Blog

Magento on AWS for Scalable eCommerce

Magento ecommerce, the number one ecommerce CMS in the world helps its users grow their online business in a great way through its powerful features. Magento 1 has been the leading ecommerce CMS and Magento 2 is the future of the electronic commerce world. 26% of the top million ecommerce sites are powered by Magento. Some of the features which have made Magento the most powerful are: Open Source Community & Support Magento is open source and it gives complete control to the owner. 24*7 support by large community of developers from all across the world. This community of developers also ensures that the ecommerce platform is secure, fast and up to date. High Performance Architecture Magento Enterprise Edition is designed to support tens of thousands of transactions per hour so your customers have a seamless online shopping experience. It features advanced full-page caching and persistent bandwidth for fast loading

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AWS Price Drops for C4, M4 and R3 Instances

Amazon announced their 51st price drop of 5% for On-Demand and Reserved instance, and Dedicated host prices for C4 and M4 instances running Linux in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo),Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions. The price drops include On-Demand, Reserved instance, and Dedicated host prices for R3 instances running Linux in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and South America (Brazil) regions. R3 instances for both On-Demand and Reserved instances running Linux in the AWS GovCloud (US)region will also be cheaper. Smaller reductions apply to the same instance types that run Windows, SLES, and RHEL. Changes to the On-Demand and Dedicated host pricing are retroactive to the beginning of the month (January 1, 2016); the new

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Rapidly deploy and use SAP HANA on Amazon Web Services with StackBuilder

StackBuilder is an easy to use cloud app store front that allows users to quickly select and operate a AWS cloud hosted website, dev & test, data analytics or eCommerce service. The StackBuilder cloud app store allows users to quickly deploy and use SAP HANA and the SAP HANA Interactive Education (SHINE) application hosted on AWS. Figure 1 – SAP HANA Shine Application hosted on AWS using StackBuilder SAP HANA is an in-memory database management system that is certified for use the AWS cloud. SAP HANA on the AWS cloud provides: Fast onboarding and enablement using StackBuilder for SAP HANA project with the AWS on-demand infrastructure. Seamlessly integrate SAP HANA system running in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and rapidly evaluate and test the solution. Scale resources up or down as necessary. Pay only for the infrastructure resources that you need and use. Develop and deploy SAP HANA quickly and

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Introducing StackBuilder – the “Turbo Tax” like wizard for AWS

Are you looking to evaluate the AWS cloud for running your application but are wondering how to begin? Do you want to quickly execute a test or pilot project without expensive or time consuming consulting assistance? Introducing StackBuilder If you are looking to jumpstart your AWS evaluation project to quickly provision, install and operate an application in the AWS cloud environment then StackBuilder is the right place to start! StackBuilder is a “Turbo Tax” like wizard for helping application owners quickly configure a fully functional AWS environment. The wizard walks the user through a series of simple questions through a 5 step process. Upon submission of the request, the user is presented with login credentials to a fully configured and operational environment ready to go! Step 1 – Select your workload Select and click an icon that best matches your cloud hosting need. Most common workloads hosted in a cloud environment

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The “AWS Logs” Blog

AWS provides extensive logging and monitoring capabilities to help ensure the integrity and security of workloads. AWS services like CloudWatch, CloudTrail, VPCFlow and AWS Config provide deep insights into the operational aspects of the system. The logs create a data avalanche that most organizations tend to ignore. This can be a costly mistake that may cause service interruptions, missed opportunities for detecting security breaches or inefficient resource utilization. However, for logging to be effective, it is essential to sort through the logs and to spot any outliers automatically, saving your IT team time and better protecting your workloads. Tools such as Splunk or Elasticsearch provide the ability to process and analyze logs at scale and provide rich dashboards for detecting and acting on patterns. The process of viewing and analyzing logs got event easier with AWS’s recent launch of Elasticsearch as a service. Once the service is created and configured, it is

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Intrusion Detection, Intrusion Prevention and Web Application Firewalls

As more and more businesses are hosted online and increasingly on cloud platforms such as AWS, it is critical to ensure robust cybersecurity defenses are in place. Typically, the security architecture for most web facing applications begins with boundary protection using a firewall. There are a number of security sub-systems such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) and Web Application Firewalls (WAF) which are generally considered as basic requirements. This is especially true for online businesses offering services in the Healthcare, Financial, Government and Commercial payments market. As always there is a wide variety of choices and it is critical to understand the role of each one of the security systems to make an informed implementation decision. Let us begin by reviewing some of the basic definition on what these system do and the protections they provide. Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) – An IPS is an appliance

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Security is critical for SaaS CEO’s and SaaS Investors

The Identity Theft Resource Center states that over 175 million records have been exposed in data breaches in 2015 through October. The incidents of breaches continue to increase and as more businesses are offering SaaS solutions to their customers, SaaS CEOs and Investors must take a careful look at their security practices to avoid business and financial risk. More and more businesses are offering SaaS solutions to their customers. However, many SaaS firms and their investors underestimate the importance of security as a critical component of their collective success. Many commercial SaaS operators have a “chink in their armor”. The lack of cybersecurity talent, low investment in security tools and generally weak management focus on security issues are contributory factors. This can be a costly mistake. Changing Regulatory Landscape around Cybersecurity US Regulators such as SEC and FTC amongst others are starting to aggressively enforce and in some cases expand their

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