CloudBusters: Episode 4 – Why my backup doesn’t work?

 Welcome in the 4th episode of Cloudbusters series. Today it’s Friday and as everyone knows on Friday the Moore’s law is even more possible to be proofed. During the last week I was deploying new environment in Windows Azure. Everything was smooth and easy till the last part – backup. Everyone loves backup, everyone knows how to do it, but not so many of us can really restore something from it if it is done poorly. Indeed, backup is important and due to that we decided to not relay only on the backup done by Microsoft (for sure you guys do the amazing job but Moore’s law is applying also here :)) . That is why we also implemented some easy way to do that with Powershell scripts. We use for that scheduled tasks and run the script created for specific environment. I wrote the same standard script and  did the configuration for my fresh new Azure deployment. The scheduled task showed that it finished successfully. Great!!! Happy to close the task and switch to something else I’ve decided to double check the log created during the backup job. And could you imagine my surprise when I opened the log file and saw the following entry:

Bacpac could not be exported. Exception calling “ExportBacpac” with “2” argument(s): “Could not export schema and data from database.”

CloudBusters: Episode 3 – Cloud(y) (r)evolution – how cloud changed IT jobs?

Welcome in the third episode of CloudBusters series. I hope that you enjoyed previous one and were waiting for this one 🙂 Last time I was trying to explain the acronyms used in cloud computing or at least the mostly used one. Today I decided to focus on the cloud impact on the traditional roles/positions in IT world.  So let’s  start with the fairy tale…Before reading further please click below sound 🙂

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

The steam machine was working on a full speed. The lonely man was standing in front of the tangle of cables, pipes and metal.

“The last chance – he said to himself – and I go home. Time to drink some tea.”

He pull the lever and the machine started to make some strange noises. The man pushed some buttons on the control panel and after some time the result was printed on the punch card.

“It works!!! – man shouted loudly. It works!!! 2+2=4! Finally, it works!!!”

You may thing that the man was crazy but as I wrote it was long time ago – in 1837 and the man was Charles Babbage, a British professor mathematics. The man who invented the first computer. It was basically an mechanical type of calculator that also had a memory.

Since that time quite a lot has changed and I can bet that the inventor of the computer had no idea what he began. Over 170 years later computers are everywhere in our everyday life. The same as IT people who manage, help and develop new IT products. During that time and especially during the last 30 years the IT jobs changed tremendously. Let’s look back one more time to the past. In 70’s and 80’s when IT departments started to be formed the IT person was responsible for everything related to the computers in the companies. No one exactly had idea what she or he is doing. If there was a problem with computer she/he was there to solve it. It has changed in the early 90’s when programming languages became more and more popular and the new operating systems allowed to create applications for the end users. Suddenly the IT person needed to take care of both: hardware and development of the applications for end users. And as it is said you cannot do two things good simultaneously. That’s how two different groups of IT people formed: IT Pro and Dev.

CloudBusters: Episode 2 – Cloud(y) Acronyms

Welcome in the second episode of the CloudBusters series. I hope that after reading the first one you can distinguish between cloud and non-cloud services. In this episode we will talk about “the cloudy” acronyms. They are in our everyday life. Why do we need to loose time to say whole name of something if we can just create an acronym. Everyone loves acronyms and the same apply to IT guys and cloud computing.

There are three main acronyms that are used in cloud computing area:

CloudBusters: Episode 1 – What is the Cloud?

With this post we are launching finally the CloudBusters series. It was very hard to decide what should be presented in the first episode. After some struggles I’ve decided to start from the scratch –  from the explanation of what the CLOUD really is. It seems that everyone heard about it but probably not everyone knows exactly what does it mean. Does it ?

The term “cloud” is relatively new in IT and for a long time there was no structured definition. In 2012 the National Institute of Standards and Technology published its own definition that in my opinion the best describes what really the cloud computing is and what it differs from other technologies. The full definition can be found under the below URL:

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf

But in simpler words – what is the cloud?