5 tips for surviving a cloud outage
"Everything fails, all the time," so says Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels.
Amazon Web Services itself experienced a much publicized four-day service disruption last April, another outage in August and it had plenty of company from other cloud service companies last year. Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform in February had downtime problems due after the company failed to account for Leap Day, and despite improvements by cloud providers to minimize future outages, more outages will inevitably happen this year and beyond.
Here are steps experts say enterprise IT shops should take to avoid cloud outages from knocking them out:
1) With AWS, use multiple availability zones.
Amazon Web Services offers "availability zones" (AZ) in each of its regions and for each of its services. The company describes AZs as each running on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure. "They are physically separate, such that even extremely uncommon disasters such as fires, tornados or flooding would only affect a single Availability Zone." During last year's outage, about 45 percent of customers who used only a single AZ for the Relational Database Services were impacted, compared to less than 3 percent of customers who used a multi-AZ approach, AWS said in a post mortem report. After last year's outage the company made it easier for customers to use a multi-AZ approach by allowing common design and APIs to distribute instances across AZs. Read more...
Three incredible new smartphone accessories that are under $30
There is so much that can be done with our smartphones now that we basically never put them down. If we’re not checking in to something or watching a video, we’re surfing the web and/or making phone calls. So in between all that hard work we do with them, why not have a little fun as well? Welcome to the wonderful world of smartphone toys.
We’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on these devices after all, so I went in search of some things under $30 that are cool for just about any phone. Read more...
Steve Jobs was planning to create a real-life Willy Wonka tour of the Apple facilities
The new biography Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success contains a lot of interesting new facts about computer pioneer Steve Jobs. Sure, you may already know that the FBI had a massive file on the Apple CEO detailing his sub-par college grades and past use of LSD. But we're willing to guess you didn't know this (though perhaps by virtue of the LSD use, you could have inferred it): Steve Jobs was planning on giving away a Willy Wonka-style tour of the Apple facilities to whomever found a golden ticket inside the 1,000,000th iMac sold. Read more...
Man wants to attend an Apple event so bad he’s willing to change his name to do it
Have a ticket to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) this June 11 that you're just not going to be able to use? Well, there's a man in San Francisco who wants to take that ticket off your hands — a man so desperate to attend the event that he'll undergo a legal name change just to be able to use your ticket. Read more...
Smartphones fuel Samsung profit to record
A surge in Galaxy smartphone sales fueled earnings at Samsung Electronics to a record high in the first quarter, usually a tough season for the global consumer electronics industry, outshining handset rivals such as Nokia Corp.
Samsung sold more smartphones in the first three months of the year than Apple Inc. and raked in more than 70 percent of its operating profit from mobile businesses. Shares of Samsung Electronics Co. shot up nearly 3 percent.
Net profit nearly doubled from a year earlier to a record 5.05 trillion won ($4.46 billion) for the fiscal quarter ended March 31.
Operating profit also logged a record high: 5.85 trillion won, which was in line with the company's guidance provided earlier this month. Sales rose 22 percent from a year earlier to 45.3 trillion won. Read more...
House vote sets up Senate cybersecurity showdown
The House's solid bipartisan vote for a cybersecurity bill sends a message to the Senate: Now it's your turn to act.
Ignoring a White House veto threat, the House approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which would encourage companies and the federal government to share information collected on the Internet to help prevent electronic attacks from cybercriminals, foreign governments and terrorists.
The vote Thursday was 248-168, with 42 Democrats joining 206 Republicans in backing the measure. Read more...
Q&A Site ChaCha Cancels UK Expansion After Poor User Take-Up
Can a reasonably successful, U.S.-based mobile content brand find equal success for its English-language service in the UK? It’s a question that could have been asked on the Q&A service ChaCha, and unfortunately it looks like the company has figured out the answer the hard way.
ChaCha, which launched in the UK in September 2011, has now quietly shut down operations in the country after failing to find enough people to use the service to make it cost-effective. Read more...
Microsoft re-releases Office for Mac 2011 upgrade after fixing bugs
Microsoft yesterday re-released Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 2 (SP2) after fixing a bug that wormed into the original update.
Last Friday, three days after it first issued Office for Mac 2011 SP2, Microsoft yanked the upgrade from its automatic update service when it acknowledged a bug had corrupted the Outlook database on some machines.
In a post on the Office for Mac blog yesterday, Microsoft said the revised SP2 "fixes a number of issues," including the database corruption problem. Read more...
Apple welcomes Chomp to the company, notifies SEC and investors of share plan
Apple has alerted the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and investors of its recent acquisition of app search and discovery company Chomp, submitting a regulatory filing with the commission that lays out the share plan for the company.
The company has filed a Form S-8 with the SEC, which must be submitted when it issues stock or stock options to employees, registering 3,207 shares to Chomp as part of its equity incentive plan. The proposed maximum offering price per share stands at $29.02, resulting in a proposed maximum aggregate offering price of $93,067.14. Read more...
Google confirms its search business faces new investigation in Argentina and ongoing probe in Korea
Google has confirmed that its business practices are under investigation in South Korea and Argentina, according to a regulatory filing, reported by Bloomberg.
While the Korean investigation is ongoing, the probe Argentina is a new development, and the country’s anti-trust organisation is assessing issues around the use of paid-for ads on the search engine.
“The Argentinian Competition Commission notified us that they are conducting a preliminary inquiry into our search and search advertising services, and we are of course happy to answer their questions,” a spokesman told Bloomberg. Read more...