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Here Are The 294 Accounts Donald Trump Retweeted During The Election

With the touch of the retweet button, Donald Trump — who has some 17.5 million followers — can program the news cycle. He can amplify formerly unknown accounts, signal what voices he's listening to, and tacitly endorse individuals and ideas, no matter how controversial: Trump, more than any politician or powerful figure with access to a smartphone, understands and uses the now-cliche “retweets are not endorsements” maxim to his advantage.

To better understand which individuals and institutions the President-elect relies on as social media surrogates, BuzzFeed News compiled a complete list of users Trump has retweeted since he launched his presidential campaign.

We reviewed 26,377 of Trump’s 34,152 tweets, which we received through the Twitter API and developer Brendan Brown, who has archived Trump’s tweets beyond what is accessible via the API (a stream of data that includes information like tweet text, time, and date). We filtered that data down to the 2,760 hyperlinks tweeted by Trump’s personal Twitter account since he announced his candidacy in June 2015 up until December 15 of this year.

By programmatically expanding the links we were able to narrow them down to the links he tweeted from Twitter (retweets show up as links from twitter.com when downloaded as data), filtered out the ones that were media tweets and were left with all the manual, regular and quote tweets Trump had sent through his account. Fourteen of the accounts that Trump has retweeted are no longer active. Among those fourteen, five accounts — White GenocideTM, babo_siren, Campaign_Trump, patrioticpepe, and TMoody — were suspended (Twitter suspends accounts when users violate its rules, most commonly if the account spams people, may have been hacked, or is engaging in abusive behavior).

Analysis of the accounts Trump has retweeted reveals several distinct patterns:

Trump appears willing to retweet almost anyone. Unlike most mainstream politicians, who carefully select the accounts they&039;ll amplify, Trump is comfortable retweeting a truly diverse array of accounts. Just last month, the President-elect retweeted a 16 year-old from California as evidence to support a Twitter feud with CNN. He does not discriminate based on number of followers (he retweeted an account with just 2 followers), number of tweets (he retweeted the first tweet from a woman who, to date, has only tweeted five times), or the contents of someone&039;s account bio (he retweeted one user whose bio at the time was: “Mexico, get ready to receive your finest citizens back! Rapists, Thieves & Perverts”).

But he is most likely to boost the signal from his inner circle and friendly members of the press. The accounts he retweets the most were those of campaign advisors and some chosen members of the press, including his social media lead, Dan Scavino (21 RTs); his son, Eric Trump (5); Fox News&039; Greta Van Susteren (4); MSNBC host Joe Scarborough (4); former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (3); Lifezette editor and conservative pundit Laura Ingraham (3); and Bloomberg Politics&039; Mark Halperin (2).

The President-elect, despite his repeated claims of a deeply biased mainstream media, retweets a high number of legacy media outlets. Among his most tweeted news accounts: Fox News (7 RTs), Fox And Friends (6), ABC (3), CNN (3), and Morning Joe (2). In nearly every instance, the retweeted accounts shared news items or memes about polls that favored Trump (many from the primaries), or negative articles about Hillary Clinton — many of them aggregations of WikiLeaks emails. Trump also appears to be eager to promote positive news about him from pop culture and entertainment accounts, as evidenced by his retweeting Saturday Night Live&039;s account three times.

On occasion, Trump will retweet a user from the other side of the aisle. This tends to happen under two circumstances:

#1) When an account says something positive about him (in one instance, Trump retweeted former Obama Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer, who suggested Trump understood the internet better than most democrats):

2.) To attempt to attack his opponents — as he did here last June with Hillary Clinton:

He has retweeted accounts with clear ties to the alt-right on numerous occasions. Trump recently told the New York Times he disavowed the movement and suggested he didn&039;t “want to energize the group.” However, throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump retweeted three separate users with the words “alt-right” in their bios. He retweeted “WhiteGenocideTM,” and four with “#nationalist” in their bios. One account that the President-elect retweeted (a bot, it turns out) had the phrase “#GoebbelsMindset” in the bio — a reference to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister in Hitler&039;s Germany

Other items of note include:

- 151 of the 294 individual accounts Trump retweeted during the campaign mention the word “Trump” in the bio or account display name.

- 22 accounts have the Make America Great Again hashtag, #MAGA, in theirs.

-14 accounts have the word “deplorable” in the bio or account display name.

- 9 accounts have the word “veteran” in the bio or account display name.

- 2 accounts have a frog emoji in the bio or account display name, presumably a reference to Pepe.

But there&039;s no better way to get a peek into Trump&039;s Twitter mindset than to explore the accounts he&039;s retweeted for yourself. Below, we&039;ve included every account he&039;s retweeted, in order of the number of times Trump has RT&039;d the account (Of note: the bios and follower counts are current as of when BuzzFeed News scraped the data on December 7th, 2016, and may not necessarily reflect the bio or follower accounts on the day Trump retweeted them). There&039;s also a full graphic at the end of the list.

KEY:

ACCOUNT DISPLAY NAME (FOLLOWERS): ACCOUNT BIO.

21 Retweets:

Dan Scavino Jr (241,484 followers): June 2015 – Current: Director of Social Media & Senior Advisor to President-elect Donald J. Trump #Transition2017 • #TrumpTrain Conductor

18 Retweets:

Official Team Trump (372,885 followers): Welcome To The Official #TeamTrump Account. Together, We WILL #MakeAmericaGreatAgain&033; #AmericaFirst

7 Retweets:

Fox News (12,068,826 followers): America’s Strongest Primetime Lineup Anywhere&033; Follow America&039;s 1 cable news network, delivering you breaking news, insightful analysis, and must-see videos.

6 Retweets:

FOX & Friends (700,152 followers): America&039;s 1 cable morning news show

5 Retweets:

Eric Trump (725,051 followers): EVP of Development & Acquisitions, The Trump Organization. Founder of EricTrumpFDN benefiting StJude Children&039;s Research Hospital. Husband to LaraLeaTrump

4 Retweets:

Joe Scarborough (653,550 followers): We can love completely without complete understanding.

Greta Van Susteren (1,109,570 followers): Retweets are just retweets; RT does not mean I agree or disagree….I am merely retweeting;check out video reports https://t.co/BpGqSgCJU9

3 Retweets:

GENE (7,535 followers): blocked by rosie followed by marcuslemonis boygeorge & scottBaio Legal Italian Immigrant. Proud US Citizen,World Traveler With 25 Years of Business Dealings

Newt Gingrich (1,784,072 followers): Husband, father, grandfather, citizen, small businessman, author, former Speaker of the House.

Laura Ingraham (1,118,943): Mom, Editor-in-Chief of LifeZette. Host, The Laura Ingraham Show, 9 to Noon ET. Listen live, join Laura365 to listen 24/7. Fox News. https://t.co/Wu93dy29HT

ABC News (8,248,722 followers): See the whole picture with ABC News. Join us on Facebook: https://t.co/ewMNZ54axm

Saturday Night Live (1,749,560): The official Twitter handle for Saturday Night Live. Saturdays at 11:30/10:30c&033; #SNL

GOP (1,056,143 followers): Updates from the Republican National Committee #LeadRight2016

CNN (30,043,735 followers): It’s our job to #GoThere and tell the most difficult stories. Come with us&033;

2 Retweets:

Trump 4 Women (14,198 followers): SEE TheTRUMPetts 1 OFFICIAL TRUMP TRAIN Vid TeamTRUMP HIT SONGWRITERS =USMC / LEO VETS

Don Vito (23,804 followers): American Patriot MakeAmericaGreatAgain AmericaFirst

TheAmericanLifeStyle (3,616 followers): Our American journey Start Now. •blest• TeamTrump #TrumpPence16 MAGA DonaldJTrumpJr IvankaTrump EricTrump TiffanyATrump

Deplorable Vlad (8,582 followers): Waterboarding&039;s too good for them. I&039;m staking my vote on TRUMP&033;

Diamond and Silk® (197,218 followers): #STUMP4TRUMPBABY #CHOOCHOOBABY #DITCHANDSWITCHNOW #STUMP4TRUMPGIRLS #TheUnitedStatesNotTheDividedStates

Trump Phenomenon (2,863 followers): Trump Landslide 2016

Willie Robertson (2,441,160 followers): President of Duck and Buck Commander. Personality on both, Duck Dynasty and Buck Commander Protected by Under Armour.

Morning Joe (280,073 followers): Live tweet during the show&033; Links to must-read op-eds and other features. Feed managed by MJ staff. Retweets not necessarily endorsements.

Gravis Marketing (2,823 followers): Gravis Marketing is a communications company, specializing in public opinion polls, public relations, political strategy, and research.

Roni Seale (6,210 followers): But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.
Matthew 19:26 (KJV)

Piers Morgan (5,292,866 followers): &039;&039;One day you&039;re the cock of the walk, the next a feather duster.&039;

Mark Halperin (253,218 followers): Managing editor, Bloomberg Politics; host, With All Due Respect; correspondent/EP, SHO_TheCircus; co-author, Game Change & Double Down

Safety (3,215,464 followers): Helping you stay safe on Twitter.

#NRA (4,13,722 followers): National Rifle Association of America NRA

Emily Miller (58,635 followers): Senior Political Correspondent OANN. Armed. Wannabe Surfer. Author of Emily Gets Her Gun. https://t.co/kuOGeQfYgc

Ivanka Trump (2,498,905 followers): Wife, mother, entrepreneur. EVP, Trump Org. Founder, https://t.co/qWTVy424t8. Author, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success (out in March)

Joseph Monaco (2,567 followers): I HATE racists&033; Proud to be followed by Bill Mitchell Mitchellvii I&039;m strongly supporting Mr. Trump for President&033; TrumpPence16 #NYPD #FDNY TrumpTrain MAGA

Tom Winter (12,664 followers): NBC News Investigations reporter based in NYC focusing on Police, Courts, Corruption, Financial Fraud, and Homeland Security stories across the Eastern U.S.

Jason Bergkamp (59,251 followers): #keksec | #NS | Nationalist ✠ | 0.2% Chosen and proud | An Anglo&039;s worst adversary | GoebbelsMindset

Katrina Pierson (242,737 followers): Senior Advisor Transition2017 & Former realDonaldTrump Natl Campaign Spokeswoman MakeAmericaGreatAgain Transition2017 MAGA

ABC News Politics (306,398 followers): Following ABC News&039; political team with tweets by: aabramson evanmcmurry and nickirossoll

Mark Cuban (6,040,253 followers): #DallasStrong

1 Retweet:

Richard Hernandez (979 followers): Formerly NVGOP. Conservative. Originalist. Prior intern at Kramerica Industries. Tweets are my own. Temeculan.

Trump2016Media (3,528 followers): My #Trump2016 Website is Updated Daily: 1000+ Interviews & Rallys, Articles, News, Media realDonaldTrump TrumpTrain MakeAmericaGreatAgain

Electra Goldwell (284 followers): I want God to make America Great again&033;

Amy Colley Tyson (403 followers): Follower of Christ, Wife, Mother, Family Nurse Practitioner, Former Miss Tennessee USA 2005, Supporter of H. Res. 752 and Animal Hope and Wellness Foundation

Donald Trump Florida (5,231 followers): Donald J. Trump for President (Florida – Official)

MariaRandisiErnandez (989 followers): Special Education Teacher &(Child Advocate).Interests:ELVIS, Hollywood,Music, Politics,Travel, Working Out,#TrumpStrong MAGATrumpTrain
*NO LISTS or B Blocked

RealBill (47 followers): [No Bio Listed]

Politics Today (54,257 followers): || CONSERVATIVE NEWS NETWORK|| News/Politics/Opinion – Reporter/Pundit #PoliticsToday Articles/Commentary Facebook: https://t.co/7wFggE8CL2 #Fact

Montana4Trump (1,452 followers): God Bless America. Conservative Catholic mother-daughter team Tweeted by: realDonaldTrump, mercedesschlapp, MattSchlapp, ktmcfarland.

USA For Trump 2016 (80,568 followers): Official USA for Trump 2016 Follow our new President Trump News Page TrumpsNewsDaily for great Trump news articles about his presidency&033;

Political Polls (46,266 followers): We are a non-partisan group dedicated to keep you informed with recent political polls from trusted polling companies and predictions from reputable pundits.

Antonio Valencia (18 followers): [No Bio Listed]

Karen Posey (15 followers): [No Bio Listed]

JohnnyBoy (2 followers): [No Bio Listed]

Corey R. Lewandowski (175,221 followers): CNN Political Commentator and former Campaign Manager for Donald J. Trump for President. MakeAmericaGreatAgain Trump2016

Eustace Bagge (291 followers): As seen on Fortune, Time, CSPAN. Aspiring Frogtwitterati.

Citizen Dale (19024 followers): Ind Engineer & business owner. Captain-Trumptbird Calling Team We&039;ve made over 80,000 calls for Donald J Trump&033; Producer of the Monster Vote video for Trump&033;

Deplorable C Lewis (1,223 followers): I VOTED for DONALD TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT If you support DONALD SPREAD THE TRUMP MESSAGE. #Trump45 #POTUS45 #DrainTheSwamp

Deplorable MP95B (15,705 followers): US Army MP Veteran (No Combat) firm believer in US Constitution & 2A. NRA Lifetime Member. Strong Trump supporter. MakeAmericaGreatAgain Trump2016 NRA #FL

RSBN TV (38,820 followers): Right Side Broadcasting Network. Following realdonaldtrump wherever he goes. 1 source for live political event coverage.

DiCristo Trump Won (4,833 followers): Love For God & Country. Make America Great Again&033; American Revolution Part Deus&033; TRUMP&033; Nov8 win gave us fighting chance&033; we have to beat Elites&033; MAGA

Polling Hub (44 followers): Polling averages for the 2016 U.S. presidential primaries. Accurate and up to date, we&039;re the most detailed poll aggregator tracking the 2016 presidential race.

Deplorable-Sweetie (22,432 followers): #Trumpette Put Americans first&033; Trump2016 ˚(*❛‿&x275B;)/&x2DA; MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN&033; I will fight for MY PEOPLE. Nationalist No rapefugees or illegals&033; TrumpStrong

Italians For Trump (57,540 followers): We are ITALIAN-AMERICANS who proudly support realDonaldTrump our President-elect of the USA&033; #Italians4Trump DrainTheSwamp MAGA #PEOTUS #IoVotoNo

NEPA for TRUMP (26,889 followers): Official realDonaldTrump Northeastern Pennsylvania #TeamTrumpPA Trump2016 MakeAmericaGreatAgain TeamTrump AmericaFirst #ImWithYou TrumpTrain TrumpPence16

TrumpCoastOfSC (8,678 followers): Retweets & quoted tweets do not equal endorsement or agreement. Follow me also at https://t.co/bkXkkAj4cU

Deplorable Distler (1,247 followers): Donald J Trump is Americas last chance. LET FREEDOM RING&033;&033;

Bryan Ranzetta (260 followers): when kids look at me I say this is because I didn&039;t eat my vegetables

Elsa Aldeguer (1752 followers): Proud Latina Trump supporter from Los Angeles California God bless America and our New President Donald J Trump

Valdosta Monkey (116 followers): Wild monkey roaming the City of Valdosta. Always down for Netflix and peel. Lets Make America Great Again.

Quelle: <a href="Here Are The 294 Accounts Donald Trump Retweeted During The Election“>BuzzFeed

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Announcing auto-shutdown for VMs using Azure Resource Manager

We are excited to announce you can set any ARM-based Virtual Machines to auto-shutdown with a few simple clicks! This was a feature originally available only to VMs in Azure DevTest Labs: your self-service sandbox environment in Azure to quickly create Dev/Test environments while minimizing waste and controlling costs. In case you haven’t heard it before, the goal for this service is to solve the problems that IT and development teams have been facing: delays in getting a working environment, time-consuming environment configuration, production fidelity issues, and high maintenance cost. It has been helping our customers to quickly get “ready to test” with a worry-free self-service environment. The reusable templates in the DevTest Labs can be used everywhere once created. The public APIs, PowerShell cmdlets and VSTS extensions make it super easy to integrate you Dev/Test environments from labs to your release pipeline. In addition to the Dev/Test scenario, Azure DevTest Labs can also be used in other scenarios like training and hackathon. For more information about its value propositions, please check out our GA announcement blog post. If you are interested in how DevTest Labs can help for training, check out this article to use Azure DevTest Labs for training. In the past months, we’ve been very happy to see that auto-shutdown is the #1 policy used by DevTest Labs customers. On the other hand, we also learned from quite a few customers that they have their centrally managed Dev/Test workloads already running in Azure and simply want to set auto-shutdown for those VMs. Since those workloads have already been provisioned and managed centrally, self-service is not really needed. It’s a little bit overkill for them to create a DevTest lab in this case just for the auto-shutdown settings. That’s why we make this popular feature, VM auto-shutdown, available to all the ARM-based Azure VMs. With this feature, setting auto-shutdown can’t be easier: Go to your VM blade in Azure portal. Click Auto-shutdown in the resource menu on the left-side. You will see an auto-shutdown settings page expanded, where you can specify the auto-shutdown time and time zone. You can also configure to send notification to your webhook URL 15 minutes before auto-shutdown. This post illustrates how you can set up an Azure logic app to send auto-shutdown notification. To learn more about this feature or see what’s more Azure DevTest Labs can do for you, please check out our announcement on the Azure DevTest Labs team blog. To get latest information on the service releases or our thoughts on the DevTest Labs, please subscribe to the team blog’s RSS feed and our Service Updates. There are still a lot of things in our roadmap that we can’t wait to build and ship to our customers. Your opinions are valuable for us to deliver the right solutions for your problems. We welcome ideas and suggestions on what DevTest Labs should support, so please do not hesitate to create an idea at the DevTest Labs feedback forum, or vote on others’ ideas. If you run into any problems when using the DevTest Labs or have any questions, we are ready at the MSDN forum to help you.
Quelle: Azure

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How to avoid a self-inflicted DDoS Attack – CRE life lessons

Posted by Dave Rensin, Director of Customer Reliability Engineering, and Adrian Hilton, Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

Editor’s note: Left unchecked, poor software architecture decisions are the most common cause of application downtime. Over the years, Google Site Reliability Engineering has learned to spot code that could lead to outages, and strives to identify it before it goes into production as part of its production readiness review. With the introduction of Customer Reliability Engineering, we’re taking the same best practices we’ve developed for internal systems, and extending them to customers building applications on Google Cloud Platform. This is the first post in a series written by CREs to highlight real-world problems — and the steps we take to avoid them.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aren’t anything new on the internet, but thanks to a recent high profile event, they’ve been making fresh headlines. We think it’s a convenient moment to remind our readers that the biggest threat to your application isn’t from some shadowy third party, but from your own code!

What follows is a discussion of one of the most common software architecture design fails — the self-inflicted DDoS — and three methods you can use to avoid it in your own application.

Even distributions that aren’t
There’s a famous saying (variously attributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and others) that goes:

“It ain’t what we don’t know that hurts us so much as the things we know that just ain’t so.”
Software developers make all sorts of simplifying assumptions about user interactions, especially about system load. One of the more pernicious (and sometimes fatal) simplifications is “I have lots of users all over the world. For simplicity, I’m going to assume their load will be evenly distributed.”

To be sure, this often turns out to be close enough to true to be useful. The problem is that it’s a steady state or static assumption. It presupposes that things don’t vary much over time. That’s where things start to go off the rails.

Consider this very common pattern: Suppose you’ve written a mobile app that periodically fetches information from your backend. Because the information isn’t super time sensitive, you write the client to sync every 15 minutes. Of course, you don’t want a momentary hiccup in network coverage to force you to wait an extra 15 minutes for the information, so you also write your app to retry every 60 seconds in the event of an error.

Because you’re an experienced and careful software developer, your system consistently maintains 99.9% availability. For most systems that’s perfectly acceptable performance but it also means in any given 30-day month your system can be unavailable for up to 43.#2 minutes.

So. Let’s talk about what happens when that’s the case. What happens if your system is unavailable for just one minute?

When your backends come back online you get (a) the traffic you would normally expect for the current minute, plus (b) any traffic from the one-minute retry interval. In other words, you now have 2X your expected traffic. Worse still, your load is no longer evenly distributed because 2/15ths of your users are now locked together into the same sync schedule. Thus, in this state, for any given 15-minute period you’ll experience normal load for 13 minutes, no load for one minute and 2X load for one minute.

Of course, service disruptions usually last longer than just one minute. If you experience a 15-minute error (still well within your 99.9% availability) then all of your load will be locked together until after your backends recover. You’ll need to provision at least 15X of your normal capacity to keep from falling over. Retries will also often “stack” at your load balancers and your backends will respond more slowly to each request as their load increases. As a result, you might easily see 20X your normal traffic (or more) while your backends heal. In the worst case, the increased load might cause your servers to run out of memory or other resources and crash again.

Congratulations, you’ve been DDoS’d by your own app!

The great thing about known problems is that they usually have known solutions. Here are three things you can do to avoid this trap.

#1 Try exponential backoff
When you use a fixed retry interval (in this case, one minute) you pretty well guarantee that you’ll stack retry requests at your load balancer and cause your backends to become overloaded once they come back up. One of the best ways around this is to use exponential backoff.

In its most common form, exponential backoff simply means that you double the retry interval up to a certain limit to lower the number of overall requests queued up for your backends. In our example, after the first one-minute retry fails, wait two minutes. If that fails, wait four minutes and keep doubling that interval until you get to whatever you’ve decided is a reasonable cap (since the normal sync interval is 15 minutes you might decide to cap the retry backoff at 16 minutes).

Of course, backing off of retries will help your overall load at recovery but won’t do much to keep your clients from retrying in sync. To solve that problem, you need jitter.

2 Add a little jitter

Jitter is the random interval you add (or subtract) to the next retry interval to prevent clients from locking together during a prolonged outage. The usual pattern is to pick a random number between +/- a fixed percentage, say 30%, and add it to the next retry interval.

In our example, if the next backoff interval is supposed to be 4 minutes, then wait between +/- 30% of that interval. Thirty percent of 4 minutes is 1.2 minutes, so select a random value between 2.8 minutes and 5.2 minutes to wait.

Here at Google we’ve observed the impact of a lack of jitter in our own services. We once built a system where clients started off polling at random times but we later observed that they had a strong tendency to become more synchronized during short service outages or degraded operation.

Eventually we saw very uneven load across a poll interval — with most clients polling the service at the same time — resulting in peak load that was easily 3X the average. Here’s a graph from the postmortem from an outage in the aforementioned system. In this case the clients were polling at a fixed 5-minute interval, but over many months became synchronized:

Observe how the traffic (red) comes in periodic spikes, correlating with 2x the average backend latency (green) as the servers become overloaded. That was a sure sign that we needed to employ jitter. This monitoring view is also significantly under-counting the traffic peaks because of its sample interval. Once we added a random factor of +/- 1 minute (20%) to each retry the latency, traffic flattened out almost immediately, with the periodicity disappearing:

and the backends were no longer overloaded. Of course, we couldn’t do this immediately — we had to build and push a new code release to our clients with this new behavior, so we had to live with this overload for a while.

At this point, we should also point out that in the real world, usage is almost never evenly distributed — even when the users are. Nearly all systems of any scale experience peaks and troughs corresponding with the work and sleep habits of their users. Lots of people simply turn off their phones or computers when they go to sleep. That means that you’ll see a spike in traffic as those devices come back online when people wake up.

For this reason it’s also a really good idea to add a little jitter (perhaps 10%) to regular sync intervals, in addition to your retries. This is especially important for first syncs after an application starts. This will help to smooth out daily cyclical traffic spikes and keep systems from becoming overloaded.

#3 Implement retry marking
A large fleet of backends doesn’t recover from an outage all at once. That means that as a system begins to come back online, its overall capacity ramps up slowly. You don’t want to jeopardize that recovery by trying to serve all of your waiting clients at once. Even if you implement both exponential backoff and jitter you still need to prioritize your requests as you heal.

An easy and effective technique to do this is to have your clients mark each attempt with a retry number. A value of zero means that the request is a regular sync. A value of one indicates the first retry and so on. With this in place, the backends can prioritize which requests to service and which to ignore as things get back to normal. For example, you might decide that higher retry numbers indicate users who are further out-of-sync and service them first. Another approach is to cap the overall retry load to a fixed percentage, say 10%, and service all the regular syncs and only 10% of the retries.

How you choose to handle retries is entirely up to your business needs. The important thing is that by marking them you have the ability to make intelligent decisions as a service recovers.

You can also monitor the health of your recovery by watching the retry number metrics. If you’re recovering from a six-minute outage, you might see that the oldest retries have a retry sequence number of 3. As you recover, you would expect to see the number of 3s drop sharply, followed by the 2s, and so on. If you don’t see that (or see the retry sequence numbers increase), you know you still have a problem. This would not be obvious by simply watching the overall number of retries.

Parting thoughts
Managing system load and gracefully recovering from errors is a deep topic. Stay tuned for upcoming posts about important subjects like cascading failures and load shedding. In the meantime, if you adopt the techniques in this article you can help keep your one minute network blip from turning into a much longer DDoS disaster.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Four topics that inspired Google Cloud Platform users in October

Posted by Alex Barrett, Editor, Google Cloud Platform Blog

Google Cloud Platform users are a generous bunch, sharing their insights about how best to use GCP through a regular stream of articles and blogs. We kept tabs on their output in the month of October, then sorted that unruly list down into four categories that are a good indicator of overall cloud adoption. Take a look; chances are that there’s a post in this list that answers your most pressing GCP question, or that will inspire you to take GCP in an entirely new direction.

Using BigQuery to analyze . . . everything
BigQuery has emerged as a great way to slice and dice data, and the blogosphere is rife with examples that will teach you how (and why).
Jumping into Big Data using Google BigQuery
25 Million Presidential Debate Tweets in Google BigQuery
Hands on with Google Cloud Platform, TensorFlow & BigQuery — early thoughts

A kornukopia of Kubernetes
Developers continue to spill a lot of ink on containers and Kubernetes, our open-source container orchestration platform.
MLS on Kubernetes Act #1: Automating Infrastructure
A Service Mesh for Kubernetes, Part I: Top-Line Service Metrics
Tutorial: Getting Started with Kubernetes on your Windows Laptop with Minikube
Kubernetes on Scaleway – Part 3
A Survival Guide for Containerizing your Infrastructure — Part 1: Why switch?
Using gcloud in a Docker container

Working with data (and databases) on GCP
So much data, so many different places to put it. From simple object-based archive, to high-performance distributed databases, the GCP community is using our storage and databases in all sorts of interesting ways.
Google Cloud Storage Vs AWS S3
Diving Into Google Datastore
Picking a cloud database for analytics: the SQL options
Camera image upload and display using Google Firebase Storage in your Ionic Framework app
Recommendation Systems with Spark on Google DataProc
Spinning up a Cassandra Cluster on Google Cloud (for free) with just a browser

Next-generation apps, the GCP way
More often than not, today’s developers organize into DevOps teams and build apps using microservices that communicate via APIs. Here are a few examples of how GCP plays in that world.
Microservices: From Design To Production with goa and Google Cloud Endpoints
Checking out the new Google Cloud Endpoints
Playing with ConcourseCI via a Google Cloud Platform free trial
How We Built Chop
Microservices: From Design To Production with goa and Google Cloud Endpoints
1 Piece of code : ExpressJS + Memcached Sessions
Adding Custom Domain to your Google Compute Engine
Tuning NGINX behind Google Cloud Platform HTTP(S) Load Balancer

That’s all folks. Tune in again next month for a recap of community-generated GCP content, and be sure to drop us a line with any blog posts and articles that you think our readers need to know about.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Tieto’s path to containerized OpenStack, or How I learned to stop worrying and love containers

The post Tieto&#8217;s path to containerized OpenStack, or How I learned to stop worrying and love containers appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Tieto is the #1 cloud service provider in Northern Europe, with over 150 cloud customers in the region and revenues in the neighborhood of €1.5 billion (with a &#8220;b&#8221;). So when the company decided to take the leap into OpenStack, it was a decision that wasn&8217;t taken lightly &#8212; or without very strict requirements.
Now, we&8217;ve been talking a lot about containerized OpenStack here at Mirantis lately, and at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, our Director of Product Engineering will get with Tieto&8217;s Cloud Architect  Lukáš Kubín to explain the company&8217;s journey from a traditional architecture to a fully adaptable cloud infrastructure, so we wanted to take a moment and ask the question:
How does a company decide that containerized OpenStack is a good idea?
What Tieto wanted
At its heart, Tieto wanted to deliver a bimodal multicloud solution that would help customers digitize their businesses. In order to do that, it needed an infrastructure in which it could have confidence, and OpenStack was chosen as the platform for cloud native applications delivery.  The company had the following goals:

Remove vendor lock-in
Achieve the elasticity of a seamless on-demand capacity fulfillment
Rely on robust automation and orchestration
Adopt innovative open source solutions
Implement Infrastructure as Code

It was this last item, implementing Infrastructure as Code, that was perhaps the biggest challenge from an OpenStack standpoint.
Where we started
In fact, Tieto had been working with OpenStack since 2013, creating internal projects to evaluate OpenStack Havana and Icehouse using internal software development projects; at that time, the target architecture included Neutron and Open vSwitch. 
By 2015, the company was providing scale-up focused IaaS cloud offerings and unique application-focused PaaS services, but what was lacking was a shared platform with full API controlled infrastructure for horizontally scalable workload.
Finally, this year, the company announced its OpenStack Cloud offering, based on the OpenStack distribution of tcp cloud (now part of Mirantis), and OpenContrail rather than Open vSwitch.
Why OpenContrail? The company cited several reasons:

Licensing: OpenContrail is an open source solution, but commercial support is available from vendors such as Mirantis.
High Availability: OpenContrail includes native HA support.
Cloud gateway routing: North-South traffic must be routed on physical edge routers  instead of software gateways to work with existing solutions
Performance: OpenContrail provides excellent pps, bandwidth, scalability, and so on (up to 9.6 Gbps)
Interconnection between SDN and Fabric: OpenContrail supports the dynamic legacy connections through EVPN or ToR switches
Containers: OpenContrail includes support for containers, making it possible to use one networking framework for multiple environments.

Once completed, the Tieto Proof of Concept cloud included;

OpenContrail 2.21
20 compute nodes
Glance and Cinder running on Ceph
Heat orchestration

Tieto had achieved Infrastructure as Code, in that deployment and operations were controlled through OpenStack Salt formulas. This architecture enabled the company to use DevOps principles, in that they could use declarative configurations that could be stored in a repository and re-used as necessary.
What&8217;s more, the company had an architecture that worked, and that included commercial support for OpenContrail (through Mirantis).
But there was still something missing.
What was missing
With operations support and Infrastructure as Code, Tieto&8217;s OpenStack Cloud was already beyond what many deployments ever achieve, but it still wasn&8217;t as straightforward as the company would have liked.  
As designed, the OpenStack architecture consisted of almost two dozen VMs on at least 3 physical KVM nodes &8212; and that was just the control plane!

As you might imagine, trying to keep all of those VMs up to date through operating system updates and other changes made operations more complex that it needed to be.  Any time an update needed to be applied, it had to be applied to each and every VM. Sure, that process was easier because of the DevOps advantages introduced by the OpenStack-Salt formulas that were already in the repository, but that was still an awful lot of moving parts.
There had to be a better way.
How to meet that challenge
That &8220;better way&8221; involves treating OpenStack as a containerized application in order to take advantage of the efficiencies this architecture enables, including:

Easier operations, because each service no longer has its own VM, with it own operating system to worry about
Better reliability and easier manageability, because containers and docker files can be tested as part of a CI/CD workflow
Easier upgrades, because once OpenStack has been converted to a microservices architecture, it&8217;s much easier to simply replace one service
Better performance and scalability, because the containerized OpenStack services can be orchestrated by a tool such as Kubernetes.

So that&8217;s the &8220;why&8221;.  But what about the &8220;how&8221;?  Well, that&8217;s a tale for another day, but if you&8217;ll be in Barcelona, join us at 12:15pm on Wednesday to get the full story and maybe even see a demo of the new system in action!
The post Tieto&8217;s path to containerized OpenStack, or How I learned to stop worrying and love containers appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Quelle: Mirantis

The Underground Neo-Nazi Promo Campaign Behind Adult Swim’s Alt-Right Comedy Show

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The Underground Neo-Nazi Promo Campaign Behind Adult Swim’s Alt-Right Comedy Show

Last month, printers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and elsewhere spontaneously disgorged a single sheet of paper bearing swastikas and rows of black and white text. Titled Samiz.dat, the printouts told the story of a man named Tyler, who in a near-future New York commits a mass murder in a synagogue. Fueled by a “pure hatred of niggers,” Tyler begins by killing “a single black in the temple” — whose presence is the result of a “kike slut” who believes in “race mixing propaganda” — then begins to shoot the rest of the “filthy Jew[s].”

At the end of the story, Tyler turns to…

“…a teenaged Jewess that was quivering in fear. Tyler grabbed a nearby tefillin and began furiously beating her with the straps. After rejoicing in her cries of pain, he used the hot flash hider of his Saiga to penetrate her virgin cunt and sear her insides before he began to rape her. Tyler&#039;s last moments were spent raping all three orifices of the virgin Jewess before killing her and himself. “I love Jews&#033; Jews rock&033;” were Tyler&039;s last words. This atrocity happened as a result of MILLION DOLLAR EXTREME PRESENTS WORLD PEACE, Friday nights on Cartoon Network&039;s Adult Swim.”

Evidence strongly suggests the disturbing text is the work of Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, the notorious white nationalist hacker and troll who throughout the past year has made a sport of sending unwanted hate speech to thousands of unprotected public printers around the country. In March, he took immediate credit for printing, mostly using open printers at universities and colleges, some 30,000 flyers for the Daily Stormer, which describes itself as “The World&039;s #1 Alt-Right and Pro-Genocide Website.” Between two large swastikas, the flyer exhorts white men to “join us in the struggle for global white supremacy.” Then, earlier in August, Weev sent to thousands more printers the first issue of a “webzine” called Samiz.dat — for the underground protest literature in the Soviet Union — that advocated raping, torturing, and murdering the children of black people, Jews, and “federal agents.” On Twitter, Weev described Samiz.dat as “an underground … magazine for racially aware authoritarians published only to every open printer on the Internet.” The hack has inspired imitators.

Indeed, these printouts have become so commonplace that they no longer spur coverage. What is surprising about the newest issue of Samiz.dat, however, is that it explicitly promotes a weekly television show on a major cable network owned by Time Warner. Corporate media tends not to be an object of affection amongst white supremacists. (“I know you fucking Jews control the fucking media,” reads a line from the document.)

But then, World Peace is far from a typical television show. As BuzzFeed News reported last month, the members of Million Dollar Extreme (MDE), the sketch comedy troupe who created the show, are the preferred court jesters of the alt-right, the pro-Trump online movement that prizes offensive speech, believes white people in America are imperiled, and churns out memes at a metastatic pace. The alt-right is a leaderless movement that resists easy characterization; in fact, that is one of its defense mechanisms. Weev described even a sympathetic report by Breitbart on the alt-right as “The tireless attempts of you Jews to smear us decent Nazis.” But his preoccupation with white identity and white nationhood, his adoption of hate speech as a principle, and his commitment to trolling make him an important figure within the movement regardless of his public statements.

Indeed, while Samiz.dat may have read simply as terrifying speculative fiction to the passersby who discovered it, the document is full of in-jokes that would only make sense to committed members of the alt-right.

Tyler, the mass murderer, is a reference to a character created by MDE frontman Sam Hyde. In the story printouts, Tyler commands his victims to post to social media blaming Hyde for the shooting; that’s a reference to a series of hoaxes in which members of 4chan publicly named Hyde as the perpetrator of a series of real mass shootings. And Tyler&039;s last words, “Jews rock&033;”, are the name of a skit in a recent episode of World Peace.

So what apparently caused Weev to devote an entire issue of his “webzine” to promoting World Peace?

Though Adult Swim has a history of controversial guerrilla marketing, the network said in a statement that it had no part in the creation or dissemination of the promotion.

Instead, Weev seems to have been prompted by a request from Sam Hyde. On Aug. 16, Hyde&039;s Twitter account (which he previously told BuzzFeed News was managed by his “assistant”) asked his followers to help promote World Peace:

Within four hours, Weev wrote to another alt-right account that he had “already finished the postscript” — a printer language — “and i&039;m waiting for the scan to finish.” Then he posted a copy of the text of Samiz.dat to Pastebin.com. The UC Santa Cruz Police Department reported flyers had been sent to networked campus printers the following day.

Hyde is personally acquainted with Weev. The two accounts periodically interact on Twitter; Hyde (or his assistant) told Weev that he was “planning on sending” him a review copy of the MDE book How to Bomb the US Gov&039;t. On the Million Dollar Extreme subreddit — which Hyde, or his “assistant,” moderates — Weev bragged about the first issue of Samiz.dat, which mentioned Hyde by name. And in a Reddit AMA, Weev said that he had met Hyde only once, but that Hyde was “an awesome dude” who had offered to help him make videos. Weev added that when they met he asked for “a fanboy jpeg,” which may be the following image of the two heiling that periodically gets shared on the MDE internet:

Via reddit.com

Hyde responded to a BuzzFeed inquiry asking if he knew about the promotion ahead of time with a one word email: “nope.” Hyde later followed up with an expression of affectionate condescension for the reporter.

Despite repeatedly taking credit for Samiz.dat online and initially agreeing over Twitter DM to answer questions about the fliers, Weev attributed the publications to his “assistant.” He told BuzzFeed News that Hyde did not know about the publication ahead of time. When asked how he knew that, since his assistant was responsible for the publication, he responded, “Why would my assistant consult those disgusting race mixers from MDE about our plan to get the liberal media to attack them?”

But perhaps a more important question than the provenance of the letter is one about what it represents: Does a show that inspires neo-Nazi pamphleteering jibe with Time Warner&039;s avowed corporate values of “freedom of expression, diversity of viewpoints and responsible content?”

Time Warner did not respond to a request for comment.

Quelle: <a href="The Underground Neo-Nazi Promo Campaign Behind Adult Swim’s Alt-Right Comedy Show“>BuzzFeed

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NetApp + Mirantis: MOS 9.0 Reference Architecture and Fuel Plugin

The post NetApp + Mirantis: MOS 9.0 Reference Architecture and Fuel Plugin appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
What happens if you need to integrate NetApp’s leading storage hardware into OpenStack?
Last year, to facilitate deployment of NetApp storage solutions with Mirantis OpenStack 8.0, NetApp created the first release of their Fuel Plugin for ONTAP and E-Series integration. This release also included a comprehensive Reference Architecture, offering guidance and best-practice gleaned from several major Mirantis OpenStack+NetApp customer deployments.
Elaborating on the more-basic instructions offered in the Fuel Plugin Guide, the NetApp Mirantis Unlocked Reference Architecture discussed NetApp ONTAP and E-Series storage solutions in detail, explained configuration options on a feature-by-feature basis, and offered step-by-step instructions for using the plugin, including pre-configuration and post-deployment checkout.
This week, NetApp has released an updated version of their Fuel Plugin for Mirantis OpenStack 9.0 (Mitaka), collaborating with Mirantis to produce a fully-updated version of the NetApp Mirantis Unlocked Reference Architecture. (Both the Fuel Plugin and Reference Architecture can be downloaded from the Mirantis Unlocked NetApp Partner Page at http://mirantis.com/partners/netapp/).
The new document makes it easier for deployment engineers and architects to integrate NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP/ONTAP 9 or E-Series storage solutions with a Mirantis OpenStack 9.0 cloud.
New NetApp Plugin Features for MOS 9.0
Mirantis OpenStack 9.0 supports several new NetApp features:

Consistency Groups, enabling snapshots of multiple Cinder volumes to be taken at the same instant in time, ensuring consistency
CHAP Authentication, for communication between iSCSI initiators and targets
Quality of Service (QoS) based on maximum I/O per GB, in addition to QoS based on maximum bytes per second, bytes per second allowed per GiB, and IOPS
Manila (File-Share Service) support is not supported out-of-the-box in Mirantis OpenStack 9.0, but the Mirantis Services division, assisted by the OpenStack@NetApp team, can enable NetApp clustered Data ONTAP storage for Manila at customer request.
SolidFire support can also be enabled separately; refer to the SolidFire Partner page for more information.

To take advantage of these new features, among many others in the Mitaka release (further stabilized and hardened by Mirantis, the #1 bug fixer for OpenStack Mitaka) NetApp and Mirantis recommend using the latest version of Mirantis OpenStack (MOS 9.0, Mitaka) and the latest NetApp Fuel plugin.
Where to go from here
Of course there&#8217;s much more than we can tell you in a single blog post! The following resources will help get you started:

Mirantis Unlocked Partner page for NetApp
Reference Architecture for MOS 9.0 with NetApp storage
MOS 9.0 Fuel Plugin for NetApp (.rpm) and Installation Guide
OpenStack@NetApp Deployment and Operations Guide
Discuss NetApp and Mirantis OpenStack at theOpenStack@NetApp Community
Technical Support is available from NetApp Technical Support or Mirantis Support.

The post NetApp + Mirantis: MOS 9.0 Reference Architecture and Fuel Plugin appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Quelle: Mirantis

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Six DevOps myths and the realities behind them

The post Six DevOps myths and the realities behind them appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
At OpenStack Days Silicon Valley 2016, Puppet Founder and CEO Luke Kanies dispelled the six most common misconceptions he’s encountered that prevent organizations from adopting and benefiting from DevOps.

Over a five-year period, Puppet conducted market research of 25,000 people that shows the adoption of DevOps is critical to building a great software company. Unfortunately, however, many companies find that the costs of the cultural change are too high. The result is that these firms often fail to become great software companies &#8212; sometimes because even though they try to adopt the DevOps lifestyle, they do it in a such way that the change in a way doesn&#8217;t have enough real value because the changes don’t go deep enough.

You see, all companies are becoming software companies, Kanies explained, and surveys have shown that success requires optimization of end-to-end software production. Organizations that move past barriers to change and go from the old processes to the new way of using DevOps tools and practices will be able to make the people on their team happy, spend more time on creating value rather than on rework, and deliver software faster.

Key points in the 2016 State of DevOps Report survey show that high-performing teams deploy 200 times more frequently than average teams, with over #2,500 times shorter lead times, so the time between idea and production is minimal. Additionally, these teams see failure rates that are #3 times lower than their non-DevOps counterparts, and they recover 24 times faster. The five-year span of the survey has also shown that the distance between top performers and average performers is growing.

In other words, the cost of not adopting DevOps processes is also growing.

Despite these benefits, however, for every reason to adopt DevOps, there are plenty of myths and cultural obstacles that hold organizations back.
Myth #1: There&8217;s no direct value to DevOps
The first myth Kanies discussed is that there’s no direct customer or business value for adopting DevOps practices. After all, how much good does it do customers to have teams deploying 200 times more frequently?

Quite a lot, as it happens. DevOps allows faster delivery of more reliable products and optimizes processes, which results in developing software faster. That means responding to customer problems more quickly, as well as drastically slashing time to market for new ideas and products. This increased velocity means more value for your business.
Myth 2: There&8217;s no ROI for DevOps in the legacy world
The second myth, that there’s no return on investment in applying DevOps to legacy applications, is based on the idea that DevOps is only useful for new technology. The problem with this view, Kanies says, is that the majority of the world still runs in legacy environments, effectively ruling out most of the existing IT ecosystem.

There are really good reasons not to ignore this reality when planning your DevOps initiatives. The process of DevOps doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing; you can make small changes to your process and make a significant difference, removing manual steps, and slow, painful, and error-prone processes.

What&8217;s more, in many cases, you can’t predict where returns will be seen, so there’s value in working across the entire organization. Kanies points out that it makes no sense to only utilize DevOps for the new, shiny stuff that no one is really using yet and neglect the production applications that users care about &8212; thus leaving them operating slowly and poorly.
Myth 3: Only unicorns can wield DevOps
Myth number three is that DevOps only works with “unicorn” companies and not traditional enterprise. Traditional companies want assurances that DevOps solutions and benefits work for their very traditional needs, and not just for new, from-scratch companies.

Kanies points out that DevOps is the new normal, and no matter where organizations are in the maturity cycle, they need to be able to figure out how to optimize the entire end-to-end software production, in order to gain the benefits of DevOps: reduced time to market, lower mean time to recovery, and higher levels of employee engagement.
Myth #4: You don&8217;t have enough time or people
The fourth myth is that improvement via DevOps requires spare time and people the organization doesn’t have. Two concepts at the root of this myth are the realities that no matter what you do, software must be delivered faster and more often and that costs must be maintained or decreased, and organizations don’t see how to do this &8212; especially if they take time to retool to a new methodology.

But DevOps is about time reclamation. First, it automates many tasks that computers can accomplish faster and more reliably and an overworked IT engineer. That much is obvious.  

But there&8217;s a second, less obvious way that DevOps enables you to reclaim time and money. Studies have shown that on average, SREs, sysadmins, and so on get interrupted every fifteen minutes &8212; and that it takes about thirty minutes to fully recover from an interruption. This means many people have no time to spend hours on a single, hard problem because they constantly get interrupted. Recognizing this problem and removing the interruptions can free up time for more value-added activity and free up needed capacity in the organization.
Myth #5: DevOps doesn&8217;t fit with regulations and compliance
Myth number five comes from companies subject to regulation and compliance who believe this precludes adoption of DevOps. However, with better software, faster recovery, faster deployments, and lower error rates, you can automate compliance as well. Organizations can integrate all of the elements of software development with auditing, security, and compliance to deliver higher value, and in fact, if these aren’t all done at once, companies are more than likely to experience a failure of some sort.
Myth #6: You don&8217;t really need it
Kanies says he hasn’t heard the sixth myth often, but once in a while, a company concludes it doesn’t have any problems that adopting DevOps would fix. But DevOps is really about being good at getting better, moving faster, and eliminating the more frustrating parts of the work, he explains.

The benefits of adopting DevOps are clear from Kanies’ points and from the data presented by the survey. As he says, the choice is really about whether to invest in change or to let your competitors do it first. Because the top performers are pulling ahead faster and faster, Kanies says, and “organizations don’t have a lot of time to make a choice.”

You can hear the entire talk on the OpenStack Days Silicon Valley site.The post Six DevOps myths and the realities behind them appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Quelle: Mirantis

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How does the world consume private clouds?

The post How does the world consume private clouds? appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
In my previous blog, why the world needs private clouds, we looked at ten reasons for considering a private cloud. The next logical question is how a company should go about building a private cloud.
In my view, there are four consumption models for OpenStack. Let’s look at each approach and then compare.

Approach #1: DIY
For the most sophisticated users, where OpenStack is super-strategic to the business, a do-it-yourself approach is appealing. Walmart, PayPal, and so on are examples of this approach.
In this approach, the user has to grab upstream OpenStack bits, package the right projects, fix bugs or add features as needed, then deploy and manage the OpenStack lifecycle. The user also has to “self-support” their internal IT/OPS team.
This approach requires recruiting and retaining a very strong engineering team that is adept at python, OpenStack, and working with the upstream open-source community. Because of this, I don’t think more than a handful companies can or would want to pursue this approach. In fact, we know of several users who started out on this path, but had to switch to a different approach because they lost engineers to other companies. Net-net, the DIY approach is not for the faint of heart.
Approach #2: Distro
For large sophisticated users that plan to customize a cloud for their own use and have the skills to manage it, an OpenStack distribution is an attractive approach.
In this approach, no upstream engineering is required. Instead, the company is responsible for deploying a known good distribution from a vendor and managing its lifecycle.
Even though this is simpler than DIY, very few companies can manage a complex, distributed and fast moving piece of software such as OpenStack &#8212; a point made by Boris Renski in his recent blog Infrastructure Software is Dead. Therefore, most customers end up utilizing extensive professional services from the distribution vendor.
Approach #3: Managed Services
For customers who don’t want to deal with the hassle of managing OpenStack, but want control over the hardware and datacenter (on-prem or colo), managed services may be a great option.
In this approach, the user is responsible for the hardware, the datacenter, and tenant management; but OpenStack is fully managed by the vendor. Ultimately this may be the most appealing model for a large set of customers.
Approach #4: Hosted Private Cloud
This approach is a variation of the Managed Services approach. In this option, not only is the cloud managed, it is also hosted by the vendor. In other words, the user does not even have to purchase any hardware or manage the datacenter. In terms of look and feel, this approach is analogous to purchasing a public cloud, but without the &#8220;noisy neighbor&#8221; problems that sometimes arise.
Which approach is best?
Each approach has its pros and cons, of course. For example, each approach has different requirements in terms of engineering resources:

DIY
Distro
Managed Service
Hosted  Private Cloud

Need upstream OpenStack engineering team
Yes
No
No
No

Need OpenStack IT architecture team
Yes
Yes
No
No

Need OpenStack IT/ OPS team
Yes
Yes
No
No

Need hardware & datacenter team
Yes
Yes
Yes
No

Which approach you choose should also depend on factors such as the importance of the initiative, relative cost, and so on, such as:

DIY
Distro
Managed Service
Hosted  Private Cloud

How important is the private cloud to the company?
The business depends on private cloud
The cloud is extremely strategic to the business
The cloud is very strategic to the business
The cloud is somewhat strategic to the business

Ability to impact the community
Very direct
Somewhat direct
Indirect
Minimal

Cost (relative)
Depends on skills & scale
Low
Medium
High

Ability to own OpenStack operations
Yes
Yes
Depends if the vendor offers a transfer option
No

So as a user of an OpenStack private cloud you have four ways to consume the software.
The cost and convenience of each approach vary as per this simplified chart and need to be traded-off with respect to your strategy and requirements.
OK, so we know why you need a private cloud, and how you can consume one. But there&#8217;s still one burning question: who needs it?
The post How does the world consume private clouds? appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Quelle: Mirantis

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Azure SQL Database Threat Detection, your built-in security expert

Azure SQL Database Threat Detection has been in preview for a few months now. We’ve onboarded many customers and received some great feedback. We would like to share a few customer experiences that demonstrate how Azure SQL Database Threat Detection helped address their concerns about potential threats to their database.

What is Azure SQL Database Threat Detection?

Azure SQL Database Threat Detection is a new security intelligence feature built into the Azure SQL Database service. Working around the clock to learn, profile and detect anomalous database activities, Azure SQL Database Threat Detection identifies potential threats to the database.

Security officers or other designated administrators can get an immediate notification about suspicious database activities as they occur. Each notification provides details of the suspicious activity and recommends how to further investigate and mitigate the threat.

Currently, Azure SQL Database Threat Detection detects potential vulnerabilities and SQL injection attacks, as well as anomalous database access patterns. The following customer feedback attests to how Azure SQL Database Threat Detection warned them about these threats as they occurred and helped them improve their database security.

Case #1: Attempted database access by former employee

Borja Gómez, architect and development lead at YesEnglish

“Azure SQL Database Threat Detection is a useful feature that allows us to detect and respond to anomalous database activities, which were not visible to us beforehand. As part of my role designing and building Azure-based solutions for global companies in the Information and Communication Technology field, we always turn on Auditing and Threat Detection, which are built-in and operate independently of our code. A few months later, we received an email alert that "Anomalous database activities from unfamiliar IP (location) was detected." The threat came from a former employee trying to access one of our customer’s databases, which contained sensitive data, using old credentials. The alert allowed us to detect this threat as it occurred, we were able to remediate the threat immediately by locking down the firewall rules and changing credentials, thereby preventing any damage. Such is the simplicity and power of Azure.”

Case #2: Preventing SQL Injection attacks

Richard Priest, architectural software engineer at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios and head of the collective at Missing Widget

“Thanks to Azure SQL Database Threat Detection, we were able to detect and fix code vulnerabilities to SQL injection attacks and prevent potential threats to our database. I was extremely impressed how simple it was to enable the threat detection policy using the Azure portal, which required no modifications to our SQL client applications. A while after enabling Azure SQL Database Threat Detection, we received an email notification about ‘An application error that may indicate a vulnerability to SQL injection attacks.’  The notification provided details of the suspicious activity and recommended concrete actions to further investigate and remediate the threat. The alert helped me to track down the source my error and pointed me to the Microsoft documentation that thoroughly explained how to fix my code. As the head of IT, I now guide my team to turn on Azure SQL Database Auditing and Threat Detection on all our projects, because it gives us another layer of protection and is like having a free security expert on our team.”

Case #3: Anomalous access from home to production database

Manrique Logan, architect and technical lead at ASEBA

“Azure SQL Database Threat Detection is an incredible feature, super simple to use, empowering our small engineering team to protect our company data without the need to be security experts. Our non-profit company provides user-friendly tools for mental health professionals, storing health and sales data in the cloud. As such we need to be HIPAA and PCI compliant, and Azure SQL Database Auditing and Threat Detection help us achieve this. These features are available out of the box, and simple to enable too, taking only a few minutes to configure. We saw the real value from these not long after enabling Azure SQL Database Threat Detection, when we received an email notification that ‘Access from an unfamiliar IP address (location) was detected.&#039;  The alert was triggered as a result of my unusual access to our production database from home. Knowing that Microsoft is using its vast security expertise to protect my data gives me incredible peace of mind and allows us to focus our security budget on other issues. Furthermore, knowing the fact that every database activity is being monitored has increased security awareness among our engineers. Azure SQL Database Threat Detection is now an important part of our incident response plan. I love that Azure SQL Database offers such powerful and easy-to-use security features.

Turning on Azure SQL Database Threat Detection

Azure SQL Database Threat Detection is incredibly easy to enable. You simply navigate to the Auditing and Threat Detection configuration blade for your database in the Azure management portal. There you switch on Auditing and Threat Detection, and configure at least one email address for receiving alerts.

Click the following links to:

Learn more about Azure SQL Database Threat Detection.
Learn more about Azure SQL Database.

We&039;ll be glad to get feedback on how this feature is serving your security requirements. Please feel free to share your comments below.
Quelle: Azure