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Take Your Business Sky High with .Cloud Domains

Cloud-friendly businesses will be able to show off their affinities with the launch of special new .cloud domains, which have gone on general sale. The new domains are already in hot demand, with businesses including Ubuntu, Weebly, Odin and ePages among the first to sign up from the 70 plus registrars selling them, including the likes of GoDaddy and 1&1.

The launch of .cloud domains first began back in November as part of the availability of a whole range of new web address options. The initial Priority Registration phase saw more than 2000 orders for .cloud domains and close to 200 domain names receiving multiple requests, which will now be assigned through auctions, with registrars offering domains for between $20 and $25. Hopefully they will not be exaggerated by price rises that have affected other areas of the web.

Back in November, Nominet, the company in charge of the .UK domain registry, announced that the wholesale price for .UK domains (including .uk, .co.uk, .org.uk and .me.uk addresses) will be rising from £2.50 per year to £3.75 per year from March 1 2016.

The increase is needed to combat rising administrative costs and help Nominet provide a ‘first-class service’ for owners of .UK domains.

Three Key trends defining the future of DevOps

DevOps is rapidly changing the face of IT and is becoming the new normal. As DevOps practices improve IT performance, it has become too late to go back to the old way of managing IT. While no one has a completely reliable crystal ball, three important trends are already underway and can be expected to continue over the next two to three years.

DevOps can create career opportunities—if you’re ready

What exactly does that mean? The resume of a DevOps practitioner should ideally demonstrate experience and knowledge of people, process, and technology skills—both coding and tool use. As might be expected, expertise in specific programming languages and tools is usually not a requirement. Smart and flexible people can always learn new tools and technical skills. The real trick is in finding people who truly understand what DevOps means and how to move an organization towards processes that support the core tenants of DevOps.

Larger companies will embrace DevOps—sooner than you think

According to Eberhard Wolff, the previous adoption pattern of agile development methods by large companies provides a reasonable template for how enterprises will approach DevOps adoption. Wolff describes that in 2000, Agile was the province of techy devotees—it was not on the management agenda. This is roughly where DevOps is today. By 2005, most developers and technical managers had bought into Agile—it was being implemented en masse.

Large enterprises—with hundreds or thousands of programmers and a rigid, established culture—have a much different problem. However, they also have models that they can emulate. Once small startups themselves, Web giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter are now running bigger datacenters than even the biggest enterprises. Execs at both tech vendors and non-tech corporations increasingly see those Web companies as bellwethers setting the standard for mainstream enterprise IT.

Open source tools will evolve to meet enterprise requirements

This pattern mirrors the evolution of Linux. Originally a geeks-only operating system, Linux has grown into a stable enterprise-grade product—still open source. Vendors such as Red Hat built huge businesses by adding the components required by enterprises—development platforms, technical support, consulting services—while working within the open source movement. We can expect similar models for open source tools for DevOps.

Horizontal and Vertical Scaling

Scalability is the capability of a system to expand from either existing configurations to handle increasing amount of load or by adding an extra hardware. There are mainly two types of scalabilities, horizontal and vertical. Horizontal scaling, is adding more servers to your application to spread the load. The simplest case of horizontal scaling may be to move your database onto a separate machine from your web server. Where as Vertical scaling is to add more RAM, more processors, more bandwidth, or more storage to your machine. Horizontal scaling can only be applied to applications built in layers that can run on separate machines. Horizontal scaling applies really well to on-demand cloud server architectures, such as Amazon’s EC2 hosting platform. Horizontal scaling can also facilitate redundancy – having each layer running on multiple servers means that if any single machine fails, your application keeps running. While Vertical scaling can be a quick and easy way to get your application’s level of service back up to standard. On the negative side, vertical scaling will only get you so far. Upgrading a single server beyond a certain level can become very expensive, and often involves downtime and comes with an upper limit. So what scaling strategy best suit your needs? It all comes down to the application it must be implemented on. There are many applications that can only scale vertically. They can only be run on a single server. You have a clear strategy choice with these applications! But, a well written application should scale horizontally very easily. An application that is designed to scale horizontally can also be scaled vertically. So your still left with an open choice. You can either weigh up the cost of vertically scaling with an extra bit of RAM vs horizontally adding a new server in your cluster.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

The terms High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are frequently heard and are used interchangeably. Which is why it is important to clarify the distinctions between the two in order for companies to understand the unique capabilities, the role of each and how they can be used most effectively within their organization. High Availability is a technology design that minimizes IT disruptions by providing IT continuity through redundant or fault-tolerant components. While Disaster Recovery is a pre-planned approach for re-establishing IT functions and their supporting components at an alternate facility when normal repair activities cannot recover them in a reasonable timeframe.

Can Disaster Recovery Include High Availability? Disaster recovery can, and it often does, include high availability in the technology design. This configuration often takes the form of implementing highly available clustered servers for an application within a production datacenter and having backup hardware in the recovery datacenter. Data from the production server is backed up or replicated to the recovery datacenter; systems are both protected from component failures at the production datacenter and can be recovered during a disaster at the recovery data center.

You may also come around end users chatting about adding a “business continuity disaster recovery” solution when they really intend to make a service highly available. More often than not elements of both high availability and disaster recovery are blended in the discussion. If you’re in the role of a service provider listening to requirements and asking for clarification regarding these questions it will help by identifying if geographic diversity is needed and how much down time can be tolerated before a system is restored. Through this you’ll know what to look forward to, and be set on the right path.

Web Server Farming: how do they work?

A server farm also referred to as server cluster, computer farm or ranch, is a group of computers acting as servers and housed together in a single location. A server farm works by streamlining internal processes by distributing the workload between the individual components of the farm and through which it expedites computing processes by harnessing the power of multiple servers. A Web server farm can be either , a website that has more than one server, or an ISP (Internet service provider) that provides web hosting services using multiple servers.

The farms rely on load-balancing software’s that can accomplish such tasks as tracking demand for processing power from different machines, prioritizing the tasks and scheduling and rescheduling them depending on priority and demand that users put on the network. When one server in the farm fails, another can step- in as a backup. Such as in a business network, a server farm or cluster might perform such services as providing centralized access control, file access, printer sharing, and backup for workstation users. The servers may have individual operating systems or a shared operating system and may also be set up to provide load balancing when there are many server requests. As for on the Internet, a Web server farm, or simply Web farm, may refer to a Web site that uses two or more servers to handle user requests. Typically, serving user requests for the files (pages) of a Web site can be handled by a single server. However, larger websites may require multiple servers.

This is why combining servers and processing power into a single entity has become and have been relatively common for many years in research and academic institutions. As of Today, more and more companies are utilizing server farms as a way of handling the enormous amount of computerization of tasks and services that they require through Web Server Farming.

Amazon IoT: The world of Cloud Computing

Internet of things, the word may seem to describe itself. IoT is a network of physical Objects or ‘Things’ embedded with Software’s, electronics, network connectivity, and sensors. It plays the role of collecting and exchanging data, allowing objects to be sensed and controlled remotely across existing network infrastructures. Therefore creating more opportunities for direct integration between the computer-based system and the physical world, and also resulting in economic benefit, improved efficiency, and accuracy. In recent news, Amazon.com has set aims on parlaying its cloud computing dominance into a big stake in the world of IoT. The e-commerce giant launched ‘AWS IoT’ this October, a new cloud computing service in its Amazon Web Services division. Amazon’s IoT, allows customers to build their own cloud apps to remotely control machinery, supply chains, and track inventory, and even handle thousands of other tasks. In a way Amazon is playing catch up with some of the already formed cloud players, as well as hosting smaller start-ups that have been offering cloud services tied up to development platforms for many years, a portion of these small players such as Electric Imp, Particle (formerly Spark Labs), Ayla Networks have been hosting their cloud offerings on AWS. If Amazon keeps their game up, they might find themselves competing with a key partner.

Usages of Proxy Servers

In computer networks, a proxy server is a server (a computer system or an application) that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resources available from a different server and the proxy server evaluates the request as a way to simplify and control its complexity. Proxies were invented to add structure and encapsulation to distributed systems. Today, most proxies are web proxies, facilitating access to content on the World Wide Web and providing anonymity. There are 3 main types of proxies: Forward proxy, open and reverse proxy. A forward proxy is the same one described above where the proxy server forwards the client’s request to the target server to establish a communication between the two. An open proxy is a type of forwarding proxy that is openly available to any Internet user. Most often, an open proxy is used by Internet users to conceal their IP address so that they remain anonymous during their web activity. Unlike a forwarding proxy where the client knows that it is connecting through a proxy, a reverse proxy appears to the client as an ordinary server. However, when the client requests resources from this server, it forwards those requests to the target server (actual server where the resources reside) so as to fetch back the requested resource and forward the same to the client. Here, the client is given an impression that it is connecting to the actual server, but in reality, there exists a reverse proxy residing between the client and the actual server. Reverse proxies are often used to reduce the load on the actual server by load balancing, to enhance security and to cache static content, so that they can be served faster to the client. Often big companies like Google which get a large number of hits maintain a reverse proxy to enhance the performance of their servers. It’s not a surprise that whenever you are connecting to google.com, you are only connecting to a reverse proxy that forwards your search queries to the actual servers to return the results back to you.

DNS Failover, Overcome your downtime!

As your business grows, it becomes more and more mission-critical, and any amount of downtime is damaging. You could potentially lose hundreds if not even thousands of dollars for every minute your site is down. Not to mention, it may also hurt your brand image and customers confidence. This is why firms and individuals today rely mostly on DNS failover. DNS Failover monitors your server and if unavailable for a certain period of time it will dynamically update your DNS records accordingly so that your domain name points to an available server instead. DNS Failover is essentially a two-step process. The first step involves actively monitoring the health of your servers. Monitoring is usually carried out by ping or ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) to verify that your HTTP server is functioning. The health of the servers can be assessed every few minutes, while more advanced services allow you to configure your monitoring time settings. In the second step, DNS records are dynamically updated in order to resolve traffic to a backup host in case the primary server is down. Once your primary server is back up and running, traffic is automatically directed towards its original IP address. Some of the reason why outages can and often do occur, happen to be because of: Hardware failures, Malicious attacks (DDoS, hackers), Scheduled maintenance and upgrades, man-made or even natural disasters. This is where DNS Failover helps prevent somewhat of downtime, allowing firms/individuals with time to fix and take care of the problems occurring. Though it may seem DNS Failover is the complete package, it does not come without limitations. In order for it to work, you need to have backup locations for your site and applications. Even if DNS records are quickly updated once an outage has been detected, ISPs need to update their DNS cache records, which is normally based on TTL (Time to Live). Until that occurs, some users will still be directed to the downed primary server.

Network latency

Network latency is the term used to indicate any kind of delay that happens in data communication over a network. Network connections in which small delays occur are called low-latency networks whereas network connections which suffers from long delays are called high-latency networks. High latency creates bottlenecks in any network communication. It prevents the data from taking full advantage of the network pipe and effectively decreases the communication bandwidth. The impact of latency on network bandwidth can be temporary or persistent based on the source of the delays. Both bandwidth and latency depend on more than your Internet connection – they are affected by your network hardware, the remote server’s location and connection, and the Internet routers between your computer and the server. The packets of data don’t travel through routers instantly. Each router a packet travels through introduces a delay of a few milliseconds, which can add up if the packet has to travel through more than a few routers to reach the other side of the world. However, some types of connections – like satellite Internet connections – have high latency even in the best conditions. It generally takes between 500 and 700ms for a packet to reach an Internet service provider over a satellite Internet connection. Latency isn’t just a problem for satellite Internet connections, however. You can probably browse a website hosted on another continent without noticing latency very much, but if you are in California and browsing a website with servers only located in Europe, the latency may be more noticeable. There is no doubt to it that latency is always with us; it’s just a matter of how significant it is. At low latencies, data should transfer almost instantaneously and we shouldn’t be able to notice a delay. As latencies increase, we begin to notice more of the delay.

What is Virtualization? Why go for it?

When you hear people talk about virtualization, they’re usually referring to server virtualization, which means a combination of software and hardware engineering that creates Virtual Machines (VMs) – an abstraction of the computer hardware that allows a single machine to act as if it were many machines. Each virtual machine can interact independently with other devices, applications, data and users as though it were a separate physical resource/unit. Why is Virtualization used? Virtualization is being used by a growing number of organizations to reduce power consumption and air conditioning needs and trim the building space and land requirements that have always been associated with server farm growth. Virtualization also provides high availability for critical applications and streamlines application deployment and migrations. Virtualization can also simplify IT operations and allow IT organizations to respond faster to changing business demands. Virtualization may not be a magic bullet for everything. While many solutions are great candidates for running virtually, applications that need a lot of memory, processing power or input/output may be best left on a dedicated server. For all of the upsides of virtualization isn’t magic, it can introduce some new challenges as well for firms to have to face. But in most cases, the pro’s of cost and efficiency advantages will outweigh most if not all the cons and virtualization will continue to grow and gain popularity in today’s world.

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