Picture credit: Cookie Jam/YouTube

Social Gaming Network (SGN) has partnered with NoSQL database provider Couchbase to rapidly scale and maintain uptime for its Cookie Jam game, which boasts over 5 million users worldwide.

The match-3 puzzle game was named by social network Facebook as its most popular game of 2014, with Facebook head of games partnerships EMEA Bob Slinn telling the Guardian it was “an amazing success story.” Part of that success has to go down to Couchbase, which itself has more than doubled in size over the past year.

The clear challenge facing Couchbase, as is often the case for social and mobile hits, is how to expect a huge spike and scale quickly enough to avoid downtime. Regular readers of this publication will note a similar pattern with Heroku after it powered social network Ello, which was described as an “overnight success.”

As a result, SGN tested the software to its limits and found good results, according to Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold. “Certainly with gaming companies, we can see huge spikes,” he tells CloudTech. “It’s hard to predict when they’re going to happen, and so that’s why for social gaming companies in particular, it’s the hits business – you can have very rapid unexpected downloads and usage of product.”

If there is an unexpected jump, then SGN can add additional nodes in a matter of minutes. “That’s an industry vertical that needs to be able to very rapidly scale without any problems, and that’s one of the reasons Couchbase has been so successful in the social and mobile gaming space,” Wiederhold explains.

One of the key challenges facing Couchbase is identifying exactly where the bottlenecks are. “Oftentimes it has very little to do with the database,” Wiederhold says. “When these social gaming companies are scaling for the first time, they run into previously unknown issues, so we work with them closely to diagnose problems and remove those bottlenecks so they can scale without ever going down.

“These problems are usually not catastrophic in the sense that it causes the game to go down,” he adds. “We’re very proud of the fact that we work with many of these gaming companies where they’ve gone through hyper-viral growth and they’ve never gone down even for a minute, but behind the scenes they’re looking at a lot of different things.”

Wiederhold praised SGN for getting its testing and due diligence sorted. “[Some companies] like one product or another, but they never put it through its paces, never stress test it, never test to see if we get some crazy spike of users, and those are the companies that we typically see get into trouble and call us after the fact and try and figure out how to retrofit their game to use Couchbase,” he says.

“SGN has a lot of experience with Couchbase now on multiple games, so that’s not the situation with them.”

For the future, Wiederhold stresses a continued move towards disrupting the legacy database market of Oracle, SAP, IBM et al, with expansion into Asia part of Couchbase’s plan. “We are regularly replacing Oracle in particular, because it has the biggest footprint in the market,” he says.

“That is happening, and probably 60% of the enterprise deployments for mission critical, business critical apps are replacing legacy relational technologies.”

Ninety-percent of your users want your site to perform well during peak periods, like the last month or so. That’s according to a study by Compuware, in which they also found that most dissatisfied users will throw you under a bus if your app or site performs poorly while they’re desperately trying to buy the right gift for their very demanding loved ones.
In an application world driven by impatient and very vocal users, performance is king. Every year before Christmas we hear at least one horror story of a site that didn’t perform up to expectations and is promptly made an example by, well, everyone. I could probably fill this post with examples, but that’s not really the point. The point is maybe there’s a way to counteract that, in real time, thanks to the power of programmability in the network.

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Almost everyone sees the potential of Internet of Things but how can businesses truly unlock that potential. The key will be in the ability to discover business insight in the midst of an ocean of Big Data generated from billions of embedded devices via Systems of Discover. Businesses will also need to ensure that they can sustain that insight by leveraging the cloud for global reach, scale and elasticity.

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With all the news these days about cyberterrorism and hacking the cloud may seem like the last place you would want to put your precious information. Pew Research has even suggested that cyber-attacks are likely to increase. Some 61% of over 1600 security expert respondents to a recent survey said «yes» that a major attack causing widespread harm would occur by 2025,according to the Pew Research study. The cold hard fact, however, is that fear of the cyberterrorist and hackers, while definitely valid, is mostly misplaced. I hold this contrarian view, because when you pull back the curtain on many of the recent breaches, you’ll likely see a mirror.

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Xero small business accounting software believes SaaS (software as a service) and especially mobile accounting software is the way to empower small business in a way that can influence whole countries’ gross domestic products (GDP.) Today we embark to learn just how this can be true.

The kiwi company was founded in 2006. In 2012, former Sage-employee Jamie Sutherland was tasked with opening the U.S. office, which now has 150 employees in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Denver.

Xero U.S. President Sutherland decided to make a switch from world’s third largest ERP (enterprise resource planning software) U.K.-based Sage to Xero because he just felt everything it was working toward just made sense with how he saw the future of business software.

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Databases take a long time to build, populate and manage, but deploying in the cloud holds great promise for changing all of that.
Time is probably the most valuable commodity in business. «Time is money» is a trite way of saying that those who move the quickest are usually the ones who get the loot.
But current database technology is anything but timely. Databases take a long time to build, populate and manage, and more often than not produce valuable results only after hours of number crunching. And with Big Data, social networking, the Internet of Things and other data-intensive workloads on the near horizon, database functionality is likely to become slower still.

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Cloudian, Inc., on Wednesday announced availability of Cloudian HyperStore 5.1 software. HyperStore 5.1 is an enhanced Amazon S3-compliant, plug-and-play hybrid cloud software solution that now features full Apache Hadoop integration. Enterprises can now transform Big Data into smart data by running Hadoop analytics on HyperStore software and appliances. This in-place analytics, with no need to offload data to other systems for Hadoop analyses, enables customers to derive meaningful business intelligence from their data quickly, efficiently and economically.

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Docker is becoming very popular–we are seeing every major private and public cloud vendor racing to adopt it. It promises portability and interoperability, and is quickly becoming the currency of the Cloud.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, discussed why Docker is so important to the future of the cloud, but will also take a step back and show that Docker is actually only one piece of the puzzle. Copeland will outline the bigger picture of where Docker fits and the remaining infrastructure that is needed for large scale adoption by enterprise IT.

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We all are well aware that oil prices have dropped to almost $45 per barrel as of mid-January 2015. Global economies are feeling the pressure from a sudden drop in crude prices, with a chance of a looming recession in some economies. What does this mean for global business and the cloud industry?
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There’s no denying it: the cloud industry has reached maturity. And businesses are lining up to make a move to the cloud. According to Gartner, organizations will store 36% of their content in the cloud by 2016, a big jump from the meagre 7% they stored in 2011.

Managed service providers (MSPs) who want to tap into this growing market will have to decide how to approach the cloud. They’ll have to assess their customers’ needs, what kind of offering they can deliver and what kind of strategy will ensure their success. What kind of MSP are you? Here are three common profiles.

The Risk-Taker

This type of MSP likes to be in control. To make sure he has complete ownership of the infrastructure, he won’t go with any public cloud provider. He’ll build his own cloud. The biggest benefit? 100% control. Guaranteed. From the infrastructure’s components to updates and maintenance, everything will be in the hands of the service provider.

But at what cost?

If you’re thinking about deploying your own cloud, consider these facts:

• The initial investment is high.
• It’ll take about three years before you see a Return on Investment (ROI).
• Competition in the market is fierce and your cloud cost won’t be able to match what the big providers are offering.

You should also account for time spent on maintenance and updates. MSPs who take this route should also know that it can’t be sustained forever.

The Conventional

Next is the conventional MSP. Unlike the risk-taker, this guy will trust another provider for his cloud needs. And that provider will be a big brand that everyone knows: Amazon, Google, Microsoft…

This route has some benefits. The MSP will be able to build his own bundle to resell. He’ll also find it easier to convince customers to move to the cloud. After all, who doesn’t know Amazon or Microsoft? The risk? Almost non-existent.

What’s the catch? Well, competition in this market is brutal. There are a lot of other players out there reselling the same cloud. Your customers can get cloud offerings from almost anyone, and probably at a lower cost!

Can you make a lot of money? If you want to sell, you’ll have to go cheap. Or, you’ll have to develop a value proposition that will be unique in your market.

The Trailblazer

Last but not least, we have the trailblazer. This type of MSP will be looking for a white-label provider to get the best of both worlds.

Relying on a white-label provider will help the MSP build his credibility. He can offer an enterprise-grade infrastructure without investing a lot of money to deploy his own cloud. And he can benefit from the latest hardware updates and maintenance and still be in control of server usage. Scalability will never be an issue. Adding or removing servers can be done quickly, ensuring that you pay only for what you use.

The best part of this model? You can sell it as your cloud to your customers. It gives you all the flexibility you need to tailor your offer and sell services that cater to your customers’ specific needs. The end result? A boost in your credibility.

The only thing you’re not getting from this model is a hands-on approach to the hardware. But since you can choose and configure your servers, this shouldn’t be a deal breaker for someone who wants to increase profits in the IaaS market.

What’s your strategy for 2015?

The post MSPs and IaaS: What to Do in 2015? appeared first on SherWeb.