One of the best reasons to use public clouds is the ability to run large-scale workloads. It’s all great and all, but what if you have a large workload running in your datacenter that you want to move to the Amazon Web Services cloud? Transferring petabytes worth of data over the Internet is not practical. […]

Organizations often monitor virtual machines (VMs), which are stored in their private datacenters, using third-party tools or Windows Performance Monitor. This helps to ensure that they are running as intended. The need to monitor workload performance doesn’t disappear just because a workload is moved to the public clouds. CloudWatch is a tool that Amazon Web […]

It’s not hard to see that Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-based service, is highly flexible and dynamic. Although this flexibility can be extremely beneficial, it also comes with its fair share of management challenges. For example, it can be difficult to keep track of any changes made to cloud resources. This is especially true […]

The Amazon Simple Notification Service (or SNS) is an Amazon Web Services solution that pushes notifications to mobile devices. SNS can be used to send text messages, but it also has other uses. SNS can be used to notify administrators when a job is completed. SNS charges a fee if you’re curious. There are no […]

It has been a challenge to back up virtual machines in the public cloud. Amazon Web Services (AWS), recommends the creation of snapshots to protect Elastic Compute Cloud instances (EC2) Before I explain how snapshots work, it is important that you understand that snapshots are not full copies of AWS instances. It is not a […]

In my last column I discussed how to create an auto-scaling group that can automatically scale workloads in response to spikes in demand. Although automatic scaling is relatively simple to set up, the entire process relies on alerts. Amazon Web Services (AWS), uses alerts to notify it when a workload must be scaled. I didn’t […]

(This post contains affiliate hyperlinks. Please read my full disclosure. The skies are grey. It can be difficult to maintain a positive attitude at work with all the other things going on in the world. Someone recently asked me about this exact question. How do you keep a positive attitude when dealing with stakeholders or […]

(This post contains affiliate hyperlinks. Please read my full disclosure. This book is called Leading Effective Virtual Teams. It reads a lot like a series magazine articles. Each chapter is filled with bullet-pointed lists containing top tips and guidelines. It is very different from other books. However, it is very effective in what Nancy M. […]

(This post contains affiliate hyperlinks. Please read my full disclosure. Vicki James, coauthor of Strategies for Project Sponsorship. Peter Taylor, Ron Rosenhead, and Vicki James just published a book called Strategies for Project Sponsorship about (surprise surprise, surprise) project sponsoring. Peter was last time interviewed about managing when your sponsor is a jerk. Today, Vicki […]

(This post contains affiliate hyperlinks. Please read my full disclosure. How to Fix Meetings: Meet Fewer, Focus on Outcomes, and Get Stuff Done is by Hayley Watts and Graham Allcott, Productivity Ninja author. It’s a book that teaches you how to best use your attention. Each section includes a practical exercise and tips to help […]