Introducing Tendenci All In-One Open Source AMS Software Solution available in AWS Marketplace

This is an exciting time for Tendenci as every developer in the world can now deploy Tendenci software in AWS Marketplace!

Thanks to our relationship with Amazon Web Services AWS, developers can finally launch an instance with one click deployment of a site for your Nonprofit or Association!

Find out more here.

Tendenci Official AMI https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B087XX3NLS

Check out Tendenci AMI (Amazon Machine Image) https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B087XX3NLS

Learn more about Tendenci – The Open Source Association Management Software.

Data Lakes for Smarter Associations

Open Source is Winning the Internet. Join us to be the BEST regardless of culture or country.

What is a “data lake”?

Data lake – it’s a big, partially structured and differently structured set of data from your association that you can use to answer interesting questions. Think of it like throwing everything in your pantry into one magical cauldron and it comes back with answers. Of course be careful what you ask, as SECURITY IS ALWAYS JOB 1! But it’s cool.

This is how AWS visualizes it:

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/big-data/datalakes-and-analytics/what-is-a-data-lake/

Having been personally involved in politics, analytics, electrical engineering, programming, robotics, public relations and media strategy not to mention the whole entrepreneurship thing, I must to start with a warning; do NOT go overboard.

Luckily Tendenci as your AMS makes this a whole lot easier with all of the ways to import and export data (or your whole database.) And pretty much every report has a structured export as well, from custom forms, donations, event registrations, memberships, you name it. You have FULL ACCESS to YOUR DATA in both flat files and in the actual database schema. For example:

I like this quote from wipro:

If the data in a lake is not well curated, then it may turn into a data swamp, flooding an organization with information.

https://www.wipro.com/en-US/analytics/five-best-practices-to-keep-your-data-lake-healthy/

You can see more screen shots of the built in reporting within Tendenci. Yet let’s be realistic, you are integrating data from many sources and a Data Lake including but not limited to your data on Tendenci might be just the thing. Contact us for more, because we LOVE DATA!

And we’ve got over 20+ years of experience to back it up.

Why not make 2020 the banner year to grow your membership and donations? Because that’s what we THRIVE ON! YOUR SUCCESS!

What a DDoS attack to an Association Looks Like

The following graphs show what a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on an association looks like. The names, rates and volume of the association have been blurred for security reasons. We are thankful to AWS for their own defenses in front of ours, which  help us mitigate these issues.

responding to ddos attacks as best we can
active response to mitigate attacks

Note: The  graphic above, is filtered for a 24 hour span for one client. The infrastructure is in place, and highly redundant, so we can monitor and keep our clients safe. For clients in the US or hosted in other countries (we have multiple Tendenci clouds as needed.)

Note 2: Make no mistake – If a bad-actor has the budget – they can and will purchase enough bots to take a site down. This is well documented. Even our resources at AWS are limited in what they can handle. Budget (yes BUDGET) accordingly. 

Amazon Email Relay Service Outage Resolved Feb 28, 2017

To our clients and end users hosted on the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud – the email outage and partial S3 (storage) outage have been resolved per the Amazon status notification site https://status.aws.amazon.com/

AWS SES Status Update

Visit the AWS status blog at https://status.aws.amazon.com/ and the AWS subreddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/ . AWS’s email outage is described in detail in the reddit post at https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/5wphqj/amazon_s3_and_amazon_ses_are_down/

And as always please keep an eye on this blog for Tendenci updates.

Edit: for more coverage visit: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-web-services-cloud-outage-internet-crashes/

Amazon’s Announcement of End of Life for Windows 2003

Note: This bulletin is a repeat of the January 22, 2015 EOL announcement, the helpdesk notifications and numerous direct calls to the clients impacted.

REMINDER: EOL for Tendenci 4

Scope of impact:

Clients still running Tendenci 4 classic.

Deadline:

April 21, 2015 is End of Life for T4. The Windows servers on our network will be shut down and be offline permanently. Original EOL Announcement here.

Why do you keep repeating this?

Just to be sure. Because we care. We want you to land safely. Sometimes our contact doesn’t relay to the board with the urgency needed. This is a hard deadline and once the servers are shut down on April 21, 2015 and archived there is no easy way to restore them.

We are concerned and want to be sure the right people within your organization know. We have been banging on this drum for some time.

April 21, 2015 is End of Life for T4. You have options. Click that link as your options although they are much more limited since we announced it in January.

Here is Amazon’s announcement stating the same thing in line with Microsoft’s timelines.

Amazon Web Services

Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,

Microsoft is ending support for Windows Server 2003 on July 14, 2015. If you are running Windows Server 2003, this may put your applications and business at risk, since there may be no security or software updates.

AWS provides you with options, whether you are moving to a modern MicrosoftWindows Server operating system, maintaining 32-bit applications in the AWS Cloud, or rewriting legacy applications.

You can migrate your applications to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances running a newer version of Microsoft Windows Server (2008, 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2). Preconfigured Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with different combinations ofWindows and SQL Server are available. Amazon EC2 running Windows Serverenables you to run any compatible solution on our cost-effective, high-performance, reliable cloud-computing platform.

Sign up to attend the Windows Server 2003 Migration webinar, or visit our WindowsServer 2003 page to learn more.

Sincerely,

The Amazon EC2 for Windows Team