/ By admin / Cloud • Cloud Hosting • Customer Service/ 0 Comments

SoftLayer and AWS: What’s the Difference?

People often compare SoftLayer with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It’s easy to understand why. We’ve both built scalable infrastructure platforms to provide cloud resources to the same broad range of customers—from individual entrepreneurs to the world’s largest enterprises.

But while the desire to compare is understandable, the comparison itself isn’t quite apt. The SoftLayer platform is fundamentally different from AWS.

In fact, AWS could be run on SoftLayer. SoftLayer couldn’t be run on AWS.

AWS provisions in the public cloud.

When AWS started letting customers have virtual machines deployed on the infrastructure that AWS had built for their e-commerce business, AWS accelerated the adoption of virtual server hosting within the existing world of Web hosting.In an AWS cloud environment, customers order the computing and storage resources they need, and AWS deploys those resources on demand. The mechanics of that deployment are important to note, though.

AWS has data centers full of physical servers that are integrated with each other in a massive public cloud environment. These servers are managed and maintained by AWS, and they collectively make up the available cloud infrastructure in the facility.

AWS installs a virtualization layer (also known as hypervisor) on these physical servers to tie the individual nodes into the environment’s total capacity. When a customer orders a cloud server from AWS, this virtualization layer finds a node with the requested resources available and provisions a server image with the customer’s desired operating system, applications, etc. The entire process is quick and automated, and each customer has complete control over the resources he or she ordered.

That virtualization layer is serving a purpose, and it may seem insignificant, but it highlights a critical difference in their platform and ours:

AWS automates and provisions at the hypervisor level, while SoftLayer automates and provisions at the data center level.

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2014/softlayer-and-aws-whats-difference

/ By admin / Development/ 0 Comments

SoftLayer, Bluemix and OpenStack: A Powerful Combination

Building and deploying applications on SoftLayer with Bluemix, IBM’s Platform as a Service (PaaS), just got a whole lot more powerful. At IBM’s Interconnect, we announced a beta service for deploying OpenStack-based virtual servers within Bluemix. Obviously, the new service is exciting because it brings together the scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure from SoftLayer with the open, standards-based cloud management platform of OpenStack. But making the new service available via Bluemix presents a particularly unique set of opportunities.

Now Bluemix developers can deploy OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer or their own private OpenStack cloud in a consistent, developer-friendly manner. Without changing your code, your configuration, or your deployment method, you can launch your application to a local OpenStack cloud on your premises, a private OpenStack cloud you have deployed on SoftLayer bare metal servers, or to SoftLayer virtual servers within Bluemix. For instance, you could instantly fire up a few OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer to test out your new application. After you have impressed your clients and fully tested everything, you could deploy that application to a local OpenStack cloud in your own data center ̶all from within Bluemix. With Bluemix providing the ability to deploy applications across cloud deployment models, developers can create an infrastructure configuration once and deploy consistently, regardless of the stage of their application development life cycle.

 

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/softlayer-bluemix-and-openstack-powerful-combination

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SoftLayer and Koding join forces to power a Global Virtual Hackathon

Koding is excited to partner with SoftLayer on its upcoming Global Virtual Hackathon, happening December 12–13, 2015. The event builds on last year’s Hackathon, where more than 60,000 developers participated from all over the world. The winners took home over $35,000 in prizes! This year, we’ve upped the ante to make the event even larger than the last time: the winner will take home a $100,000 grand prize.

“We are working with Koding for this virtual hackathon as part of our commitment to promote open source technology and support the talented community of developers who are dispersed all over the globe,” said Sandy Carter, general manager of Cloud Ecosystem and Developers at IBM. “Cloud-based open source development platforms like Koding make it easier to get software projects started, and hackathons are a great place to show how these kinds of platforms make software development easier and more fun.”

Why a virtual hackathon?
Hackathons are awesome. They allow developers to solve problems in a very short amount of time. The challenge with traditional hackathons is that they require you to be physically present in a room. With more and more of our lives moving online, why be tied to a physical location to solve problems? Virtual hackathons allow talented individuals from all over the world to participate, collaborate, and showcase their skills, regardless of their physical location. Our Global Virtual Hackathon levels the playing field.

Who won last year?
Educational games, especially those that teach programming, were popular to build—and a few actually won! Want to see what the winners built? Click here to check out a fun yet effective game teaching students to program. Learn more about the team of developers and see their code here. Last year, nine winners across three categories took home a prize. To see a list of last year’s winners, see the blog post here.

Tips to be successful and win this year
Here’s some motivation for you: the grand prize is $100,000. (That’s seed capital for your startup idea!)

So how do you win? First and foremost, apply now! Then talk to some friends and maybe even team up. You can also use Koding to find teammates once you’re accepted. Teammates aren’t a requirement but can definitely make for a fun experience and improve your chances of making something amazing.

Once you’re in, get excited! And be sure to start thinking about what you want to build around this year’s themes.

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/softlayer-and-koding-join-forces-power-global-virtual-hackathon