Zynga's IPO not so hot, we'll see how Zynga's data center build out goes in 2012

With all this bad news on the stock, it will be interesting if there is an affect on Zynga's aggressive data center capacity expansion.

I was going to write this post on Saturday, but waiting one more work day, Zynga is down another 5%.

Zynga stock falls again, down nearly 10 percent from IPO price

Zynga went IPO yesterday, and closed down 5% from its opening.  WSJ reports on the Zynga offering.

Zynga IPO Fizzles as Stock Falls 5%

By SHAYNDI RAICE And RANDALL SMITH

Zynga Inc. bombed on its first day of trading Friday, closing down 5% in a signal that the appetite for new issues of fast-growing technology companies may be waning.

The San Francisco social-game maker's shares finished trading at $9.50, a day after the company priced its initial public offering at $10 a share. Zynga opened at about $11 a share on the Nasdaq Stock Market, but fell below its IPO price within the first 10 minutes of trading.

Loggly suffers extended outage after AWS reboot shuts down their service

Loggly a cloud service  that provides as one of its services System Monitoring and Alerting.

Systems Monitoring & Alerting

Alerting on log events has never been so easy.  Alert Birds will help you eliminate problems before they start by allowing you to monitor for specific events and errors.  Create a better user experience and improve customer satisfaction through proactive monitoring and troubleshooting. Alert Birds are available to squawk & chirp when things go awry.

But, Loggly has suffered an extended outage that was caused by AWS rebooting 100% of their servers, but that was only half the time down.  The other half was due to not knowing the service was down.

Loggly's Outage for December 19th

Posted 19 Dec, 2011 by Kord Campbell

Sometimes there's just no other way to say  "we're down" than just admitting you screwed up and are down.  We're coming back up now, and in theory by the time this is read, we'll be serving the app again normally.  There will be a good amount of time until we can rebuild the indexes for historic data of our paid customers. This is our largest outage to date, and I'm not at all proud of it.

...

Loggly uses a variety of monitoring mechanisms to ensure our services are healthy.  These include, but are not limited to, extensive monitoring with Nagios, external monitors like Zerigo, and using a slew of our own API calls for monitoring for errors in our logs.  When the mass reboot occurred we failed to alert because a) our monitoring server was rebooted and failed to complete the boot cycle, b) the external monitors were only set to test for pings and established connections to syslog and http (more about that in a moment), and c) the custom API calls using us were no longer running because we were down.

Combined, these failures effectively  prevented us from noticing we were down.  This in of itself is was the cause of at least half our down time, and to me, the most unacceptable part of this whole situation.

The other half of the outage was caused by Loggly not testing for a 100% reboot of all machines.

The Human Element

The other cause to our failures is what some of you on Twitter are calling "a failure to architect for the cloud".  I would refine that a bit to say "a failure to architect for a bunch of guys randomly rebooting 100% of your boxes".  A reboot of all boxes has never been tested at Loggly before.  It's a test we've failed completely as of today.  We've been told by Amazon they actually had to work hard at rebooting a few of our instances, and one scrappy little box actually survived their reboot wrath.

One of the lessons that Loggly learned that some of my SW buddies and I are using in a SW design is to add more than one monitoring solution.

The second step is to ensure more robust external monitoring.  With multiple deployments, this issue becomes less of an issue, but clearly we need more reliable checks than what we rely on with Zerigo or other services.  Sorry, but simple HTTP checks, pings and established connections to a box do not guarantee it's up!

Big Data, Hadoop, Dell, and Splunk, where is the connection?

I have been busy working on a Big Data paper, so my blogging is not as often.  Getting into Big Data technical details has been easy, and then it hit me that Big Data in data centers and IT has a lot in common with monitoring and management systems.  Collecting gigabytes or even terabytes of data a day to monitor operations is a big data center problem.

Researching the Big Data topic it was interesting to see the intersection of Dell, Hadoop, and Splunk in Big Data.

Barton George has a post on Splunk.

Hadoop World: Talking to Splunk’s Co-founder 2 Votes Last but not least in the 10 interviews I conducted while at Hadoop World is my talk with Splunk‘s CTO and co-founder Erik Swan. If you’re not familiar with Splunk think of it as a search engine for machine data, allowing you to monitor and analyze what goes on in your systems. To learn more, listen to what Erik has to say:

Barton references a GigaOm post on Splunk and Hadoop.

Splunk connects with Hadoop to master machine data

By Derrick Harris Nov. 8, 2011, 6:49am PT No Comments

• in Share42

Splunk has integrated its flagship product with Apache Hadoop to enable large-scale batch analytics on top of Splunk’s existing sweet spot around real-time search, analysis and visualization of server logsand other machine-generated data. Splunk has long had to answer questionsabout why anyone should use its product over Hadoop, and the new integration not only addresses those concerns but actually opens the door for hybrid environments.

Dell's Barton George is interview himself as well at Hadoop World.

Hadoop World: What Dell is up to with Big Data, Open Source and Developers

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Besides interviewing a bunch of people at Hadoop World, I also got a chance to sit on the other side of the camera.  On the first day of the conference I got a slot on SiliconANGLE’s the Cube and was interviewed by Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon and John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.

-> Check out the video here.

DatacenterKnowledge posts Poll on whether Renewable Energy is a factor now that Facebook and Greenpeace collaborate

DatacenterKnowledge has a poll post.

Poll: Green Power and Data Center Site Selection

• By: Rich Miller
• December 16th, 2011

Facebook said yesterday that its data center site location policy “now states a preference for access to clean and renewable energy.” The announcement ended a long-running feud between the social network and the environmental group Greenpeace, which had targeted Facebook in a social media and PR campaign because the company’s two data centers in Oregon and North Carolina each relied upon utility power that originated primarily from coal.

You find out the results when you take the poll.  I put my vote in and saw I was the first to vote. so, now 100% say renewable energy is a factor. :-)  But, of course I am biased thinking Green Data Centers are important.  Is there such a thing as an unbiased opinion?

Banning Cellphone use while driving, where is the data and who will fight the ban

WSJ has a post on the NHTSA's call to ban cellphone use while driving.

Next Up in the Distracted Driving Debate: Where’s the Data?

The National Transportation Safety Board’s call Tuesday to ban all cellphone use in cars will put a spotlight on the conflicting data about how common and dangerous such behavior is.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration earlier this month released the results of the “National Occupant Protection Use Survey” – conducted by researchers who watched drivers at intersections. This study concluded that about 5% of drivers were holding cell phones behind the wheel. That study also found that 0.9% of drivers were manipulating a hand-held device – a proxy for texting.

Part of this discussion is where the data is to support the conclusions.

The Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a separate study earlier this month – this one a telephone survey conducted in November and December of 2010 – that tracks closer to State Farm’s findings. http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/traffic_tech/tt407.pdf This survey found that 80% of men and 73% of women will answer calls while driving, while 43% of men and 39% of women said they would make calls on the road. The NHTSA said its survey had 6,002 respondents.

Both the State Farm and NHTSA telephone use survey found that respondents were more tolerant of talking while driving than texting. In the State Farm survey, 74% said they strongly agreed with the idea of banning texting while driving, but only 36% strongly agreed with the notion of a ban on talking on the phone.

And, who do you think would argue most against this data?  Who has the most to lose if this goes into law?  The cell phone carriers.  You can imagine the carrier lobbyists in Washington maneuvering.

Maybe we should ban talking while driving as that is distracting.  Or ban kids from being in the car.

I wonder how many accidents are caused by children in the car vs. talking on the phone?  Of course this is silly, but if you are overly obsessed with making driving safer, you come up with silly ideas.