Time can support credibility, Google vs. Microsoft outage reports

One of my friends has made the switch from Google to Microsoft.  Well actually I have many friends who have made the switch.  There are also many who have Google to go to Microsoft.  One friend who made who knows how Microsoft works and Google made the point on how the outage reporting posts from the companies differ. 

Microsoft had an Outlook outage with this post on the event.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, some of our Office 365 customers hosted in our North America datacenters experienced unrelated service issues with our Lync Online and Exchange Online services. First, I want to apologize on behalf of the Office 365 team for the impact and inconvenience this has caused. Email and real-time communications are critical to your business, and my team and I fully recognize our accountability and responsibility as your partner and service provider.

Google reported on one of its outages with this.

Earlier today, most Google users who use logged-in services like Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents found they were unable to access those services for approximately 25 minutes. For about 10 percent of users, the problem persisted for as much as 30 minutes longer. Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies—we strive to make all of Google’s services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today.

One way to look at the contrast is Google is specific with the time of 25 minutes, 30 minutes longer.

Microsoft says they have full understanding of the issues, but doesn’t provide the specifics on time.

We have a full understanding of the issues, and the root causes of both the Exchange Online and Lync Online services have already been fixed.

Google had another outage where specifics are reported down to the minute.

Issue Summary

From 6:26 PM to 7:58 PM PT, requests to most Google APIs resulted in 500 error response messages. Google applications that rely on these APIs also returned errors or had reduced functionality. At its peak, the issue affected 100% of traffic to this API infrastructure. Users could continue to access certain APIs that run on separate infrastructures. The root cause of this outage was an invalid configuration change that exposed a bug in a widely used internal library.

Timeline (all times Pacific Time)

• 6:19 PM: Configuration push begins
• 6:26 PM: Outage begins
• 6:26 PM: Pagers alerted teams
• 6:54 PM: Failed configuration change rollback
• 7:15 PM: Successful configuration change rollback
• 7:19 PM: Server restarts begin
• 7:58 PM: 100% of traffic back online

Outages are painful for all companies.  

Suggestion for when you report your own outage if you include the time of events, then your communication can be viewed as more credible.  Using terms like “some” or “brief” doesn’t work when you are the one who is affected by the outage and brief would mean a minute of outage.

Dockers beats VMware when you have similar workloads - 20 to 80% lighter -> 25% to 500% more performance?

Gigaom’s Jonathan Vanian interviews Docker’s CEO Ben Golub and posts on June 27, 2014.  I had a chance to talk to Jonathan before he interviewed Ben and I had a simple question.  If you have a 100 servers running workloads that would fit in a Dockers environment how much better is Dockers vs. a typical virtualized environment?    Here is what Jonathan wrote up.

If an organization has 100 applications that are only slightly different from each other, it doesn’t have to spin up 100 virtual machines to house each application, thus saving a ton of overhead that comes with spinning up so many operating systems.

Depending on the situation, using containers can result in workloads that are 20 to 80 percent lighter than an equivalent workload using only virtual machines, according to Golub.

How can Docker be smaller than a VM?  Microsoft in its support for Docker writes an explanation.

By making Docker containers significantly smaller than traditional VMs, they can be booted/restarted more quickly, more of them can run on a single host and they are considerably more portable. Furthermore, when capturing a new Docker container, the tooling only needs to capture the differences between the original and the new container. This makes it possible to rationalize Docker as a kind of version control system for disk images.

One simple assumption you can make is if something is lighter with its size there is a 1-1 relationship between being lighter means you should be able to be more efficient.  If you are 20% lighter, than you can do 25% more work with the same capacity.  If you are at the extreme of 80% lighter, then you can do 500% more work with the same capacity of server hardware.  

As time goes on we’ll hopefully see real world results of how much more efficient Docker is than a hypervisor virtualization strategy.

Disclosure: I work for Gigaom Research as a part-time freelance analyst.

Kiva Systems looks like it is for Internal Amazon use

I have run into a few people who were pumped up to use Kiva Systems in areas other than warehousing.  But, after an inquiry for information went unanswered and no ability to contact a sales person I found it is highly probably that Kiva Systems is for internal Amazon use for new growth and the installed base is in maintenance mode.  The Boston Globe reported on the current state of things at Kiva System back in Dec 2013.

But the impression is that Kiva’s interest in selling to non-Amazon customers has waned. The company hasn’t announced a new customer since it became part of Amazon, and much of its sales staff has departed. The company continues to hire — but in departments like engineering and manufacturing, not sales or marketing. It could be that satisfying Amazon’s appetite for Kiva bots is consuming most of the company’s resources.

Many of amazon.com competitors have walked into the trap of being single sourced, a no-no for anyone in supply chain management.

But as Kiva ramps up production of its robotic systems for its new parent — the number on order from Amazon may be as high as 18,000, according to one trade publication, and could be higher according to my sources — the big question is what happens to Kiva’s early customers. Major retailers such asStaples, Walgreens, Gap, Office Depot, and Crate & Barrel installed Kiva’s technology in their warehouses. And now they all must grapple not only with possible shortages of Kiva bots, but also whether they want to do business with a direct competitor.

So, if you were thinking of using Kiva Systems you may be best looking for other options, like the above installed base.

I did talk to one Kiva customer, only on the condition that I not use his name or company. He said Amazon would continue to support the systems he’d installed for several years, but added, “I’m planning now for life without Kiva.”

Data Center spying with Drones in NC is about to illegal, can you shoot a spy drone?

There have been helicopter views of Apple data centers in Maiden NC that have gone viral.  Facebook and Google are also in NC.  A helicopter can only get so close before there are restrictions and safety issues.  If you were thinking you could take a drone with you and throw it up over the fence to spy on a data center, don’t be surprised if it gets shot down by a drone hunter.

Gigaom’s Barb Darrow posts on the new NC legislation on drones being illegal for hunting or fishing.

Going huntin’ or fishin’ in North Carolina? Leave your drone at home

by Barb Darrow

2 HOURS AGO

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photo: Nicolas Halftermeyer

SUMMARY:

North Carolina legislators are poised to approve a law that restricts the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to help hunters and fishermen find their prey.

If North Carolinians want to bag some game they’ll have to do so the old fashioned way, without help from an unmanned aerial vehicle (a.k.a., a drone) if new legislation passes in the state legislature. The state’s lower house recently unanimously passeda bill outlawing the use of drones for hunting and fishing and the state Senate is about to vote on it.

What I am curious is whether it is legal to shoot a drone since they are illegal for hunting or fishing?  How do you document an infraction?

Disclosure: I do freelance for gigaom research and know barb darrow.

Google, Microsoft and others form Consortium for 25/50 Gbps Ethernet Switches in Data Centers

LightReading reports on Google, Microsoft and others forming a consortium for 25/50 Gbit/s switches to increase speed and reduce cost of data center networking.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – A consortium of companies including Arista Networks, Broadcom Corporation, Google Inc., Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., and Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of a specification optimized to allow data center networks to run over a 25 or 50 Gigabit per second (Gbit/s) Ethernet link protocol. This new specification will enable the cost-efficient scaling of network bandwidth delivered to server and storage endpoints in next-generation cloud infrastructure, where workloads are expected to surpass the capacity of 10 or 40 Gbps Ethernet links deployed today.

The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium was formed by the above leading cloud networking technology providers for the purpose of supporting an industry-standard, interoperable Ethernet specification that boosts the performance and slashes the interconnect cost per Gbps between the server Network Interface Controller (NIC) and Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch.

ZDnet says the consortium is a response to stalls in the IEEE process.

The consortium was formed after plans to create official Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) specifications stalled at a meeting last March, due to a perceived lack of support.

...

The tech giants say that in essence, specifications published by the consortium "maximizes the radix and bandwidth flexibility of the data center network while leveraging many of the same fundamental technologies and behaviors already defined by the IEEE 802.3 standard."