As a Certified AWS Consulting Partner we are big fans of AWS. From cost optimizations to whiz-bang features we have drunk the AWS cloud Kool-Aid. Learn more about the latest and greatest from AWS by reading these articles. Enjoy!
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What's an ISV?
In the world of AWS acronyms abound. The term ISV gets thrown around a lot but it's relatively easy to unpack. First, ISV stands for Independent Software Vendor. What this means is a company who product or service is build in AWS Cloud, but is not an AWS p
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Media Content Distribution + Cloud
Executive Interview with Fredrik Andersson, Founder and SVP of Products of Accedo While in-person events have been curtailed by COVID-19, innovation continues to advance in both tech and media and entertainment.
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Metal Toad Brazil
As we round the bend into Fall (which officially starts September 22), we are reminded of the changing season by things that are familiar to us: getting kids back to school, a welcome cooling of the air, the changing of the leaves (and for some people, most importantly, the return of the Pumpkin
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The Impact of the Cloud on Universities
An Executive Interview with Chris Manriquez, Vice President for Information Technology/CIO at California State University, Dominguez Hills I’ve been chatting (virtually) with some of the execs I admire—from across a range of industries—to get insights on how they’re using cloud tech
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Digital Rights Management (DRM) + Cloud
Executive Interview with Olga Kornienko, COO and co-founder of EZDRM While in-person events have been curtailed by COVID-19, innovation continues
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Machine Learning - it's easier than you think!
10 years ago, a younger me interviewed a brilliant young man named Tony for a position as a programmer at Metal Toad.
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Live Stream From Drone To AWS With S3 Backup
Drones are awesome, and a lot of fun. But what happens if your drone gets lost along with all its footage? Or, what if you want other people around the world to be able to tune in to what the drone sees — in real time — as it sees it?
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Media Supply Chain + Cloud
In this interview, I chat with Erik Åhlin about media supply chains, how M&E companies can leverage the power of the cloud, and what he sees for the future of the industry.
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The Impact of the Cloud on Higher Education
Carmen Lidz is the Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer at Los Angeles Community College District, where she shapes the technology vision and implements strategies, infrastructure, and enterprise systems and services to support the entire...
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Remote live streaming to AWS Media Services from a DJI Spark drone
I’m Vaughn Hawk, a Cloud Engineer for Metal Toad for over 3 years.
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How Cloud became the most important buzzword in business
Cloud is not the first (and probably not the last) disruptor to business via software. Over the past 50 years or so there have been four major epochs of software, with Cloud being the latest. SaaS software is dying and the Cloud is coming for all of us.
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Lambda: javascript vs python
For this hackathon we created a product, YouToad, using Amplify (S3, React, Lambda) and AWS Elemental MediaConvert
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Cloud + Live Events
As CIO at sports and music entertainment giant AEG, Bill Martin drives the convergence of business and technology to deliver innovative success. Bill and I got together to talk about how businesses are actualizing the promise of the...
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AWS re:Invent Insights—The Future of Machine Learning
After being immersed in hundreds of announcements and innovations and inspiring presentations at AWS re:Invent, the key insight I came away with was this: machine learning has so radically evolved that it will change the future of every industry smart enough take advantage of it.
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AWS Personalize - AWS reInvent Insights
AWS Personalize, part of Amazon's suite of machine learning services, allows for creating highly curated experiences is a major differentiator for enterprises that seize the possibilities.
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Cloud + Healthcare
Bridget Barnes has spent over 15 years leading strategic information system architecture at Oregon Health Science University (OHSU)—one of the nation’s most prestigious hospitals and a vibrant hub of groundbreaking...
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The Cloud May Be ITs Antidote for COVID-19
These are unprecedented times where it's hard to get anyone to pay attention to anything other than the COVID-19 epidemic sweeping the globe. But what is the answer for IT if we are looking at a prolonged period of distributed work?
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Cloud + Manufacturing
In this interview, Jim gives his take on the future of cloud, the building blocks of evaluating enterprise tech solutions, and his advice for other execs navigating the ever-changing cloud landscape.
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The Battle for Cloud Marketshare in Oregon
Oregon has always been well known for its timber industry. Indeed at one point in the 1970s fully 12% of the States GDP was produced by timber. While timber's former dominance is not a surprise, many p
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What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is: the delivery of services, on a pay-as-you go basis. It’s the availability of offsite computer system resources that offers strength and flexibility
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AWS Media Symposium—New York 2020 (Postponed)
Excited about the future of media and entertainment? Join us at the AWS Media Symposium in New York this year (March 11, 2020). We’re excited to be sponsors at what promises to be an illuminating day of ...
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HPA Tech Retreat 2020
Exhilarating, overwhelming, and immensely inspiring—the HPA Tech Retreat (February 17–20 in Palm Springs, CA) is one of our favorite events of the year.
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AWS Media Symposium—Miami 2020
We’re excited about the AWS Media Symposium in Miami this year (February 13, 2020). It will be a full day for AWS partners, experts, technologists, and leaders in the M&E industry to learn and connect.
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AWS Partner Requirements Expand Metal Toad's Knowledge
Early last year, AWS drastically increased the requirements for becoming certified as a partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN).
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How to Choose the Right Cloud Provider
The promise of cloud technology has spawned tremendous innovation by some of the biggest, most powerful companies in the world.
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What is AWS Cloud?
Taken literally AWS is an acronym for Amazon Web Services, but that doesn't really help to clarify what it AWS is. Summarized, AWS is Amazon's offering for selling computer time in the cloud.
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ReactJS Amplify App Pt II - Storage
The banner and food feed have placeholder images that are ready to accept an avatar image. Now on to storing and retrieving an avatar in an s3 bucket using Amplify Storage, and displaying it using Amplify React S3Image!
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ReactJS Amplify App Part I - Overview and Auth
This is a three part post about our experience using AWS Amplify to develop a food logging app for the Metal Toad hackathon. Here in part one we cover the initial project overview/setup and our experience implementing Amplify Auth. Part two will cover Amplify Storage, with part three covering Amplify AppSync and PubSub.
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2019 State of Video+Cloud for Media & Entertainment VIP Luncheon: AWS Elemental
The cloud is transforming everything, and the Media & Entertainment industry in Los Angeles is feeling this shift acutely.
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Building a AWS Headless CMS
Over the past several years, Metal Toad has launched several successful cloud-first web and mobile applications, often with hardware components. With each release, I'm noticing how product management, UX, and engineering are frequently able to produce the same features of a CMS faster and cheaper than using Drupal, Wordpress, Salesforce, and Adobe.
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Predictive Maintenance with Machine Learning and IoT
Maintenance of machinery is vital in all industries. Not only does maintenance cost time and money, but improper maintenance could lead to inefficient performance or potentially be a safety hazard depending upon the purpose of the machinery.
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The Battle for Cloud dominance in Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a massive metropolis. While only #18 by population - with a mere 18.7 million people - Los Angeles is 3rd in the world in GDP with over a trillion of dollars produced annually.
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Saas vs. Cloud
I talk a lot about the Cloud. And while, "the cloud" is certainly a candidate for buzzword bingo, unlike some other buzzwords, I really do believe this one lives up to the hype.
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How to win with the AWS Well Architected Framework
Over the years, we've perfected our own internal AWS standards regarding product management, scrum management, code quality, peer review, continuous deployments, and others.
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The Cloud War: Battlefront IBC (1 of 4)
At IBC2019, the biggest international conference for the Media & Entertainment industry, there were some major themes:
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The Value of Android, iOS, and React to the Cloud
As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Metal Toad helps our clients identify their cloud solutions. However, one question I frequently hear is, “If we are building cloud solutions, then why is there a need for engineers in Android, iOS, and React specialties?”.
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Why the Cloud Movement Is the Future of All Business
Cloud computing is quickly becoming not just another tech innovation, but a fundamental shift in the way businesses function. Learn the top 6 advantages of moving to cloud and the ONLY 3 ways to accomplish innovation.
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5 Signs You Need AWS Cloud Migration Consulting
At some point in the last decade, you’ve probably bought a new computer. And at first, it’s great: performance is zippy, but after a few years, things start slowing down. Even though you upgrade your OS things seem wonky.
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5 Signs You Need Better AWS DevOps
Imagine this scenario: you want to build a new house, so you hire two people: an architect to design the structure and all the plumbing and wiring and the like, and an interior designer to come up with the various features of the rooms, the lighting, the colors, the decor.
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Your Serverless Function has a Secret
Your Serverless function has a secret... maybe it's a password for a remote API, a private key, or signing certificate. These secrets have to be stored somewhere, and in the old days that usually meant just a plaintext config file on your server.
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AWS Snowflake Data Warehousing
Learn about AWS Snowflake Architecture, data handling and connecting to Snowflake, how to set up a Snowflake DB, and load Data from the pros at Metal Toad.
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AWS Lambda and Infrastructure as Code
AWS Lambda, for those not familiar with it, is an event driven serverless platform for compute resources.
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Building an Expandable IoT Data Pipeline - Part 1
Background and problem description In late 2016 we were approached with an opportunity to build a data pipeline for one of our large clients.
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Servers...yay or nay?
Recently the term "serverless" has been thrown a lot in reference to provisioned, on demand functions invoked by a cloud provider, as a service. Obviously we're not going to call them ODFIBACPaaS, so most of the web has decided to...
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Origin Protection with AWS WAF & Shield
Amazon has been steadily improving their CloudFront CDN offering with WAF (Web Application Firewall) capabilities. This is a great feature, however it's ineffective if origin servers can be attacked directly, bypassing CloudFront. With a little extra work, access to the origin can be restricted. The solution is to add a secret header value at the edge, and configure the load balancer to block requests that are missing this secret. This is necessary because CloudFront distributions are not associated with security groups, nor are fixed IPs available (unlike higher-priced competitors like Kona Site Shield).
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Using Serverless Config to Deploy an AWS CloudWatch Dashboard
My team’s most recent project has been really interesting - it’s a JavaScript project that includes using the Serverless Framework to deploy a variety of AWS Lambda Functions (e.g. uploading to S3 buckets and making requests to the API that we built)...
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Best Practices For a Secure Cloud Part 1
Whether you’re running on premise datacenter, using a private or public IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) hosting platform, security is extremely important. We’ve all seen the horror stories in the news when companies experience data security breaches.
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Using Capistrano with Dynamic Virtual Environments
The Problem At Metal Toad we use Capistrano to facilitate deploying projects. It allows us to support different environments, pulling and pushing databases and files, for all sorts of products.
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NFS Performance on AWS
Last year, I wrote a blog about the performance of various NFS Solutions in AWS. Earlier this year, Amazon announced its own NFS Solution called Elastic File System, “EFS”.
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Amazon CloudFront with Drupal 8
Since I wrote my first review of CloudFront, Amazon has added support for three essential features...
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AWS Cross-Account Roles and Consolidated Billing
Amazon Web Service recently introduced support for cross-account roles. What this now means, is that you can use one IAM account to access multiple AWS accounts.
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Cloud Architecture: AWS CloudFormation
In my previous blog series, Evolution of a Custom Cloud, I went over how our base design for a custom cloud has improved and how we setup our current VPC network architecture.
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Capistrano Deploy to dynamic AWS EC2
At Metal Toad we use Capistrano to deploy our projects to their respective servers. Normally this is done with a configuration file for each stage (Dev, Staging, QA, and Production) that contains a list of servers. Below is an example of one of those files.
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Evolution of the Custom Cloud: Part 1 "Architecting the Cloud"
Last year Metal Toad launched its Custom Cloud Service. Since then, our Custom Cloud Architecture has evolved to handle the increased complexity and security requirements of our clients cloud applications.
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AWS NAS Test Part 2
Shortly after I wrote AWS NAS Test I was contacted by Zadara Storage. They had some concerns about the data I reported from my test.
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AWS NAS Test
As part of Metal Toad’s Managed Services Team, I have worked extensively in custom cloud based solutions. There is no doubt Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the pack in Cloud hosting, but when it comes to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution, I have found a shortfall...a fast solution.
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The 2013 Emmys Leverage AWS
When preparing for a big event, it is our job to make sure the general public sees exactly what is expected, and with the help of Amazon Web Service (AWS) we did! All planning comes with a few standard issue assessments/steps: Identify need, identify options, and begin to build!
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Bucket policy for friendly file exchange on Amazon S3
We sometimes need to exchange huge files with our customers and partners (too big to fit within the typical storage limits of Basecamp, or the free tier on Google Drive, Dropbox, etc). There are now many user-friendly client apps for Amazon S3. I like Cyberduck. Combined with AWS's flexible policy system, setting up a transfer bucket is a snap.
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Using Amazon Cloudfront with Drupal
We like to use our own site to experiment with different technologies. CDN's are nothing new, and Metal Toad has projects running on competing systems including Akamai and Level 3. Still, I think Amazon Cloudfront is an interesting offering and I wanted to give it a spin. Here's my review of the service after setting it up with Drupal: