AWS Public Sector Summit Washington, DC – 2018

AWS Summit Washington DC
Event Details: On June 20-21, 2018, global leaders from government, education, and nonprofit organizations will come together for the ninth annual AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC. The move to the cloud is unlike any other technology shift in our lifetime. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to use the cloud for complex, innovative, and mission-critical projects. With over 100 breakout sessions led by visionaries, experts, and peers, you’ll take home new strategies and tactics for shaping culture, building new skillsets, saving costs, and achieving your mission.

[Know more about the Conference]

About Idexcel: Idexcel is a Professional Services and Technology Solutions provider specializing in Cloud Services, Application Modernization, and Data Analytics. Idexcel is proud that for more than 20 years it has provided services that implement complex technologies that are innovative, agile and successful and have provided our customers with lasting value.

Our Senior executives will be attending this event. For further queries, please write to inquiry@idexcel.com

Journey to the Cloud with AWS Managed Service Providers

Journey to the cloud with AWS Managed Services
Given the extensive relationship of modern organizations with the Cloud, IT professionals are working to stay ahead of all the rapid changes within the industry. To remain prominent in the space of business evolution, it is always necessary to continue moving forward with the latest available technology. For this very reason, many organizations are seeking external partners to manage their transformation projects.

If your organization has decided to switch its managed services partner, it’s imperative to recognize the factors which can help determine the perfect service provider for your organization; however, before we look into these factors, let’s understand why a managed service provider can prove to be an asset for your organization.

Using a Managed Service Provider (MSP)

In this day of advancement, juggling between different organizational responsibilities can be a challenge, even for prominent organizations. In such circumstances, an MSP’s knowledge and technical expertise can go a long way in providing the extra lending hand every organization needs in this day’s technological environment.

Most of the times, an MSP’s varied range of experience, which includes digital transformation, planning, and implementing projects proves to be every cloud’s silver lining. By employing an MSP, organizations can expect to benefit from a faster turnaround time, better response time through enterprise monitoring, and the ability to manage cloud services remotely; this includes the opportunities of automating cloud functions while gaining direct control over your IT infrastructure.

The benefits of an MSP are not limited to enterprise management and infrastructure control. There is a great scarcity of cloud skills within the IT sector. As per a recent survey, it was revealed that companies realize the importance of the Cloud, but lack the required workforce to implement the strategies. With an MSP in place, such shortage of skills can be fulfilled successfully, that too at a nominal cost.

Other considerations include the likes of disaster recovery, which are aimed at offering business continuity and decreased downtime. Such features help an organization stay prepared for sudden disasters. MSPs often cater to different industries, which means that there is a specialized MSP available for each organization within their respective industries. This way, there is much focus on the organization linked with the MSP; this process enables a centralized, focused approach within the MSPs services, which makes the link stronger and creates a mutually exclusive, yet beneficial, relationship between the two parties.

In other words, matching the right cloud services with the workforce is a challenge that not every organization wants to undertake. At the same time, companies can optimize their day to day challenges in a more efficient manner by employing the services of a specialized MSP. The headache of hiring the people with the right skills is not required, and your services also become managed in a more secure, and efficient manner.

Consider the Details and Requirements

So you have decided on signing up with an MSP. However, you can’t just sign on the dotted line without weighing a few options. During the sign on process, here are some of the factors you need to consider before and after the move:

Be upfront about your needs. As a business, you need to be direct with your potential MSP. This way, every requirement can be met appropriately, and both parties can judge what they are receiving out of the new business relationship. During the discussion phase, businesses and organizations need to consider all short term and long term goals prudently before moving forward.

Ownership rights and means should be clearly defined. Who takes care of the infrastructure, the workforce, and the hosting rights need to be clearly defined during the discussion phase so that everything is in black and white. Differentiate between the old contract and the new contract and chalk out the details you would like to highlight with the new provider so that the specifications are as per both parties requirements.

The Final Verdict
Many businesses change MSPs regularly to maximize their service quotient. The intent is to ensure that the service bouquet is efficiently organized and organizations can make the best deal for their dollar. By negotiating with MSPs, companies can understand the extent to which they can provide their services and how each of these services can aid in delivering day to day target deliverables.

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Idexcel Achieves AWS Financial Services Competency Status

Idexcel Achieves AWS Financial Services Competency Status
Herndon, VA– June 04, 2018– Idexcel, a professional services and technology solutions provider, announced today that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Financial Services Competency status. This designation recognizes Idexcel for providing deep expertise to help organizations manage critical issues pertaining to the industry, such as risk management, core systems implementations, data management, navigating compliance requirements, and establishing governance models.

Achieving the AWS Financial Services Competency differentiates Idexcel as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member that has demonstrated relevant technical proficiency and proven customer success, delivering solutions seamlessly on AWS. To receive the designation, APN Partners must possess deep AWS expertise and undergo an assessment of the security, performance, and reliability of their solutions.

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify Consulting and Technology APN Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

Idexcel helps financial organizations transform business processes, rationalize product portfolios, strategize business assets, comply with regulations, manage risks and maximize customer satisfaction by adopting and implementing Digital transformation, Cloud computing and other emerging Data science technologies like AI and ML to modernize their existing IT infrastructure. Know more about our financial services offerings.

“Our goal is to become a full-featured core banking application available in the cloud. With AWS and technology partner Idexcel, we’re on our way.” – Jennifer Ballard – Director of Client Services, Cync Software/NDS Systems LC

About Idexcel
Idexcel is a Professional Services and Technology Solutions provider specializing in Cloud Services, Application Modernization, and Data Analytics. Idexcel is proud that for more than 20 years it has provided services that implement complex technologies that are innovative, agile and successful and have provided our customers with lasting value.

Our name, “idexcel” is a representation of our core principle “Ideas to Excellence” We are relentlessly driven by results and take pride in our customer-centric engagement models. We blend our clients’ needs with proven delivery models and highly talented execution teams to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, Idexcel has offices and delivery locations in the US, Europe and Asia supporting global clients.

Learn more about us at http://www.idexcel.com

Idexcel Achieves AWS DevOps Competency Status

Idexcel Achieves AWS DevOps Competency Status
Herndon, VA– May 22, 2018 – Idexcel, a professional services and technology solutions provider, announced today that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) DevOps Competency status. This designation recognizes that Idexcel provides proven technology and deep expertise to help customers implement continuous integration and continuous delivery practices or helping them automate infrastructure provisioning and management with configuration management tools on AWS.

Achieving the AWS DevOps Competency differentiates Idexcel as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member that provides specialized demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success with specific focus on Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery, Monitoring, Logging, and Performance, Infrastructure as Code or Consulting. To receive the designation, APN Partners must possess deep AWS expertise and deliver solutions seamlessly on AWS.

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify Consulting and Technology APN Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

Idexcel’s DevOps as a Service enables agile development teams to focus on their core strengths by delivering a ‘as a service’ environment, customized for your organization’s needs. Idexcel offers proven tools, flows, environments and expertise for large and small enterprises to quickly spin up a DevOps environment for your use. We offer capabilities for enterprises to develop, build, test and deploy software across a variety of cloud environments including Amazon AWS and on-premise environments.

About Idexcel
Idexcel is a Professional Services and Technology Solutions provider specializing in Cloud Services, Application Modernization, and Data Analytics. Idexcel is proud that for more than 20 years it has provided services that implement complex technologies that are innovative, agile and successful and have provided our customers with lasting value.

Our name, “idexcel” is a representation of our core principle “Ideas to Excellence” We are relentlessly driven by results and take pride in our customer-centric engagement models. We blend our clients’ needs with proven delivery models and highly talented execution teams to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, Idexcel has offices and delivery locations in the US, Europe and Asia supporting global clients.

Learn more about us at http://www.idexcel.com

Idexcel Achieves 100 AWS Certifications Designation

100 AWS Certifications Designation

Herndon, VA– May 8, 2018 – Idexcel is proud to announce that we have achieved 100 AWS Certifications Designation. This designation recognizes our team’s relentless focus and commitment to hire exceptional technical talent and refine their skills further and create innovative solutions to better serve our customers. Idexcel continues to add certifications and talented AWS Professionals to meet the demand of today’s most complex and desired business outcomes.

Idexcel offers Cloud Services, Application Modernization, and Data Analytics. For more information, visit http://www.idexcel.com

AWS IoT Analytics Provides Intelligence Data For Businesses

AWS IoT Analytics Provides Intelligence Data For Businesses

One of the significant highlights of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2017 conference is the company’s IoT Analytics; a fully-managed service that makes the experience of running sophisticated analytics on massive volumes of IoT data flawless. The new AWS system eliminates the worry of cost and complexity typically incurred during the build and deployment of a personal IoT analytics platform. AWS IoT Analytics has rendered an effortless way to run analytics on IoT data, along with gathering ongoing insights to better the experience of decision making for IoT applications and machine learning.

The Complexities of Unstructured Data

Since IoT data is highly unstructured, it became a mission for AWS to simplify data structures so that it would become easier for cognitive computing solutions to analyze the IoT database. This idea is executed through business intelligence tools that are designed to process large unstructured data. IoT data is procured mainly through reasonably noisy processes, which in turn produces extensive and complex data with gaps, corruption, false reading and so on; this data needs to be taken care of before any analysis can occur. Besides, IoT data is often integrated into the context of other data from external sources and must be managed appropriately.

Are you utilizing analytics and the existing information provided by your system to increase problem solving and overcome the obstacles to processing big data? Amazon’s AWS IoT Analytics allows for customers to solve complex problems without complex solutions. Our team here at Idexcel is at the ready and available to work with those who want to ensure they are getting the most out of their AWS setup. Be sure to reach out for our cloud advisory services and accelerate your journey to the cloud.

Analyzing Problems and Providing Solutions

AWS IoT Analytics automates each of these problematic steps that are required to analyze data from IoT devices. IoT Analytics acts as a catalyst that filters, transforms, and enriches information before storing it in a time-series data storage for analysis. The service can then be customized according to the business: which, how much, and when to use appropriate data. AWS IoT Analytics applies mathematical equations to process and then enrich the data with device-specific metadata. Data is then analyzed by running queries using the built-in SQL query engine. IoT Analytics kick starts the process and provides better scope for outputting high accuracy information. IoT Analytics also exhibits the ability to facilitate machine learning through employing pre-built models of common IoT use cases; it can then quickly respond to probable system failure or system incompatibility and suggest replacement of hardware.

AWS IoT Analytics can keenly examine and scale automatically to support up to petabytes of IoT data; it helps analyze data from millions of devices and build fast, responsive IoT applications without managing different hardware or infrastructures. The service complements the driving forces of current IoT infrastructure with differing advancements.

It is worth noting some of the most important benefits of IoT Analytics include:

Quick and Easy Queries on Massive IoT Data – With the help of a built-in IoT Analytics SQL query engine, it becomes effortless to run ad-hoc queries; this service enables the user to use standard SQL queries to extract data directly from the data store to answer potential questions.

Time-Series Analytics – AWS IoT Analytics also supports time-series interpretations to analyze the performance of devices over time in a recurring pattern, and understand their place and manner as they are being employed. Analytics can continuously monitor device data and suggest maintenance actions as needed. The system can also observe sensors to analyze and react to environmental conditions.

Data Storage Optimized for IoT – AWS IoT Analytics stores processed device data and can deliver fast response times on IoT queries. The source data is automatically stored for later processing or to reprocess it for another use case, creating a more intelligent dataset.

Prepare IoT Data for Analysis – AWS IoT Analytics also performs data preparation that makes it easy to prepare and process your data for analysis. Integrated with AWS IoT Core, the service makes it easier to ingest device data directly from connected devices. IoT Analytics filters the data apart from corruption, false readings, and errors, and then the system performs mathematical transformations of message data. Using conditional statements the analytical service filters data, and then collects specific data required for analysis; it also gives the option of using AWS Lambda functions to enrich device data from external sources.

Tools for Machine Learning – AWS IoT Analytics is well suited for machine learning on IoT data as it has the ability hosts Jupyter notebooks. The administrator can directly connect IoT data to the notebook to build, train, and execute models right from the IoT Analytics console. Machine learning algorithms are applied to data all the more readily, which produces a health score for each device in the fleet.

Automated Scaling with Pay-As-You-Go Pricing – AWS IoT Analytics follows a pay-as-you-go service, with which one can analyze an entire fleet of connected devices without managing hardware or infrastructure. As the administrator’s needs change, they can expand or contract computation power. The data store will also automatically scale up or down, which results in the billing of only employed resources.

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Amazon ECS for Kubernetes: Bridging the Migration gaps

Amazon ECS for Kubernetes
AWS has unveiled a new container service that will allow its users to run Kubernetes on AWS server without needing to install and operate a separate Kubernetes cluster. The service can be identified as a major advancement for AWS which will allow the users migrate smoothly, who had, though, previously found Amazon ECS slightly rigid when it yielded optimum results only when operated on AWS’ own server.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes is a managed service that transcends this obstacle. With this cross platform achievement, AWS will certainly attract (or at least keep) its customers for it has eradicated one major obstacle of transferring clusters on personal server of AWS—inter-cloud exchange. Kubernetes is known to be an open-source system used for automating the deployment, scaling, and managing containerized applications. While Kubernetes had previously posed significant challenges to producing applications, where one was required to manage scaling and availability of Kubernetes masters and persistence layer, Amazon EKS has eased this tedious task by rendering an automatic selection of appropriate instance types. It runs them across multiple Availability Zones along with replacing unhealthy masters through constant heath monitoring. Even the patch and upgrade routines of master and worker nodes no longer need to be monitored manually, which required a lot of expertise and, above all, a tremendous amount of manpower and time. Amazon EKS automatically upgrades the nodes and prepares them for high availability. It runs three Kubernetes masters across three Availability Zones to achieve this flawless feat.

Amazon EKS, just like ECS, can be integrated with many AWS services to provide direct scalability and security for various applications, including Elastic Load Balancing for load distribution, IAM for authentication, Amazon VPC for isolation, AWS PrivateLink for private network access, and AWS CloudTrail for logging. It runs the latest version of the open-source Kubernetes software, which allows the user to have all the latest and existing plugins and tools from the Kubernetes community. Due to the absolute compatibility offered with Amazon EKS for application running on standard Kubernetes Environment, the user can easily migrate any standard Kubernetes application to Amazon EKS without any code modification.

Having stated the common properties of Amazon EKS, let’s look at the major benefits for opting it:

Secure
Security is of paramount importance in this cloud based IT world. With more advanced features, the Amazon EKS is loaded with highly advanced security features for the Kubernetes Environments of any managed cloud service. The migrated workers are launched on the user’s Amazon EC2 instances, where no compute resources are exposed to other customers.

It allows the users to manage the Kubernetes cluster using standard Kubernetes tools such as kubectl CLI for managing Kubernetes, through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) authenticated public endpoints or through PrivateLink.

Fully Compatible with Kubernetes Community Tools
Since Amazon EKS runs the latest version of the open-source Kubernetes software, all the existing and even newer features, plugins, and applications are supported in it. Applications that are already running in an existing Kubernetes environment will be fully compatible, and can be flawlessly moved to Amazon EKS cluster.

Fully Managed and Highly Available
Amazon EKS eradicates the need to install, manage, and scale personal Kubernetes clusters. With this development, EKS is one step ahead of the ECS. The worker and master clusters of Kubernetes are automatically made highly available which are distributed across three different Availability Zones for each cluster, due to which, worker and master servers start functioning more smoothly than ever before. Amazon EKS manages the multi Availability Zone architecture and delivers resiliency against the loss of an Availability Zone. Furthermore, it automatically detects and replaces unhealthy masters and provides automated version upgrades and patching for the masters.

Amazon EKS integrates IAM with Kubernetes which enables the user to register IAM entities with the native authentication system in Kubernetes. The user no longer has to worry about manually setting up credentials for authenticating with the Kubernetes masters which also allows IAM to directly authenticate with the master itself as well as granularly control access to the public endpoint with regards to the targeted Kubernetes masters.

Besides that, it also gives the option of using PrivateLink to access Kubernetes masters directly from personal Amazon VPC. With PrivateLink, Kubernetes masters and Amazon EKS service endpoint appear as an elastic network interface with private IP addresses in Amazon VPC, which opens the threshold for accessing the Kubernetes masters and the Amazon EKS service directly from Amazon VPC, without using public IP addresses or requiring the traffic to traverse the internet.

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Amazon ECS: Another Feather in AWS’ Cap

Amazon ECS: Another Feather in AWS’ Cap

Amazon ECS Another Feather in AWS’ Cap
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a newly developed, highly scalable and high-performance container orchestration service that supports Docker and allows users to effortlessly run and scale containerized applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. ECS removes the need for users to install and operate container orchestration software, manage and scale clusters of virtual machines, or schedule containers on said virtual machines.

ECS is a service that introduces simplicity while running application containers in an accessible manner across multiple availability zones within a region. Users can create Amazon ECS clusters within new or existing virtual PCs. After building a cluster, users can define task definitions and services that specify running Docker container images have to across selected clusters. Container images are stored in and pulled from container registries, which exist within or outside the existing AWS infrastructure.

For vaster control, users can host tasks on a cluster of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances; this enables users to schedule the placement of containers across clusters based on resource needs, isolation policies, and availability requirements. ECS is a useful option when creating consistent deployment and build experiences, along with managing Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) workloads. Users can also develop sophisticated application architectures on a micro-services model if desired.

ECS allows users to launch and stop Docker-enabled applications with simple API calls. Perform a query about the state of an application or access additional features such as Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, security groups, load balancers, CloudWatch Events, CloudFormation templates, and CloudTrail logs.

Recent IT developments have signaled an increasing dependency over smart cloud containers, and that is where Amazon ECS has become an essential pick. Firms are seeking more efficient and ready-to-go solutions that do not add any additional obstacle to an organizational pace. Amazon ECS offers various advantages and customization options including:

Containers Without Infrastructure Management
Amazon ECS features AWS Fargate, which enables users to deploy and manage containers without having to maintain any of the embedded underlying infrastructures. Utilizing AWS Fargate technology, users no longer need to select Amazon EC2 instance types, provision, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. Fargate gives ample time for users to focus on building and running applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

Containerize Everything
Amazon ECS lets users quickly build various types of containerized applications, from long-running applications and micro-services to batch jobs and machine learning applications. ECS can migrate legacy Linux or Windows applications from on-premise solutions to the cloud and run them as containerized applications.

Secure Infrastructure
Amazon ECS provides the option of launching containers in one’s own Amazon VPC, allowing them to use the VPC security groups and network ACLs. None of the available resources expose themselves to other customers, which makes data all the more secure; it also enables users to assign granular access permissions for each of the containers using IAM to exhibit restriction on access to each service and accessible resources that a container has. This intricate level of isolation permits users to use Amazon ECS to build highly secure and reliable applications.

Performance at Scale
Amazon ECS is a product of gradually developed engineering over a period of years. Built on technology developed from many years of experience, ECS can run highly scalable services. Users can launch various Docker containers in seconds using Amazon ECS with no further introduction of complexity.

Compliment Other AWS Services
Amazon ECS is a product that works well with other AWS services and renders a complete solution for running a wide range of containerized applications. ECS can seamlessly integrate with services such as Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon VPC, AWS RDS, AWS IAM, Amazon ECR, AWS Batch, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeStar, and AWS CloudTrail, among others.

It is important to highlight that Amazon ECS, when integrated with other AWS Services, will provide the best solution for running a wide range of containerized applications or services instead. Other popular container services such as Kubernetes and Mesos can also be efficiently run on AWS EC2.

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