Category: News

Last Tuesday, parts of the Internet came to a grinding halt when the servers that powered them suddenly vanished.  The disappearing server act came from servers that were housed as part of Amazon S3, Amazon’s popular Web hosting service.

When that incident happened, several big and popular services and Web sites were disrupted, including DraftKings, Gizmodo, IFTTT, Quora, Slack and Trello.

According to the Web site monitoring firm Apica, 54 of the largest online retailers experienced performance impairments on their Web sites, with some slowing down by more than 20 percent; 3 sites went down completely (Express, Lulu Lemon, One Kings Lane); and for effected websites, average slow down time was 29.7 seconds – 42.7 seconds to load.

What happened?

"At 9:37 a.m. PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process," Amazon said.  "Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.  The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems."

Those subsystems are important.  One of them "manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region," according to Amazon.  And without it, services that depend on it couldn’t perform basic data retrieval and storage tasks.  The second subsystem, the placement subsystem, "manages allocation of new storage and requires the index subsystem to be functioning properly to correctly operate."  The placement subsystem is used to allocate storage for new objects.

Kinetica, provider of the fastest, in-memory database accelerated by GPUs, today announced its real-time analytics and visualization solution is immediately available on the Nimbix Cloud.  Providing instant results and visualized insights across massive streaming datasets, Kinetica on the Nimbix Cloud can be launched in seconds and is the ideal solution for GPU-accelerated analytics.

"Kinetica on the Nimbix Cloud harnesses the power of parallel GPUs to deliver real-time analytics and data written to Kinetica is automatically routed to parallel connections across the cluster," said Amit Vij, cofounder and CEO, Kinetica.  "The full Kinetica stack can be provisioned with a couple of mouse clicks from the Nimbix console or launched and automated with JARVICE’s powerful task API."

Containerized EOS

Arista cEOS introduces the containerized packaging of EOS software and its agents for deployment in cloud infrastructure with the same proven EOS software image that runs on all Arista products. These flexible deployment options empower cloud network operators that are customizing their operating environments to provide a uniform workflow for development, testing and deployment of differentiated services. It enables the provisioning of a robust and proven network operating system across production and development platforms with a uniform EOS distribution and single-image consistency.

The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) has published a new reference architecture to assist enterprise IT professionals with the integration requirements of hybrid cloud computing. IT environments are now fundamentally hybrid in nature – devices, systems, and people are spread across the globe, and at the same time virtualized. Achieving integration across this ever-changing environment, and doing so at the pace of modern digital initiatives, is a significant challenge. This deliverable explains the core reference architecture and concepts for hybrid integration in the enterprise. It is available for download at: http://www.cloud-council.org/deliverables/cloud-customer-architecture-for-hybrid-integration.htm.

Zadara Storage, the provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS), and Trio today announced that Zadara’s VPSA Storage Array platform is now being offered by Trio as part of their new storage-as-a-service portfolio. The new offering is intended for Israeli-based companies who are interested in migrating their existing CapEx storage to an OpEx-based cloud environment and International companies who are interested in hosting or replicating their data in Israel.

Industry research has shown that the public cloud storage-as-a-service market is growing at approximately 25% per year, and by 2020 will capture 25% of a massive $50 billion in enterprise storage spending (source: IT Brand Pulse, February 2017). This transition is driven by IT professionals recognizing that the traditional Capital Expense (CapEx) model of capacity acquisition and management cannot keep up with the data storage needs of today’s enterprise. Instead, IT organizations are being asked to reduce costs, while at the same time providing immediately available, elastic, and reliable enterprise-grade storage. The traditional model of evaluating potential vendors, buying, installing and maintaining disk arrays and then repeating the cycle every 3-5 years cannot support this goal.

The drive for digital transformation has transformed how IT, the development team and business managers work together. Or, put another way, digital transformation has paved the way for IT, the dev team and business to work together. There’s really no other choice, as a balance among business goals, automation, security, business continuity and an agile, software-defined infrastructure is key to getting—and staying—ahead of the competition.

Indeed, 50 percent of CEOs said they expect their industries to be substantially or unrecognizably transformed by digital, according to Gartner’s "2016 CEO Survey: The Year of Digital Tenacity." But even if a company doesn’t see itself as being digitally transformed (or, at least, not any time soon), no company can succeed in today’s economy without pushing its current digital envelope.

Automate Your Delivery Pipeline

• Different types of test automation
• The value test automation provides
• DevOps and automating your delivery pipeline
• Building a real-world framework

Agile methods have introduced a bunch of new processes to help support fast-paced operations and ensure that products meet quality standards. Continuous practices have become a staple for facilitating these needs, but they can often be dependent upon each other to function effectively. Alone, continuous integration and continuous delivery can bring essential benefits but they cannot reach their full height without continuous testing. With quality testing tools, teams can uphold continuous testing requirements and establish an environment for successful continuous integration and continuous delivery efforts.

The importance of CT

Continuous practices were implemented as a means of ensuring that a deliverable would be ready to release at any moment. However, this couldn’t happen if it wasn’t appropriately tested. Users are placing a major emphasis on whether an app is functional and meets their needs when they download it to their devices. In fact, according to research by Localytics, 23 percent of people abandon an app after just one use. Although this is a slight improvement over last year, the numbers show that 62 percent will use an app less than 11 times. User retention is the name of the game for organizations that want to be competitive, but to do this, they’ll need to step up their testing capabilities.

SwiftStack, a company that powers hybrid cloud storage for enterprises, today announced availability of its latest software release, SwiftStack 5, which will be demonstrated at the Google Cloud Next Conference 2017, March 8 through March 10 in San Francisco, at booth #A4. One notable enhancement to its Cloud Sync feature is the ability to replicate data bidirectionally between the four Google Cloud Storage offerings, as well as other cloud provider’s solutions. Two-way synchronization of data stored between on-premises and the public cloud is managed as a policy controlled by IT, so data is automatically delivered to where it can best be computed on or utilized, within private data centers or in the public cloud.

"We believe that enterprises now and  for the foreseeable future will live in a hybrid cloud world, where business value should determine where data lives, when it moves and how it behaves," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "IT creates and controls the policies for corporate data that places data on-premises and/or in the public cloud, based on the criteria that keeps their customers happy: cost, performance, security, access and availability." More about Duplessie’s view on multi-cloud data management can be found in this short video:http://learn.swiftstack.com/2017-esg-multi-cloud-data-management.html.