Suite 487, 311 Castlereagh Street Sydney NSW 2000 Australia

With the growth in the Cloud market, the demand for our presence in Sydney has increased dramatically.

We look forward to working closely with Sydney based businesses.

“I would like to extend my thanks to today’s go live. It was smooth, it was slick and it was professional.
Onwards and upwards!!”
Andrew Kneebone | Business Solutions Group (BSG) | Project Manager

Andrew took some photos of the momentous occasion.

Check it out, we are using this across multiple customers

http://tommyjohnson.github.com/ditto/

The simplification of technologies, the abundance of choice and the ease of getting started make cloud technologies really easy to move to. In particular, moving infrastructure to a cloud environment and making use of platform as a service solutions like OpenShift, Cloud Foundry or Heroku really escalates the speed of development for developers and in turn saves lots of time and costs upfront. What happens next is what blows out your costs and impacts your profitability. Interested to know what this is? – then read on.

Developers start to focus on production issues, try to fix traditional infrastructure problems, open security holes and lose time on new development to work on support. Developers start to get woken up in the middle of the night to fix issues and come into work annoyed, late and un-productive. Budgets start to blow out and the company culture gets really ugly.

Your business application starts to suffer, slow down and constantly be out of action, reducing your ability to be productive and impacts profit. The reputation of the application starts to drop and users view the application in a negative mindset. The up hill battle of improving the reputation starts. Your forecasts start to look like they are way off target and you start to panic.

“Budgets start to blow out and the company culture gets really ugly”

At this point, directors and managers start to lose sleep, wondering how things can be improved, how to improve the culture and how to re-invigorate the applications reputation in the market place. The features you wanted to release are not getting done and the company starts to feel overwhelmed with tasks and issues that you just want to disappear.

You realise that you have a gap, a big one too. You need someone to just fix the issues, plug any holes in the environment and make things work well. Your developers do not have the right skills to do this and so you look at hiring a support resource. Great! so you look in the market for a support resource. You may find one that is good, really good, and gets cracking fast, but they need to work on issues late at night, be in the office to fix other issues during the day and even add some enhancements. They too get tired and frustrated, working long hours and start to fall behind on the tasks at hand. The loop starts over again.

Alternatively, you look at getting support from an outside company. One that focuses on supporting Cloud infrastructure, security and performance. Again this is great and you have a team of resources that can manage the environment but still leaves a gap. The gap in this case is the final area of cross developer-infrastructure resources. People that automate and control your release processes and provide architecture assistance as well as ongoing support. We typically call this DevOps. You need the infrastructure group to create the scripts, understand code and make changes based on your architecture needs. So how do you fill this gap?

“DevOps teams provide the communication between developers and infrastructure people”

Find a company that can do the infrastructure build, provide support and integrate nicely with your developers. This will eliminate the gaps in supporting your applications, build the confidence in your developers to stop worrying about the infrastructure and get the reassurance that issues will be dealt with by the right people all the time, and improved on.

DevOps teams provide the communication between developers and infrastructure people, ensure quality assurance is in place and assist in rapid development and release processes. In essence, solving the communication between the parties involved will produce a better result for your business.

Speaking with a potential customer today, I was asked the question about ethics and the uncomfortable feeling cloud computing induces. I started to really think about my answer before speaking and found that, just maybe, ethically, cloud computing is a game changer in society.

Cloud technologies are introducing a whole new set of social problems, in particular, around privacy and how we do business.

“Local business can gain access to the

same tools and online products as the big globals”

With the growth of Cloud technology use and our acceptance to using systems that have a smaller initial cost footprint, we are quickly moving away from local business to make our purchases and buying from larger, global companies. And by doing so, opening up our information to global analysis. This leaves local business with a serious problem; how do they compete on a global scale? Local business will start to close doors more rapidly than ever before and will create a gap in the local community, especially if the local business is a fundamental services.

The potential customer belongs to a buying group for local businesses and the context of the question was far more relavent than any other time I have been asked previously. My answer in the end was simple, “Small business needs to accept that change is inevitable and start to make use of cloud technologies”.

“Make it easy to buy or browse online”

The next question was “How?”. I am a believer that the next couple years will see significant change in Australia, especially in retail and service based industries, with many businesses folding under the pressure of change. However, I do see a significant change to how culture is changing and will change. Australian’s will want to support local business but only if they make it easy to buy. I see the use of cloud based systems used more and more by local business to extend the reach and ease of use for local consumers. How does a small business operator take this and make it an advantage? Make it easy to buy or browse online and give consumers the options to pick up locally.

Local business can gain access to the same tools and online products as the big globals, by leveraging buying groups. When you buy in bulk, you get the features the big players get for less, usually. In essence, what this is called is business as a service. Business as a service is a term used where you pay your monthly fees and sometimes a per transaction feee, and the software owner will maintain and enhance the system for better results. Your need to manage is restricted to things like inventory and special offers, making it a really simple model to leverage.

This region is extremely relevant to all Australian businesses. base2Services has invested heavily in Amazon Web Services over the past 6 years, having the first Solution Provider label a few years back, through to the first AWS reseller label last year.

The evidence that our hard work has produced in this space and how far ahead we are of our competitors knowledge and experience with Amazon AWS is staggering.

Looking forward to a great 2013 year with AWS and our customers.

With the launch, finally; I should say; of Amazon AWS in Sydney, you can now run your applications and services within Australia. To most of you, this may mean absolutely nothing, but to me it means everything. I will explain why this is a big deal shortly, but let me make a couple things clear upfront.

“resurgence in spend by companies in IT”

base2Services, the company I manage and partially own, has worked with Amazon AWS for 6 years. To add to this, Amazon AWS was launched in BETA 6 years ago. We are the first Australian based company to use Amazon AWS and even though we had some amazingly tough challenges with AWS in the early days we could not go past the way it was going to change IT forever. We also have a very close relationship with Amazon AWS and are respected by their management and engineers. So yes, I am biased towards AWS and for reasons beyond commercial.

“more tangible costs and no more capacity planning”

We have had one of our clients test systems running in the Sydney region during the 6 week BETA testing programme. In this time, AWS was testing the environment shutting down and unplugging servers to validate the environment. We were testing the speed and durability of the environment. Here is what we found, the average response time was 10ms. Wow! This is less than the dedicated servers we have sitting in Sydney. It was not expected. And something else we found, apart from some edge services that are not available yet in Australia, like Glacier, everything just worked.

Getting the benefits of what Cloud computing provides from the world’s most mature cloud provider and having it here in Australia is a great result. I can go on for hours talking about the benefits of cloud computing, but I will only pick a few. Cloud Computing means no more servers, better scalability in your applications, more tangible costs and no more capacity planning. To add to this, being in Sydney means faster response times for the eastern states, no data sovereignty issues and easier to convince your stakeholders to leverage AWS.

“average response time was 10ms”

So what does Amazon AWS in Australia mean to me? Basically, we are going to see a massive uptake of cloud computing in Australia by larger organisations. We are going to see a change over the next couple years in the types of IT jobs available in Australia and we are going to see more development jobs kicked off. Having Amazon AWS in Australia will impact some job types, but will create new ones, but above all, it will see a resurgence in spend by companies in IT.

Having AWS in Australia has created a new confidence in the industry. I saw this at the recent Customer Appreciation day we sponsored. The enthusiasm from senior management was there. They all had an interest in meeting to discuss, something that was tougher to get over the past few years.

Over the past 20 years, people have heard the buzz words EAI, ESB and SOA. Although most companies really did not implement any of these very well, those that did, got some truly rewarding benefit from them. In particular, an easier to manage integration environment.

In today’s world, I still see companies that build spider web integrations, or rather, point to point solutions. Each integration is tactical and the thought of “how do we manage this moving forward” is not considered. The problem with this model is that eventually, someone is going to need to find a problematic integration point, figure out where the code is, and try to fix it. Sometimes, it is unclear if anyone even knows where the code is!

For those that have successfully implemented an integration strategy, they know that

1. the integration is documented
2. the integration resides within the integration stack
3. the integration code is available and can be changed

But what happens when organisations start to move to the cloud? Are the same integration considerations taken into account? See, when companies start to venture into the cloud, they need to take the same level of strategic thought and practise as they have when implementing an Integration strategy. They need to know

• how the cloud services interoperate with the existing and remaining business solutions?
• how do they maintain SLA’s within the new application and technology portfolio?
• what integration patterns will need to be used?

I have noticed that many cloud based solutions do not have the same maturity of integration capabilities as more traditional in house applications do, and with the restrictive nature of cloud based systems, for the good of all, it is difficult to access your data and information via integration channels. On the other hand, I also see many cloud based solutions that consider integration capabilities the number 1 priority and you can integrate to your hearts content; or at least the business need. You really need to consider your cloud integration strategy when selecting cloud based solutions.

Consider that if you cannot access the data via integration channels, how will you do it? You will need to be creative!

Avoid the easy path

The cloud gives you new challenges, and most importantly, it gives you real integration challenges. If your developers are building individual integrations, without an integration strategy, then you are going to have the same challenges as those that need to keep finding the source code. In fact, the problem would be worse. In some cases, the integration code no longer resides on your environment. The integration points are completely scattered and with no strategy, the problem increases tenfold when trying to manage your integrations.

Spider Web Integration Pattern – Yuk

Build out your strategy first

When you start to move down the cloud solutions path, you will no doubt take a methodical and very strategic path. You will see what you can leverage, where the costs benefits are and what value the business will get overall. In this process, and as part of your assessment, work out the integration strategy. Ensure that you are clear how interoperable the solutions are and what key patterns you can leverage. Avoid, changing your patterns for each cloud solution and try to keep them aligned to the handful of patterns you choose.

Looking forward to seeing you all there. To register, follow the link below
www.aws.amazon.com/apac/cad-anz