Our next meeting is billed as an evening on RPCEmu the free alternative for
running RISCOS on Windows, Linux and Macs.
As a number of us use or at least toy with this I hope we can bring some
devices and perhaps some issues to try and resolve during the evening. Do
you have issues with the networking under Linux for instance?
With everyone's time running short before the end the club year we also hope to
have time to discuss future topics and the future of the club as we head
towards the AGM and our next year.
Cloud computing first became visible on a large scale when Amazon launched
their public cloud offering Amazon Web Services or AWS. Since then a number
of proprietary and open source cloud software providers have offered such
services with many using an API broadly similar to Amazon's.
The API allows provisioning of new machine instances and storage volumes,
managing and assigning public and private IP addresses and firewall rules.
Cloud environments with a large number of pre-built machine images available
make it quick to deploy and scale large numbers of similar machines suited
for a particular task such as processing a particular type of data or
transaction, or scaling a website or service on demand to cope with peaks
of load.
Microsoft now provide their Azure cloud which is mostly focussed on Windows
but do provide Ubuntu Linux as a certified machine image. Of the Amazon
like cloud vendors we looked at software called Openstack. Public clouds
from Rackspace and HP run on Openstack and the software can also be
downloaded to create private clouds on a company's own machines.
Many businesses are now looking to cloud providers as a means of reducing
costs of maintaining physical servers and data centre infrastructure be
that for their entire server estate, or initially just for scaling out for
times of high load. Smaller more agile companies behind web apps and file
storage / backup may host their service entirely out of the Amazon cloud.
It is likely you have some data stored at a cloud provider now even without
knowing it.
Cloud providers charge for the runtime of an instance and depending on the
size of that instance in terms of RAM and CPU cores, etc. and start in the
50p to £1 an hour range. Many have introductory offers that would let an
individual host a single small machine image for free for up to a year.
Orchestration tools exist to simplify the task of deploying and scaling a
service and the one in Ubuntu is called juju. With a tool such as juju, in a
few commands, you can deploy, for example, a database and WordPress blog site
then scale that up and down for load in either a local private cloud, or a
public cloud such as Amazon.
Amazon initially offered EC2 (elastic compute) and S3 (storage) but now
offer a range of service in the cloud from message queues and cacheing to
video file transcoding services.
We may have to delay our AGM this year since several of us will be unavoidably away or heavily committed in both April and May. So it may not be held until June this year. The Committee hope to have some time after the RPCEmu evening to run through ideas for the future programme.
| 2013 | ||
| March 20th | "RPC Emu" | All |
| April 17th | TBA | TBA |
| Emergency topic - "Slideshow" | All |
Meetings are now on the Third Wednesday of the month unless otherwise stated.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website.
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2·50. The membership fee is £20 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
We are continuing our publicity for EAUG events , however their website has not been updated for a year now. So if you wish to know information please phone one of their contacts.
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall, on the second Tuesday of the month
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
http://www.eaug.org.uk/mtg.htm
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.eaug.org.uk or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.eaug.org.uk/ppl.htm
Tea/coffee/biscuits usually available.
Visitors pay 2.00 GBP for the evening, which is deductible from the normal joining subscription if you decide to join at a later date.
See the Membership page of the website for more information:
They have now moved to the St. Andrew's Computer Club at Britannia Road, Ipswich.
They have a full programme on the parish website
(http://www.ourstandrews.co.uk), We may be able to make new contact with them to arrange something in common.
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
However many household insurance policies will include cover away from home often with no increase in premium. (Ed.)
Our website has had to be moved since BT is no longer giving free hosting to customers and Peter was running the old website on his account. So Gareth has been fortunate to register a web address of our own and has generously hosted it on his own woolridge domain. All our old website data has been ported to the new site and a redirection placed on the old address. The old site will disappear some time soon
If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website.
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk