Google launched its new “Google Compute Engine” yesterday at I/O. Here’s more info about GCE on the Google Developer’s Blog, and a nice analysis by Ben Kepes on CloudAve. If “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” then it’s clear the guys at Google hold the Amazon Web Services EC2 in very high regard. In many ways, GCE is a really good copy of EC2 circa 2007/2008. There are some differences – like really great encryption for data at rest and in motion – but essentially GCE is a copy of EC2 4-5 years ago.
Monthly Archives: June 2012
Open Clouds at Red Hat
Red Hat has been making steady progress toward what is shaping up as a fairly interesting cloud strategy. Building on their Deltacloud API abstraction layer and their CloudForms IaaS software, a hybrid cloud model is starting to emerge. Add to this their OpenShift PaaS system, and you can see that Red Hat is assembling a lot of key components. Let’s add the fact that Red Hat has gotten very involved with OpenStack, providing an interesting dynamic with CloudForms.
Explaining Cloud Services in Layman’s Terms
Everywhere you look, smart IT companies all over the world are touting Cloud Computing as the future of the IT industry. But here is the thing, for all the hotness of the term, what does Cloud even mean?
How Web APIs Unlock Value in the Cloud
How Web APIs Unlock Value in the Cloud by David Schoenbach, Vice President of product management at Exadel.
Red Hat Bets the Farm on Hybrid Clouds
Red Hat has talked to enough enterprises – ‘cause that’s where the money is – to know that what they want now is a hybrid cloud. The capex and opex temptations are just irresistible. How to get there is the problem.
To ensure Red Hat get a chunk of this hybrid action it’s proposing to let enterprises manage a hybrid cloud (presumably through its CloudForms management widgetry) so it looks like part of their on-premise Red Hat infrastructure.
AWS Power-related Outage in Older Data Center Ends, Once Again Hits Single Center Customers
From the AWS Service Health Dashboard:
9:32 AM PDT Connectivity has been restored to the affected subset of EC2 instances and EBS volumes in the single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 region. New instance launches are completing normally. Some of the affected EBS volumes are still re-mirroring causing increased IO latency for those volumes.
As happened earlier this month the failure was apparently triggered by power systems failures. The US-EAST-1 data center in Virginia is Amazon’s oldest.
As in the past, the outage hurt customers relying on a single center.
Related articles
Cloud Computing: Dispelling the Remote Revolution Misconceptions
Cloud computing is a few years old, but despite the many benefits and the fact that the term has entered the public consciousness, there are still a lot of people that are in the dark concerning what the cloud actually is and what it can do. It’s not like the Internet, which had a clear definition and immediately visible perks, like online commerce.
GoDaddy Guest Blog: Announcing Parallels Plesk Panel 11
Go Daddy is excited to announce the launch of Parallels® Plesk Panel 11 on VPS and dedicated hosting environments. Starting June 26, all new Plesk installations will provision with version 11, and existing Go Daddy customers can request a server reprovision to update their control panels to the newer version.
What’s in store for Parallels Plesk 11 users? First and foremost is the integration of NGINXTM as the end-user Web server. NGINX edge server technology lets you increase the number of maximum concurrent website connections, decrease server CPU and memory resource consumption, and improve the efficiency of serving your visitors with slow connection speeds on your Linux® server.
If increased server performance doesn’t get you excited enough, Parallels Plesk 11 promises improved security features to really get you fired up.
Enhanced security mode introduces advanced protection of sensitive data in Panel. With enhanced security mode enabled, password reminders and remote API features are updated to further protect your server from unauthorized access.
Additional security updates include password-protected backups and minimum strength requirements for user generated passwords. Secure backups lock attackers out of backup data if your external storage backup is compromised.
With Parallels Plesk 11, you can now force stronger user passwords by choosing from five password strength levels. Setting a minimum strength password requirement helps ensure server login integrity.
Plesk 11 gives you increased server performance, added security and more to your panel and websites!
Be sure to check out the Go Daddy Virtual Dedicated Server and Dedicated Server product pages for more information on advanced hosting solutions.
AWS US-EAST-1 Troubles
From the AWS Service Health Dashboard this morning:
7:45 AM PDT We are investigating possible connectivity issues for a small number of instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.
8:11 AM PDT We can confirm network connectivity issues for some EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region. Customers may be experiencing network impairment or connectivity issues to their EBS volumes performing read/write operations. We are actively working to resolve this issue.
8:37 AM PDT We can confirm network connectivity issues for some EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 region. Customers may be experiencing impaired read/write access to their EBS volumes. New instance launches are also delayed. We are actively working to resolve this issue.
In 5 Minutes or Less Video – IP Intelligence Service
I show you how to configure the IP Intelligence Service available on BIG-IP v11.2, in 5 Minutes or Less. By identifying relevant IP addresses and leveraging intelligence from cloud-context security solutions, F5′s new IP Intelligence service combines valuable information on the latest threats with the unified policy enforcement capabilities of the BIG-IP application delivery platform. Deployed as part of the BIG-IP system, F5’s IP Intelligence service leverages data from multiple sources to effectively gather real-time IP threat information and block connections with those addresses. The service reveals both inbound and outbound communication with malicious IP addresses to enable granular threat reporting and automated blocking, helping IT teams create more effective security policies to protect their infrastructures.