One of the hardest things to handle in network or cloud troubleshooting is when something breaks and you are trying to track down why. What did you do to change things that resulted in the problem? Getting at the root of your changes can be difficult, particularly in the case of complex environments that have multiple dependencies and interlinked services. Three vendors, some of whom made announcements at VMworld, are getting the idea from Cher to "turn back time" and show you what your network looked like in the past when it was still working. It is a dandy idea.
If you are looking for better visibility into how your Google Docs are shared across and outside your enterprise, it might be worth your time to examine CloudLock. While the service has been out for more than a year, it has recently gotten some new features that make it more compelling.
Despite a significant outtage of Amazon Web Services earlier this month, Amazon recently announced the launch of a new zone, AWS GovCloud. While cost savings are a definite plus in this economy, downtime and security issues caused us to wonder if the cloud could be trusted with such vital data? So, we asked you for your thoughts on trusting the cloud for government use.
You answered and we culled your responses on Facebook and Twitter and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
It wasn't long after the last week's Amazon Web Services outage was resolved that the cloud hosting services provider had some big news. A new zone, called AWS GovCloud, was launched for the explicit purpose of giving U.S. government agencies and contractors a secure, cloud-based environment for sensitive data and applications.
While this month's AWS outage wasn't nearly as long or severe as the one we saw in April, such disturbances are a potential cause for concern. If you think having Reddit or Tumblr go down for an hour can cause a panic, imagine having mission-critical systems at the Pentagon grind to a halt.
Amazon's Web hosting services suffered another outage this past weekend, this time in its European zone, thanks to power issues at a data center in Dublin, Ireland.
The outage, at first thought to have been caused by a lightning strike, may actually have been caused by a transformer failure, according to ESB Networks. Whatever happened, the data center's primary and secondary power sources were both knocked out, resulting in downtime for several Websites using Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. Apparently, power was lost to not only the data center's main power source, but also the backup generator, which is rare.
Amazon announced today its fifth annual Amazon Web Services Start-up Challenge for entrepreneurs using AWS. This year the contest has been expanded globally and will reward 15 regional semifinalists, five each from the Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe/Middle East/Africa. This time Amazon has teamed with YouNoodle.com, a global entrepreneurship network and contest platform to help administer the contest. Past finalists of the AWS Start-up Challenge include Justin.tv (in 2007), cloud-computing email productivity service Sonian Corp. (2008) and Yieldex.
AWS and other cloud providers like RackSpace have been pivotal in the next-generation explosion of web and mobile applications that have changed the dynamic of the current era of technology disruption. Amazon's ease-of-use and elastic pricing model has lowered the bar for startups looking to experiment with their products and scale quickly. By opening the contest to a worldwide audience this year, Amazon has set its sights not just on the Silicon Valley crowd but also on disruptive developer hotbeds across the globe.
Netflix stores 50 different files for every viewable media asset, including 3 copies of every movie, ten years of user ratings, extensive user account info and metadata including complex licensing rights for everything. Audio files, log files, subtitles, etc. A year ago the fast-growing consumer service saw its own data centers melt down under the weight of all that data, Netflix's Adrian Cockcroft said this morning at O'Reilly's OSCON Data conference in Portland, Oregon. Now, the company is aggressively moving its huge collection of data into the cloud, especially Amazon services. That work is essential to Netflix's world-beating ambitions.
Netflix announced this week that it now has 24 million customers across the United States and Canada. Cockcroft says the company is now focused on expanding to 43 countries in Latin America and then going world-wide. Expanding to 43 new countries means a 43X metadata explosion, Cockcroft says today. Netflix's impact on the entertainment industry and on the web at large has been widely discussed, but hearing about how the company deals with itself, internally, is fascinating.
Google has one of the largest and most secure clouds in the entire industry. You do not often hear of a successful distributed denial of service attack against Google and rarely are Google applications hacked (unless, of course, it reportedly comes from the Chinese government). How does Google keep the data centers that comprise its cloud so safe and are they the gold standard in data protection?
Adam Swidler, senior manager for Google Enterprise, laid out how the company keeps its cloud safe at the Cloud Control Conference in Boston this week. The measures that Google goes through are quite thorough. For instance, no Google clients or federal regulators are allowed inside of Google's data centers. When it comes to tough nuts to crack on the Internet, Google's cloud is about as tough as it gets.
OpenStack is a popular open source cloud operating system used by more than 90 companies and the U.S. government. In the world of cloud, OpenStack is where the cool kids hang out and where some of the most talented developers in the world program. Yet, it almost never came to be.
OpensStack had its one-year anniversary on July 19. The cloud structure has its roots in NASA. The story of OpenStack is really the story of how NASA created its Do It Yourself cloud environment - NASA Nebula. With just a few developers working on a side project in the basement of the NASA Ames Research Center outside of Mountain View, Calif., the seeds of OpenStack and Nebula were planted. Yet, as with any government program, lack of funding almost killed the project several times and threatens to kill its future. It took the president to really get it off the ground.
The city of Chongqing will be the first in China to see the debut of a "cloud district," or, to give it its official name, an "International Offshore Cloud Computing Special Management District." This area in an industrial city in the southwest is primarily designed to "gain market share of cloud computing technology." But users within the district can access the Internet outside of the traditional Chinese censorship regime.
The special district in Chongqing is a reflection of a huge overall investment in cloud computing. According to the People's Daily, the government is making a $772 million investment in a 93,000-square mile "cloud computing industrial base."
