Video of Amazon's Kiva Robots

I tried to contact Kiva Systems once and didn't hear anything back.  From what I read it looked like all resources are working on amazon.com warehouses.

The media repeats an AP article, but Time has an article with a video

“The robots are made by Kiva Systems, a company Amazon purchased for $775 million in 2012 to better handle the hundreds of worldwide orders Amazon customers make every second. Kiva’s robots bring shelves of goods out of storage and carry them to employees, allowing Amazon to retrieve more items for more customers simultaneously. Amazon began using these robots in July of this year, and there are now more than 15,000 of them in 10 of the company’s warehouses. They whir around like gears on a Swiss watch.”
— https://time.com/3605924/amazon-robots/

Here is a video that is part of the Time article.  What would be nice is a voice over instead of music.

Uptime's Tier Rating challenged by 7 layer Approach by Int'l DC Authority says "Tiers Officially Outdated"

SearchDatacenter has a post on a challenge by the International Data Center Authority (IDCA) of Uptime's Tier Rating.

““The existing [focus on just power and cooling] doesn’t reflect what we need today, and in the future,” said Mehdi Paryavi, president of the IDCA, a research and education organization headquartered in Washington, D.C.

The IDCA created a seven-layer pyramid of holistic data center operation: application, platform, compute, IT infrastructure, site facility infrastructure, the site’s space and topology. This model accounts for the interdependencies between IT and facilities that engender high-quality service delivery.

”We’re past the days of silos where people say, ‘I’m a database administrator. I don’t care about power.’ Everyone needs to know the impact of their choices,” Paryavi said.”

Going to the IDCA web site they say that

“Tiers Officially Outdated!”

I haven't studied IDCA.  Here is a video on the training program.


A difficult challenge for data center automation, availability of the control system

Part of the cloud is automation.  An example is PuppetLabs, and here is a blog post on the topic.

“Automation extends to the software layer, where complex systems can be configured once and then rolled out on the fly as needed, using cloud automation tools. Intelligent systems architecture can balance the load among compute, network or storage resources, bringing systems online or offline as demand dictates.

This infrastructure-as-code approach to the modern, increasingly complex data center requires advanced cloud management tools, and cloud automation answers that need. The same software-defined approach to managing private cloud architecture works equally well for managing public clouds. Bonus: By abstracting away the differences between clouds, sophisticated cloud automation software makes it easy to provision the resources the business needs at any given moment, without getting bogged down with where the servers actually sit.”
— http://puppetlabs.com/blog/what-cloud-automation-driving-force-data-center-automation

There are tons and tons of companies that have cloud automation tools.  But, how many people spend time addressing the availability of the automation control system.  ???  This may seem obvious, but a control system needs to have a higher availability than the services it is managing.  Otherwise the service will go down when the automation control system goes down.

And, this may mean you need a backup to the automation system when it goes down during an outage.

As Cloud environments get bigger and bigger, automation is a part of the solution, but have you thought about what happens when the automation system goes down.

Take the Web IQ test, what is your score?

Pew Research has a Web IQ test that the conducted and you can take it too.  Before you read and get hints try taking the test here.

“What Internet Users Know about Technology and the Web
BY AARON SMITH

TAKE THE QUIZ
Before you read the report, test your own Web IQ by taking the interactive knowledge quiz. The short quiz tests your knowledge of questions recently asked in a national poll. After completing the quiz, you can compare your score with the general public and with people like yourself.”
— http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/11/25/web-iq/

I took the test and got my score. 12 out of 12. Outscored 99.8% of population, but bet you lots of my friends can get 12 out of 12 too.