ICILS, short for the “International Computer and Information Literacy Study,” is an international survey recording the computer and information literacy of secondary school students. It was first held in 2013. In Germany in particular, the results of the first study caused quite a stir; among all the developed nations, Germany turned out to be country […]
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UKFast’s CEO has compared its new business ClearCloud, selling AWS and Microsoft Azure support, to a sports car customers never need to refuel.
Lawrence Jones said the business’s new arm will also support UKFast’s eCloud Hybrid and eCloud Private services, and that it was launched with the purpose of broadening the firm’s multi-cloud offering to its 5,000 clients.
What sets it apart from the competition, according to Jones, is quality of service matched with fixed prices.
“Smaller businesses and the medium-sized customers don’t want to give people a blank cheque and [buying] Amazon is like giving someone a blank cheque because you don’t really know how much it is going to cost,” he told Cloud Pro.
“My customers are used to having a fixed fee and as much bandwidth as they want, as much CPU usage as they want, as much storage as they want and all within the agreement that was set out at the beginning of the contract.”
Indeed, outlining the cost from the start is a big selling point for ClearCloud, Jones said.
“It’s like having a sports car and not having to pay for the petrol. I know how much I’m going to pay and I won’t be spending any extra,” he said.
The new venture was born out of conversations with customers. Originally, UKFast targeted small businesses paying between £700 and £800 per month, but over the last few years, it has started attracting larger clients that could pay hundreds of thousands of pounds a month.
Its roster now boasts the likes of Laterooms as well as huge public sector organisations like the Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office. These large customers are adopting a multi-cloud strategy where they host with ClearCloud, but they also have workloads in AWS and workloads in Azure.
A key element to ClearCloud’s future success is the appointment of former AWS global architect Matt Bibby as MD. Jones believes that his insight into AWS and understanding of the cloud market gives UKFast a competitive advantage.
“With Matt joining us, it has supported UKFast in another way that is quite unusual because we’ve had a few customers contemplating AWS and they were able to talk to Matt and spin up some clouds and then they realised this was definitely not for them and wanted to go back to UKFast,” he said.
“So we decided, yeah, we will take a couple of these bigger workloads on for some of our larger customers, and it turned out very positive,” Lawrence added.
Picture of Matt Bibby, MD of ClearCloud (left), with UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones/Credit: UKFast
Technology is a pain in the posterior. It waits until you’re at the very precipice of breaking point and then breaks. Hence, last week, in the midst of a deadline cataclysm, my phone decided to have a meltdown. Almost literally.
I first realised something was up when I felt a warm sensation in the trouser region. Given that I’m not quite yet of the age when ‘little accidents’ occur, I concluded it must be the phone in my pocket. And given that phone is a Samsung Galaxy, I got it out pretty sharpish.
I tried all the usual overheating remedies: killed all the open apps, restarted the phone, scoured the settings for battery hogs, but nothing was working. A deep dive into the settings revealed that ‘Google Services’ was thrashing my phone’s processor, but with literally no more information to go on, and a phone that was chomping through battery at a rate of a 10% every 30 minutes, I had no option but to thrash it and start afresh.
This gave me flashbacks to the days of Windows XP. Remember when you used to have to reinstall the operating system every year or two because your computer accumulated so much cruft it took 10 minutes to do anything? Well, smartphones have now reached that stage. Once in a while, you need to manually chuck out the rubbish they’re incapable of clearing out for themselves.
I wasn’t too concerned about factory-resetting my phone because I had two backups of all my data. Google keeps a backup of all Android handsets by default and Samsung practically insists on taking a backup of its own for good measure. The last time I moved handsets, the Google backup reinstalled all my old apps on the new phone within minutes. It was like moving home and finding the removal men had put all your furniture back in the right place and made you a cup of tea to boot.
Sadly, things didn’t go quite so smoothly this time. Google didn’t even offer to restore my data during the phone’s setup. And although Samsung stepped into the breach, offering to restore all my apps, photos, contacts and the like, attempts to restore from its backup where plagued with ‘server errors’. I could only restore parts of my data.
At first, the language in Chez Collins was a tad fruity. I was preparing to rip a branch off a nearby tree, go the full Basil Fawlty and give my obstinate Galaxy S7 a ‘damned good thrashing’. But after I’d calmed down and started reinstalling apps manually, I realised this wasn’t such a disaster after all.
Unlike the days of Windows XP, when all our data was stored on the device and a faulty backup was very bad news indeed, these days everything is stored in the cloud. Email, photos, social-media accounts, documents – all you need do is reinstall the app and enter your login details, and everything is basically back to how it was. We don’t look after our own data these days. We get Dropbox or Google or OneDrive or Facebook or whoever to take care of it for us.
My phone’s now running like new with battery life back to almost two days. That mini-meltdown might be the best thing that ever happened to it.
Image: Shutterstock
One of the most important but often missed steps in having a reliable infrastructure is disaster recovery (DR). Surprisingly, most companies decide either to not implement DR or to implement it halfway. Here, I intend to explore common terms and understandings in disaster recovery; how to leverage the cloud, different types, the plan and important considerations, as well as the economic impact.
DR can be implemented at regional or zone/domain level, depending on needs. I advocate and adopt having high availability (HA) at zone/domain level and DR at regional level; the cloud presents itself as a good alternative in terms of cost value for HA and DR – even more so with the plethora of providers that exist nowadays.
First, some widely used terms:
RTO – recovery time objective. Essentially how long it will take to have the DR site operational and ready to accept traffic.
RPO – recovery point objective. Essentially to which point in time in the past of primary site the secondary site will return. It is also an indicator of data loss; if data is synced every hour, site A crashes at 11:59am, site B has data until 11am, so worst case scenario is about an hour is lost and the secondary site will be operational as primary site was operational at 11am. That is RPO 1h. The smaller the better – alas the more costly the implementation will be.
Regional – how far is too far and how close is too close? When is close too close? Having primary in London region and secondary in Dublin region, an asteroid the size of Kent falling over Wales can make the solution unviable, but the likeliness of that happening is negligible.
Cost – it is always a factor and in this case, it can make a difference since regions such as Ashburn (USA) are usually (significantly) cheaper than regions in Europe. Other than these main reasons, having a secondary site close to primary is priceless. Now, can it be too far? It depends. If the nature of the business depends on milisecond transactions, then analysts and customers in Bangalore cannot use a site in Phoenix. If it does not, the savings of having a secondary site (temporarily) in a different region are worth it. Also, it is not something permanent – the system is in a degraded state.
An alternative approach is having three DR sites – a primary site with a given RTO/RPO in case it is needed, and a secondary site in the form of pilot light only.
In some circles DR is covered on a hot/cold/warm approach. I usually prefer these terms in high availability architectures, although I have seen DR sites referred to as warm. A hot site is usually a site that is up and running and to which I can failover immediately. That is for me something I would relate to HA as mentioned, however a warm site can be a site that has the resources, and only the critical part is running or ready to run. It may take a few minutes until things are in order and can failover into that DR site.
A cold standby is one that, although it receives updates, they are not necessarily frequent, meaning that failing over may mean that the RPO is much larger than desired, and of course, the RTO and RPO are usually numbers bound to the SLA, so they need to be well thought and taken care of.
DR at zone/domain level is a difficult decision for different reasons; availability zones consist of sites within a region with independent network, power, cooling, and so on i.e. isolated from each other. One or more data centres comprise a zone and one or more zones (usually three) comprise a region. Zones are used frequently for high availability. Network connectivity between zones is usually very low latency – in the order of a few hundred microseconds – and transfer rate is of such orders of magnitude that RPOs can be made almost obsolete, since data is replicated everywhere in an instant.
As sometimes HA within zones is a luxury, a DR solution can be necessary within the zones. In this case, it is usually an active/passive configuration, meaning the secondary site is stopped.
It is a given that the economic impact is a big factor regarding RTO, RPO, compliance, security, and GDPR as well. It is not necessarily true that the more responsive the secondary site is, the more expensive it is as well. It will depend on the architecture, how it is implemented, and how it is carried on when needed. Basically, the economic impact will be given by the amount of information kept in different sites, not so much by the size of the infrastructure, nor the replication of that information; that which can be automated, and nowadays done with enough frequency as to almost have the same data in two or more regions at any given moment.
Also, as long as the infrastructure is stopped, it is possible to resume operations in minutes without a large impact. Of course, this will depend on the cloud provider. Some providers will charge even for stopped VMs or stopped BMs, depending on the shape/family – for instance Oracle Cloud will continue billing if the instance stopped uses NVMe and SSD, meaning any Dense/HighIO machine – so beware of these details.
Within the economic impact is also the automation. It can be automated, semi-automated, or no automation. For the most part, in DR cases I rather prefer semi-automated on a two-man rule fashion. What this means is even when everything indicates there is a massive outage that requires DR, it will take more than one person to say ‘go’ on the failover, and more than one person to actually activate the processes involved. The reason being: once the DR process is started, going back before completion can render a nightmare.
Although it is strange to see pilot light within economic impact, there is a reason for it; pilot light allows a DR site with the minimum of infrastructure. Although a data replica must exist, the DR site needs only one or two VMs, and those VMs, when needed, will take care of spawning the necessary resources. As an engineer, I sometimes steer towards pilot light with an orchestration tool, such as Terraform.
Having a virtual machine online that contains all the IaaC (infrastructure as code) files necessary to spin up an entire infrastructure is convenient, and usually it is a matter of a few minutes until the last version of the infrastructure is back and running, connected to all the necessary block devices. Remember, nowadays, it is possible to even handle load balancers with IaaC, so there are no boundaries to this.
This is a critical part, not only because it describes the processes that will become active when the failover is a reality, but also because all the stakeholders have a part in the plan and all of them must know what to do when it is time to execute it. The plan must be of course not only written and forgotten, but tested, not only once, but in a continuous improvement manner.
Anything and everything necessary to measure the efficacy and efficiency of it. It is adequate to test the plan with and without the stakeholders aware, in order to see how they will behave in a real situation – and it is also advisable to repeat every six months, since infrastructure and processes can change.
Sometimes, the plan does not cover going back to the primary site, and this is important, since the infrastructure is at the moment in a degraded state, it is necessary to bring the systems to the normal state so as to have DR again. Since going back to the normal state of things takes time as well, and all the data needs to be replicated back, this is something that needs to be done under a maintenance window, and surely all the customers will understand the need to do so; but just in case, when setting up SLO and SLA, bear in mind that this maintenance window may be necessary. It is possible to add them as a ‘fine print’, of which I am not a fan, or consider them within the calculations.
There are some considerations with regard to DR in different regions, specifically but not only for Europe, and these come in the form of data, security, compliance and GDPR. The new GDPR requires companies to have any personal data available in the event of any technical or physical incident, so DR is no more a wish list item – it is required. What this basically means is that under GDPR legislation, data held of a person must be available for deletion or freed up for transfer upon request. For those legally inclined, more information can be found in article 32 of GDPR. In case DR is found to be daunting, there are nowadays multiple vendors that offer DraaS as well.
Google is about to embark on building a massive subsea cable spanning the length of the Atlantic Ocean – from the French coast to Virginia Beach in the United States.
Claimed to be the first private transatlantic subsea cable, named ‘Dunant’ after the Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri Dunant, the latest addition to Google’s infrastructure network will aim to increase high-bandwidth ability, and create highly secure cloud connections between the US and Europe.
Google claims the new connection – which will support the growth of Google Cloud – will also serve its business customers by guaranteeing a degree of connectivity that will help them plan for the future.
Explaining the project in a blog post, Google’s strategic negotiator, Jayne Stowell, said the decision to build the cable privately, as opposed to purchasing capacity from an existing cable provider or building it through a consortium of partners, took several factors into account, including latency, capacity and guaranteed bandwidth for the lifetime of the cable.
Dunant follows Google’s plans to build another massive private cable spanning 10,000km between Los Angeles, California and Chile, dubbed Curie, one of three cables comprising a $30 billion push to expand its cloud network across the Nordics, Asia and the US.
Both Curie and Dunant originated in the success of relatively short pilot cables, dubbed Alpha and Beta as a nod to their software development process.
“Our investments in both private and consortium cables meet the same objectives: helping people and businesses can take advantage of all the cloud has to offer,” Stowell said.
“We’ll continue to look for more ways to improve and expand our network, and will share more on this work in the coming months.”
Google’s efforts to build a transatlantic cable follows the completion of a joint project by fellow tech giants Microsoft and Facebook in September last year, named Marea, that connected Spain with the east coast of the US.
The cable stretches more than approximately 6,600km, and weighs 4.65 million kg or, as Microsoft put it at the time, the equivalent of the weight of 34 blue whales.
Picture: Virginia Beach, US/Credit: Shutterstock
Twas the week before earnings, and all in the cloud, vendors announced new customers, and took off the shroud.
That's certainly the case with Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Major League Baseball (MLB) extending its partnership with the Seattle cloud giant for its machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning expertise.
MLB already runs various workloads, including its facts and figures base, Statcast, on AWS. The new initiatives aims to improve the experience for armchair fans as well as those in the stadia – the Amazon ML Solutions Lab is being utilised to beef up in-game statistics within broadcasts, including on MLB Network.
The system's success is such that MLB will utilise Amazon SageMaker, the company's product to build, train and deploy machine learning models, to be able to accurately predict the direction of the next pitch crunching statistics on the pitcher, batter and catcher, as well as the game situation.
On a more eyebrow-raising level, MLB also says it will also utilise SageMaker, as well as Amazon Comprehend, the natural language processing service, to "build a language model that would create analysis for live games in the tone and style of iconic announcers to capture that distinct broadcast essence baseball fans know and revere."
"Incorporating machine learning into our systems and practices is a great way to take understanding of the game to a whole new level for our fans and the 30 clubs," said Jason Gaedtke, MLB chief technology officer in a statement. "We chose AWS because of their strength, depth, and proven expertise in delivering machine learning services and are looking forward to working with the Amazon ML Solutions Lab on a number of exciting projects, including detecting and automating key events, as well as creating new opportunities to share never-before-seen metrics."
The baseball arbiter is not the only new or improved customer AWS has announced in recent weeks. 21st Century Fox has expanded its relationship with the company – again with machine learning and data analytics services at the forefront – for the 'vast majority' of its platforms and workloads. The media giant said it had reduced its data centre needs by half and moved more than 30 million assets – or 10 petabytes of data – to Amazon storage.
Earlier this month, Formula 1 selected AWS as its official cloud and machine learning provider, moving the majority of its infrastructure to Amazon from on-prem data centres, while earlier this week Walmart and Microsoft announced a major five year tie-up collaborating on moving hundreds of existing applications to cloud-native architectures.
This time next week all the major players will have reported their latest quarterly earnings. Watch this space for more – but for the time being the position is still one of dominance for AWS. With high levels of capex shoring them up, the growth of the hyperscalers continues, with Synergy Research describing the growth of the last two quarters as 'quite exceptional'.
With a steady stream of high value customers continuing to filter through, the next week's reports should be fascinating to explore.
This session will provide an introduction to Cloud driven quality and transformation and highlight the key features that comprise it. A perspective on the cloud transformation lifecycle, transformation levers, and transformation framework will be shared. At Cognizant, we have developed a transformation strategy to enable the migration of business critical workloads to cloud environments. The strategy encompasses a set of transformation levers across the cloud transformation lifecycle to enhance process quality, compliance with organizational policies and implementation of information security and data privacy best practices. These transformation levers cover core areas such as Cloud Assessment, Governance, Assurance, Security and Performance Management. The transformation framework presented during this session will guide corporate clients in the implementation of a successful cloud solution. Session participants will gain a deep understanding of the cloud lifecycle model, levers and framework that will enable an enterprise accelerate the digital transformation journey and reap the benefits of cloud computing.
Walmart and Microsoft have formed a strategic partnership that will see Microsoft’s Azure cloud services power Walmart’s digital transformation drive.
Azure becomes Walmart’s “preferred and strategic cloud provider” ahead of other large cloud players like Amazon Web Services (AWS). While the retailer hasn’t categorically shunned Amazon’s cloud service, Amazon has accused Walmart in the past of badmouthing its services to other tech suppliers.
Walmart has denied doing so, but said it has advised its suppliers to use Azure. This new partnership unites Amazon’s biggest rival in the cloud space with its closest competitor in the retail sphere, giving Microsoft another big name customer as it tries to close the gap on its cloud rival.
The strategic partnership builds upon the duo’s existing alliance, tagging on Azure’s machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data platform services to its current critical application and workload management implementation.
“Walmart’s commitment to technology is centered around creating incredibly convenient ways for customers to shop and empowering associates to do their best work,” said Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO.
“Walmart is a people-led, tech-empowered company, and we’re excited about what this technology partnership will bring for our customers and associates. Whether it’s combined with our agile cloud platform or leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to work smarter, we believe Microsoft will be a strong partner in driving our ability to innovate even further and faster.”
Microsoft will help Walmart hit its digital transformation goals, such as migrating its walmart.com and samsclub.com to Azure, developing new innovations to benefit customers and improving staff productivity and collaboration using Office 365, including Microsoft Workplace Analytics, Microsoft Stream, and Microsoft OneDrive.
“Walmart is a pioneering retailer, committed to empowering its employees and delivering the best experience for its customers wherever they are,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “The world’s leading companies run on our cloud, and I’m thrilled to partner with Walmart to accelerate their digital transformation with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.”
Picture: Shutterstock
Lori MacVittie is a subject matter expert on emerging technology responsible for outbound evangelism across F5’s entire product suite. MacVittie has extensive development and technical architecture experience in both high-tech and enterprise organizations, in addition to network and systems administration expertise. Prior to joining F5, MacVittie was an award-winning technology editor at Network Computing Magazine where she evaluated and tested application-focused technologies including app security and encryption-related solutions. She holds a B.S. in Information and Computing Science from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University, and is an O’Reilly author.
Walmart is making Microsoft its preferred cloud provider – with machine learning and artificial intelligence a key focus.
The two companies – both rivals of Amazon – have signed a five year strategic partnership deal with Walmart looking to utilise ‘the full range of Microsoft’s cloud solutions’, as the retailer put it.
A ‘significant portion’ of walmart.com and samsclub.com will be migrated to Azure, including its cloud-powered checkout, while Walmart and Microsoft engineers will collaborate on moving hundreds of existing applications to cloud-native architectures.
The press materials included an interesting paragraph focusing on Walmart’s culture and how Microsoft will play within it. “Walmart continues to foster a curious, collaborative, accountable, and agile culture to position the company for further growth,” the company notes. “To do that, it’s critical to have tools that encourage those skills and traits.
“Through this partnership, Walmart is investing in its people with a phased rollout of Microsoft 365 providing associates with the productivity tools to foster a culture of collaboration, creativity and communication,” the company added.
All very good – but it is interesting to look at this deal from the perspective of where Amazon sits. Last year, it was reported that Walmart had told technology companies and vendors that if they ran apps on Amazon Web Services (AWS), they would lose business with the retailer. AWS and Microsoft, of course, are major rivals in the cloud infrastructure space.
Writing for this publication last year, David Auslander – who since the article was written now works for Azure’s customer advisory team – argued Microsoft and Google were potentially the only clear winners from Walmart’s declaration of war on AWS. “Microsoft has recently reported steady gains in [public cloud] market share, and most of that gain has come by way of taking share away from AWS,” Auslander wrote. “While AWS is a key part of Amazon’s empire there is still much speculation about the larger effect of this move on either Amazon or Walmart.”
“Walmart is a pioneering retailer, committed to empowering its employees and delivering the best experience for its customers wherever they are,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a statement. “The world’s leading companies run on our cloud, and I’m thrilled to partner with Walmart to accelerate their digital transformation with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.”