Amazon gets (more) serious about government cloud

Another Step towards cloud security becoming acceptable even for the likes of the Government.

Gigaom

Not that you probably needed it, but here’s more proof that Amazon Web Services(s amzn) is dead serious about getting more government work.

First, CloudFormation, the company’s tool that lets systems administrators manage sets of related AWS services from simple templates, is now available on Amazon’s GovCloud service. GovCloud was built for government agencies and other entities with special compliance and security needs.

And, on Monday, AWS opened a brand new office in Herndon, Virg., near two motherships — Washington D.C. and Amazon’s gigantic US-East data center farm. Amazon plans to add 500 jobs in the space which will be home to engineering, customer support, security and other functions, according to this Washington Business Journal report.

As almost everyone knows by now, Amazon has targeted some mission-critical government cloud applications including the once-secret CIA cloud, where AWS is now challenging an IBM-prompted Government Accountability Office review of its CIA…

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Codeacademy

Only a quick post today….

What does it all mean?

When people think about computer science, they imagine people with pocket protectors and thick glasses who code all night. The truth is coding is now in every day life, with the explosion of mobile devices and development of applications it is hard not to have an understanding of coding and everyone should at least give it a go! Coding is shaping the devices we interface on a daily basis and never has the freedom to learn coding been more open. This is the aim of Code Academy. www.codecademy.com

If you have ever had a desire to code and do not know where to start this is the place to go, it is an online learning portal where you can learn languages such as Java script, J Query, PHP, Python, Ruby, API programming, IOS development and much more. Further to the online tutorials and excellent built in programming tools the aim of this site is to develop a community of both learners and teachers exchanging best practices.

I have embarked on learning Ruby and I must say it is quite addictive, the website allows you to put in the practice as you learn either in the web browser or dedicated application such as “Hackety Hack” which I am currently using to learn Ruby.

My experience of this so far is really positive and as a tech guy it is good to learn the foundations of a language I have never had the chance to use before. In my line of work we are encouraged to learn about applications and all aspects of their internal workers. Code Academy allows me to do this and also understand how these applications are constructed and to speak on a level with other coders.

If you have ever thought an App was good or wanted to know how something was put together I encourage you to visit this site and give it a go! www.codecademy.com/

 

Why you might want Stackdriver to watch your cloud infrastructure for you

Stackdriver doing what everyone has promised for years but never delivered.

Gigaom

Stackdriver thinks you need to know more — a lot more — about what’s going on in your IT infrastructure so you can avoid performance degradation and other snafus. To that end it’s positioning itself as a sort of New Relic of cloud infrastructure, according to founders Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri. The two are VMware(s vmw) vets and are bringing their enterprise IT credibility to an array of customers — some startups, some established older companies — all of which are developing cloud-first applications.

Much as New Relic monitors what’s shaking in customers’ application stacks, Stackdriver says it keeps a watchful eye on the critical infrastructure underlying those applications using data supplied by the cloud providers’ APIs along with its own agents deployed throughout customer infrastructure. That gives them a bunch of data points to pinpoint nascent problems before they get out of hand.

This whole notion proactive — and…

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