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Making every (leap) second count with our new public NTP servers

Posted by Michael Shields, Technical Lead, Time Team

As if 2016 wasn’t long enough, this year, a leap second will cause the last day of December to be one second longer than normal. But don’t worry, we’ve built support for the leap second into the time servers that regulate all Google services.

Even better, our Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers are now publicly available to anyone who needs to keep local clocks in sync with VM instances running on Google Compute Engine, to match the time used by Google APIs, or for those who just need a reliable time service. As you would expect, our public NTP service is backed by Google’s load balancers and atomic clocks in data centers around the world.

Here’s how we plan to handle the leap second and keep things running smoothly here at Google. It’s based on what we learned during the leap seconds in 2008, 2012 and 2015.

Leap seconds compensate for small and unpredictable changes in the Earth’s rotation, as determined by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). The IERS typically announces them six months in advance but the need for leap seconds is very irregular. This year, the leap second will happen at 23:59:60 UTC on December 31, or 3:59:60 pm PST.

No commonly used operating system is able to handle a minute with 61 seconds, and trying to special-case the leap second has caused many problems in the past. Instead of adding a single extra second to the end of the day, we’ll run the clocks 0.0014% slower across the ten hours before and ten hours after the leap second, and “smear” the extra second across these twenty hours. For timekeeping purposes, December 31 will seem like any other day.

All Google services, including all APIs, will be synchronized on smeared time, as described above. You’ll also get smeared time for virtual machines on Compute Engine if you follow our recommended settings. You can use non-Google NTP servers if you don’t want your instances to use the leap smear, but don’t mix smearing and non-smearing time servers.

If you need any assistance, please visit our Getting Help page.

Happy New Year, and let the good times roll.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Bluemix Local System can help banks ease operational pressures and boost innovation

The banking sector is facing some tough challenges.
New entrants into the sector are quickly gaining customers through innovative services and because of increasingly stringent regulations. The urge for greater operational agility in response to new business models and rapidly evolving customer preferences is made even stronger by the market’s disruptor/disrupted scenario.
Many banks’ lack of agility in aligning IT operations with business imperatives is particularly needless when cloud capabilities promise consistent advantages.
Choice with consistency and hybrid integration are two principles of the IBM Cloud platform. These ideas underline the strong focus of IBM on the hybrid cloud.
Many companies, especially banks, have their cloud strategy still largely articulated around the virtualization phase of the cloud journey. Meanwhile, they’re lagging behind in other areas, such as orchestration and automation in the deployment and management of application environments. This is where IBM Bluemix Local System can play a pivotal role in streamlining the overall governance of the application life cycle while reducing risks and guaranteeing the support of open technologies.
The Bluemix Local System is the evolution of the IBM PureApplication System. As such, it uses the concept of application patterns: they are pre-defined templates of application environments, providing the operating system support, scripting tools and orchestration capabilities needed to fully automate the deployment and management of those environments, no matter how complex.
The adoption of patterns enables a significant acceleration in the life cycle of middleware and applications by automating low-level, trivial tasks. Thus, high-value resources can focus predominantly on building and enhancing applications.
Since the beginning, PureApplication and its patterns have had high affinity with the applications in the industrialized core of organizations, where availability, stability and cost optimization matter most. Whenever a pattern is available (off-the-shelf or built ad-hoc) for such applications, the result is acceleration of their cloudification.
With such capabilities, PureApplication has proven to be the ideal platform for these cloud-enabled applications, as many clients have learned.
The story goes further with the coming of Bluemix Local System. As the name indicates, this new system can host an instance of Bluemix local, reaching the other end of the application realm: the innovation edge. Here, the main focus is on speed and agility to build new apps with the objective to engage more deeply with existing and new clients.
In this arena, traditional, big banks must confront newcomers. These are mainly start-ups with a high propensity to build applications directly on the cloud, thereby taking advantage of all the services offered in it. On IBM Bluemix, they can make use of unique capabilities in the catalogue of services, in areas including cognitive (Watson), analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT) to build applications.
Bluemix Local System is the ideal platform for the coexistence of cloud-enabled and cloud-native applications.

Using this architecture, banks can run their industrialized core on patterns, achieving an agility posture. They can build new apps for their innovation edge with the Bluemix runtime and services. The ultimate goal is not just a coexistence, but rather, a fully symbiotic experience.
The hybrid character of this architecture is augmented because both sides can expand in the public or dedicated cloud (Bluemix public and dedicated, PureApplication Service).
There are a number of pacesetters in the banking industry that are competing with the disruptors because they have evolved. They’ve done so by unleashing the full integration of cloud-native and cloud-enabled applications using Bluemix Local System.
Learn more about Bluemix Local System and patterns.
The post Bluemix Local System can help banks ease operational pressures and boost innovation appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud