The Cloud World is Here, Welcome Chrome OS

Introduction

Finally, Google Chrome OS is here. Welcome to the era of the cloud. Keeping privacy aside (a much broader and difficult topic), in a few years all computers will be just a thin client of the internet. Is fantastic how you can open notepad on Google Chrome OS and all you type there is immediately on the Cloud. As this feature there are many other features that will be main stream in a few months.

Interesting Video


Enjoy Clouding, and Thanks for sticking around. Your comments are always welcome.

Website Spell Checkers, Commodity Service or Still a Premium

Hi Fellow Cloud Enthusiast,

I have been completely silent for the last two month due to a project and other things that have come up, but that does not mean that I have not been with my eyes open on all things happening on the cloud. I will post more on that later.

For now let's stay in topic. Sometime during last week I was looking for a good tool on the cloud that will give my client the ability to spell check their website in a easy, friendly and effective way. It was incredible to find out that the search or the decision was not easy. That make me think if online spell checking is a commodity or a premium service.

Below some of the best options currently out there.

Our Three contenders are:

INSPYDER - InSite

InSite is site-wide (site) spell checking and link validation tool. This tool requires an installation and it cost around $200 per licence or $50 for spell checking feature only. This tool gives out a nice report after the crawling completes. This is not a cloud (online website) tool, but it achieves the same as the others in this category. This type of tool have their market, I tend to stay away from them just because they need to be installed, they required to have an Internet connection at all time during the crawls, and there are some crawls that could take up to an hour depending on the size of your site.

This is a good options if your site is small, or if you are just checking a representative sample of your complete site.

Spell r US

Spell r US (site) is a rich Internet application that will check websites for spell errors. There pricing plan is simple and requires no contracts. They have pricing plans from 24/month to 900/month. Spell r US have some good features like custom dictionaries, word cloud, interactive help, and in the more expensive plans link checker as well. They seem to be the BMW of the online spell checking industry. I end up doing my project with them.

I have to say that they are the reason I think this is not a commodity as everyone else think to believe. This service can/will get very expensive if you use it on big websites, as much as $ 900 a month, but definitely check them out since they also have pre-paid plans.

Site Improve (site)

SiteCheck from SiteImprove is more than spell checking but I feel I have to keep them here since Spell R US also provide link checking and other features. This online tool brings to the table Link Checking, Spell Checking, Site Inventory and Accessibility. I got a trial account, and the first impression was that the User Interface needed some rearrangement. It was not easy for me to figure out how to get a printed report of the spell checking, actually I never found the printed report, I had to solve the spelling problems using their interface which was one of my clients requirement. I was moderately happy with the application, but the initial price proposal for our use was on the high side.

Opinion

From all three services evaluated the only service that has an export to CSV format feature is the Spellr.us, which will let us customize our reports. Also Spellr.us has a Broken Link/image feature and custom dictionary for law terms (Client Requirements). The service does not require a contract and can be used on demand. The cost to obtain the features to fulfill our requirement is $400 for a month of usage. That amount will allow us to scan up to 300 websites with no more than 10,000 pages each in a given month. We can discontinue the use of the service on the same month and wait another 3 months to activate it. Making the service around 100 dollars per month if you use only on specific months.

I hope you enjoy your spell checking process, and if you have comments or questions please go ahead and drop them here. As always enjoy your clouding!

Amazon CloudWatch finally becomes Usable

Today Amazon released the Console for CloudWatch. Allowing all EC2 users to obtain valuable information of their instances without further installing other applications on the instances. This step was necessary, useful and it was the only way of actually justifying the need to pay for the CloudWatch service. The Amazon people have placed a blog post with nice pictures that you can see if you click here.

Thanks for staying around and as always keep your clouding happy!!!

No More Excuses for Enterprises to adopt the Cloud

I am just very exited about the new VPC offering of EC2. This feature starts the new crash of the titans for Cloud Computing. Where Enterprise Data Centers, with millions of dollars and super expensive IT infrastructures collides with the Cloud Computing.

There are no more excuses now. No lengthy process to purchase a server, or to test a new service from your data center. With the VPC offering you can get a new server and make it part of your data center with a VPN connection. Your migration process is easier now.

All of you that want to test the cloud against your real infrastructure, just bring it in with VPC and enjoy the benefits without compromising too much.

I will like to hear from people actually testing this new VPC feature, please leave your comments or send me an email to geo [at] readytocloud.com I will really appreciate it.

Thanks and keep clouding!!!

Bring the EC2 Cloud Home with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) from Amazon

Amazon just announced the release of their limited beta for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud or VPC, which lets you create your own logically isolated set of EC2 instances and connect it to your existing networking.

For the start-up business this is a great advantage. Allowing your EC2 instances, connect directly in a secure way to your small business network with pay as you go plans. The main benefit I see is being able to have EC2 servers, and translate them at your firewall with your own IP. This means it all looks like you. There are some picky clients out there, no offenses. With this feature you get the best of both worlds.

You need to have enough Bandwidth to be able to sustain the traffic that is expected but any good Network expert can help you on that task. I hope the Amazon folks keep the good work. Please submit your comments and if you find any good tools, comment about them.

Happy clouding!!!

New Lower Prices for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

Starting today Amazon has decrease the amount paid by people that will predict their EC2 usage and decrease the on-demand (chaotic) usage. This good piece of news for all cloud (EC2) users signifies savings, but if you read a little more into it, you will see the actual underlying issue.

In a few days, the 24th of August of 2009 in the Australian Architecture Forum 2009, Dr. Anna Liu is going to disseminate a research that proves performance issues on different cloud providers, among them Amazon EC2, by a factor of 20 percent depending on the time of day.

If Amazon is on that conference, which it should, then I am sure this is move towards, normalizing the amount of unpredicted on-demand usage on their infrastructure.

Well. If you are a steady user of the EC2, go ahead and get a few reserved instances, because they are good offers. Only by utilizing your ec2 instance for 20% of the year you can get break even on the offer.

Enjoy clouding and keep me posted.