Where is AWS in its Renewable Energy efforts

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft all have renewable energy efforts.

Found AWS has a summary in their sustainability page.

“Amazon Web Services (AWS) Wind and Solar Farms

AWS has a long-term commitment to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint. We’ve made a lot of progress on this commitment. AWS exceeded its goal of 40% renewable energy by the end of 2016, and set a new goal to be powered by 50% renewable energy by the end of 2017.

In 2015, AWS announced the construction of Amazon Solar Farm US East, Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge, Amazon Wind Farm US Central and Amazon Wind Farm US East, located in Virginia, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina respectively. Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge became operational January 1, 2016, and Amazon Solar Farm US East went into operation in October, 2016.

In 2016, AWS announced the construction of Amazon Wind Farm US Central 2, a 189 MW wind farm in Hardin County, Ohio. We also announced five additional solar farms: Amazon Solar Farm US East 2, Amazon Solar Farm US East 3, Amazon Solar Farm US East 4, Amazon Solar Farm US East 5 each have a capacity of 20 MW and are located in New Kent, Buckingham, Sussex, and Powhatan counties in Virginia. Amazon Solar Farm US East 6 is a 100 MW facility in Southampton County, Virginia.

These ten renewable energy projects will deliver a total of 2.6 million MWh of energy annually onto the electric grid powering AWS data centers located in the AWS US East (Ohio) and AWS US East (N. Virginia) Regions. The electricity produced from these projects is enough to power the equivalent of over 240,000 U.S. homes annually, which is approximately the size of the city of Portland, Oregon.”
— https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/gkkwdp34z5ou7ug

Raging Wire Goes Open and Transparent to see in its Data Center

Data Center Frontier has a post on Ragiing Wire's latest data center that has lots of windows.

“SACRAMENTO, Calif. – At first, it looks like any other hallway. But as you step onto a glass-enclosed catwalk, your entire field of view is filled with Internet infrastructure. Glance in either direction and you suddenly have a birds-eye view of an entire data hall, gazing down upon cabinets, cages and IT equipment.

Walk a few more feet ahead, and you enter a round observatory with dueling portals of critical infrastructure – cooling on one side, power on the other. Just a short walk ahead is a door that opens on a view of the entire equipment yard, including emergency backup generators and cooling towers.

”
— http://datacenterfrontier.com/the-cut-away-data-center/

You can do a 3D walk through from a browser here.

Will look for Doug and other Raging Wire people at DCD SF and see how this effort is working.

Three Cloud Companies present at Geekwire Cloud Summit - Amazon, Google, Microsoft

I went to Geekwire Cloud Summit and it was a mini reunion of Gigaom's publishing staff. Barb Darrow posted on the big 3.

“It is no understatement to say that public cloud computing is revolutionizing how technology is used. Executives from the top three public cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—spoke at the GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit in Bellevue, Wash. this week.
Here are three lessons you need to learn now.
Managing partnerships is critical—and hard
Microsoft (MSFT, -0.13%) and Amazon are courting major software companies to run their operations on their respective clouds, and many—Tableau (DATA, +1.44%), Salesforce (CRM, -0.44%), Workday (WDAY, +0.92%)—are doing so.
”We want to win both big customers and the software companies selling to those customers,” Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice president of cloud and enterprise, said at the conference.”
— http://fortune.com/2017/06/08/cloud-amazon-microsoft-google/

Another good talk was the VC chat which had 3 people I used to work at Microsoft.

“Cloud computing is changing the technology world and creating opportunity for hundreds of new companies — so how are investors thinking about which ones to put their investment behind?

Three Seattle-area venture capitalists — Frank Artale of Ignition Partners; S. “Soma” Somasegar of Madrona Venture Group; and Sheila Gulati of Tola Capital — spoke on stage Wednesday at the inaugural GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit about the state of the cloud computing industry and opportunities they see for related technologies and startups.

The panelists all agreed that it’s an exciting time for cloud technology — and that this is only the beginning.

“We are early in this game, and it’s a game that is fundamentally changing how computing happens,” Gulati said. “Cloud is the new operating system.”

The discussion, moderated by Seattle angel investor Charles Fitzgerald, ranged from the most attractive cloud-related areas of investment to how Seattle is becoming the cloud capital of the world.”
— https://www.geekwire.com/2017/heres-venture-capitalists-thinking-cloud-computing-companies-technologies/

First step to Improve Home Networking Performance, don't run Internet Connectionat 100%

Of the things that you have at home what runs at 100% of capacity? Your heating and cooling? No. Your fridge? Your lights? Your Car? No. Would you run your kids, family or dog at 100%? No.

Yet almost everyone expects their Internet Connection to run at 100%. I did. I fell into the trap of running speedtest, fast.com, speedof.me to see if the Internet Connection is working.  The only data I had is the speed and latency.

QOS settings would be there, but so hard to use. So blindly think that all is good.

Then I decided to try Pfsense Traffic Shaper. And, one of the first things you need to do is input upload and download to use the network at 96% of top speeds. Why? Because running the network at 100% is not good. And without a traffic shaper the capacity will go to 100% for a large file which affects all other traffic.

Does it work to use Traffic Shaper? The best test is my son saying Xbox One Grand Theft Auto is so much better. Audio is perfect. No lag. No drops. And it is so much more fun to play.

A benefit to me is the inline writing and editing in squarespace is now better as Web pages have a higher priority. VOIP has top priority. Next is Games. Facetime and Web are in the middle. oh yeh game IMAP, POP3, and SMTP a mid level priority too. P2P traffic is the lowest.

Here is an article on setting up PFsense Traffice Shaper.

Thanks to my Netgate SG-2220 and PFsense software running as a firewall with Unifi Cloud Key and Access points I am making improvements in my home network. I also have a Xirrus AP and another router when i really mess things up, but haven't done that for months now.

Improving Availability of Home Wi-fi with an extra access point

Earlier this year my Netgear POE switch went bad and stopped routing traffic correctly. It took me 4 hours to figure out the problems was the switch. Luckily I could borrow one of my other switchers to see if the problem went away. That's when I found out how much better performing my newer broken switch was versus my older one. Luckily the Netgear switch has a lifetime warranty and I got a replacement within a couple of days.

Everything is working great, then a couple days later my Netgate SG-2220 goes dead. Netgate support couldn't help me recover the unit. Get a replacement board. Reimage. Found out the Intel Atom's were bricking.

“Intel’s Atom C2000 processor family has a fault that effectively bricks devices, costing the company a significant amount of money to correct.
...
Coincidentally, Cisco last week issued an advisory warning that several of its routing, optical networking, security and switch products sold prior to November 16, 2016 contain a faulty clock component that is likely to fail at an accelerated rate after 18 months of operation.”

To improve my home wi-fi I just added a 4th access point. I can now have one access point go bad and the remaining three will cover the house. It is a luxury to have 4 access points, but one will go bad at some point. i can log into the access point controller to trouble shoot wi-fi.

The failed firewall and switch has me thinking more about redundancy.

At some point I may go for a complete redundancy for the firewall and switches which besides reducing the single points of failure it means I can do maintenance and network will not go down.