from SapientNitro, Microsoft, CA technologies and Scribboard shared their views with the students of the University. Sapient’s speaker Manpreet Singh Brar, gave a high level overview of Public Cloud & Cloud Computing, showcasing the benefits of virtualization. He also talked about Sapient’s private cloud offering (SapeCloud aka EnvOD). Speaker from Microsoft demonstrated highlights on Azure platform (Public Cloud) and it’s adaptability from small business to large enterprise customers.

…In the panel discussion, Manpreet emphasized on being diligent and cautious in adopting cloud, stating - “With all the benefits I talked about, does this mean to get on the cloud straight away? No. Make sure you spend time to map business requirements with technologies and understand the long term cost of ownership. Be cautious and patient in assessing technology architecture & services end to end”.

The topic covered in the second session was Digital e-Commerce, ERP and Business Intelligence. Speakers from SapientNitro, IBM education and TCS participated in the discussion. Mohammad Wasim, Director, SapientNitro presented a crusty overview of evolution of commerce in digital space and highlights of multichannel marketing & commerce (MC2). The session was hugely appreciated and applauded by all students and faculties. The audience showed willingness to know more about Sapient’s work & culture.

…Over lunch, Wasim shared his views on the purpose of the summit - "Having attended a couple of graduate institute seminars, I feel responsible to guide and mentor folks coming out of the college. Specifically on this one, technology is changing at such a drastic pace and our education system still imparts knowledge of yesteryears. There is a huge gap between what organizations expect and what fresh talents entering the industry are capable of. Because of this, there is a huge efficiency loss. Our effort and responsibility should be to enable faculty to impart relevant education".

Another speaker form Sapient, Bupesh Kaw, opened the world of Business Intelligence (BI) and how BI helps organizations to do better business.

The summit concluded with post lunch sessions on Network & Security, and Mobile Systems. Speakers from CSC Corp, HCL Comnet, Gale Networks, Inspira, GlobalLogic and Samsung India presented their views in this session.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Cloud Computing | Amaon AWS EC2 Outage

Lesson Learned from recent AWS EC2 outage on April 21st, 2011.

More complex systems are less stable. We need to build solution for failure and that exactly is the response to situation like this one. Majority of the folks who survived this outage or has minimal impacts has few commonalties to share:

1. Solution should be spread across multiple availability zones ( In literal means these are physical datacenters)

2. For mission critical application such as banking, heath care, government. Spread your solution to multiple regions, there are 5 regions in which AWS operates:

a. US East Region

b. US West Region

c. EU West Region

d. Singapore

e. Tokyo (Lately experienced the impact of Tsunami) ..

And for mission critical applications, existence of DR is must. We all know it.

3. Spread across multiple providers, you may choose to deploy solutions across multiple players for more resilience.

4. It is rather imperative that you must understand AWS thoroughly prior to deploy the solution. EBS which seems failed this time is equivalent to RAID 1/5/6/10 etc. So for mission critical applications and high availability solution, look for spot instances instead of EBS instances.

Outages of this sort are learning curve for providers, system integrator (SI's) and consumers. Cloud computing is just an tool like any other and its leverage is in our hands.

Will it happen again, I am sure it will !

Though there will be less outages as we progress on and becomes more proficient to manage our solution on public cloud.