A Higher Education institution recently reached out to us for support regarding their ongoing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) migration to address a handful of pain points they had been experiencing along the way. The University wanted to leverage the enhanced VDI capabilities offered by AWS AppStream 2.0 to streamline and improve their students’ remote learning experience. Our team worked with the University to optimize the AWS AppStream 2.0 workloads by providing insight into usage patterns for the VDI applications. We also established landing zones using the hub-and-spoke account model to lay a strong foundation for the institute’s future cloud journey. … Read More
Monitoring Your Kubernetes Cluster at a Glance with Lens
Kubernetes is an incredible technology that enables you to do so much more with your resources than ever before. But, how do you know what’s going on inside your cluster? Many folks are already aware of in-cluster solutions like Prometheus and Grafana. These de-facto tools do an excellent job of storing and displaying cluster metrics and performance over time. What if you have more than one cluster to monitor, though? You’d need to log in and view your Grafana dashboards in each cluster or create a combined dashboard showing all your clusters’ current state. Lens is a rapidly growing, free, … Read More
Overview of AWS CloudShell
At AWS re:Invent 2020, AWS CloudShell was announced as a new service. A browser-based shell that provides access to AWS services from your web browser. This feature has been available in Azure and Google Cloud in some form for some time now; AWS CloudShell now brings the same capability to AWS. AWS CloudShell has unquestionably made many AWS tasks easier. CloudShell inherits your current user’s credentials, so there is no need to authenticate; simply click the AWS CloudShell icon, and you are ready to go. AWS CloudShell itself provides a managed Amazon Linux 2 environment. The service already includes the … Read More
Getting Started with GitOps using ArgoCD (How-To)
GitOps is a modern twist on DevOps that prescribes one or more Git repositories as the “source of truth” for the declarative state of your environment(s) and applications. In GitOps, all environment and application configuration is stored as code and actioned upon to change the state of the environment/application accordingly. In this post, we’ll explore how you can get started with this concept and try GitOps out for yourself on a local test cluster. Create a Local Kind Cluster Kind (Kubernetes In Docker) is a local cluster tool under a Special Interest Group (SIG) in the Kubernetes project space. Kind … Read More
End-of-Life Impact of Adobe Flash on Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE 11g) and Alternatives
If you have recently installed Adobe Flash Player before December 31, 2020, you may have noticed a popup displayed by the program that informs you that Adobe Flash support is ending on December 31, 2020. As of January 12, 2021, Adobe has put the final nail into the EOL coffin and will block Adobe Flash content from running Adobe Flash Player, and all browsers before 2021 will have a “kill switch” to deactivate Adobe Flash. Adobe strongly recommends users to make the transition out of Adobe Flash in order to help protect their systems as vulnerabilities may be present in … Read More
Selecting the Best Cloud Option for an Oracle E-Business Suite Migration
A nation-wide professional services company was running an on-prem version of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Financials and Projects and needed an unbiased evaluation as their hardware aged, support costs began to increase as relative performance decreased. Like many other companies, they began to explore moving to the cloud, but they were unsure how to choose from the wide range of cloud options with licensing and compliance implications to consider. Our team evaluated hosting Oracle EBS on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). After careful evaluation, OCI provided the best combination of low total cost of ownership, flexibility, and … Read More
Growing Orthopedic Institute Gains Modernization, Security, and Flexibility through Migrating to the AWS Cloud
The Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio (OIO) faced the challenge of refreshing legacy hardware while planning for the increase in capacity of several upcoming acquisitions. To solve these challenges, OIO asked M&S Consulting to evaluate and create a strategy for its cloud alternative. We recommended Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a good fit for their needs and provided a strategy that would migrate over 90% of their servers to the cloud. The primary business applications for OIO are Patient Electronic Medical Records and Imaging solutions which are vital to the success of treatment. To support migrations, we created a set of … Read More
Cloud-First Applications at Harvard Business Publishing
Harvard Business Publishing is an organization responsible for strong corporate learning programs and prestigious publications such as the Harvard Business Review. M&S Consulting was tasked originally with performing a migration of HBP’s infrastructure from on-prem to the AWS cloud. The initial solution focused on a traditional lift-and-shift migration to get the HBP data and application infrastructure to the AWS cloud. M&S Consulting utilized infrastructure-as-code through AWS CloudFormation to build a repeatable, versioned infrastructure for the migrated applications. Once in the cloud, the solution focused on re-architecting and optimizing existing applications to take advantage of cloud infrastructure capabilities, as well as … Read More