Can OpenStack Beat AWS in Price

This is a liveblog of the session titled “Can OpenStack Beat AWS in Price: The Trilogy”. The presenters are Rico Lin, Bruno Lago, and Jean-Daniel Bonnetot. The “trilogy” refers to the third iteration of this presentation; each time the comparison has been done in a different geographical region (first in Europe, then in North America, and finally here in Asia-Pacific).

Lago starts the presentation with an explanation of the session, and each of the presenters introduce themselves, their companies, and their backgrounds. In this particular case, the presenters are representing Catalyst (runs Catalyst Cloud in New Zealand), OVH, and EasyStack—all three are OpenStack-powered public cloud offerings.

Lago explains that they’ll cover three common OpenStack scenarios:

  • Private cloud
  • Managed private cloud
  • OpenStack-powered public cloud

Lin takes point to talk a bit about price differences in different geographical regions. Focusing on AWS, Lin points out that AWS services are about 8% higher in Europe than in North America. Moving to APAC, AWS services are about 29% higher than in North America. With this 29% price increase, I can see where OpenStack might be much more competitive in APAC than in North America (and this, in turn, may explain why OpenStack seems much Continue reading

The Internet, Homemade

The following post originally appeared on the APNIC blog.

The Internet can enhance social inclusion and participation and can contribute to economic development. Therefore, it should be a commodity for every citizen, but, as RFC3271 says, ‘it will only be such if we make it so.’

Internet infrastructure and services do not even reach 50% of the global population. The three main issues affecting Internet growth are: not everyone wants or needs it, not everyone has access to it, and not everyone can provide it.

I respect people’s choices with the first issue since the Internet is not a natural thing that we need to sustain or protect ourselves. However, for many, they don’t want or need the Internet because there is a lack of locally relevant content and services or training on how to use it. Metaphorically speaking: Shall I eat the same fast food made far away when I like my local tasty food not offered here?

Without content and services adapted to my local taste and language, it may not be attractive or digestible. At the same time, local access and education are necessary primers to produce such relevant and meaningful content.

The second and third Continue reading

Widespread impact caused by Level 3 BGP route leak

For a little more than 90 minutes yesterday, internet service for millions of users in the U.S. and around the world slowed to a crawl.  Was this widespread service degradation caused by the latest botnet threat?  Not this time.  The cause was yet another BGP routing leak — a router misconfiguration directing internet traffic from its intended path to somewhere else.

While not a day goes by without a routing leak or misconfiguration of some sort on the internet, it is an entirely different matter when the error is committed by the largest telecommunications network in the world.

In this blog post, I’ll describe what happened in this routing leak and some of the impacts.  Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to completely remove the possibility of these occurring in the future.  As long as we have humans configuring routers, mistakes will take place.

What happened?

At 17:47:05 UTC yesterday (6 November 2017), Level 3 (AS3356) began globally announcing thousands of BGP routes that had Continue reading

Lessons Learnt from Running a Container-Native Cloud

This is a liveblog of the session titled “Lessons Learnt from Running a Container-Native Cloud,” led by Xu Wang. Wang is the CTO and co-founder of Hyper.sh, a company that has been working on leveraging hypervisor isolation for containers. This session claims to discuss some lessons learned from running a cloud leveraging this sort of technology.

Wang starts with a brief overview of Hyper.sh. The information for this session comes from running a Hypernetes (Hyper.sh plus Kubernetes)-based cloud for a year.

So, what is a “container-native” cloud? Wang provides some criteria:

  • A container is a first-class citizen in the cloud. This means container-level APIs and the ability to launch containers without a VM.
  • The cloud offers container-centric resources (floating IPs, security groups, etc.).
  • The cloud offers container-based services (load balancing, scheduled jobs, functions, etc.).
  • Billing is handled on a per-container level (not on a VM level).

To be honest, I don’t see how any cloud other than Hyper.sh’s own offering could meet these criteria; none of the major public cloud providers (Microsoft Azure, AWS, GCP) currently satisfy Wang’s requirements. A “standard” OpenStack installation doesn’t meet these requirements. This makes the session more like a Continue reading

Make Your Application Serverless

This is a liveblog from the last day of the OpenStack Summit in Sydney, Australia. The title of the session is “Make Your Application Serverless,” and discusses Qinling, a project for serverless (Functions-as-a-Service, or FaaS) architectures/applications on OpenStack. The presenters for the session are Lingxian Kong and Feilong Wang from Catalyst Cloud.

Kong provides a brief background on himself and his co-presenter (Wang), and explains that Catalyst Cloud is an OpenStack-based public cloud based in New Zealand. Both presenters are active technical contributors to OpenStack projects.

Kong quickly transitions into the core content of the presentation, which focuses on serverless computing and Qinling, a project for implementing serverless architectures on OpenStack. Kong points out that serverless computing doesn’t mean there are no servers, only that the servers (typically VMs) are hidden from view. Functions-as-a-Service, or FaaS, is a better term that Kong prefers. He next provides an example of how a FaaS architecture may benefit applications, and contrasts solutions like AutoScaling Groups (or the equivalent in OpenStack) with FaaS.

Some key characteristics of serverless, as summarized by Kong:

  • No need to think about servers
  • Run your code, not the whole application
  • Highly available and horizontally scalable
  • Stateless/ephemeral
  • Lightweight/single-purpose functions
  • Event-driven Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Why speeds and feeds don’t fix your data management problems

For a very long time, IT professionals have made storage investments based on a few key metrics – how fast data can be written to a storage media, and how fast it can be read back when an application needs that information, and of course, the reliability and cost of that system. The critical importance of storage performance led us all to fixate on latency and how to minimize it through intelligent architectures and new technologies.Given the popularity of flash memory in storage, the significance of latency is not about to fade away, but a number of other metrics are rapidly rising in importance to IT teams. Yes, cost has always been a factor in choosing a storage investment, but with Cloud and object storage gaining popularity, the price of storage per GB is more than a function of speed and capacity, but also the opportunity cost of having to power and manage that resource.  When evaluating whether to archive data on premises, or to send it offsite, IT professionals are now looking at a much wider definition of overall cost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why speeds and feeds don’t fix your data management problems

For a very long time, IT professionals have made storage investments based on a few key metrics – how fast data can be written to a storage media, and how fast it can be read back when an application needs that information, and of course, the reliability and cost of that system. The critical importance of storage performance led us all to fixate on latency and how to minimize it through intelligent architectures and new technologies.Given the popularity of flash memory in storage, the significance of latency is not about to fade away, but a number of other metrics are rapidly rising in importance to IT teams. Yes, cost has always been a factor in choosing a storage investment, but with Cloud and object storage gaining popularity, the price of storage per GB is more than a function of speed and capacity, but also the opportunity cost of having to power and manage that resource.  When evaluating whether to archive data on premises, or to send it offsite, IT professionals are now looking at a much wider definition of overall cost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Riverbed enhances its SD-WAN performance-monitoring platform

Digital transformation is on every IT and business leader’s radar today. The path to it, though, may not be simple. While many industry pundits like to call out the likes of Uber and AirBnb, those digital natives didn’t have to worry about disrupting an existing business.To help mainstream businesses make that jump to a digital organization, Riverbed launched two new solutions at its Disrupt customer event last week in New York City.Enhanced network performance management The first is a new version of its network and application performance management platform, SteelCentral, enabling IT staff to better understand digital experiences. This aligns with a new movement among the NPM/APM vendors to shift to digital experience management (DEM), providing visibility into customer or worker experience regardless of whether the infrastructure is on premises, in the public cloud or in a hybrid environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Riverbed enhances its SD-WAN performance-monitoring platform

Digital transformation is on every IT and business leader’s radar today. The path to it, though, may not be simple. While many industry pundits like to call out the likes of Uber and AirBnb, those digital natives didn’t have to worry about disrupting an existing business.To help mainstream businesses make that jump to a digital organization, Riverbed launched two new solutions at its Disrupt customer event last week in New York City.Enhanced network performance management The first is a new version of its network and application performance management platform, SteelCentral, enabling IT staff to better understand digital experiences. This aligns with a new movement among the NPM/APM vendors to shift to digital experience management (DEM), providing visibility into customer or worker experience regardless of whether the infrastructure is on premises, in the public cloud or in a hybrid environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Riverbed enhances its SD-WAN performance monitoring platform

Digital transformation is on every IT and business leader’s radar today. The path to it, though, may not be simple. While many industry pundits like to call out the likes of Uber and AirBnb, those digital natives didn’t have to worry about disrupting an existing business.To help mainstream businesses make that jump to a digital organization, Riverbed launched two new solutions at its Disrupt customer event last week in New York City.Enhanced network performance management The first is a new version of its network and application performance management platform, SteelCentral, enabling IT staff to better understand digital experiences. This aligns with a new movement among the NPM/APM vendors to shift to digital experience management (DEM), providing visibility into customer or worker experience regardless of whether the infrastructure is on premises, in the public cloud or in a hybrid environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Riverbed enhances its SD-WAN performance monitoring platform

Digital transformation is on every IT and business leader’s radar today. The path to it, though, may not be simple. While many industry pundits like to call out the likes of Uber and AirBnb, those digital natives didn’t have to worry about disrupting an existing business.To help mainstream businesses make that jump to a digital organization, Riverbed launched two new solutions at its Disrupt customer event last week in New York City.Enhanced network performance management The first is a new version of its network and application performance management platform, SteelCentral, enabling IT staff to better understand digital experiences. This aligns with a new movement among the NPM/APM vendors to shift to digital experience management (DEM), providing visibility into customer or worker experience regardless of whether the infrastructure is on premises, in the public cloud or in a hybrid environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon and Google make it easier to connect to the cloud

As more organizations look to enable hybrid cloud computing, a big question remains: How do I connect my network to the cloud? This week Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services each released new products that make that process easier.Google’s Dedicated Interconnect is now generally available Dedicated Interconnect is an important way for customers to connect to the public cloud. It allows organizations to connect their on-premises resources to a colocation facility and then that co-lo facility has a direct network connection to the public cloud. Public IaaS cloud providers like Google want to give their customers access to fast connections to their cloud, but they don’t want to connect to each individual customer’s site, so they’ve created this co-lo based Interconnect. Google runs the Interconnect and offers either a 99.9 or 99.99% service level agreement. Google is working with a handful of colocation vendors as the middle-man, including Equinix, Digital Realty and Infomart.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon and Google make it easier to connect to the cloud

As more organizations look to enable hybrid cloud computing, a big question remains: How do I connect my network to the cloud? This week Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services each released new products that make that process easier.Google’s Dedicated Interconnect is now generally available Dedicated Interconnect is an important way for customers to connect to the public cloud. It allows organizations to connect their on-premises resources to a colocation facility and then that co-lo facility has a direct network connection to the public cloud. Public IaaS cloud providers like Google want to give their customers access to fast connections to their cloud, but they don’t want to connect to each individual customer’s site, so they’ve created this co-lo based Interconnect. Google runs the Interconnect and offers either a 99.9 or 99.99% service level agreement. Google is working with a handful of colocation vendors as the middle-man, including Equinix, Digital Realty and Infomart.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is a Tunnel

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a… tunnel? In this video, I take on the age old question: what is a tunnel? Is it a protocol, or is it something else?

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IDG Contributor Network: How to solve the IoT data distribution dilemma

While the Internet of Things has enjoyed dizzying success when it comes to generating capital and public awareness for its furthered proliferation, several hurdles remain in its way. IoT-enthusiast familiar with its staggeringly quick development already know that the data distribution dilemma currently facing the IoT is perhaps its greatest obstacle towards future growth, yet few of them have solutions on how to go about solving this crisis.So, what exactly is the data distribution dilemma facing the IoT today, and what should governments, businesses, and private actors be doing to overcome this challenge? Solving the IoT’s data distribution nightmare will take serious investments and require new and better standards, but the cost of ignoring this growing predicament are too high to ignore.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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