Articles on Datacenters

Cloud and Datacenter Bulletin - April 2019

Details: Published: Friday, 14 June 2019 16:13; Written by Riccardo Gallazzi

News from the AWS world
As every month, the world of Amazon Web Services gets new products and features. This month we'd like to inform you about a new class of S3 Storage - Glacier Deep Archive - designed for storing large amounts of data similar to the "usual" Glacier but at 75% of the price and available within 12 hours; the Single Sign-On service expands its coverage to new regions; Open Distro for Elasticsearch, as the name suggests, combines Elsticsearch, a distributed and document-oriented search and analysis engine used for real-time log analysis and monitoring and Kibana, an advanced data visualization system, making them available in the form of RPM packages and Docker containers (it is not a fork of the two projects: the contributions are pushed on the upstream channel); RedShift now includes an automatic concurrence scaling function in the event of activity bursts; Direct Connect is updated with a new console that allows you to have services in different Regions (excluding China) and access them from a single point; the SNS notification service now includes 5 new languages, including Italian; regarding containers, we point out that EKS (Elastic Container Services for Kubernetes) supports Windows Server workloads, although in tech preview mode. The new Deep Learning Containers are containers with pre-installed applications for programmed learning activities (TensorFlow, Apache MXNet and PyTorch ).

Cloud and Datacenter Bulletin - July 2018

Details: Published: Wednesday, 11 July 2018 10:56; Written by Riccardo Gallazzi

New versions of Nextcloud are available

Nextcloud is updated by releasing versions 13.0.3 and 12.0.8.

The improvements introduced by the new version include: support to host databases through IPv6, OAuth compatibility, better log system and prohibition management, better management of errors in Workflow and addition of links to privacy policy, always in a GDPR perspective as described in the GDPR Compliance Kit. The changelogs are available at this address.

The iOS client was also updated, which introduces total support with Apple mobile devices.

Please note that version 11 no longer has active support.

Cloud - Datacenter Bulletin - April 2018

Details: Published: Thursday, 12 April 2018 18:00; Written by Riccardo Gallazzi

Kontena joins the Open Container Initiative

Kontena joins the Open Container Initiative (OCI).
Kontena is an open-source solution that allows you to manage containers in production, in a manner similar to Kubernetes.
It includes capabilities of high-availability, affinity rules, health check, orchestration, on-demand volume creation, multi-host networking, multicast and hybrid cloud support, VPN access, Let's Encrypt secrets and certificates, role-based access control, load balancing, SSL termination, automatic scaling, support for Docker Compose, service discovery, monitoring and logging with support for FluentD and StatsD, CLI, shells and WebUI and stack and image register.

The Open Container Initiative is a project of the Linux Foundation launched in 2015 by Docker, CoreOS and other leaders in the container sector that aims to create open standards regarding container format and runtime. It includes members such as Docker, CoreOS, VMware, Red Hat, SUSE, Oracle, OpenStack, Intel, Mesosphere, Google, AWS and, indeed, Kontena.

Google Cloud: 96 vCPU instances and support for Windows containers

Google Cloud announces new instances with 96 vCPUs.
Instances can have up to 624GB of RAM and Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Skylake) with the AVX-512 instruction set and are available in the us-central1, northamerica-northeast1, us-east1, us-west1, europe-west1, europe-west4, and asia-east1, asia-south1 and asia-southeast1.

Furthermore, support for Windows containers (available via Docker) is announced by means of optimized VM images.

Spectre and Meltdown: a recap

Details: Published: Wednesday, 11 April 2018 14:41; Written by Riccardo Gallazzi

The first week of the new year was characterized by the appearance of two major flaws in processors, the so-called Meltdown and Spectre announced by Google ProjectZero in this post, which afflict most of computers and devices in use today. The impact has been outstanding in terms of media coverage, and the topic has been the subject of discussion not just among IT professionals.

Meltdown and Spectre briefly

Meltdown and Spectre are two distinct vulnerabilities that affect computer processors: not just servers, laptops and desktops but also micro-computers, specialized computers and IoT devices. They were discovered by four different research teams who reported them to CPU manufacturers, several months prior the publication of the news; but these vulnerabilities are not new, in fact they have existed for decades. No computer with a processor produced in the last 20 years is to be considered immune and safe; a dedicated tool for Linux and BSD is available and provides information on the system status, and a similar tool for Windows exists too.
We are not aware of known attacks: antivirus can detect the code responsible for an attack, but not the vulnerability itself.

Cloud - Datacenter Bulletin - January 2018

Details: Published: Monday, 29 January 2018 12:21; Written by Riccardo Gallazzi

HyTrust published its VMworld 2017 Cloud Adoption Survey
HyTrust, an IT company in the security sector, published a report on the enterprise cloud world made during last VMworld 2017.
323 companies were surveyed, and these are the results. 21% of them are concerned about GDPR and have a plan in place and 52% are not concerned about GDPR or are unaware of its relevance for their business and 27% are concerned about GDPR, yet have no plan in place.
Among the other results of the survey, although the hybrid cloud infrastructures are more and more used, 22% don’t use a public cloud, 44% don’t have an hybrid cloud and 28% entrust a single hybrid cloud vendor. The percentage of those who don’t use any form of encryption in a public cloud thankfully lowers from 28% of last year to 10% of this year. The biggest fears in terms of security are about uncontrolled or unmonitored access by admins (32%) and a malicious or accidental exposure of workload data (30%).
Containers are an appealing topic but it’s seldom used in production: just 12% of participants use it a production environment.