Dmitry Sotnikov

Here’s how you can send a lot of individual personal messages if all you have is a GMail or Google Apps account. One of the key ways for successful startups or new IT projects is knowing your customers (and partners) and being available to them – so you can quickly collect feedback, learn more about what they are trying to achieve with your platform, and just make sure that they know who to contact when they need to. Instructions below will help you set up your personal gmail account or Google Apps account to send personalized email like the one you see on the right. Note that this is as personalized as it gets with everything originating from your address (no on-behalfs) and the recipient being the only person in the To list (no BCCs or users seeing addresses of each other). Phase One: Simple Email Script 1. Open the Google Script developer environment by going to ... (more)

SYS-CON's 1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo: Show Report

Dmitry Sotnikov's Blog Overall, very exciting times, and a great event put together by the folks at SYS-CON! There was a lot of excitement and optimism throughout the event. As someone put it: cloud computing is about 700 days old. That means that there are a lot of arguments about definitions, and where things are going, and so on. And that also gives a lot of vibe and a lot of fresh community spirit. Below are my notes from all the sessions I attended at the last week’s Cloud Computing Expo 2008 on: Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 A few general comments on the conference. First and foremost,... (more)

Cloud Track at WSO2Con Europe

WSO2Con Barcelona agenda is now live including the Cloud track near and dear to my heart. Here’s a quick overview of what to expect: Cloud Strategy – track keynote – we will go through all things cloud with WSO2 technology: our work with Apache Stratos, private cloud, dedicated cloud, and our shared public cloud services, Still to-be-announced session on IaaS platforms and how we work with them, Apache Stratos Roadmap and Strategy – Apache Stratos is a community project to which we are one of the key contributors and which we at WSO2 are using a lot internally for our own produc... (more)

Checklist for Cloud Service Operations

I knew one software company that failed their SaaS transition because they chose to cut a few corners with the operations. Since they were software engineers, they did not really want to spend time on such mundane tasks as security, auditing, backups and so on. One day they let a disgruntled employee go, the guy went to an internet cafe, logged into the hosting account with the shared admin credentials, and deleted all customer data. There were no backups or data replicas to bring the data back, no personal admin accounts or procedures to prevent such an incident from happening, a... (more)

Building WSO2 Cloud

This year I changed my job and became in charge of the Cloud business at WSO2. This means that now on this blog you will have even more “cloud stuff”, so I thought I would start with a quick This year I changed my job and became in charge of the Cloud business at WSO2. This means that now on this blog you will have even more “cloud stuff”, so I thought I would start with a quick intro to why I joined WSO2 and our general cloud directions. Sorry if the stuff below sounds a bit salesy. :) WSO2 started as a middleware company – with an enterprise service bus – WSO2 ESB – that is st... (more)