Virtual Machines are tremendous inventory to manage for Cloud providers. Consequently, they use centralized management tools. However, these tools are already available from public cloud providers that help to manage not just one public cloud but other public clouds and on-premise inventory. They are also a means to provide productivity tools to desktop and virtual machine end users. I discuss one such technique below as an extension of the article on indexing based search in the cloud as described here. 

Systems Manager is a management service that helps to automatically collect software inventory, apply OS patches, create system images, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems. These capabilities help to define and track system configurations, prevent drift, and maintain software compliance of your EC2 and on-premises configurations. By providing a management approach that is designed for the scale and agility of the cloud but extends into the on-premises data center, Systems Manager is convenient tool to seamlessly bridge existing infrastructure with public clouds. 

Backup and file indexing activities on the desktop are regular maintenance and productivity enhancement operations and are therefore best suited for automation via Systems Manager. I believe that desktop search can be included with System Center automations. This lets data to be indexed to follow the same route as logs and metrics with the convenience of a central management. Personal document indexing as a productivity tool then merely requires using queries on a cloud service.  

Running commands and batches on the target is easy with Systems Manager because it uses an agent on the target. Commands issued from the Systems Manager go over encrypted channel to the agent and are executed locally. Individual commands and batches can be executed seamlessly between agents of different flavors in a platform agnostic manner. 

By hosting the logic to do the bulk of the operations behind backup and file indexing in cloud services, the Systems Manager and the agents are alleviated from strenuous work. There are several advantages to designs based on Cloud Services and remote administration of targets via System Manager First, there is a formal separation between function and administration. Second, the service can take on many different data sources and callers.  Third a staging xml or json cache can be used to prevent significant changes to data anywhere. Fourth, by hosting the service in the cloud or on a cluster from the cloud, the service can be elastic and expand to as many resources as necessary with automatic rollover, load balancing and differentiation in terms of components. Finally, cloud based services can use a  variety of data repositories such as Big Data, data warehouse, time series database and so on  rather than a simple but efficient relational database. Finally, access control can be better exercised by the Cloud based Services. 

Systems Manager is a viable method for managed services to end users and transfer of data from their virtual machines

 #codingexercise

We were looking at counting the number of increasing subsequences in an earlier post by enumerating the combinations of its elements or maintaining counts of subsequences that end with the element. We try dynamic programming approach:

Int GetCountDP(List<int> A, int index);  

{  

Int n = A.Count;  

If (index == 0) return 1;      

Int result = 1;  

For ( int I = 0; I < index; i++)   

{  

    If (A[j] < A[I])  

        result += GetCountDP(A, i) + 1;  

}  

return result;  

}

or better yet

Int GetCount(List<int>A) 

{ 

var dp = new int[A.Count+1]{}; 

for (int  I = 0; I < A.Count; i++){ 

    dp[i] = 1 

    for (int j = 0; j <= i – 1;j++) { 

        if (A[j] < A[i]){ 

            dp[i] = dp[i] + dp[j]; 

        } 

   } 

Return dp[n-1]; 

}

The count of distinct subsequences replaces the logical comparision above with a hashtable checkup.