Advertorial One of the key factors to consider when evaluating an IT solution is concerned with how fast updates are brought to the market. Releasing an application is not enough. You need to work on it every day, add new features and services and simultaneously keep it running. Yet you can't just turn off the app, update it, and turn it on again. Your online store should be up and running while the guys wearing shabby knit sweaters are deploying your latest updates.

To make sure that the update implementation process remains unnoticed by users, you need to resort to special microservices, containers and the orchestration infrastructure. This is the definition of Kubernetes. With this solution, manual management of different versions, subversions, and parts of an application becomes unnecessary. This makes the system more powerful, reliable, stable, and expandable. Overall, it becomes easier to use.

How Kubernetes helps businesses:

Businesses profit from using Kubernetes as it helps them automate their work. Using Kubernetes significantly reduces the amount of money spent on hardware and human resources. It allows the project team to focus on their main task of website development rather than website administration. Here's how it works:

Kubernetes uses a virtual machine by G-Core Labs combined with a DevOps approach, thus helping businesses automate routine tasks. In this case, the application is launched and works at any stage in the same way as if it were launched and would work on the developer's local host.

"The economic, organizational and social consequences of the pandemic will continue stimulating digital innovations and cloud services", - believes Henrique Cecci, Senior Research Director at Gartner. This consulting company expects end users to spend more than $480 billion on public cloud services next year.

Public clouds simplify the work with Kubernetes significantly as they use modern infrastructure solutions such as API. This synergetic system makes it possible to distribute the workload within the cloud efficiently, thus enhancing the profit you get from your IT investments.

Here is how it works: imagine that you run a service with users in ten countries working with two clouds, with the main cloud being located in America and the backup - in Europe. In the past this was enough, but as new legal requirements have been introduced to one of the markets, you now need to store user data on the territory of the respective country.

In this case, you will most likely address one of the cloud providers - for example, G-Core Labs. As a result, you will get access to a virtual machine featuring a powerful CDN and other resources, which will allow you to deploy and manage containers most efficiently using Kubernetes. Thanks to a content delivery network with over 140 points of presence in 100 cities around the world, your servers with all the users' personal data will be located on the territory required by law.

Usually, businesses connect with a provider because they have to, yet it brings a positive effect in the end. After migration, the service clients in the desired region download files 22.5 times faster, while storage and download fees make up about the same sum that you previously paid for storage alone.

Kubernetes allows businesses to reduce their infrastructure costs and helps companies get the most of their IT investments. Migrating to a public cloud also brings businesses further bonuses. For example, in G-Core Labs, outbound traffic and the configuration of cluster nodes through the cloud control panel or via API are free of charge. You pay only for virtual machines, disks and load balancers.

Therefore, you will pay due attention to the four main sectors allowing you to save money - the cloud, the cluster, the main tools, and the company's culture. At the same time, you will also be able to reduce the amount of money spent on Kubernetes itself, while taking the full advantage of using this technology.

Automatic scaling provided by Kubernetes results in high availability and maximum application performance, which are both important for businesses. Now, when you need a new container for some service, you contact the provider and connect the new server to the cluster. Kubernetes automates this process. It uses an API request to order a virtual machine from a cloud provider, connects it to the cluster, and adds the required pod (container) with the required parameters.

This platform turns out to be very helpful in many other cases as well. Let's imagine that you've launched an application in Kubernetes and that its containers are already receiving some traffic. When the CPU load increases, the platform will notice this and will automatically increase the number of machines used in order to distribute the requests properly.

Using special metrics and tests allows the system to quickly identify damaged or unresponsive containers. Failed containers are created anew and get restarted on the same pod. This allows programmers to focus on development instead of doing routine administrative tasks.

Kubernetes allows developers to create production-like environments for automated testing. General application logs and Kubernetes app logs will help you detect problems and errors even faster.

Imagine that you've decided to completely redesign your cybersports video streaming app. The new layouts have already been internally tested by the team and have been sent to focus groups for trial. Everything seems to be fine. In your own cloud, everything works well. But what is it going to look like on production? To answer this question, you can resort to the so-called canary testing which implies a partial release of a certain service. While the overall check is still in progress, small amounts of live traffic are sent to the released application parts. The results are tracked and compared with the ideal, allowing you to make decisions concerning the app launch.

Such "traffic injections" remain unnoticed by the users because the containers are duplicated, and the users get redirected from one container to another. For orchestration purposes, you can use Kubernetes provided by G-Core Labs. The provider's virtual machines work with high-performance servers that have Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Ice Lake) of the 3rd generation. In April 2021, G-Core Labs became one of the world's first companies that started integrating such processors into their infrastructure.

Businesses should consider migrating to the Kubernetes platform in quite several cases:

Migrating to Kubernetes is necessary for companies that need to maintain their information systems online 24/7. This is exactly why using Kubernetes together with the cloud technologies offered by G-Core Labs is the ideal solution.

Sponsored by G-Core Labs

The rest is here:
How Kubernetes lowers costs and automates IT department work - The Register

Migrating to the cloud offers federal agencies huge advantages in performance and flexibility. Government services cant effectively scale or adopt new capabilities like big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and internet of things without migrating to the cloud. But government cloud adoption has empowered an old IT nemesis: shadow IT.

Shadow IT is the use of IT systems, devices, software, apps and services outside the supervision of an organizations approved IT systems. In the past, shadow IT was typically a business unit creating their own locally developed applications, or LDAs, because the office of the chief information officer engagement was judged too onerous. During my time in public service, I saw personnel surreptitiously use Microsoft Access to address an urgent data processing need that inadvertently turned into a mission-critical mission system. This was only discovered when Microsoft Access reached its scaling limits and then turned into an emergency project to transform it into a web-based application.

Building LDAs is even easier when using cloud services. This opportunity for shadow IT is exacerbated by government mandates to move to the cloud prior to the development of a governance structure that can monitor and manage such a move. Combine all this with the very human tendency of development teams to experiment with creating cloud resources and not clean up after themselves, and the result is more shadow IT and cloud sprawl.

Cloud sprawl is inefficient use of the cloud: over-provisioned, over-scheduled, underutilized or orphaned cloud assets. It often happens when development teams spin up new cloud resources, forget about them, then move on to the next urgent task. Even when cloud servers are terminated, the servers storage volumesin a sense virtual hard drivesare often left behind. This creates orphaned cloud resources.

Teams also size cloud resources too large based upon the legacy technical specifications coming from on-prem data centers, instead of starting small and using cloud elasticity for auto-scaling. This results in over-provisioned and underutilized resources. This cloud sprawl increases costs and often leads to overruns in government program budgets.

Cloud sprawl and the related lack of governance can also make agencies more vulnerable to data breaches. When development teams create cloud resources, they may not fully understand the impact of its related configurations, as was the case in the 2019 Capital One data breach that enabled access to sensitive records stored in Amazon Web Services S3 buckets. To mitigate the risk introduced by misconfigured cloud resources, agencies need to define cloud usage standards and implement ways to monitor compliance to those standards.

Effective implementation of AIOps is the answer to modern-day shadow IT and cloud sprawl. Heres the Gartner definition: AIOps combines big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection and causality determination.

One cloud-centric AIOps solution is robotic cloud automation, or RCA, a suite of AIOps capabilities that establishes governance guardrails and enforces usage standards across multiple cloud environments. For critical standards compliance issues, it can also remediate the non-compliance findings by bringing cloud resources back into the desired state configuration. This delivers significant cost savings and security improvements through automated monitoring, reporting and remediation of compliance issues.

For all enterprise cloud hosting teams, the first step to regaining control is to define your standards. When agencies are considering which standards to establish, they should embrace established industry standards. RCA is aligned with some of the most widely respected standards in the industry, including Center for Internet Security Benchmarks, NIST 800-53 and AWS Foundational Security Best Practices. These provide baseline standards to start from, including hundreds of configuration guidelines to safeguard cloud environments against todays evolving cyber threats.

As mentioned above, for many agencies the genie is already out of the bottle. Cloud adoption preceded a management structure, and teams have already created the cloud sprawl and violated security best practices. In such cases, RCA deployment follows a predictable iterative implementation pattern by first enabling monitoring and reporting to understand the depth and breadth of the compliance challenges. Then agencies need to drive effective communication and change management strategy that engages the cloud users, to adopt the new cloud standards and iteratively drive improved compliance.

Once fully compliant with a standard, RCA can enable automated remediation, which locks-in future compliance by maintaining the desired state configuration of cloud resources in perpetuity. For example, for every new server spun up in the cloud, RCA evaluates compliance to three core configurations: proper tagging, encryption and standardized security group usage. If the server fails any of these tests it is automatically terminated. Cloud sprawl is nipped in the bud. Its truly governance as code.

RCA is a powerful enforcement tool for any CIO managing a multitenant cloud environment. Yet critically, its not enforcement in the old, top-down model of the past. RCA provides AIOps that enable teams to own more of the security responsibility because a cloud hygiene baseline is baked into the system. Agencies can save millions by embracing AIOps, shutting down existing cloud sprawl, and preventing it from happening again in the future.

Gone are the days when one central IT team could support 20, 40, 100 separate development groups. It simply isnt possible due to the complexity of cloud service offerings, even if government agencies had the budget and the talent pool to attempt it.

I do understand the lingering appeal of the do it ourselves approach. I remember 10 years ago wondering if government could truly trust the big cloud service providers to support agency infrastructure and mission. That question has been definitively answered: yes. The cloud provides incredible capabilities to agencies we couldnt imagine a decade ago. For example, the CSPs have perfected automated database failover in their managed database products that enable reliable and consistent failover in minutes.

Long gone are the days of engineering database synchronization and manual failovers. Now RCA enables AIOps for government to eliminate shadow IT, cloud sprawl and securely explore the potential of the cloud.

Aaron Kilinski is co-owner and chief technology officerof Simple Technology Solutions.

Read the original post:
What Agencies Need to Do to Combat Shadow IT Driven by Cloud Sprawl - Nextgov

Hetzner Cloud products in Nuremberg and Falkenstein run on servers in our own Hetzner data center parks in Germany.

A video-monitored, high-security perimeter surrounding the entire data center park and access control systems guaranty the highest security level.

We operate all of our data centers in accordance with strict European data protection regulations. Our data center parks in Nuremberg and Falkenstein are in the middle of Europe, giving our customers quick connections to Western, Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe.

Have a look at the Hetzner Online Data Center Park Falkenstein.

Hetzner Cloud products in Helsinki run on servers in our own Hetzner data center park in Tuusula, Finland. Tuusula is just a 30-minute drive from central Helsinki.

A video-monitored, high-security perimeter surrounding the entire data center park and access control systems guaranty the highest security level.

We operate all of our data centers in accordance with strict European data protection regulations. Our data center park in Helsinki is in the north of Europe, and is a great addition to our customers quick connections to Western, Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe.

Hetzner Cloud products in Ashburn run on our own Hetzner servers in the data center park of a third party in the USA. The location is about a 45-minute drive from the US capital Washington, D.C. and is the first Hetzner Cloud location outside of Europe.

Data security is our top priority. For this reason, we are the only ones in control over the usage of our Hetzner servers in the data center in Ashburn.

We host our cloud instances in our own data centers in Germany and in Finland. In Ashburn, Virginia (USA), we also provide AMD-based cloud servers and cloud features. The Ashburn location is in a region nicknamed "Data Center Alley", which is one of the most highly trafficked regions in North America, making our proximity to it ideal.

Visit link:
Truly thrifty cloud hosting - Hetzner Online GmbH

Did you know that the storage space of the worlds first computer was just 225 kilobytes? While we take the copious amounts of storage space on our computers and smartphones for granted these days, it is important to be curious about the Cloud, which is the future for storage devices, applications, and public and private sectors. In this article, lets look at what the Cloud is and how its enabling us to shape a better future.

Before you take it in a literal sense, no, the Cloud storage is not actually stored in huge masses of water droplets suspended in our atmosphere. The Cloud works because your data is stored on servers across continents, and you can access that data using the Internet. The Cloud has many advantages over a traditional data storage infrastructure. Accessibility, Savings, and Scalability are three of the most fundamental features of the Cloud.

Having physical servers and maintaining them is challenging, and thats when the Cloud helps immensely. Its more cost-effective since you wont need to buy hardware, and its also good for the environment and savings as the electricity required to run the servers is also saved. Not to mention, it also saves a lot of time.

Its highly scalable, meaning if your firm needs more storage space, youre only a few clicks away from upgrading the storage, which is again better than having to upgrade physical servers, which is largely time-consuming and involves a lot of capital as well as manpower. Its also accessible from anywhere.

Bonus info: Imagine that youve finally struck a great deal with an organization thatd require you to share some of your companies files with them and vice versa. Cloud makes collaboration much easier and more efficient.

Last and one of the most crucial things, your applications or data on the Cloud will be accessible 247 throughout the year. If you have an application running on the Cloud, the app can be distributed across multiple servers around the globe. Hence, if one of the servers goes non-functional, the other server will act as a backup.

Some of the famous firms that provide Cloud storage and services are Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (Google Cloud Platform). Of course, there are many other companies, but these are by far the most popular ones.

Theres a lot more to the Cloud than what meets the eye, but these are the things you need to know to get started with the same. Got any questions or suggestions? Drop them in the comments section below.

See the original post here:
What Is The Cloud And Where Is It Used? - Fossbytes

APPLE has built in a genius feature into your iPhone Photos app.

You can find any photo in your camera roll in seconds, if you know how.

2

2

It's the Search function, which uses powerful computer image analysis to work out what's going on in your photos.

So you can search for specific terms like "lake", "dog" or "cheese".

And just as if you were searching on Google Images, you'll be able to find relevant photos in your own reel.

If you've had an iPhone for a while, you likely have thousands or even tens of thousands of photos.

So searching through these manually can be an absolute nightmare.

Instead, just try searching for a key term in the app to narrow it down.

Latest

Apple has built dedicated machine learning into the Photos app to recognise scenes and objects.

You can even search for specific events, like a concert that you went to.

"Photos for iOS can use the time and location of your photos along with online event listings to find matching photos," Apple explained.

"It's also possible to search by location.

So you can enter a place name like London to track photos of your trip to the UK capital.

First, make sure you're updated to the latest version of iOS.

To do this, go into Settings > General > Software Update.

Then open the Photos app it's like flower petals made from the colours of the rainbow.

Tap the big Search button in the bottom right-hand corner of the app the one with the magnifying glass logo.

Then at the top, use the search bar to type in something you're looking for.

You can search for a type of object or scene, a place or time, or even a person's name (if they're assigned in your Photos ap).

And don't start to panic that Apple is snooping on your photos.

All of the processing to make this work happens on your iPhone.

So your image data isn't being sent up to Apple's cloud servers to be analysed for the search function.

"When you search your photos, all of the face recognition and scene and object detection are done completely on your device," said Apple.

"Apple harnesses machine learning to enhance your experience and your privacy.

"We've used it to enable image and scene recognition in Photos, and more, without requiring your data to leave your device."

Best Phone and Gadget tips and hacks

Looking for tips and hacks for your phone? Want to find those secret features within social media apps? We have you covered...

In other news, Google Chrome users have beenurged to delete their browser.

Facebookrecently rebranded to Meta.

Check out thebest iPhone 13 dealsin October 2021.

And take a look at yourhidden Facebook rejection folder.

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

See the rest here:
Your iPhones best trick is tucked away inside Photos app do you know it?... - The Sun