cloud computing

SQL Server 2005 end of support is closing in – Are you ready?

Shantha Kumari

The extended support for Microsoft SQL 2005 is closing in fast. The April 12, 2016 deadline will be your cut off date for making the shift to the Azure SQL Cloud Database or upgrade to the new SQL Server 2014 version. This means that there will be no security updates or upgrades after that date resulting in higher maintenance costs and a less secure and stable business infrastructure.

With just 3 months to go, the alternatives are SQL Server 2014 on-premises or Microsoft Azure SQL Database in the cloud. Upgrade your database today to see dramatic performance gains and new high availability features. Easily scale and onramp to the cloud while maintaining security, support, and compliance.

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Data Lake – Is it the future for Big Data?

Shantha Kumari

Data Lake is a new storage concept that is gaining ground in the Cloud. Often the Data Lake term is being used as part of the Big Data solution. In theory, it is where you can store raw data in its native format, usually in Hadoop and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). It can be used and processed to create data sets for other applications and users as and when needed. You don’t worry about the complex (and often expensive) data pipeline needed to simply collect and store diverse data.

The credit for coining the term Data Lake goes to James Dixon, Pentaho Chief Technology Officer. Dixon used the term initially to contrast with “data mart”, which is a smaller repository of interesting attributes extracted from the raw data.

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AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Automated Website App Deployment

Shantha Kumari

Elastic Beanstalk is an AWS PaaS (Platform as a Service) which allows you to create, deploy and push the web applications to the various services , including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon CloudWatch, auto scaling, and Elastic Load Balancers.

Being multi-platform means that the website apps developed in Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Passenger, and IIS can be easily deployed. An open architecture means that applications not written for the Web can also be deployed on the Elastic Beanstalk. The supported deployment methods include Git and Java Web Application Archive.

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